![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Company
Time: Tuesday, October 9, 2012 (night).
Place: Road 11 km from camp, not far from Gisenyi, Rwanda.
Last Event: Blasting the living hell out of would-be ambushers.
The moment the survivors of the Agents' hasty rocket ambush surrender, the team springs into action. Everybody knows that all the gunfire and explosions along this stretch of road will attract unwanted attention before long, making it imperative to get moving. Zhang zip-cuffs the prisoners, and then Qoqa selects two for interrogation. One is marched over to Vinnie's jeep, where Klas pulls guard duty; the other goes in the second jeep, where Zhang watches him while Paul drives. Then Qoqa takes over the pickup truck full of supplies, with Anabel as her passenger, and all three vehicles pull out and head back toward camp. This leaves Lev and Wen in the bush with four captives . . .
As soon as the vehicles are out of sight, Wen and Lev get down to the distasteful task of executing their prisoners. Neither Agent is exactly a cold killer – but then, these men ambushed a convoy carrying medical supplies along a public highway, discharging machine guns, mines, and RPGs without regard for who else might be in the area. Over-armed assassins and thugs not being honorable soldiers in wartime, neither Lev nor Wen feel bound by military convention. Lev uses his knife and makes it quick. Then he and Wen start the 11 km march to camp, pushing through brush under cover of rain and darkness, weapons hot.
The group driving back has a much easier time of things. The prisoners are no trouble – wounded and bound, and held at gunpoint by Klas and Zhang, they sit quietly – but the tree blocking the road is still a problem. Vinnie solves this through sheer skill and experience: he has everybody pull over and hop out, and then he eases the vehicles around the end of the barricade one at a time. Only the pickup truck proves to be a challenge, and Vinnie makes even that look easy. Anabel takes advantage of the pause to check in with Jili by radio; all is well back at base. Before long, the convoy is on the road again, rolling toward camp with Vinnie's jeep in the lead.
As the road straightens out a few hundred metres from home, Vinnie once again lucks out at spotting trouble before it spots him. He sees two trucks come into sight and kill their lights on the far side of the camp turnoff. In response to this shifty behavior, he douses his own lights and pulls over. Paul and Qoqa witness Vinnie's reaction and follow his lead. When Klas and Vinnie fish out their night-vision binoculars and take a closer look, Vinnie realizes that the trucks are of the same make and model as the ones the group blew up earlier. He warns Klas, who fires up the radio and calls in a warning to Jili: "Get everybody out and into the trees – now!"
Before long, all six Agents near the camp are out of their vehicles, peering through night-vision gear. It's clear that speeding to the rescue like the cavalry would be unwise, as the trucks may well contain another 14-16 men armed with machine guns and RPGs. However, Vinnie reminds everyone of his concealed tire-shredder, which ought to slow down a potential attack on the construction site just enough to let the group make a stealthy approach on foot. The others agree with Vinnie's assessment and begin hasty preparations.
Klas and Zhang push the bound prisoners face-down in the ditch, where Anabel holds a rifle on them and hisses that any trouble will get them shot. Meanwhile, Paul, Qoqa, and Vinnie get the heavy weapons back out. A group equal in size to the one encountered earlier would mean facing 5:1 odds, so the Agents decide to go in loaded for bear. Klas and Zhang grab the machine guns from the jeeps, while Paul and Vinnie shoulder the two RPG-18s that were uncrated but never used. Klas loads up on frags, too. Everybody brings a rifle as well, along with plenty of ammo.
With those preparations made, Klas leads Paul, Qoqa, Vinnie, and Zhang toward base, moving stealthily through the wet vegetation alongside the lane. Sure enough, it seems that the worrisome trucks encountered Vinnie's tire-shredder. The lead vehicle is stopped at an awkward angle, half in the ditch, blocking the progress of the trailing one. When Klas sneaks up for a closer look, he sees two men trying to fix a shredded tire, and then notices a rustling in the bushes that suggests that the trucks' other occupants are moving in on the camp. In Klas' mind, anyone creeping around in the brush at night could only have bad intentions.
Stealing back to the others, Klas relates the situation. Qoqa and Vinnie – being the handiest with knives – get the job of taking out the "pit crew" left with the enemy trucks. That goes flawlessly (if bloodily), and before long the Agents are back on the move, stalking through the undergrowth. They arrive just in time to see two groups of seven armed men quietly positioning themselves in semicircles around the engineers' hut and the laborers' shack, setting up machine guns and RPG-7s. It's quite obvious that their intention is to blast the buildings and kill everyone inside.
Realizing that his squad of five must stop 14 armed men in a few seconds, Klas plunks grenades into Qoqa and Zhang's hands and tells them where to throw. Then he gestures for Vinnie and Paul to ready the RPG-18s and point them at specific patches of ground. As quickly as possible, he explains that he's going to lob a grenade behind the enemy – close enough to cause casualties, but hopefully far enough out from the shacks to avoid injuring anyone inside – and that when he does, he wants Zhang and Qoqa to hurl grenades at their targets while Vinnie and Paul unleash their rockets. If all goes well, there will be five explosions behind the armed men in the camp, strung out in a way that should expose them to overlapping kill zones. Of course, there will be only one crack at this, and only Klas has hands-on experience with explosive weaponry . . .
Everybody prepares to put Klas' plan in effect, trusting in his knowledge of ordnance to keep from blowing away the huts and anyone left inside. Klas gives his squad as much time as he dares to get psyched up and draw a bead. As soon as it looks as if the enemy is about to start shooting, he hisses "Now!" and chucks his grenade. The other four Agents catch his cue; Qoqa and Zhang have frags in the air an instant later, while Paul and Vinnie fire their rockets.
The results are exactly what Klas had in mind. There are five blasts in an arc behind the two groups of goons, and when the smoke clears, there are just three enemies left standing, bleeding from ears and fragmentation wounds, firing uselessly into the night. Qoqa takes a quick shot at one of these, but bullets prove unnecessary – the survivors soon collapse, claimed by concussion and severe shock. Just as Klas said, the shacks are still standing afterward, with only a few holes punched in them by fragments.
With the area secure, the Agents get on their radios. Anabel confirms that all is well with the prisoners. Jili reports that she's hiding in trees with the workers, behind their hut, and that all is well there – though there may still be people in the engineers' cabin. Qoqa takes the lead on looking into this, identifying herself at the door and then checking whether anybody is injured. Fortunately, Paarl and his mates heeded Jili's verbal warning and kept their heads down; they all came through without a scratch.
Outside, Klas surveys the carnage and notes that the attackers were using the same makes and models of weapons as the shooters involved in the road ambush – and for that matter, the ones who raided the camp before. Added to Vinnie's observations about the vehicles being the same, there's no doubt in anybody's mind that all three attacks are related. Not that there was in the first place.
With the immediate threat neutralized, the Agents get to work tying up loose ends. Zhang dashes back up the lane to help Anabel herd the two captives into camp. Qoqa conscripts Klas and Paul to shift bodies and hose down anything that's splattered with gore. Vinnie fixes the tire on the attackers' lead vehicle, and then pulls the tire-shredder aside and drives the two trucks the rest of the way onto the site, adding them to the swiftly growing motor pool of captured rides. After that, he goes back for the team's jeeps and pickup truck. Once all the vehicles are safely parked, Vinnie hops back into his jeep and speeds off to fetch Lev and Wen.