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The Company
Time: Wednesday, July 7, 2010 (wee hours).
Place: English Midlands, U.K.
Last Event: Defeating apparently American abduction squad.
With eight wounded operatives of somebody's overseas service down with serious wounds, and a surveillance helicopter circling overhead, the Agents have little time to confer on their next move. They arm themselves with the carbines taken from their defeated attackers. Anabel also grabs a headset, with the hope of sending a message to the chopper crew. She keeps things simple: You have eight wounded men down here, and now we're armed, so fetch your comrades before they bleed out – and no funny business. As the team waits for a reply, Wen takes aim on the aircraft . . . which simply circles once and then leaves the area!
On seeing this, Qoqa leaps into action. She dashes around, doing what she can for the casualties. Fortunately, she has her ever-present belt pouch, and the men bleeding in the field came with some medical gear of their own, stuffed into their load-bearing vests. Wen – who has some corpsman training – slings her captured carbine, pulls out her flashlight, and moves to help Qoqa. Nobody especially wants eight more deaths on the Company's conscience.
As Qoqa and Wen work, Anabel assists by digging out first aid kits and trauma kits from the patients' vests. Jili also makes the rounds, albeit with a less-humanitarian objective: policing up shoulder cameras, headsets, and anything else that might transmit a signal, and disabling the lot. Paul and Vinnie gather firearms and ammo, and stack it all safely out of reach, just in case somebody wakes up and feels brave or desperate. Then the two men stand guard over the proceedings.
Qoqa's priority is to stop the casualties' bleeding. Her triage efforts consist of taking a hasty look to determine who's in the worst shape, and then ordering Wen to look after the least-wounded men. Both Agents work quickly, applying rapid-clotting dressings, haemostatic bandages, tourniquets, and so on. After a mere five minutes – thanks largely to Qoqa working at legendary speeds – the worst wounds are tied off. People may still die, but in hours instead of minutes.
That buys some time to decide what to do next. Qoqa wants to stabilize the men properly so that they'll survive until they're eventually found, and won't die if moved by careless medics. She figures that if they were sent to capture the group using darts that deliver an imprecisely measured dose of tranquilizers – and possibly a few bullets – then they'll have some serious medical gear in their vehicles. Vinnie wants to secure the vehicles regardless; he isn't comfortable with ignoring a possible backup element, or drivers, or just a transmitter belting out a video signal. Everybody agrees that faster transportation than bicycles would be useful.
Jili, Qoqa, and Wen all have some experience with night-vision gear, and manage to find three sets still operational. The others decide to rely on their natural senses. Paul binds the wounded by twos with their own zip-cuffs, making sure that each pair includes at least one man who took a leg hit. Then the whole group heads out stealthily, nobody carrying less than a carbine and a pistol.
The team backtracks until they come across two SUVs stopped quite far off the road behind fairly thick bushes, engines cut and no lights on. There doesn't appear to be any activity nearby, but nobody feels like taking chances. Vinnie crawls forward slowly, looking for tripwires, while Wen covers him from concealment. The other four watch the flanks and rear.
Vinnie does indeed find a tripwire in his path. It's connected to a munition that he doesn't immediately recognize – doubtless some species of flare or mine. Fortunately, he does recognize the trigger mechanism, and is able to disarm it without much difficulty. He makes it to the SUVs without further incident, and confirms that there's nobody under, behind, or inside the vehicles. He signals for the others to join him, which they do, carefully following the path he cleared.
It turns out that all the doors on both SUVs are locked. The Agents don't want to risk smashing a window, if only to avoid setting off an alarm – noisy, silent, or otherwise – or a booby trap, so Anabel and Paul are sent back to find the keys. The other four stand guard over the vehicles. However, the heightened caution proves unnecessary; Anabel and Paul return without incident, report that none of the wounded men have come to, and hand Vinnie two sets of keys.
Vinnie unlocks the SUVs and then the whole team pores over the vehicles, looking for useful equipment. At first, there doesn't appear to be anything inside besides a couple of laptop computers that Jili sets aside to check out later. Of course, secret agents working on foreign soil wouldn't drive around with suspicious hardware sitting on the back seat, so everyone keeps searching. After a few minutes, Vinnie lifts the rearmost seats and unlatches a compartment in the floor . . . where he finds electronics cases, medical kits, ammo, and even a SAW, as well as storage space for the kit the men had on them in the field.
After a brief huddle, the decision is to drive over to the wounded so that Qoqa can use the medical gear. Then Vinnie will disable one SUV and the whole group will take off in the other. Once they're safely on the road, somebody will call 999 and report a shooting at this location. Everybody agrees that as useful as firearms might be, it would be best to leave them behind. This has to do with avoiding police interference: Nobody wants to drive around England with illegal guns, and it might take at least some heat off if all the weapons used in the shooting are present and accounted for.
With that, Paul and Vinnie drive the others back to the injured men, keeping the lights out and trying not to run into anything in the dark. Everybody has a job to do before the group can take off. Just to be safe, nobody works alone.
Anabel and Paul get the task of breaking camp. They collect all of the group's gear and toss it into one of the vehicles. After that, they carry the bicycles to the barn of the nearby farm and stow them inside – casually, as if they might be the farmer's property. Fortunately, the gunfight earlier was with suppressed weapons several hundred metres away, so the night's violence doesn't seem to have stirred things up at the farm.
Paul and Anabel finish before the others are done preparing the vehicles and dealing with the wounded men, whereupon Anabel proposes that it's time to call in a favor: Terence West owes the group for helping him round up dangerous Russian gangsters and generally revitalizing his law-enforcement career – and a little help from MI5 could be useful right about now. With her associates' nodded agreement, Anabel calls the private number that Terence gave her. It takes a few tries, but she eventually manages to wake up the MI5 man and get him on the phone.
At first, Terence seems happy to hear from Anabel – he's clearly attracted to her, after all. Anabel dampens his spirits almost immediately by filling him in on the night's events, with a suitable spin: Her people, acting in self-defense, just shot eight Americans who were doing some very "black" wet work in England. As the spooks were assisted by a helicopter, which is rather high-profile, doubtless somebody fairly high up is in the know. However, she imagines that MI5 didn't get the memo. She then gives Terence the GPS coordinates, and suggests that he move quickly, as there are doubtless "cleaners" on the way as she speaks.
Terence seems disturbed but not surprised. He promises to send people to investigate as soon as possible – but also explains that this sort of situation is very delicate, and he's simply in no position to make guarantees. While his personal team does deal with foreign activity, their beat is international criminal gangs, not spies from fellow NATO powers! He imagines that those who do deal in espionage matters will be on their way, too. All he can promise is to try to throw them off Anabel's trail for a short time, perhaps 24 hours. He suggests that Anabel get out of the U.K. at once.
Meanwhile, Jili and Vinnie pore over the SUVs, looking for tracking devices in every conceivable hiding spot. They find and remove two such beacons on each vehicle. Jili is also worried about the more obvious radios and computers aboard, and disables them just to be sure. She makes a point of removing the hard drives for future examination, however. Vinnie removes a little something of his own: All the sparkplugs from the truck he plans to leave behind.
The whole time all of this is going on, Qoqa and Wen are once again treating the wounded. With the better gear from the captured vehicles, they're able to clamp bleeds, apply proper dressings, splint legs, start drips, inject antibiotics, and so on. Qoqa is in charge of these proceedings, with Wen serving as a nurse. Wen gathers the packaging of all the supplies used on each man and tapes it to him with surgical strips, her logic being that this will keep the site orderly for when Qoqa inevitably decides to "clean" it, and at the same time let the medics who evacuate the men know what treatments each patient has already received.
After working for about an hour, Qoqa stands up, pulls off her surgical gloves, and says that she has done all she can. By now, everybody has learned what Terence told Anabel, and is anxious to get moving – the authorities are at most 15-20 minutes out, and it would be best not to encounter them. With the injured treated, camp broken, and vehicles prepped, it's time to go. As previously discussed, the Agents leave behind all the gear the downed spooks were carrying, other than a pistol apiece, but keep certain equipment from the SUVs, including the computer hard drives, the remaining medical supplies, and the SAW.
Vinnie switches on the headlights of the disabled vehicle just to make sure that the wounded men are found, and then takes the wheel of the other SUV. Without further ado, the group heads out. Wen keeps an eye out for the helicopter, but if it's up there, it's keeping its distance. Likewise, while there may be truckloads of British cops or spies on the way, none of the Agents notice anything that's obviously such a response.
The goal is to get to the Channel before sunrise, driving as quickly as possible without actually speeding. The only scheduled stop is a brief visit to a rest area in order to ditch any remaining items that came from Belfast with the group. The enemy picked up the trail somehow, and the leading theory is that some piece of gear has a tracking device concealed in it. Paul's "old service vest" is especially worrisome in this regard . . . and sure enough, Jili finds a small beacon inside!
At the rest stop, Anabel gets out and buys food and coffee. She also casually plants the tracker that Jili found on a truck parked nearby. The others mostly stay put – although Vinnie steps out toss the discarded items in the trash and to refuel the vehicle. Refreshed and hopefully tracking device-free at long last, the Agents get back on the road and drive south.
In the predawn twilight, Vinnie pulls into a small seaside village in Kent. The hour is early enough that the place is asleep. The goal here is to hire or steal a small craft and cross the Channel covertly – preferably before the locals wake up and spot the abandoned SUV, and the local police decide to take a look. Anabel and Vinnie stroll into the village, looking for either suitable transport or the sorts of characters who might be able to set that up. The others remain in the vehicle, heads down and trying not to attract attention.
The sleeping village is quiet and a little foggy. At first, neither Anabel nor Vinnie sees or hears anybody else up and about as they walk toward the water. As Vinnie approaches an intersection, however, he hears a vehicle pull up around the corner. On alert, he steps out . . . and finds himself immediately set upon by two men! One is armed with a TASER, the other with some sort of injector that resembles a tranquilizer dart rigged to be wielded like a knife. At the same time, Anabel hears a noise above her, and turns just in time to see a third attacker drop from a low roof, brandishing a stun gun.
Not wishing to attract the local police – or to escalate a scuffle involving less-lethal weapons to a very lethal gunfight twice in one night – neither Agent goes for a gun. Instead, both pull knives. Unfortunately, things don't go well. Before Vinnie can land a telling blow, he's subdued by a TASER hit. Anabel manages to hit the "panic button" on her Company phone, alerting her colleagues in the SUV, just before she's hit with the injector. She collapses almost instantly and passes out fully a few seconds later.
Back in the vehicle, Jili, Paul, Qoqa, and Wen spring into action. Qoqa is in the driver's seat, and immediately starts the engine. Jili, sitting next to her, says that the signal came from Anabel's phone, which she can easily locate using her own device. Paul and Wen simply get ready for action. Paul warns that gunshots will bring the local coppers, which might be good or bad, depending. The Agents feel that would be bad, and decide to use fists, not firearms, in the event of violence.
It doesn't take long to reach the corner where Anabel and Vinnie were grabbed. Anabel is nowhere to be seen, but her phone is still lying in the street. More important, there are two burly men manhandling an unconscious Vinnie into the back of another SUV while a third stands guard, brandishing a TASER. The turn is too sharp for Qoqa to use her vehicle as a weapon, so she simply pulls up short so that everybody can jump out and hopefully rescue Vinnie and Anabel.
This precipitates a very nasty close-in fight. Wen and Paul charge the men. Wen is hit by the TASER before she can close the gap, but Paul manages lands foot-first on the TASER-wielder's knee, breaking it. The goon with the crushed knee falls but doesn't pass out, while his two associates stop dragging Vinnie. One pulls out a TASER and backs up a little while the other draws a stun gun and steps forward.
At this juncture, Qoqa pulls a knife and wades in, while Jili – unarmed – does her best to help her allies. However, Jili gets zapped with the stun gun and joins Wen on the sidewalk, while Qoqa loses her knife in the melee. This leaves Qoqa and Paul, unarmed, facing an opponent with a TASER and another with a stun gun. The man with the broken leg is down but not out; he ditches his discharged TASER in favor of an expandable baton, and starts taking swipes at Qoqa's ankles.
Then things swing back the Agents' way. The spook with the TASER misses his shots and backs off to reload. Qoqa and Paul use this opening to grab the guy with the stun gun, disarm him, bash his face into the parked SUV, and then kick the living tar out of him. He crumples to the ground, bleeding badly from the ears and nose. They also deliver a few extra kicks to the man with the broken knee, but he manages to cover up and take little damage.
And then things go bad again. The chap with the TASER shoots Paul, who falls to the ground, leaving Qoqa alone. Fortunately for her, that TASER is once again unloaded. Unfortunately for her, the man wielding it has a baton of his own, and comes at her with it. As he charges, Qoqa dips down and grabs for a weapon – any weapon. She comes up with the stun gun just in time to zap her assailant before he's able to cosh her.
With two of the three abductors insensible, and Jili, Paul, and Wen all stunned, Qoqa knows she must end the fight quickly. She turns back to the badly hurt man on the ground, who's still flailing at her with his baton, and silences him with the stun gun. Realizing that he and the other goon she zapped might recover before any of her allies do, she shows no mercy: She snatches up a baton and puts a brutal beating on all three downed enemies.
To be continued . . .