Battle Group Castle

By

UCSBdad

Disclaimer: I own zero Castle. Rating: K Time: In an AU future and see below.

Author's note: This is a sequel to Vengeance and to Tercio Corazon Negro.

Sweetbriar had been a nice, middle class section of Harmony City, composed of neat row houses. Of course, there were no upper class or lower-class sections of Harmony City. That would not have been harmonious.

The people who had lived there had been artists of one sort or another, for the most part: Painters; sculptors; poets; playwrights; performance artists; and people who served their immediate needs such as publishers and art gallery owners. When the pirates took over Harmony, the pirates had quickly decided that these kinds of people were completely useless for the economy they needed from Harmony. Most had been sent off world as slaves, and the few who had remained and survived no longer had the careers they had spent a lifetime developing. Accordingly, most of the abandoned bouses were now occupied by squatters.

Two such squatters, dressed shabbily, walked out of one house and sat on the front steps. One took out a plastic bottle of cheap alcohol and the two men passed the bottle back and forth.

After a bit, a slender blonde walked by, wearing a very short and tight skirt with a top cut low enough to show off her boobs. She wiggled her ass as she walked by and one of the men called her over, holding out the bottle as an invitation. She leaned over, perilously close to having her boobs fall out, and took a drink. She sat, and she and the men talked for a bit. One of the men handed her some bills and began to lead her into their house. She pulled back and gestured to a house across the street. The men shrugged and followed her across the street.

Once inside, they found that a once spacious home had been crudely divided up into tiny apartments. A burly man with a shotgun sat just inside. A few bills changed hands and the three walked up the stairs to the second floor.

Castle let out a breath as they made it to the floor where Cedric Marks and his contact were hiding.

The two men opened their coats and took out three small, but powerful submachine guns and three pistols as backups. They already wore body armor and had a set for Beckett.

Sergeant Mike Bennett carefully checked his weapons, grenades and explosives he was carrying.

"Colonel, is there some reason you and Captain Beckett are doing this? Me and my people could have handled this without breaking a sweat."

Castle glared at his wife, who smiled sweetly back at him. "Bennett, my wife has a personal score to settle with these people. And she's a very, very stubborn woman." Kate's smile got bigger.

"Oh, Bennett, thank you for not looking at me out there, or doing anything." Kate said. "That was very polite of you."

"No problem, ma'am. There was a nasty rumor going around that if I was out of hand, the colonel was going to promote me to captain and put me in charge of training brand new second lieutenants in our Officer Training Unit. Truly a fate worse than death."

Both Rick and Kate smiled.

"Shall we get this under way?" Bennett asked.

They quietly approached the door of Marks' apartment. A quick check showed no security devices other than a cheap lock. In this neighborhood anything more complex would indicate you had something worth stealing and would draw thieves.

Bennett quickly attached small explosive devices to the lock and to the area where the door hinges would be. Then they stood back and Bennett nodded to Castle, who nodded back. Bennett set off the charges.

The blast knocked the door askew and a kick by Bennett knocked it down. Inside, Marks grabbed a heavy pistol, but Bennett fired a short burst from his submachine gun into his wrist, nearly severing the hand. Marks tried to change hands, but Bennett was on him and knocked him unconscious with a blow from the submachine gun.

Meanwhile, Castle confronted a small, elderly Asian man who threw up his hands. "I surrender." He screamed. "I can be of value to you." Castle put him face down on the floor and cuffed his hands behind him.

Kate faced the last occupant in the room, a redheaded woman who reached for an assault rifle on a table behind her.

"Don't!" Kate screamed, but the woman paid no attention. As the redhead turned, Kate fired a long burst into her stomach and chest. The woman fell and the rifle clattered to the floor.

"Bitch. You killed my Jerry." She moaned.

"Tyson? He isn't dead. Yet."

"We'll…" The woman said no more as her mouth filled with blood and she died.

"Who the hell was she?" Kate asked.

"Dr. Kelly Nieman." Said the Asian man on the floor. "She arrived just before the ECDO task force. She was Jerry Tyson's lover."

"She was a doctor?"

"Yes. Quite insane, of course, but a doctor none the less. By the way, I'm Xoang Ji and I can be of great help to you Colonel Castle and to the ECDO as a whole." He stopped and smiled. "But I'll require some help from you as well."

Almost as soon as the shooting stopped, the street outside was filled with armored vehicles and heavily armed soldiers who raced inside the building. Two helicopters filled with troops hovered over the street. As the two prisoners were led away, Castle led his wife away and had a very long talk with her about risking her life unnecessarily. Kate did not see that she had risked her life unnecessarily, she was a soldier, after all. Castle eventually gave up, realizing it was hopeless to argue with his stubborn wife. She did manage to make him feel much better about things.

Two days later, Castle checked in with his headquarters company commander.

"How's things, Captain Beckett?"

"Some things are delightfully sore." She said in a low voice.

Castle blushed. "How are things in the battle group and elsewhere?"

"Tyson is meeting his general court martial today. I would imagine he'll be found guilty and sentenced to death. Of course, you'll have to approve the death sentence."

Castle smiled. "I'll give the court's decision my fullest attention. What about Marks?"

"Intelligence is still interrogating him under joy juice. He seems to be a bit more resistant to it that Tyson was, but he's talking."

"Does he know that much?"

Kate nodded. "He doesn't really know much more than Tyson did about Harmony, but he has a lot of odds and ends of information about other hired killers, the people who hire them, how they're paid, and general information on the criminal underworld. Tyson was a fanatic and didn't know much about anything other than Senator Bracken's operations, and he had only a low-level knowledge of that. Marks knows all sorts of things."

"What about our guest, Mr. Ji?"

"He's a ship broker. Buys and sells ships. Almost all of them taken by Han Worlds' pirates. He's given us a lot of information on the pirates' organization here in Harmony City. It seems they were dug in deeper here than we thought. He's given us hideouts, arms caches, bank accounts, the names of people who are helping the pirates either for money or through blackmail, and lots more. The pirate organization here in Harmony has been smuggling weapons, food, medical supplies and people to the pirates in the rural areas. We have troops raiding the city now."

"Why wasn't I notified first?" Castle demanded.

"One, you were sound asleep, and you looked so tired I couldn't wake you."

"You're the one who made me so tired." But he smiled when he said that.

"Two, we had to move fast. Word would have spread that Ji had been taken and he's looking out for himself, not the local pirates."

"Has he given us anything else?"

"No, and he won't until we get someone in authority from the UK or the ECDO. He claims he has a lot of detailed knowledge on Han Worlds' piracy, but he won't give it up for free. He wants to keep all of his ill- gotten gains, and be sent to Earth where he can make himself safe."

"Then he'll get away with everything he's done?"

Kate shrugged. "Unless the Chinese or the Han Worlds get to him. He's a marked man now."

"He's been a marked man ever since he started this. Nothing's changed for him."

As they spoke, a company from the Tercio and the company of paratroopers were fanning out through the city to round up the pirates' supporters.

Castle had increased the size of the airborne company to about one hundred and thirty men so that all of the company would not have to go out on operations at any one time.

There was some rivalry between the Tercio and Battle Group Castle, at least at the lower levels. However, rivalry is not necessarily a bad thing. Then again, it can be a bad thing.

"Doyle, will you move your ass?" The sergeant shouted.

Bucky Doyle, one of eight combat engineers assigned to the paratroop company nodded. "I gotta get ready, sergeant."

Doyle was not wearing the full body protective suit that most explosive ordnance disposal troops did. He would be working today in a wrecked vehicle repair station and the full suit was too big and too clumsy for him to get to his job. Instead, he had on a smaller, one-piece protective suit that covered him from his knees to his neck. A thick helmet with a clear visor covered his head. The suit came with protective gauntlets, but Doyle found them too clumsy to use for the type of fine work he had to do. The other engineers in his squad joked that if a bomb did go off, he'd lose both his hands and his feet. Doyle replied that he'd still have his most important appendage. His comrades replied that with no hands, he'd be unable to have sex.

"Are you ready, dammit?"

"Yeah, sarge." Doyle said as he attached his helmet to his suit and picked up his gear. "What do we have?"

"Looks like a small weapons cache at the back of the building. A bunch of submachine guns, ammo and grenades. The trooper who found it said he could see a wire stretched across the inside of the door. The door's a piece of shit. Just some boards crudely nailed together."

When Doyle arrived at the door, he saw that was the case. He pushed a miniature camera on a flexible mounting through a crack in the door and looked around.

"Yup. There's a sawed-off shotgun with its trigger attached to the wire." He looked some more. "Oh, they got cute. When the shotgun fires, the recoil will shove a live grenade out of an old can, releasing the spoon, and setting off the grenade. Then, BOOM!"

"Can you disarm it?" The sergeant called. "Hughes is desperate for any kind of weapons."

"No problem. I just send my little friend in and cut the wire. Just a sec."

Doyle cut part of the door away. When he was done, he had enough of a hole to send a small flying drone inside. The drone had a video camera that was projected onto Doyle's visor. The drone flew up and used one of its many attachment to cut the wire.

"Okay, just to be on the safe side, I'm going to pull the door open using a length of rope. Coming out."

Doyle backed out as far as he could and pulled the rope. Unknown, to Doyle, there was another grenade high up by the ceiling. A cleverly camouflaged piece of wood, looking just like the rest of the building was all that held the grenade up. When the door opened, the grenade fell, was armed and exploded.

Doyle was blown backwards by the blast and all he could see was red.

"Oh, my God! I'm blind." He screamed.

TBC