This fic is dedicated to the memory of Tony MacDonald, RAN, dedicated serviceman, fellow W/X writer, and recent cancer victim; the fictionalised likenesses of the MacDonald brothers are used with the permission of Lt. Commander Michael MacDonald, RAN, and will hopefully reflect at least a fraction of the great respect I have for both of them, as writers and as servicemen. RIP, Tony – I don't doubt you earned it.

Remember: Transmitted, ::translated::

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10:41, SUNDAY FEBRUARY 07, 1999, LIMA (22:41/06-02-99 ZULU)
HAZELTON RESIDENCE
ESK VIEW, NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND

For once, Napier's mercurial weather patterns had shown mercy over the Waitangi Day weekend, and the hillside property Andrew Hazelton had bought thirty-nine years before was already basking in the horizon-to-horizon sunlight that would become outright brutal heat in a couple of hours. In the kitchen, Andrushka and his half-sister Elena Zyrianova were sorting out the food for the barbecue, chatting back and forth as they cut vegetables and tossed salads. Just outside the open French doors of the conservatory, a game of backyard cricket was underway, with Elena's twin thirteen-year-old grandchildren batting and three young adults in the field.

On strike, Nikolai Zyrianov narrowed his eyes as the bowler approached the stumps, wound up the tennis ball, and delivered... then he timed it perfectly and hammered the ball back past that bowler's ear, sending it over the fence twenty metres behind him and far out into the long grass. "Six runs!" he chortled.

"And out, remember?" the bowler reminded him mildly, and the boy's face fell. "Plus: you get to fetch the ball."

"'Fetch'?" was the incredulous splutter. "Just 'cause you're named after a dog doesn't mean I've got to sit up and beg when you say so, Snoopy!"

"Kolya!" his aunt barked, with a hint of a Russian accent, and the boy's petulant scowl melted before her furious glare. "Lose the attitude, right now. You'll never be too big for me to turn over my knee, panyemayo?"

"Yeah, I got'cha," Kolya muttered sullenly, then, reluctantly, looked at the man he'd mouthed off to. "I'm sorry – I was out of line."

"No harm, no foul," Xander Harris said evenly. "Now get moving."

Kolya grimaced, but said nothing and started trotting towards the fence to retrieve the ball he'd slogged so far, half-throwing his bat down on the grass as he went.

When he was over the fence and out of earshot, the young woman shrugged an apology to her friend. "Sorry, Snoopy –"

"Don't worry about it, Taz." Xander waved off her helpless expression. "Teenaged whinging I can handle. Besides, he must've been wanted to use that line for weeks now – he needed to get it out before he ruptured something."

"Yeah, I know, but he ought to know better than to feel hard-done-by when we ask him to pick up after himself. You'd think he'd've learned there were heavier crosses to bear...."

He could see the memories in her eyes as she spoke, and he knew without looking that the gaze she was directing over his shoulder had settled on the port facility at Ahuriri across Hawke Bay. Thousand-yard-stare time, Taz? I can't say I can blame you....

Only a few months past her twentieth birthday, Tatyana Alekseyevna Zyrianova stood a shade under five-feet-eleven and, while she was leggy and clearly feminine, the Daisy Duke shorts and snug, faded purple singlet she was currently wearing made it perfectly clear that she also had the kind of panther-lean muscle definition that put people in mind of Linda Hamilton in the second Terminator movie. 'Taz' wore her henna-dark hair in a waist-length French braid, and the grey-green eyes set into her gamine face held a near-permanent flash of deviltry; even standing still as she was at the moment, she radiated boundless energy and a formidable confidence that was somehow devoid of conceit. But then again, she had earned the confidence - she'd been on the front lines of an undeclared war since she was fourteen, and had handed the enemy ample punishment in her time – and well knew that indulging in conceit would have been a fast ticket to an early grave.

Even as that thought crossed Xander's mind, Taz's husband caught the shift in her body language and came up behind her, slipping his arms about her waist and kissing her under one ear, offering silent comfort against the bad memories. Michael Bleddyn was a whisker shorter than his wife but had a wolfish power to his own frame. A freckle-faced fellow with close-cropped, gingery-blond hair, currently clad in khaki shorts and a grey singlet marked with the 'Budweiser' of the SEAL team he'd stolen it from, Misha who was only saved from being the picture of a baby-faced assassin by the ruthless resolve lurking behind his topaz eyes and the various scars scattered about his body, including the burns that covered the back of his right hand and forearm and the pencil-thin vertical line that ran from his hairline to the point of his left cheekbone. He'd been right there with Taz from day one of their resistance campaign, and it was just as evident in his bearing that he knew what he was about (despite his being more than a month short of his own twentieth birthday), but his was more a manner of thoughtful intelligence and of a gentle, steady temperament that was somewhat counterintuitive for their chosen profession.

Man, even if I tell the Scoobies back home how I wound up friends with these two, they're probably not gonna believe it - and they believe in vampires and magic and demons and sixty-foot-long Mayor-snakes, the sole American in the group noted ruefully. Actually born Alexander Lavelle Harris, he'd been dubbed 'Xander' by his first and oldest friend when they met in kindergarten. Slightly taller and (subjectively) older than the two New Zealanders, with dark hair and eyes and a face that easily lent itself to laughter, Xander had first entered their lives by appearing out of a portal in the middle of the Hobsonville base in November and asking for the two of them by name. Only, from his viewpoint he'd already known them for some weeks, and they him for some months. It seemed that they had first entered his life in this coming July, when they had rescued him from a team of assassins as he left his home-sweet-Hellmouth-town of Sunnydale to see America, told him why the assassins had been sent, and promptly had an associate of theirs see to it that he had the proper training to continue in his self-appointed quest to protect his friends from the various 'goblins' in the world. After some adventures in various times and places – they had sent/would send him to the Royal Marines in 1992, where he'd spent more than a year learning the bootneck's trade and gotten into a couple of scrapes on his first and only deployment – that same associate had dropped him off in the middle of Hobsonville, some eight months before he'd ever left Sunnydale, to see that his training was completed. Though only after he'd made sure that some of the friends he'd made on deployment were properly set-up to deal with the assassin problem.

The confusion of tenses and logic paradoxes involved in that little back-and-forth made all their heads hurt. Indeed, it had prompted them, one and all, to take up the rallying cry of one Miles Edward O'Brien: "I hate temporal mechanics!"

At the moment, though, slightly more immediate headaches were on the young trio's mind, and Misha gently squeezed his wife/lifelong best friend. "You okay in there, cariad?" he asked tenderly, his accent a lyrical blend of New Zealander drawl and the lilt of his Welsh birthland.

Taz dropped a hand to his wrist and returned the gentle squeeze. "Yeah, I'm fine - just woolgathering."

"Yeah, well, I'd say you've earned the right," he murmured dryly, giving the newly-rebuilt port a long look himself and unconsciously rubbing at his scarred arm. "Haven't we all...."

"Are you going to start pashing again?" asked a disgusted voice.

All three adults gave the speaker an appalled look. "Katya!" Taz gasped in mock shock, staring at her niece with wide eyes.

"Well, you two suck each other's tongues more than the people on Melrose Place ever did," Katerina Zyrianova pointed out reasonably.

Xander considered that for a moment, then judged, "She's got a point. You two're even randier than I used to be, and I was Sunnydale High's resident horn-dog."

"Who got laid all of twice in high school," Taz noted sotto voce.

"Not all of us were seventeen-year-old brides, Taz," Xander returned sardonically.

Taz's eyes flashed, and she was opening her mouth to speak when her mother came out from the kitchen. "Tatyana, Misha, Shura - call for you."

The banter died instantly, and all three young adults exchanged looks. "I thought we had two weeks off?" Xander wondered.

"So did we," Misha noted evenly. "Sounds like something came up – like it always does, every time a bloody coconut.... We'll take it in the Tank, Elena – thanks."

Katya's shoulders had slumped as soon as her grandmother said 'call'. She knew what that meant. "You said you'd be here for my first day at high school!"

Misha waved the other two inside and hugged her gently. "And we meant to be, kiddo," he said gently, rubbing her shoulders soothingly. "But the bad guys usually don't consult our schedules when they make their plans. I promise: we'll be back as soon as we can."

"When?"

"I don't know yet, but I'll let you know when I find out. Now why don't you and Kolya go help your grandmother and Uncle Andrushka with lunch, hmm? We'll be out to eat soon."

- - - - - - - -

Having spent almost forty years in the NZSAS and the black-ops trade, Andrew Hazelton had remodeled his 'home' to reflect the mindset that such an extended career made almost inevitable. The hillside property that he called home was only the visible portion of his little compound; he'd spent a great deal of time, money, and clandestine effort all but hollowing out the hill and filling it with a three-level warren of subterranean chambers, mostly made from old shipping containers, which he had dubbed the Catacombs. He had bunkrooms for twenty people, a small dojo, an armoury that would have impressed the typical survivalist cult... and 'the Tank', a state-of-the-art communications centre that had been especially isolated against electronic eavesdroppers; the only way a signal could get in or out was through a high-bandwidth fibre-optic link he'd hand-laid in the early nineties.

It was this link that interested the three young adults now. When Misha came through the Tank's door and closed it behind him, completing the chamber's EM isolation, Taz punched the button that brought their 'telephone call' – actually a video-conference request - up on the big-screen on the wall. The man on the other end at Hobsonville was a tallish, solidly-built, dark-haired fellow in the undress uniform of a Royal Australian Navy Lieutenant-Commander. "Nice outfit, MacGyver. Catch you at a bad time?"

"Yes, you did, Wombat," Taz said curtly. "I've got my mother, my uncle, and my niece and nephew outside setting up the barbeque. It's a beautiful summer's day, and we're on our first stint of leave in better than a year, so whatever's going on, get your head out of my tits and spit it out, hmm?"

"Hey, don't shoot me, okay?" Mike MacDonald protested, raising his hands defensively. "I'm just the messenger. Zorro wants you back up here ASAFP. There's a caper in Latin America that needs your 'specialist experience'."

"Experience with what?" Misha asked evenly.

"The Stormhawks, for one."

Taz and Misha exchanged a serious glance. That could mean any number of things, most of them very bad.

"He also specifically requested that you bring the latest edition of your field notes, Fenris. He's planning the briefing for 0700 tomorrow. Tony's bringing a puddle-jumper down to Napier airfield; he'll be ready to leave again at 1930."

"That gives us most of today, anyway," Taz murmured. "All right, Wombat, we'll be on the plane. But tell Zorro not to expect us to be happy about it."

"I think he already figured that out, MacGyver, but I'll pass it on." MacDonald tapped a key on his console and the screen went blank.

"'Oh, hit me, baby, one more time....'" Xander quoted sourly. First real down-time I've had in almost five subjective years, and it gets canceled less than a week in. If I ever find out where that guy Murphy is buried, I'm gonna go jump up and down on his grave.

"I hear you, Snoopy," Misha said wearily, completely missing the Britney Spears reference. (Which was understandable – her first single would not make its broadcast debut for another couple of weeks.) "C'mon: let's go make the most of the time we have."

- - - - - - - -

06:58, MONDAY FEBRUARY 08, 1999, LIMA (18:58/07-02-99 ZULU)
NZSAS 'GOLF TROOP' HEADQUARTERS, HOBSONVILLE, NEW ZEALAND

Just before the appointed hour, the youthful trio dutifully trooped in Golf Troop's briefing room, clad in the short-sleeved midnight-blue uniform of the New Zealand Paranatural Defence Service; as was NZPDS custom, all three wore holstered pistols and the beret of their parent service, SAS sandy-beige for both Taz and Misha and Royal Marine green for Xander. "So what's the emergency this time, Jim?" Taz asked, over the lip of her second cup of Army-style coffee of the morning.

In a regular-service unit anywhere else in the world, a mere lance-corporal who addressed her (or his) CO by their given name would have been instantly reduced to a smoking grease-stain by the officer's wrath. Special operations units have their own rules and camaraderie, and doubly so in Golf Troop, New Zealand Special Air Service – especially since Golf Troop didn't officially exist, much less officially not exist – so such disdain for the usual punctilio was about the norm. Besides which, given the nature of the campaign they'd fought and that no other member of the New Zealand Army had seen sustained combat since Vietnam, MacGyver and Fenris had the most field-experience and first-hand knowledge of the goblins (and of Stormhawk) out of anyone associated with the New Zealand military, which meant they enjoyed a certain degree of latitude.

Even so, Zorro gave them both a steady look before he spoke. "How does the Ordo Astra getting control of the future of the global micro-electronics industry grab you?"

"Knew we could count on you for our daily dose of doom and gloom," Misha murmured drolly. The Ordo Astra was the largest vampire warrior-sept on record, and since it had gone corporate in the mid-nineteenth century, it had amassed enough money and influence to distort gravity, much less the global economy. They were also about the only group of demons anyone had heard of who were possessed of enough collective brains to want to try to rule the world, rather than destroy it, and to have an actual decent chance at pulling it off to boot. "How do they propose to do that?"

At Zorro's nod, Wombat tapped a key on his laptop, splashing the first page of his pre-prepared PowerPoint presentation on the briefing room's roll-down screen. "What do you know about a country called Arulco?"

After glancing at his two compatriots, who looked as blank as he did, Xander elected to answer the question. "Nothing's springing to mind."

The image on the screen was a map of the north-western corner of South America, centered on the Ecuador/Peru region. A little square on the coastline between the two nations, stretching from Tumbes in the north to Lobitos in the south, was shaded in light red and marked with a red-white-red national flag. "It's a little post facto consequence of Spanish colonialism in Latin America. When they pulled out of their American possessions in the early nineteenth century, the Spanish didn't leave all that many nice, neat little lines on the maps telling people where their land started and the other guy's ended. Ecuador and Peru fought a couple of wars over defining those lines back in the mid-nineteenth; the second time, around 1847, the Ecuadoreans got lucky and sliced off a chunk of the Peruvian coastline about a hundred miles square. They had enough grunt to turn that new possession into an independent country of its own – Arulco - and enforce recognition of its sovereignty as part of the peace terms. With the implicit threat of Ecuadorean intervention if they tried anything military to reclaim their 'lost territory', the Peruvians restricted their activities to a lot of bluster.

"Arulco's political system was set up on a model that is, as far as I know, unique: a democratic monarchy. Every ten years since the country's foundation in 1848, they've held an election to determine which of the great land-holding families is best suited to run the country; technically, any of those families are eligible, but only two have ever had any real support for the throne, the Cordonas in the north and the Chivaldoris in the south. The Chivaldoris had held power, with only one interruption, since the foundation; they were essentially benevolent moderates, pursuing an even-handed policy of détente with their two neighbours to forestall any trouble. From the audience, the sole exception was...?"

"Nineteen-thirty-eight to nineteen-forty-eight?" Taz said promptly.

"Give her a Krispie!" Wombat crowed ironically. "Absolutely right. The populace saw World War Two on the horizon and decided that during a time of global war, they needed a King whose policies were a little more - shall we say 'vigourous'? The Cordonas got the nod, and they did fairly well during the war years, but when the next election came up, the war was over and so was their time in the drivers' seat. They didn't exactly love that idea and went back to their estates in the north to sulk and plan a return to power – peacefully, mind you; they wanted to do it with the ballot box, not an ammo can.

"Between '48 and '88, King Andreas Chivaldori held onto the reins, but the Cordonas' PR campaigns took ever-larger bites out of the winning margin, and in '87, the Crown's projections showed that the next election could well see the Chivaldoris defeated. Between his own failing health and his wife's death, Andreas knew that he wasn't going to be given another term in his own right, but he couldn't afford to let the Cordonas take over, especially with the recent discovery of mineral deposits in the country that could be either the economy's salvation or its ruination, so he took a punt and started a search for a bride for his only child, his son Enrico." (The PowerPoint brought up a photo of the man in question; taken in 1986 by its timestamp, it showed a Latin man in his late twenties, strong and vital, with the air of command and keen intelligence in his eyes.) "Enrico would be the one in the hot-seat after the next election, and Andreas figured that the electorate's seeing him go through all the pomp and circumstance of a Windsor-esque wedding would put him over the top compared to his rival, Miguel Cordona." (He pulled up another photo, this one dated 1987; the man shown was slightly taller and thinner than Enrico, but clearly possessed much of the same qualities.)

"Andreas' people scoured a lot of the world looking for a suitable candidate, and they looked hard... but given the situation, they also looked fast, which makes for mistakes." (A third photo came up, this one from 1988 and showing a moderately attractive strawberry-blonde woman in her early twenties with wide-set green eyes.) "They finally settled on this woman, one Gloria Prescott, from upstate Pennsylvania; Mayflower family, law student, all the right connections to American high society, and more importantly her family had a number of key contacts in the defence industry... including Templar Security Solutions."

"Ah," Misha said, as one undergoing a revelation. The Templar Trading Group was the Ordo Astra's primary 'above-ground' organ, a truly massive multinational conglomerate whose component divisions did business in just about every arena known to man – and many others they didn't like to acknowledge as existing – and Templar Security Solutions was their military-products and –services arm. "'Oh, look what a tasty morsel is dangling before us. And what is that little metal thing stuck in it, anyway?'"

"Something like that. They didn't dig deep enough on Templar – or didn't know to start digging in the first place – and snapped her up in a heartbeat. The wedding was everything they'd hoped for, and it had the desired results... but then things started coming off the rails. Six months after the wedding - and four after the election – King Andreas was found dead in his bed. The post-mortem results indicated poisoning, and there was a certain amount of circumstantial evidence pointing to Enrico as the doer."

"Only that doesn't make sense – he already had the top job, so why kill his father?" Taz pointed out rhetorically.

"The Royal Guard appeared not to notice that little irrelevance when they followed Glory's orders and arrested Enrico for regicide," Wombat said in a bland voice. "A week after his arrest, the vehicle transporting Enrico to the courthouse for the trial was Molotov'd and burned out completely, killing all five people inside. Palace sources blamed it on the Cordonas, claiming they were trying to cover up their own involvement in the King's death and that they had gone from peaceful campaigning to armed revolt... possibly at Peruvian instigation. Cue the usual consequences: declaration of martial law, suspension of the normal judicial process 'for the duration of the emergency', 'disappearances' of prominent opponents, massacres of demonstrators by security forces...."

"Very neat," Misha noted, his voice absently professional. "Enrico is attainted for murder and high treason, so he's politically neutralised until the trial; implicate the Cordonas and suggest they're foreign stooges, and they're no longer legitimate candidates; Glory gets the top job by default. Thorough, well-orchestrated, covers all the angles – are you sure Glory was at law school? 'Cause a lot of qualified political-science types couldn't execute something that slick." Unless they had the Stormers walking them through it; that little scheme certainly has all their fingerprints on it....

"Except, according to rumour, she tried to get a little too fancy: the convoy was actually intended to turn Enrico over to the Cordonas, in the expectation that they'd kill him as 'an enemy of the people'." Wombat snorted expressively at that one. "Seems she missed one little detail: Enrico Chivaldori and Miguel Cordona were good buddies at Harvard Business School. They never positively identified Enrico's body in the fire – they pinged two of his escorts, but the other bodies were too badly charred for IDs. Best guess is, the Cordonas smuggled him out of the country, faked his death, and kept him under wraps until they got a better bead on what Glory's agenda really was."

"But even if he was still alive, he's still under the taint of high treason," Xander protested. "What good could he do?"

"Inside Arulco? Not much, especially these days." Wombat pulled up a map of the country, then overlaid a map of shadings representing per-capita income. The only 'bright' spots were the capital city of Meduna and Balime, the Arulcan Riviera. "Before '85, the country's economy was essentially entirely based in agriculture; they were completely self-sufficient there, with enough of a surplus to make cash with exports. Throw in off-shore oil-fields near the port-city of Grumm, which brought in enough cash for most of their major capital expenditure, and the individual standard of living was on a Second World level, and approaching First World equivalence. After Glory took over, she forced a complete changeover from agriculture to extraction and exploitation of the various mineral strikes around the country. She tried to do too much too fast, and the result was inevitable: complete economic implosion. Per-capita incomes are less than five percent of what they were fifteen years ago, and it hasn't helped the situation any that Glory completely discontinued all government services in '90 to funnel the money into the mining operations and the military – all services, including education, sanitation and health-care, public works other than those supporting the mining operations...."

"Okay, now I believe she's a law student!" Xander stared at the Australian in amazement. "She pulled all the education funding? Jesus Christ – in another five years, she's gonna have no indigenous source of literate labour!"

Wombat shrugged. "She doesn't seem to think she needs it – she only needs miners and soldiers, and as far as she knows all they have to do is swing picks or shoot things."

"Okay, that's taking stupidity to a height that offends even the King of Cretins!" the Californian muttered in disgust. "Lawyers – talk about having only passing contact with reality...."

"Yeah, but she's smart enough to know that the people with the guns still have most of the clout. The Army's in charge these days, despite everything the Cordonas could do to oppose Glory politically. When they were finally hounded completely underground by government forces four years ago, they finally gave up on internal reform and turned into a guerrilla resistance network, making their estates around the northern border town of Omerta very unpleasant for government troops... until four months ago, when a squadron of Stormer AlphaJets bombed the place back the Jurassic Period just before a full battalion of FRA tanks and mechanised infantry swept through and killed anything that was still breathing – man, woman, child, young or old. They did a real Carthage on the place.

"A month later, a man claiming to be Enrico Chivaldori contacted the US, British, and Russian governments, asking for their assistance in freeing Arulco. The Yanks checked his credentials and DNA – it was on-file in Massachusetts following a bogus rape allegation – and when they confirmed his identity, they were ready to hear what he had to say."

"Why'd they listen?" Xander wondered. "It's not like this penny-ante dictator stuff is something out of the ordinary, and the Mogadishu thing made Clinton say 'unless it's in my backyard, I don't care'."

Wombat pulled up a map of Arulco, this one showing five gold dots scattered about the country. "The mines in the coastal town of Chitzena, the mountain town of Drassen and the main military base at Alma all produce gold or silver. Grumm is the country's sole oil facility – apart from export cash which goes straight into government coffers and/or Glory's bank accounts, it also provides their entire domestic supply of fuel, though you can only get it if you're in the military, one of Glory's hangers-on, or pay eighty bucks a litre on the black market. And this," he isolated the last dot, "is why everybody's so interested in Arulco. This mine, just south of the central town of Cambria, produces a high volume and a wide range of 'rare-earth elements'."

"'Rare-earth elements'? That's not a term I'm familiar with," Misha said. Xander was actually a little relieved to see his massively-more-worldly friend demonstrate a lack of knowledge about something.

"Group IIIA on the Periodic Table, also known as the lanthanide series, periodic numbers 57 through 71; scandium and yttrium are usually lumped in with them as well, since they're usually found in the same deposits and share many properties with the lanthanide elements. And despite the name, they're not especially 'rare', as they're more common than gold or silver or platinum. Don't you remember your high-school chemistry? It wasn't all that long ago, was it?"

Misha gave the Australian a flat look for the sideswipe. "I was more concerned with the 'blowing shit up' kind of chemistry in high school, smart-arse."

"REEs have a lot of applications in the field of industrial- and micro-electronics; most laser systems use some, for example, including that holographic sight on your pistol. However, their main relevance in this instance is that they also show promise in experiments aimed at producing room-temperature superconductors. They're found in a lot of other countries, but most of them are in countries that the Stormers don't have influence in anymore – the Aussie and European deposits are out of their reach these days, for one thing, and the largest deposits elsewhere in the world are found in 'Longnan clay' in China's Jiangxi province; conversely, the deposits in Arulco are almost ridiculously pure and can be refined easier, meaning they're cheaper to produce in volume."

"Ah, and the Stormer's interest becomes clear," Taz said, having an epiphany of her own. "With full, exclusive control of that mine and its output, the Stormers can put a stranglehold on REEs like de Beers has on the diamond market and mortgage the future of RTSC research - or entirely limit it to their own people. And if the leg-up it gives them lets them actually make RTSCs work with one or more of the minerals they produce –"

"Everybody'll be clamouring for their product and they'll make a killing, or they'll have sole rights on the new hardware and they'll make a killing," Wombat nodded. "Plus, if they can produce RTSC engines or computers, they'll have sole rights to those as well; the entire world will have to buy from them or get left behind, and Templar will have us all by the balls."

"Don't'cha love it when a plan comes together?" Xander observed sardonically. And if they get that kind of a leg-up on the next generation of high-end computer equipment, what's to stop them putting hard-wired back-doors into it all and reading everybody's mail? Computers that powerful are used mainly for cryptography, and if they get that kind of access to government communications.... He shuddered at the thought. Seeing Moloch loose in the Internet had been bad enough, and the self-styled Corruptor had done little more than create chaos for his own amusement; if the Stormers could manipulate information to their will on a methodical basis, they'd have the whole of humanity in cattle-pens before anyone realised something was wrong. Just fucking lovely, that is! "Okay, so how do things shake out? Who wants what from the Arulcans?"

"CIA has main jurisdiction over the American effort, with strong assistance from DoD and DEA. A month after they first heard from Chivaldori, they'd recruited a sizeable group of mercs and sent them in to bolster the remnants of Cordona's rebel force under the combined banner of the CVLA, the Confederation of Volunteers for the Liberation of Arulco."

"El Confederación de los Voluntarios para la Liberación de la Arulco," Misha translated off-hand, just to show Wombat he was still paying attention.

"I'll take your word for it," the intelligence specialist drawled. "The CVLA's had some successes against the government's forces, liberating both Omerta and Drassen from their garrisons in recent weeks; hell, most of the battalion assigned to Drassen defected in place. Thing is, CIA's put strict guidelines on the terms of their involvement and what they expect from a post-war Arulco. One of those was that the CVLA go gunning for the local drug cartel ASAP – one of the local 'businessmen', a joker named Klaus, decided to start farming coca to make ends meet and now he's almost a feudal warlord in control of the area around the town of San Mona. Another was that the State Department and the White House were willing to recognise and protect Free Arulco as an independent nation, on certain conditions, one of which being that the CVLA proves that it is, indeed, a serious player."

"And such 'proof' would be given by, oh, taking Cambria and its mine?" Taz hazarded cynically.

"Can't put much past you, hmm?" Wombat snorted. "That's my understanding, yes; technically, they have to liberate everything north of a certain geographical line, but I'm pretty sure that Cordona can read between the lines as well as you can.

"The Russians are renting them men on a strict cash-and-carry basis, trading warm bodies for silver ore taken from Drassen; since the post-Cold War RIFs they've got a shitload of trained manpower still floating around. They're so far down the dunny they don't have the time or energy to worry about the Arulcan mineral deposits – besides, they've got scads of their own out in Siberia; they just have to start looking for it properly.

"The Poms are hooking the CVLA up with European mercs and supplying them with intel and some weapons-systems, but they're not asking for cash and they haven't set any explicit conditions on their help."

"Makes sense; the Brits have always had more style than the Yanks," Misha murmured.

"Hello, sitting right here!" Xander interjected acerbically.

"Case in point," the Kiwi operator deadpanned, raising a general snicker. "So what's the attraction for the British?"

"They have certain historical ties to Arulco – they did a lot towards training and equipping the Arulcan military back in the '60s, back when the Yanks were distracted by Vietnam – and I think they're using Arulco as a live-fire proving ground for some of their latest hardware. Not to mention jamming a thumb right in Templar's eye."

"Which brings us to the Stormer angle." Misha's eyes had gone as hard as the topaz chips they resembled. Most New Zealanders had seen some nasty stuff out of the Stormers, but that was mainly surface stuff; he and Taz knew their true depths. "What's their involvement?"

"You remember how Ecuador and Peru had themselves a little skirmish over their eastern border back in '95?"

"Yeah. Everybody in the region went shopping for guns right afterwards – they got a little worried when they saw Ecuador beat the Peruvians on points."

"Apparently it put the shits up Glory, too – she seems to think Arulco is the next on the chopping block. And there's a certain degree of justification for that alarm, if you look at the correlation of forces in the border region: the Peruvians have three fighter squadrons within half an hour's flight-time of the border, one of MiG-29s and two of attack birds, not to mention a full brigade of T-62 main battle tanks less than two hours' drive from the line. That being so, Glory took a look at her military and went apeshit at how bad things were – their military operates on a modified Soviet conscription model, and even before the education cuts that wasn't much of a good idea; now, it's a fucking disaster. They've got some capable kit, but even a lot of their newest stuff was in shocking condition because of inadequate maintenance -"

"Until they hooked up with Templar Security Solutions, who started getting them system upgrades and modern equipment, and proper personnel education and training," Taz nodded. "Even after the way our British counterparts have been biting into their operations and their access."

Wombat took a deep breath and reminded himself that these kids weren't trying to make him feel redundant; they just knew the workings of Templar's collective mind far better than he did. "Not to mention their providing the necessary training cadre to show the natives how to use it properly. Since the Poms have managed to close down most of their other European sources, the Stormers are mainly getting them French and Italian gear these days. In return, Templar got to take over operations at the mines and the Grumm oil-fields, taking their own cut and giving the rest to the government... with the probable intended end result MacGyver just divined."

"Total manpower in-country?"

"I've got a full analysis of the Arulcan order of battle here, but I'll give you the high points now. Not counting the battalion that defected at Drassen, the government forces, the Fuerzas Real de Arulco, can field a total of fourteen Army battalions – five of mechanised infantry, seven infantry, one cavalry, one artillery; their Air Force comes to one squadron of upgraded Mirage F.1C fighters and another of AlphaJet trainer/attackers, plus a squadron of Hind helicopter gunships and an assortment of fixed- and rotor-wing transports; and their Navy totals one frigate equivalent to one of our ANZACs, four missile boats, and about a dozen torpedo-armed patrol boats. Stormhawk Security Forces garrison the remaining government mines and the oil platforms off Grumm, operate two more AlphaJet squadrons out of the primary airbase at Meduna, and man the four SAM batteries scattered about the country... best estimate on total Stormer manpower is on the order of twenty companies total, scattered about in one- and two-company detachments." Wombat gave them all a steady look. "There are also four battalions of 'élite Royal Guards' stationed in the capital city of Meduna, with two more companies of Stormers attached. Companies from the Special Purposes Group."

"Shit," Taz breathed. The SPG was Stormhawk's commando unit, and they were damned near as good as they thought they were; hell, given where they'd originally been recruited from, regular Stormers weren't exactly wimps. "Twenty line companies and two more of SPG? I didn't know they had that kind of manpower in the Americas!"

"Which makes trimming it back a damned good idea, and the sooner the better," Misha noted. "And why are we here, in particular?"

"One of the senior American mercs put in a call to the British yesterday," Zorro supplied calmly. "It seems they had an 'incident' at the Drassen mine a few days ago; he'd heard rumours that they had a special unit that might have some experience in dealing with... 'unusual problems', and he had one. Leaving aside the fact that most of our teams are either over in Oz teaching their Special Purposes Detachment the trade or off on capers, you two are our resident experts on both the goblins and on Stormhawk, and considering that those are two of their biggest worries right now, you're it."

"And Snoopy?" the topaz-eyed Kiwi asked mildly. "With all respect, Zorro, you've got no authority to order him anywhere."

"No, but I do," Xander inserted, a little testily. "What, d'you think I can't hack it out there?" God, are they going the whole 'fray-adjacent' route on me too?

"There's only one way to find out, but that's not the issue," Misha countered evenly. "We need your insight into the Scoobies if we're going to pull off the Sunnydale caper, and you can't tell us too much if you get your head blown off in some Latin American sideshow."

"This just in, Fenris: I'm not the one whose absence would cause a temporal paradox, remember? You and MacGyver and Andrushka - all three of you were there on that Virginia lay-by to save my ass from the Mentors this coming July. If one of you gets zapped, our entire timeline could come unglued. Me? There's already one of me running around out there, and even that's probably one too many; I've left you three and Colt time-delay packages with all you need to know in case I get zapped; and if we want to preserve the timeline I need to be there to make sure you don't get slotted!"

Misha and Taz gave their friend a steady, appraising look, traded a split-second glance, then nodded to each other. It was Taz who answered his heated words. "Okay. You want in? It's all yours. But if the universe blows up because you get killed, I'm gonna kick your ass."

"Duly noted." Xander shrugged one shoulder. "Besides, I just finished that medical course you set up for me, and you need a corpsman. Where else am I going to get the practical experience I need?"

"South Central LA?" Misha suggested blandly, then looked to Zorro. "Okay, it looks like that's the three of us on board. Who else are you giving us?"

"Hulk for commo and heavy weapons," the Colonel supplied readily. "Wombat here has volunteered in his capacity as intelligence analyst and liaison, with Tone supplementing the on-ground logistics staff and assisting with the training programmes and a former shipmate of theirs named Trevor Colby as an additional shooter, but the Aussies are having a little trouble finding Colby at the moment so they'll have to catch up with you in the US."

Taz nodded again, tacitly but officially accepting operational command of the NZSAS/NZPDS detachment to the CVLA. "How do we get there?"

"We've 'disappeared' one of those Global Expresses we picked up as surplus when the Stormers left New Zealand – you fly out at noon today, with a refueling stop at LAX before you go on to Brize Norton to mate up with the team Ultraviolet are chopping to the CVLA. From there, it's a C-17 via MacDill to Panama, where you'll change flights to a 'civilian' C-130 for the last leg to arrive in-country."

"Well, at least we're going to our fate in style and comfort for the first couple of legs," Xander drawled. "Why can't we always travel on long-range VIP jets?"

"Because, my friend, the universe has no concept of 'justice'," Misha observed softly, and for once Xander had no smart answer.