![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Company
Time: November 1, 2009 (10:30).
Place: Grandfather's island, south of mainland Greece.
Last Event: Infiltrating the mansion basement.
In the basement of Grandfather's mansion, Lev, Hamid, Vinnie, and Zhang finalize the plan to grab Grandfather, hole up, and summon the authorities. They conclude that it would be best to send Vinnie to fetch the others. The reason for this is simple: Vinnie is a bomb-maker, so he can take advantage of the trip to lug the team's explosives topside and rig a fiery diversion from their activities in the mansion. With that decided, Vinnie packs all 25 lbs. of C4 into his bag and heads out.
Sitting at the security console, Hamid virtually escorts Vinnie to the stairs up. He blinds cameras, disarms alarms, and unlatches electronic locks. Vinnie reaches the stairwell without incident. He uses the remote that Hamid installed earlier to blind the camera over the exit at the top. In the time that this buys him, he picks the lock and sneaks onto the main floor of the mansion. From there, he steals over to the open window in the lounge. He hears a shouted conversation in Russian behind the study door, but opts to keep moving.
Just before he heads out onto the grounds, Vinnie radios the other seven and asks them to be ready to move – he's on his way. Then he stealthily crosses the gardens and reaches the cover of the heliport. He finds the others already packed and waiting for him there . . . thanks largely to the organizational skills of Qoqa, who's bandaging Klas' ankle when he shows up. (Klas apparently twisted it when he and Wen climbed down off the hangar, but it shouldn't slow down the group much.) Vinnie quickly relates the situation in the mansion and the plan formulated in response to it.
Anabel gets on the satellite phone and calls Terence West. She shares the group's location and what they've seen: prisoners, illegal arms, stolen art, and so on. She also passes along the ID number of the Greek policeman. West is surprised to be getting a call for help from the Russian FSB (as he still thinks of Anabel and friends), but agrees to contact his Greek counterparts. He asks Anabel to do her best to keep her team from engaging in violence, as this would complicate the situation with the Greek police.
JB uses the base radio's satellite uplink to report in to Chaturvedi. He shares the same information with him that Anabel passed along to West, but adds details of the group's tactical plans. Chaturvedi responds by saying that he has a plan of his own – one that will summon the Greek authorities, if all goes well. He's less concerned than West about explosions and shooting, but asks the Agents to do whatever they can to get out of sight, and preferably off the island, before the Greek authorities arrive.
As Anabel and JB make their reports, Wen and Vinnie plant the C4 charges on the fuel tanks behind the hangar, and Jili rigs a remote control for them. When all this is done, it's time to head out. Vinnie leads the others back across the gardens to the south wall of the mansion, once again using topiaries, low walls, and statues for cover. This goes surprisingly well, and soon everybody is hiding in the shrubbery outside the lounge window.
Fortunately, the lounge is still empty, so all eight Agents can simply climb through the window. Vinnie directs Anabel to the shouted conversation coming through the study door. Anabel tells the others that it's somebody important – someone used to being obeyed – giving his staff orders to refuel a yacht. JB stalks over to the study window, looks in, and reports that he sees an older man seated at a desk, with a very menacing armed bodyguard at his elbow. He's shouting at two men in coveralls, one of whom has a visible pistol belt.
The Agents briefly confer and conclude that the man sitting at the desk has high odds of being Grandfather. They take up positions in the lounge, just outside the door to the study. Wen and Klas crouch in the two best shooting positions, attach suppressors to their pistols, and brace their weapons. Vinnie equips his own silenced handgun and stands to one side of the door. The others back off and cover the remaining entrances to the room. On Vinnie's cue, it all goes down.
Vinnie kicks the door open to give Klas and Wen a shot. As soon as Wen can see into the office beyond, she shoots the bodyguard in the face three times, dropping him out of sight behind the desk. Simultaneously, Klas shoots the man with the pistol belt; surprisingly, though, his mark doesn't drop immediately. Vinnie then moves into the office, his pistol at the ready, to make sure that the door stays open.
Grandfather's men prove to be tough customers. The man Klas shot fights through the pain and draws his pistol. The second man in coveralls, whom JB thought unarmed, pulls a small pistol from concealment. Vinnie can also hear the bodyguard thrashing around on the floor behind the desk – he may be down, but he isn't out just yet.
Then the man the Agents presume to be Grandfather shoots through the front panel of his desk with some sort of hand cannon! There are three loud booms as the thin wood explodes outward into the room. Vinnie is struck once in the chest. His body armor turns a lethal hit into merely a painful one, but he flinches and backs away, causing the office door to start drifting shut.
With the racket of Grandfather's monster pistol echoing through the mansion, the Agents realize that stealth is blown. They act quickly to regain control of the situation. Vinnie grits his teeth, pushes aside the pain of his shattered ribs, and shoots the man who produced the concealed pistol, dropping him at once. Klas barges into the office and braces the door open. Wen charges past Klas, leaps onto the desk, and shoots Grandfather in the gun arm. Jili hits the button on the remote and blows the fuel tanks.
The decisive action buys the Agents control of the office. Grandfather is winged and has Wen's gun in his face. The bodyguard and the two men in coveralls have all passed out from their injuries, and are being covered by Klas and Vinnie regardless. And while there are shouts of alarm all around the mansion, the focus appears to be on the explosions and massive blaze behind the hangar.
Wen and Vinnie use duct tape to bind Grandfather to his rolling office chair. They also gag and blindfold him with the stuff. Klas grabs the hand cannon (a ridiculous .50AE pistol that only a gangster could love) from its rig under the desk; it might prove useful. Anabel, Ben, JB, Jili, and Qoqa holster their handguns, unsling their M16s, and cover the office door. When Grandfather is ready to roll – literally – all eight Agents move out of the office in a tight group, rifles pointing in every direction.
However, it looks as if the diversionary blast worked perfectly. While there are plenty of running footsteps and blaring alarms, nobody has shown up in the lounge yet. Vinnie manages to lead the others most of the way to the stairs before they encounter even token opposition: a man with an AK-type rifle, about 30 meters away down the long corridor. Klas and Wen gun down the gangster without a second thought, causing the unarmed servants to scatter and leave the way clear.
At the door to the basement, Vinnie decides that there's no time for picking locks. The screaming cooks and maids, and the sounds of shooting, will soon bring many more armed men into the area. Thus, he grabs Grandfather's hand cannon from Klas and blows the lock away. Then big Ben, with help from Jili and Qoqa, manhandles Grandfather down the stairs, chair and all. Meanwhile, Klas and Wen move forward, rifles at the ready, while Anabel, JB, and Vinnie cover the rear.
Once the Agents are at the basement door, Hamid can hear them over the radio and unlatches the lock. He warns his associates to expect trouble on the other side, as he saw armed men on some of the basement cameras. Wen slaps a fresh magazine into her weapon, nods to Klas, and counts down. On her mark, Klas opens the door and Wen rolls through with her rifle at the ready. There's a brief exchange of automatic weapons fire and then Wen yells, "Clear!"
The Agents in the stairwell boil out into the corridor, rolling Grandfather between them, and see that Wen has taken out two more gunmen. With nobody in sight at the moment, the group pushes for the guardroom door. As soon as they get there, Zhang opens it up and lets them in. Then Hamid locks the door and changes the code . . . just in case. When the dust settles, all 11 Agents are together in the relative safety of a reinforced security room, with no injuries worse than Klas' twisted ankle and Vinnie's cracked ribs.
It's only then – in better light, no longer on the run, and without distracting alarms and shooting – that Qoqa recognizes Grandfather. She recalls his face from posters back in Chechnya: He's none other than "The Sausage-Maker," a horrible man who played both sides of the conflict, sold displaced Chechen women into sex slavery, looted the place, and then got out before everything was bombed to ruins. She tells the others that even if Grandfather can evade criminal charges, there are people in Russia and Chechnya who want him for war crimes. This certainly explains why he hides on a Greek island . . .
There's little time to discuss this, however. Once Grandfather's bodyguards realize he's missing and track down where he was taken, things are going to get hot. The Agents have to get ready to hold them off until the authorities arrive. Everybody is given a job to do:
• Hamid and Jili get to work on the security systems. They activate all the electronic locks and alarms between them and the rest of the mansion. While the console here lacks links to anything outside the basement, it enables them to deny the gangsters easy access to the level. Jili patches her laptop into the system in place of the existing computer, and sets things up so that her codes – not the originals – control everything.
• Wen visits the armory off the guardroom. Her task is to find munitions that might be useful for demoralizing Grandfather's men in the likely event that the situation turns into a standoff. She grabs grenades, antipersonnel mines, warheads for the largest antitank rockets in the stash . . . anything that she and Vinnie could quickly turn into a booby trap using only the tools at hand.
• Lev joins Wen in the armory. First, he finds 5.56×45mm rounds with which to top up the magazines of the group's M16s. Then he loads a bunch of Russian guns and fills up plenty of spare magazines for them. After that, he digs out and sets up a couple of machine guns. By the time he's done, there are enough loaded assault rifles and machine guns for all 11 Agents to have several extras, should they need them.
• Anabel starts telling Grandfather what she wants him to believe. Her con is that she and her associates are in Grandfather's general line of work, albeit in Ukraine, and have decided that they want what he has. She explains that she, Lev, and Qoqa represent her syndicate, and that their demands are simple: $100 million in diamonds or he dies. To help make her point, she emphasizes that her associates are dangerous mercenaries who aren't above shooting everyone and blowing the place up. As a twist, she implies that this operation was made possible because she infiltrated Kirill's circle.
• Qoqa treats Grandfather's wounded arm while Anabel rants and Zhang holds a gun on him. Qoqa is confident that she can keep Grandfather from bleeding out, but his arm is a write-off. Not that this seems to bother Qoqa much; indeed, she decides that Grandfather won't even be getting painkillers. As she works, she covertly gauges Grandfather's reactions to Anabel's words. Predictably, he's angry . . . but he seems especially stressed when Kirill's name comes up. This leads Qoqa to suspect that Kirill might be more than he seems, maybe family; she collects a blood sample just in case she needs to test her theory.
• Ben sees to Vinnie's wound, forcing Vinnie to stay put. While Vinnie's armor is shredded at the site of impact, it looks as if the vest managed to keep the bullet from putting a big hole in him – although some ribs were broken in the process. Ben carefully removes the mangled slug, cleans the wound, and tapes Vinnie up. When he's done, Vinnie is feeling fairly confident that, if push comes to shove, he can pull his weight.
• JB takes a look at Grandfather's two prisoners. He doesn't feel that there's much he can do here for Olga – whose injuries are more psychological than physical – but he indicates that he can patch up the cop well enough to walk and talk. He warns that he'll need some time for this, though, and starts treating the man's wounds.
• Klas gets the job of watching the security cameras while all of this is going on. So far, though, nobody has ventured into sight in the corridor outside the guardroom.
To be continued . . .
This is getting good
Re: This is getting good