30, Drama

“I said it was gonna be a good day, dammit!  I said we were gonna get through this mission with no drama!”  Special agent Dale O’Connor bitched passionately.  He was lying on his back flat against the ground as bullets went whizzing above him only inches from his head.  “What’s a guy gotta do to get a quiet mission these days, huh?”

“If you can’t handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”  Special agent Bradley McVandalay pulled the trigger repeatedly on his hand gun but wasn’t firing at anything specifically.  He could feel the heat radiate from the firearm and laughed.  “I can handle the heat,” he joked to himself.

O’Connor perked up for a moment then ducked as a bullet came whizzing by where his head had just been.  “I ask for one little favor, but nooooooo!  You and Murdock get intel on a terrorist cell that just happens to be the only one in history with an alarm system.”  

“We told you there was an alarm system.  Let me jog your memory.  You were sitting on a couch, drinking.”

“When am I not drinking, McVandalay?”

“True,” McVandalay temporarily conceded, “but you’re not always on a couch.”  He waited to see if his friend would remember.

“Hmmm?”  O’Connor turned his head towards the direction of the shooting and tried to focus.  “You know that I have to write things down, for gods sake.”

McVandalay made a mental note of how much ammo he had left.  “Today can still be a good day, Doc.  It’s all how you look at it.”

“Bradley, I’m a simple man.  I want to blow some shit up and get a little drunk.  Help me blow shit up and get drunk.  I beg of you. Help me!”

McVandalay was half listening to his friend rant, but also listening to his surroundings.  He closed his eyes.  “I just can’t find where they’re hiding,” he muttered to himself.  A bullet whizzed by his head and missed him by millimeters.  As if he was using echo location, he opened his eyes and grinned.  “Gotcha.”  

He lurched and launched his body so quickly that it was almost as if he had been launched from a spring loaded machine.  As his carcass twisted, his outstretched arms unloaded bullet after bullet in the appropriate direction from where the shooter was placed.  One of McVandalay’s rounds met its target.  A quarter mile away, a sniper rifle fell unceremoniously out of a tree followed by a dead body.

McVandalay got up leisurely and dusted off his long sleeves.  He helped O’Connor to his feat and said, “got him.”  

“Well that was a shit storm of bullets trying to end my good day.”  O’Connor’s words were indignant, but his delivery was dry and passionless.  “Tell me I get to blow something up.”  He yawned.  “Please.”

A cool wind rustled through the trees in the Russian forest.  The terrorist cell was located at the foot of a cliff in a remote mountainous area a few hundred miles from Moscow.  Their cell’s goal was to destroy gas stations and cause maximum suffering to the local Russian people. 

The American agents were planning to kill these terrorists without their government knowing.  After that exchange of bullets, the whole world might as well know. 

“Von Stryker’s intel said that these guys use their meth sales to purchase illegal explosives.  Guys like this aren’t as dumb as we think, Doc.”

“Look, the only reason to bring me into a mission like this is to blow something up.  That’s it.  I’m done dressing up in fancy tuxedos, I’m done shaking hands with the ever changing heads of state.  All of it.  Fuck it all, Bradley.”  

“Every mission needs support.”

“With guns like Mickey and Lorenz backing you up, you don’t need me dude.”  O’Connor reached into his pant line and pulled out of a flask.  He took a pull and offered it to his friend.  “I’ve grown soft.”

“It’s disturbing to drink whiskey that is warm from your body heat.”  McVandalay took another pull and grimaced as the jet fuel burned down his esophagus.  His eyes got huge as he tightened the lid.  Both agents froze, then instinctively dropped to the ground.  Bullets again missed them by inches.

“No drama, I said!”  O’Connor somehow knew exactly which direction to roll for cover, even though he technically didn’t know where the shooter was positioned.  He rolled up behind a tree and went completely still.  Bullets zipped through the air with such violence that the air itself angrily protested in big heated waves as the projectiles rudely ripped by.

“Found ’em,” McVandalay whispered.  He again did a super human move and contorted his body in a strange flip coupled with multiple twists.  By the time he’d landed, he’d unloaded half a clip worth of bullets at his target.  His aim was true and another sniper fell from a tree a quarter mile away.  “Got ’em.”

“Two for two, yay for you.”  O’Connor was grumpy and couldn’t help being a dick.  “Ol’ Shooter McGoogins is at it again, ladies and gentlemen.”  He scowled the whole time, but the side of his lips betrayed a grin as he got McVandalay giggling.

Upon investigating the two dead snipers, O’Connor recognized one of them.  “This was the guy at the underground fight a week ago up in St. Petersburg that was being a dick to the locals.”

“Snap a pic and send it to Sarge.  Tell her what’s up.”  McVandalay searched the bodies and confiscated cell phones, then took both sniper rifles as O’Connor sent the text.  “Rice loves these old soviet sharp shooters.  Lorenz would appreciate the other.”

“Sent,” said O’Connor.  He closed his text message app and before he could even put his phone back in his pocket, it gave a notification ringtone.  He crinkled his brow in confusion.  “That’s weird.  I have this phone on silent.”  He looked at it and announced, “Sarge says she’s on her way.”

McVandalay looked confused as he processed this information.  “Here?  As in, she’s on her way to a rural fucking forest in the middle of Russia?”

“I don’t know, dude,” O’Connor admitted.  “I sent that text and she replied four seconds later saying, I’m on my way.  You know as much as I do, man.”

“Fuck.”  McVandalay wondered how this might complicate things.  They’d walked the three miles from the main road through thick brush and fallen trees in an attempt to not be seen in a vehicle. That plan clearly hadn’t worked.  “Knowing Sarge, she’ll drive right up to that first blockade gate and blast her way right through.”

“Our mission just changed, Bradley.  It used to be that we were gonna kill these Russian mafiosos and get out clean.  Now our mission is to not let Sarge start an international incident.”  O’Connor shrugged and took a sip from his flask.  “No drama,” he muttered.

The two agents were confused as hell as they worked their way to within a hundred yards of the large Russian mansion.  It was five stories tall and looked as big as a modern hotel.  There were balconies, pools, hot tubs, cascading waterfall features, and every luxury a person could think of.  

The shock caught both men off guard.  “Well hell, Doc, this sure doesn’t look like a terrorist training camp, does it?”

“This looks like a cocaine cartel mansion but out in the middle of the friggin woods.  It makes no sense.  How did our satellites not know that this place was a fucking mansion?”

“Dude, this intel came from Von Stryker, and she said herself that all she could guarantee is that the mafiosos are meeting at those coordinates at sundown.  That’s now, so let’s hope they’re all in there. Oh, and she admitted that it might even be a trap.”  McVandalay’s eyes squinted even though it was dark outside, as if he was trying to make out something in the distance.  

“Oh yeah.  I remember now when I was on that couch. You told me.”  O’Connor froze.

“I feel it too.”  The skin on McVandalay’s arms tingled.  

“No god damned drama.”  O’Connor put away his hip flask and pulled out a small hand gun.  The agents made eye contact with each other and nodded.

In the flash of a moment, both agents dropped and rolled separate directions.  O’Connor had his back to a large boulder while McVandalay was behind a very large tree.  For the third time in less than an hour, bullets whizzed only inches from their heads.  

“So much for the element of surprise.”  McVandalay looked around to see if there was any logical way into the mansion without getting shot to pieces.  “We gotta abort.”

“Not until I blow something up first!”  O’Connor reached into his pocket and pulled out a device that looked like a screwdriver.  “Lemme try this.  It’s an infrared scrambler.  If a sniper is looking through a night vision scope, it’ll blind his eyes for a minute or two.”  O’Connor clicked a button and then pointed it up in the direction of the shooters.  He could hear two men yell “argh!” and he knew that they’d been temporarily blinded.  “That should keep them off of night vision.”

“Nice work, Doc.”  McVandalay meant it.  The lull in firing gave him a moment to take in his surroundings.  He could hear the sounds of men running around both sides of the large property.  The plan was to box the agents in.  “Doc, which direction are we shooting our way out?”

Bullets resumed whizzing over their heads only fifteen seconds after they’d paused.  “That didn’t last long,” lamented O’Connor, then he grinned.  “If I had a dollar for every girl that told me those exact words…” but his joke was cut short by a small explosion not far away.

“I’ll blast a hole through their ranks on that west side.  You get ready to blind those shooters on the balcony!”  McVandalay felt his heart race.  This was when his head was clearest.  “On my mark!”

“This’ll be easy!  You said.  This’ll be a smash and run job!  You said.”  O’Connor was bitching to himself as he held the infrared scrambler at the ready in one hand with his pistol in the other.  “You’ll be smelling ash by sundown and you’ll be wasted by midnight!  You said.”

McVandalay was waiting for the right moment to pop up and start shooting but his instincts forced him down and into the fetal position.  A large explosion erupted only twenty feet from him.  The shock wave ripped over his curled up body and momentarily rattled him into a shocked state confusion.  A few seconds later as he was recovering, he could see several armed men come around a large fence.  The men simply didn’t see the two agents hunkered down yet.  Once they did, the fire fight would be in the open.  

“That’s on me, of course.”  O’Connor was now completely obvious to his surroundings.  He mumbled bitterly.  “I’m the dumb one, thinking I’d get to leisurely get to blow up a terrorist camp.  How could I be so dumb?”

A large cracking sound emanated from the top of the mansion.  The sound was deafening, like as if a mortar shell had hit the roof of the building and exploded.  Bits of wood from railings flew in all directions.  In the seconds of silence that followed, a large cloud of dust and smoke filled the air.  The bullets followed shortly thereafter.

McVandalay could hear that the shooter was on the roof, but the bullets weren’t pointed at the agents.  The sounds of death and destruction could be heard in the surrounding property.  Both agents stayed low and listened.  After half a minute, the shooting stopped.  Shortly after that, it was obvious that no more bad guys were alive.

McVandalay’s wrist communicator lit up.  It was a message from Porter.  “Heads up, Sarge jumped out of my bird a few minutes ago and will be joining your party.”  A small clearing in the smoke and dust allowed McVandalay an unobstructed view all the way to the roof of the mansion.  He could see some sort of metal robot that resembled the Terminator.  It’s head was looking side to side, then down at the carnage below, as if the machine was looking for more targets to shoot.  When the robot didn’t see anything, it stood up straight.  It’s arm touched it’s ear and a face plate lifted to reveal the face of Sergeant Schuman.  

When Sarge had landed in her metal suit, a portion of the roof had collapsed and ripped out an exterior wall from the force.  Sarge was perfectly poised above the property to have a clear shot at everything.  She lifted her arm to her mouth and her voice came out of McVandalay’s wrist com.

“Thanks for the intel about that gambler, McV.  I’m one step closer to finding Bean Pole.  Gimme ten minutes to search this place and then Doc can do what he does best.”  With that, Sarge touched her ear again and the robot face plate went down.  She turned around and walked into the smoldering hole down a smoke filled hallway.

“I’ve never loved that woman more,” said O’Connor appreciatively. “I get to blow shit up.” For the first time all night, he smiled a genuine smile.

In the distance, a skinny but powerful bare knuckles boxer from Columbia known as Bean Pole was in a gym training with some mean Russian boxing coaches for upcoming fights sponsored by the mafia that he hoped might make enough money to help send to his family back home.