» Sat May 28, 2011 8:12 am And finally, this is a one-shot. Meaning no continuation. However, if anyone wants to do their own story about the goings on before the blast, feel free to have a go.
IC: The car continued down the street, past dilapidated apartment complexes, and ruined shacks. This section of the city had fallen into ruin after the occupation had begun, and had never recovered. It was a mess, where no law enforcement officer would dare enter, and it made the perfect hiding spot for criminals. It was a breeding ground of the corrupt, the unlawful, and the sinful. If there was something illegal you wanted, you could get it here. Including information.
Agent Pierce had never been to Montreal before. He had spent the vast majority of his life in the States, undergoing counter-terrorist training and doing field operations against low lever threats like gun smugglers and drug dealers. But now he had hit the jackpot. Or rather, the FBI had hit the jackpot, and then they had assigned him to reap the rewards. Tough luck for the FBI, but no more than they deserved, in his opinion. And now, after all his years of training, he finally had a chance to prove himself in a true field op. No more dealing with petty crime.
He checked his P229 and racked the slide, then put it back into his holster underneath his suit. He would have to be ready in case things got ugly during the bust, and he had been promised it would, even if the targets did surrender. No witnesses were to be left. Beside him Agent Ryder was readying himself for action, examining his Uzi, and in front, Agent Maxwell was checking his P229 more throughly than Pierce had. Maxwell was too paranoid, in Pierce's opinion. He always assumed the worst would happen, and insisted on taking apart his gun and reassembling it several times before a mission to insure it wouldn't malfunction. According to him, it had saved his life before, but Pierce doubted it.
Their driver, Agent Hammon, wouldn't be taking part in the op after delivering them to the location, but he was perfectly fine with that. He had a bad record with field ops, from what Pierce had heard. The man had several bullet wounds to prove it.
They passed an old, long abandoned gas station. The walls were covered in graffiti, and there were several delinquents gathered around it doing many most likely illegal activities. They all saw the black sedan but made no moves to run. They knew that if an agency with fancy cars like that was driving through the slums, that they would have a bigger target than them. Nevertheless, Pierce made sure to mark the area down for a purge in the future. The ATF would be getting something out of this after all, it seemed.
The car pulled to a stop outside yet another crippled apartment complex. It was obviously lived in, as the clothes hung out to dry signified, but the people here were the poorest of the poor. They probably didn't even pay rent. There was no one around who would collect it. Agent Pierce adjusted his sunglasses, and made sure his ear piece was properly set up, then opened the door and got out of the car. The sun was unbearably bright after spending most of the day in the darkened car, and even behind his sunglasses, Pierce had to blink a few times to get his vision back completely. No doubt Maxwell and Ryder were having similar problems.
In front and behind them, two vans had stopped as well, and about six men each piled out of them, wearing combat vests and helmets and armed with rifles of varying power. The M16 was still a favorite of The Company, though it was slowly being phased out by the FN SCAR in other agencies. The military had abandoned such weaponry altogether a while back for laser weaponry, but such technology had yet to become fully trusted by the agencies who knew where it came from. You can take something Red and relabel it, and change it, and mold it, but beneath the surface it's still Red.
Ryder, who looked quite pale under the midday sun, held a hand to his ear-piece and nodded absentmindedly. He motioned with one hand, and the men in armor moved forward and up the stairs of the complex. Ryder, Pierce, and Maxwell followed after them, Ryder being the only one with his weapon out. Across the street, people were gathering by a rusted railing to watch.
Pierce got to the top of the stairs as the men were getting into position. The CIA agents were well trained, and already knew what to do. Not that it was all that complicated. Their orders in this case essentially boiled down to 'kill anything that moves.'
And with good reason. The FBI had been tracking this group for some time now, attempting to find their base of operations by tracing them whenever they made cyber attacks. It was near impossible though, and it seemed a miracle that they had managed it. One of the Commie hackers must have gotten sloppy.
Indeed, this group they had been sent out to kill was a group of Chinese cyber terrorists that had been striking at government websites for some time now. They were based here in occupied Canada, protected by Chinese-Canadians that had had sided with their home country over the Red, White, and Blue. It was disgraceful that any free person would willingly side with them. And so they had been sent to perform clean up work. Members of the Secret Service, sent to oversee a CIA strike team. The FBI would have been performed the purge, but they had been compromised long ago, as everyone knew. The only reason the CIA wasn't compromised was because while they were all ridiculously corrupt, they were patriots of the purest form. CIA policy on recruitment insured that.
On Ryder's next command, the agents busted open the door into the complex. Unlike the majority in the area, the complex did not have doors linking across catwalks on the outside. It had merely one door, which lead to a long hallway. And the noise caused by busting open the locked door had most likely alerted everyone in the building, even they hadn't already seen the obvious. If the Reds hadn't seen this coming from a mile away, Pierce would have been disappointed.
Ryder motioned with his hand again. They had to sweep the entire building, because the idiot FBI trackers had failed to get a pinpoint location. The agents got in place, two men to a door for half the hallway. Pierce pulled his pistol out from under his suit, as did Maxwell. Then the operation began. The agents began kicking open doors and pulling the occupants out of the room forcefully if they refused to comply with orders. Few did. They were forced up against the wall of the hall while an agent kept his M16 trained on them. Then, one by one, the rooms were swept. After five minutes, nothing had been found.
Cracking his neck as he watched, the agents moved to the other half of the hallway, ignoring the door leading to the stairs. No one had gotten out with Pierce, Maxwell, and Ryder watching the hall. Then it began again, with screaming and shouting and cursing as more civilians, most clothed in nothing more than rags, were forced out. Then gunfire began. It came from the fifth door down on the left side, and Pierce and Maxwell ran over to it while Ryder covered the exits. More gunfire flashed from inside, and a CIA agent fell over dead in the doorway just as Pierce was about to enter. He had been struck three times in the face.
"Alright commies, you have ten seconds to drop your weapons and come put peacefully. If you do so, your lives will be spared and you will serve only the minimum amount of prison time. If you continue to resist-"
Pierce scrambled out of the way as more shots punctured the wall and Chinese curses flew at him. "Damn bastards! No one ever plays nice. Ever!"
Maxwell leaned slightly around to look through the door, and immediately pulled back to avoid having his head shot off by automatic weapons fire. "They've got heavy ordinance. That wasn't part of the briefing!"
"Yeah, well do you ever pay attention to the briefings? Our intelligence never gets it right anyway," Pierce responded, as the CIA agents and Ryder collected around the door. One of the agents got on the other side and unclipped a grenade from his belt. He looked towards Ryder, who nodded in acknowledgment, then threw it through the door as more gunfire erupted. A moment later there was a bang and a great flash of light, and the agents charged through the door. It was a large apartment, much larger than Pierce had expected. It only appeared to be two rooms, but the one they were in was large enough to store a tank in. There were three couches in the middle, surrounding a TV, five beds off to the left side, and a large bookcase on the right, but no sign of any computers. What was in plain sight was seven Chinamen carrying AK-47s. The agents opened up on the stunned men, who were stumbling back and forth holding their eyes. Pierce brought his pistol up and tagged one of them in the forehead, while the rest went down in a storm of automatic fire.
Furniture was ripped to pieces, blood went flying, and screams erupted all around as the men went down. Outside, he could hear crying. Maxwell stepped through the room, pausing twice to deliver killing shots to the wounded Chinamen. He then decided to state the obvious. "There's no computers in here."
Ryder sighed in annoyance. "Of course not, did you expect them to have them in plain sight? It's hidden somewhere in here, I'm sure of it. The FBI are idiots, but they're not that stupid. Then they'd be CIA."
There was a collection of glares from the men in the room, but no one said anything. The crying continued, and actually increased in volume. Ryder held a hand to his ear without the ear-piece and sighed in annoyance again. "Daniels, silence them. You know the drill."
Several of the agents left the room, and a moment later the hall was filled with gunfire. The crying had ceased. Pierce had expected it, but was still shocked at the calm exhibited by everyone else in the room. It was as if they hadn't just killed a building full of civilians. It was horrifying, more horrifying than the act itself. "Was that really necessary?"
Ryder looked at him as if he were an idiot. "Of course it was. This is a matter of nation security, Agent Pierce. All measures to protect American citizens must be taken. Those people were not American citizens. By not reporting the Chinamen in their midst, they were aiding them in their attempts at destroying the U.S.A. Do you have an argument against protecting innocent people?"
"Of course not, but couldn't we have simply-"
"It's all a matter of course, Agent Pierce. All a matter of course. Daniels!"
The CIA agent came back inside the room. His eyes were hidden behind his helmet, but Pierce would be willing to bet they were just as unemotional as Ryder's had been. Ryder motioned with his free hand again, and the agents began taking the apartment apart, piece by piece. There was something they were missing there, but they couldn't see it. Ryder's eyes flickered in annoyance. Things were going too slowly.
"Agent Maxwell, go back to the car. Get the experimental glasses we had secured for this mission."
Pierce looked at him in confusion. "Wait, you brought those along? Why didn't we just use them in the first place?"
Ryder looked at him again, and he once again got the feeling that he was acting like a fool. "Because we don't have them, understand?"
About a minute later, Maxwell came back in and handed Ryder a perfectly normal looking pair of sunglasses. But Pierce knew better. Ryder put them on and pressed a carefully concealed button on the side, then looked across the room. All the agents suddenly became very uncomfortable, and shifted away from his gaze. His eyes rested on one section of the wall, between two of the beds. He scowled and dropped his Uzi, grabbing an M16 from a nearby agents hands. He pointed it carefully at the wall after switching it to semi-auto, and pulled the trigger. A three round burst shot through the wall, and was followed by a short scream.
Ryder smiled, and handed the M16 back to the agent, who was staring at him. Actually, everyone was staring at him. He walked over to the wall and kicked it over and over again until he managed to bust through. More of the agents came over and began bashing the wall with the buts of their rifles, clearing it away and making an opening wide enough for Ryder to step through.
He entered the small room and stepped over the body of the small Chinaman in a jumpsuit. He walked over to the computer and sat down in the folding chair, glancing at the screen. The man had been in the process of wiping the computer clean of information, but hadn't completed the process. He obviously hadn't been expecting anyone to find him either, as he didn't have any security measures put up to prevent the process from being stopped. "How sloppy."
His hands glided over the keyboard, and before long the process canceled. Ryder smiled as he gained access to multiple files. "Jackpot, boys. We now have access to..."
He trailed off as he read a certain file he had picked at random. They were codes to bring down the nuclear defense system that was in place all across US territory. If the Chinese had already gotten access to the files...
He got up from the computer and rushed out the door, Pierce and Maxwell behind him. "What's going on?" Pierce asked, confused.
Ryder hesitated for a moment before replying, "The information on that laptop is classified on a NTKB, and YDNTK."
Pierce stopped, confused again, before he realized what Ryder meant. "Is it really that serious?"
"I'm afraid so."
Ryder went down the stairs and went back to the car. He got in and closed the door, pulling a cellphone out from underneath his suit. He quickly dialed a number and put the phone up to his ear, but got an automated response about how the number was unavailable. He frowned. That shouldn't have happened. He dialed a different number and got the same response. He tried calling a line at the CIA. No response. He then tried one to the FBI. Still no response. Now he was getting worried. It wasn't until he saw the mushroom cloud only a short distance from him that he realized what was going on. He dropped the cell phone in total shock. Agent Hammon was nowhere to be seen, and Pierce and Maxwell were staring open-mouthed at the sight.
Pierce took his sunglasses off and backed up, not comprehending what was going on in front of him. He had finally made it to the big leagues. He had finally had a big assignment. He had finally experienced a true field ops. And now he was going to die. As would so many, many others all across the world. Because at the same time, similar ops had been taking place all over the Northern Hemisphere, and the same transmission had been sent from each. There had been Chinese spies in US territory for years. They were only being caught now because they were allowing themselves to be caught. It was over. And now the world would burn in a maelstrom of fire.
