The Brigade

Sling was standing to where he could see out into the center of the camp from the sheltering shadow of the tent interior. He saw Rahib standing out there, shouting something, and then Fernando lurched into view, facing off with Rahib and waving a pistol. Sling could see the figures of other insurgents, moving about, forming up two opposing lines.

While Hilario was still crying out at his own ejaculation and begging for Sling to finish him, Sling lowered Hilario to the ground, dropped the ends of the plow belt, and reached for Hilario's throat, his thumbs seeking out the vein that would black the young insurgent leader out.

Hilario wasn't quite out, but definitely was stunned, when the first shot rang out in the camp center. Sling crouched low, grabbed up his fatigue trousers, and pulled the knife out of the sheath attached to the trousers' legs. He was at the back of the tent in a flash, picking up the duffel he's stashed there in one hand and slitting up the wall of the tent with the knife held in his other hand. He turned and, at the sound of automatic weapons fire, Sling saw, past the figure of Hilario, who was groggily fighting to sit up, both the body of Rahib sprawled on the ground and the body of Fernando slowly falling to the ground. Stray bullets were zinging into the tent and pinging against this and that, and although Sling didn't stay around to see anything else clearly, he thought he saw Hilario jerk and grunt and start to topple over in the periphery of his vision.

Silas "the Sling" Collins, a senior member of the Agency's special ops unit that was informally known as the candy store, could still hear the gunfire coming from up the slope of Mount Pulog when he was half way down the mountain. But he also was beginning to tune his ears into the sound of the chopper coming to pick him up, the chopper he'd summoned with the GPS device hidden in his duffel that he'd set off as soon as he felt he was safely away from the fire fight that was imploding the recently created Philippine insurgent Brigade.

It had been a fairly easy and quite effective operation, really. The hardest part was for whoever managed to make Collins believable as a connection between mainstream Islamic terrorism and Rashid's Moro insurgent group.

As he drew close to the whirlwind caused by the blades of the hovering chopper, Silas laughed when he looked down and saw that he was still clutching and dragging his favorite sex toy, the plow belt. He was happy he wouldn't even have to replace that.