I'm updating a fic. Somewhere, Satan is putting on a parka and wondering where the hell these snow clouds came from.
Really though…I've had a looooong period of writers block when it came to my Joe fics, except for a few crackbunnies. A few of my original pieces got some time put into them, though, so I'm not really too sorry.
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"Here." Tommy carefully marked an X in red pencil on the map spread out on Hawk's desk.
Hawk eyed the map thoughtfully. "The middle of the Venezuelan rain forest?"
"You asked where the Commander keeps getting steel and fuel for his vehicles." Tommy tapped the mark with the tip of the pencil. "Right here. He did some covert prospecting a decade or so back-before he hired me-and found oil deposits and iron ore in this area. Bought it through a company owned by Extensive Enterprises. There's a surface facility that does some legitimate exporting of both petroleum and steel products for appearances, but the main operation is all underground."
"You've been there?"
"Year or so back. Production was down. The Commander decided to put the fear of God into his employees. He killed a few managers, shot a few random employees, installed a new project overseer, and threatened to send me after him if he didn't make quota." Storm grimaced.
Hawk raised his eyebrows. "And?"
"He made quota."
"Ah." Hawk leaned back in his chair. "Defenses?"
"Two platoons of infantry soldiers for a total of a hundred men. Six HISS tanks with crew. Fourteen F.A.N.G choppers with crew. The river here is patrolled by modified Moray attack boats. There are eight machine gun nests hidden in the forest, and six snipers on duty at all times."
"I take it the snipers move?"
"Daily."
"Anything else you can tell me?"
Storm Shadow shrugged. "It's been a year since I was there. Codes, shifts…they'll all be different. Even the defensive situation might have changed. I'd recommend a full recon before any offensive move is made."
"Agreed." Hawk sipped at his coffee. "Thank you. Dismissed."
The ninja saluted and slipped out the door.
Hawk sipped his coffee again, examining the map, and paged Breaker.
"Sir?" Breaker's voice crackled over the 'comm almost immediately.
"I need satellite photos of the following coordinates." Hawk rattled off a series of numbers. "Best resolution you have. If you find any sort of industrial activity in the area, I want a full background check of the corporation involved."
"Sir." A long pause. "Sir, permission to speak freely?"
"Granted."
"Is this a tip from our new 'team member?'"
Hawk could actually hear the quotation marks around the last two words. "Are you questioning my judgment, Corporal?"
"No sir! It's just…"
"You have your orders, Corporal." Hawk cut the tech off. "I want photos and intel, and I want them right now. Go do your job. Leave worrying about the ninja to me."
"Yessir." Breaker still sounded slightly doubtful, but also completely unwilling to pursue the matter with his CO.
"Good. Report to me as soon as you have anything."
"Yessir."
Hawk set his 'comm aside and pulled a stack of paperwork his way. "Snake Eyes? If you'd like to get yourself out of my ventilation ducts and into my office, I'd appreciate it."
He was only on the second funding request form when the office door opened and a silent figure in black snapped to attention. "Ah. Snake. At ease. Have a seat."
Snake Eyes appropriated the chair on the other side of the desk. *You didn't hear me?*
"No." Hawk smiled to himself at the slightly quizzical tilt of the ninja's head. "We'll call it an educated guess. I take it you heard and saw everything?"
A nod.
"When Breaker finishes gathering information, I will likely be sending you, Beach, Recondo, and Storm Shadow to recon the area. If Tommy is right about this, we could cripple Cobra fairly significantly by hitting this base."
*Yes sir.* Snake Eyes…Hawk recognized that slight wrinkling of the black mask. That was a grin.
"I thought you'd like that. Dismissed."
Snake snapped to his feet, saluted, and slid out. Hawk returned to his coffee and paperwork, feeling pleased with himself.
Three birds with one stone. Keeping his commando happy, forcing his Sergeant Major and new ninja to work together, and gaining potentially vital information that could help them destroy an important Cobra facility.
He always had been good at multitasking.
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Breaker cracked his gum, chomped for a second, and cracked it again.
Tickititktitkt click.
Huh.
Military satellites had great resolution. As a result, Breaker could see not only that there was indeed what looked like an oil drilling facility at the coordinates Hawk had given him, but could see the company logo painted on the side of a large square concrete building.
It looked innocuous enough. HAE Corp; a quick background check on the company turned up only boringly normal and non-illegal endeavors. Breaker went and got himself another cup of coffee.
It took him fifteen minutes to hack into the company servers. It took him five to find the parent corporation of HAE Corp was a division of Global Energy Development. Which was also boringly normal.
Breaker sighed to himself. He'd never say anything to Hawk's face (Ever. He liked living.) but he personally had some misgivings when it came to trusting the intel of their recent enemy.
He absently cracked his gum again. Global Energy had better encryption than HAE. It took him seventeen minutes to hack in.
It took thirty seconds for his eyebrows to his hairline.
Global Energy was financed by a man by the name of Fred Acorb. Breaker barely restrained himself from facepalming; Tomax and Xamot really had a weird thing about spelling names backward.
He glanced at the clock, and was mildly surprised to find that it was almost dinnertime. He reached for his 'comm.
"General Hawk? I've got something."
"Very good. Full report, my office, fifteen minutes."
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Whenever Daniel LeClare, better known to his teammates as Recondo, had to leave the muggy heat of his beloved South American jungles, he was always vaguely disappointed. Sure, the Pit wasn't Wisconsin in the winter (he shuddered at that thought; out of the whole team, only Dusty really understood his complete and utter loathing of weather cold enough to freeze water. And his mother wondered why he was so reluctant to come home for Christmas.) but it still wasn't the Amazon.
Therefore, when Hawk had summoned him, he'd been almost gleeful. He was at his best when in the jungle, and if Hawk was asking for him in particular, odds were in his favor that he was about to be deployed somewhere hot and damp.
He was less gleeful when he found out who he'd be going on this particular mission with.
Four hours after their briefing, sitting in the back of a transport plane, listening to Beach Head snoring softly and watching Snake Eyes quintuple-checking all his gear, (was there such a thing as obsessive-compulsive gun cleaning disorder? Because if there was, Snake Eyes had it) his misgivings hadn't dissipated much.
Storm Shadow was sitting silently, carefully waxing a bowstring. (damp weather and rain were hard on bowstrings, so this was a reasonable precaution. Recondo had hung around with enough tribesmen to be pretty well versed in archery)
It had been a few months since the ninja had turned up. No one had turned up with shuriken stuck through vital bits yet, but Recondo still had vivid memories of watching a ghostly figure in red-stained white carve his way through four greenshirts before getting bodily tackled by an avatar of death in a black bodysuit.
If Snake Eyes hadn't turned up at that particular moment, Recondo had no doubt that he would have died in that gutted Aztec temple too. Things like staring death in the certain bloody face tended to stick with you.
(Recondo still had a somewhat personal grudge against Cobra for the temple thing. It was a crying shame; gorgeous old ruins like that, utterly destroyed just because Cobra Commander had liked the snake motif carved on the exterior walls. The Jugglers had gotten their panties in a bunch over the Joes using as much C4 as they had, but there hadn't been anything left of the inside of the temple anyway.)
Personally, Recondo wouldn't be surprised if this was a wild goose chase. Or failing that, a setup to betray and either capture or kill himself, Beach, and Snake.
To sum it up in as few words as possible, he wasn't happy. He was getting sent into the Amazon rain forest, and he wasn't happy about it.
He hadn't thought that would ever happen.