Life as a New Hire Ch. 27

Firearms were kept to a minimum after hours, so bows were the order of the day - except for the snipers on the mesa top. My movements must have alerted her. I sat down and continued dressing.

"Charlotte, the Seven Pillars know we are here - they know the camp is here," I told her.

"How imminent is the threat?" Charlotte knelt beside me. I didn't know.

"They must be close, to be making a reconnaissance of the caves," Miyako said with tactical certainty.

"It was drawn to you, Charlotte - you were out of place, so this thing looked further. Otherwise these caves are irrelevant," she added. Miyako had the mindset of a seasoned professional spy.

"The cavern and spring have a night guardian," Charlotte countered. "I saw her when I was following you two here."

I had on my light bulletproof vest (no shirt), shorts (no underwear) and shoes (no sox).

"Let's go check on her to see if she's seen anything," I suggested/ordered.

What I had assumed was some sort of bedroll brought by Miyako turned out to be a Ninja Survival pack. This allowed me to weapon up while she dressed up. The amount of time we were taking still ate at my nerves. Charlotte stopped me from heading out first, only to be stopped by Miyako. The ninja slipped out like a cool desert breeze.

(Friend, Enemies and those In Between)

Thirty seconds later, a plastic BB bounced off my right shoulder. This time, I was leading Charlotte out. No one spoke. We couldn't see Miyako anyway, now dressed in her black pajamas and her face being reduced to just one slit for her eyes. We found the Amazon dead at her post. She was in a cunningly crafted blind not easily spotted from any direction.

A quick sweep for 'gifts' left behind revealed nothing, but the corpse yielded plenty. She was shot multiple times with two separate flash and sound suppressed submachine guns. The woman had been alive when we came down and if there had been a firefight, Charlotte would have heard the shots, if not seen them; thus the suppression. The bullet holes suggested a small caliber weapon.

Miyako stepped up, held up three fingers. Every piece of the Amazon's gear was still on her. The attackers had shot up her phone box. Wireless communications were deemed too risky so all the outposts had buried land lines. At this point, a few seconds of extra effort stood between the Seven Pillars and success; that and the Goddess Paranoia.

Had the assailants yanked up the box and cut the phone line, it would have been rendered useless. Instead, they shot up the device and moved on so that when Charlotte pulled out the cache of concealed goodies, including the spare phone box, we were back in business. As Charlotte got to work switching out the busted for the back-up, I studied our situation.

Advanced teams taking out the perimeter guards, and most likely the snipers, didn't make much sense. The camp had 300 highly motivated Amazons. Cutting them off temporarily from their armory and vehicles didn't make any sense, since all Amazons were armed anyway. That left timing. But timing meant nothing if I didn't have the goal of their attack.

It came as a double-whammy. The Chinese place a high premium on family and the Seven Pillars had mastered a sadistic art form of turning young foreign women into their concubine/assassins. The Condotteiri would have slaughtered the entire camp. The Seven Pillars would want to kidnap the children, both as current bargaining chips and as future tools.

500 girls...400 could be kidnappable. The oldest would go down fighting with their sisters. How did you get 400 kids out of here? Helicopters? That would be a fuck load of helicopters taking out their team and the children. Besides, helicopters alone couldn't dig them out of their cave and cliff-face strongpoints.

Desert - no waterways. That left the road. You couldn't use ATVs - not enough carrying capacity. The smart move would be to have tractor-trailers parked alongside the hard top state road. They would use smaller, more rugged trucks to ferry their captives out to the semis. That suggested some sort of 'cover/support' vehicles.

2 1/2 ton trucks with weaponized Hummers providing fire support a la 'Blackhawk Down' and that meant the bridge and the BBQ pit. That objective would solve both of the Seven Pillars problems - moving the main assault group into close contact with the Amazons so the Amazons couldn't organize a defense, and removing their hostages in a prompt manner so they all could be gone before anyone else could react.

The Seven Pillars had to have secured the bridge and were mostly likely replacing the missing piers. It was the choke point of their battle plan. Worse for them, it wasn't part of a barricade where they could attrition the Amazon numbers with vehicle mounted heavy weapons. The ditch ran north-south, bow shaped with the arch to the west and was over a kilometer from the camp.

The flanks were purposefully strewn with huge boulders that limited traffic to horse and motorcycles - no four-wheelers. They had to have control of the bridge, so that's where I went.

"Charlotte, I'm going to the bridge," I whispered before slipping out of the blind. I didn't order Miyako to follow me and I was sure Charlotte wanted strangle me for departing from her protective custody.

There are four kinds of fights, be they between armies, or individuals. Set-piece (sparring), assaults, ambushes and meeting engagements. I was about to be in the latter one. Meeting engagements happen when opposing forces are set on goals that unknowingly intersect one another. One of the most famous battles in US history - Gettysburg - was a meeting engagement.

I was using the bone-dry culvert because we feared the Seven Pillars had replaced our snipers. Miyako was...somewhere else. The enemy commandos used the same conduit to avoid having the remaining Amazon pickets spot them and raising the alarm. I had little doubt that the three men speedily moving south were heading for the grotto and its three inhabitants (Charlotte, Miyako and me).

Not knowing that I could both see ghosts and guessed who its demonic masters were, they assumed we were still in the caverns. Me not knowing how this whole ghost-scout thing worked, I assumed that I had a chance of surprising them at the bridge if I moved fast enough. In a final prick of irony, they misinterpreted the role their snipers played in our engagement.

They believed that their snipers would alert them if anyone moved on the bridge, ignoring the fact that the snipers didn't have a complete view of the gulch. I was only using the big ditch because I was afraid they had taken out the Amazon snipers and now had the high ground, which turned out to be true. Thank you, Goddess Paranoia.

My first tomahawk was in my left hand and my Glock-22 was in my right. My fear of snipers and the bend in the gully saved my life. We literally ran into each other, me and the first 7P soldier. His long barreled Type-05 was pointing past my left, his torso slammed into my pistol, ramming his front armored plate against it as it discharged.

The proximity muffled the sound of the gunshot. The bullet failed to punch through his impressive body armor, but the resulting force knocked him down and out. Unfortunately, our shared momentum knocked my gun out of my grasp. My right hand went for tomahawk two. The flattened man's team mates swung their submachine guns my way.

Halfway through his shift, a black dart flew out of the western darkness, past the first one, then snapped back. The action caused the hardy thread to wrap around the barrel of his weapon. I couldn't see her, but I knew it was Miyako with her flying wedge with the thread attached. The middle guy was startled and not moving as his training dictated.

That allowed me to use him as a shield against the third guy. Right as 7P #2 decided to release his weapon, I kicked him hard into the confused man behind him. Neither man went down, but I still got what I wanted.

Guy number three's main weapon was trapped to his right as I rushed his left. Vainly he tried to get an arm up to defend himself. My right tomahawk shattered his forearm at the elbow joint. Only the body armor on the inside of the blow stopped the appendage from falling off. My rational mind was catching up with my instincts.

These men had on head-to-toe ballistic body suits with knee guards and solid ballistic inserts for the front and back of the torso. They had on some sort of dull, dark-grey respirator mask which was why the armless guy wasn't screaming his head off. They also had matte black circular ear protections and a type of high tech visor on the ears and eyes respectively.

The sole survivor was falling back, drawing his silenced pistol while trying to put some distance between us and find Miyako at the same time. Dummy, tomahawks are designed for throwing. A bit of Amazons indignation was behind that toss. His visor was cut in two as my anger drove the blade 6 cm/2+ inches into his skull.

I heard a sharp crack of a rock being shattered. Miyako's graceful flip landed her at my side. I ran to the last victim, put my foot on his chest and put my right hand on the tomahawk's shaft. The guy reached up and grabbed the thigh of the foot on his chest with both hands. Shit, the fucker wasn't dead!

My left axe came down, struck his right temple and his skull came apart like a nitrogen frozen cantaloupe. I was sure I'd be downing a case, or ten, of something potently alcoholic to bury that visual for the rest of my life.

"They have definitely taken out our snipers," Miyako murmured.

"You didn't have to do that. He was already dead. It was a nerve spasm." Nerve spasm? He GRABBED ME...okay, in the instant replay it was more of his arms flying up than an actual grab. The cracking rock was a near-miss of my tender, sensitive ninja athlete. The fuckers must pay.

I wasn't expecting mercy to be the rule of the day, but still, Miyako was a ninja, not an Amazon. She was a bystander in our feud. In hindsight - that was a totally irrational line of thought. My closest ally pulled another of her wedges from somewhere and stabbed my first opponent in the throat three times. I hadn't killed him, so she did. I reassessed our situation. Our opponents knew we were up and about.

The final southern stretch to the bridge was eight to ten meters of open ground and the width grew to almost eight meters. I returned my axes and unslung my shotgun...I had loaded it with slugs instead of shot. I am a 'one shot/letting you know I'm pissed with you' kind of guy. By sticking to the eastern side of this gully, gulch, micro-canyon, we remained immune to the sniper fire from the top of the mesa.

As the bad guys were coming to the conclusion that their three-man troop was being born away on black wings for a long-overdue, one-way trip to Diyu (Chinese Hell), they realized we still needed to be dealt with. Either the dying gasps alerted them, or they found a lack of radio contact disturbing, I'll never know. Miyako and me, we sprang upon them unprepared, but not surprised.

As I had feared, they were shoring up the bridge with semi-portable hydraulic jacks. That segment of their plan had barely reached its conclusion so the seven battle-clad types didn't have their weapons up and ready to fire. There was an eighth guy who was looking right at us and two tortured ghosts flanked him. One was the female spirit I'd seen in the caves.

That guy had on less physical protection than the others for reasons I couldn't fathom. It was a combination of oriental lacquered wood, metal, ballistic cloth and silk sleeves and pants. It appeared to allowed greater freedom of movement, but left his hands and head uncovered.

His bald Han head was covered with tattoos that screeched 'Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!' at me for no rational reason.

"Rènwù wánchéng. Qù," the man snapped. The ghost I hadn't seen before took off to the southwest. In that freeze frame instant, I could make out semi-translucent erosions in the ghosts' bodies. They were frayed around the edges. The best parallel I could draw was the way a sheet of fine paper starts to curl around the edges in that first second it catches fire.

Every second in that perverse continuation was a further mutilation of their essence. At the same time, the other seven guys went combat-unfriendly. Shooting the fanatic sorcerer glaring at me served my sense for the dramatic. I put a solid slug into the guy behind him...because he had his back to me and couldn't see it coming ... just like the SD ladies at the range taught me.

Naomi wouldn't clap me on the back for the hit. But she would have been disappointed had I shot someone else, or missed. Doing my duty was the minimal expectation. The 12 gauge projectile caught the man between the C2 and C3 vertebra. It didn't matter if the slug penetrated his fancy suit of body armor - the impact snapped his spine and severed his spinal column.

One down, seven to go. They were about to get their turn, but not before I put lead in one more. This one saw it coming. He was also kneeling and aiming my way. It hit him just below the knee-guard, snapping his tibia. I threw my back into a groove in the gully wall. It was more Aya-sized then muscle-bound me-sized. It had the benefit of being the best of a bad lot of choices.

Dry rock walls splintered, projecting fragments all around. A few stung, but I had bigger problems. Bad things often come in threes and tonight was no exception. First on the list didn't even involve me. A fist-shaped divot exploded from the wall of the gulch across from me - that sniper was shooting at Miyako who had moved to the east side of the gulley.

My secondary concern was the team of killers walking their fire into my hiding place. Two or three were shooting at me so the others could edge around for a clear shot. And there wasn't a damn thing I could do to stop them. The tertiary issue was the chthonic ramblings of the Han warlock.

Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe my shelter really was decaying at an accelerated rate. The rubble at my feet was inviting me to slip and fall into the open. Of course, that line of thinking was superstitious nonsense. Next time I was nearly killed I'd ask my goddess, Dot Ishara, about it.

A dozen firecrackers went off, the ditch flooded with a blinding light and I ran for it. I even picked up a bullet along the way. Sweet Mother Ishara! It was a searing burn along the back of my right thigh. I could hear all the pain receptors on my left side rejoicing that for once, it wasn't them squealing in pain.

The far/west side of the ditch had a better niche to hide in with the disadvantage being it would leave me open to sniper fire from the mesa. I'd asked Rachel what her best shot had been. She was my detail's sniper as well as its leader. 1.8 kilometers...then she'd promised me that any shot over 500 meters was pretty much a crap shoot.

Oh, I knew she was lying to me, but it was sweet of her to try. Now I was hoping an elite Seven Pillar sniper would be daunted by a one kilometer-distant target. I was feeling lucky. Actually I was feeling like I had no choice, but being so screwed I had to trust in luck would elicit more sympathy in the retelling. What I did know was that I had to get under the bridge and waiting for those guys to run out of bullets wasn't the solution.

I knelt down as low as I could go, leaned out and started firing. The Chinese gentlemen were nice enough to keep firing at my old hidey-hole, their muzzle flashes clearly visible in the wispy ninja smoke. It was more than I expected from a handful of tiny flash pellets. It was the flash that had saved me. The smoke was a bonus.

I fired at the target closest to the west wall. He'd have the best shot at Miyako when she showed herself. Quick-firing meant I had to aim for the center mass - their best protected region. I compensated by using the 'automatic' in my automatic shotgun. I switched to 'select fire'. Three slugs hammered him back.

An advantage of moving to my new cover was I cut down the range between us to three meters. Was he alive? Most likely, but he was feeling like an exceptionally malicious Red Cap had performed a River Dance on his chest. The one next to that guy shifted toward my firing spot. He had a half second on me. I'd give him this much, he knew his shit.

His 'shit' meant he had expended his mag and was putting in a fresh one without missing a beat. Wiesława couldn't have been smoother, chambering that first round flawlessly. Several successive hits from his rounds walloped me back into the crevice even as I pulled the trigger. My ballistic vest had saved me, though I had a whole new set of bruises to explain to Rachel.

I'd been aiming for the fuckers face mask, so odds were good that if my first shot missed, so had the other two. My magazine had two shots left. I went back to single shot and propelled myself out far enough to invite more punishment. I was having an awesome firefight, compared to the Seven Pillars hit-man I'd tried to kill.

If you put three 12 gauge slugs into a person's jaw and throat at close range, their head really does pop off - shades of the shootout at the Medical Examiner's office. Of more immediate concern was Evil Han Wizard guy looking right at me. Before I could squeeze of a shot some sixth sense told me I was too late.

The closest armored companion to his left had sprouted an arrow in the gap between his underarm and chest plate. All three of us were shocked. Not only were they both surprised to be dead, but the one arrow that had done them both in had come from the west - away from camp. As the two Chinese death-dealers harvested their own cursed reward, I saw the ruin of the sorcerer's left ear.

That was correct - someone shot Mr. Evil Tattoo-head through this skull and punched into the second man's chest from the side, piercing his heart. Yikes! Wilhelmina Tell? Then I got a clear look at the long, obsidian shaft that seemed to suck in the light and at the fletching made with oily black feathers donated from a bird that had never truly lived.

It wasn't like there weren't dozens of people around willing to kill me. What was one more? I had a bridge to sabotage and that Chinese warlock had already sent the message, via the enslaved ghost, that the bridge was secured for their cause. There were two more men to kill, so off I went. There was another reminder I wasn't alone.

One of the two remaining bad guys was being reacquainted with the gulch being three meters high. He was kicking out his life, hanging from the bridge while his companion was shooting into said pathway from below. I had unfinished business to take care of. The man I'd crippled was gamely bringing his QCW/Type-05 to bear on me, so I put a round into his face.

Mr. River Dance earned my final round into his respirator as he tried to sit up. Whoops; left my Glock behind and I doubted my .380 could cut the mustard against their body armor. Axes it was, proving I was an amateur. To prove they were professionals, the hanging man flipped out a blade, cut his noose and landed facing me. His remaining companion turned to face me as well.

My favorite ninja wasn't done yet. As the second man turned, Miyako stepped from behind one of the false pylons and kicked the gun out of his hands. The ex-hanging man had the choice of reaching for his dropped Type-05, thus letting me chop him in the back as he bent over or...draw a sword?

I was a tad curious why he didn't draw his silenced pistol until I saw it lying next to his submachine toy. Go Miyako! He'd dropped his big gun when she snared him and she'd somehow knocked the pistol out of his hand when he went for that next - most likely to shoot her as she was securing his necktie to the bridge. The sword it was then.