Capturing Dr. Mindbender

Disclaimer: Same as before.

RogueFanKC: Kudos for recognizing the Three Musketeers Tie In. (DC3 D'Artagnan.)

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Bilby set his L1A1 SLR atop an old table in a room of the abandoned apartment building across from the complex where Dr. Mindbender was holed up. COBRA had made a huge mistake by occupying Los Angeles, they gave up the advantage of concealment and apparently had been strained for resources by moving a vast quantity of troops and Heartless drones to hold the place.

The snipers had moved into position about five hours before the assault was scheduled to begin. Bilby and Hedaya's hide was at the topmost floor, and two large holes in the wall provided convenient firing hides. Windows were not really the best places to shoot from, because even if a sniper stayed well away from them return fire would naturally be directed towards such an easy loop hole. Therefore, the smaller holes in the wall in the upstairs room provided ideal firing ports.

Shades and Mario were covering the rear area escape routes from the maze of construction atop the arboretum. It was a building with an ornate enclosed foot bridge that crossed over the access road that the second sniper team was interdicting. Mario had his telescope sighted M-14 set up on the left side of the bridge with Shades setting his CAR-15 on the right. The two snipers had an overlapping field of fire to pick off anyone that tried to either escape or attack the assault forces from behind. Any COBRA or Heartless adversary would be dealing with a round through his head if he attempted any sort of maneuver.

Scuttle had the massive M82A1 fifty-caliber sniper rifle on the roof of another adjacent structure to the compound. Of the four SEALs Scuttle was the top marksman and most experienced sniper, having gone through the US Army sniper school in Ft. Benning, Georgia. His partner, QM1 Wassner, was not as well schooled, but having been brought up hunting in the forests of Bavaria, was a natural shot. Scuttle had the task of disabling all the vehicles in the COBRA vehicle parking lot beside the compound as well as taking out targets of opportunity.

As soon as they saw the helicopters make their passes the snipers were to open up immediately. In the C2 (Command and Control) bird, Col. Calvin Hudson wiped sweat from his brow as he waited for the nineteen aircraft in the strike force. Four AH-6 Little Bird helicopters would provide gunship support, with another four MH-6 Little Birds with benches welded to their sides carrying four man Gamma assaulters, and eight UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, two carrying more Gamma assault units and four carrying twelve man Ranger chalks. In addition another Black Hawk, Super Eight Two, was flying a circuit as the rescue bird, carrying a dozen Rangers and Gamma assaulters whose task was to protect the two Air Force pararescue personnel from rude strangers while they stabilized any injured personnel around a crash site. Cal Hudson knew those boys on Eight Two were well trained and ready to go, but he also hoped to God to never have to use them, because he knew that lives would be further imperiled by a crash. He knew, for all the rivalry with the Air Force, the two pararescue men were more than qualified, the daredevil medics were specialists at rescuing downed and injured aircrew. Already they had some action seen in LA, when two Heartless shadows shot down a news helicopter flying over the downtown area. Eight Two held the Heartless, COBRA troops, and curious civilians at bay long enough to extract two wounded camera crew members, the pilot, and the reporter. He hoped that those brave lads aboard the rescue bird weren't gonna have to defend an Army crash site.

Bilby centered his crosshairs on the head of a lone Crimson Guard sentry walking his post behind a sandbag bunker. Hedaya had his own sights on the soldier Heartless manning the RPK machinegun in the bunker. From their position they could cover the entire front end of the complex. Mario and Shades could cover the back and right side of the complex with their fields of fire so that Scuttle and Wassner could deal with the vehicles in the parking area without any distractions.

Scuttle's sights were on a lone soldier Heartless standing behind a recoilless cannon mounted atop a Toyota pickup truck. Wassner's sights were roaming, his magazine loaded with tracers to give Scuttle some help with picking targets.

The silence was eerie, the tension palpable as five minutes prior to the launch of the mission the snipers flicked their safety catches from off to on. Suddenly it was shattered by the sound of rotors. The helicopters were on their way.

"All sniper teams commence fire." Came the order. But the snipers already engaged their targets.

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Surprise. That was the only word that could grasp the closest thing to emotion the Shadow Heartless felt as the Soldier Heartless standing on the recoilless literally lost its head in a shower of black blood. Before the Shadow Heartless could move two paces to trigger an alarm, another round took it out.

"Nice shooting Scuttle!" Wassner said, as he fired into another crowd of COBRA vipers running to investigate.

"QM1, buy me a beer when we get back to base but please shut up!" Scuttle growled as he took out the Toyota's engine with a second half-inch diameter bullet. He disabled about half a dozen more vehicles with single shots before he reloaded another magazine and joined Wassner in picking off targets of opportunity.

All around the compound guards started to fall as the snipers opened up with lethal precision. Bilby's round took down the Crimson Guard sentry and before the body even hit the ground, Hedaya took out the machine gunner nearby him. The report of Hedaya's weapon, thanks to the suppressor on the end of the barrel, made the report sound almost like a BB gun firing off.

Shades and Mario opened fire about a half second after both Hedaya and Bilby, and Wassner and Scuttle's teams went into action. Mario's first round shot down a lone Heartless shadow walking along the fence line. Shades put a bullet through the head of another Heartless that appeared around the corner, one that had escaped Scuttle and Wassner's kill zone.

A Large Body Heartless appeared around the corner and Mario turned his rifle toward it, only to see its head explode apart. Scuttle had scored another kill. They could hear a lot of shooting coming from Wassner and Scuttle's positions just as the two AH-6 Little Birds flew over head with the four MH-6s in tow. Like lightning the Little Birds dropped their teams at prearranged sites around the building while the two Black Hawks containing more Gamma assaulters started taking down parts of the compound out of the snipers' field of vision.

"This is Star Four Two, reporting an RPG team atop target building." One of the helicopter pilots said over the radio.

"Not anymore!" Scuttle said, after two rifle shots sounded. The two Heartless with a rocket propelled grenade launcher trying to shoot down a helicopter literally came apart as Scuttle drilled them with fifty caliber bullets.

As the assaulters hit the dirt a perimeter was being set up by placing four twelve man Ranger chalks around an area the size of a city block. Half a block away a convoy to extract the prisoners, assaulters, and combat elements was already in place and consisted of nine wide bodied Humvees and three five ton trucks with motors idling and carrying more Gamma operators, Rangers, the two remaining SEALs and two Air Force Combat Controllers.

Cover Girl sat in the cargo Humvee as a driver. Beside her was EMC Brewster, manning the radio and maps. Manning the fifty caliber machinegun was DC3 Armand D'Artagnan and the fourth was Air Force Combat Controller, Staff Sergeant Brian Halb, an expert at directing precision air strikes, extractions and clearing landing zones. Sitting on the other side of the back seat was Staff Sergeant David Falk. The convoy commander, a solidly built, square jawed man, Lieutenant Colonel A.P. "Goat" Ayden, so named because he graduated last in his West Point class, was in the lead Humvee. That was two vehicles ahead of the cargo Humvee and four in front of the trucks that would hold the prisoners and their guards.

Cover Girl blew a kiss at Shipwreck, driving the Humvee behind her. "Hey there's a place for that sorta thing." Grinch remarked from the seat next to Shipwreck. Corporal Hector Illario smiled to himself standing in the turret where the MK-19 automatic grenade launcher was mounted. Shipwreck and Grinch were going at it again, as they usually did whenever they mixed. Illario was a 20 year old Filipino with an easy grin who had graduated from high school in Daytona Beach, Florida with a 3.89 GPA and a 1400 SAT. To his parents horror he decided to take a sabbatical by joining the Army right after his eighteenth birthday. He smiled again as Sergeant Dominic Rossalvo threw him a jaunty thumbs up from the lead Humvee. Illario returned the gesture as he heard the sniper teams and the Gamma assaulters raising hell inside the target building.

His fellow Rangers were in position and trading shots with a small group of Heartless. 1st Lieutenant Drake was commanding the twelve man chalk with Staff Sergeant Mendoza as second in command at the Southwest corner of the perimeter, closest to the convoy. He heard an M-60 going off and knew that Corporal Frank Hockle, a lanky little guy from Minnesota, number three of Company K's quartet of hell raisers, was out there. Sergeant Dominic Rossalvo led the hellraisers and the fourth member was Specialist Mike Stoty, a SAW gunner and a stocky little former NYU business student from the Bronx, New York City, New York.

Even with that half a dozen Heartless contingent he had just mowed down, Frank Hockle found this entire mission to feel like a massive let down. The Heartless didn't seem to be putting up the epic mother of all battles the Rangers had been expecting. The Heartless seemed to be weakened by the previous missions of the Gamma detachment led by Captain George Canby Fetterman and the efforts of GI Joe and the Misfits. It seemed the Task Force was just along for the mop-ups.

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Dr. Mindbender's nerves were too deadened to feel anything even closely approximating terror. As of forty-eight hours ago, the many largely experimental treatments he had developed conspired to render him both immobile and sterile. His chief researchers had warned him that if treatment were to continue he would have less than six weeks life left to him. The alternative was to allow nature to run its course and allow the transformation into a Heartless. But that was the last thing Mindbender ever wanted.

Even now as he heard the Crimson Guard and those accursed Shadow drones dying all around him, that fear was all but gone. With the last of his strength he hauled himself out of the chemical bath and dragged himself along towards his life support rig. He put it on and made sure all of his notes on his life prolonging methods were on his person. He didn't think to evade capture, for it was inevitable.

This was further shown by the door being kicked down and a cylindrical object flying into the room. All the cylinder did was explode in a bright, disorienting flash, as it was designed to stun any occupants of the room in question. The explosion blinded and deafened the already weakened scientist. Gamma Unit operators suddenly appeared in a cloud of smoke, grabbing the already stunned scientist and two of his guards and heading out of the building. ~ ~ ~ ~

"Colonel." Ranger Sergeant Neil Carson shouted, "Gamma Extraction force ready."

"Alright! Let's move out!" Ayden shouted.

As the familiar Queens accent sounded shout resounded several more Rangers repeated the command on down the line. "Move out!"

The convoy moved forward, firing at the occasional lone Heartless gunman or COBRA viper, but encountering little opposition. Within three minutes the compound Dr. Mindbender occupied had been completely taken down, the COBRA and Heartless personnel within either killed or captured.

The Gamma assault unit, led by Sergeant Major Cavendish, the Squadron Sergeant Major, came out with five prisoners, including an extremely ill Mindbender. As the assaulters moved in, the snipers provided cover for them. The Rangers had begun to withdraw back into the convoy, leaping aboard vehicles in an orderly manner, while fast and accurate sniper fire heavily discouraged pursuit. It is a known fact that infantrymen will not press the attack if they know or have any sort of inkling that they are under the scrutiny of a telescopic sight.

First Mario and Shades began their withdrawal with Wassner and Scuttle getting ready to travel. They got into the cargo Humvee as Wassner and Scuttle suddenly broke off toward the second Humvee behind the lead. Then Bilby and Hedaya made their withdrawal, jumping into one of the five-ton trucks.

The convoy sped through the streets of Los Angeles, firing a wall of flaming lead at any sign of resistance. A technical, the same vehicle that had been involved in the massacre of several Los Angeles civilians tried to attack the convoy, only to take three 40mm grenades from Illario into it's fuel tank. The technical exploded in a fireball that threw the corpses of half a dozen Heartless across the terrain.

"Absolutely bad ass dude!" Stoty exclaimed as he hopped into the lead Humvee with Hockle and a couple other guys from his chalk.

Bilby's expression was unreadable, save for the stony glare he gave Mindbender. "You, my friend, have a lot to answer for." Bilby said, voice devoid of any emotion, save for a searing hatred.

Mindbender stared at the apparition in desert fatigues and wearing an Afrika Korps field cap. If only he were capable of physical exertion that would convince the Australian that his life was in danger, then he would obtain the ultimate release. All he could do was manage a sharp-tongued reply that was greatly softened by the raspy, coughing tone his mangled vocal cords could muster.

"I altered a person to resemble your lost love. The least you could do is thank me." Mindbender replied.

"I normally would thank you with a bullet between the eyes. But that's what you'd want, isn't it? The ultimate release. Well how ironic, the creator of freaks and monsters is becoming that which he created." Bilby replied.

"To what have I degenerated into? Only a frail, hollow shell of a man." Mindbender lamented.

"If you even were a man to begin with." Bilby said, drawing more than a slight pleasure at the decrepit, frail and pathetic sight the slowly dying Mindbender presented.

"You enjoyed her company didn't you?" Mindbender taunted, "You must have enjoyed countless little moments...."

"What's he talking about man?" Sergeant First Class Cass Garner, the medic, asked.

Hedaya explained everything that had happened to Bilby regarding Akima for the past few months. Cass Garner's eyes widened and then narrowed, "You monster. Don't you know that the first phrase of the Hippocratic Oath is do no harm."

"He hardly cares Cass." Bilby replied, indicating Mindbender, who was even now shriveling into a tiny ball, a fetal position. Antennae began to grow out from his forehead.

"Perfect fate, don't you agree?" Hedaya recalled, "What you did to Sally O'Connor was just the straw that broke the camel's back."

The rest of the ride passed quickly, with only the occasional bit of conversation between the Gammas and SEALs and the multitude of excited Rangers, many of whom just completed their first combat operation. As they drove by, Grinch wondered how long this gung-ho Hoo-ah spirit would last when the Rangers started taking casualties. Just because this mission had been easy, it didn't mean the mission to take out the next COBRA kingpin was going to be the same. That was something their young support troops (average age, nineteen) were failing to realize.

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Next a little lightheartedness and humor thanks to one of Psyche Out's brilliant ideas.