![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Company
Time: Friday, March 16, 2012 (wee hours).
Place: Ski chalet in B.C.
Last Event: Breaking glass, flash-bangs, and Adnan the traitor.
Everybody is acutely aware that the shots Wen fired in the wine cellar amount to a starting gun signaling a deadly showdown. Wen moves as quickly as possible; even as she scoops up Adnan's dropped pistol as insurance against emptying her revolver, she tells Arnaud and "Bruce" to stay put and draw any weapons they might have. "Bruce" pulls out his gaudy gold-plated Desert Eagle, Arnaud readies a tiny holdout gun, and both men take cover in alcoves along the cellar walls. That done, Wen rockets up the stairs to rejoin her crew.
Up in the kitchen, Lev hisses hasty orders to his teammates. Knowing the Agents' capabilities, he sends Hamid (the group's worst shot) and Qoqa (the only medic) to the cellar to protect the clients. He then leads everybody else out the kitchen door, with Wen at his left-hand side, Paul and Klas behind them, Zhang and Vinnie next, and finally Anabel and Jili. Lev's plan is to minimize the advantage of the attackers' carbines over the squad's revolvers by aggressively closing the range to the point where handiness is important as firepower. He and Wen will spearhead the counterattack; Klas, Paul, Vinnie, and Zhang are to check side rooms along the way; and Anabel and Jili's job is to watch the rear.
As the bulk of the team moves out, Hamid and Qoqa dash for the wine cellar. Qoqa pauses for a moment to check on Zulfiqar, and finds that he's alive – he must have been sapped or choked out. She manages to revive him quickly, whereupon he stands, finds his machine pistol, and declares that he's going to get revenge. He relents when Qoqa points out that "Bruce" is still alive and in need of guarding, and "Bruce" assists by ordering Zulfiqar to do his job. Before long, Zulfiqar is helping Qoqa and Hamid mind "Bruce" and Arnaud, all five of them pointing guns at the cellar's heavy wooden door.
Upstairs, it doesn't take long for Lev and Wen to make contact. As they lead their stealthy squad down the hall, four enemy shooters appear, about to assault up the hall. The engagement distance is perhaps four metres, and there's little room for maneuvering. Lighting is poor, though the mysterious assassins are clearly wearing night-vision gear. The Agents are somewhat quicker, perhaps because they're less laden with gear, and fire the first shots.
The opening moments of the gunfight see the four rearmost Agents leave the tight confines of the hallway: Anabel, Jili, Vinnie, and Zhang dive into rooms to either side of the corridor, willing to take their chances with possible assaulters who've breached windows there. This leaves Wen, Lev, Klas, and Paul to do the shooting. The first telling hit of the battle is scored by Wen, who kneecaps an enemy gunman with a .357 slug. After that, chaos ensues. Shooters on both sides hit the deck to avoid gunfire and give allies behind them a clearer shot, and it's hard to discern exactly who has been hit.
In the seven seconds of shooting that follow, the Agents mostly conserve ammo by firing one or two well-placed shots at a time – but Wen shoots rapidly enough that she empties her revolver and must transition to Adnan's pistol, and everyone sees Lev perform an impressive reload under fire, slapping in a moon clip so fast that his weapon is silent for a mere second or two. Suspecting body armor, they mostly aim for legs. Their opponents stick to three-round bursts from suppressed carbines, although one of them drops his weapon after being hit and is reduced to using his sidearm. Given the shooting conditions, the raiders aim for center of mass.
The butcher's bill is paid almost entirely by the assassins. Lev and Wen each knock two opponents to the ground with multiple leg shots, setting them up for Klas and Paul, who bound forward over Wen and Lev's prone forms to deliver lethal headshots. Thanks to shooting first and hitting often, despite darkness and cramped quarters, the Agents keep their enemies from firing back with any accuracy. Klas, Paul, and Wen are all hit, but their body armor greatly reduces the deadliness of the suppressed, short-barreled carbines, and none of the three suffers anything worse than a big bruise. By blind luck, there are no hits to unarmored heads or extremities. The tensest moment is when a sorely wounded gunman goes for a grenade, but Wen solves this problem with bullets.
Meanwhile, the Agents in the side rooms are relieved to find that they aren't facing yet more attackers. Anabel, Jili, and Vinnie keep their heads down and stay out of the way. The hallway outside is buzzing with hot metal death swarming in both directions, and while the chalet is well-built – with lots of stone – the walls are hardly impenetrable. They take braced shooting positions covering the windows, using the heaviest furniture and appliances they can find for concealment, if not cover. Unsurprisingly, Zhang isn't content merely to stay put . . .
On seeing that the room he has entered is clear, Zhang decides to see what he can do about flanking the enemy. He stealthily slides open the glass panel and slips outdoors. There, he spots a team of two men set up perhaps 10 metres down the walk from the front door, covering the exit with a sniper rifle and a carbine, doubtless tasked to cut off anybody who comes running out in panic. It seems that they haven't yet noticed him, and he decides to keep it that way, moving out in a wide arc to circle behind them.
After creeping to within point-blank range, Zhang executes the man with the carbine with a shot to the back of the head. The sniper rolls over, draws his sidearm, and fires several rounds in Zhang's general direction, but he shoots wide. Zhang blasts the sniper in the face. Once his opponents are down, Zhang gathers up their weapons and looks for their tracks in the snow. These are easily found, and lead toward the road. Zhang decides to follow the trail back to whatever vehicles brought the assassins.
Indoors, the others' ears are ringing from the sound of gunfire. Only Lev hears Zhang's exchange of fire . . . but he knows the sound of a .357 Magnum, and as that comes first and last, he suspects that Zhang got the better of the engagement. There's little time to think about that, however, because there are doubtless more hostiles in the chalet. As soon as Lev sees that his people have stood back up or emerged from hiding, as the case may be, he leads them cautiously forward.
On entering the large open area at the end of the hallway – living room, dining room, and lounge, overlooked by a second-story interior balcony, with skylights above – Lev sees four more shooters hastily converging on the unenclosed stairway from upstairs. He and Paul shoot first, again at the legs, causing one of the men to stumble and pitch over the edge of the stairs. This buys Klas and Wen time to lunge for the carbines dropped by the team's earlier opponents when they stumbled in here and were shot down. It also gives Vinnie an opening to dart forward and add his revolver to the team's firepower.
This second skirmish is brief and extremely one-sided: The Agents avoid being hit by moving constantly and making good use of concealment, drawing fire away from the crouched Wen and Klas. As soon as those two have long arms (which both of them recognize as a SCAR-L variant with an extremely short barrel and a suppressor), they turn and make short work of their enemies, putting well-placed double-taps between their victims' eyes. The sole survivor of this second team of assassins sees the writing on the wall and retreats out of sight upstairs.
Klas takes the lead rushing the stairs, charging with his plundered carbine at the ready. Vinnie follows, brandishing his revolver, and finally Wen, also with a carbine. Lev and Paul take the time to grab carbines as well, and bring up the rear a moment later. As Klas reaches the balcony, he spots his quarry in one of the bedrooms that open out onto it – Anabel's room, as it happens – pushing the door almost but not entirely shut. Having some experience in the soldiering business, Klas suspects a hasty grenade booby-trap, and warns the others.
By now Vinnie is upstairs, and being the expert on booby-traps, he takes a look. As it turns out, Klas' intuition is spot-on: There's a grenade – an earnestly deadly concussion grenade, not a flash-bang – against the door, pin out and spoon barely held down by the door's weight. It's a tricky, delicate situation, as the spring-loaded handle is liable to push the door open in seconds all on its own, making this less an improvised mine than a crude time bomb. Vinnie grits his teeth and snatches the grenade from its place on the floor, successfully clamping the lever to its side.
As soon as Vinnie stands up, grenade in hand, Lev kicks open the door and the Agents storm the room. No one is inside, but the door to the exterior balcony – which offers a lovely view of the mountains – stands open. Wen, who's on point, sees nobody on the balcony but spots a line of some sort fastened to the balcony rail. Suspecting that the man who planted the grenade is presently trying to escape by rappelling, she shoots at the rope, its fastener, and the general area on the balustrade where it's attached. Her efforts are rewarded with a twanging snap followed by a scream.
Vinnie rushes forward and looks over the edge of the balcony. He sees a man in assault gear sprawled on the ice and rock below, apparently unconscious. As Vinnie is holding a live grenade without a pin, he decides to dispose of it and the assassin in one fell swoop. The dropped grenade lands on the man's chest and explodes messily.
Realizing that Wen saw what were almost certainly snipers on the nearby slope earlier, and that these shooters will have seen the explosion, the Agents duck back indoors. Top priorities are to deal with any remaining assassins in the area and to check on Hamid, Qoqa, and their charges. The chalet – now a mess of broken glass, bullet holes, flash-bang fires, blood, and bodies, thoroughly trampled and shot to bits, with the power cut – isn't a good place to be. As soon as it's safe to stick a head outdoors, it would be wise to leave. Learning what happened to Zhang is also a concern, though a lesser one given his prodigious skills.