My Descent into Slavery Ch. 02

"You have my permission. Is there a man you trust in Morocco to head up the raids here?"

"Yes, your Majesty. We have evidence an attempt was made to bribe him and he refused. He has never been paid. He might be the man you want heading your police forces when all is said and done. Even so, he won't be told until he needs to know."

"My thanks to you for bringing this to my attention. Salaam."

"Salaam, your Majesty, and thank you."

"Well, that's another headache I don't have to worry about," Edgar said. "It's time to start serious training."

******

They were on a plane crossing West over the Atlantic. Edgar noticed Sahar seemed remarkably relaxed and happy.

"What's up with you?"

"What do you mean what's up with me. I'm going with you to get people ready to rescue our women."

"I get that, but you seem happier than usual. You're usually so fucking grim."

Sahar laughed. Not something you heard every day. "I fucked Richard, last night and again this morning."

"Like fucked fucked, not just oral sex like before."

"Fucked beautifully, completely and fantastically."

"You don't fuck men," Edgar said. "Want nothing to do with them."

"Well, Richard knows, so I'll tell you. I'm in love with Beth. I want to be a bigger part of her life. Her life is with her Master, Joshua. If I want to spend more time with her, I need to be able to fuck Joshua. Richard is my first attempt to be able to fuck men, so I can eventually learn to fuck Joshua. When we rescue her, I want to be able to fully share in her life. I want to be able to go to her bed with her, no matter where she goes. If that means getting fucked by Joshua, I needed to accept men in my life. It was a great first attempt. I might even enjoy myself."

"Well I'll be damned."

"We're probably all damned, but I feel the darkness inside of me lifting. As soon as we kill all these fuckers, I want a better life for myself. I don't want to be the Angel of Death anymore. I want to love and be loved. Richard was my start to be normal. It worked much better than I expected. I have hope, finally."

"What is there about him that made you pick him?"

"Perhaps because he's the man who is most like Beth. I don't know for sure, but I trusted him, and he didn't betray my trust. He doesn't push for anything. He accepted what I was willing to give, as little or as much as I wanted. He didn't touch me at all until I told him I wanted to be touched. The sex was actually great. It was like all he cared about was my pleasure, not his. I'll fuck him some more until I'm ready to try some other men. It will probably need to be after we rescue Beth. I don't want to be distracted by sex, but I'm ready."

"It's a nice change."

She smiled again.

******

Fatima, Maahnoor, Hibbah, Farah and Yasmine walked around the wooden mock up of Mahmoud's headquarters, accompanied by Professor Kline. All of them got cold shivers as they walked around it, recalling what had happened to them there. It was not yet as detailed as Mahmoud's fortress, which was helpful. There wasn't the constant smell of shit and piss and vomit, the smell of fear and despair they'd lived with while there. Instead, it was sand and ocean and tropical breezes. The windows were merely cut outs; doors nothing more than holes in the walls so far. They agreed the overall dimensions of the building itself was fairly accurate, as were Mahmoud's room and the slave quarters below it. They'd never been in the guards quarters at all, only the rooms reserved for sex, so it was empty space behind the sex rooms. They had general agreement, but disagreement over some specifics regarding the floor with the servants quarters and dining halls.

The outside walls should be higher, and a little further from the building, they agreed, and the interior garden dividing walls that led to the guard towers wider. They pointed out where and how many guards were usually at each location, remembering, even if they'd rather forget.

Many men were starting to show up; hard, fierce and dangerous looking men. They were issued gear as soon as they arrived and Ethan, Edgar, Smitty with Sahar sitting quietly behind them, would sit down with them and talk to them about their qualifications, where they'd served, what they considered their skill set to be. A lot of the men were surprised at Sahar's presence. She didn't speak at all, but watched everyone, soaking it in.

"What's she here for," one bold fellow asked.

"She's going to teach you how to shoot," Edgar said.

"I already know how to shoot," he replied.

"Not like she does. No one knows how to shoot like she does," Edgar said and Sahar smiled.

One fellow came on a helicopter with twelve other men. He saw the five women looking over the building with Professor Kline, who he'd met, and came over to them.

"Do you speak English?" he asked.

"We do," Fatima replied.

"My nickname is Ranger. I'm a friend of Beth's. You were the women she helped free from this Mahmoud guy, right?"

"Do not speak his name here, Ranger. Most of these men won't know where they're going until right before they go. Operational security," Fatima said. "We are freed slaves, yes."

"Is it likely Beth is still alive?"

"They don't like to kill their slaves," Hibbah said, "so it's likely she's not dead, but she'll be forever changed. Beth said she would try to draw attention from the other two women taken, so she's probably been beaten severely. We don't like to talk about all we lived through there. All of us were virgins when taken there except for Fatima. We were conditioned to be pleasing to men and women and surrendered all except our last virginity, which was saved for our owner. The most disgusting things were done to us, things that even now disgust me, except I still do them because they were ingrained in me with constant pain. The nameless one likes to use a stingray barb for his most severe beatings. Fatima still carries scars on her back, as does Farah, although their owners also beat them with the barbs."

"Regardless, this man is dead, right?"

Fatima pointed to Sahar, sitting at the reception table. "If he doesn't die in the fight, Sahar will kill him, and it won't be pleasant. There will be no arrests, no trials, no stays of execution. Joshua will blow the place off the map. Except for the women who are captive there, he'd do it with all the people in it."

"Good. I'd hate for this to be a wasted trip."

"Welcome to the hunting party, Ranger," Fatima said.

******

Edgar was conducting an orientation with the first hundred men they'd gathered.

"Men, " Edgar said. "The fellow standing next to me is Smitty, ex-Delta Force. He'll be conducting the training here. I've got other things I need to take care of, so I'll be headed out this afternoon. This will be the mess tent except for this part I'm standing in front of, which is a training tool kind of like the Hogan's Alley game at video arcades. We'll be showing you how it works in a minute. This particular Hogan's Alley has been set up with the design of the mock up outside, except with a more finished look. It's designed to be worked by a five man clearing/killing team. Four of the men with guns, one with anesthetic darts. We want you to kill all the bad guys, not shoot any of the good guys from other teams, nor any of the women captives you see in the game, who will mostly be naked. They need to be shot with dart guns so they won't give us away inadvertently by screaming. I've seen a lot of you looking at the young woman beside me, wondering what the fuck she was doing here. One guy asked. I said she's here to teach you to shoot.

"I told you that this game is designed for a five man squad. She's going to run the scenario all by herself with a special weapon designed to shoot both bullets and darts. She will probably die, but if any team of five can beat her number of kills and avoid killing as few good guys as she did by herself, that's a good team. I'll put you together. I'm not expecting any of you to beat her the first time around. As you get used to working together, you might.

"Sahar was a slave like the women we're trying to save. Whatever was done to her was so bad, she refuses to talk about it, but it has made her an avenging goddess, an Angel of Death. She has lived and breathed killing since we met her. She's unequaled on the range. Some of you might be able to beat her in hand-to-hand because of size, reach and strength differential, but you'll know you've been in a fight. She's never learned small unit tactics, because she's never been part of any military or para military force. What she excels at is operational awareness. She seems to know where the bad guys are before the bad guys know. Sahar, why don't you run through the scenario for us."

Sahar booted up the system and took her special rifle. She died twenty minutes later, having killed twenty-three bad guys and anesthetized twelve slaves. She was killed by a woman who was naked, but armed, hesitating when she saw it was a woman.

"Not bad," a guy said. "She memorized it."

"She didn't and can't. First time it's been run by anyone except the people who designed it. And it changes every time. It's never the same every time you run it. It uses AI to mimic real life. You attack the mockup fifty times, every time it's going to be different, depending on the red team playing the bad guys. Same with this."

"You'll be practicing on this until we finish the mock up. The primary difference in the two is with this Hogan's Alley, the screen moves as if you're moving, but you're standing still. We still need to do the mock up to get used to moving together, and avoiding obstacles and objects in your path. The game can't duplicate that. It's just a moving picture. You still need to move together. Any five guys, take a shot at it. The red weapon is the dart gun, the other four are like the real weapons you'll be carrying. It shoots the same, kicks the same, but it doesn't sound the same or we'd all be fucking deaf. Your fake guns will run out of ammunition. Sahar had to change her gun magazine twice and the dart magazine four times. You push the release button like you would on a real gun, and in roughly a second, you hit the bottom like you're slamming in a new magazine and recharge the firing mechanism, and you've got a new load. Go ahead, any five guys. The unit is considered dead if any two of you die."

The first group to try it died in twelve minutes, killing fifteen enemy combatants, two of the other friendly assaulters and three slaves.

"That's why Sahar is here. She can't really teach you, because she's not sure how she does it herself, but she's the gold standard of excellence. She'll be in on the assault because I don't have anyone who can do it better than she does. She doesn't like men. Whatever happened to her as a slave messed her up. Don't fuck with her. Your usual grab ass with women might get you killed. None of the women here are to be touched, though five are leaving here tomorrow. They wanted to ensure the mock up was accurate, because they've been there. I have another one who will be training with you, a former Marine sniper. While she might enjoy you fucking with her. I won't. This is deadly serious shit and if you don't want to take it seriously, you can walk. I can have you back on the mainland in two hours. Let's have another five give it a try."

******

Ranger stopped by Sahar before she left.

"That was some incredible shooting," Ranger said. "How do you do that?"

"I've been doing different scenarios like this one five or six hours a day every day for months. You're Beth's friend, Ranger, right? Fatima told me you were here."

"That's right. I told her if she ever needed help, I'd come for her. I brought ten other bad asses with me. She's getting rescued or I'll die trying."

Sahar hugged him. "Beth actually helped when I was having a tough time with my accuracy. She talked to me about using subspace to get rid of distractions. Accuracy all came down to three things, sight alignment, breathing and trigger squeeze. Put everything out of your mind but those three things. Being a former slave who'd never fired a gun before, I knew fuck all about this shit, but I knew a shitload about subspace. The first time she showed me, she even pinched my nipples to show how I could push that distraction aside and still shoot. I have a fluid awareness of my surroundings, but I'm using subspace to push aside distractions, anything not mission related, like exhaustion, fear, whatnot. Try explaining that to anyone who wasn't a slave."

"I'm a slave. I understand subspace. Thanks for the tip. I'll try using it like you do."

"You're a submissive?"

"I am. I have a Mistress; Beth's first Dominant."

"It will need to wait until after Beth's rescue, but I'm trying to have sex with men again. I just had sex with my first male in several months. He's a submissive, so it made it easier for me. Would you like to be the second?"

"I'll need the permission of my Mistress, but yeah, I'm interested."

"Good. You're welcome. Good hunting."

"Good hunting to you."

******

"Smitty, how are they doing?" Edgar asked.

"Not bad. There's this guy named Ranger tearing it up. I think he'll go in with you and Sahar. We've got all the snipers picked out and four assault teams, including yours. We'd like one more assault team. The men are competing for it now. The new dart guns arrived and we're working with them. We get consistently good results with the darts out to 140 yards. The mock up is finished. We tried parachuting a team onto the roof of the mock up four times, but they got made every time. Just too noisy, no matter how accomplished the paratrooper. We need to go with the drones, but I'd like to get them sooner than later so we can work with them a few days."

"Understood. They're working on it day and night. I think you'll get them with a week left to go on our deadline. How are the exercises going?"

"Not as well as I hoped, but our guys are competing against more of our guys on the Red teams. I hope Mahmoud's men aren't nearly as accomplished as our own men are. We're consistently taking about twenty percent casualties despite the numbers advantage. We also lose fifteen percent of the slaves. Part of it is we aren't getting the gate guards with the paratroopers without some warning being given off. We think the drones will help with that, but we need them. The other part of it is after we snipe the guys in the towers, the towers are empty and someone usually notices. Since there's a couple guys in the tower, they always expect to see at least one. If they don't, they raise an alarm."

"Fifteen percent is an unacceptable number on the slaves. That's a one in nine chance some of them are our three."

"I know."

"I'll be there in a couple days to start making final preparations for the assault. So far, we haven't noticed any change in their operational preparedness. They seem to be fat, dumb, and happy. No signs of low light or infrared equipment, so darkness should give us an advantage. We've sent out a few messages from Schultz saying everything is okay. We've pretty much nailed the schedules. We figure to hit them about an hour before the shift changes. Long enough for the ones on duty to be getting tired and losing alertness, and well before fresh ones come out. There's still the random asshole who comes out for a smoke, but we've now programmed that into the Hogan's Alley so people will be looking for it."

Edgar disconnected. "What do you think, Richard?"

"He's right about the drones. They've tested the decibel levels and they've tuned them so they're even quieter than they were before. It should help with the gate guards. The other issue is tougher. Taking out all the guards in all the towers at once means you have a pretty good chance of someone seeing one or several towers without a guard. That's suspicious as hell.

"Is there any chance of putting one or more of our guys in each tower immediately? Some kind of grappling gear to get someone up in the tower ASAP, before you try storming the building, maybe wearing turbans or fezzes or whatever the hell their guards are wearing. Again, I'm operating off of movies and books, but don't they have things that will quick hoist you up the walls if you shoot a line into the wood. Maybe drop down and open the doors instead of blasting them off the hinges. Maybe land some paratroopers inside the walls like ten to fifteen seconds after taking out the guards."

"Power ascenders are available, and they're good for really tall climbs, but nothing as fast as you see in 007 movies, but the walls aren't that tall. Most spec ops guys can climb that wall in seconds. We trained on taller walls on obstacle courses. The paratrooper thing is a tricky timing issue. Essentially, the first paratrooper out has to make the sniper kill call just before he lands, which may not be optimum for what the guards are doing at the time. While one of the guards is always alert, sometimes the other one is fucking one of the slaves and isn't visible. Dropping one when we can't drop the other means our surprise is blown, but the grappling hook idea works for getting men inside the walls instead of paratroopers. There are devices which launch grappling hooks fast and far, but I don't know how loud they are. It's a possibility," Edgar said. "With the right gear and money, a lot of things are possible."

"We've got the money, just need the gear."

"See what you can find?"

"On it."

******

Richard found a couple of grapnel launchers, one from X-Products which was a can launcher that could fire grappling hooks, one from Helix which seemed designed for military and law enforcement operations. The can launcher used military round blanks, but it didn't seem too loud, from the videos posted on-line. The Helix design used compressed air, and seemed quieter, but since they were running short on time, Richard purchased some of both for testing purposes with a promise the suppliers could send me up to ten overnight if we needed more.

The two different grapnel launchers were shipped FedEx to Florida and transported to The Bahamas as soon as they arrived. The pace slowed down, most of the preparations were made. Only the assault plan and training still needed to be completed. Everything else was in place.

Once the training was complete, the assault team would fly to Europe as a group, deplane and get on commercial or smaller planes and fly in groups of three to five to several places in Morocco and Algeria. From there, they would make their way overland to a rendezvous point near Mahmoud's headquarters to avoid raising suspicions. Their gear would be pre-positioned at the rendezvous point so they weren't traveling armed. Some of the snipers would parachute in closer to keep an eye out for changes and to keep an eye on things until the main group got there.

"We've done all we can beforehand," Edgar said to Joshua and Richard's group. "It's all down to finishing up the final assault plans and touching up the training to our best chance of success. Smitty said the drones have knocked our casualties down to ten percent on the blue team and around seven percent on the slaves. We hope to get that lower before the go date. We've confirmed the slaves branding date through Schultz's secure messaging. We'll be there before then, hopefully rescuing a day before, as I don't want to cut it that close."

"I'm going with you, Edgar," Fatima said.

"You can't, you're not trained for this."

"I'm not going as a shooter. I'm going as a guide. I know that place like the back of my hand. If you're rushed, I can get you where you need to go faster. Maybe the mock up isn't perfect, but I still have nightmares about the place. I can take you where you need to go in the dark. I'm the one who got everyone into this because of my parents. I'm going with you."