It Takes a Colonel

by Sandilynn Petersen

Inspired by Avirra's "A Year of Murdock," I hope to produce one chapter of under 1000 words each week for 52 weeks featuring our favorite A-team Colonel. The other guys may not be in all of these. The Colonel may be soloing on some of these adventures. But I hope they are enjoyable to read. Please read and review.

2. Chapter 2 Missing Is Not an Option

2. Missing Is Not an Option

Disclaimer: I do not own The A Team movie or television series or any of the delightful characters found on The A Team.

He was lying on his belly behind a pile of rocks on a hill north of Seoul. It was dusk. The year was 1950.

Crouching beside him, Sergeant Kremer adjusted his binoculars. "Come on. Show your face," he muttered under his breath. "Unless he's gone underground again, back in one of those tunnels."

Hannibal shrugged his right shoulder to relieve the tension in it, keeping the Springfield aimed in the approximate last known location of the man Kremer was trying to target. He didn't respond.

A sniper had been taking pot shots at their troops as they attempted to reach the next hill. Corporal Solomon was the first to fall, blood trickling down his nose from a neat round hole between his eyes. He wasn't the only one. For the last twenty minutes or so they had come no closer to knowing where the enemy soldier hid.

The sniper waited and so did they.

Kremer ordered Private Morin and two others to scatter, edge their way around trees toward the unseen enemy. Even now, Hannibal saw them crouching and running, pausing, crouching and running again in a hunched posture, their weapons at the ready. He kept his breaths even and slow, his rifle scope sighted on the far rocks.

A flash of gunfire and Morin lay still, face down and yards away from a yellow-blossomed kerria thicket on the lower slope of the hill.

"There, Smith!" Kremer's angry explosive hiss caught Hannibal off guard. His shot missed the sniper's head and splintered the trunk of a tree behind him. When Flores and Wagner reached the location, they found the tunnel but no armed man. Like a ghost, the Chinese enemy sniper had simply disappeared.

But now was not the time for flashbacks like that.

Hannibal shook his head to clear it of phantom snipers and long dead comrades. They were approaching the clearing.

"Go, Face!" he growled from around his cigar.

One of his men, a hangman's noose around his neck, his hands tied behind his back, balanced precariously on the hood of a truck. His other team mate struggled against ropes that bound him to a tree. The order was given and the truck's driver slowly backed it out from under Hannibal's pilot.

His feet scrabbled one last frantic moment for a toehold. The black dress shoes had no tread, not like the high top Converse tennis shoes the man usually wore. It wouldn't have helped anyway. His feet slid smoothly off the metal.

As the catering van exploded onto the scene, the Colonel took aim from his open side window. He would not miss his target this time. His friend's life depended upon it.

Murdock plummeted to the earth, dangling from the tightening noose, his eyes widening with the certainty of death.

And Hannibal fired.

oooooooooo

AN: A scene from "The Duke of Whispering Pines," Season Four, reflections of Hannibal's Korean War service and photos of American soldiers serving as snipers during that war brought this story to mind.