Mike stepped out of the Nautilus machine and turned off the stereo, cocking an eyebrow in query.
“There has been an incident in the village,” the woman said. “A Keldara woman has been taken by Chechens. They were seen driving down the hill this way.”
Mike thought rapidly about how long it would take them to make it out of the area as he grabbed a towel and ran up the stairs. He could hear the duty squad throwing on their gear but he didn’t bother; the vehicle would be out of the valley before they could even make it out the door fully rigged. Instead he kept climbing, running up to the second level and into his bedroom.
He’d laid in a gun room next to his room, a little security blanket in case everything went to shit. Among other weapons in the room was a Barrett. The Robar was more accurate but the M-82A1 was a better light material gun.
He grabbed the Barrett and headed for his balcony, looking down into the valley. He could see the road clearly from his position and there was a white van heading down the valley road at high speed. They must have gotten the impression they weren’t welcome or maybe they were just really stupid drivers.
Mike moved rapidly but with care, throwing the Barrett up onto the balcony railing, sliding in a magazine, arming the weapon and then snuggling in to look through the scope.
It took him a moment to acquire the speeding van but when he did he slid forward, laying the crosshairs on the engine compartment and then leading it. In the mild spring air he could see the round crackling through the rippling air and it impacted forward of the van, gouging up a spurt of dust that was lost in the dust of the van’s passage. He pulled back a bit and the second round cracked into the side of the vehicle, uncomfortably close to the cargo compartment. The third of five rounds cracked into the driver’s area and the van swerved wildly for a moment then straightened out. Killing the driver was nowhere in his plan so he led the van, which was getting out of range, a bit more and let go with the fourth round. He couldn’t figure out where that one went but he followed it up with another and was professionally pleased to see the van’s muffler start streaming blue and the van slowing to a stop.
He dropped the Barrett, then stopped by the gun room just long enough to pick up a fully-loaded silenced M-4. He still made it out the front doors just after the last member of the duty squad.
“Over,” Mike snapped, slipping in the door of the Expedition.
“God damnit, Kildar,” Russell said. He was one of the Rangers with the group, a pure shoot trainer, a real freak of nature, too. He pumped more iron than any normal human should and looked like a walking tank. Loaded down with his weapon, body armor and spare ammo he looked even worse. “You’re not even in armor.”
“Shit happens,” Mike said. “Go!”
No one had gotten out of the van when they reached it. It was parked on the side of the road, near the southwest end of the valley. A few Keldara who had been in the fields had drifted that way but Mike waved them back as he unloaded from the Expedition and moved forward in tactical present.
As he neared the back door he could hear the rest of the team moving out to either side and noticed a bit of movement by the back window. Suddenly the back door opened up and a man was revealed holding a gun to the head of a girl. Mike noticed in passing that it was Katrina. Figured. She looked more pissed than scared but she was sitting still. There was a large red mark on her face and her blouse was torn, revealing an amazingly good chest for a fourteen year old girl. Mike figured somebody was just going to have pay for that.
“If you or your men move closer I’ll kill her,” the man said in heavily accented Georgian.
“Go ahead,” Mike said, glancing past him into the van. There were seats in it and he couldn’t figure out how many girls were in it, but it was close to full. “I’ve been in this situation before. One guy walked away alive. He was the one that let the bitch go. I don’t really care if you kill her, pussy in the mountains is in overabundance. But if you do you won’t be walking away.” The M-4 was sighted for 150 meters, so at this range, due to parallax, the round would tend to track up. Mike dropped the sight to just below the guy’s chin and worried about the shot. The problem with the M-4 was that the 5.56 round was bound to pass through the target. If there was a girl on the other side of him, and Mike was pretty sure there was, she was liable to take a round in the back. “Hey! Girls in the van! On the floor if you please!”
“Shut up!” the man shouted. “I will kill her, I swear!”
“You’re clearly not listening carefully,” Mike said, dropping to a sitting position and leaning over a bit so he was now targeted to go through the guy’s head and upward. “You can let her go and walk or…”
The top of the man’s head lifted up and sprayed blood and brains into the interior of the van accompanied by screams from the girls on the interior.
As soon as the man’s hands went flaccid, Katrina rolled out of the van and onto the ground, lying flat. Mike darted forward to cover her as the rest of the team went for the other doors. There were more screams and a crunching sound as women started to pour out of the side door.
“Sorry about that, boss,” Russell said as Mike walked around the driver’s side of the van. Russell was holding the driver by the wrist and the guy was sitting on the ground, trying very hard not to move; his hand was at a forty-five-degree sideways angle. “I guess I pressed a little too hard when I jerked him out.”
“Works for me,” Mike said, walking over to the man on the ground. “Hurt?”
“Yes,” the man whispered, his face white.
“Good,” Mike said. “Your van’s all shot up, but we’ll get you a splint and a ride back to Chechnya. Then you tell your buddies that the valley of the Keldara is off limits, clear? You try to take our food, you try to take our women, you try to fight us, you’re going to end up very dead. Is that clear?”
“Who are you?” the man asked, looking around. “You’re Americans.”
“I am the Kildar,” Mike said. “These are some of my friends that I asked over to help out with the security situation. American and British Spetznaz. They’re going to be working on the security in the area. And training the Keldara to do the same. So unless you want to get the shit kicked out of you, stay far, far away.”
“Patch him up,” Mike said, looking at Russell and switching to English. “Tell doc to just splint it. I’ll get Vadim to find a ride for him back to the border.”
“Will do, boss,” Russell said.
“Boss?” Thompson said, walking around the side of the van. “We’ve got the girls unloaded, what do we do with them?
“What the fuck do we do with them?” Mike asked, looking at the nine girls lined up by the roadside. They’d mostly stopped crying and now looked at the men with guns in fear. They also were covered blood and in some cases vomit.
“Clean ’em up and fuck ’em?” Thompson suggested. The former Sfer shrugged at Mike’s expression. “Just a thought. I mean, they were on their way to being whores anyway, right?”
Mike had to admit that under the mess some of the girls were damned good looking. Not as good looking as Keldara, but still damned good looking. On the other hand, some of them were… pretty young.
“We’ll take ’em up to the caravanserai for now,” Mike said. “I’ll call Vadim and get his read on the situation. They all came from farms, maybe they can go back.”