![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Company
Time: Tuesday, October 9, 2012 (morning).
Place: Construction camp not far from Gisenyi, Rwanda.
Last Event: Preparing to go pick up medical supplies.
Come the morning of October 9, it's time to head into Kigali to fetch the medical supplies that Darmatech bought off the UN for a "generous donation." Vinnie takes one of the jeeps, with Anabel riding up front and Klas in back, while Paul and Qoqa follow in the best of the team's many pickup trucks. Everybody else stays behind to guard the camp. Jili sticks close to the phones and radios, while Lev, Wen, and Zhang arm up and patrol the perimeter. The weather has no interest in cooperating – it's wet, wet, wet.
The drive to Kigali is uneventful, and sees Vinnie and Paul pull up in front of the UN facility just before noon. Anabel approaches the lone guard at the entrance and drops the name of the group's contact, Jean McKibbin. The guard is both officious and clueless, but he eventually deigns to admit Anabel – but only her, as he has no other name on his list. Anabel is escorted to a small office by a sour-looking man who gestures vaguely at a chair before disappearing behind a door. After about an hour (and many cigarettes for Qoqa, waiting out in the pickup truck), a thin, middle-aged woman appears and introduces herself as Jean McKibbin.
McKibbin proves to be personable and chatty, if quirky. She apologizes for the wait, explaining that the place is badly understaffed and little more than a storage depot – and not even that by design, but a converted school. On hearing that the guard left Anabel's associates out in the rain, she's shocked. She arranges for the vehicles to be admitted to the shabby fenced compound next to the building, and then invites everyone in for a cup of tea. The whole time, McKibbin prattles about UN aid work not being what it used to be, the many places where she has worked in the past (including Chechnya, to Qoqa's surprise), and her honest-but-stereotyped opinions of various ethnic groups.
Eventually, the Agents persuade McKibbin to check whether she received a memo about transferring some medical supplies to Darmatech employees who are setting up a school for rehabilitating child soldiers. She confirms the arrangement and points out the window to several pallets of cargo sitting under tarps in the wet compound. Vinnie and Qoqa go out to inspect the goods, while Klas and Paul stay nearby with the vehicles, just in case. Anabel continues to chat with McKibbin.
On examining the cargo, Vinnie is relieved to see that nothing is soggy despite the damp weather, mostly thanks to the tarps and the fact that the pallet loads are thoroughly wrapped in plastic. Qoqa is happy to discover that the supplies are in good shape and mostly not as old as McKibbin's messy paperwork suggested. However, there's a small hole in the packaging where it's painfully obvious that someone stole some morphine. Qoqa and Vinnie look at each other and shrug – are narcotics ever not a target for theft?
After Vinnie and Qoqa give the thumbs-up, it's time to load the pickup truck. They conscript Klas and Paul to help out, and McKibbin assigns two laborers to lend a hand. Anabel stays out of the rain and chats with McKibbin (and hears Paul call her a "sugarplum" under his breath). Packing up doesn't take long. By mid afternoon, it's time to drive back to base in the rain.
Toward dusk – made all the darker by oppressive cloud cover – Vinnie rounds a tight bend perhaps 10 km from camp and immediately spots a tree down across the road. He starts to decelerate at once, his exceptional skill behind the wheel letting him do so safely despite the poor driving conditions. Even as he does, Klas starts shouting, "That tree is where we wouldn't see it until we turned. You're driving into a kill zone . . . back out before they close the back door!" Vinnie complies, while Anabel fires up the sat phone and calls Jili. Paul, following in the pickup truck, sees the jeep suddenly skid to a stop and reverse in the opposite lane, Vinnie making a frantic "Back up!" gesture as he passes.
As Vinnie and Paul hastily pull back around the bend, Klas' gut feeling proves well-founded: there's a series of explosions along one side of the road, thankfully in front of the retreating vehicles, as a machine gun opens fire from somewhere behind the felled tree. Bullets and shrapnel whistle past. Somewhere ahead, riflemen start blazing away from concealed positions, and then an RPG whizzes wide of the jeep and narrowly misses the pickup truck. Thanks to Klas' instincts and Vinnie and Paul's reflexes, the Agents identify the KZ and break out quickly enough to deny their attackers a clear shot.
Vinnie backs up until he can no longer see muzzle flashes, and then executes a J-turn and hits the gas. The slick road actually helps a little; he's soon accelerating away from the ambush. Paul is somewhat slower off the mark, and pays for this with a couple of bullet holes in his vehicle and a bit of flying glass stuck in his body armor. He reacts quickly enough to avoid worse, however.
The whole time, Anabel is on the sat phone, relating where the vehicles are and what she sees. She's soon drowned out by the din of explosions, gunfire, screeching tires, and roaring engines, but Jili hears enough – snatching up her tactical set, Jili alerts Lev, Wen, and Zhang. Zhang sprints for the jeep with the heavy weapons. As Wen waits for Zhang to pull up, she obtains the GPS coordinates of the ambush from Jili, and then asks Jili to patch the phone through to the radio circuit.
Less than a minute after Anabel's distress call, Lev and Wen hop aboard the second jeep and then Zhang puts the pedal to the metal. Zhang decides to drive flat-out despite the weather and darkness, relying on his catlike reflexes – and Vinnie's habit of keeping the motor pool in top condition – to avoid disaster. As the jeep careens down the road, Lev and Wen prep their kit. Then Lev mounts the machine gun on the pintle while Wen gets Zhang's gear ready and unpacks the MGL-140. All three slot their trauma plates into their armor, Zhang seeking Wen's assistance as he burns rubber.
Meanwhile, about 1 km from the ambush and 11 km from camp, Vinnie pulls off the road, with Paul close behind. Fortunately, they manage to avoid getting stuck in the mud. Upon stopping, Paul immediately hops out, grabs a shovel from the jeep, and starts doing his best to conceal the vehicle tracks. Klas unfolds the jeep's camouflage net and sets it up, while Qoqa rolls the pickup truck further back and conceals it behind some brush. Vinnie gets a GPS fix on the hiding spot, and then Anabel raises Wen on the encrypted radio and passes along the coordinates.
Zhang's race to the rescue comes to a sudden halt when he sees the felled tree looming ahead. He pulls over to let Lev and Wen out to scout the area. They find no ambushers, just spent brass, scorching from a backblast, and muddy tire marks. Whoever was here a few minutes ago pulled out and drove away from the camp, toward Kigali.
One look at the roadblock confirms that the tree is too massive to shift with the jeep. Wen certainly has enough C4 to remove it, but nobody relishes the thought (or noise) of a hasty demo job. In the end, Lev volunteers to drive the jeep around one end of the barricade, through what amounts to a small lake of mud tangled with roots. Luckily, he seems to know what he's doing. He soon has the jeep back on the road, where Wen and Zhang rejoin him and Zhang takes back the driver's seat.
Further down the road, Vinnie's group stays hidden, weapons ready. Klas even mounts the jeep's machine gun. Eventually, two light trucks drive past, coming from the direction of the ambush. They're moving slowly even for someone driving in the rain at dusk; Vinnie is certain that they're searching. Klas points out that if they're doing that, then they must be in touch with an observer further down the road who can confirm that the target hasn't escaped in that direction – meaning that they'll keep looking. Anabel ventures a guess that this is how the ambushers knew when to drop the tree, too.
A few minutes after the trucks go by, Vinnie sees a jeep approach and slow down – it's Zhang, Wen, and Lev. The two teams link up, and soon the second jeep is stopped next to the first. Lev drapes the vehicle with a net while Wen hides the trail. Then the Agents hastily confer about what to do. Consensus is that they have little choice but to take out their attackers.
With that plan made, everybody gets ready to hit the trucks on their next pass. Wen loads the MGL-140 with HE rounds and asks Qoqa to unpack four of the group's RPG-18s. Paul and Zhang dismount the machine guns and bring them forward, while Anabel and Vinnie join them with AK-103s in hand. Klas, Lev, and Wen show up a moment later with RPG-18s at the ready, and Qoqa brings a fourth, closed RPG as a spare. Those with RPGs keep their rifles handy on slings, and Wen rests the MGL-140 nearby as well. Then it's time to wait.
It isn't long before the Agents hear the ambushers' trucks returning as they continue their search. Wen and Lev, the only Agents qualified on the RPG-18, draw a bead on the lead and trailing vehicles, respectively. Knowing just how good Wen is with heavy weapons, Klas backs up Lev, with the intention of firing only if Lev misses his mark. All three aim for the engine block to guarantee detonation and a crippling hit. At Lev's signal, Wen and Lev shoot.
Wen's rocket streaks out and detonates squarely against the side of the target. The blast wrecks the engine, substantially annihilates the cab behind it, and turns the truck to flaming wreckage skidding down the road. Wen thinks she can see body parts. Lev hits a little off-center, but that doesn't matter much; though there's more truck remaining afterward, this mostly serves to get caught up in the wheels, causing the vehicle to flip. Again, there's a lot of fire and destruction.
As soon as rockets are away, Wen switches to her MGL-140, Lev grabs his rifle, and the Agents move in. They encounter six men limping out of the wreckage, all of them wounded, half of them no longer armed. Qoqa shouts a command to surrender. When the bleeding survivors see eight people closing in on them – one with yet another RPG at the ready, one with a repeating grenade launcher, and two with machine guns – they discard their remaining weapons and fall to their knees.