Rage & Fury

by Darryl Hadfield

  Most of the events were indoors, but several weren’t. Mountain Biking had barely made the inclusion list for the event, and pretty much had to be outdoors. Cincinnati had held fast to their green-space movement, and there were actually thousands of acres of land within city limits, most of which had some fairly worthwhile mountain bike paths. Most of the other events were either definitely indoor, or could be manipulated to be indoors – and the facilities were readily available for pretty much everything you could imagine.

  There were only a few that I really wanted to check out – Mixed Martial Arts was one, Pentathlon was another, and Archery sounded like fun. Karate? Please, spare me. I don’t fight for sport, I fight to WIN. Why MMA then? Because that was the only one that was actually about fighting, and you knew who won – it wasn’t for show, and no-one was pulling punches.

  Pentathlon really had me curious, too. It was supposedly “modern” but had been the same five events (Pistol shooting, Épée, 200 meter freestyle swim, Horse Jumping, 2 mile arkscraper obstacle run) for the last hundred and fifty years. None of them were really of a lot of interest to me on their own, but doing all of them one after another struck me as pretty interesting.

  Things got really boring, really fast. MMA was great, and gave me the idea to set up a fighting club within the unit – but the rest? Bah.

  Okay, Archery wasn’t bad, but it was way too much gear, and not much skill. I’d thought it would be a case of each person had to use the same equipment, which would have leveled the playing field, but nope, everyone had their own custom stuff – even their own arrows. Stupid.

  Pentathlon? If I’d have spent the time jerking off, at least I would have had something to show for my attention and efforts. Pistol wasn’t even pistol, they used wimpy little airguns. Épée? Yeah, that was just goofy. They had people doing swordplay and dancing around with these little flimsy swords that bent like they were a limp dick, and whoever touched the other person with the tip of their sword first, got the point. Swimming? Okay, I can (well, I can NOW, I couldn’t always) but that was a snooze. “Show Jumping” was nothing more than people jumping horses over barriers – geez, the rider wasn’t even doing anything! The arkscraper run was…. Okay, it also wasn’t so bad. Apparently it used to be an outdoors thing and it was all about distance on a level plane, but the arkscraper run was an obstacle run, which meant it was spread over five different levels, and “2 miles” was the distance your body would travel, both horizontally and vertically. It reminded me a little bit of the obstacle course in basic training, but on steroids.

  Our part in all of this was to handle security, make sure any “bad guys” don’t cause any trouble for the “good guys.” For the most part, this was still the point.

  Unfortunately, “most” isn’t “all.”

  18 days into the events, we started having trouble. Citizens getting grumpy outside Cincinnati’s two arkscrapers, rocks and other debris getting thrown in the way of transports to the non-arkscraper facilities… it escalated rather quickly, and by the end of the week, we had full-scale riots by “people of African-American descent.” This had been a perpetual issue in this city, and we’d planned for it – but it didn’t help that it meant we had a much greater possibility of having to engage fellow citizens.

  Fortunately, several of my teammates were black, so we shifted things around and had them ‘go native’ to get a better feel for what was going on.

  As it turns out, what we found out was that there were only several agitators who were pushing for the riots to occur – handing out cash, minor weapons (i.e. the sort of stuff you could make at home, or that was purchasable but as something else), and generally contributing to the social disharmony.

  Purportedly it was a white woman who was running this circus; that was really weird but made the whole “reparations for historical enslavement” line more than a little absurd. Our public affairs people cautioned us not to say anything, since apparently this was a major no-go topic for anyone in the military.

  Okay, fine, whatever. Just don’t get in my way, and I won’t put you down.

  I was riding shotgun – literally – with the Women’s Mountain Bike athletes, leaving for “Mount Airy Park” on the west side of Cincinnati where the event was due to take place. The armored vehicles in front cleared the crowd, and we were able to get underway without more than hurt feelings, but by the time that we arrived at the stands, I dismounted out of the transport with half a dozen of the rest of my team, and we started a perimeter guard – that promptly got the attention of the spectators who were braving “the evil horrible terrible radiation-filled atmosphere!” to watch the event. They weren’t so bad.

  The unwashed masses – easily several hundred of them – that followed the bus made it worse, and by the time we’d gotten the athletes offloaded, the crowds were sounding nastier and nastier.

  Then one dipshit dumbfuck decided to jump the (admittedly pathetic) barriers and rushed me with a knife. Have you ever heard the phrase, “Don’t worry about the experts, they’re predictable – worry about the amateurs, they’ll do the last thing you ever expect” ? Yeah, that.

  This guy ran at me with a knife. Now, let me say first, I was head-to-toe in dark gray uniform, rank visible, face obscured with a light meshy fabric we were issued for this whole Olympics thing, body armor against both projectile and bladed weapons… I brought my shotgun from high ready and pointed it at this guy, expecting him to stop.

  He didn’t. I had beanbag rounds loaded, the first two – he took one, AND KEPT COMING. I hammered him with the second one… and he kept coming like I’d tickled him.

  By this time, he was on me – and that blade was razor sharp. Not as sharp as Rage, but Ballard had cautioned me about being too aggressive with the civilians, so I left it where it was. This guy rammed that blade home, dead center over my heart and I felt the tip of the blade come THROUGH my soft armor, barely nicking my chest, before I butt-stroked this guy with the butt of my shotgun. He brushed it off – I was left with no decent option except to put the third – and fatal – round (a slug, in case you wondered) through his face. That dropped him, and his body twitched. We found out later, after an autopsy, that he was high on Carfentanil (among other things!), enough that he was going to be dead in the next day or two anyway. Yeah, that picture you probably saw from all the major media outlets of an Olympic security person with a fourteen-inch long knife sticking comically out of his chest? That was me.

  Why don’t people listen to the voices in my head that tell them to STFU and GTFO? We’d get along SO much better if they did.

  The 2100 Summer Olympics made me a little less happy.

  Chapter 28: Back to the Grind.

  I spent the rest of 2100 doing training, more training, and then a bit of training to break the monotony of.. .training. Weren’t we supposed to be used as a quick reaction force? The world’s best anti-terrorism unit? The number one EL PRIMO teams to take any objective, achieve any mission goal, all within parameters and on time or faster?

  Turns out… yes, we were.

  Wait, wait… let me back up. We finished the Olympics gig in August, and then went back to our training routine – and then got called out a month later for another splinter cell of that same group (the one that caused the issues at the Olympics).

  I asked for Intelligence assets, and got handed Ivy’s platoon from MIB – which was a bit of a pain in the ass; she’d been promoted to major and it went slightly to her head. We were still screwing every chance we got, but of course, anytime we had a professional engagement, that came to a screeching halt.

  For whatever reason, Colonel Wentz decided it was time for him to saddle up and get back on the horse – which is why Team 9, my team, got him as a supernumerary. I’d managed to keep my team mostly intact – we lost O’Leary the younger to a line infantry unit, when he made Sergeant, so he wasn’t a casualty, but we did lose his older brother, still a Corporal First Class, when one of howling freaks in Cincinnati go
t too close with a lucky blade slice. The edge made a jagged cut across his carotid, and he bled out for certain before we could get him to medical assistance; he and his brother were orphans, no parents to contact – but I still had to take Junior aside later that day to explain his brother was gone. That was… not happy-making. Anyway, I had a history of keeping my team mostly together, with very few injuries based on the way I used my guys, so Wentz wanted to tag along with my team rather than someone else’s. Made sense, I understood it – he *was* COB’s CO, after all.

  Anyway Major Hotez’s (“Yeah babe, you sure are a major hot ass!”) platoon was assigned to us as the intelligence asset for the mission, which itself was somewhat vague. “Seek and Destroy” sounded great in stories and for dedicated combat missions, but we were in a domestic deployment situation, where anyone not confirmed “Friendly” wasn’t an enemy – they were Americans. In the end, we were tasked to be in El Paso, Texas, as there was a strong belief that there was expected activity about to pop up there. Specifically, the suspicion was that this terrorist organization was going to try to knock down El Paso’s sole arkscraper. Our mission was, generally, to stop them if the attack was coming to fruition.

  El Paso was a city was so heavily influenced by Latinos – legal and otherwise – from Mexico and South America that the place should have just ALL been called “Juarez.” (okay, explanation – Juarez WAS El Paso – but on the Mexican side of the border.) There was an Army Airfield there, so we hitched a ride from the Logistics guys, in another troop transport. Remember Captain Willis and Lieutenant Paulson? The guys who ‘dropped’ me off when I first joined the Rangers? Yeah, their “special skills” was that they were the sort of guys who could fly damn near anything – and they maintained proficiency in an impressive number of aircraft. They were also experienced combat pilots, and they were… now a Major and a Captain – and my team’s drivers for this adventure.

  Since it was such a vague mission, we loaded out for general combat, with the expectation that the MIB platoon with us would run double-duty as logistics people for us, and would get my sleepy-eyed killers any additional gear we needed.

  We started our brief on the way there – the troop transport wasn’t ideal, but from “go” to wheels-up was only 2 hours – and we were the sort of troops who worked on short notice, which meant we got our briefings whenever and wherever we could.

  Hotez was doing the briefing herself, based on content and analysis provided by her platoon. “Sources have confirmed that we have at least four, and as many as 18 known insurgents of American origin in the El Paso area, with a sixty-five percent chance of falling within our current mission parameters.” Ah, so these were bad guys in general, and better than even odds they were being naughty about the arkscraper we were supposed to protect. “We have been able to identify four different sources of explosive components of a basic variety, “ which meant probably fertilizer and/or other relatively harmless (on their own) chemicals, “that are outside normal purchasing patterns.”

  “What composition?” I was curious, because it meant a big difference in whether or not we needed hazmat gear.

  “Ammonium nitrate is the bulk of it, purchased from three of the four locations we’ve identified. The reasoning provided was that they were looking to expand a soil-based food production facility for the higher-end production chains within the El Paso arkscraper.” God, it was sexy when she was matter-of-fact like that. “Given the number of existing hydroponic facilities already in place here, that was a slam-dunk. Our concern is a home-built ANFO style munition.”

  “Okay, you said bulk, and three locations. What was the rest, and from what other location?” Ahhh Master Sergeant Pangan, I’m so glad you pay attention in class.

  “The other source of material was actually an Exchange – we found several people looking for iron and aluminum scrap.” She looked a little disgusted.

  “Aluminum and Iron? Uhhwut?” Okay, so maybe Pangan wasn’t always listening to everything in class.

  “Get your head in the game, Brice. Aluminum and Iron – aluminum broken down into small enough pieces is lethal on its own, but mix it with that iron, using electrolysis to shred it to rust, and then grind the rust particulate even further…” I hoped spelling out the basic recipe for thermite might make better sense to him.

  “Yeah, but the ANFO-“

  “Thermite, Brice. I’d lay odds the plan is to use thermite on a third of the base support pillars in the arkscraper, and then the ANFO blast in the middle – time it all right, and the arkscraper tilts over and pancakes on its side.” Okay, so I had to make it blindingly obvious sometimes. It’s all good; he’s handy to have around to cover my back, and I *was* supposed to be doing the majority of the strategic thinking for my team, sooooo…

  By the time we got to El Paso and settled in, the plan had started fleshing itself out in my head. Surveillance was the name of the game, at least to start – we needed eyes on the known perpetrators, and hopefully they’d lead us to the rest that we didn’t know about.

  We also bumped up our patrols through the arkscraper, pushing teams in doubles or triples dressed in civilian clothing through as low-end occupants, or streetgangers, or even arkies assigned to do maintenance. It was tricky and took time since we only had the seventeen of us (remember, my fifteen guys, plus me, plus Colonel Wentz) and we had to make sure that no-one recognized us from one location in another – disguises were the name of the game. Fortunately, Ivy’s MIB platoon was able to lend a hand with that.

  Speaking of Ivy, I should mention that things got… a little weird, after we settled into one of the outlying buildings attached to the arkscrapers via the skyways. Every time we’d been on a mission together, previously, she’d had no issues with breaking off our “socializing” and “recreation activities.” This time, though, a couple of days into it, she showed up at the door to my room. “Are you alone? Can I come in?”

  “Sure, Ian (Corporal Burris) is out on a patrol with Colonel Wentz.” When it made sense to double-up on rooms, we did so – and tried to pair junior with senior staff, where we could, to help build more of that sense of teamwork. What better way than to see your teammates up close and personal when they’re showering, brushing their teeth, how they dress, how they shit.. okay, it wasn’t *THAT* close of a team, but I suspect you understand my meaning.

  She strode in and looked around, as if to double-check and ensure that the living space was truly empty other than me. She turned back to me and… I swear to god, she whined at me! “Goddammit James, I’m so horny, can I please have a quicky??”

  I was… surprised. “Don’t be stupid. You know better than that, Major. Leave Immediately; what you do on your personal time is your business, but you WILL maintain professional decorum in line with mission parameters.” I went from ‘surprised’ to ‘pissed off’ amazingly fast.

  “C’mon, no-one will know…” she was close enough to grab my crotch and tease with her fingertips just the way she knew I liked it. I grabbed her wrist and twisted, applying pressure to a point on her arm I knew would be painful.

  “I will not repeat myself. Leave.”

  She pouted and left, clearly not happy with me. I didn’t particularly care, since there was a mission to complete, and I’m not about to think with my balls when my and my team’s lives (not to mention a hundred thousand people living in that arkscraper!) are on the line.

  We eventually found seven conspirators, and had solid tracking for each of them. We had found, we believed, the foundational supports that they were targeting, and it became little more than a matter of identifying when they placed the explosives, and then we could roll them up, and bam, done, everyone goes home.

  And? It didn’t matter.

  It was perhaps three weeks into the mission and we were expecting action any day now. I went looking for Colonel Wentz to review my deployment, and get a better feel of where he wanted to be, vs. where I needed him to be – remember, I had a reputation for not just N
OT losing teammates, but also bringing them home relatively un-injured, as well.

  I knocked gently on his door, and heard no answer, so I popped the door open – thinking I’d give him a short call, verbally. I heard a bit of rustling, a moan or groan… and I went pretty quickly to full alert.

  I eased the door open to not make any noise, and crept in – Rage in my hand, and unfortunately, no other weapons other than my bare hands.

  Coming around a corner, I realized the moaning was probably intended to be sexual, but wasn’t. A naked blonde woman, her back to me, had a choke hold on Colonel Wentz – his arms were flailing, and she didn’t seem to have a clean hold (or else he’d already be out). I crept up, Rage in a forward grip, and laced it around her throat, grabbing a handful of hair at the same time. With the edge against someone’s throat, they get the idea you mean business, pretty fast – especially when that edge is razor sharp and is already cutting skin just from the slightest contact. “Drop him!” I hissed, not wanting to make any significant noise. The colonel’s assailant had him dead to rights, and I hoped I wasn’t too late.