"LAPD SWAT!" I roar around the corner, my SMG held into a tight hug, "quit shooting at me, moron, I'm the negotiator!"
How the fuck I landed with that job is anyone's guess.
The corridor forms a T here, we're at the top and the suspect is at the bottom. Straight ahead is red team and behind me stands blue team.
The boss leads red, I lead blue and she's giving me a hard look right now. I'm not doing a good enough job for her.
"Give me your mirror." I ask Swanson, who must put his LMG to the floor and search his pouches for a while before handing me the snake cam. We call it a mirror, but it's actually an optic fiber wire.
Through the mirror, I see the masked man pointing his .45 Auto pistol to a woman on the floor. She's whimpering and crying that he shot her, which is pretty much the reason we're here in the first place.
"Listen, pal, the lady dies, you lose all bargaining edge and we'll put two rounds through your skull in a heartbeat, let us send someone to patch her up."
"You stay where you are, Imperialist scum!"
Might as well have just told me he's a communist.
"Xing, talk to this guy." I order our shotgun wielding Taiwanese girl.
She walks up to the corner, hugging the wall and squeezing past the others, but stops a step behind me, holding her riot shotgun with the same disgusted respect she shows every firearm.
"Tell him what?"
Good question… "Tell him we're at war." She gives me a puzzled look and the boss face palms, but Xing and I served together for a long time and she trusts me.
The man replies in a shocked tone, but they always sound like that, fucking yellow reds.
"Tell him this war is over resources, material necessities, we have no reason to hate one another or shame ourselves as human beings. Our countries are clashing to see who is right and who is wrong, it is our duty to ensure as little people suffer from it as possible."
She relays the message and seems puzzled at the answer. "He says your words make sense, you seem honorable."
The grin that spreads on the boss' face is the second creepiest thing I've seen today, the first being how she kisses her bowie knife before deployment. She's done it before every call for the last decade and I still think it's creepy as fuck.
"Ask him if he'll let me go check the victim." Xing smiles under her face mask. I know she does just by the way she sounds when she translates my demand.
You'd ask why we don't just shoot the bastard, since he's not even using the hostage as a meatshield, and I'd ask you what the fuck you're doing in a firefight asking questions, but if I had to answer, I'd explain that catching a Chinese spy alive is pretty damn hard and one hell of a career booster.
Xing nods once, "He agrees, wants you to come unarmed and alone…"
This could only get more cliché if the guy had a black moustache and offered me some big moral dilemma, but I get out of cover with my guns in Xing's hands and he just watches as I walk up to him and the woman.
Speaking of cliché, you always see shit like that; helpless woman help at gunpoint by evil red spy. It's the first time in my career it's ever happened so damned Hollywood-like. Most of the time, it's desperate people trying to get a ransom or robberies gone wrong. This guy, he's after something and is only buying himself time to figure a way out, or find whatever it is he's looking for.
I kneel next to the victim and he just watches. She's in her late twenties, office worker, got a .22 round stuck in her hip, but the man's carrying a Colt .45. Maybe he has a silenced pistol hidden somewhere and whipped out the big handgun when the cops showed up, so he could kick through our riot gear…
"What's your name?" The woman isn't in shock, her eyes are focused and she hasn't lost so much blood.
A .22 wound is small, granted, but it should still be bleeding a lot more than that, unless someone hit her with a Stimpack.
"Andrea…" Good actress, really, could have worked, had I not spent the last thirteen years around gunshot victims, when I'm not getting shot myself.
The spy isn't pointing his gun at me directly, but it would take only a flick of his wrist for it to be lined up with my skull.
One explanation for this little show would be that they wanted to attract law enforcement so they could just kill a few cops and cause some chaos, but they only let one of us get close and there's no bomb around here, we checked.
Bandaging the already healing wound, I review everything we know about this building…
One of RobCo's many administrative offices, rather small and poorly guarded. The guy practically telegraphed his identity just a minute ago, so he doesn't care if we know he's a Chinese spy… Maybe he's not…
No, Xing talked to him and he responded, he's Asian for sure… Both of them are spies and both worked here, maybe there's more, maybe these two are just a diversion, meant to buy another agent enough time to get whatever they're after.
Why not take it without breaking their cover, then?
Security screening! All employees are searched before they leave the office at night, but we didn't search anyone when evacuating the building, this would have allowed their pal to slip out some files unnoticed.
"Boss," I don't care if the reds hear me, I can deal with them, "they're decoys! We've got a third fuck getting away!"
All I can say before having two guns shoved in my face. Just a step to the right, holding the guy's wrist, and that's one postponed issue.
The girl shoots, but hits her friend's forearm and I slam him down on top of her. Orders are still to take them alive, so I knee the spy across the face when he sits up and stomps down on the lady's thigh in the same movement.
A femur is tough to break, but having a boot and a few hundred pounds of military hardware slammed on one's leg tends to make one less than mobile nonetheless. She takes another shot at me, the man now out of the way and sprawled a few feet ahead, but the tiny rounds bounce off the advanced armor covering my shoulder.
I kick her again, in the stomach this time, and she blurts out a thin stream of blood. The boot digs in her midsection as I bent over to snatch the weapon and break her nose.
The guy's back up and charging me, so I greet him with an uppercut that doesn't have as much success as I hoped it will. Next thing I know, he's sitting on me, his injured arm limp and his handgun in my face. My boot comes up just as the pin comes off.
Though my kick comes in time to screw his aim and save my mug from bursting like a melon, it doesn't daze or knock him off. He should at least be dizzy, but he's lining up another shot instead.
They train their spies good, that's a given. I try to punch him, but he dodges and squeeze the trigger.
The flash is blinding and my eardrums feel like they've been thorn out.
Smoke's everywhere, blurring everything as I shove the roaring fuck off me.
Flashbangs are magnesium bombs, very fucking hot. My suit can withstand that kind of heat, it's meant to survive energy weapons, his business suit isn't.
Once I've extinguished the poor fuck's face and confirmed that he and his girlfriend are properly sedated, I take a breather and check how I'm doing.
Everything's blurry and that's not just smoke. The helmet was meant to prevent disorientation from flashing a room like that, but nobody expected me to prime a flashbang still strapped to my chest.
And I've got a .45 ACP stuck an inch under my neck cover, which would explain why it seems like the air scrubbers were replaced by thin straws.
Point blank impact on the upper sternum with a high caliber round and I'm still standing; I'm marrying that suit.
Xing pops in my face, yelling at me with comical bubbling sounds, distant as if underwater.
I take the helmet off and yell back. "Can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am!"