To Meet An Agent
Chapter 1
Phil Coulson was not looking to recruit a sniper. Events, however, have a way of convincing a person.
A/N: Any rights to the Avengers do not belong to me. I am not making any profits off of this.
Agent Philip Coulson was not happy. Not happy indeed. The same could also be said of the five United States Army Marines pinned down around him, but, then again, being shot at could ruin anyone's day. Another example of his terrible luck could be illustrated by the six men huddled in one very squished group behind a single overturned combat vehicle (Frankly, it was hard to tell what model and make it used to be, since IEDs tend to have quite a destructive effect on everything that touch).
Coulson didn't even want to consider the thirty or so trigger-happy jihadists merrily adding bullet holes to the other side of their cover.
"Having fun with your little get together over there?" Coulson's head snapped up at the unfamiliar voice crackling faintly through his radio transmitter. Before he could even reply, another male barked over the radio.
"Barton, what the # $% do you think you're *&#^ &* doing, you little & ^*?"
One of the soldiers pressed against his side sat up with a vaguely impressed look on his face as the –ahem – non-regulation transmission blasted through loudly enough to overhear. Coulson glared at him and raised a hand to his ear.
"Identify yourselves, soldiers," he intoned, "Then get off this frequency. I have no time –" He ducked as a round from an AK-47 shrieked off the metal hood above him, " – to deal with jokesters right now."
"Aw, you wound me! And here I was all set to join your party. You guys are mean." The voice was male, perhaps mid-20's, and arrogant. Possible younger brother to an alcoholic. Coulson's sharp eyes swung around the scene before him suspiciously as he registered a miniscule flash of light from the corner of his eye. One sand and debris filled courtyard in the middle of Tikrit? Check. Approximately thirty Muslims taking potshots at five trapped soldiers and one increasingly irked SHIELD agent? Check. Now, where had the reflection come from?
14/4/2003, 0800 HRS (Local Time), Tikrit, Iraq.
Lieutenant Cody Gutierrez was not ready to die in this hellhole. He gingerly touched his blood-soaked hair as he stared at the body sprawled inelegantly on the sand several feet away (Shot through zygomatic bone and exited through lacrimal cavity and his face was gone gone gone his heels had been drumming for ten seconds before he died and the man had sprayed bits of bone all over him).
He hadn't looked a day over twenty.
Gutierrez vaguely listened to the suited, blank-faced man issuing orders over a surprisingly high-tech radio; he just worked on pulling his knees close to his chest.
ن ماتت, أمريكي خنازير! أنتم كلاب سوف تموت على مجد الله قد أثنت اسمه! Screamed one of the jihadists, sending several rifle rounds into the sand a few scant inches from the suit's leather-clad foot. Gutierrez propped his shaking M16A4 on his knees and watched the man shoot a disparaging glance at the now-sand-filled bullet crater. Gutierrez forgot his nerves completely as he disbelievingly observed the man crane his head to yell back over the crumpled hood of their cover.
وقد تم وضع بلدكم الأم الذي ينام مع يهودي! He shouted, seemingly unaware that he was inches away from losing either a foot or his life. Gutierrez shakily smirked as he heard an inarticulate scream of rage issue from the shoddy homes serving as Islamic Extremist Playground. It's amazing, he thought, to see a pencil-pusher like the suit reduce a terrorist to frothing at the mouth. He had only caught three words in the civvies' reply - "whore," "mother," and "Jew," - but he could fill in the blanks easily enough.
Gutierrez worked on maintaining his new fragile sense of calm as he scanned the soldier next to him for injury, seeing only a bullet graze—left anterior quadrant of abdomen—and minor scrapes –-supraorbital process – from hitting the truck too hard in his run for cover. That duty done, he returned to listening to the civvies' rather one-sided conversation.
"Identify yourselves, soldiers, then get off this frequency. I have no time to deal with jokesters right now."
He actually managed to sound bored. If Gutierrez hadn't heard the man purposefully drive a lunatic into a spitting, "I-will-blast-a-couple-of-hundred-AK47-rounds-at-you" rage a few minutes before, he would have expected an insurance policy pitch right about then.
Then Gutierrez nearly jumped out of his skin as the suit stiffened, sat up, and whipped a truly wicked looking Desert Eagle out of his suit in one smooth motion. Gunfire blasted as he unloaded four rounds into a window overlooking the courtyard, and Gutierrez blinked as a man staggered and pitched headfirst over the sill, landing with a muffled crunch onto the concrete below. An assault rifle quickly followed and clattered into the pool of blood spreading from the crumpled figure.
Huh. Maybe not a pencil-pusher after all.
14/04/2003. 0815 HRS (Local Time). Tikrit, Iraq.
"Agent Coulson, this is SHIELD, Code Ten-Alpha-Foxtrot. What is your position?"
"Coulson to Ten-Alpha-Foxtrot. I am pinned in the northeast sector of the city. Rectangular courtyard. Seven buildings, two of which have three stories. Dimensions of courtyard are 50 meters by –" Craning his head to glance around the bumper, he ignored an Arabic epithet (and the subsequent gunfire directed at his head) and examined the space around him. "-30. Hostiles at west and southwest corners. Estimates are that our position will be overtaken in approximately fifteen minutes. Be advised, roads may be rigged with IEDs."
"Confirmed. Agent Coulson, the 4th infantry division has been contacted and are on their way to evac. ETA 0900 hours. SHIELD out."
No matter which way he looked at it, the situation didn't seem to have an obvious solution. The insurgents had fanned out into a rough semi-circle in an attempt to pick off the outlying soldiers behind their vehicle, and, unfortunately, it seemed to be working. The six soldiers did not have sufficient cover to shield a retreat into the buildings 20 meters away and ammunition was beginning to merit conservation. Coulson could not devise a plan that could safely recover all of his mission parameters.
His attempts to plan were cut off by an annoyingly familiar voice. Coulson's eye twitched (which, admittedly, was the same as pulling out hair for any other man) as his radio receiver burst into life yet again.
"Coulson, eh? You sound stiff. Should loosen up a little. I hear the bars in this city have a night-life like you wouldn't believe."
And, yet again, Coulson couldn't even open his mouth before he was interrupted by what he was sure was this Barton's CO.
"Barton! Stop playing merry hell with classified frequencies!"
"I didn't think that you cared so much for me, Sarge! I knew you liked me! In that case, I – we have a situation."
Coulson blinked as lackadaisical Barton shifted one hundred eighty degrees. The snide and cheery voice went flat as footsteps could be heard over the frequency.
"Barton, report!"
"Three insurgents, sir, one with a vest with what looks like enough C4 to level a city block. He's got a kid as a shield." The voice was still inflectionless, and metallic clicks could be heard in the background as he continued his terse description: "One vantage point available, approximately 2000 meters from target. Accessing now. Target is entering a courtyard via the. . . southeast corner and joining a group of hostiles already present. ETA for vantage point is sixty seconds. Barton out."
Coulson could only tense and groan as a child's hysterical cries drift into earshot.
14/04/2003. 0819 HRS (Local Time). Tikrit, Iraq.
Gutierrez yelped as a line of fire zipped over his leg, clipping the edge of his combat boot. Leaning around the shards of the back taillights, he emptied several rounds into the torso of a jihadist, pausing only to check for any other obvious figures. He resolutely ignores the feeble twitching of the dying man. The sun is rapidly rising, eliminating any morning shade provided by the buildings. Sweat trickles into his bullet graze, and Gutierrez fervently wants something – anything – to happen to break this stalemate before the scorching afternoon arrives.
Coulson abruptly goes stiff, and Gutierrez blinks as the guy's face becomes set in stone. His eyes are as cold as a snake's. The first part of his yelled statement is incomprehensible, but the second is stated very calmly – if menace could be calm.
"دعنا نذهب للأطفال. وهي علاقة بذلك. She is innocent; this sacrifice gains nothing for Allah or for Hussein."
Gutierrez risks a look and promptly swears at the sight of the tall, darkly handsome man with his arms clenched around a young girl, holding her to the vest that's blinking with enough ordinance to take them all out.
"Ah, my American friends." The voice is cultured, speaking English with only the slightest of accents, but the fanatical edge is abundantly clear as he gloatingly describes the devastation he will cause in the name of Allah. He can hear the child sobbing now, and even his rudimentary Arabic can pick out the words "mother" and "home" repeatedly.
Coulson is obviously listening to someone over his headset, and his eyes narrow, glaring at nothing, when he intones, "Take the shot."
And Lieutenant Cody Gutierrez leans over just in time to see the vest-adorned man's head explode.