Eighteen hundred hours, the man said. I check my watch yet again—sixteen-thirty. Almost two hours to go, still. Fuck.
Knowing Pugli, he wants to do the honors himself, so my guess is that Eliza is unharmed for now. And as long as she stays out of Pugli's hands, she should stay that way.
But Pugli won't live long enough to know anything's gone wrong.
Exactly thirty minutes on the dot from Lear's update, I hear the distinctive sound of an Osprey—it's flying low and fast, skimming the hilltops like a dragonfly. It roars overhead, flares to a halt, the rotors rotating upright to let it hover and then descend. Its door opens and ten figures clad in full battle rattle emerge, jogging toward us. The lead figure is short and stout, carrying a black duffel bag that looks heavy from the way he's carrying it.
Once the men are on the ground, the Osprey takes off again and is gone in a cloud of swirling dust.
The lead figure approaches me; he's brown-skinned, with a shaved head and a thick black beard. His dark eyes are hard and restless, scanning our surroundings, taking in the things operators take note of—possible cover, where an ambush might come from, where you'd dig in for a prolonged firefight.
He drops the bag at his feet and extends his hand to Bryn first. "Miss Harris. I am Chico. I know your father and mother." His accent is Latin American. "I am hearing that there is a sick fuck who has stolen an innocent child."
I step toward him, give him my hand. "Chico, I'm Rush. And you heard right—Pugli kidnapped my daughter."
"Pugli?" His expression darkens with fury. "I hear of him. He is a bad, bad, bad man. I am glad to be part of killing someone so evil as him." He indicates the bag. "I bring goodies. Tony, what is the latest intel?"
A tall bloke with a nasty scar curling his upper lip into a permanent sneer steps forward, tablet in hand. "Same as before, sir." His voice makes him from the American South. "No movement, no additional arrivals, no departures. An estimated sixty targets."
I'm rummaging in the bag—there's vests, assault rifles, mags, sidearms, shotguns, grenades, flashbangs, NV headsets…he brought the goodies alright. I speak while sorting out my kit. "What's the target like? I assume he's got defensive measures of some sort."
Bryn is alongside me, pulling on a vest and choosing weapons.
Tony answers. "Bet your ass he's got defensive measures. Walls around the house, for one. Fuckers posted at the corners, the gates, all over the place. No easy in, that's for damn sure."
"We will get closer and do some recon," Chico says. "But I think we will have to come up with some kind of clever plan. We are too few to directly assault this place."
“Well then," I say. "Let's get clever, shall we?" I pause, a hand on Chico’s shoulder. “By the way, Lear told me to tell you Cuddy says ‘fuck you.’”
Chico gives me a flat stare, and then bursts into laughter. “Oh, Cuddy. I miss that loca putana.” He hesitates. “Please do not tell her I called her that.”
Yeah, nah. Not on your life, mate. I’ve heard the stories.
Pugli is no one's fool. He expected us. This place ain't an estate, it's a small fuckin' fortress is what it is. He's got men posted on the walls with sniper rifles covering all lines of approach, and there ain't no cover to be had for miles in any direction. More men patrol the grounds beyond the walls in ranged patrols. I'd also wager he's got a bloke on the inside with a shoulder-launched SAM or some shit like that in case we decide to try and fast-rope in.
Once we've established the situation, we retreat half a click further back to come up with a plan.
"So, as you said, a direct approach is suicide," I say to Chico. "Using the Osprey to get closer is risky too—I wouldn't put it past the bastard to have some sort of defenses in place against aerial attacks." I give Chico a long, hard look. "So, mate, what's our clever plan, then?"
Chico stares into space over my left shoulder, gaze vacant as he considers the problem. I can almost see the wheels turning in his shrewd brain. Definitely not a bloke I want to be on opposite sides of, I can tell you that without having watched the man work. Sometimes, you can just get the measure of a person at first meeting. And, as advertised, this is a hard, confident man who knows what he's about.
"Guerilla warfare, I think," Chico says. "Pick off their snipers, for a start. Pick off the roving patrols. Keep them wondering where we are. Draw his men out. Perhaps even draw him out, force him to try to flee this place, and then when he does?" He mimes firing a shoulder-mounted rocket. "He dies. Bada-boom."
"Right, so we split up into groups," I say. "Surround the place and make him wonder how many we have."
"What if he doesn't come out?" Bryn asks. "What if he's set up to be able to outlast exactly this kind of thing?"
"We pick off his men until we have cut away his numbers and we can attack," Chico answers. "It is not the fastest solution, but it is the one that prevents us from wasting our lives. We can get supply drops from our Falcon One—food, water, ammunition, things like this. He can maybe last, but so can we."
"Well then," I say. "Let's pick teams and start doing violence."
13
13: ATTACKING TUSCANY
I'm with Rush, unsurprisingly, along with another man from RMI; we've split into four groups of three. Each team has a man with a scoped rifle—RMI didn't come to play around. We go over the plan once more and then break, splitting away and slinking around to our various positions. The one thing working in our favor to a degree is geography—the rolling hills of knee-high grass may not provide enough cover for us to approach the walls undetected, but they do allow us to slither close enough to put the crosshairs on the men on patrol and the men on the walls.
Rush and I are both armed with M-4 carbines and sidearms, and our RMI companion is armed with a sniper rifle—I'm not familiar with the exact make as my training never covered that kind of work.
