| From: | Paul J. Adam ShadowTK@********.demon.co.uk |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Horatio On The Bridge |
| Date: | Wed, 1 Nov 2000 00:43:29 +0000 |
>>>>>[Well, ain't we got fun?
+++++begin video
Lynch opens his eyes as Minnie approaches. "They're on their way then?"
She nods and starts rummaging through the armoury racks in the corner.
"What the hell's this?" the slim blonde Mafioso says, pulling out a
four-foot sword and glaring at it. The Marine takes the heavy, straight-
bladed weapon from her and slides it into the sheath across his back,
takes his rifle from its clips and slings it... and also takes a light
machine gun, overload factor or not.
As he's linking ammunition belts end-to-end, Minnie is called off to the
intercom. It seems the FBI have landed in force, with Lone Star for
numbers and the FRAG for attitude. Lynch dives for a monitor in the
operations room, scanning fast as alarms flare. Two men on the roof, the
wall sensors screaming warnings as black-armoured troopers swarm
across...
"Minnie..." Lynch suggests, but she's busy. He drops his voice. "Bob,
arm the detonators in the tunnel and start bugging out. We don't start
anything, we just get the hell out and hope they missed it. Capice?"
"Si, jefe." Bob takes off like he was rocket-propelled. The alarms begin
to sound, before the system shuts down with just an angry red-on-black
SYSTEM COMPROMISE message.
"Dona.....if you go outside....They'll kill you." Guilas is warning his
Dona.
"I know, Herve, I know. I'm thinking..."
Lynch steps forward and takes the blonde woman by the arm, leading her
firmly in the direction Bob had taken. "Minnie, I know what you're
trying to do, but your fight isn't here." Though he's speaking quietly,
his tone has an absolute edge of command. "You have other things to do,
more important things. You have to leave. Now."
Reluctantly, she nods. "OK, Spanish Jim...where are you? Okay, there you
are... Right, we need some time. Delay them Anyway you can, and keep
casualties down, but delay them. We need to get out, understand?" As Bob
reappears, Lynch exchanges looks with him and Bob takes over, leading
Descabiere towards the tunnel.
Gunfire stutters from the roof, and an explosion thrums through the
ground. "Who the hell is-" Spanish Jim exclaims.
"The FRAG. Create an incident, start the fight, then win it. They'll be
playing hardball and coming in now." Lynch cocks the MP LMG.
"Collapsing-bag defence onto the tunnel entrance, trade space for time,
and we don't let any of those bastards into it for four minutes. Move!"
"Aren't you meant to be-"
"You let me worry about that." Lynch takes up position covering the
hall, arranging the long tail of linked 5.56mm ammunition so it'll feed
cleanly. "Watch the windows, watch the walls, and be careful. These
bastards are cocky but they're not bad."
"Okay." Spanish Jim suddenly looks scared, but purposeful. Perhaps it's
becoming real to him, that he's fighting a rearguard action against over
a hundred Lone Star cops, Federal agents and elite FRAG troopers...
The Marine, too, seems aware of the seriousness of the situation, as he
whispers to himself.
"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers - for he today that sheds his
blood with me shall be my brother-"
The double doors at the end of the hall blow open, one falling flat and
the other hanging off its hinges. Two small objects fly through and
Lynch shuts down his left eye for a moment -
Fragmentation grenades, not flash or gas or concussion. They detonate
and send razor-edged fragments whickering through the hall, slicing the
silk wallpaper and slashing into the soft carpeting. In the moment after
the twin detonations, black-clad figures burst through the ruined door-
Into a long burst of machinegun fire, one of them falling and screaming
and the other leaping back, shooting back blindly in a wild wasted arc
as Lynch brings his eye back on line.
The Marine pulls a grenade of his own off his combat harness and throws
it at the door, where it explodes just short in a bursting cloud of
white smoke. White phosphorous. He looses off another thirty or forty
rounds in a long burst, walking it across the doorway at waist height,
before moving across the hallway in a short rush and ducking into one of
the receiving rooms. Something explodes where he'd been firing from,
setting fire to the carpet.
At least three people are firing through the smoke cloud from the
phosphorous grenade (which itself has started half-a-dozen smoky fires)
and Lynch looses another twenty rounds at them, rewarded with a scream,
before retreating. Again, bullets and three explosions pummel the
doorway he'd just abandoned, but then the grenade he'd left detonates.
"Talk to me, Jim." Lynch says, raking the contested doorway with
machine-gun fire. This, it seems, is a war of grenades and blind fire.
Lynch is contesting and delaying the FRAG's tactics of bombing a room
and swarming it, without exposing himself to their direct fire. He may
not be inflicting heavy casualties, but he's slowing their advance to a
crawl.
"Jim, you there?" he repeats, as a L7 rocket thuds into the wall ten
feet away but fails to explode, still spitting smoke.
"Jim's daid, sir! They kilt him!" A tremendously Southern voice, full of
fear.
"Okay, Saints, hold it together. Get back to the tunnel entrance and
don't let nobody but our folks get near it, okay?" Lynch sounds
remarkably calm, for someone who's simultaneously soothing a scared
teenage mobster and firing a MP-LMG through the thickening smoke and
confusion of Minnie Descabiere's house.
"Yessir, Mr Lynch sir!" Saints has the pathetic gratitude of a terrified
man who's been given a clear instruction, by someone who at least
counterfeits well to know what they're doing.
Retreating through the receiving room, into a less formal and more
comfortable space, Lynch throws another phosphorous grenade to slow his
pursuers, and takes a couple of seconds operating the stereo system. A
personal override, a playlist selection, and "volume 11".
As he shifts the ammo belt over his shoulder and fires another burst
into the smoke, every speaker in the house suddenly blasts out a frantic
rhythm, played by madly overdriven guitars, at a volume that probably
contravenes various strategic weapons-limitation treaties. Perhaps the
FRAG's radio net resists jamming, but nobody's going to hear much of
anything over that noise.
Lynch takes advantage of the momentary surprise to advance, leaning
around the doorway; two FRAG troopers are halfway across the receiving
room and a third was covering them from the doorway, all indistinct in
the smoke but made clearer in the white fug by their black uniforms, and
Lynch fires three short bursts to put two down and send the third
scurrying for cover, returning fire that makes the Marine dodge back.
And as he retreats again, once again throwing a grenade to cover his
retreat, the vocals of the agonisingly loud music cut in: sung by
someone who seems to have gargled with razor blades before taking the
microphone, at the same ear-destroying stomach-shaking volume.
"If you like to gamble
I tell you I'm your man
You win some, lose some
It's all the same to me!"
>From the - break room? Hard to tell, in the smoke - Lynch moves fast
through a corridor (still empty) to one door in particular. Pausing by
it, he says "Lynch, coming in!" and shoves it open - but makes the first
thing through his hand giving a thumbs-up. Three bullets hit the door as
it swings open, but none hit him before the fire stops and he ducks
through.
Inside are three men and one woman, all armed, all afraid. A small
trapdoor in the floor sits open.
"Is this everyone?" Lynch asks as the door shuts (cutting out a lot of
the noise outside). Confidence of command or not, he can't keep the
shock at the losses they've taken out of his voice.
"Yessir." Saints replies, shaking badly. "They kilt us all, sir, they
just kilt everyone -"
"Get going down the tunnel, all of you." Lynch shoves the four heavy
bolts across the door: it's reinforced and braced, and will take a lot
of breaching.
"Yessir!" Saints is gone in an eyeblink, with two of his companions. The
third stands, shaking his head.
"You too, David."
"No. La Dona needs you far more than she needs me." David shakes his
head. He's an unexceptional-looking man except for the simple, basket-
hilted _Schlager_ at his side and the narrow, puckered scars of well-
healed cuts lacing his scalp. "I can hold them for some time at the
entrance, long enough for you to reach the far end. There you can
inflict further delay before escaping."
"You'll die here."
"So would you, warrior." David shrugs, as something thuds against the
door: then a frantic series of small impacts beat against it. Outside,
faintly, the gravel-voiced vocalist can be heard introducing the guitar
break. "But I am more expendable than you."
"It's a good day to die."
"But you have more to do, a wife to save, my Dona to protect. Go."
Like Saints, Lynch doesn't argue with someone who has made up his mind.
"You want this?" He offers the MP-LMG and the hundred rounds or so still
dangling from its breech. Something makes the door shudder in its frame,
and dust and smoke jets through the jamb: now it's slightly bulged.
"Use it on the first few past my corpse, Running Wolf." David draws his
razor-edged sabre: like Lynch's greatsword, it's a simple, unadorned,
well-used and absolutely lethal weapon. Raising it, he says simply
"Salut."
"Die bravely, David." Lynch replies, and drops through the trapdoor.
Beneath, is a small room, maybe six feet on a side, with a dark doorway
in one wall and a pit in the floor.
Lynch goes through, pulling the steel security grate closed behind him.
As he runs along the tunnel (which quickly becomes damp unlined earth, a
circular tube of perhaps five feet in diameter) he hears the distant
sounds of the door giving way: a pause, a couple of explosions, a burst
of gunfire, and then terrible screams.
Indistinct shouting, and another explosion, and more shrieking that ends
in a drowning gurgle. Lynch suddenly has concrete under his boots, as
someone else dies noisily behind him, and a pace later there's an alcove
to his side that he ducks into.
"Who's that?" A voice asks.
"Lynch. David's back there buying us some-"
Gunfire. Explosions. A long silence.
"He bought us an extra minute. Is Minnie out?"
"She's out and clear. No sign that they've made us." The voice sounds
like Guilas. At the end of the tunnel, silhouettes move warily, then the
security gate blows apart in a bright flash of RDX. "Are they-"
"Coming. For a while." Lynch unfolds the MP-LMG's bipod. "How many left
here except for you, Herve?"
"Just me."
"Go get the car started. I'll be with you shortly." Lynch steadies his
breathing, covers one eye with his hand: a flash grenade explodes, then
another, then a concussion grenade. "Good tactics." He looses off half
the belt down the tunnel, triggering a storm of return fire, and rolls
clear.
Another small empty room, again with just a ladder to the trapdoor above
and the grenade sump in the floor. Bullets and occasional L7 rockets
slam into the wall opposite the tunnel mouth, as Lynch sends a ten-digit
sequence on a coded frequency.
Minnie's escape tunnel is perhaps four hundred yards long, and in the
roof every fifty yards is a small charge of C-4 explosive inside a can
of gasohol. The explosives cause a series of earthfalls, the burning
gasohol devours the oxygen in the tunnel making it into an asphyxiating,
choking deathtrap. It will be a while before anyone follows Lynch out.
"Good hunting, guys." is Lynch's last comment to the tunnel mouth: not
for the FRAG troopers and maybe a few FBI and police trapped and dying
there, but for Minnie's rearguard.
Coming out, Lynch finds himself in a lockup garage, outside which Herve
Guilas waits in a Chrysler-Nissan. "Sealed?"
"Tight. Let's go."
"We've got a rendezvous-"
"Never rush to a RV, Herve. Let's go to ground and be sure we've shaken
them off." Lynch puts his rifle and sword on the floor in front of the
back seat, takes the passenger seat beside Herve. "Head north, up to
Everett way. We've got time, let's do this right."
"Okay." Guilas sounds doubtful but nods, and moves off: just another
commuter car joining the rush-hour traffic.
+++++end video
What a clusterfuck. Positively Mongolian.
How the hell did Ernang find the balls to move so openly?
Anyway... now I have a whole new set of problems.]<<<<<
-- Lynch <17:54:53/10-31-61>
