Sam Fisher- 12 Militia

  If I wait for them to hash it out, it’ll be too late, Sam told himself. Gotta do this now. Slow and careful, he let his SC4000 bullpup carbine slip off his shoulder and into his waiting hands. Reaching for a gear pouch on his belt, Fisher recovered a rubber-coated hoop made of dense material and slotted it into the muzzle of the carbine’s secondary launcher.

  First, he had to take the biggest guns out of commission. Fisher leaned back and aimed at a fighter standing upright in the flatbed of the closest technical. No more than twenty years old if he was a day, he wore a bright red soccer shirt and a threadbare painter’s cap, and he had both hands resting on the Dushka heavy MG that pointed out over the Toyota’s battered hood.

  Waiting until there were no eyes on his target, Fisher exhaled half a breath and pulled the SC4000’s secondary trigger. The modular launcher mounted on a rail beneath the carbine’s barrel ejected the plastic projectile with a low hiss. It blurred through the air, striking the man in the red shirt in the temple. The ring airfoil projectile acted like a long-range knockout punch, silently taking out the gunner. He slumped forward on the Dushka, and nobody noticed.

  Fisher pulled another airfoil and reloaded, shifting his arc of fire toward a second technical with the same setup. This gunner was bare-chested except for a webbing vest, and he was shifting from foot to foot behind his weapon, almost dancing on the spot with unspent nervous energy. He had a buddy close at hand leaning on the side of the second technical, who seemed in no hurry to move away.

  Meanwhile, the disagreement was building in volume, approaching a climax.

  Fisher fired again. The second airfoil ring was dead on, just like the first, but the guy in the web-vest clearly had a harder head, a numb skull. Whatever it was, he jerked aside and flailed, clutching at his face and moaning. His buddy on the ground found this hilarious and laughed like a hyena – or at least, he did until he realized the gunner now had a broken jaw and blood streaming from his nostrils. Finally, gravity caught up with the guy in the vest and he tumbled backward over the side of the flatbed, vanishing from sight.

  Laughing Boy caught up to the fact that this wasn’t funny after all and called out a warning that was missed among the shouted argument. In that fraction of a second, Fisher flicked off the SC4000’s safety, laying the stubby carbine across the crook of his elbow, right at the cluster of gasoline drums beneath the shelter. The noise of their discharge swallowed by an integral sound suppressor, two pre-selected incendiary rounds thud-thudded from the muzzle and hit the fuel dump.

  Bolts of magnesium fire sparked and the drums went up with a rolling whoosh of orange flames and black smoke that rose twenty meters into the air. The men searching around nearby were blasted off their feet and they didn’t rise again.

  Shock went through the fighters in a wave. They reacted like startled dogs, some of them diving for the dirt, others firing wildly in whatever direction they thought danger was coming from.

  Fisher was already moving, rolling away from his spot in the scrub, down into a gulley that ran parallel with the roadway.
...

  Rising again, he slipped in behind one of the battered pickups and chanced a look around the rear of the vehicle. One of the fighters had scrambled up to the now-vacant Dushka on the second technical, and he leaned into it, swinging the machinegun around to aim in Fisher’s direction.

  Has he seen me? Fisher couldn’t take the chance. Snap-firing, he put another two rifle rounds through the fighter’s torso, but as the man died he clutched the heavy MG’s trigger and the Duskha shouted. Loud, flat crashes of gunfire raked across the dust and the hood of the old vehicle, anti-material bullets as thick as a man’s thumb punching through the metal.

  Fisher sprinted from cover and he heard a cry of alarm. If they hadn’t seen him before, someone had now. Rifle rounds hummed through the air around him, buzzing like mad hornets. He pulled and tossed a stun grenade over his shoulder and dropped behind a low sandbag wall as the nine-banger went off in a ripple of concussions.

  A jagged spark of pain crawled down his spine – a reminder from an old war wound that he wasn’t as young as he used to be – and Fisher ignored it. Popping up, he shot into the first target he saw, a man in fatigues with a drum-fed PPSh fire-hosing bullets along the low cover. As the man fell, Fisher was already in motion again. The key to controlling this engagement was to never give the fighters something to combine their fire on, to make them think they were facing six men and not one.

  At the edge of the shallow, smoke-reeking crater where the fuel dump had been, he ambushed a bearded fighter with an AKM, breaking his neck with a punishing blow from the SC4000’s stock. Fisher hauled the dead man away and tossed his body into a gulley, leaving his comrades to think he had vanished.

  The men who had been arguing put that aside when Fisher first declared war on them. Now they were snarling at one another as to where their enemy was and what to do about it. A few of them dug in near the bunker entrance, making the smart choice to give their assailant only one angle of attack. The others dithering behind the technicals or out in the open were living on borrowed time.

  Fisher peered down the ACOG sight atop the SC4000 and shot a gunman in the thigh, counting on his screams to draw the attention of his friends close by. Sure enough, a ripple of shadows near one of the vehicles gave away their position, and he slipped silently toward it.

  They never saw him coming. Bursts of controlled, steady fire ended the last of the men outside the bunker. Fisher came upon the wounded man groping for his fallen rifle, and with cold efficiency, he put him out of his misery with a headshot.

  “All call-signs, this is Nomad.” Fisher hesitated, hearing the soldier pitching up his voice to be heard. “Ran into some unfriendlies at the LZ, but we’re clear now.”

- Dragonfire, Chapter 4