Chapter 03

Unwelcome Company

Darkness had settled over the city of Sapporo. On the side of one older buildings near an industrial area, a movement in the shadows could barely be seen.

Sam Fisher was climbing up a drain pipe on a side of the building opposite the industrial zone, away from the bright lights illuminating the manufacturing building and everywhere near it. There was a string of trees on that side, which had made his approach to the target much easier.

The building itself looked squat compared to its five story height. The relatively small windows made the walls seem even more overly thick than they actually were. The off white exterior looked as though it could very much use another coat of paint.

The gutter pipe he climbed was itself quite old, but relatively rust free and sturdy enough to easily hold the agents weight. The endeavor was not easy, to say the least. Climbing a five inch drain was deceptively challenging, but even in his forties Sam could do a great deal of things that the average athlete would kill himself at.

Stopping at a third floor window, he held the pipe with his right hand and leaned as far as his arm would let him. It was just barely enough for him to look inside. "Grim, I'm outside a room with several computers in it. I can see the back side of one and there's a wireless antennae."

"Good, Sam. If one of them has it, then they probably all do," she replied, "Activate your handheld and we can use it to hack their network." Still hanging precariously, he pulled out what appeared to be a PDA, but it was not ordinary in any sense of the word.

The device came to life and the agent could see the data streams racing furiously through the screen as it transmitted them via satellite back to NSA headquarters. Over a minute went by before he spoke again, "Grim, I'm not usually one to complain, but this is a pretty uncomfortable position to hold."

"Just a few more seconds," she said, "Okay, we have what we need from there. Checking the files now, but it'll be a few minutes." Fisher had already put away the device and was continuing upward. "Just wait a little while and we'll decide whether or not you need to proceed further."

"You know it's not my style to wait," he replied as he neared the top of the pipe.

Taking a quick look first, he pulled himself onto the roof of the five story structure. Still dressed in the same clothes that he had worn to the cemetery, he crouched and silently made his way across to the fire door. Like a wisp of smoke, he vanished into the interior.

He crept down the concrete stairs, careful to watch for anyone who might see him. After finding nothing but dark rooms and bits of trash everywhere on the fifth floor, which seemed to be undergoing some kind of renovation, he moved down to the fourth. Nearing the door, he heard a noise in what he assumed was a hallway. He was without a fiber optic camera since all his gear was hidden at the hotel, so he had no way to check what was happening without taking a chance.

Listening carefully, he heard some laughing a few meters from the door, young voices, and footsteps leading toward him. They were irregular, a stuttering shuffle of a walk. Whoever it was, chances were good that they were drunk. When he heard the steps pass him, he cracked the door and peered toward the laughter.

The hallway was only half lit by the fluorescent tubes above and the dim light coming through the small windows. Out of all the doors in that direction, only one had light emanating from the space beneath it. There was a faint smell that Sam thought he recognized, but quickly dismissed it. Opening his own door further, he turned and saw a shambling figure moving toward what appeared to be a bathroom.

Quickly moving into the hall, Sam made his way close to the toilet-bound young man. Just seeing him from behind, he thought the guy looked like some kind of tree-hugger. Long, scraggly hair, ragged jeans and a t-shirt that said "Turkey Leg Face Hug!" in English on the back.

Following the young man, who appeared to be around 20 years old, into the bathroom, he locked the door as the hippie began to take care of business. Feeling no need to hurry, Sam hid and let the young man finish. It wasn't necessary to make the guy pee on himself during interrogation.

Zipping his pants up, the man walked over to the sink to wash his hands. Creeping out of a nearby stall, the agent stood behind the young man, waiting for the right moment. That moment came when the Japanese man glanced up and saw the large figure looming directly behind him.

In a flash, Fisher had his arm around the neck of the terrified young man tightly enough to reduce his scream of panic to a hoarse wheeze. "Shhh," Sam hushed him, and loosened the force in his arm just enough to allow the man to breathe. "Commendable," he whispered to his captive in Japanese, "washing your hands like that. And I thought you were just another dirty hippie." The young man started to giggle uncontrollably.

The agent was confused by the unusual reaction for a moment. Suddenly noticing something, Sam sniffed the air. There was the smell of sake, as he had expected, but there was another scent also. The same thing he detected in the hallway, only now it was strong and easily identifiable.

"You're high aren't you?" Sam grinned slightly.

"I'm not high," he responded indignantly before returning to his laughter, "I am so high."

"Grim," Fisher called out at a whisper, "How much longer?"

"Not long," she replied in his ear.

This could be fun, he thought to himself. The idea of messing with the guy's head did have a certain appeal to it, but he thought better of it fairly quickly. There was no time to play. Besides that, he wouldn't be able to get anything reliable out of this guy, and if the smell down the hall was any indication, he wouldn't get much from his friends either.

Pulling him into a stall, Sam drew out a fighting knife from his belt. The blade was around six inches long and a tactical black color. Taking a quick step back, then lunging forward to throw the hippie off balance, he reared the knife back and hammered the bottom of the handle into the man's head. With an audible exhale, he went limp in Fisher's arms.

Quickly replacing the knife, he quietly sat the unconscious Japanese man on the toilet. Closing and locking the door, he vaulted over the top and out of the stall. Moving toward the door to the hallway, the agent was ready to go spy on the rest of the group when he heard a noise.

Stopping in his tracks, he focused on the sound, trying to place it. It was familiar, something that he had heard before, but there was something strange that was keeping him from identifying it. Whatever it was, the noise was starting to make him feel uneasy. He could tell that it was getting louder and, turning toward the window, he became convinced that it was coming from outside.

"Sam," Lambert called, "Their computers are clean, there's no evidence connecting them…"

"Shhh," Fisher hissed, not bothering to explain himself. The droning sound was louder still, and as he knocked the old handle latch on the painted over window out of place, he was starting to suspect that it was a helicopter. It still sounded strange to him, though. It was like the engine was muffled but the noise of the rotor blades was not.

Pushing the old and stubborn window open, Fisher experienced a nasty feeling in his stomach. "Damn," he whispered to himself. Abandoning stealth, he turned and made his way quickly to the door, "Lambert, we have a big problem."

"What's going on, Sam?" came the response. There was an odd digital quality to his voice, but that was the least of his worries right then.

Making a quick glance in the hallway, he moved quickly to the stairs, "There are two Mi-24s outside the building right now. One looks like he's circling and one looked like he was approaching the roof."

"Hinds?" Lambert's shock was evident in his voice, "What the hell are the Russians doing there? How did they find out so quickly?"

Stepping into the stairwell, he swung himself back against the wall in the hallway when he heard the door to the roof flung open. As he heard the clatter of weapons and boots hammering down the stairs, the sound of another door bursting open on one of the lower floors reached his ears. They're coming in from the ground, too? He could feel the blood starting to pump strongly through his veins as he took a deep breath to focus himself. "I don't know," the agent spoke in a deadly serious tone, "But I've got company, and lots of it."

The MV-22 began to slow down from its nearly 300 knot cruising speed as it descended into Sapporo. Flying close behind, another Osprey followed her sister ship, carrying six additional members of the Tuatha de Danaan SRT force. Still moving under ECS invisible mode, the birds made their way toward the target area.

The ground leader of the operation, Sgt Major Melissa Mao, felt an uncomfortable sensation in the pit of her stomach as the craft made its irregular descent. She knew that the less than smooth ride was not a reflection on the pilots skills. Experience told her that flying in the vicinity of mountainous terrain usually created all sorts of microbursts and wind shear, giving the flight a rough feel and occasionally causing the aircraft to loose ten or twenty feet of altitude in the span of a second or two. The northern island of Hokkaido, of course, was definitely not flat.

She was used to that sort of thing, however. Years of being ferried around on military helicopters had rendered her immune to the stomach churning effects of less than perfect flight conditions. The feeling she had was something she associated with going on a mission. Nervousness before the operation was something that she had come to accept in herself long before.

There was only a dim red light filling the cargo area, allowing Melissa to develop her night vision, though she kept her eyes closed anyway. As she breathed in through her nose, she let her mind drift to the odd smell of the cold, filtered air circulating in the cargo area. It smelled sort of like there was a nonexistent cloud of dust floating around, mixed with the light amount of ozone given off by the imperfect ECS. It was something she was familiar with, but never quite got used to, mainly because there really wasn't anything else that had quite the same odor.

"Sgt Major!" the voice of the crew chief standing before her brought her out of her rumination, "I think you'd better come see this!"

Wondering why there was an edge of anxiety in the enlisted mans voice, Melissa glanced across the cargo space at her two teammates as she unlatched her safety belt. Kurz and Sousuke both wore dark expressions as they turned toward the nearby windows and started studying the darkness outside.

Coming up to the cockpit, she put her hand on the copilot's shoulder to steady herself, "What's the situation?"

"It seems like there are already birds in the air at the primary LZ," he replied, "We can't get positive identification on them, our instruments aren't picking them up very well for some reason, but we think they may be Soviet."

"Are you sure?" she asked, "Intel said it would be tomorrow at best before they discovered this place. And besides that, what the hell are they doing flying into Japanese airspace like this? This is going to be a major international incident!"

"There," said the pilot, indicating the FLIR display in the center display monitor. The green image was grainy, but the digital zoom on their model showed them the building they were heading for growing larger, and the helos hovering around it. "Two of them, and that one looks like a Mi-24. Looks sort of like an E model, but the engine housing's shaped weird."

"They're both Mi-24s," Melissa stated as the other one circled out from behind the building, "Make for the secondary LZ and inform de Danaan of the situation. See if they know how the hell two hinds got this far into JSDFs air defense zone."

"Roger," responded the copilot, flicking a few switches on his comm equipment before keying up to transmit.

Mao had already turned and left the cockpit, heading back to her teammates. The pair looked up at her as she approached, their grim faces waiting for confirmation that there was a problem. "There are Soviet aircraft in the target area," she stated simply.

Though neither one showed much reaction to this news, she could tell that neither one had expected to hear that. She continued after only a second of pause, "Two Hinds are circling the building, so it's possible that they have unloaded soldiers in the area."

"That would be sixteen moderately armed men at most," Sousuke quickly declared, "Assuming those two Hinds are the only aircraft involved."

"What, you want more, Sousuke?" Kurz said with a sarcastic half-smile.

"I'm just saying that there might be more aircraft in the area," Sousuke stated, "It's not uncommon for Hinds to move in on a location in pairs from multiple directions. There may be two or four more hiding out as backup."

"It's possible, Sousuke," Melissa nodded, "but with that many birds in the air, the chances that they would be detected would be much greater. I doubt that there's any more of them. Besides, sixteen professional soldiers and two assault helicopters would be more than enough to take that building."

"I concur," Sousuke responded, "So what is our current plan of action?"

"We're going to the secondary LZ," she said, "It's further away, but at least it'll give us room to maneuver."

"Backup?" Kurz asked, though he likely knew the answer.

"Unlikely," Sagara shook his head, "The enemy will be gone before de Danaan could get anything here. Not even the ARX-7 could get here in time if it wasn't already standing by in a transport missile."

"It isn't," Mao said flatly, "We're on our own here. We just have to be careful and do what we can."

"Let's just hope that those Russian pilots aren't using thermal," Kurz proffered ominously. They all nodded wordlessly. As cold as the night air of Hokkaido was, their bodies would be painfully obvious to even the most basic thermal imaging systems. They wouldn't get anywhere near the target without being spotted.

"One minute!" called the crew chief.

Giving the thumbs up to the chief, she turned back to her team, "Get ready!"

Unlatching themselves, they stood from their seats. Grabbing onto hand holds as they went, the three made their way back to the rear loading ramp. They felt the deceleration as the two large propellers on the ends of the wings began to rotate upward, engine and all. As the ramp began to lower and the red light turned off, Mao sharply racked her weapon, sending the first round of the loaded magazine into the chamber and cocking the firing pin. Taking another deep breath, the feeling in her stomach disappeared, her nervousness fading from her mind. It was time to get down to business.

She could see the ground of the field that they were landing on rise up to meet the helo, and she felt a lurch as the bird set itself down in the grass. Gripping her weapon Melissa bounded forward, hopping about a half meter from the end of the ramp to the ground below.

As she jogged away from the Osprey, careful to avoid the spot where the other invisible bird should have landed, she noted how oddly soft the ground of the soccer field was. It just wasn't as hard and dry feeling as she had expected with the wintry conditions in that part of the country.

Seeing the other six members of the team appearing from behind the invisibility of the second bird, she activated the small radio that was seated in her ear, "Tewaz-2, Urzu-2, how do you hear?"

"Urzu-2, Tewaz-2, have you loud and clear," she heard as one of the six gave her what appeared to be a thumbs up, though she couldn't really tell in the darkness.

"Read you the same," she said, "Three teams of three, proceed with the mission, be careful to avoid detection."

"Roger, team three leader is Tewaz-4," came the reply.

Without bothering to signal to Webber or Sagara behind her, she set off at a run in the direction of their target building. Feeling the wind pick up behind her and a moderate increase in noise, she knew that the MV-22s were beginning to take off. An odd sound startled her, almost causing her to miss a step, and she heard Kurz start to say, "What the-?"

Mao almost yelped when ice cold water began to spray her. Slowing down greatly as she blinked the offending liquid from her eye, she heard a curse from Webber. "Why the hell do they have automatic sprinklers in a freezing ass cold place like this?"

All Sousuke said was, "Not good." Turning back, Melissa saw what he was referring to.

The water from the sprinkler system was hitting the two Ospreys. The ECS invisible mode was flickering on and off, struggling to maintain itself as the first of the two lifted off the ground and away from the spray. In a matter of seconds, however, the system had completely failed on the one still on the ground. It was plainly visible for all to see.

"Move it!" she yelled as the three of them sprinted away from the landing zone. She knew very well that even though the secondary LZ was further away from the target than the primary, they were still well within the firing range of the Hinds. As soon as the enemy noticed the transport helicopter under their nose, all hell would break loose.

Hearing the noise of the second helicopter, she looked over her shoulder as the engines roared to full power, desperately trying to escape the area. Without the ECS half the city could probably hear its takeoff, she thought to herself. It had barely risen two or three meters off the ground when she was nearly blinded by the Osprey's automatic countermeasures. Streams of white and reddish flares shot to either side of the helicopter and straight into the ground. Melissa knew that there was around ten seconds worth of flares in those dispensers. These lasted for two.

Her body cringed involuntarily as the missile struck the helpless MV-22. The sound of the explosion hit her ears hard as the pressure wave from the explosion blew all the water from the sprinklers away from the epicenter and almost knocked her off balance. Her compromised night vision barely allowed her to see one of the large rotor blades flipping and skidding across the field right past them, tossing dirt and clumps of grass on them as it ripped through the turf.

Barely able to see, she almost tripped as they kept on running. Blinking to try and regain her vision in the darkness, she felt a strong grip on her left arm. Kurz had noticed her falter and wordlessly helped her along. Feeling a strong surge of ego, she yanked her arm free and yelled over the radio, "This is Urzu-2, report!"

She could hear the tension in their voices as they responded, "Tewaz-2, check!"

"Tewaz-4, all here." She could breathe a small sigh of relief. Mao felt bad for the Osprey crew, but at least all the ground teams made it out of the open space.

They vaulted over a fence and sprinted across a narrow, one-way street. As they ran into a three story parking garage, Sousuke called out, "Here they come!"

They zipped around the ticket dispensers and finally slowed their pace when they came into the parking area itself. Slamming her back against the concrete interior wall of the garage, she crouched there for two seconds to pull the cold air into her burning lungs, then stood upright and looked over the top of the wall.

One of the Hinds raced past in the direction the first Osprey had gone, churning the air powerfully and whipping nearby trees about as it pursued its prey. She hoped that the ECS on the bird came back fully in time.

The second Hind was moving much slower. It knew they were there. Hovering nearby, it searched in the direction of the other teams. She looked at the two men beside her, both wearing similarly hard expressions, "Any ideas?"

Sousuke shook his head, still taking deep breaths, "Their armor is too strong for the weapons we have."

"Even if I hit the base of the rotor," Kurz looked like he wanted to spit, "I couldn't do anything to it with a just a 7.62 round. Even if we had Tewaz's C4 charges we couldn't get the things…"

"There's got to be something!" she yelled, feeling a strong determination to not loose.

"Move!" Sousuke yelled, throwing them all into motion. A split-second later, chunks of concrete were scattering through the air as they ran in a crouch. The Hinds 12.7mm gun was quickly chewing up the space that they had just been hiding.

The helo stopped firing at them for a few seconds before a new sound came to her. She didn't even have time to yell at them to get down before the two rockets hit.

A/N

I live! Sorry, but I've been quite busy over the last month or two, so I just sort of polished up what I had already written as the first half of a long chapter. I'm hoping that it turned out well, despite the cliffhanger ending.

I was going to add more details to the scene where Sousuke, Kurz, and Mao were dealing with their, er, circumstances, but I wanted to keep the frantic, slightly disorienting feel of it. I think it came across more or less the way I wanted it to, but I was getting tired of thinking so much about it, so it's going to stand the way it is unless I made a major mistake.

By the way, I can't remember if Tewaz has already been used in the FMP universe or not. If it has…well I guess that's something I'll have to change.

To all the reviewers: Thank you very much! I'm happy to see the positive feedback I'm getting and the constructive criticism that I think will help me make this a pretty good fic. I hope you guys stick around.

Gunso