Silence In Numbers: File One, page 6
Sam read the latest letter explaining their next officer and how this one was “different”, a promise they’d heard many times. However, the information they were given only succeeded in making the men even more skeptical than usual, rather than infusing them with hope.
It was a woman this time, though that wasn’t unheard of obviously. According to Command she was top in her class - every class. Not much was given about her personality, but one attribute was the main focus of the group’s discussion over the next few days: “Age: 20.”
At first they’d been shocked, then they moved on to laughter, then back to shock, and finally anger and indignation. “They’re desperate,” some offered as an explanation.
“Finally gave up on us, I say.”
“It’s ridiculous! Sending a kid to order us around? She’ll get us all killed!”
Sam had remained silent. It wasn’t that he had any more faith in their new unknown commander than the others; he didn’t. Not in the least. He was sure she’d be dead within the month, if not the week.
It was that fact right there. He didn’t find himself agreeing with sending someone so young into such a brutal conflict unprepared. It wasn’t right, but that didn’t really matter here he supposed. It would happen either way.
She arrived three days after they’d been told of her appointment. She was young and beautiful, which only added to her being out-of-place in this hell. Her curly violet hair and pale complexion seemed too gentle for the harsh reality of the jungle, and every man there was ready to disobey her orders, most not out of resentment but to stay alive. She’d stepped off the helicopter with a younger girl with bright blue hair, but they were given no explanation at the time; the younger girl (only seventeen) had simply moved away and taken a seat in front of a tent to watch while the new commander stood in front of the group of men that had absolutely no faith in her abilities.
But Sam had noticed something different. The young woman folded her arms behind her back and looked over her new charges as the transport helicopter lifted behind her, not staying in the area any longer than to drop off the girls and their supplies. She took in the hard men wearing torn and bloodstained clothes and numerous scars and moved in front of them, examining without any shown emotion. When she spoke it was far more even than they expected to come from those lips. “My name is Katsumi Samakura. You’re mine now. Things are about to change.”
One of the men shrugged. The lack of respect wasn’t really a personal insult to her; they’d heard this sort of thing before, several times. She’d break soon. “We’ve got it handled.”
Her eyes turned to the speaker. The deep lavender gaze seemed to hold some strange power within it that silenced him. “If that were true you’d have won by now.”
Anger was the response. They’d been facing death for months, fighting like mad. This new girl with no experience here had no right to talk about it like she had, insulting their sacrifices and those of their fallen allies. One of the men stepped out of the line they’d reluctantly formed, moving to strike her. Sam didn’t blame him; it was like she’d spat on the graves of their fallen allies and on the shreds of their own dignity. She hadn’t done one thing to earn their respect or the ability to speak as she had.
But she wasn’t the type to take that sort of thing. She ducked the swipe and slammed her fist into the man’s stomach, doubling him over. Her knee came up and he snapped back with a spray of blood emitting from his now-broken nose. After he hit the ground she stomped her foot onto his throat, holding him there as her lavender eyes flared to life with hidden emotion. “I don’t need your respect, but I demand your obedience.” The others were startled, but after a second rage took over, and Sam knew it was going to get ugly; out of the corner of his eye he noticed the blue-haired girl watching carefully, her fingers playing over a pistol on her belt.
Their new commander drew her own pistol, pointing it at the downed man and ignoring the others, who stopped to watch as she continued. “This company’s death count is ridiculous and its progress is nil. You’re thinking yourselves heroes? What have you done to earn that distinction? All you’ve done is survive. That’s not victory, that’s just stalling. I’m here to change that.” She removed her foot to allow the soldier up, but she kept her pistol drawn even if it was hanging at her side. “I’m not here to earn your respect. I’m just here to win battles and keep you alive, prioritized in that order.”
But despite her statement, she had gone on to earn their respect. To their surprise she not only directed them with amazing precision and insight, but she did it with an extremely cool head and even tone, even during the fiercest and bloodiest skirmishes. The most amazing thing, though, was that not once after her arrival did they ever fall into a trap. She had an almost supernatural sixth sense; she was never able to divine specifics out of thin air, of course, but she always guided them around ambushes with nothing more than a mutter about a “bad feeling”.
Progress had been made after that as they began to form into a real team, but of course that was before –
Law was snapped out of his memories by a loud beeping informing him that it was time to check in again. He sighed, making contact as he looked out the window once more. It was times like this that made him almost long for open warfare. Silence was worse than the sound of any weapon.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Sano leaned against the side of his car, running a hand through his crimson hair with a sigh. “So boring…”
He was ready to move at any moment, but there was nothing to move towards yet. All he could do was wait, just like everyone else. He slid his hands into his pockets. He’d decided there were worse things than wearing suits, especially as he caught his own reflection in the car window and winked at it, grinning as he imagined his Captain rolling her eyes at the gesture. Reno would probably throw an insult his way, too. Still, as he looked up into the night sky, he couldn’t help wishing he was in the helicopter with them rather than standing around on his own bored out of his mind.
He pulled out his phone, flipping it open and starting to look around on their network. Nothing was happening anyway, he might as well see what everyone else was doing. According to it, they were all still in their usual positions. Law was on a street corner miles away, Rufus was on a rooftop somewhere, and Reno and Katsumi were apparently circling the Kitsuine Tower again. That thought made him hope that wouldn’t be the target. Unlike the others on their team, Sano was like Katsumi, a native of Japan. He had similar feelings towards the tower.
Terrorism was always a heavy subject for him. He still remembered his first real experience actually fighting it as a rookie cop eleven years prior:
2057 was a year without wars but with enough crime to make up for it. Kurasano, 22 years old and fresh out of Academy, had been in his first year of active duty as part of a firm specializing in Public Security, basically what would’ve been the police force in the early years of the century. Sano had strong feelings about his job, strong reasons for doing it, but those were things he didn’t like to dwell on.
He was on a simple patrol the day a real terrorist group attacked. He, along with most of the men in the area, were used to criminals, even the vicious kinds that could bring dozens of deaths, but they weren’t used to what real terrorists could do.
It started with an explosion; Sano found he hated how many things had exploded during his lifetime. They’d been after government officials who weren’t important enough to bring in the real Special Forces so Public Security had been sent in. It wasn’t a fair fight.
Sano ran with familiar men into the front of the building only to be greeted by a hail of gunfire from weapons a lot more powerful than the handguns they held. Men three times his age fell around him, shredded and pouring blood, viscera and other things he still couldn’t cleanse the images of from his mind despite trying. He dived into cover, watching his partner’s head explode near him, covering him with blood and brain matter. His eyes were wide in horror and shock. Training hadn’t taught him about this, about what real weapons did to a human’s body, about the sheer violence and brutality of a real conflict.
The smell was as bad as the sights, things he’d never wanted to recognize the scent of assailing his senses. It was all he could do to keep from curling up and crying right there, forgetting the people around him and trying to ignore the horrific reality.
But that was before he heard the laughing.
The cops who were on the ground around him were good people, mostly. Sure, there was the odd bad egg, but they had all chosen to make protection their profession. Most had families, children, wives, husbands, homes they wouldn’t be going home to at the end of the day. And Sano could accept that, he could; he already knew from personal experience that life was unforgiving and harsh. Not cruel, but harsh. People died, he knew that.
But he couldn’t accept that the people who were killing them were laughing about it. Those lives meant so little to them that the brutality was humorous. That was when something new triggered. That was when Sano stood up.
It wasn’t like his fear and horror disappeared; they just didn’t matter anymore. Anger rushed through him, a tidal wave of rage that made thinking about little details like personal danger or fear impossible. At that moment all he wanted was to stop the laughter and the slaughter, he wasn’t thinking about the future at all.
They fired of course but he moved as they did, returning fire with his handgun as he swooped down to pick up another from a fallen officer. He remembered screaming though he didn’t remember starting to. He moved from cover to cover, always moving forward, bringing down target after target. They couldn’t get a real shot at him, he moved too much and they were too confident to do the same. Their confidence faded once they realized just how many of them he’d brought down, but by that point fear and anger clouded their judgment instead.
It was strange, Sano thought, how his anger enabled him to cut through their numbers while their anger prevented them from winning. The few surviving officers moved forward behind Sano, working with him towards victory, and soon enough the entrance was clear. Sano didn’t stop there, though the killing mostly did. He pushed forward into the building towards the government officials, working with his allies to bring the rest down, and it got easier as it went. Many gave up without even firing, knowing the majority had been taken care of downstairs.
Sano had walked into the official’s office without hesitation, the end of the road. A terrorist stood with a gun to the official’s head, demanding he drop his weapon. Sano had complied; he knew it was the best course of action even as the terrorist took the opportunity to shoot him in the chest.
As Sano had stumbled back another officer had swung around the edge of the doorway, shooting the now-open terrorist dead. Sano remembered hitting the wall and slumping down, others coming to his aid and calling for medical attention. Sano had just smiled. He’d never expected to get out of there alive; he’d forgotten about that back in the lobby.
Later, as he recovered after surgery, another officer had told him that was the point when he became a real protector, when he’d forgotten about his own safety. Sano never forgot that, and ever since he’d never put his own safety before another’s.
Sano smirked as he was snapped out of his reverie by a loud beeping. “Yeah, I’m a hero alright.” He checked in and dropped his phone back in his pocket, looking up at the sky once more. “A big damn hero…”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Wind howled over a rooftop as it picked up for a moment before settling down again. The weather seemed to be reacting a bit oddly, but maybe that was just his mind reading too much into things. Nature didn’t care what was going on with humans; it never had.
Rufus adjusted his shades, appreciating the protection they offered his eyes from the wind at this altitude. It was night so his shades were on a light night vision setting, bathing the world in a faint green glow. He could pick out any detail of the street below, but right now all of those details were boring. A few people walking, some cars, a bus every now and then. Rufus shook his head as he thought about how few people he was seeing. It wasn’t normal, but that was no reason to assume it was because they were somehow “sensing” possible trouble in the air.
He blamed Captain Samakura for these stray thoughts. He could tell he was trying to have the same “sixth sense” she seemed to have. Ridiculous. He’d seen too much to ignore hers, of course - that was why he was on this rooftop - but no one else had the same ability as far as he knew, even himself.
His thoughts logically went to his Captain as he sat against a raised vent on the rooftop with his sniper rifle resting on a tripod beside him. He’d always preferred lone work before her, but she was the first person he’d worked for that he was truly able to respect. He respected M of course, but he rarely dealt with M, and he didn’t trust that man enough to work to change that fact. Samakura was different; she’d been in enough different situations to understand how things worked in different walks of life. She’d even understood his own. After another glance at the street below Rufus sat back, allowing himself to follow that line of thought to an examination of his past:
It was seven years ago. Rufus, thirty years old at the time, knocked on a door, smiling before kicking it in. A knife slipped from each sleeve into his hands as he stepped inside and ducked. A shotgun blasted apart the wall over his head and he turned to the right, one hand knocking the barrel upwards and the other gutting the offending criminal. He yanked the shotgun from the dying man’s hands, tossing it behind him and stalking further into the hallway.
Criminal organizations were always going after each other; after all, they had to compete just as much as any legitimate company, they just sometimes did it a little more brutally (or at least they were more forthcoming about their brutality). For those times when his own organization decided a more violent solution was required, Rufus was often the answer.
A door in the hallway burst open as an attacker rushed out but Rufus just stepped past him, jamming a knife into his eye socket as he did and leaving it there as he continued on, knowing the man’s screaming was making his targets nervous. He found a doorway at the end of the hall and entered, finding himself face to face with a veritable armory of guns. The criminal he was after stood against the room’s windows; between them were eight armed guards who immediately opened fire.
Rufus stepped out and pulled the door shut behind him, letting it take the hail of fire. He kept hold of the doorknob and kicked the door off the hinges, rushing into the room with the door as a shield. He slammed it into two men, pushing them further until they smashed through the window, falling with a scream to the streets far below. Rufus shot his left hand out to catch one of the bars that had held the windowpanes together and shot his right hand out to grab one of the falling guns.
He swung around to the left, narrowly dodging more fire, and opened up on the others who all dived for cover. It was risky, but it worked. Then things got a lot more chaotic.
Rufus ducked as he heard fire behind him and looked back to see, surprisingly, a woman swinging towards the room on a rappelling wire. He dived to the side as she swung in, landing between him and his target. She had violet hair, strong lavender eyes and a skintight black military combat suit, which to him meant she was quite out of place in this fight between criminals. He aimed the gun but she moved faster, her pistol shooting it out of his grip. He flung his remaining knife and charged as he drew another.
She sidestepped and slapped the thrown knife away with the flat of her free hand, bringing up her pistol to block his stab attempt. In the next few seconds their limbs were a blur as she avoided stabs, he avoided shots and they both tried to get the upper hand, punches, kicks and grapples being countered. They wouldn’t know who’d come out on top, though, as the other criminals in the room had recovered and both opened fire. Rufus and the woman instantly dropped below the table, but noticed as Rufus’ target took off out of the room.
The woman vaulted over the table, gunning down two guards and chasing the man into the hallway. Rufus flipped the table, kicking it into the remaining guards, picking up another gun and following. He fired on both people in the hallway; the woman rolled into a side door, the man wasn’t that lucky. His legs were caught by a few bullets and he went down heavily with a loud cry. Rufus tossed the empty gun aside and readied his knife for the kill but the woman came out firing to stop him. Fortunately for him, he managed to avoid both shots, and that must have been the last in the weapon since she flipped it around in her hand and came at him with melee strikes once more.
Rufus did his best, and after several hard strikes it seemed he was the stronger, but she was faster. He stabbed at her stomach and she jerked to the side, catching his wrist. She ejected the magazine from her pistol and, as it fell to the floor, kicked it back up into his face, which only stunned him for a second, but in that second she jammed the empty pistol on top of the knife so the blade went inside the magazine chamber, twisted hard and ripped the knife out of his grip, struck him hard in the stomach with the hilt and kneed him in the chin sending him to the ground.
She dropped her knee into his stomach and pulled the knife from the gun, holding it to his neck and speaking in an even voice touched by a hint of breathlessness. “Don’t move. I need him alive, but not you.”
Rufus sighed, following her directions as he heard someone else coming from further down the hall, probably more of her unit. “I can tell when I’m beaten.”
