Hound55
Cyberlad
Retired
Half Pint
mickilennial
Ezekiel
Master Bruce
PrinceAlexus
Pilatus
Chronic
There's no moon out tonight.
Black clouds, depositing another blanket of snow across the valley, have blotted out the night sky. The woods are pitch dark, a darkness that feels thick and heavy, and even without a heavy wind, the air is the kind of cold that kills in seconds. Most nights like this, every animal in the valley has either fled to warmer weather, or taken shelter in a burrow or cave. Anything living is staying as still as possible, trying to conserve as much heat as they can; not a single soul wants to be caught out in this cold.
For a hundred miles in all directions, the valley is still.
Most of it, anyway.
The sniper half-buried in snow has a high-powered rifle, the kind that reach out a mile or more on a clear day, and put a hole through anything short of tank armor. He and his spotter have IR scopes that cut through the snow, fog, and blackness like it's high noon. They could pick out a target on the other side of the valley and take its head clean off without them ever knowing something was wrong.
And they're facing exactly the wrong direction.
Creeping up on them is all a matter of patience. Move slowly but deliberately, no errant twitches or shivering--something that's easier said than done, given how goddamn cold it is. Keep low, keep your breath even, don't wear anything that can give off a glint of light...which means I don't bring out my claws until I'm already on top of them.
I take the spotter first, grabbing him from behind and putting my knuckles against his jugular. With a quick SNIKT, any cry for help he might give is drowned in a red gargle. As his body falls to the snow, the sniper turns, but I'm already on top of him. Pin him down with the left hand, and a thrust to the chest with the right, straight through the heart, follow with another through the forehead. Messy, but quick; he's dead in seconds.
I retract my claws and take a moment to go over their gear. No markings or badges, like I expected, but a lot of their gear gives them away.
"Shit," I mutter under my breath as what I find confirms my suspicions.
They're wearing state-of-the-art insulation suits, stuff that not only keeps the cold out, but keeps body heat in to reduce signatures on IR. They've got SDR and sat-com radios, which means they're linked to a wider satellite network. And if the M107 rifle wasn't a dead giveaway, the fact that they flew into the valley on a pair of small, agile helicopters-- Little Birds, I'd bet-- spells it out plain as day.
These guys are American spec ops. Or at least, mercs or other operators patterned off of them. If my last experience with Uncle Sam is any indication, these guys are all the best in their field. They've been given the newest and best equipment that the US's bottomless pockets can buy them, trained in extreme conditions and ordered to meet inhuman standards, then exceeded every one of them.
This was going to get really ugly, and really painful.
I take the sniper's rifle and start scanning the valley. To be honest, I never could shoot worth a damn, but the scope helps me see what I'm looking at.
Two squads of soldiers, six men apiece, advancing on a small cabin I'd put together as a safehouse for nights like these. The back line has five men with assault rifles-- the new SIG Sauer XM7s, by the looks of them-- and a sixth carrying a SAW light machine gun. They've set up a firing line along a high ridge with plenty of coverage of the cabin, covering the other squad as they move in.
The other six men, the ones advancing two-by-two on the cabin, are actually carrying what look like air rifles. One of them takes a moment to put a round in its chamber, and I see the fluffy fletching of a tranquilizer dart.
"They wanna take me alive," I say as I put the rifle down. "Cute."
These guys are professionals, but their brass pretty clearly didn't give them the full picture of what they're up against. Normally I'd prefer slipping away over getting into a fight with US troops, but I've already dropped two of them, and they don't tend to let that go easily.
Besides, whatever Uncle Sam wants with me, it's clear he wasn't planning on asking nicely.
I descend from the sniper's perch and down into the valley. If these boys came down here on a hunting trip, they're about to find out they're not at the top of the food chain in these woods.
"Alpha team, advance," Captain Joseph Bricklemoore ordered, watching the aerial drone feed miles away. "Confirm the asset is in the cabin, then secure. Bravo, eyes open, but do not engage unless fired upon."
Bricklemoore knew he didn't have to state the obvious to his men, but he couldn't help it; he needed this mission to go off without a hitch. He'd had to burn most of the favors he had in high places to even make this mission happen, up to and including slowing down the lines of communication just enough so that the request for authorization would only reach the Director's desk just after they had secured the asset and brought it in.
As far as the higher-ups knew, his men were conducting training maneuvers in Minnesota, not hundreds of miles into Canada. This was, by all rights, a renegade operation, one that would see him court-martialed or worse if it went wrong. But only if it went wrong. And what the Director and the top brass-- and his own men, for that matter-- didn't know, wouldn't hurt them.
Bricklemoore and his contacts had been able to track down a high-value asset, one that had been giving other teams the slip for ages. And he knew that the way things worked in this organization, he was going to have to make some big plays, deliver big results, regardless of whether the paperwork had been signed off on.
The Director didn't like him much, and the Assistant Director especially didn't like him. But when he brought in the asset that even she hadn't been able to capture, he couldn't wait to tell that fat bi--
"Sir, we've lost contact with Charlie team," one of the comms operators interrupted his thoughts. "Charlie two went offline, followed by Charlie one. Their vitals...they've flatlined, sir."
Bricklemoore frowned. "That's not possible. The asset is--"
"Contact! Enemy contact!" came Bravo One's voice over the sat-com. "Bravo Five is down! Requesting weapons free!"
"What the hell, what the hell, what the hell," Bricklemoore muttered, watching the drone footage as a figure moved through the woods, apparently not wearing any thermal gear despite the deadly cold, moving towards the firing line. Its posture, its movements were more bestial than human, a wild animal with a taste for blood.
"Repeat, requesting weapons free!"
Bricklemoore watched the monster as it vaulted from the ground, scaled a tree, then readied to pounce.
"Sir!
"Weapons free," he said. "Light him up."
"Uhhh, sir?" the comms officer said. "There's a call for you."
"I'm in the middle of something here!" Bricklemoore snarled.
"I know, sir," he said, "but it's from the Assistant Director."
The wild man in the woods no longer scared him. Not half as much, at least, as who was on the other line. As the monitors from the drone feed flashed with gunfire, Bricklemoore could feel his ambitions going up in smoke.
Painfully, he took the radio from the comms officer, and spoke. "This is Bricklemoore."
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
Bricklemoore winced, then tried his best to put on a brave face. He could still salvage this.
"I'm securing a valuable asset, one that the MTF has labeled as a highly dangerous security risk," he began, then decided if he was in for a penny, he might as well be in for a pound, "one that your teams have failed to locate, I might add."
"Do you really think we didn't know the asset was in the Canadian Rockies?" the Assistant Director responded. "We stopped pursuing the aaset as soon as it entered the area. That's a restricted area, Bricklemoore!"
"Yes, but--"
"Do you know what a restricted area is, Captain Bricklemoore?"
"...I--"
"Yes or no, Captain?"
"...y-yes..."
"Clearly you don't, because a restricted area is a place where our operators are forbidden to operate. And yet, I see fourteen of our operators-- excuse me, ten, no, nine and counting--operating in an area where they are expressly forbidden to operate. So, I reiterate, Captain, what the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"If we can still--"
"No, Bricklemoore, you can't," the Assistant Director cut him off. "I'd tell you to order your men to pull out, but it's too late. You killed them the moment you ordered them to go into those woods. From now on, the job of securing the asset is going to Colonel Flag."
"C-Colonel Flag, ma'am?"
"That's right. You've just made a mess that's too big for an ambitious dumbass like yourself to clean up. Effective immediately, I'm placing this mission under the jurisdiction of Task Force X."
"Nnnngh....son of a bitch got me good," I say through gritted teeth as I look down at the ruined pulp that was my lower intestine a few seconds ago, lying on my back until enough muscles and tendons form to let me stand back up. Next to me, the soldier with the machine gun gasps a few last times, his body rattling violently, then goes still. With that many shots on target, at that range, his gun cut across me right down the bone, and would have cut me clean in half if it weren't for the gleaming silvery metal that coated my exposed spinal column.
I roll over onto my belly, and white-hot pain shoots through my body as I pull myself across the ground, open wounds dragging across gravel and bark, away from the dead gunner and towards the dying squad leader.
"Hgggk...Momma...I don't....I don't...." he's muttering to himself. He hasn't got long. I crawl towards him until I can look him in the eye.
"Who...who sent you?" I ask. He's fading, so I grab his head with one hand and turn him to face me. "Who sent you?"
"Can't...can't tell..." he says through ragged gasps. "Asset...too important..."
"Asset?" I ask. "Why come...after me...now?"
He looks at me, confused.
"You?" he says, wide-eyed. "Don't even...know...who th...the fuck...you are..."
He tries to take in another breath, then he goes still.
"Then what the hell are you..." I say, as I look up at the cabin, "doing here...."
...the lights in the cabin are on.
