That Others May Live

by CptBrony

Into the Dragon's Den

Into the Dragon’s Den

In the dead of night, the team advanced stealthily into the valley. Duke and Frost took the lead with their suppressed weapons and night vision, ensuring that even if the way wasn’t clear, then clearing it wouldn’t cause too much noise or fuss. No need to wake any sleeping beasts.

When they arrived at the drop zone, the Nighthawks were the first ones out with their wings, followed by the men with parachutes. The men had a much faster freefall, as the Nighthawks flared their wings right off and descended in circles. They had to keep an eye open for any dragons that could be awake. Though in the dead hours of early morning, that wasn’t too likely.

The flight had been long, but it was planned meticulously to evade detection over the dragon lands. The lands weren’t really “dragon lands”, per se. They were just inhabited by dragons. There was no real governance here, no real system. Whoever the biggest and scariest was, that dragon decided how things went. It was lucky that none so far had felt like going after Equestria.

The land was as hostile as its inhabitants. Dragons were clearly the toughest creatures in Equestria; they lived in volcanoes, sulfur pits, and heat all the time. The men were doubtful that they could handle the cold, but that didn’t matter when they could burn you into crispy man-bacon. There was hardly any vegetation anywhere, save for a few crackly bushes and tumbleweeds. The wind was weak, making it even hotter, and everything was a burned-looking red shade.

Why the gryphons chose to be here was obvious. How they were here so effectively was not quite so obvious. They had managed to evade capture, bribe the dragons, or somehow scare them. That last one was not particularly likely, and the dragons, from what the Nighthawks told the men on the way to the op, were not very friendly to any other race, though gryphons especially. They seemed to like the taste of fowl the best.

There were also hundreds of cave systems in the area, and an unknown number of them were connected. The gryphons had a particular one they liked to go in and out of, but it was hard to say just how far it may have gone into the ground. If it was too expansive, and they took OGA and ran with him, they might never be able to find him until he resurfaced.

Frost was in the front of the group, taking careful steps to avoid sending rocks tumbling down the valley to echo all over the place. There was almost no level ground, and most of the mountainsides were pretty steep. The path they were on was one of the only ones they could actually travel safely, save for the bottom of the valley. But that was where their Earth Pony extraction force would be, quite possibly fighting its way to the exfil point.

As the team tip toed along, each member kept one eye on the sky and one eye on the ground. A gryphon ambush would signal the end of the mission if it came too early, and a dragon ambush would signal the end of everyone’s lives. The air was tense around the team, and no one could wait until they finally reached the cave where they would be fighting back against what would try to kill them.

Frost put his hand on a rock as he passed it, then quickly retracted it. It had started to break under his hand, despite the rock being so large. Upon closer inspection by Duke as he passed, it was more of a giant ball of ash. How it formed, he had no idea, but he knew that it would be better not to break it. If any of them started rolling down the mountain, they could create a cloud of dust visible for miles.

Frost put his hand up in front, signaling the group to stop moving, and knelt down. Everyone else followed suit. Duke moved forward and put his hand on Frost’s shoulder, looking ahead to whatever Frost could see.

“I got eyes on,” Frost whispered. Duke looked ahead and spotted what Frost saw; a cave entrance with two gryphons poking their heads out. When the gryphon’s heads went back into the cave, Frost turned around to face Duke. “We’ll want to approached from just above the entrance so they don’t see us coming up on them.”

“Good idea,” Duke said. They were approaching the cave from the side, so getting above it would be easy enough. “This is a cave, though. Don’t shoot unless you have too; no need for a bullet ricochet to make all kinds of noise.”

“Amen,” Frost replied.

Duke turned to the Nighthawks. “Alright, here’s the plan,” he said. The Nighthawks convened around him and leaned in to hear. “Frost and I are gonna get up above the cave entrance, and jump in from there to get the jump on them. You guys-“ Duke pointed to a spot just a little ways away from the cave entrance- “Will be waiting there. When we jump in, fly around and shoot in as fast as you can. If there’s more guards at the entrance, it’ll be your job to take them out.”

“Roger that,” Aprotelese said. He took his Nighthawks and they quietly made their way to their waiting point.

Duke turned to Frost and tapped his shoulder. “Good to go,” he said.

“Aye,” Frost replied.

The men started to climb on a diagonal toward the cave entrance to get above it. Climbing both forward and up at the same time was easier than just climbing up and minimized the distance they actually had to travel. Duke was glad he took so many math classes at the academy, or else he might not have been bothered to remember the Pythagorean theorem. He had never expected to actually use it in real life.

As the men slowly made their way over, they kept their eyes on the entrance to the cave. If the gryphons poked their heads out and spotted them, they would have no choice but to open fire and hope that there were no other guards to see them lose their heads. Of course, if that were to happen, the Nighthawks would no doubt understand that they had to go immediately. They were well-trained soldiers.

Thankfully, the gryphons didn’t poke their heads out again, and the men were able to get just above the entrance without any issue. Once there, they secured their primaries so they wouldn’t rattle around and swing all over the place, then drew their knives. Frost’s FE9 made Duke’s knife look like a needle by comparison. But Duke liked his knife; not too big, not too small. It was easy to move, and it had lots of uses.

Duke and Frost slowly peeked over the edge, ready to drop down if necessary. As they slowly looked over the edge, the enemy gryphons started to slowly appear below. They were so close that the men could make out the individual feathers on their heads, and they had no idea the men were there.

Before the men dropped, though, the gryphons started talking, driving them to pause before going. They listened intently to the conversation below for any important details.

“Latka, what are you doing out here?” one gryphon, an entrance guard, asked of another gryphon. “Aren’t you supposed to be inside helping?”

“Yes, but the fumes in the gas chamber make me edgy,” Latka replied. “I have my suit on, but it still feels too dangerous. We keep them well sealed in the tanks and the room where we work, but I still hate the job.”

“Then why did you volunteer?” Another gryphon asked. That made three.

“Because I want to make it last as long as possible when I detonate one of my bombs in Canterlot,” Latka replied darkly. “I want the ponies to look at me in my safety suit and know that it was I that gave them a five minute death.”

“We must strike at the heart of the ponies,” the first guard said. “But are you sure they won’t be savable when we strike?”

“The gas right now is an instant kill,” Latka said, sounding like he was admitting something. “If I cannot make my gas, I will simply use that.”

“What is the gas called?” the second guard asked. “The one you want to use?”

“I remember the man calling it Phosgene Oxime,” Latka said. “Very slow. Not curable, at least not by any means we have here. If I cannot develop it in time, though, we can use the gas he already gave us, VR.”

“Who could imagine that such a weapon could exist?” the first guard asked. The men above got ready to jump down. “Or that we would be able to use it first to such an effective end.”

That was the last of the conversation as the men fell from above and plunged their knives into the two guards necks from above, severing the spines right around their transformation into the brain stem. The third gryphon, Latka, barely had time to register what happened before Frost’s FE9 found its way into his torso and his neck was crushed by Frost’s powerful, angry grip.

“You won’t be using it,” Frost said, blackness in his eyes. He violently threw Latka against the wall, then pulled his knife out of the gryphon’s torso to slash his throat and let him fall to the ground.

Duke keyed his comms. “Clear,” he said, letting the Nighthawks come up.

Duke and Frost pointed their suppressed weapons down the entrance hall to the cave while they waited for the Nighthawks to show up. When the team was fully gathered behind the men at the entrance, Aprotelese came up and tapped his shoulder and the group advanced into the cave system.

Duke took the front with his MP7, followed by Frost and the Nighthawks. There were dim lights throughout the cave passage, just barely illuminating the room enough that the men couldn’t use their Nightvision. With their camouflaged uniforms and closeness to the wall as they moved, it was exceptionally difficult to see them when they were near the lights, and close to impossible when they hid in the shadows.

They could hear voices chattering off in the distance, but currently, they didn’t know if the hall split up ahead or how far it went. They could see that it went on a steep downward slope up ahead, and as they approached, they saw it split into two halls. The team kept an eye on the walls and ceiling for any other passages or any rooms along the way, but saw none. They had to check everything because the gryphons could fly, so a door in the ceiling was not an unreasonable thing to expect. Pegasi did it all the time.

When they reached the split, Duke stopped and held his position. Frost moved up to him and positioned himself next to Duke. They had to communicate with hand signals for the sake of making as little noise as possible. Frost pointed two fingers forward and separated them to form a “V”, then had his fingers walk toward one and then separately toward another. Duke nodded, then gave the signal that he would go with Moon Moon, Wolf, and Mosquito to the right. Frost would take Aprotelese, Fog, and Comet. Two teams of four, seeing as a team of eight was not ideal for fighting in the confines of a cave, was the ideal way to advance.

Duke advanced first, taking his group down the right passage and leaving Frost to take his down the left. They had a solid couple of teams, and anyone they encountered would be hard pressed to successfully fight against them.

Duke kept as close to the wall as he could and watched the front like an eagle hunting a finch. As he descended through the mountain and through the passage, he felt the pressure changing as the rock loomed overhead. Maybe it was just his imagination, but he could swear he needed to pop his ears a couple of times.

When they finally reached the bottom of the passage, it split into three more directions. All the way to the right looked like a massive stage area, where there might have been speeches and addresses, maybe meetings. Beyond that were what appeared to be some back rooms, covered by curtains to prevent any passersby from looking inside.

Duke motioned to the team to check that area first. It was a godsend that there weren’t any gryphons currently meeting there, but there could be some in the back. They could also be keeping OGA in a cage or something in one of those back rooms. The room had no holes in the ceiling leading anywhere else, but the floor had quite a few, seemingly random, depressions in the rock, some of which had pillows, and some of which didn’t. They certainly didn’t look planned.

There were four rooms in total, two on the left side of the room, one to the right, and one behind a small, raised patch of rock. The team started with the two all the way to the left. It would be better to do it that way because it would mean that, if all the rooms had gryphons, then two guys wouldn’t be leaving a room with gryphons piling out of the doorway immediately next to them. That wasn’t a corner to go around lightly.

Duke and Moon Moon took the right doorway, Mosquito and Wolf on the left. With a countdown of Duke’s fingers, they went from three to one, then each team silently barged through the curtains to clear the rooms. Neither room had any gryphons, only boxes of poorly preserved meat and vegetables.

“Didn’t know they ate veggies,” Duke thought.

They left those two rooms and went to check the next two, only to find them similarly devoid of hostile fighters. They were, in this case, filled with speakers, a microphone, and even some chairs, which perplexed the operators but didn’t stop them. As nice as it was not to encounter hostile gryphons just yet, that meant they were all further in. If there was food and AV type equipment here, it meant they had probably gone down the hall to the living quarters. Hopefully, that meant they wouldn’t run into those tanks they heard about.

The team left the meeting area with haste and looked down each of the next two hallways. They were a little bit smaller in size compared to where they had already been through, encouraging yet smaller fireteams to go hunting within. Duke tapped Wolf on the back to signal they would go together, and sent Mosquito and Moon Moon down the middle hallway. He and Wolf would take the left passage.

Duke took point as he and Wolf advanced through the dark passage. Before long, they came upon a massive room, filled with boxes, weapons, armor, and, somewhat unexpectedly, enemy combatants. Duke and Wolf hugged the wall to say out of sight as they nervously scanned the room.

There were easily ten visible gryphons, possibly more behind some of the stacks of boxes in what could easily be described as an underground warehouse. The gryphons were moving the boxes around, unloading some and loading up others. It was clear that this was some kind of transport and supply hub, where, if what Duke heard was right, they would also be transporting some of the gas. It had massive strategic implications, that they had possession of the area and, more interestingly, how they would choose to keep their ace in the hole of a human. It would seem wiser to keep him away and let him watch from a distance.

That didn’t matter now. For the moment, Duke had to figure out how to advance. Even if none of the gryphons in there were armed, they could just pick up any weapon and fight with it. The amount of noise made by the moving boxes was practically deafening, though, so fighting might not be necessary.

Duke looked to Wolf, then signaled for him to follow Duke when he went. Wolf nodded his understanding and Duke turned back to watch the room. When he saw a chance, he would have to go for it.

After a few minutes of waiting, Duke finally saw his chance. A gryphon stumbled, and it looked like he was carrying quite a bit of heavy metal armor. As it was about to come crashing down, Duke began to move forward, and once it hit the ground and jerked everyone’s attention that way, he really sprinted.

With Wolf right behind, Duke ran into the room and took cover behind some boxes. When Wolf joined him, they could here a whole lot of yelling from the other side and what sounded like a few smacks being given to the gryphon who dropped all their stuff. Duke stood up a little to find a crack in between the boxes on his pile and looked through. Most of the gryphons were already turning away and returning to their duties while one was on the ground, picking everything up and being chewed out. Duke remembered those days back in Air Force basic. Almost made him nostalgic.

The nostalgia didn’t last, though, because one of the gryphons was coming toward their pile of boxes. He wasn’t walking up to it, though, he was moving to the side, like he was going around it on Duke’s side. Duke silently cursed the gryphon and pulled his knife back out of its sheath. When the gryphon came around, just as he expected, Duke grabbed it by the beak, holding it shut, and stabbed the knife into its throat from the side and pulled it out to let the gryphon go out quickly. It tried to struggle, but Duke kept his grip strong, and the somewhat small gryphon rapidly faded from the world.

With nowhere to go but forward in the room, Duke was forced to leave the body there. Unhappy with the situation, he looked around the sides of the boxes before him and checked the walls. There was a hole in the ceiling here leading to another room, but there were only two doorways on the ground. One was where he came through, so the other was his only advance forward. He wasn’t intent on sending anyone anywhere in this place alone, so Wolf would not be flying up to that hole just yet.

That meant getting past up to nine or ten more hostiles, possibly more, without being made. While it was certainly no easy feat, Duke knew it was possible. He had worked with the Special Forces before, and they did understand that sort of thing.

Duke looked forward into the room to check on where the gryphons were. With the massive number of boxes, and now being within the maze of them, he could only spot two, and if he moved to take them out, it could easily mean being seen by two more. That would mean taking out two more, and the cycle could easily just continue from there. He would be better off sneaking past them.

The only two lights that illuminated the room hung from the ceiling, and they were two basic light bulbs with no shades or covers, just bare bulbs. No shadows up high to conceal Wolf, so it was the ground for him as well. Duke could try shooting out the lights, but that would be way too suspicious a thing to try.

He had to run it and hope for the best. Push came to shove, he’d fight, but he preferred not to.

So, with one last scan and determination of who was where and looking at what, Duke made his run. The two gryphons he could see were still busy with the stuff lying all over the floor, and in the relative darkness of the more perimeter areas of the room, it was easy enough to avoid them.

When they hid at the next set of boxes, they could hear a group chatting in the next area of the room. Duke and Wolf were hiding in a shadow made by the box and so could risk a quick peek at whoever was next.

They turned out not to be next, as it were, as there were four of them standing there. They couldn’t take them out silently with knives, and in here, firing the gun would be a stupid idea. Even if he got all four with a single shot each before they managed to alert the others, if the bullets went through and through, they would hit something and make a loud noise, and the blood spatter would certainly not go unnoticed. They would have to find another way.

The group was sitting there, in a circle, playing with their gear, so it was clear they wouldn’t be moving. There wasn’t much of a way of sneaking around the side, and going back wasn’t Duke’s preferred option. What they did have, though, was the boxes.

Duke wasn’t about to climb up on top of them, that would be stupid. But he was more than happy to crash a few of them. He just needed to find a good way to do that.

Duke turned back to the area they came and scanned for any boxes that might satisfy their needs. The two gryphons around the clutter on the floor had finished up and were getting back to moving things around. The funny thing was, the gryphon who dropped all that stuff before was going for another set of heavy looking boxes, and struggled immensely with them.

Duke looked for anything that might drive that gryphon to drop those boxes like he did the first time. He thought of picking up one of the rocks lying around the perimeter to throw at his feet, but there were no loose rocks in the main area, so if they saw it, they’d know something was up. The boxes that the gryphon picked up were armor cases again, though, so that meant if Duke could throw a gauntlet or something, it would work fine.

Duke checked the boxes around him. Some were open and had weapons in them, but Duke wasn’t looking to throw a knife at the gryphon. That was about as obvious as shooting him. Eventually, one of the boxes had a full set of armor, including two gauntlets. Duke picked one up and took aim at the gryphon.

He was clearly a young one, barely able to carry anything, let alone the weight he was given. It was hardly fair, sending what was clearly a child to do an adult’s job in a war. Back home, it was a war crime, and no one knew how to deal with that. Though Duke was taught that you aim at the weapon and address the weapon, not the bearer of said weapon.

With a calculated throw, Duke sent the gauntlet flying at the gryphon and knocked him right in the leg, sending him tumbling and creating yet another massive crash. Before the pair knew it, the other gryphons got up with frustrated looks and went to chew out the young gryphon yet again.

Duke and Wolf took their opportunity and ran. They didn’t have to worry about noise, not with the loudness of the abuse of the young gryphon and metal scraping against stone. They probably just ruined that set of armor, too, which was an added bonus.

Duke and Wolf were able to run through the entire maze of boxes without any issue, weapons raised and eyes forward for trouble. All the gryphons had clearly gone to the crash to see what punishment awaited the young one who kept screwing up. It was war, after all! Failure was not an option, although all these gryphons had done so rather gloriously.

Duke and Wolf went through the door and found a short hall that only had three more doorways, one left, one right, and one on the end. Maybe the rest of the cave was natural, but this area had been dug. It was too smooth, too polished to have been there originally. The duo cleared the left room, a bedroom with a cloth nest for gryphons to sleep in, then the right, where there were more basic bunks. This was where those guys out there lived, to be sure.

They moved to check on the final room, though Duke had little hope left that OGA was there. This room had an actual door, not curtains, so the duo had to stack up and prepare for a rapid breach. It would be noisy, for sure, but if they moved quickly, they could minimize the noise made and buy time by shutting the door behind them.

Duke slowly turned the knob to find it unlocked, then waited. He put up his fingers for one more countdown. Three… Two… One…

Duke threw the door open and added a little kick with his right foot as he entered. As he and Wolf rushed in, they spotted two gryphons, one in bed and the other standing at a table. Duke turned his weapon to the one at the table and put three in it as Wolf rushed the bed and stabbed into the neck of the sleeping one before it could even stir.

The gryphon that Duke shot slumped to the ground after knocking its now useless head on the table. Duke rushed it to check and confirm the kill, and Wolf finished up his dirty work on the bed by cleaning his blade on the gryphon’s feathers. Duke noted that this gryphon looked a little different, had a more rounded head unlike the other ones he saw on the way in, but paid it no mind.

OGA wasn’t there, and Duke shook his head. He had expected no less when he learned what this section of the cave was for. He only hoped that the others were okay.

“Frost, if you can reply, tell me what you’ve found,” Duke said. He waited a moment, but got no response. “Dammit.”

“Well, let’s hope the others found more than we did,” Wolf commented.

“Yeah,” Duke replied. “We can only hope.”

Frost stepped forward into his passage with measured caution. Aprotelese, Fog, and Comet followed in suit, stepping lightly and painfully aware of the world around them. None of them particularly liked being in a cave, as opposed to the open air, but there wasn’t much of a choice in the matter here. They were here, and they had a job to do.

Before long, Frost found that his passage brought him up and higher in the mountain. He kept his rifle pointed forward, ready to put own any gryphon that dared to come near. Behind him, he couldn’t even hear his team breathe, but that was how he liked it. Any noise right now would set him on edge.

The passage leveled off and opened up into a large common room up ahead. There were weapon racks on the wall, a food station filled with raw meat in the very center, and a single passage to the right that went further into the cave. There were also a number of mats covering spots on the floor, though they seemed randomly placed and pinned in place in at least two corners, sometimes three. Suspicious, to be sure.

Frost kept on moving forward through the room that was devoid of combatants. All unknowns were considered hostile here, as risks could not be taken, especially since it was a terrorist militant facility. If they weren’t fighters, they could easily become them in a jiffy, and even if not, they supported the terrorist cause. No different than if a bomb was dropped on them from afar.

Frost crept forward toward the right passage, but something didn’t feel right about this room. It wasn’t a gut feeling, though. Something about the climate of the rom didn’t feel right. Frost couldn’t place it; maybe it was the smell, though that was foul for obvious reasons. The temperature? Frost didn’t know what a cave here should feel like. But there was something, something that kept him on edge.

Frost stepped on the corner of one of the strangely placed rugs and stopped when he saw it move. It didn’t look right, and when he leaned down to poke it, he figured out why. There was a hole underneath it, and probably every one of the carpets in the room. What was on the other side, he couldn’t say, and there was only one way to find out.

Frost slowly removed the pines keeping the rug in its place and found the last thing he wanted. A small space that he couldn’t fit in, extending an unknown distance into the dark. He might have been able to get through if he didn’t have his gear, but that wasn’t what he planned on doing.

“Never thought I’d actually see a rat hole,” Frost thought.

There were too many to worry about at the moment, so he led his team further along into the next passage. The passage was even less of what he had hoped for; from where he stood, he could see it extended a good hundred feet to the end, where it split into an upward passage and a downward passage. Thankfully, there were no real doorways, only curtains keeping the gryphons in the hall from seeing into each room. It meant staying quiet in the rooms, but it also meant no creaking hinges.

They would have to search each room one by one. The Nighthawks had orders to eliminate the facility, so whatever or whoever they found in the rooms, unless it was OGA, it was going to go. Frost kept his knife ready to go in case they found anything.

The first room they checked didn’t have anything in it except an empty little nest. The Nighthawks seemed to be frustrated with the initial lack of finding anything, but immediately left the room and checked the room across the hall. Inside of that room, they found three gryphons sleeping on cots and silently disposed of them. Frost was the last one in the room that time and walked in on them already cleaning their blades.

Frost walked over to Aprotelese. “You don’t go ahead of me,” he said in a very clear whisper.

“We have our own mission here,” Aprotelese bit back. “Nothing’s getting in the way of that.”

“Nothing except my mission,” Frost warned. “If you put OGA’s life on the line for your little extermination mission, it won’t be tolerated, and you will be obstructing a United States rescue operation. Don’t. Do. That.”

Aprotelese breathed in deep then let it out slowly. “Fine.”

“I get that you’re pissed, so am I,” Frost said. “Amel was in danger too. But you have to keep that under lock right now. All of you.”

Frost took the front once again and led the team down the rest of the hall. Each room from that point on had a gryphon or two, which Frost was more than willing to help to put down. As long as he was in the lead, keeping his gun from pointing near his own guys, it didn’t matter if they’re missions were terribly different. They just had to get it all done.

When they hit the end of the hall, Frost looked up and down the passages as they split. The downward passage curved off, but not a lot, and he could see it just led to another hole in the floor. A lot of light was coming from the hole, leading Frost to believe it led to another room somewhere that there could easily be a group of hostiles that he wasn’t too intent on finding right now. Instead of going there, he opted to lead his team up and into the darker area.

At the top of the passage, they found themselves looking at a massive room with three distinct, sealed doors, labeled and locked up tight, and two more passages. There were two gryphons sitting on chairs in the center of the room, both asleep at the wheel. Frost and Aprotelese quietly walked over to them and silenced them for good.

Frost observed the doors that were around him; Detainment, Research and Development, and War. The two guards, if they could even be called that, had keys to two of the rooms, Detainment and War. Frost grabbed the Detainment key and Aprotelese took the War key. They separated for a moment, pursuing their separate objectives. While Frost moved toward the room, he heard Duke call on the comms. In a moment, he would be able to respond and say he found OGA.

Frost quietly slipped the key into the lock, turned it, and started to push the door open. It wasn’t exactly quiet; the door scraped against the ground, right against the stone floor, probably ruining it more than it already was. He decided that it would be better to just shove it open than to prolong the loud noise.

When he kicked the door through, he rushed in with his rifle up and found three targets, standing in the middle of the room with shocked expressions. Before they could respond, Frost put them each down with a single shot, then finished them off with one more shot each on the ground. With the combatants down, he turned his attention to the cages where OGA would be-

Nowhere. Nowhere in sight. OGA wasn’t in the first cage, not the second, not the third, not any of them. Frost had to look twice to make sure he wasn’t missing something. There was nothing else in the room, no passages, no doors besides the cage doors. Frost took a few steps toward the door, then slammed his fist against the cage and keyed his comms.

“Duke, I found the prison area, but no people,” he said.

“What?” Duke replied. “Are you sure that’s it?”

“Well, the big sign might be a little misleading,” Frost replied sarcastically.

“Dammit,” Duke replied. “Celestia said he’d be here.”

“Could they have moved him?” Frost asked.

“…” Duke didn’t respond immediately. “I don’t know.”

“Duke,” Frost said, voice filled with caution. “She did say he was here.”

“I know what she said,” Duke said. Frost heard him sigh on the other end of the comms. “We need to link back up.”

“Copy that,” Frost said.

Duke keyed all comms to speak to the whole team. “Guys, we need to meet back up by the area we inserted. How copy?”

“Aye,” Aprotelese responded. No one else talked.

“Mosquito, Moon Moon, how copy, over?” Duke asked.

The comms keyed in. “Your friends aren’t able to talk,” a gruff voice replied.

Everyone’s hearts sank at the same time. Mosquito and Moon Moon had been made. The entire team was at risk now, and the operation was a complete bust. They had to get out.

“You have your orders, gentlemen,” Duke said into the comms. He and Frost checked their weapons.

“We know where you are,” the voice replied. “You’re not leaving this place alive.”

Duke faced the way he came with Wolf and Frost stared down the door behind him. It had swung shut as he came in, and whatever was on the other side of the door would do its level best to kill him. He had to make sure it failed.

In unknown unison, Frost, Duke, and Aprotelese took in deep breaths and let them out slowly, like they were about to take their last. Then, with a sense of readiness and determination, they looked toward the sounds of chaos.

“Let’s do this.”

Author's Note:

Please hold your comments until you've read the next two chapters.

Comments

[hs0003]

Comments comments comments.
You hold them

[Dream Seeker]

I-

No. Must. Resist. The urge.

[GMZ_Casper]

C&C:
When Wolf joined him, they could here a whole lot of yelling from the other side...
> Replace ‘here’ with ‘hear’.

[paladinwolf]

c14608526.r26.cf2.rackcdn.com/45CEDD67-7421-4FC8-A9C1-F66940A58D41.jpg

[Ink_25]

Let's do this! Leeroy Jenkins!

[Iroh Legoman]

6954391
That's actually worked for me