"You know," said The Bald One. "You should forget all about your big payday. SHIELD doesn't negotiate."
Loren liked big guns which made bigger holes in human flesh. He liked money. He liked the prostitutes and penthouses money bought. People were only useful as a target for one kind of gun or the other, and in his fifty years, he'd had plenty of practice with both.
This was why Loren became a mercenary when he was discharged from the army, and even by those paltry standards, he did not like The Bald One.
"Hou je bek," he said, sighting a shot along his barrel into The Bald One's eye. He wasn't really going to shoot. Firing off an assault rifle in quarters this close without industrial-strength earplugs? Was he a rank amateur? Had he never handled guns or hostage situations before? Did he want to lose his hearing?
Like hell he wanted to lose his hearing.
The boat bobbled on the waves.
Loren's finger curled around the trigger guard.
"I'm just saying," the Bald One said. "SHIELD doesn't negotiate." His demeanor said "you don't know who you're messing with" in a way which made Loren want to hold him down and administer much purpling of the nurples until he surrendered every last dime of his meager lunch money.
"Shut up," muttered the tech seated to his right.
SHIELD didn't seem to do much else, either, right or otherwise.
Case in point: the Lemurian Star. A - what had Batroc called it again? Ah, yes, a "mobile satellite launch platform", which didn't sound much like something worth hijacking in Loren's view - in the process of violating Indian sovereignty, weighted down with computers, tech agents, and enough top-secret intel to kick-start two or three simultaneous world wars.
What sort of security did these surgeons of rockets, these scientists of brain, provide for their own black operation? 25 pirates hijacked the whole thing without suffering a single casualty. That's what kind of security.
"Jesus Christ," said a woman with a voice small with fear and yet loud with anger further down the counter. "Give them another reason to just kill us all, why don't you, Jasper?"
The Bald One's name was Jasper. Loren chuckled, and didn't notice when his finger slipped from outside the trigger guard to in. De Smedt, at the other end of the galley, was laughing outright. Loren had thought he'd hated the Bald One, but clearly, his animosity was but a dim light twinkling in the cold firmament when compared to the blazing hateful glory of Jasper's parents.
"Listen to your colleague, Jasper. She is wise."
"Thank you," said the woman.
"We don't use names in front of these scum, and we don't negosh - "
The boat shimmied up and back on the waves again, and Loren's finger slipped, and a massive crack and foul gunsmoke stench filled the room like the air behind Satan after a large Mexican lunch.
Where Jasper's eye had been, there was now a complete hole, and where Jasper's brains had been, well, they'd kind of escaped and taken up residence on the counter behind him and on the guys on either side of him and -
The rest of the hostages were screaming.
De Smedt was shouting something.
Loren only knew two things:
One was a piercing, shrieking whine in his ears which told him he'd lost some frequency response, godverdomme.
The other was that Batroc would not be happy.
Later, he briefly knew a third thing: the exquisite pain of a STRIKE team bullet perforating his lung and stopping his heart.
But it was over fast, and he never heard it coming.
Batroc, Sitwell, Pierce, Fury &etcetera ©2014 Marvel, Disney, etcetera ad infinitum.
Story title from Elvis Costello's "Radio, Radio".
Thanks to zedille for various and sundry suggestions.