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The Company
Time: Sunday, October 7, 2012 (late afternoon).
Place: Kigali, Rwanda.
Last Event: Scaring off would-be armed robbers.
After dispersing the gold-seeking gang of gunmen without bloodshed, the Agents stash their weapons and prepare to leave the area. Consensus is that the next stop should be at another moneychanger, to convert the remainder of the group's gold into francs. Lev happens to know the best part of town to visit for this. He shares this information with the others, and then the team rolls out quickly but calmly in a convoy of three jeeps and three pickup trucks (including one confiscated from the would-be thieves!). Before long, they're pulling up outside several suitable businesses.
Anabel gets the job of exchanging the gold, with Klas and Zhang for security. The transaction goes smoothly. Before leaving, Anabel decides to try to cut some time off the group's search for machine tools by asking the teller if he happens to know where to find a suitable wholesaler that does business on Sundays. Amazingly, he does! (The way he looks at Anabel suggests that he racked his brain for this information just to impress her.) He recommends a Brazilian-owned place on the outskirts of the city.
The Agents pull out and follow the teller's directions to a sprawl of one-storey warehouses on a mucky industrial lot. For this deal, Anabel brings Vinnie – who knows tools – as well as Klas and Zhang. Once again, Anabel makes friends easily; she's soon chatting up the manager and negotiating a good price on the hardware that Vinnie says the camp needs. Indeed, the man claims that he could offer Anabel an even better price if she were willing to wait eight to 10 days for an order, but after a quick conference with Vinnie, Anabel says that time is of the essence.
Vinnie looks over the tools to confirm that what's in stock isn't garbage. His verdict is that the equipment isn't exciting but will do the job – it's certainly better than the setup at the camp. With this established, Anabel closes the deal. The manager is happy to accept cash, and orders his staff to start loading the Agents' trucks. While the laborers shift heavy crates, Anabel chats some more and comes away with personal contact information for the shop boss, in case the team needs additional hardware in the future.
Toward dusk, just before the Agents get back on the road, the satellite phone rings. It's Chaturvedi. He reports that he consulted with Darmatech and worked out that the UN depot is willing to arrange a transfer of medical supplies in exchange for a large donation, but that the paperwork will take 48 hours. He also mentions that Paarl was cut off when he last checked in over the camp uplink, so the team should try to get comms working again. When Anabel explains that Jili took care of the matter already, Chaturvedi seems puzzled and relates that this happened earlier today.
Once the call is over, Anabel shares Chaturvedi's news with her associates. Nobody has a problem with returning to Kigali two days from now to fetch medical gear, but several team members express concern when they hear about the comms failure – that could be due to any number of causes, hostile action among them. The whole group agrees that it would be prudent to depart at once. If nothing else, avoiding a night in Kigali and getting their cargo of tools, kitchen equipment, and food (and Paarl's liquor) safely to the camp seems like the wisest course of action.
The convoy sets out with Vinnie and Anabel in the lead jeep, followed by Zhang hauling tools in the best pickup truck, Jili and Klas in the second jeep, Paul and Lev each driving one of the rattletraps laden with food and equipment, and finally Qoqa and Wen bringing up the rear in the last jeep. There are no hassles or holdups on the road, and the Agents manage to travel in a tight column. It's well after dark when Vinnie – knowing that it would be best to scout the camp on foot, just in case – pulls onto a barely visible mud road into the bush, perhaps a 15-minute hike from home base. The others follow, and soon all six vehicles are hidden in a shallow, brush-filled ditch.
As soon as the vehicles are stopped, the whole group gets to unpacking equipment and gearing up. All nine Agents don camouflage-patterned fatigues, assault vests, helmets, and jungle boots, and then insert trauma plates into their vests. Each vest is already stuffed with ammo, compass, flashlight, knife, radio, and survival gear. Everybody grabs night-vision binoculars, too. The team's weapons of choice are brand-new AK-103s fitted with night sights, flash hiders, and patrol slings. Klas and Wen pack completely rebuilt rifles whose resemblance to 103s is mostly cosmetic, topped with night scopes.
Wen and Klas smear on face paint with practiced ease and then vanish into the night, leaving the others to conceal the vehicles. Lev, Qoqa, and Vinnie see to it that the jeeps and trucks are camouflaged as well as possible. Vinnie makes sure to collect and hide the keys, too, just in case. Then it's time to adjust gear, daub on paint, and hunker down to wait for the two scouts to radio in.
The darkness and dense bush make it easy for Klas and Wen to approach the camp undetected. They cover the last few metres at a crawl, doing their best to remain unseen and unheard. Using their night-vision gear to scan the site from the edge of the clearing, they soon discover why Paarl was abruptly cut off: four light trucks fitted with pintle-mounted machine guns are parked in the center of the construction site, and the place is overrun by troops of some sort.
Klas and Wen do their professional best to assess the threat. They both count 25 heads. All four machine guns are manned; an agitated-looking man is brandishing an RPG-7; four gunmen, including one armed with a light machine gun, are holding the workers at gunpoint; and three goons are guarding the engineering crew, who are on their knees in the muck, while a tall man with a beret yells at them. A dozen more intruders appear to be ransacking the place, looking for something. Jean-Pierre is motionless on the ground over by his crew, while Paarl is bleeding from repeated pistol-whipping. Going by equipment, discipline, and disposition, Wen and Klas suspect that the interlopers are irregulars, probably guerrillas or militia.
Wen radios in, and then she and Klas sneak back to the others in order to show them the way. Everybody agrees that the next move is to take down the armed men at the camp. Without further ado, the group moves out quietly, with Wen in the lead, bringing along one of their light machine guns just in case. All goes well. Before long, all nine Agents are at the edge of the clearing, setting up concealed shooting positions behind light cover. At this point, the man with the beret starts punctuating his words to Paarl with pistol shots fired in the workers' general direction; Anabel makes out the man yelling, "Where's the gold?" and Paarl responding with, "The company stooges have it."
On Lev's silent signal, all hell breaks loose. Klas kills the enemy leader with a single headshot, while Wen does the same to the man holding the machine gun on the workers. Everybody else fires short, controlled bursts to the chest. Qoqa, Vinnie, and Zhang take out the other three gunmen covering the workers; Paul drops the man with the RPG; and Anabel and Jili neutralize two of the four vehicular machine-gunners. Lev is too busy giving orders and designating targets to shoot, but he's ready to open up with the group's machine gun if their position is charged from a direction that won't endanger the workers.
The enemy reaction is swift but completely uncoordinated, the latter doubtless due the loss of their leader and their lack of night vision. Most of them either dive for cover or shoot in the wrong direction. A few charge their attackers, but with minimal organization and more than half of their support weapons down, this accomplishes little. Meanwhile, the Agents calmly hold their ground, relying on darkness, concealment, camouflage, and flash hiders to keep the opposition in doubt, and exploiting night optics and well-braced shooting positions to pick off targets at will.
All told, the engagement is overwhelmingly one-sided. The gunmen in the camp unleash long bursts of automatic fire, but not a single bullet finds a target. Before long, the militiamen are retreating toward their vehicles and being cut down for their trouble. Indeed, there are only two tense moments for the Agents. One comes when Lev opens up with the machine gun and it misfires – but even so, he manages to mow down two targets first, and nobody on the other side appears to notice or exploit the situation anyway. The other is when a retreating enemy readies the dropped RPG and Klas, Lev, and Zhang all miss him – but a lucky shot from Paul settles that matter.
The shooting ends when all the visible intruders are motionless on the ground, the last of them killed by a headshot from Wen as he struggles to start one of the trucks. Vinnie is the first to enter the camp to take a look, as the others cover him. It's soon apparent that no hostiles remain to shoot back, however. When the rest of the team closes in, Qoqa counts casualties, declares 20 dead and five badly wounded, and notes that the gunmen lacked helmets or body armor better than the occasional decrepit flak vest. An examination of the opposition's weapons, mostly AKMs, reveals a lot of magazines emptied by panic fire.
Qoqa's next order of business is to examine the construction personnel. It turns out that Jean-Pierre is alive, if badly beaten, and not in danger of death. Paarl is in a similar state. The only other injury is a stray bullet in one worker's foot – ironically, the result of a bad shot on Qoqa's part. Otherwise, the Agents' use of carefully placed shots and short bursts, along with Lev's refusal to blaze away with the machine gun, seems to have paid off. On checking with his associates, Lev finds that nobody fired more than 21 rounds and many fired fewer shots, averaging a phenomenal seven bullets per enemy casualty.
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