[Story] Exigent Circumstances

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Siege
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[Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Siege »

Exigent Circumstances

The year is 2011, and the Cold War never ended. For a full year now the Soviet Union has been in the grip of a political civil war that is beginning to turn violent. But whilst the eyes of a wary West are universally turned to Moscow, in other parts of the world strange machinations are afoot. Two days ago and half the world away Director Jack Ridley, head of MI-6's reborn Special Operations Executive, received a very unusual message...

ONE: Tip Off

The black Land Rovers came to a halt near the decaying docks, and hard-faced men poured out onto the Hong Kong road. Soldiers in urban camouflage fatigues wielding stocky submachineguns, and men in plain suits with wired earpieces and subtle bulges under their shoulders secured the street around the small convoy. The doors of the second car opened and two figures stepped out onto the cracked asphalt of the street. Jack Ridley looked up at the storm clouds brewing in the East Asian skies, then at the foreboding warehouse in front of them, and finally turned to face the athletic blonde beside him. “This is the place?”

Sunday Summers straightened some imaginary rumples in her elegant black pantsuit, produced an expensive-looking PDA and scrolled through some information on it. “This is indeed the place,” she confirmed after a moment.

“Doesn't look like much.”

“I imagine that is the point.”

He snorted. “At least back in the good old days crazy terror-barons used to shack up in style.” He gestured at the dilapidated warehouse which was rapidly being surrounded by armed men. “Can you imagine holing up in there when you could have a secret volcano lair?”

The blond woman gazed at him, and a corner of her lips twitched. “I suppose I can, though not to any instructive consequence.” She looked around. “I have to say, I still don't quite understand why we're here.”

Ridley shook his head. “Neither do I.” He gestured at the soldiers, the closest of whom had taken their positions next to a side door, strapping it with a breaching charge in the process. “Which is why we didn't come alone.”

“Despite being told to do so.”

“Exactly. No-one tells me what to do. It does bad things to my blood pressure.” He stalked purposefully toward the door. The men in khaki suits fell in around him in a deliberate protective pattern. “Let's hit it boys.”

The breaching charge detonated and the warehouse door exploded inward, transforming into a cloud of fire and splinters as it did. The soldiers of G Squadron, 22 SAS swept silently forward into the darkened building, under-barrel flashlights searching hungrily for a target, any target, to terminate with extreme prejudice. The men from MI-6 waited patiently by the door until, one gunfire-free minute later, the special operators gave the 'all clear' and Captain Sanderson, their highly decorated commander, stepped back out and addressed Ridley. “Sir. You better come see this.”

The abandoned warehouse was made up of several larger and smaller spaces, most of which were completely empty and, from the dust on the floor, hadn't been visited for some time. However in one of the smaller rooms, which had presumably once been a foreman's office, a big plasma television and a high-res web-cam were hooked up to a satellite receiver. On the screen, a woman with intense black eyes looked at the soldiers and special agents who now filled the room. Her black hair fell straight down past high cheekbones and attractive lips curved into a half-smile. A pair of thick-rimmed Italian glasses rested on her nose, and she wore a tight-fitting New Kids on the Block t-shirt under a black leather jacket. “The infamous Mister Jack Ridley,” she greeted the head of MI-6's Special Operations Executive. Her voice was surprisingly light and pleasant. “How agreeable of you to come see me at such short notice.”

“Mary-Louise Drake,” Ridley stoically replied. “I wish I could say the same of you.”

“I thought I asked you to come alone?”

The British spymaster snorted. “Like that was ever going to happen.”

Mary-Louise Drake, internationally wanted arms-trafficker and terrorist enabler, stared at him with a mischievous look on her face. “You didn't think I'd be there in person, did you?”

Ridley looked chagrined, then sighed. “You know, for a moment there, I kind of did.”

Drake smiled serenely. “I'm not that crazy.”

“Yeah, well, a guy can dream.” He briefly turned away from the screen and whispered to one of the khaki suits, “Oaksley, trace that signal.” Then back to the television. “So, what brings me here, other than to see your pretty face again? I'd hoped that after we sank your stolen toy submarine you'd stay under for a while.”

“Ha. 'Stay under'. That's funny.” Her smile widened. “You didn't think me dead?”

Ridley smiled back at her. Once his smile had been roguish and charming, but that was a long time ago. Now it was cold and calculating, and took even the hardened arms trafficker visibly aback. “Lady, in my line of business you learn fast enough not to presume anyone dead unless you've seen the corpse.”

Drake creased her brow ever so slightly. “I'm touched by your concern, Mr. Ridley. Interestingly enough, the reason I contacted you has to do with the untimely demise of the Perilous.”

Now it was Ridley's turn to frown. The year before HMS Perilous, a British Aggressor-class submarine chock-full of nuclear missiles, had defected to terror syndicate WRAITH. It had taken several months and an international drag-hunt across the oceans before the rogue boomer and its charismatic captain had been traced to a hidden submarine pen in Yemen. A decision had been made to level the underground docks with the sub was still inside, and in a rare feat of East-West cooperation a Soviet battlecruiser had fired several cruise missiles loaded with bunker-buster warheads into the fortified base. The SOE agent responsible for finding and identifying the submarine had only just managed to get clear of the strike in time but all's well, or so Whitehall had reasoned, that ends well. And Her Majesty's Government, eager to bury the embarrassing defection as deep as it could, had ordered the dossier closed.

But as the leader of Operation: PICKPOCKET, DSOE Jack Ridley had always had mixed feelings about that ending. Too many questions were left unanswered: What had the Perilous been doing in Yemen? And why had Drake been present at the base at the time? And perhaps even more importantly now: If she'd gotten out alive, who else – and what else – had escaped from the doomed WRAITH facility also?

He decided it wasn't very wise to voice those concerns aloud, however. “Perilous was destroyed,” he said confidently. “It won't bother Her Majesty again.”

Drake nodded. “A collapsing mountain will do that to a submarine. Too bad, I had been kind of hoping to sell that boat back to you. But it's not the submarine you should be worried about. It's the missiles and warheads.”

“Those things have been crushed beneath tons of rubble and water. There's no way to get at them.”

She clucked her tongue. “Unless I retrieved them before you blew it up.”

The possibility was enough to give Ridley pause. The Aggressor-class carried sixteen Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Each of those in turn carried eight MIRV warheads, for a total of one hundred and twenty eight nuclear weapons. More than enough atomic firepower to vaporize a small country, or to start a very large war. “You're bluffing.”

She shrugged and pressed a button on a keyboard. Part of the screen changed, displaying black-and-white video footage of an underground dock. Concrete quays rose up from the water. Bright electric lights illuminated murky water and roughly hewed walls. Men in blue overalls were using a crane to carefully lift a large missile out of a black, cigar-shaped hull. “I'm not bluffing,” she assured the secret agent.

Ridley stared at the video. He knew she could be playing him. It could all be fake – there was no way to tell right now. But he also knew that with his luck, it probably wasn't. He crossed his arms. “Okay. Let's assume for a minute that I believe you, and you're a one-woman nuclear superpower now. Why tell me this?”

She pressed another button, and the video was replaced by a photograph of an Arabic man. The photo had clearly been taken from a distance. He wore a dark keffiyeh and was about to step into an unmarked car. Even from a distance Ridley was able to make out the man's intense features. Either the photo had been digitally enhanced, or the surveillance equipment had been state-of-the-art. “I assume you recognize him?” asked Drake.

“Raheem al-Qadari,” he replied. “Iraqi intellectual, turned republican, turned guerrilla freedom fighter, turned terrorist after the defeat of the revolutionary factions in the Third Gulf War. His men bombed the Royal Palace in 2003 and he's been making a nuisance of himself ever since. What about him?”

“He stole some of my merchandise.”

An involuntarily shudder passed down Ridley's spine. “Merchandise?” he asked, already certain he wouldn't like the answer.

Drake sighed and absentmindedly combed a hand through her hair. “Two Red Lightning thermonuclear warheads.” Her voice took on a disturbingly dream-like quality. “With a maximum yield of four hundred and fifty kilotons per bomb the most advanced warhead produced by the United Kingdom.” Her eyes hardened. “I was quite disturbed when I found out what he'd done.”

Ridley blinked. “An Iraqi terrorist stole two of your stolen nukes. And you were disturbed. I think the appropriate turn of phrase is 'what comes around, goes around'?”

“Your thinking, Jack, is wrong,” she said, and there was a hardness to her voice that didn't fit with her petite image. “You can cling to your obsolete doctrine of national sovereignty if you want, but I believe this world no longer needs governments to run its affairs for it. It may in fact be better off without them – and at any rate I don't think government ought to have a monopoly on any weapon, not even nukes.”

“But these stateless rogues you're breaking a lance for ought to at least have the decency to pay you for their weapons of mass destruction, right?”

“Exactly,” she said, apparently missing his sarcasm entirely. “The new world order can't function without at least some basic rules and common decency.”

“I don't know if I should laugh or cry,” muttered Ridley. “Well. This is all very interesting, but let me repeat: Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I think you're cute. And because I want you to stop al-Qadari and retrieve my merchandise before he does something stupid.”

Ridley snorted. “Even assuming I believe you – and I haven't said that I do – what makes you think I'm particularly inclined to help you take care of your problem? And why did you want me to come all the way down here to tell me this?”

“Because I think your government would like its nuclear weapons back. And because I have reason to think Raheem al-Qadari is headed for Hong Kong.” The woman on the screen looked Ridley straight in the eyes. “To do something stupid.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. Mary-Louise Drake was known to be more than a little unstable. He still wasn't sure he believed a single word she'd said. On the other hand, if a known terrorist enabler warned you that a known terrorist was headed for Hong Kong with a set of nuclear weapons, it would not do for MI-6, let alone the DSOE, to ignore that warning. His voice was suddenly serious. “Okay. Tell me what you know.”

She smiled happily. “Say please.”

He gritted his teeth and ruthlessly beat down his sense of professional pride. “Please.”

“With sugar on top?”

“Will you get to it?!” he demanded irritably.

Drake laughed melodically. “He smuggled the warheads overland through Pakistan and then to Sri Lanka. We briefly lost the trail near Rangoon, but my people picked them up again in the Gulf of Thailand.” She waved away his next question before Ridley had a chance to open his mouth. “I know what you're thinking, but I couldn't get them back myself. Al-Qadari has lots of bad guys with big guns. That's not my forte.”

Ridley connected the dots and nodded. “They're on a ship, then.”

“Yes, the Star of Oman, registered in Lebanon. Her last stop was in Brunei, where as far as I've been able to tell nothing was off-loaded, so the warheads should still be aboard. Next stop is...”

“Hong Kong,” Ridley inferred. He briefly looked at Summers, who was busy making notes of everything that was being said.

“Indeed,” Drake confirmed. “I would very much like for you to intercept the ship at sea, before al-Qadari gets a chance to vaporize the better part of the city.”

“But why?” he asked suspiciously. “Why go to these lengths to warn us?”

She shrugged. “There's this great sushi place near Victoria Harbour. I'd hate for it to disappear. Where else would I eat my temaki?” She smiled. “My reasons are my own, Mister Ridley. The question is, what are you going to do now?”

He frowned and scratched his chin, thinking. “We'll check it out.” Then he looked straight at her. “But think about this, Drake... You might believe government is obsolete, but if you're speaking the truth then when the shit hit the fan, you came to me, faithful servant of Her Majesty that I am. Think about that for a while.”

She scowled and then, incredibly, stuck out her tongue at him before breaking the connection.

Ridley turned to face Summers with one eyebrow raised, only to find out her expression mirrored his own. “So. What do you make of that?” he asked.

Sunday Summers shook her head. “I'll say, that woman is quite disturbed. And I do not trust her. But even so...”

Something seemed to pass between her and her boss, a kind of implicit understanding. He nodded. “Yeah. Something weird is going on here, and we had better take it seriously. Get me the governor.”
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Booted Vulture »

I had to google the word 'Exigent' because of this you darn vocabulary shower offer.

Decent set up. How careless of the British to lose nukes and to bomb that there base without you know verifying that the nukes were still there.

Still one imagines this al-Qadari chap would need some launching hardware to use the warheads to fullest effect. The nuke terminology got a bit confusing though. Does al-Qadari have two bombs or two MIRV sections?
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

God. She is *lovely*. A global thermonuclear arms dealer who sounds like friggin' Luna Lovegood, of all the people in the world! :mrgreen:

I love the banter. Especially when this crazy broad doesn't even sound actively malevolent or evil, but talks so childishly cloudcuckoo and sugary sweetly. Very charming, man. Very... adorable. :D

Imagine our hardboiled protagonists, grim and gritty, shooting and running and gunning for their lives as the evil lair explodes, but here we have Mary-Louise Drake just giggling and maybe she can even grab the intercom and start childishly teasing and toying with the heroes on air - like a schoolgirl GLaDOS.

The best part is that despite/inspite of her apparent lunacy, she's still a friggin' dangerously competent global arms dealer - who, like, damn, gets nukes and Scuds and is, in Ridley's own words, a one-woman nuclear power! Damn!

I'd love to see some of that charismatic but crazy Royal Navy sub captain. Like, the Hunt for the Red October, but BRITISH! With TEA! And SCONES! Under the sea!

I can imagine that, to some degree, perhaps Drake's close confidants, confederates and associates might be a little bit loopy on some level. Like, maybe she attracts all similarly-minded nutsoes. That could be how WRAITH contacts her, because while she's so Luna Lovegoody there's also Malcolm Kroner playing with his pet cat and making his kitten wave its hand while going "goodbai chandwa!"

Shut up Malcolm.

Drake must meet Baylor.

It will be epic.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Acatalepsy »

Definitely an interesting premise. And of course, its not that much of a stretch that one criminal might want another criminal caught for whatever reason - not wanting them to get away with theft might be one, as might not setting of nuclear bomb (and thus spoiling the arms market).
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Artemis »

not wanting them to get away with theft might be one, as might not setting of nuclear bomb (and thus spoiling the arms market).
And that lovely sushi restaurant, of course.

I like this a lot, Siege! Both our spymaster and our International Woman of Mystery acted very smart, and I really liked their interaction.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Siege »

TWO: Crew Expendable

The two sleek Panther helicopters strained against increasingly fierce winds as they drove out to sea and the heart of the approaching tropical storm. Dark clouds boiled overhead, occasionally illuminated by early flashes of lightning. Inside the struggling helicopters the atmosphere was tense. The special operators of G Squadron had changed their urban camouflage for midnight black and grimly looked at the worsening weather that constantly buffeted the helicopters. Aboard the lead chopper only one man seemed totally at ease in the worsening weather.

“You seem inordinately calm,” Sunday Summers noted, and braced herself as a particularly intense gust of wind pushed the heli sideways. The sudden movement shoved her brusquely into the side of the nearest SAS soldier, who going by the grin on his war-painted face didn't seem to mind at all.

In sharp contrast, Jack Ridley had folded his arms behind his head and swayed preternaturally smoothly in tune with the helicopter's movements. “Considering all the crap I've been through,” he smiled, “I think that if a spot of bad weather finally does me in, it'll be the greatest irony the world has ever known.”

“Well, that's certainly a great comfort,” she grumbled sarcastically and once again clawed her way back out of the side of the soldier's webbing. “I do beg your pardon, sergeant.”

Further conversation was interrupted by the voice of Captain Sanderson. His voice crackled across the tac-net from the other helicopter. “Bravo Team, the intel on this Op is pretty sketchy, but we have to assume it's solid. To recap: the package is aboard a medium freighter, Lebanese registration number 52775. There is most likely a security detail on board. We are looking for two cone-shaped nuclear warheads, so check your Geiger counters for any traces of radiation that might indicate the presence of radioactive material.”

Ridley activated the microphone hooked to his helmet. “Copperhead to Bravo Team. Rules of engagement are...” He grimaced a little. “Crew expendable.”

The commanders of the two strike teams – Sanderson for Bravo One, and his second-in-command Lieutenant Prichard for Bravo Two – acknowledged tersely. The soldiers fell quiet. None of them much liked the idea of having to potentially shoot innocent sailors whose only crime was that they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the special operators also knew what was at stake. They would do what they had to do.

The helicopters flew on into the heart of the gathering cyclone, until after several silent minutes the voice of one of the pilots crackled over the tac-net, thick with static from the approaching storm. “Copperhead, Triggerfish One-Two. We have visual on the target. E.T.A sixty seconds.”

“Copy: One-Two,” Ridley confirmed. He turned to the commandos. “Lock and load, boys.”

“Thirty seconds,” the pilot reported. “Going dark.” The helicopter flared its main rotor and began to bleed off speed against the wind, whilst simultaneously turning to match the course of the cargo ship. Captain Sanderson threw open the side door of the Panther helicopter, and roaring wind filled the compartment, tugging at everything not tied down. Through the door the soldiers could see the helo now flew only a dozen meters above the waves. The approaching storm was whipping the cold water of the South China Sea into a frenzied maelstrom. In the middle distance Star of Oman could be seen battering its way through rolling waves a dozen meters tall, navigation lights flashing at its sides. Thousands of gallons of water sloshed across the freighter's main deck before washing back into the sea.

“Ten seconds,” the pilot radioed. “Radio check. Go to a secure channel.”

The commandos turned their tactical radios to the preselected encrypted channel and began checking their gear for the rope-down. The men stood up, using the grips mounted on the ceiling to keep their balance in the bucking and shaking helicopter. Ridley took a moment to shoot a glance at his aide-de-camp, who unsteadily followed after the sergeant who'd been sitting next to her. “You don't have to be here,” he said, after making sure his radio was turned off.

Despite a slightly motion-sick look, Sunday Summers managed to shoot Ridley a venomous glare. “Indeed not,” she replied. Instead of her usual suit she wore black fatigues and combat boots. Her trusty SIG and a TMP machine-pistol were locked in a gun harness strapped over a bullet-proof vest. “I could have been sipping caipirinhas at Government House instead.”

That wasn't exactly what Ridley meant. “You never roped down to a freighter in the middle of a storm before.” He leaned closer. “If you don't feel one hundred percent confident doing this...”

Summers gazed briefly at the frenzied sea below the shaking helicopter and her face turned a lighter shade of green. Then she shook her head. “I'm touched by your concern for my well-being,” she said firmly. “But now that I'm here I might as well go through with it.” She smiled sickly. “I mean, how hard can it be?”

Ridley grinned and wanted to say something to encourage her, but was interrupted by the pilot. “Green light!” Lieutenant Prichard dropped the rope line over the side of the crew compartment. “Go! Go! Go!”

One by one the commandos linked their harnesses to the rope and then jumped into the raging tempest, rappelling quickly down to the aft deck of the Star of Oman. Within seconds only Ridley and Summers were left in the compartment. For a moment she looked wide-eyed at the pitching, brine-battered deck of the freighter, twenty meters and an eternity below. Strands of blond hair trailed from underneath her black tactical helmet and whipped in the howling wind. Then her eyes narrowed. “Bollocks to this,” she muttered, and clipped her harness to the line. Without further hesitation she jumped off the helicopter, wrapped her legs around the rope line and rappelled down to the deck, landing heavily but solidly on both feet.

Ridley was only seconds behind her, unclasping from the rope-line and bringing up his UMP rifle in one smooth motion that betrayed years of practice. Summers had already drawn her TMP. Ridley idly noted that she seemed much more at ease now that she was aboard the rolling and stamping freighter, moving lithely with no apparent difficulty despite the way the ship hurled itself against the waves – no surprise there: Lieutenant-Commander Summers had served for nearly a decade aboard several Royal Navy warships.

The commandos of Bravo Two had spread out across the aft deck. Bravo One under Sanderson would circle around and wait for them to clear the bridge before rappelling onto the main deck. “Weapons free,” Prichard radioed. Now that they were aboard, the SAS commandos were his responsibility. “Squad, on me. Secure the bridge.” His men moved with expert precision, covering each other as they rushed toward the door that lead into the bridge structure. One of the men pulled it open, and the others rushed inside. The insides of the superstructure were painted a fading white, with flecks of rust showing through the ancient paint job here and there. The soldiers rushed in to secure the bunk rooms at the deck floor, and liberally applied the butts of their rifles to ensure the four men who were sleeping there would remain firmly asleep. “Four non-combatants secure.”

Four others rushed ahead to secure the stairs leading up into the superstructure and toward the bridge. “Stairs clear!” the radio crackled.

Ridley and Summers surged up the stairs to the bridge, surrounded by the soldiers of Bravo Two, who positioned themselves near the heavy metal door to the bridge. One of them pulled a cylindrical tube from his combat webbing and pulled the pin just as another pulled the door open. “Flashbang out!” radioed Prichard and threw the grenade onto the bridge where it detonated. An incredibly loud bang assaulted Ridley's ears, and though he'd closed his eyes knowing what was coming he noticed the brilliant flash of white light even through his closed eyelids. When he opened his eyes however his vision cleared after blinking once or twice – the bridge crew was not so lucky. “Go!” ordered Pritchard, and heavily armed soldiers surged onto the bridge.

“Tangos by the map table!” The warning was followed almost immediately by gunfire, the heavy ringing bark of Soviet AK-series weapons first, followed by screams and, almost instantly, the controlled stuttering of the commandos' silenced weapons. The gunfight lasted maybe three seconds before the all-clear came over the tac-net, followed swiftly by Pritchard's “bridge secure!”

When Ridley entered, the bridge smelled of gunpowder and there were several bodies on the floor. Two were of men carrying Eastern Block rifles and cheap surplus combat gear. Judging by the bullet holes in their chests and the pools of blood in which they lay they were quite obviously dead. Another two men were unarmed crew who had been caught in the crossfire. Neither of them had survived the fusillade the startled armed men had unloaded. A third crew member was still alive however, and wailing in pain from a badly bleeding wound to the arm. One commando was looking to his injuries whilst another kept a rifle pointed at his head. Judging by his now-ruined uniform he was presumably the captain of the Star of Oman. He blabbed something in Arabic that Ridley couldn't make out and wasn't very interested in.

Pritchard briefly surveyed the carnage, then activated his radio. “Bravo One, bridge is secure. You've a green light for infiltration.”

The second Panther helicopter soared in and came to a halt over the main deck, inaudible and all but invisible in the worsening weather. A drizzle of rain swept against the bridge window, and Ridley could barely make out the commandos fast-roping down to the deck. “Bravo One is ready and will hold the bridge,” radioed Sanderson. “Bravo Two secure the cargo hold. Go!”

The door to the cargo hold was down two levels, one level below the main deck. One of the men slowly and carefully opened it a crack whilst another peered through as the team stacked up behind him. “Catwalk clear,” the commando reported.

“Move!”

The door swept open fully and the first members of the team raced silently onto the exposed catwalk hanging over the cargo bay. The innards of the tramp freighter were one large cargo space, filled with a confusing warren of crates and containers of varying sizes, stacked up several meters. The catwalk lead all the way along the bay to a door in the far side that lead into the forward area. A set of metal stairs lead down into the cargo bay. The soldiers quickly surged down from the horribly exposed catwalk down into the relative cover of the chaotic bay.

“I'm getting a reading,” someone whispered. A second later, Ridley heard the small Geiger counter attached to his combat vest begin to softly click its ominous radiation warning. If the armed guards on the bridge hadn't been enough, that was enough to convince him there was some serious truth to Drake's warning.

“Keep it tight,” radioed Prichard. “Check your corners and move up. Three meter spread.”

The commandos spread out across the cargo space, navigating the maze of narrow pathways left between rows of stacked wooden crates and steel containers. Ridley and Summers fell in behind Prichard's second in command, Sergeant Dunn, weapons at the ready. Endless seconds passed as they slowly moved ahead through the silent bay, the ship rolling beneath their feet.

“Contact!” The warning hissed across the tac-net milliseconds before the sound of gunfire shattered the silence. Multiple automatic weapons chattered somewhere to the left, answered almost instantly by the stuttering of submachineguns and a curse. “Kearsarge is down!”

Dunn, Ridley and Summers rushed ahead through the maze. “Movement right!” someone warned. Abruptly the maze of crates opened up into a mostly free area near the back of the cargo hold. Dunn moved up, sweeping his rifle to the left to face whoever had attacked his squadmates. Ridley noticed movement to the right. Instincts honed by years of close quarters combat kicked in and he threw himself flat, wrestling to bring up his UMP in time, but the ship chose just that moment to jolt as it hit a heavy wave and Ridley landed clumsily on his own gun.

Time slowed. The hostile, a man in khaki fatigues similar to the ones worn by the men on the bridge, brought up a compact Vikhr assault rifle. Ridley cursed, realizing Dunn had not seen the man and he would never be able to untangle his own weapon in time. The assailant pressed the weapon into his shoulder, training the barrel on the fallen secret agent. Ridley could see his black, close-cropped hair; his pressed lips; the way his finger moved from the guard to the trigger...

Suddenly Summers was crouched over him. Her TMP was out and she was steadying the machine-pistol over her wrist. The gun buzzed once, then again, and the attacker fell to the deck, dropping his rifle and clutching his ruined throat where a fusillade of 9mm rounds had punched clean through. “Target neutralized,” she announced evenly, before shooting Ridley a grin and offering him a hand.

To the left, Dunn's rifle chattered as he pumped three rounds into one of the men who had been keeping Prichard and the rest of the commandos bottled up. The remaining two gunmen tried to counter the sudden new threat, but the SAS soldiers pressed their advantage, blowing them away in a hail of bullets and splinters that punched clear through the packing crates they used for makeshift cover.

“Cargo bay clear!” Prichard announced. The Lieutenant quickly tasked one of the men with seeing to Corporal Kearsarge, who had taken a nasty but nonlethal wound to the leg. Prichard himself was bleeding from a series of superficial scratches where flying splinters had cut into his face. Dunn and another soldier rushed back up the catwalk to secure the forward hold, which as it turned out was deserted.

In the meantime Ridley had unclasped the Geiger counter from his vest. Holding it out in front of him he swept it around, looking for traces of radiation. Soon enough the chirping device lead him to a steel container set apart from the rest of the cargo against the far wall of the cargo bay. The soft clicking turned into a near-continuous chirp as he moved closer, indicating a major radiation source. “Help me open this up,” he urged.

Summers smiled and holstered her machine-pistol after double-checking the safeties. “This is what I get for saving my boss' life,” she said and produced a small, postage-stamp sized patch of plastic explosives from her combat vest. “I get to be ordered around some more.”

“You get to play with C4,” countered Ridley. “I know girls who'd die of jealousy if they saw you now.”

“I'm certain you do,” snorted Summers. She attached the explosives to the heavy-duty lock that was keeping the container shut and retreated several steps. “Fire in the hole!”

The explosives detonated with a dull thud and a flash of smoke, reducing the lock to slagged scrap metal. With some effort, Ridley and Summers pulled open the container doors and looked inside.

The container was empty.

The Geiger counters continued to chirp their warnings, but the container was entirely devoid of content. Something nuclear had definitely been stashed here. Operative word being 'had'. Whatever it had been, it was gone now. A rude curse escaped Ridley's lips. He activated his radio “Sanderson. The package is gone. Something was definitely here, but it's not any longer. We're too late.”
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Damn! Where did it go?! Nice tacticool action with the G Squad. I like how cool and professional the SAS always are, and how they seem to come down helicopters to ruin everyone's shit anywhere. Who Dares Wins!

And, man, Summers is just so British. I do beg your pardon, sergeant! :mrgreen:
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Booted Vulture »

Good chapter. Jack Riddley's supposed to be older now? So he's more John Mason in The Rock than James Bond in Goldfinger

Man, real British aren't like that. Not any more at least. Or up North.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Siege »

Booted Vulture wrote:Jack Riddley's supposed to be older now?
Yeah, he's older, more experienced, and more cynical. He's also no longer a solitary agent but the director of MI-6's Special Operations Executive, the 'direct action' element of the Secret Intelligence Service. He doesn't become Sean Connery until much later though, when he makes head of MI-6 in 2021 ;).

Concerning your earlier question, it would appear al-Qadari is in possession of two warheads. The term 'MIRV' and 'warhead' are pretty much synonymous; a single submarine-launched ballistic missile contains multiple MIRVs (Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles), i.e. multiple warheads, so it can destroy a whole bunch of (clustered) targets in one go. In CSW one British Trident II carries eight Red Lightning warheads, for a total firepower of 3.6 megatons. Inside the missile the end result will look more or less like this.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Booted Vulture »

So the bad guy's not restricted to blowing up just two places with these two stolen missiles of his? If he can separate out the sub-munitions he can smuggle lots of bomblets to lots of different places and nuke lots of things. I mean 3.6 megatons is a lot even spread out over the sub-munitions. So each of the smallest sections are still going to waste a city each. I mean the bombs that got dropped on Japan were less than a kiloton a piece, if I recall correctly.

So depending on al-Qadari's aims Jack is in a lot of trouble here. I mean if al-Qadari just want to blow things up; he separate and scatter the bomblets to the point where Jack can't track them all down fast enough. Of course if he wants to sell them; he may want to keep them together as people would probably want to buy the entire system. (though third rate powers may just want a bomb so they can figure out how it works)

Anyway, this is obviously way bad mojo for poor Ridley.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Acatalepsy »

I mean the bombs that got dropped on Japan were less than a kiloton a piece, if I recall correctly.
Not quite. Little Boy and Fat Man were 14 and 20 kilotons respectively. Still, You can grind the city to halt easily enough. It would be worth more to grind more cities to a halt than to completely fry one city - the idea being that you create a complete shutdown of the target's infrastructure, creating food shortages, crashing power grids, etc.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Siege »

Booted Vulture wrote:So the bad guy's not restricted to blowing up just two places with these two stolen missiles of his?
No, not quite. One missile contains eight warheads. But al-Qadari doesn't have two missiles, he has two warheads. Which isn't as bad as if he'd had two missiles, but it still means he's got 900 kilotons of explosive badness at his beck and call. More than enough to level a sizeable chunk of city, especially a city as built-up as Hong Kong...
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Artemis »

Current Theory: Drake stole BACK the warheads, then informed Ridley and MI6 about the freighter to kill the witnesses, and to send them on a red herring.

Great action, Siege. Reading this go me through a 5-hour makeup class that likely would have killed me otherwise!
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Siege »

Okay... This story is now officially moving scarily quick :?. I can't believe how fast this gets written. Here's to hoping it lasts...

THREE: Juncture

“We are missing something,” Ridley said, and he scratched his chin as the Panther helicopter raced the storm back to Hong Kong.

“It would appear we do,” Summers replied, her face studiedly neutral. “Two nuclear warheads, to be precise.” She seemed to be getting the hang of moving with the bucking and shaking of the helicopter, which was a good thing because there were no more commandos to catch her fall. Prichard's men had stayed behind on the Star of Oman to make sure it safely reached Hong Kong as well as to interrogate its captain. Captain Sanderson and Bravo One were returning on the other helo.

“True enough, but that's not what I meant. Nothing about this situation makes sense to me.”

Summers frowned. “How do you figure?”

“We lose several nuclear warheads to WRAITH. The syndicate in turn loses several of them to some middle-eastern middle management terror mook... And then they turn to us, of all people, to retrieve them.” Ridley leaned forward. “Doesn't that strike you as a little convenient?”

His aide shrugged. “Not really. After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“No, he isn't.” Ridley shook his head. “I know Malcolm Kroner. The enemy of his enemy is his enemies' enemy, nothing more. And he wouldn't care if someone vaporized downtown Hong Kong with a stolen nuke either. If he got us involved in this, he didn't do so out of the goodness of his heart – it's because he's seeing an opportunity somewhere.”

“But it wasn't Kroner who got us involved,” countered Summers. “It was Drake. And you saw her... Lord only knows what her motivations are.”

“True...” Ridley knitted his eyebrows. “But she was with WRAITH in Yemen. If she's with WRAITH, she's with Kroner. There's an angle we're missing.”

“Perhaps,” Summers allowed. “Although I would offer that allegiances can shift. Either way I daresay our more immediate concern is where those warheads went.”

Her boss nodded. “They must have off-loaded them somewhere. Assuming we believe Drake and it wasn't in Brunei...”

Summers raised an eyebrow. “Assuming we do. We don't even know if there are any warheads for sure. For all we know they're just smuggling ordinary radiological materials.”

“Quite. However,” Ridley waved her objections away. “Let's for the moment assume she's telling the truth. That means the warheads were still aboard when the Star of Oman left Brunei. And considering the traces of radiation we found they can't have been gone all that long. So they off-loaded them relatively recently, presumably on the Spratlys or somewhere in the South China Sea.”

“Right.”

“They can't move the warheads into Hong Kong by air, there are radiological detectors at every airfield and heliport in the city. So they must have transferred them to a smaller vessel, hoping to smuggle them in under the radar. Between the two of us you're the naval expert... So. How long do you reckon it would take them to get there?”

Summers looked out the side window. Gusts or rain slapped thick against the thick plastic. “In this weather? A small ship would be lucky to make ten knots. The bigger the boat, the less it suffers from the storm. Assuming they're using a trading sampan or a similar small ship they'd have fallen behind the freighter the minute they pushed off.”

Ridley nodded. “So if the Star of Oman hasn't reached Hong Kong yet, the warheads probably haven't yet either.”

“Precisely.”

The secret agent looked relieved. “All right. That means we still have time before they get here.”

“Unless this al-Qadari chap hired a small aircraft and initiates the warhead as soon as he's over the city,” Summers offered dryly.

Ridley looked at her as if he'd swallowed a bug. “All the more reason I have to talk to the governor as soon as possible.” He switched radio-nets to the cockpit. “Are we in range of the city yet?”

The pilot shook his head. “Approximately five more minutes sir.”

Ridley acknowledged grimly, and the chopper flew on in silence for the next few minutes until the pilot announced that, “we're in range, sir. I have an open line to CBF.”

The DSOE briefly adjusted his microphone. “This is Director Jack Ridley of the Special Operations Executive, MI-6 confirmation code JOKER TWO ZERO SEVEN. I am issuing a special directive for a city-wide Nuclear Emergency Plan. We have possible weapons of mass destruction coming into the colony. All airports are to be closed immediately. No diplomatic flights, no exceptions. All British forces in the Hong Kong area are to go to a state of heightened alert. I want all navy and police vessels fitted with radiation detectors out on patrol.” He listened briefly as if interrupted, then glowered. “Sir, with all due respect... Don't argue with me. The Civil Contingencies Act applies here. I have a blank check from the highest level of Her Majesties' Government.” His expression turned grim. “Sir, I'm invoking exigent circumstances. If I want to, I can take your underpants. Do I make myself clear? Excellent.” He closed the channel with a brusque motion.

Summers looked at her boss and raised an eyebrow. “Governor's none too happy with you just about now, I recon?”

“Like I pissed in his scrambled eggs,” Ridley smiled sourly. “As a rule, powerful people don't like being overruled by some jumped-up bozo from the Midlands.”

“What else is new.” Sunday Summers smiled just a little too broadly for Ridley to resist. “Relax, boss. He'll turn around once we save his city from catastrophic destruction.”

Ridley smiled in return. It was his first honest smile in a while. “Let's get to work, then.”

It took the Panther helicopter another twenty minutes to reach the helipad at the edge of Victoria Harbour. A drizzle of rain padded down from the ever-darkening clouds overhead, blurring the hundred thousand lights from the myriad skyscrapers surrounding the bay. Summers and Ridley hurried from the helipad through the light spray to the waiting Land Rover that awaited them.

“Oaksley,” Ridley greeted the man who awaited them in the front passenger seat. “Tell me you have some good news for us.”

“Boss,” the young, spikey-haired man answered politely. Ian Oaksley had transferred to the Secret Intelligence Service's direct action division from MI-5's surveillance and counter-terrorism division. “The guv'nor just issued a region-wide terror alert. I assume that was your doing, sir?”

“It was,” Ridley confirmed.

“Well, I attempted a trace of that signal our perp set up in order to talk to you in the warehouse. It bounced between a whole bunch of satellites, some of 'em American and some of 'em Soviet. I dunno how she managed to access the latter. I guess her techies ran a low-level bypass that SICKLE didn't notice until the transmission was-”

“Get to it, Oaksley,” Ridley cut him short.

He nodded. “It's sort of odd sir. First I thought she was in Los Angeles, but then I noticed an encoded VOIP signal embedded in a seemingly unrelated set of transmissions... Well. I can't be entirely sure, sir, but I'd bet a thousand quid the transmission came from right here in Hong Kong. And it was a real-time transmission, which means-”

Ridley rolled his eyes. “I'm not a complete idiot, Oaksley. It means she's here, right in this bloody city.” He looked at his subordinate. “Tell me you have an address.”

“I do sir. And I ordered it locked it down, too, sir,” Oaksley replied defensively. “I had surveillance set up around the place the minute I found out. No-one's been in or out of there.”

“And?”

“A strike team is standing by.”

The DSOE smiled thinly. “Excellent work. Let's go.”

The Land Rover roared to life, heading down the West Kowloon Highway past Olympian park. The usually busy highways were almost empty now, owing to the incoming tropical storm. Rain battered against the windscreen in fierce gusts, shoving at the heavy car as it careened past towering skyscrapers, illuminated from within by hundreds of lights in orange and white. The expertly trained SIS driver barely slowed down to take the off-ramp down to Waterloo Road, running several red lights in the process and sending sprays of water both left and right.

Skyscrapers gave way to more ordinary highrise and apartment buildings as the car water-planed past the old trees of King's Park, into the Pui Ching neighborhood and onto Victory Avenue. The rain was beating a steady drumbeat on the roof of the car as it slowed and finally pulled into a suspiciously empty parking space behind a nondescript Toyota. Inside it were two men in plain suits. The man on the driver's side was holding a digital camera fitted with a telephoto lens. “Aidan, Claxton,” Ridley greeted them as he bent over the front passenger seat window, ignoring the rain that poured from his brow into his eyes. “What's new?”

Claxton Boswell greeted him with a surly nod. “Hey boss. Nothing much. A few people entered and left. We matched them against a directory of the building's occupants. None of them are our crazy girl.”

Ridley looked over the top of the car at row of buildings on the other side of the road. Chinese characters in busy red and blue neon burned on several of them. “Which building is it?”

Boswell pointed at a tall, white-gray apartment building on the other side of the street, built in the nondescript concrete-and-glass style of the mid-1980s. “Number ninety-four. The apartment is 83-b. About halfway up. There's no lights on as far as we can see. The boys are waiting for you near the entrance.”

He nodded. “Alright. No sense in waiting then. Claxton, you keep a look out down here. Aidan, you're with us. Let's hit it.”

The five agents - Ridley, Summers, Oaksley, Aidan Davies and Oaksley's driver, Helen Griffith – hustled across the street. The wind tugged at their coats as it howled through the artificial canyons of downtown Hong Kong. The stars were now entirely blotted out of the night sky by storm clouds blacker than the night itself. The secret agents were joined near the entrance by another three of their colleagues who had masqueraded – rather unconvincingly – as men and women reading newspapers or simply strolling up and down the empty, rain-swept street.

The lobby of the apartment building was an empty expanse of faded linoleum, with walls of cheap yellow tile and a cork bulletin board half-full of announcements from the building owner in Chinese and English. There was no building concierge to bother the agents, who rapidly fanned out and secured the atrium, pulling guns out of concealed holsters as soon as they were through the door. Ridley paced toward one of the four elevators on the far side of the lobby. “Illsley, Hoyce,” he indicated two of the agents who had patrolled the street. “You stick to the lobby. Cover the stairs, and report any suspicious activity. Anyone so much as looks at you funny, you arrest them on the spot.” He called for two separate elevators, which arrived shortly. “Oaksley, Davies, Griffith, take the other elevator. We're going up.”

The elevator doors closed. Sunday Summers pulled the TMP from its holster and checked the magazine and safety. “Tough day,” she mused as weird cantopop echoed softly out of the elevator's shoddy speakers. Her black fatigues and bulletproof vest looked distinctly out of place in the mirrored walls of the elevator. A Hello Kitty sticker was stuck onto one of the mirrors. To Ridley, it seemed utterly bizarre, like a token from a parallel dimension he had long left.

“Hm-mm.” Ridley muttered non-committaly. He looked at his aide. “You okay?”

She nodded once. Ridley idly noticed how nicely her neck curved to where her hair disappeared under her ACH helmet. “That wasn't the first time I shot someone. I'll be fine.”

“All right. As long as you're sure,” Ridley replied, and turned his attention to more pressing matters. He flicked the safety off his own UMP submachinegun as the blinking numbers above the elevator doors approached their floor. “Lock and load.”

“Roger that, boss.”

The elevator doors slid open to reveal a hallway that looked similar to the lobby. The floor was covered in cheap linoleum with a psychedelic 1950's-style geometric pattern. White tile covered the walls, and the ceiling was similarly painted white. Brown doors were spaced evenly throughout the hall. A few seconds after Ridley and Summers had stepped out, the next elevator arrived, and the other agents stepped out. They had each produced their own weapons, easily concealed Beretta 93R machine pistols, from shoulder holsters hidden beneath suits tailored expressly to hide such weapons and the kevlar armor they wore underneath.

83-b was a corner apartment several dozen meters from the elevators mounted in the middle of the building. The secret agents hurried silently down the hallway and took up position besides the door to the apartment. “One, two, three,” Ridley counted softly. “Go!”

Griffith forcefully kicked in the door to the apartment and Ridley surged in first, rifle pressed into his shoulder and at the look-out for any potential hostiles lurking inside. Summers and the other agents followed closely behind, spreading out across the small living quarters. Like most in Hong Kong the apartment was small, consisting of only three rooms and a small kitchenette in an alcove. It took the agents mere seconds to secure all of it, aided by the fact that there was no living soul to be seen inside.

There were only a few pieces of furniture inside the living room of the apartment: a cheap couch, a low wooden table, and a bureau with mounted on it a plasma television identical to the one Ridley had encountered in the warehouse, fitted with a similar web-cam and satellite transceiver. “Well, it looks like we found out where the transmission came from,” Summers concluded.

“Boss,” said Aidan. “Take a look at this.” He handed Ridley a sheet of paper which had been left on the wooden coffee table. On the sheet a crude portrait of a man had been drawn. The face of the man was clearly that of Jack Ridley. The portrait was drawn in crayon.

“Huh. Okay...” Ridley muttered, shaking his head. “That officially beats even Hungary for fucking weirdness.”

Summers surveyed the empty apartment. Posters of the Spice Girls and Boyzone were pinned onto the walls. Pizza boxes were piled up in the kitchenette. “It doesn't seem there's much left, Jack,” she said. “She was here, no doubt about it, but that was some time ago. I doubt she'll be coming back.”

Before he could reply the team radio crackled ever so briefly, and Ridley could almost make out the sound of Claxton Boswell's voice before the signal was cut off. “Claxton?” The radio remained silent. “Claxton?! Come in?” Still nothing. He frowned and switched channels. “Hoyce. Illsley. Did you hear that?”

Briefly Jonathan Illsey's voice cut across the channel. “Boss! We've got company!” He said more, but his voice was drowned out by the chattering of something that sounded eerily like automatic weaponry.

Ridley cursed. “People, we have a situation. Weapons tight, there are friendlies in the building...” He moved toward the door of the apartment, once again pressing the UMP against his shoulder. Adrenalin pumped through his veins as he realized, instinctually, that someone was moving up through the building toward this apartment. “Be on your toes. Someone's coming for us. Be ready to take them apart.”

He edged outside the door to the apartment just in time to see a striking woman step out of one of the elevators, surrounded by a mob of heavily armed and violent-looking men. They carried body-armour and automatic rifles with drum-fed magazines, but somehow Jack Ridley only had eye for the way her red hair curled down past pronounced cheekbones. Time appeared to freeze. For an infinitesimal moment he and she looked each other in the eye. An expression of surprise and stunned recognition flashed across her face. “Jack.” Her voice was only a whisper, but somehow he understood her loud and clear across the full length of the hallway. Despite the years, her voice was just as honey-smooth as he remembered.

“Chandra,” he breathed. He imagined his own expression mirrored hers, and he realized she understood him as surely as he had understood her.

Then the moment was gone. Time unstuck. In the blink of an eye terrorists and secret agents alike brought up their weapons and opened indiscriminate fire.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Booted Vulture »

Do he just walk into the ex-CIA WRAITH girl?

*checks who's who dates.* Does this fic end with her replacing Kroner? :D
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

We're now in for a FIREFIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!

Man. Jack Ridley is surrounded by some of the awesomest chicks around, mang. All John Baylor gets are a bunch of deranged megalomaniacal screaming sweaty manly men. :P

But, geeze. The situation is terrible! What on Earth would Chandwa be doing out there, anyway? With a bunch of thugs, in the rain, in Hong Kong? I bet it's all Malcolm's fault!

Shut up, Malcolm.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

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FOUR: Hard Target

Hot lead filled the hallway, buzzing through the spot where Ridley had been a second before he'd thrown himself bodily backwards through the doorway. The chatter of automatic weapons was loud like thunder in the close confines of the hallway. For the second time in a day Jack Ridley was forced to eat the floor, and it was pissing him off. He scrambled for the relative safety of the apartment, only to find it wasn't as safe as he'd hoped. Bullets tore into the cheap plaster walls, and entirely too many of them penetrated the thin walls to be comforting. Someone yelled in pain, but the apartment was filled with ricocheting ammunition, clouds of plaster and fragments of wall, and in the heat of the moment he couldn't make out who was hurt.

To their credit the agents reacted with lightning speed. Weapons appeared as if teleported directly into their hands even as men and women scrambled for what little cover the small apartment provided. They began loosing stuttering volleys of return fire from automatic pistols through the doorway.

For an endless minute pandemonium reigned. Ridley brought up his UMP and sent 30 rounds down-range, aiming at the flashes of gunfire he managed to make out through the dust in short bursts that still managed to empty the magazine in under thirty seconds. The stench of cordite filled the hall. He switched the empty magazine out for a fresh one and risked a quick glance into the hallway. The DSOE thought he could see at least one body on the ground, but from the continuing muzzle flashes and the bullets ripping overhead that didn't seem to deter the WRAITH goons much. “I thought taking a promotion would mean I'd get away from this crap.” He gritted his teeth and fingered the trigger, sending bullets toward one of the distant flashes.

Then, as sudden as it had started, the gunfire stopped. The silence was almost painful to the ears. The hallway was filled with a haze of gunpowder and ruined plaster. Ridley turned around, making sure to keep low to the floor as he did so. “Everyone all right?” he hissed back into the apartment.

“Aidan's down,” Griffith whispered back. She'd slipped out of her jacket. There were bloodstains all over her tactical vest. “His kevlar took most of the impact and I've stopped the bleeding, but the bullet's still in there.” She threw an uncertain look at the doorway. “Boss... Those guys pack a hell of a lot more firepower than we do.”

Ridley produced an easy smile that appeared far more confident than he felt. He could think of a dozen things he might have attempted in a situation like this back when he was a solo agent. But he wasn't solo any longer. He was the DSOE, and these were his people. He was responsible for them as much as he was for himself. He had to get them out in one piece somehow. “We're secret agents, Griffith. Her Majesties' finest. We'll be out of here in no time.” He looked at Summers, who was changing the magazine of her TMP with steady hands. Empty shell casings littered the floor where she was hunkering down behind the door to one of the apartment's bedrooms. “Any bright ideas?” he whispered.

His aide shrugged and gestured at her vest. “I have some grenades?”

“Flash?”

She grimaced. “No. The regular explosive sort.”

He gritted his teeth. “Can't use 'em. We'll kill some poor sod hiding behind one of those doors down there.”

“Jack!” a familiar voice called from down the hall. Chandra Gosely sounded just the same as she had all those years ago when he'd first met her, before she'd become the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, before she had betrayed her country and ran off with WRAITH. A thousand memories associated with that voice came back to him, not all of them unpleasant, but all of them entirely unhelpful to his current predicament. “Hey Jack. You still alive, honey?”

He grimaced and by way of reply put several rounds through the thin apartment walls in the direction from which he believed her voice had come, but his compact submachinegun didn't have the sheer penetrating power of the automatic battle rifles the terrorists carried. In an instant the short-lived peace was gone again as the terrorists returned fire, sending several further magazines worth of ammunition into the apartment. Beside Ridley, Summers cursed expressively as pieces of plaster came down on her from a wall that with every passing second looked more like Swiss cheese. By way of reply she jammed her machine-pistol into one of the holes and blindly sprayed rounds down the hallway.

“Ticha! Ti-cha!” Gosely called out in Russian, audible even over the gunfire. The guns fell silent again. She laughed, her voice bright and, to someone who knew her, obviously full of adrenalin. “I'll take that as a yes,” she called. “Sorry about the mess, though this does remind me of good old times. I've missed you, Jack.”

Outside in the distance Ridley could hear police sirens approaching. They'd be here in under ten minutes, but by Ridley's estimate that would be about nine and a half minutes too late. Besides, he doubted the Hong Kong constabulary had the firepower to match hardened terrorists. He looked at the spent shell casings that littered the floor and grimaced. “I missed you too,” he called back.

“Give me the decoder. You can keep Drake for all I care. Just give me the DDLC and I'll be out of your hair.”

Ridley had no idea what she was talking about, but he wasn't about to let Gosely know that. “You can't have it!”

“Don't play coy with me now, Jack. Don't make me take hostages and force you.”

“What the bloody hell is she talking about?” muttered Summers. Her hair and black fatigues were covered with white plaster.

“I'll be damned if I know,” Ridley whispered. Then, louder: “Don't make me come out there and shoot you in the face, Chandra,” he replied with a voice full of false cheer. “I've beaten odds a whole lot worse than this. You know that, don't you?”

The other end of the hallway was briefly silent. Then Gosely laughed again. “She's not there, is she? You don't have her. She beat both of us to the punch. She's gone, and we're shooting at each other over nothing.”

“Oh I don't know about that honey,” Ridley replied. “There's that twenty-five million dollar bounty on your head after all.”

There was no reply, but Ridley knew better than to assume that meant the coast was clear. When no gunfire or grenades came through the door in the next minute though, he allowed himself to breathe a little easier. Finally he got up in a crouch and carefully edged toward the door, keeping his rifle ready in case of subterfuge. The hallway was clear – for a given value of clear: it looked like the first stages of World War 3 had played out in the corridor. Walls were riddled with bullet holes, most of the lights were gone, and there were shell casings and ceiling materials strewn all over the linoleum floor.

The terrorists were gone too, leaving behind small piles of spent shells and a single body. The man was bald except for a wiry patch of beard. His features looked Slavic – what was left of them; a small caliber round had punched its way through his forehead, leaving a right mess on the wall behind him. “Keep your distance,” warned Ridley. “He might be booby-trapped.” He flipped the radio still clipped to his vest to the police frequency and activated it. “This is joker-two-zero-seven. I have an eight-two-one at number ninety-four Victory Avenue. Agents down. I repeat, agents down. Roll paramedics to my location.”

The next few minutes were a blur. Ridley spent some time checking up on Aidan Davies, who was obviously in a lot of pain and had lost quite a bit of blood but otherwise didn't appear to be lethally injured. Then the Flying Squad arrived, and the armed police officers rapidly secured the scene. After he established his bona fides as a special agent in charge from MI-6 the officers knew better than to throw anything worse than weird glances in his way, and instead began knocking on doors to check if anyone had inadvertently been hurt in the firefight.

Soon enough, Ridley and Summers found themselves back downstairs. Rain was pouring steadily down, turning the blue and red lights of police cars and ambulances into a blurry haze. Paramedics were loading the bodies of Hoyce. Illsley and Boswell into black body bags. The three agents never had a chance against the overwhelming firepower the WRAITH terrorists had sported. Ridley felt oddly hollow at the sight – at some level he knew he felt awful for losing three good men, but in his life he'd seen far too much death and destruction to still feel as bad as part of him thought he should. He sighed and turned away, then walked over to where his three remaining agents were huddling under a tree and a pair of confiscated umbrellas that offered at least some refuge from the downpour. “How are you guys holding up?”

“Fine,” Oaksley said numbly, and his voice made it clear he was anything but.

Summers just shrugged. “Bit jittery from the adrenalin. But I'll live.”

Griffith didn't immediately reply, but looked worried as the ambulance that carried Davies set off into the night. “How's Aidan doing?”

“Bullet's lodged against one of his ribs,” Ridley replied. “He's going to need surgery to dig it out, but his condition is not life-threatening. He'll be back up in a week or so.” Griffith merely nodded, but her shoulders sagged a little in relief. Ridley looked over his little group. “Look, people. That was an ugly scene back there. We got jumped when our pants were down, no doubt about it, but there's still bad guys out there, and we still have a job to do. So what say you we get some payback?”

The agents nodded. Ridley recognized the grim look in their eyes of Griffith and Oaksley as they gathered their composure. This was the first time either of them lost colleagues in the line of duty. Suddenly the DSOE felt very old. “You two head for the safe house and grab some heavy firepower,” he told them. “Then rendezvous with Captain Sanderson at the Macau Ferry Terminal heliport and wait for our call.” He turned to Summers. “You're with me.”

“As was to be expected,” Summers replied wryly. “And I was just beginning to look forward to a hot shower.”

Ridley's lips twitched, and he tried very hard not to think of Sunday Summers under a hot shower as he commandeered an unmarked police vehicle. They got in and hit the road, leaving the clusterfuck at Victory Road behind them. The night and the storm rendered Hong Kong in streaks of undecipherable cuneiforms of blurry neon. “So,” Summers said after a little while, the tension fading from her muscles with every passing minute. She turned and looked at him speculatively. “You and Gosely? What's the story there? And don't tell me it's classified.”

An ugly grimace flickered over Ridley's handsome features, even though he'd expected the question. “Back in the days, before she hit the Most Wanted list, before she was DCI even... Chandra Gosely used to be the CIA section chief in Berlin. When I was a young gun in the late eighties I did a few ops in East Germany. We sort of got to know each other.”

“I take it you mean that in the biblical sense?” She smiled a little at his foul expression. “This might come as a shock, but I have heard of your reputation.”

Ridley gave her a sour look. “Yeah. Well. It was a different time. It's a cliché, I know, but it really was. We were running ops on a shoe-string budget and this was back when the Stasi were really mean sons of bitches, before they went all high-tech and got their Virtual Panopticon running. We pulled a few narrow escapes, adrenalin ran high, things happened.” He fell quiet for a moment. “Which I suppose means I didn't really know her all that well after all, huh?”

She shrugged a little and looked out the window. The rain was now coming down in sleets. The storm had almost reached the southern edge of Hong Kong. “Don't you suppose we ought to let her former employers know she's in town? We might get some help from our brothers in Langley whilst we're at it.”

Ridley snorted. “Fat lot of good that would do us. Langley these days can't find its own arse without three satellites. If we tell them Gosely is in the city, they'll ask us nicely to please hold whilst they shit their pants for a bit, and then after a meeting or three they'll send one of their goon squads over here. No; the last thing this situation needs is a bunch of American killers.”

“Because we're doing such a good job managing it ourselves?” Summers asked pointedly. “We got shot at twice today and we still have no idea what's going on. In fact, it seems everyone knows more than we do.”

“No need to remind me,” Ridley replied irritably. He turned around a corner with a squeal of protesting tires, and his voice turned thoughtful. “Did you hear what Gosely said?”

Summers scratched her chin. “You mean the bit about that decoder she was after?”

“Not just any decoder. A DDLC.”

“And that's what?”

“Digital Decryption Logic Suite. A decoder on steroids. Restricted technology, very powerful and potentially very dangerous. You'd want one if you were going to try your hand at breaking multi-megabyte encryption keys in a hurry.”

Summers raised an eyebrow. “What's Chandra Gosely want one of those for?”

“I can't be sure yet,” Ridley frowned. “But it's a safe bet that if Gosely is after it, and Drake has it, then we want it before those two get to do whatever it is they're planning.” He turned left onto another empty road, the rear wheels slipping a little on the wet asphalt. The wipers were working overtime trying to provide at least a marginally useful view of the city that was rushing by.

Summers nodded. “Speaking of which, does it seem odd to you that Chandra Gosely of all people would turn up at the doorstep of Mary-Louise Drake with a squad of armed men looking to do some violence?” She looked at Ridley. “Drake's supposed to be with WRAITH, right? Those two are supposed to be allies, right?”

Ridley nodded slowly. “So why is Drake talking to us? And what is Gosely doing at Drake's doorstep looking for a decoder? Those are good questions. We should definitely ask Drake about them.”

Summers looked at him weirdly. “Uh, I'm sure we'd like to ask her that, but unless you have her number on quickdial we sort of can't?”

Ridley smiled a little. “I think I can do you one better than her phone number. I think I know where she is.”

“And how could you possibly know that?” She looked at him, then at the buildings passing by the windows, which were gradually getting higher again. “Where are we going?”

“What time is it?”

Summers frowned, then checked her watch. “A few minutes to eight in the evening. Why?”

His smile widened fractionally. “How do you feel about grabbing a bite to eat?”
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Awww! They missed each other! The double entrede on that one is clevers. God, Jack Ridley gets all the interesting womens, all the interesting crazy womens. Man, Chandra's grown to be a ruthless bitch. I wonder if she's still got her misplaced sense of loyalty and stuff for American lives, like when she told Malcolm to shut up back in The Monster's Lair.

Man, Jack's so sly with the womens. I can't wait for their next stop. ;)
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Artemis »

It's really great to read about how Ridley has grown up. I thought he was cool before, but now I honestly really like the guy.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Booted Vulture »

Haha! That was great. Poor Riddley; not even worth Chandra killing him on his own merits.

And the plot, as they say, thickens. Awesome how quickly you're getting this out Siege. Who's on a roll?
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Siege »

This took a little longer to get together than the previous chapters, mostly because I wanted to get the conversations right. I like how it worked out though.

FIVE: Breath of Life

The Sushi Shin restaurant was located at the water's edge in the shadow of the International Commerce Center. It offered a grandiose view over the stormy water of Victoria Harbour and was the only Japanese restaurant in the city to boast two Michelin stars, the oldest and best-known European hotel and restaurant guide commending its chef for his “excellent and innovative take on traditional Japanese cuisine”. Despite glowing commendations in dozens of up-scale travel guides the restaurant at this hour appeared desolate in the rainstorm that was now sweeping in earnest through the streets of Hong Kong. Rain was battering its windows and outdoor lighting, and fierce gusts of wind tugged at the small bonsai trees and lion statuettes that decorated the steps up to the entrance. Ridley had parked the car next to the restaurant. The lot was all but entirely empty, with only a handful of cars occupying spots here and there.

“So now what?” asked Summers. She peered through the sleets of rain toward the front door. There didn't appear to be a guard on station, but it was probably no coincidence that the only exterior security camera facing the door was broken. “You really suppose she's in there?”

“I do,” Ridley nodded and unclasped his tactical webbing. “Lose the hardware. We're going in there.”

Summers raised an eyebrow. “Boss. We're about to take down one of the world's most wanted terrorist enablers, and you want to leave the guns in the car?”

Ridley looked at her. “Who said anything about a take-down?” He shoved the UMP in the back and stuck his side-arm back in its holster. “Keep the pistol and the Kevlar.”

“Boss,” her voice took on a more alarmed tone. “Seriously, boss?”

He sighed. “We're not going to take Drake down, Sunday. Between her, al-Qadari and Gosely she's the lesser evil; right now I just want to talk to her. And we're not going to convince her to talk to us if we walk in there kitted out for war, are we?”

Summers didn't seem convinced. “Shouldn't we at least call for back-up?”

Ridley looked at her. “We'll only need more guns in the area if the people in there are going to shoot us. And if they're going to shoot us, they'll do it on sight – in which case backup won't do us any good. So, no, we might as well not.”

She looked at him weirdly. “Your logic baffles me.” Then she sighed, shrugged and unfastened the tactical webbing, making doubly sure nothing snagged on the grenades tucked into it. Then she stuffed the TMP in the glove compartment. “And you really should have told me taking this job would mean things like walking into terrorist hide-outs without backup.”

He snorted. “After all the trouble we went through in Jakarta? Like that would have changed your mind.”

“It might have,” Summers replied defensively. She sniffed. “And this rain is going to ruin my hair.”

“Write it up as expenses,” Ridley dryly replied and stepped outside.

By the time they had crossed the two dozen or so meters from the car to the front door Summers and Ridley were already thoroughly soaked by the downpour. On the upside, no-one seemed to be guarding the entrance to the Sushi Shin. Ridley swung open the wooden front door and entered, black tactical shirt soggy wet under dripping body armour.

For a brief moment, the thoroughly Japanese interior of the Sushi Shin turned into the set of an old Western movie as conversation fell quiet and every man and woman in the place turned toward the entrance. The pianist who had been performing a piece of light jazz stopped playing to see what the commotion – or rather the lack thereof – was about. In three seconds flat, the restaurant fell completely quiet. Jack Ridley took another three steps into the place, then stopped and briefly considered the people gazing at him. “We come in peace,” he gravely intoned. An insufferably cocky smile played across his lips and he glanced at Sunday. “We should have sunglasses. Baylor would've brought sunglasses.”

Summers noticed how her boss seemed to grow more youthful by the second. “You're loving this, aren't you?” she whispered. There was subdued and hidden movement among the booths in the back and most of the occupied tables in the restaurant. There was nothing to see, but Summers instinctively knew that guns were being readied under tables and in jacket pockets. This restaurant was a death trap. One wrong move would transform the deceptively quaint Japanese interior into a killing zone that would have the two SIS agents at its epicentre. Even so and to her credit it would be impossible to tell that Sunday Summers knew this to be so, apart possibly from the glacial pace with which her hand crept toward the holstered SIG on her belt. Otherwise she seemed as unconcerned as if she was a tourist who'd just waltzed into a fish-and-chips joint on the M5 motorway. She raised her voice a little. “It's night, boss. Sunglasses would be silly, unless you're trying for the Langley look.”

“Good point. Maybe we should've brought bandanas instead.” His gaze locked on a particular table near the back of the restaurant. “Keep your hand away from your gun,” he said and sauntered over at a lazy pace.

At the table, a black-haired beauty looked at them with interest over the rim of a sashimi plate. She had a cone-shaped piece of nori seaweed in her hand. There was a single Middle Eastern man at her table, all broad shoulders and lean muscles who even sitting down at a fancy dinner managed to telegraph the fact that he was ex-military. The man looked at the woman with a frown on his face, but she waved his obvious concerns away. “Ari, meet the legendary Jack Ridley,” Mary-Louise Drake introduced him politely. “We meet in person after all. How did you know I would be here?”

Ridley crossed his arms. “You told us.”

“I did?” for a moment Drake looked confused. Then she recalled the earlier conversation and insight flashed across her face. She knitted her brow. “Ah. Yes, I suppose I did, didn't I? How silly of me.” She shrugged and turned to the man. “Ari, be a dear and fetch some more sashimi? Our guests must be starving to drop by so late.”

The man opened his mouth in protest, reconsidered, closed it again and got up from the table. He glowered at Ridley and Summers, then disappeared into the kitchen. Through the restaurant, the men and women who had apparently forgotten all about their food relaxed a little. Drake smiled and gestured at the two seats at the table. “Please, do sit. And don't mind Ari. He's former Mossad... They're a testy bunch.”

“Don't I know it,” Ridley replied, his tone amicable as if he were talking with a good friend instead of a declared enemy. He patted his Kevlar. “I hope you don't mind the armour. We had to take certain precautions.”

“Don't we all?” Drake smiled a little. “I have to admit I like how you just walked in the front door, Jack. That was gutsy.” Her bright smile widened. “I like gutsy.” Then the smile was abruptly gone. “Although I wonder what you're doing here. I'm not alone, you know.”

“I do indeed know,” Ridley replied and made sure to keep his hands above the table. “We're just here to talk. Nothing more.”

“Really? Just talk?” Drake sat up and stretched a little. The DSOE couldn't help but notice how that movement accentuated how tight her Batman t-shirt was pulled over her breasts. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Do you also find it hard to believe that Chandra Gosely is in town?” Ridley said, his tone of voice such that it seemed he was just making idle conversation. “And the crazywoman appears to be looking for you, no less. She and a bunch of goons shot up your old place at Victory Road but good.” He looked at her. “I wonder why that is.”

Drake's expression was all the proof he needed. Ridley smiled thinly. “Oh. I guess you don't find that so hard to believe after all.”

“Well, it doesn't matter,” Drake shrugged childishly and vindictively jabbed a chopstick into a slice of raw fish, spearing straight through it. “I was long gone by the time they got there.”

“You were only a dozen city blocks away,” Ridley countered and pointed at the table. “Eating fish and having not the faintest clue one of the most dangerous women on the planet was after you.”

Drake stared at Ridley, a disconcerting expression in her eyes. “I am also one of the most dangerous women on the planet.”

“Oh please,” Ridley sighed. “I know you're good, you know you're good, but we both know you're not that good. I tracked you down in under a day. WRAITH has people everywhere, in places even I don't know about. You can't hope to stay ahead of them forever – in fact if they really want you I doubt you'll make it to the end of the week in one piece.” He leaned forward and locked his eyes on Drake's. “We can make sure that you do.” He hesitated for a moment, then his voice softened. “But I think you already knew that. I think you want to help us. But I don't think it's just to save yourself from WRAITH.”

“It isn't?” Drake's voice trembled a little. She didn't look away.

“No,” Ridley said firmly. Her reaction confirmed his hunch. Now he recognized the expression in her brown eyes. She wasn't terrified, as he'd first thought. Something was haunting her. “You know, I've been wondering about something since we talked this morning. You put al-Qadari in a position to strike at the city, and then you went through all that trouble to help us catch him? That doesn't compute. Why are you helping us out at all?”

“Why do you think?” Her eyes were big, and her voice was barely a whisper now.

The DSOE shrugged. “At first I thought you were running some other agenda. But I'm beginning to doubt that. I've read your file. I know what you did for Colonel Easly in Cairo. I know you helped him escape a certain and unpleasant death. Thanks to you the Fraternity kidnapped Easly. They were going to torture him, and then executive him... But you changed your mind. You couldn't live with that on your mind.” His eyes bored into hers. “WRAITH isn't what's bothering you. You are what's bothering you. You arrange for terrible things to happen, you're even very good at it... But you can't live with the consequences. And I can help you out with that. I want to trust you. But I have to know for sure. Come on, Drake. I need you to give me a hand here. I need to know what's going on.”

Silent seconds passed. Drake looked at her hands, strands of black hair obscuring her eyes. Finally she let out a shuddering breath. “When I did business with Raheem...” For a moment Drake seemed genuinely lost. “I wasn't myself at the time.” She was silent for a moment. For a second Ridley thought he'd just imagined he saw her lip tremble. “I had nothing but death in my heart.” She looked up and her voice hardened. “I have... a condition. I get, weird. I... do things, when I'm not me.” Drake fidgeted with her fingers. “Sometimes, after, when I am, I don't much like what I did.”

“I see,” Ridley spoke softly. He didn't get it though, and yet somehow he did. According to the expert profilers of Vauxhall Cross, Drake had a serious mental condition, suffering from repeated bouts of manic depression during which she manifested dissociative breakdowns expressed by nihilistic, self-destructive impulses. Unfortunately in the case of this particular international arms dealer, those impulses translated into selling nuclear weapons to terrorists.

“In Cairo, when I opened his cell door, I was hoping Easly would shoot me. But he didn't. I came close to killing myself after Yemen. It's happened before, you know. I've had to talk myself out of it a few times already, and it gets a little harder every time. It's why I came here. It seemed like a good idea, what with Raheem...”

“You need someone to look out for you.” Ridley said softly.

“You mean someone like you?” She snorted dejectedly, and her voice turned hard again. “You would stick me in a concrete hole in the Glasshouse for forty years and have me prodded by interrogators until I'd wish I was dead. I might as well take my chances out here. Or shoot myself and have it over with.” Drake poked at her plate, her lust for fine cuisine clearly evaporated.

“That's a fair point,” Ridley allowed. “But what if we didn't?”

“What if you didn't what?”

“Lock you up. Prod you. What if we didn't do any of that. Hypothetically speaking, do you imagine we would be able to work out an, ah, arrangement?”

She looked at him, confusion on her face. “You're a government agent. You have laws and rules and regulations you have to follow. You're not like me, you don't get to ignore who I am and what I did. You can't just make that sort of thing go away. And why would you even care? A few hours ago you were sending your commandos into a warehouse to take me down.”

“A few hours ago I did, and then you helped us trace stolen nuclear weapons. That changes things considerably. It means you go up a notch in my book. So that puts you at at one notch.” He leaned back in his chair. “Add some more and I'll be sure to make it worth your while. And if you think I can't keep my promises...” The cocky smile was suddenly back on Ridley's face. “Well then you must have me confused with someone far less awesome.”

The arms dealer's lips twitched a little, but she didn't seem convinced. “Hypothetically speaking, how could I be sure you'll be able to keep Gosely away from me? Look at Russia. Hell, look at America. Kroner is having his way with you and there's nothing you can do about it. Why should this be any different?”

“I don't represent Russia or America. I represent Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. Big difference.” He shrugged and added, “besides, Kroner's dead.”

Neither Ridley nor Summers were quite prepared for Drake's reaction to that – she burst into a fit of hysterical laughter that turned the heads of several of the bodyguards in the restaurant. It wasn't until Ari returned from the kitchen a minute later with a tray of tea and sushi that her laughter subsided. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Oh really,” she finally wheezed giddily. “Is that what you think?”

“Don't you?”

“I think I talked to him on a videolink two weeks after Chernobyl.”

Ridley serenely inclined his head, flashed a dazzling smile at Ari, and expertly lifted a piece of raw fish off the nearest dish with two chopsticks. “See, that's another notch. We're already cooperating.” Without looking at Drake any further he deposited the chunk of fish in his mouth.

In the scope of a split second expressions of surprise, anger and resentment flickered across Drake's face, before she settled for a sullen pout. “You- you tricked me. I told you all of that, and then you used me to tell you something you didn't know yet.”

“Mm-hmm,” Ridley closed his eyes and savoured the taste of expertly made Japanese food. “I can see why you'd come here. This is excellent sashimi.”

“Don't change the subject.”

“I asked you a question.” Ridley's voice was suddenly stone-cold. “You just didn't realize it. You confirmed something I suspected though – I told you, I never presume anyone dead unless I've seen a corpse.” Suddenly he smiled. It was a warm and handsome smile, the smile of someone you could trust. Ridley didn't think himself a particularly trustworthy person, but that didn't mean he couldn't smile like one. Dozens of people had made that mistake before, often very much to their detriment. “That wasn't so hard, was it?” He leaned forward. “Come on, Drake. Work with me here. You know more than you're telling me. Where are the nukes coming ashore? Because they weren't on the ship anymore when we got there.”

Drake was silent for a few seconds. Then she looked at Ari, and something unspoken passed between them. Finally she sighed, and something about her demeanour shifted. When she spoke again, cool confidence was back in her voice. “Fine.” She knitted her brow. “But don't think this makes us best friends or anything.”

Ridley calmly raised his hands. “No thinking. Gotcha.”

“Because I'm totally not helping you because I like you. I'm doing you a favour. Helping you catch the bad guy.”

He inclined his head. “Your point is taken, I wouldn't dare read anything further into it.”

“Okay,” Drake crossed her arms. “Glad we have that worked out.” She drew a pleased breath. “If the warheads were not on the ship, that's because they were off-loaded ahead of the storm. Your best bet for intercepting them would be when they come ashore at the Shau Kei Wan typhoon shelter in Aldrich Bay.” Summers opened her mouth with a question, but Drake pre-empted her. “The warheads are aboard a mini submarine. As long as it stays more than two dozen meters below the surface the salt sea water will block any traces of radiation. Your warships patrols are blind to the nuke that way.”

Summers nodded. “What kind of sub are we talking about?”

“An Anaconda type-7.” Drake smiled happily. “I sold it to Raheem. Bought it at a discount from a narcobaron in South America. Made quite a bit of money off that sale.”

“I'm so happy for you,” Ridley replied neutrally. He looked at his aide. “That sub will do maybe ten knots per hour?”

“At best,” Summers knitted her brow in concentration. “The Anaconda is a close-subsurface vessel, so it'll probably manage less in this weather.” She checked her watch and performed some quick mental calculations. “It shouldn't be here for another hour at least.”

Ridley visibly relaxed. “Excellent. And you're sure they'll make landfall in this typhoon shelter?”

Drake nodded in agreement. “I was supposed to meet them there with the PAL codes.”

“PAL...” Ridley blinked. “As in, Permissive Action Link? As in, the code that has to be entered to arm the warhead? You mean these guys can't fire their nukes yet?”

“Well, no. Not without the codes.”

Ridley closed his eyes. “You know, you could have told us that before.” A thought occurred to him, and he fixed his eyes on Drake. “Let me guess. Gosely is after those codes.”

“That would be my guess.” Drake smiled deviously. It made her look vixen-ish. “I may have sold her fakes.”

“That's why Gosely was after the DDLS,” murmured Summers. “It'll let her crack the nuclear launch codes. Ruddy hell.”

Ridley nodded. “Yeah. A thing like that would get you the undivided attention of a WRAITH bigwig.” He looked at Drake. “Is the decoder safe?”

She nodded. “It's tucked away. Impossible to find.” Drake fixed him with a stare. “Consider those codes my insurance policy in case you renege on your promises, Mr. Ridley.”

The DSOE shrugged. “Fine by me. We'll have to discuss the exact terms of our arrangement some other time, Miss Drake. If you don't mind, my colleague and I have an ambush to set up?” He stood up from the table. “Is there a way we can reach you?”

Drake picked up a pen and scribbled a number on a napkin. Handing it to Ridley she said, “and don't bother trying to trace it. It's routed through a-”

“Low-level SICKLE bypass, yes I know,” he nodded. “Someday you'll have to tell me how you managed that.” He folded the napkin and stuck it in his pocket. “Pleasure doing business with you, Miss Drake.”

“Likewise so far, Mr. Ridley,” Drake smiled. “Ari, please escort our guests to the door.”

The curly-haired bodyguard walked Ridley and Summers to the front door. The two SIS agents felt the eyes of the other people in the restaurant in their backs the whole time. None of them appeared to have touched their food in the brief time the two agents had been inside. Nor had the pianist played even a single note. Ari remained silent until he had opened the door. Then he fixed his eyes on Ridley and said, with a surprisingly cultured voice, “you hurt her and I break your neck.”

Ridley smiled at him. “You probably can't tell right now, but deep down inside I'm petrified.” With that he stepped out between the bonsai trees and into the rain.

Despite the torrents of water Summers and Ridley slowly walked back to the car. Getting in, Summers let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. “Good Lord. I thought we were dead for sure.” She shook her head. “All those people in there were bodyguards, were they not?”

Ridley nodded. “Yes. And there were a half dozen more in the kitchen. I could hear their footsteps when Ari came back with the food.”

Summers rubbed her forehead. “So, what if they'd decided halfway through to kill us after all? What would the 'legendary Jack Ridley'” she air-quoted the name, “have done?”

Ridley shrugged. “They would've killed us. But not before I killed Drake.”

“How?”

He looked at his aide from the corner of his eye. “Chopstick through the eyeball and into the temporal lobe of the brain. Death in under fifteen minutes.”

“Christ,” Summers loosened her blond ponytail and drew a shaking hand through her hair. “Jesus Christ.” She shook her head. “I can see now how you do it, you know. The women. I can see why they do it, too.”

Ridley didn't look at her. Summers had been working for him for just under a year. They had been in the field together before, but none of those cases had been anything like this one. “Yeah?”

“The way you talked to Drake in there... You knew exactly what to say, didn't you? What buttons to push. How to turn her on herself. You took her apart in five minutes flat Hell, you could probably have talked the pope into giving up celibacy. Did you even mean any of it?”

“Yes. And no.” He shrugged, a hard and remorseless look on his face. “It's what I do. You become what you need to be, and a spy isn't any good if he doesn't know how to string people along. How much of it I meant... That depends on how things work out. That's just the way it goes.”

Summers looked at her boss. “So you don't trust her?”

“Hell no. And she doesn't trust us, either. And with good reason – if it was of benefit to Britain I'd sell her out in a heartbeat, and she would do the same with us. But right now she's still our best chance of finding those warheads.” He shrugged. “And who knows. Maybe she's telling the truth. Maybe we really are her last best shot at getting out. We can worry about that later. Right now we have a submarine to catch.”

Sunday Summers nodded, fastened her seat belt and retrieved the TMP from the glove box “Well then. Let's ambush some terrorists.”
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
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Shroom Man 777
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Goddamn. Ridley, you son of a bitch! Jesus Christ, what a cold bastard. Goddamn it!

Man, Mary-Louise Drake is all sorts of screwed up. I kinda feel bad for her especially when she opened up and stuff. What a poor girl. You almost wanna cuddle hers! :(

It makes Ridley more mean for wanting to stick goddamn chopsticks into her brain! What an asshole! :evil:

But yeah. Goddamn you do the dialogue so goddamn awesome. I was completely hooked, Siege, with how you write Mary. You succeeded in totally making a damn dangerous amoral weapons smuggler seem so sympathetic, and at the same time delved into how Ridley's not exactly all smiles and sunshine himself.

Man.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Booted Vulture »

Man, Riddley is one smooth operator.

You don't get to be a head spook without a serious lack of ruth.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Acatalepsy »

Scary sort of stuff all around. And excellent writing.
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Re: [Story] Exigent Circumstances

Post by Siege »

SIX: Docklands

Heavy winds tugged at the back of Ridley's Kevlar vest as he sprawled across the corrugated metal rooftop of the dockside warehouse. He tried his best not to care about the lukewarm rain that ceaselessly sheeted in his face or the annoying sound the downpour made as it fell on the row of bulky industrial condenser units. The DSOE was soaked to the bone after sitting on a rooftop in the middle of a tropical storm for the better part of an hour. “Copperhead to Bravo Team” he whispered into the radio, trying successfully not to let his teeth clatter in the process. “SITREP.”

“Copperhead: Bravo One,” came the voice of Captain Sanderson. “We are in position. No sign of the target.”

“This is Bravo Two,” reported Lieutenant Prichard. “In position. We got nothing either. Are we sure this intel is solid?”

That was of course the million quid question tonight. The SAS commandos and their MI-6 handlers were holed up at strategic positions surrounding the Shau Kei Wan typhoon shelter in Aldrich Bay, where according to Mary-Louise Drake the missing nuclear warheads would be smuggled into the city of Hong Kong. Ridley believed she was on the level, but in his business there were no guarantees and even if she was, Al-Qadari could have changed his plans at any time. Either way the typhoon shelter was still their best bet. And at least the fact that Raheem al-Qadari was travelling by underwater mini-sub precluded the terrorists being warned by the Star of Oman take-down.

And so Her Majesty's forces had arraigned themselves in carefully concealed positions in its immediate vicinity of the shelter. After the Victory Road fiasco Ridley wasn't taking any chances. Apart from the SAS commandos he had requisitioned a company of troops from 47 Royal Marines, veteran hardcases most of whom had served in the Gulf Wars and a dozen other conflicts the wrld over. The marines were assembled on a few hastily cleared parking lots a short call and a few hundred meters inland from the bay, and they had brought their toys with them, armoured Land Rovers and Jackal EmWimmick vehicles armed with machine guns and Mk 19 grenade launchers, more than enough to make mincemeat out of Al-Qadari's men and whatever they might be able to bring ashore in a miniature submarine should they decide to make a fight of it. Ridley would've felt even better with two scrambled gunships, but the storm was now properly loose in Hong Kong and its strong and unpredictable gales precluded helicopter operations in the bay area.

With all his troops in position, all that was left to do was wait in the sleeting rain until the bad guys showed up. As he tried to ignore the annoying sensation of rainwater soaking down the back of his spine Ridley considered that the more he thought he about it, the less desirable the job of being Britain's number one superspy actually was. These days most of his time he spent like this: long waits in places that were either too hot or too cold, too warm, too wet, sometimes all of the above, but certainly pretty much always cramped and uncomfortable in some way. Oh, sure, there were occasional visits to exotic locales and he got to see things most people didn't even dream existed, but most of that time he spent running, ducking, shooting or otherwise trying to hold on to dear life, so there was hardly ever time to enjoy it. Come to think of it, Ridley didn't think he'd ever been to Hong Kong just to relax... It had always been one crisis or another, be it Chinese divisions posturing near the border or lost nuclear warheads. No, this job wasn't what it was cracked up to be.

“This job isn't what it was cracked up to be at all,” a voice muttered, and for a fleeting moment Ridley wondered if the cold and the rain had made him vocalize his thoughts aloud. Then he realized it hadn't been him who'd broken the silence, but Summers. She lay sprawled beside him on the roof, the butt of an AWSM sniper rifle resting against her right shoulder and her eye peered through the infra-red scope mounted atop the weapon.

He craned his head. “Still thinking about those cosmopolitans at Government House?”

“Caipirinhas,” she grumbled. Water dripped from her black military cap. Strands of blond hair slicked against her neck, and her soaked combat fatigues accentuated her figures in an way that, despite the dark and the storm, Ridley couldn't help notice was quite pleasing. “And for the record, yes I am. Most longingly, in fact.”

Ridley snorted, which made a funny sound in the rain. “When did you turn so cantankerous?”

“When you had me set up on this bloody roof in the middle of a bloody storm, is when.” She angled the sniper rifle a little and pressed her eye to the scope. “Hold on, I think we have incoming.”

A second later the radio crackled. “Bravo Team, movement on the water.” Ridley lifted a surprisingly light set of IR goggles to his eyes and looked out over the bay. The night vision set rendered the night in eerie shades of blue and green. For a brief moment the DSOE saw very little as the rain interfered with the infrared illuminators mounted on the device, but then the advanced image enhancing algorithms dreamed up by the demented boffins at Q section kicked in. The torrents seemed to part like the Red Sea and then vanished completely from sight, edited out in real time by the thousand-dollar chips inside the device.

Sure enough there was something moving along the stormy surface of the bay. Even with high-tech night vision it was all but impossible to spot, a black blotch moving against the equally dark water, only distinguished from its stormy surroundings by the way it cut a straight line through the waves. Only the very tip of the submarine protruded above the water, sprouting antennas, a periscope and what was probably a snorkeling device. The rest of the submersible was hidden underwater, but even so Ridley estimated it couldn't be much more than thirty meters long. That at least was consistent with Drake's claim that Al-Qadari was using an Anaconda Type-7. At this distance and over the howling wind it was impossible to hear the sub approaching, but if Drake was right it would be all but impossible to do so anyway – the Type-7 was a favourite of South American narcobarons because it used a hybrid electric drive to suppress its acoustic signature, enabling it to evade warships hunting drug boats.

“Visual confirmed, Bravo Team,” Ridley radioed. “Looks like our bad guys have decided to grace us with their presence.”

“Copperhead, this is Bravo Two,” came the voice of Lt. Prichard. “Three trucks on approach.”

“They've come to collect the warheads,” Ridley concluded. “Let them pass and make sure you stay out of sight. We'll take them at the harbour. Bravo Lead, you are weapons free. I repeat, you are weapons free.”

“Five by five. Bravo Team, move up to Phase Line Beta,” ordered Captain Sanderson over the tactical net. “Copperhead will provide overwatch and sniper fire. Charlie Team remain on stand-by for support.”

From the vantage of the warehouse roof Ridley could clearly see the two commando teams conduct their final approach of the typhoon shelter. Shau Kei Wan was a small lagoon on edge of Aldrich Bay, protected by a crescent-shaped artificial breaker. Dozens of small ships, ranging from traditional sampans to sleek racing yachts, were moored near the promenade on the west of the shelter. The promenade itself was lined by high residential buildings, making it distinctly unsuitable for the kind of illegal smuggling of atomic weapons that was about to go down tonight. At the west of the shelter however the residential flats made way for a small fishing and cargo harbour and a series of small wharves. The ramshackle wooden hangars were tied down and abandoned for the night, and thus ideal for those who didn't want to attract unwanted attention. Even better, the Island Eastern Corridor highway ran right behind the docklands, meaning the wharves offered a quick getaway. It was a fair bet that this was where Al-Qadari would choose to unload the goods, which was why Ridley and Summers had set up on top of the highest warehouse in the small docklands area.

The SAS commandos had been divided into two strike teams: Bravo One under Sanderson would approach through the docklands themselves in order to take out the submarine. Prichard and the rest of Bravo Two would take out the trucks, cutting off the escape route into the city. The royal marines of Charlie Team meanwhile would form a dragnet behind the primary operations theatre in order to capture any hostiles that might slip through in the confusion.

The smuggler submarine coasted silently into the harbour. Two heavy-duty Scammell 6x6 trucks, probably British Army surplus, rolled onto one of the concrete quays no seven hundred meters from the warehouse. Men in watertight parkas clambered out of the trucks, fanning out across the dock. Some climbed up to one of the dockside cranes, presumably to help unload the sub once it came in to dock. Ridley could see the men were armed with a variety of weapons, mostly Eastern Block automatic rifle models, but he saw one man with a scoped weapon climb up the crane as well. Silently he directed Summers' attention to the man. Sunday nodded in acknowledgement and trained her sniper rifle on the man.

“Copperhead to Bravo Team, counted eighteen tangos by the trucks. The sub is coming in now.” Ridley proceeded to describe the disposition and locations of the terrorists in the dock. Sanderson acknowledged tersely.

By the time the DSOE had relayed the positions of all of Al-Qadari's men the submarine had slid alongside the dock. Men had appeared on deck, exchanging a series of coded messages with the terrorists on the concrete quay via signalling lights. The men by the trucks threw ropes to the small submersible and began tying it to the dockside. More rebels appeared from the submarine, including one who was clearly in charge by virtue of directing all the others with a series of agitated gestures. It was impossible to make out any details at this distance, but in his mind Ridley marked him as the Iraqi terrorist leader Raheem al-Qadari. With a rusty groan the dockside crane swung into action, its cable, sheave and hook swaying in the storm as they were lowered to the sub, which pumped extra air into its ballast tanks and rose further from the water. The terrorists opened cargo hatches and lowered the hook down into a hold below the deck. A few minutes later the harbour crane began to lift a crate out of the hold. It looked to be made of thick steel and from the way it swayed lazily in the tempest Ridley could tell that it was heavy. The terrorists directed the crate onto the first truck, which rumbled a few meters to the side. A second truck approached and the process repeated itself. Then the crane began hauling a third out of the hold.

“Err, boss?” Summers frowned. “There are three crates.”

“So?”

“There are three crates,” Summers repeated, her eye still pressed to the scope. “This chap is supposed to have two nukes, right? So what's in the third crate?”

Ridley glanced at her. “Good question. Let's find out. “ He activated his radio. “Bravo Lead, this is Copperhead. I have a visual on the package. You are free to engage.”

“Copy: Copperhead,” Sanderson confirmed. “Bravo Team, move to Phase Line Alpha. Get ready to move and secure the package.” Below him Ridley could see the commandos move up through the shipyards, using berthed-up boats, heaps of rope, crates and cargo containers as cover to conceal their presence from the terrorists as long as possible. The DSOE began guiding the men toward the optimal positions to take out the sentries Al-Qadari's men had posted at the edges of their perimeter. Zooming in, Ridley could see some of the commandos had drawn Ka-Bar fighting knives as they readied to take the first line of terrorists by surprise.

Before Sanderson could give the final order to engage however a new voice interrupted the operation. “Copperhead, this is Charlie Two-Three. Heads up. A convoy of four SUVs is coming off the number four off-ramp and is headed in your direction at high speed.”

Ridley frowned irritably. “Now what?”

A second later another crisp voice came across the tac-net. “Copperhead, Charlie One-Three. Confirm another three vehicles approaching your position at high speed across Oi Lai Street.”

Ridley suppressed a curse. “Can nothing go according to bloody plan today?” He pushed himself up and swept his binoculars around toward the other side of the building. Sure enough two convoys of vehicles were now racing toward the docklands. Both were made up of heavy black suburbans and all of them, Ridley noticed, were unmarked. The seven vehicles rolled unopposed through the unguarded gate and past the metal fencing surrounding the dockyards before coming to a halt in front of one of the shabby warehouses. His binoculars unimpeded by the sleeting rain Ridley could see men and women dismount from the small fleet of cars. They wore an eclectic assortment of clothing, but they had one thing in common: they were all very heavily armed. The DSOE could make out several sets of heavy juggernaut body armour, a wide variety of fully automatic weapons, and even several burly men wielding what looked very much like squad assault weapons, with extra bandoliers of ammo strapped across camouflaged flak vests.

At the centre of the group of new arrivals was a striking female, who paced between the gaggle of the armed men pointing and giving orders, an air of command about her. Even from this distance Ridley could see long strands of curly hair fall freely onto her shoulders. He recognized her at once, and realized that if the night vision set had rendered the scene in its true colours, that long hair would have been a bright, flaming scarlet. “Gosely,” he whispered. “Shit!” He switched on his radio. “Bravo Team, this is Copperhead. We have unexpected visitors. WRAITH is here in force. At least twenty tangos just arrived at the dockyard entrance. Go to contingency plan foxtrot.”

“Copy: Copperhead,” the unflappable voice of Captain Sanderson replied. “Bravo Team, retreat to Phase Line Beta and await further instructions. Charlie Team, proceed to Point Gamma. Be advised, armed hostiles are on the ground. Exercise extreme caution.”

Below the SAS commandos began to disengage from Al-Qadari's terrorists, who had loaded the first three crates onto the flatbed trucks. They made it to relative cover only moments before Al-Qadari's terrorists noticed the WRAITH hit-team. One of the men who had arrived with the trucks called out something, and a group of men surrounding the man Ridley had pegged for Al-Qadari walked toward the small group of WRAITH goons that surrounded Chandra Gosely. The DSOE noticed she had less men with her than had dismounted the trucks, which meant that some of them had probably remained behind in the warehouse in order to cover their leader's retreat just in case. He frowned. “What the hell is going down there?”

Through the binoculars Ridley could see the two terrorist leaders talk with one another, but of course it was impossible to make out what they were talking about at this distance. “Crap,” he whispered, thinking fast. He pushed himself up and turned to Summers. “I'm going down there to see if I can find out what these people are talking about. Keep me appraised if anything changes and if you see anyone about to jump me... Shoot them.”

For a second Summers' eyes flickered from the scope to her boss. “Even if that person is Chandra Gosely?”

Ridley's face set with grim determination. “If you get a clear shot, take it.”

Summers frowned almost imperceptibly. “You sure, boss?”

He nodded curtly. “Yes. Dead women tell no tales.” Ridley put the binoculars away and slung his trusty UMP over his back. “Bravo Team, Copperhead is on the move. I'm going to take a closer look at what's going on here,” he radioed before crawling quickly to the edge of the east of the warehouse roof. Wasting no time he angled his body over the edge and dropped a handful of meters down onto the scaffold below. The dull thump of his landing was drowned out by the wind and the pouring rain. Ridley drew a Walther pistol from beneath his armour and screwed on a silencer before edging down the steep planks that lead down from the scaffolding to the ground. Without the high-tech binoculars his vision was seriously impaired by the rain and the darkness but, the DSOE knew, so was that of everybody else. He smiled involuntarily. Here he was, infiltrating a group of heavily armed hostiles with unknown intent in the middle of a bloody storm in the hopes of trying to find out what they were planning to do with their stolen nuclear weapons. Perhaps he should be more concerned, but it was simply exhilarating to be back in the field again. Besides, the element of surprise was his and there were only forty-odd hostiles present. It took a whole lot more than forty armed men to stop Jack Ridley from getting what he wanted.

Stealthily he made his way to the edge of the warehouse. There the concrete quayside began, stretching maybe several dozen meters to the water of the typhoon shelter. Piles of wooden boxes, bundles of coiled rope and metal crates plastered with Chinese characters were haphazardly scattered across the dockside. He was still several hundred meters away from the place the meeting was being conducted, but he already spotted several of Al-Qadari's patrolling men silhouetted against the headlights of the heavy trucks. Ridley switched on his radio. “Copperhead Two-Three, this is Copperhead One-Two,” he called Summers. “I'm about to make a move. How's the situation looking from up there?”

“One-Two, this is Two-Three,” Summers replied curtly. “Gosely and the leader of the sub team appear to be having some sort of disagreement. No changes otherwise.”

“Confirm, Two-Three. I'm going dark. Keep Bravo Team apprised of my location. And if this goes south try not to shoot me by accident.” Ridley didn't wait for confirmation but switched off his radio and turned his focus back to the docks. The attention of Al-Qadari's terrorists seemed directed entirely toward the group of WRAITH hitmen, something Ridley decided to exploit to the fullest. He swiftly and silently bridged the distance between him and the nearest sentry, making sure to keep as much cover between him and the terrorists as possible, putting his pistol away and drawing a razor-sharp combat knife from his belt as he went.

Using an old sampan drawn up onto the dockyard for maintenance as cover he managed to approach within mere feet of the man. When the terrorist briefly looked the other way, Ridley jumped from cover, clasped a hand over the man's mouth and drew him back behind the boat before putting the combat knife through the man's heart with surgical precision. The terrorist instantly went limp and gurgled up blood before his eyes turned glassy. Ridley quickly unwound the terrorist's rain-soaked keffiyeh, paying no mind to the blood that now flecked part of the black and white garment. He draped the cloth around his own face and walked around the boat and onto the dockside, assuming the place of the man he'd just killed, gambling that the rain and darkness would make it impossible for the other men to tell him apart from their now-dead comrade.

Ridley sauntered calmly onto the quay, looking for all the world as if he belonged right where he was. Most of Al-Qadari's men were guarding the trucks. Headlights danced in pools of rainwater left on the weathered concrete, illuminating hard-faced men with Arabic features who held their weapons with the casual air of trained killers. There were more men on the deck of the mini-submarine, closing hatches presumably to make the submersible ready to depart again. Unlike the men by the trucks the sailors had South East Asian features – Ridley guessed they might be hired smugglers, perhaps from Malaysia or the Philippines. He noticed how the sailors threw uncomfortable glances in the direction of the armed men.

The DSOE angled his head so the men by the trucks couldn't see his face and turned his attention to the loud disagreement that was taking place a few dozen meters away from the trucks. The leader of the terrorists – Ridley was now close enough to see that it was indeed Raheem al-Qadari – was arguing with Chandra Gosely. Both had several bodyguards with them, with the better part of Gosely's heavily armed goons remaining at a distance behind her, mirroring the positions of Al-Qadari's own men. Most of them kept their hands on their weapons, which was no surprise considering the disagreement was clearly getting out of hand. Gosely and Al-Qadari were pointing and shouting at each other.

“I will have none of it!” the Iraqi demanded with a voice full of fire. “Your woman has betrayed me. That means you have betrayed me. Why should I trust anything you say?”

“You know who I am,” Gosely sounded supremely confident, as if she wasn't bothered at all by the armed men only inches away from violence that surrounded her. “You know what I can do. I'll find her, and then I'll get you the damned codes.” She planted her fists in her sides. “But first I want you to give me my goddamn nuke!”

“No!” Al-Qadari all but shouted. “I do not get my codes, you do not get your weapon!”

“Too bad. Mr. Al-Qadari, I was really hoping we could come to some sort of arrangement,” Gosely smiled insincerely and clasped her hands behind her back. Only Ridley recognized the calm insanity in her inflection, the same craziness that had been there during the Victory Road shoot-out just hours before. He instantly realized exactly what was about to happen and mouthed a silent oh, shit as he scanned his surroundings for the nearest cover. “Luckily for me,” Gosely continued, “whether or not I take my warhead is really not your call to make.” Abruptly, the former CIA director pulled a Colt pistol from the small of her back and in one smooth motion shot Al-Qadari in the chest at point-blank range.

Time seemed to skip a beat, and then everything happened at once. Al-Qadari's men and the WRAITH goons brought up their weapons at the same moment. Ridley dove for the dubious cover afforded by a set of wooden crates and simultaneously reached for his radio. The sound of gunfire tore through the night as two groups of terrorists began unloading automatic weapons at each other at only a few dozen meters distance. “Copperhead to Bravo Team,” Ridley shouted as he frantically tried to keep his head down as low as possible. “This situation is officially out of control. Get in here now!”
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
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