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The Company
Time: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 (23:30).
Place: Mazatlán, Mexico.
Last Event: Raiding the cartel warehouse.
After infiltrating the cartel compound over the rooftops and taking down a mixture of Mexican gangsters and Afghan militants in a lightning raid, the Agents reload and get ready to search for the Russian nuclear weapon. Zhang rappels from the warehouse roof into the yard below, and then heads over to the small office building to help Lev and Qoqa clear it. Klas and Wen stay up top to watch their backs. And Paul, Vinnie, Jili, and Anabel – in that order – rope down into the warehouse through the skylight, taking care to cover each other as they do.
Just as Anabel touches down and Lev is about to toss a stun grenade through the office door, Wen shouts a warning over the radio: From her perch, she can hear squealing tires and see headlights coming up the road at high speed. Whoever is coming will arrive in a matter of seconds!
The Agents set up to face this new threat. Outside the office building, Lev moves to the corner that affords a view of the gate, Qoqa kicks the door shut and takes up a position between it and Lev, and Zhang clambers onto the low roof. Atop the warehouse, Wen and Klas draw a bead on the gate. Inside, Paul and Vinnie dash for the door to the yard, leaving Anabel and Jili to examine the plastic "tent" there.
The speeding cars come to a screeching halt out front. From his position on the office roof, Zhang can hear at least 10 men get out. They approach the building and gate, pause for a moment, and then back off saying something in Spanish that Zhang can't decipher. The only part he understands is "Back, back, back! It makes a big blast!" This doesn't sound good to him, and he hisses a warning over the radio.
An instant later, there's a deafening blast as the gate is blown off its moorings and sent flying across the compound. Then a moment after that, a second explosion rocks the office building. Zhang is fine, but he can hear the door scraping through the rooms below and smell pulverized cinderblock. The area is filled with smoke and dust. The Agents are acutely aware that however happy the local police might have been to turn a deaf ear to a cartel shootout, they'll have to respond to this – which is to say, the clock is now ticking.
A few seconds after the explosions, Wen sees eight men armed with M4 or CAR-15 carbines of some kind rush out of the haze by the gate. They're firing long bursts at nothing in particular, and not covering one another or moving like professionals. In her experienced opinion, they're rabble – likely more gangsters – and that's what she radios in. Once Klas, Lev, and Zhang acknowledge, Wen counts down: "3, 2, 1, . . . go, go, go!"
Klas and Wen score a couple of headshots, immediately sowing confusion among the enemy ranks. Lev pops around his corner, fires a burst from his submachine gun, and then ducks back out of sight. Zhang does something similar from the office roof, using the shallow parapet for cover. Neither Lev nor Zhang inflicts spectacular damage, but the new arrivals are caught off-guard by the Agents' well-coordinated strike, and respond with full-automatic panic fire that makes a lot of noise but hits nothing.
Undeterred by near-random automatic fire, the Agents keep the pressure on. Klas and Wen take turns aiming and firing, sharing target information via radio. Lev and Zhang repeatedly pop out, fire bursts, and then duck back behind cover; when they empty their magazines, they transition to pistols instead of reloading, refusing to give their opponents even an instant to regroup. This action buys Paul and Vinnie time to burst out of the warehouse and dart over to one of the parked SUVs, where they can engage the enemy from behind the protection of a heavy engine block.
The gangsters, by contrast, are all over the place. Some shoot up at where they last saw Zhang, even though he relocates after every appearance. Others fire at the corner of the office building, accomplishing little but to knock cinderblock chips into Lev's armor without really wounding him. Two appear to realize that there are snipers in the area, and blaze away at the warehouse roof without coming close to Wen or Klas. Hosing bullets around like this soon empties their magazines . . . and when they crouch and start to reload, Klas and Wen radio this in, declaring open season on their poorly coordinated enemies.
The only hitch comes when Qoqa, still watching the office's back exit, sees the door and the wall to either side of it suddenly perforated by dozens of small holes. This looks like the work of shotguns. It seems that the gangsters sent some of their men through the building! Qoqa reports this over the radio as she levels her submachine gun at the door. Paul and Vinnie shift their aim to cover her.
Sure enough, the back door bursts open and four men come running out. The two in the lead have Benelli M4 Super 90s, or a variant thereupon; the others carry carbines, like their pals out front. Unfortunately for them all, they emerge right in the center of Paul, Qoqa, and Vinnie's overlapping fields of fire. One shotgunner somehow messes up a clear, short-range shot at Qoqa, filling the air to her left with pellets. His associates hit nothing. And then that's it for those gunmen – Lev spins and takes out Qoqa's opponent with a smooth double-tap from his pistol, while Vinnie, Qoqa, and Paul chop the other three to bits with 90 rounds from their submachine guns.
The men who charged through the front gate fare no better. They make an effort to reload their carbines, then transition to handguns when they realize that they have to shoot back, and finally attempt to retreat when it dawns on them that they've walked into a trap. None of that matters, though. Wen and Klas methodically assassinate them from the safety of the warehouse roof. Perhaps 10 seconds after breaching the compound, all of the gangsters are down.
The Agents know that there isn't a moment to lose. The police are doubtless on the way, thanks to the explosions. Everybody pauses only for long enough to reload (and for Vinnie to help himself to a shotgun). Then it's time to find the nuke and leave the area!
Anabel and Jili inform the others that the "tent" they were investigating holds a drug lab, not nuclear weapons. Thus, the Agents have no choice but to divvy up the compound and search it at speed. Klas, Lev, and Zhang are left on sentry duty, Klas watching the street while the other two hold their positions by the office building. Everybody else – including Wen, who rappels down to join her associates in the warehouse – fans out and gets to work.
Jili and Qoqa fire up their Geiger counters and start sweeping the warehouse interior. Paul focuses on the two big rigs pulled up to the loading dock. Vinnie systematically examines the parked SUVs in the yard. And Anabel requests that Lev and Zhang watch her back as she searches the office.
While the others look for the nuke, Wen radios Hamid to bring the cube van over to the next block, behind the group's parked vehicles. She warns him to stay well clear of the back of the warehouse. Then she starts planting SEMTEX on the back wall! Talking as she works, she explains that when the team is ready to move out, she'll blast them a new exit to the back street.
Outside, Vinnie finds that the SUVs hold little of interest; they've been cleaned out, confirming his theory about a vehicle change. Paul radios in that the two transport trucks contain a lot of heroin hidden in a big shipment of running shoes, but no nuke – not unless it's very cleverly disguised. It's Qoqa and Jili who hit paydirt, their Geiger counters picking up a trail of higher-than-background radiation that points to the haphazard pile of cargo that the Afghan guerrillas were sitting on. Qoqa starts shifting crates, and Vinnie and Paul come back inside to help out. They soon uncover a decidedly military-looking case covered with stenciled-on Cyrillic writing.
It takes little more than a glance for Jili, Paul, Qoqa, and Vinnie to confirm that they've found the Russian bomb. They manhandle it onto a small cargo trolley in order to move it more easily. Wen tells them to roll the thing out of the warehouse so that the blast from the explosives she's rigged won't damage it. She also shouts at Klas to get off the roof, which he does – albeit with a moment of embarrassment when he gets stuck mid-rappel, cuts himself free, and lands painfully on his tailbone.
With everybody clear of the warehouse – and sirens now audible in the distance – Wen collects a couple of the RPG-7s that the Afghans left behind, runs outside, and blows the SEMTEX. This tears a gaping hole in the back wall! As soon as rubble stops raining down, Vinnie, Qoqa, Paul, and Jili hustle the nuke out the new "door" and onto the back street, where Hamid is waiting with the van. The five of them load the bomb aboard. While they're taking care of this, Wen tosses a thermite grenade into each of the trucks full of heroin and running shoes.
With that, it's time to leave. Wen shouts for Anabel, Lev, and Zhang to get moving. However, Anabel reports that she has found a floor safe, and wants Vinnie to come take a look at it. After a hasty discussion, everybody agrees that this may be worth the risk. The plan is for everybody but Anabel and Vinnie to pull back to the vehicles, drive around the block, and then pick those two up out front. If Vinnie doesn't have the safe open by then, too bad!
Zhang get behind the wheel of the lead car, with Klas beside him; Hamid climbs back into the cab of the cube van; Qoqa takes the second car, with Lev and Jili as passengers; and Paul gets the last car, with Wen watching the back. Meanwhile, Vinnie borrows Jili's electronic stethoscope and sprints to the office, where Anabel shows him the safe she found. As the vehicles race around the block, Vinnie works as quickly as he can. Unfortunately, there isn't enough time to crack a safe or even to plant explosives properly – the others pull up out front before he can get it open. With the sirens too close for comfort, Vinnie reluctantly gives up and takes over the van from Hamid, while Anabel hops into Paul's car.
Then it's time to move. Zhang speeds off into the night, followed closely by Vinnie in the van, then Qoqa's car, and finally Paul bringing up the rear. While the police are responding in force, it appears that they're all coming from the south. The Agents' theories as to why vary: cartel bribery, indifference to gangs killing each other off, or rank incompetence. Whatever the explanation, the sirens soon fade into the distance, and nobody can see any flashing lights.
To be continued . . .