Friday, July 7th, 2017
Alert, Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada
11:34 GMT-5 (16:34 GMT July 7th)
The giant off-road vehicle raced across the flat(-ish) icecap at speed.
"You just had to jinx it, didn't you?" Stephanie challenged.
"Huh?" Mindy asked.
"You had to demand somewhere cooler, didn't you?"
"Not my fault! Ow!"
"Whine like a bitch, get slapped like a bitch!" Stephanie grinned as Mindy glared back at the youngster.
"She has a point," Electra commented meekly. "For a change."
"Thank you, 'Lectra," Stephanie replied.
"Yes, thank you, 'Lectra," Mindy groused as she steered the monstrous truck over the decidedly uneven terrain which was flat (from a relative point of view) but was pockmarked with random hummocks which varied from an inch in height to over a foot – the latter being narrowly avoided as they careered around the ice on the massive tyres and Mindy got herself used to the way the vehicle drove.
Stephanie sat beside Mindy in the passenger seat and she peered ahead across the never-ending whiteness with an occasional glance back at Electra who sat in the back seat grinning as they bounced this way and that. It was like no driving which Mindy had encountered up to that point in her life but it was amazing fun. As Mindy executed an extended right hand turn, Electra yelled out from the back seat.
"Another Toyota!"
Stephanie scrambled around in her seat and she grinned as she recognised a twin to their truck and she could see Dave waving at them from his open window as he joined on a parallel course. Beside Dave sat Charlotte with Jamie and Becky in the backseat.
"Fancy meeting you out here!" Dave chuckled over the radio.
"Just having some fun," Mindy responded as she pushed her right foot down on the accelerator pedal. "Catch me if you can!"
"We are all going to die!" Electra groaned as she checked that her seatbelt was securely fastened.
Stephanie simply laughed.
The next day...
Saturday, July 8th
Alert, Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada
05:30 GMT-5 (10:30 GMT July 8th)
The early morning peace that Saturday was shattered as ten diesel engines roared to life.
The giant hanger doors slid open exposing all to the frigid sub-zero temperature and the never-ending daylight. Mindy would have preferred darkness but that was not due to arrive for another few months and they could not wait that long. The first eight vehicles, the four-wheel-drive Toyotas, headed out in single file on a heading of zero-zero-two degrees from true north – they were too far north to make use of magnetic compasses as the magnetic north pole was some 175 miles to the southwest of them in northern Canada. With a larger roar, the remaining pair of vehicles roared out onto the frozen ice pack which covered the Lincoln Sea. The ten-vehicle convoy kept a rigid fifty yard separation to allow for manoeuvring and so as not to follow another vehicle through a hole in the ice or into a crevasse.
It was a decidedly boring drive as there was nothing to see – no trees, no people, nothing but...
"I spy with my little eye, something beginning with..."
"If you dare say 's' and fucking 'snow' then I will fucking punch you!" Abigail, who was seated in the back of Tango Hotel One, said to Jamie, who sat in the seat beside her.
"I was going to say 'i' and 'ice'," Jamie retorted somewhat dismissively.
"Do I need to stop and come back there to slap you both?" Mindy growled.
"Abigail would just enjoy it," Stephanie sniped from the front passenger seat to Mindy's right.
Abigail knew better than to respond and annoy Mindy so early in the mission.
..._...
As for the two extra vehicles which trailed the convoy, they were beasts – twin beasts.
Each 7.6-metre long vehicle which stood 2.2-metres high and 2.2-metres wide was painted in a white and dark grey mottled colour scheme which allowed the military vehicles to blend into the icepack. Each fully amphibious all-terrain armoured vehicle was composed of two tracked bodies linked by a steering and drive mechanism. While the front body of each vehicle was the same, carrying up to four crew in relative un-comfort with four armoured hatches – two per side – and an armoured upper hatch, the rear bodies were not the same. The first vehicle sported a windowless armoured rear body which could carry eight fully-equipped troops strapped into inward facing seats and was fitted with an armoured rear hatch as well as an armoured upper hatch. The second vehicle's rear body consisted of a load bed with an armoured surround as high as the front body. Armoured sides could drop to reveal a HIAB crane mounted at the rear for recovery purposes. Both vehicles were powered by a single 5.9-litre in-line six-cylinder Cummins turbo diesel producing some 250-bhp via a six-speed forward and one-speed reverse automatic transmission.
They were being driven by the only two people available who were familiar with driving tracked vehicles.
Combined Strike Team (35)
Callsign: Tango Hotel One Vehicle: Toyota Hilux ATY44 (Open Flatbed)
Crew (4): Mindy Lizewski (Hit Girl), Stephanie Lizewski (Psyche), Jamie Lizewski (Rage), Abigail Murphy (Fury)
Callsign: Tango Hotel Two Vehicle: Toyota Hilux ATY44 (Open Flatbed)
Crew (4): Marinette Cheng (La Coccinelle), Dakota McFadden (Arbiter), Tommy Morgan (Splinter), Yvette Dubois (La Terreaur)
Callsign: Tango Hotel Three Vehicle: Toyota Hilux ATY44 (Fuel Carrier)
Crew (4): Dave Lizewski (Kick-Ass), Scarlett Radford (Pyrrha), Jake Bedford (Resolute), Olivia Kensington (Ajax)
Callsign: Tango Hotel Four Vehicle: Toyota Hilux ATY44 (Fuel Carrier)
Crew (4): Andrew Bedford (Allegiant), Craig Montgomery (Stripe), Owen Sterling (Termino), Eva Horton (Nox)
Callsign: Tango Hotel Five Vehicle: Toyota Hilux ATY44 (Fuel Carrier)
Crew (4): Chloe Bennett (Shadow), Saoirse Hella (Foxtail), Curtis Bennett (Trojan), Megan Williams (Wildcat)
Callsign: Tango Hotel Six Vehicle: Toyota Hilux ATY44 (Command & Control)
Crew (4): Cassie Bedford (Nemesis), Marty Eisenburg (Battle Guy), Abby Hunt (Hal), Eric Cunningham (Q)
Callsign: Tango Hotel Seven Vehicle: Toyota Hilux ATY44 (Enclosed Flatbed)
Crew (3): Mathilda Lando (Leon), Charlotte Perrin (Intrepid), Ruth Anders (Songbird)
Callsign: Tango Hotel Eight Vehicle: Toyota Hilux ATY44 (Enclosed Flatbed)
Crew (3): Lucy Ford (Piranha), Willow Harrison (Rampart), Freya Thompson (Obsidian)
Callsign: Victor Two One Vehicle: BvS 10 Viking with APC Rear Body
Crew (3): Patrick Miller (Astute), Ariana McKenna (Thunderstorm), Rachel Clarkson (Doctrina)
Callsign: Victor Two Two Vehicle: BvS 10 Viking with Recovery Rear Body
Crew (2): Jennifer Staite (Surgeon), Electra Haig (Rigour)
Saturday, July 8th
The Arctic
07:44 GMT-5 (07:44 GMT July 8th)
The initial drive was 'bouncy' – Stephanie's word – as the vehicles raced across the flatter sections of snow-covered ice.
The high-grade suspension ate up much of the uneven terrain but not every violation was absorbed by the shockingly expensive shock absorbers fitted to the custom vehicles. Indeed, the only members of the team enjoying a relatively smooth ride were those inside the two Viking tracked armoured transports. The enhanced suspension and the tracks combined to produce a relatively smooth ride when compared to the four-wheeled vehicles which struggled with certain obstacles while the Vikings happily breezed across the tops of the same obstacles much to the consternation of their wheeled colleagues!
Everyone knew that the ride would get worse the further they travelled on the icepack, but that was to be part of the risk and was unavoidable. It was to be a stop-start beginning as the wheeled vehicles raced over the smoother portions of the icepack but then were bogged down in icefields which required a cautious approach so as not to damage any of the vehicles on the massive blocks of ice which were as hard as steel and could tear into a fuel tank or destroy the chassis. At those times, only the driver remained in the vehicle as the crew attacked the snow and ice with pickaxes and shovels, hacking a way through for the convoy which would make use of the tracks created by the lead vehicle. As such, to ease the workload, the lead vehicle rotated once an hour, where possible, to allow driver and crew to rest for a seven-hour stretch by which time they would be back in the lead.
However, Mother Nature would intervene and at times it could take several hours to hack through just a mile of ice thus making very little headway.
..._...
Saying goodbye to those who remained at Alert, had not been easy.
However, they were out of harm's way, for the most part. Rodney and Marc would keep an eye on the younger members and they would operate a small command post gathering information and watching over the strike team with a massive wall map provided by the Canadian forces to plot their course and compile information on what was happening in the world's rapidly deteriorating situation. Mindy fervently hoped that they would not be simply cataloguing more deaths and injuries as the operation fell apart. There were so many parts to the overall operation involving so many countries and so many military units, all of which needed super-accurate coordination for the operation to come off as anything even remotely successful. The clock had begun almost a week earlier and could only be stopped by the use of a single codeword but Mindy would never stop the operation.
The operation had to succeed and had to be taken to its very end – the entire world depended upon it.
..._...
The whiteout quite literally came out of nowhere.
One minute they could see for miles and then over a period of just seconds, the weather deteriorated and they could barely see the end of the bonnet, let alone any further. Stephanie looked up at Mindy and she could see concern etched into her face. Surprisingly, they had slowed to a crawl and Stephanie had swiftly radioed that fact to the rest of the convoy so nobody got rear-ended. They were moving at barely ten miles per hour and they were bleeding speed until just a few minutes later, they ground to a halt out of a pure necessity to live.
"Leave your engines running," Dave warned everyone over the radio. "Or the oil will freeze and you won't be able to restart."
"At least the heaters will be on," Jamie pointed out.
"Fat lot of good they're doing!" Abigail groused as she huddled down into her thick winter jacket.
"Well, your grousing is heating up the car anyways," Mindy sniped back.
"Glad to be of help!" Abigail retorted miserably.
The vehicle shook as the storm raged beyond the glazing and it felt like they were very alone despite the knowledge that there were another thirty-one people within five hundred yards of them.
"Eat something," Jamie suggested as he passed out an energy bar to everyone.
"Thanks, Jamie," Stephanie responded as she eagerly ripped into the food desperate for sustenance.
Mindy enjoyed the peace and quiet as everybody chewed away on their snack. The weather was a little unnerving but she knew that they were ready for anything – almost anything – she hoped. She just wanted it to be over, one way or another, with every nuclear device identified and rendered safe. She wanted to go back to her life as a mother and a vigilante. She was fed up with being responsible for everything else which had been added to her plate over the past few months. Being a vigilante patrolling the streets and taking down the odd drug dealer was so safe and so much more fun than being pursued through steaming jungles, dry sandboxes, or frozen icepacks.
Not to mention that friends and colleagues had been maimed along the way, and it seemed that Vengeance had probably suffered the hardest of them all.
A few days earlier...
Monday, July 3rd, 2017
Great Kingshill, England
11:00 GMT+1 (10:00 GMT July 3rd)
The meet was set for eleven o'clock that morning in a small town some four miles or so to the north of High Wycombe.
It was a risk and one which Leo was very unhappy about taking but he had reluctantly accepted that they really had no choice but to seek help if they wanted to see Wanda back in one piece. Over an hour had been spent briefing Cara and Hahn on what to do under certain events as both youngsters would be with Rosa and Leo, however, Leo had hired a motorcycle and he would arrive at the site of the meet a good ten minutes ahead of the Range Rover and enter the meet from a different direction as he trusted nobody.
The location for the meet was an old farm which seemed to be not much more than a house, a few barns, and an abundance of derelict farm machinery and similar detritus. Rosa turned the Range Rover into the entrance, her eyes scanning left and right for trouble. Another Range Rover, very similar to her own was parked beside an out building and she saw a young girl waving her through a set of steel gates which would take her away from the main road and towards the back of the small farm. The Range Rover pulled in behind her as the young girl closed the gates. After fifty yards, a woman stepped out from behind a pile of scrap, her hands cradling a SIG Sauer MPX-SD assault rifle and waved for Rosa to stop. Rosa did so and she noticed the other Range Rover stop a dozen yards away and the driver's window lower to reveal a man holding an identical weapon.
Rosa took a chance and she pushed open her door. She noticed another young girl in the shadows, similarly armed – the children had to be Predators, Rosa reasoned, and members of Vengeance. She was outgunned, literally and metaphorically.
"You armed, Rosa?" the woman asked conversationally.
"I am – small of the back."
"Keep it there," the woman directed. "Your colleague is skulking around behind the hedge over there, I would suggest you call him over before he ends up with a bullet in the head."
Rosa scowled but she called out a codeword: "Icebox!"
Leo had heard the woman identify his location and he figured – correctly – that the helicopter orbiting the area was a Vengeance machine. After cursing violently, he stepped out from where he was hiding and moved towards Rosa.
"Hello, Leo," Rylee offered, her assault rifle aimed squarely at Leo's head.
"Fucking Rylee!" Leo growled. "Your little friends here as well?"
"You betcha!" Simon commented as he and Tanya made an appearance, their own weapons raised and aimed.
"Rosa, I hate you," Leo said quietly. "These three are trouble incarnate and they are best kept at arm's length if not further."
The woman chuckled as she listened to Leo.
"You know these reprobates, obviously," Keira commented.
"Luckily, I shipped out soon after they arrived but they caused enough crap for me to remember them – wasn't there a fourth?"
Leo saw the expressions harden and he saw Rylee's lip curl as her finger tightened on the trigger.
"Did I miss something?" Leo asked quickly.
"Not one word about her," Simon warned Leo.
"Okay," Leo agreed. "Now, back to business."
"I have Cara and Hahn," Lizzie said after she had peered inside the Range Rover.
"You lost Wanda," Rosa accused angrily.
"Actually, you dropped the ball there letting her roam alone around High Wycombe," Keira countered.
"That was my fault," Leo admitted. "Were your people hurt?"
"We have three in hospital with one not expected to make it," Keira conceded.
"Thank you for trying," Leo said. "What happens next?"
"We'll track down your wayward teen," Keira responded simply.
"How?" Leo persisted.
"We have the police checking through CCTV from the roads and motorways," Keira explained. "So far, we know which roads the BMW did not take and it appears that the vehicle probably never actually left the local area. She did not take the motorway but we may have had a sighting on the A404 heading south and then another on the A4094 below Wooburn moor. It looks like she was circling back on herself and we believe her to be somewhere around Wycombe Marsh."
"By 'she', you mean Miranda Frost?" Rosa clarified.
Keira raised an eyebrow.
"I roughed up a newsagent to get his CCTV," Leo admitted.
"We know about that," Keira commented. "We've suppressed the police investigation there, Leo. By the way, the guy was pissed to find that you had wiped his DVR – covered most of your tracks."
"Thanks," Leo replied.
"Now...," Rosa began just as Keira raised her left hand to Rosa and she turned her head away.
"We have incoming!" Keira announced loudly as she shoved Leo out of the way, her weapon now to her right shoulder and aimed to the east, past where David and Jordan sat in their Range Rover. "Behind the trees, hundred fifty yards."
Leo looked up and he saw a small black helicopter dive directly at the point indicated and then pull up at the last moment, buzzing whomsoever lurked there.
One hundred and fifty yards to the south...
It had been pure luck, really.
She had just assembled a team of hired guns to assist her when a snout had told her about an incident in the town and that Wanda Mannheim had been seen in the town centre before being abducted and pursued. Siobhan Longford had arrived in the town centre in time to see that little whelp, Leo fucking Evans, drive out of a road in the very Range Rover which they had been looking for. The rest had been simple. However, she had not counted upon air support which had obviously made her team as they had moved to ambush the small gathering – whom Rosa was meeting, Longford had no idea, nor did she really care. However, the fact that the eldest child, Wanda, had been kidnapped was something very interesting – it was plainly obvious that there was somebody else gunning for Rosa and the Mannheim children.
Longford remained behind the eight men who formed part of her team of hired guns and watched as they moved in towards the now-alerted Rosa, and her friends. She had no idea if the other children were there, but it made sense that they were – even better, she knew where their safehouse was. Rosa would die or go on the run, and she would fall very soon, either way. Tufts of grass puffed up ahead of her attack team and Longford realised that the people with Rosa were using suppressed weapons.
Had Rosa hired her own defensive team?
The farm...
Rosa leapt back into her Range Rover, where she started the engine just as Keira ran around the front of the vehicle and she climbed into the front passenger seat while Lizzie climbed into the back, shoving Hahn into the middle seat.
The Zetas dived into the backseat of the other Range Rover leaving Leo to run ahead and push open the steel gate while the two Range Rover's turned around and then raced out of the farm with Rosa in front and David behind. Leo sprinted down the road to where he had left his hired motorcycle. Rosa slowed enough for him to pull on his crash helmet and start his engine before she roared away, heading west, only to cover fifty yards before two BMW X5 4x4s sped out of a junction to her right and blocked the road ahead.
Rosa stomped on the brake pedal with both feet, wrenching the large 4x4 around, the giant tyres protesting at the abuse and leaving rubber trails upon the greying tarmac. Behind her, David threw the wheel over and he stomped on his own brakes as he fought to avoid a collision – the collision the previous day had been one too many; they did not need another one! David grimaced with relief as his front bumper just missed Rosa's rear bumper by mere inches but that simply meant that his Range Rover came under fire from the marauding BMW X5s as Rosa managed to put herself beyond his own vehicle. The armoured glazing and bodywork absorbed the bullets without affecting the vehicle's roadworthiness. Simon and Rylee took a moment to fire off short bursts at the enemy before they were forced to close the armoured windows for personal safety. Leo could see what was happening and he was able to move smartly out of Rosa's way as she darted up the street, her right foot buried deep in the plush carpet. Almost four hundred yards later, they approached an oblique T-junction and Keira began to issue orders.
"Take a left!"
"Huh?" Rosa queried.
"We have this scoped out – move it!" Keira ordered.
Rosa did, cutting up an Audi A4 which was forced to slam on its brakes as the two Range Rovers took the oblique left turn at speed on squealing Pirelli tyres. The fuming Audi driver stared after the rapidly vanishing Range Rovers for a few moments before he attempted to continue his journey but he stomped on his brakes yet again as a horn blared from his left and two BMW X5s raced past him closely followed by a motorcycle.
The high-powered vehicles raced up the normally-quiet residential street with the BMW X5s determined to overtake the Range Rovers, however, David had other ideas and he swerved his vehicle from side to side in several successful attempts to block the enemy from passing. Several times Rosa was forced to lean on the powerful horns as they raced along at sixty miles per hour – twice the speed limit for the street – as children, adults, dogs, a cat, and other vehicles attempted to make use of the same street. Many obscenities were shouted at – or after – the speeding vehicles and some people could be seen on their mobile phones either filming the chase or calling the police. Keira yelled out a warning as a child simply froze in the middle of the road and Rosa took out a wooden 'for sale' sign as she veered around the boy who could not have been much more than six years of age who was swiftly yanked from the street by an older child. Very soon, after just a third of a mile, a T-junction approached.
"Take a right," Keira directed.
Rosa did, being a little more cautious as she slowed and pulled out hoping not to collide with anything substantial. Subconsciously, Keira had seen the black helicopter race ahead of them and then drop out of sight some way ahead, but as they raced along the narrow hedge-lined route, they were forced to dodge pedestrians and other vehicles with Rosa dangerously overtaking a small van, the same dangerous manoeuvre being executed by the three other vehicles following. As they came to a straight stretch of road, the helicopter suddenly appeared, hovering thirty feet in the air over the road, the left side facing the oncoming vehicles. The drivers of the BMW X5s slowed, expecting an ambush once they laid eyes on the vicious-looking black helicopter which appeared to be unarmed. Then Keira turned to Rosa and she grinned.
"Stop! Stop! Stop!" she called out and Rosa did so, slewing the Range Rover to a halt with David stopping beside them. "Watch,"
Rosa and everyone else peered behind them as the two BMW's approached and the helicopter lifted upwards and dipped its nose, turning away and heading over some trees at speed. The two enemy 4x4s came forwards at speed but only for a moment as six explosions rang out almost simultaneously and the two unarmoured vehicles were visibly crushed by the directional explosions, glass exploding outwards in a cloud as steelwork was shredded and twisted. As for the softer flash and bone, that too was shredded and twisted into a blubbery mess. In just a single second, two expensive vehicles and four men had died in a most spectacular fashion.
"What happened?" Rosa asked quietly.
"Six M18 Claymore mines placed by the helicopter crew a few minutes ago and triggered remotely," Keira explained.
"But..."
"We're playing by their rules, Rosa – the proverbial gloves are off and anything goes. We're not fucking about with these people nor am I putting any of my people at risk of harm for any fucker!"
"Okay," Rosa said in full agreement with Keira's sentiments. "Where now?"
"We get you and the kids to safety while we track down Wanda."
"That was really cool," Cara commented from the backseat.
Hahn looked like he was going to be sick while Cara was grinning broadly. Lizzie laughed as she nodded.
"It was cool," she agreed.
Rosa just shook her head as she took her foot off the brake pedal and stomped on the accelerator.
Three days later...
Thursday, July 6th
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
The Doughnut, Cheltenham
13:22 GMT+1 (12:22 GMT July 6th)
On a subterranean sub-level two dozen feet below the surface, super computers crunched their way through enormous quantities of intercepted data.
In this case, one computer sub-system sorted through data intercepted by the GCHQ Bude satellite ground station sited on the north coast of Cornwall from where it would intercept civilian communications traffic travelling over various undersea communications cables. The sub-system was programmed to search for certain keywords or phrases which were of interest to the UK Government and the intelligence services but which originated from a telecommunications device within the United Kingdom be it landline or mobile. A phrase and a single word had been picked up and together, they had triggered further investigation: 'the girl is with me' and 'wonder'. The analytical subroutines had matched the phrase as a possible 'kidnap' alert and the word as matching the phonetic pronunciation of a name – 'Wanda'. Both together had triggered an alert which had surfaced on the computer of an operator on the second floor of The Doughnut and he swiftly identified and confirmed the alert as valid and he checked the routing which was marked with a message precedence of 'IMMEDIATE' and a security classification of 'SECRET' which indicated that the message was hot and needed to remain so until it reached its intended recipient which in this case was an office in the Ministry of Defence.
After confirming that the necessary interception information, such as who, where, and when, was available, with a single key press, the message was encoded, super-encoded, and then transmitted via dedicated fibre-optic cable the one hundred miles to the sprawling Ministry of Defence building in the very centre of the capital city.
Ministry of Defence Main Building, London
13:34 GMT+1 (12:34 GMT July 6th)
The messenger, a young female sailor, moved swiftly through the corridors and up two flights of stairs before she stopped outside an oak door and knocked loudly.
"Enter!" came a loud commanding voice.
The sailor pushed open the heavy door and she strode over to a large oak desk behind which sat a senior officer bearing the three gold stripes of a Royal Navy commander.
"Signal for you, sir!" the sailor said as she stood at attention before the officer. "Immediate!"
"At ease, Menston," Commander Craig Lawrence directed and he took the offered clipboard.
He lifted the top cover sheet and he signed the sheet of paper beneath before he took the buff-coloured envelope from under that sheet and examined the seal.
"Thank you, Menston. Dismissed."
"Aye, aye, sir!"
Once the door was closed, the commander checked again that the seal was intact and he slit open the envelope with a small knife. Inside was a collection of documents detailing a communications intercept complete with location of the call and the destination.
"Damn!" the man exclaimed when he had read through the initial cover sheet and understood what the message was about.
He received a dozen such intercepts over the space of an average week but this was the first to achieve a response so fast. Most importantly, it provided a location, narrowed right down to an actual address. Interestingly, the caller had used an encrypted device to make the call, but the encryption had been cracked some months previously allowing the call to be parsed after intercept. Of even more interest was the location of the recipient of the phone call – Washington D.C. of all places; the commander knew exactly what to do with that piece of information.
As for the location of the originator, the commander made an encrypted phone call of his own.
Meanwhile, up north...
Saturday, July 8th
The Arctic
12:50 GMT-5 (11:50 GMT July 8th)
The whiteout lasted three long freezing hours but then vanished like it had never been leaving crystal clear blue skies with incredible visibility.
It was also shockingly cold as they forced open the doors to their vehicles and clambered out onto the soft snow which had built up all around the stalled vehicles. Without much chatter, shovels appeared and everyone began to dig out their respective vehicles. It took a full hour for all of the vehicles to be able to move a few feet forward and onto flat(er) snow-covered ice. Mindy waved at the other vehicles and she received enthusiastic waves in return. She could not identify everyone she saw as all were fully covered up with no exposed bare skin in view to avoid the very high risk of frostbite. However, everyone appeared to be in high spirits as Mindy noticed a few snowballs being thrown at unsuspecting colleagues!
Everyone was very tired by the time the convoy began to make headway after having lost over four hours of time thanks to a single snowstorm. Actually, that was not all that bad as Abigail (and her big mouth) soon fell asleep, closely followed by her partner in crime, leaving just Jamie to converse with Mindy.
"Peaceful without the dubious duo, right?"
"Oh, yeah!" Mindy replied in full agreement with her son as she led the convoy ever northwards.
The scenery, while slightly boring, was still stunning and like nothing which Mindy had ever experienced before. It was the same for Jamie whose eyes were beginning to hurt as they spread wide with every new sight. The world was a fascinating place and he had endured two of the many extremes available. He had been scorched by the raging sun amongst the driest sands which pervaded everything – he was still finding sand in his equipment even in the Arctic and despite the heavy cleaning which everything had endured. He was glad to leave the constant thirst and oppressive heat far behind, along with the horrors experienced on those sands. He hated the desert and the boy had no desire to return to one anytime soon – if ever. But the Arctic was something else instead. A human could not survive for more than mere minutes without layer upon layer of clothing topped off by very thick jackets and trousers. It had been noticeably laborious to pull on all the layers and all that clothing was heavy. In the desert, sweating was a must to prevent yourselves from overheating while in the Arctic, sweating could kill you. The temperature difference between the two extremes was somewhere in the region of some sixty to seventy degrees Celsius and Jamie had felt very cold on their arrival in Greenland, let alone when they had ventured even further north. It was amazing to consider that they were no longer over land and that below them was simply miles of icy water descending into darkness.
Just a simple mistake, forget a glove, accidentally expose your face, for example, and you could lose that part of your body to frostbite very quickly. As for falling through the ice – that did not even bear thinking about. The desert was survivable and indeed they had survived the barren desert, but the Arctic was something else and Jamie was very worried that they would not all come back alive from the giant ice pack. His adoptive parents had almost died in a jungle hell-hole which had sapped most of what Hit Girl was from his adoptive mother and left her struggling but, of course, she had rallied and defeated those bastards who had captured their team in Cambodia. Against all the odds, though, they had pulled off the mission in a highly successful manner, rescuing the commander almost as planned.
So much had to go right for them all to finally go home. To go home back to their lives. Back to their families. Jamie just wanted to be normal (-ish) and enjoy life with his adoptive family and his big sister. His trained mind knew that the odds of everything going right were very, very slim indeed. But, he was never one to step back from bad odds – they would win through; he knew they would.
Somehow.
..._...
They stopped at six that evening having covered just nine kilometres in a little over twelve hours.
Mindy was not impressed by their progress but they were at the mercy of the terrain and at the mercy of the weather, both of which could change in the blink of an eye. Everyone was grumpy and tired after the frozen trek but before anybody could rest they had to laager the vehicles in a rough circle for security and then they needed to unpack and setup a number of four-person tents for the night. The tents were not something which amused the intended occupants.
"This sucks!" Abigail complained as she fought with one of those tents. "Remind me, Steph: why can't we just sleep in the truck?"
"Because the ice could break underneath the trucks and you would have no chance of escape as your sorry arse sank a few miles straight the fuck down!"
"Oh."
The tents were all arctic-grade and coloured white and grey to blend into the surroundings; indeed, from overhead, it would be difficult to identify the campsite as camouflage netting was strung over the larger of the vehicles and the trailers.
..._...
"You guys okay?" Mindy asked as she peered inside the tent.
"Yes, Mum!" Stephanie responded facetiously.
Mindy chuckled as she looked around at the other three girls.
"I'm good, thanks," Electra said as she snuggled down deep into her oversized arctic-weight sleeping bag.
"I'll survive," Yvette grinned as she too snuggled down for warmth.
"Me too," Ruth added with her own conspiratorial grin.
"Please behave, girls," Mindy suggested before she crawled backwards out of the tent and she zipped up the inner and outer doors.
It was cold, despite the hour and it was still as bright out as it had been throughout the entire day – apart from during the snowstorm, of course. Mindy pulled her scarf up over her exposed mouth and her goggles down over her eyes as she trudged through eighteen-inches of soft snow which was a bit of a struggle when eighteen-inches meant that the snow was over your knees. Mindy could hear laughter and she knew that some asshole was making height jokes at her expense.
"Fuck you, Jen!"
"Language, Mindy!" Rachel called out.
"Yes," Andrew added. "Children present!"
"Fuck the little b...!" Mindy retorted before she was cut off by Dave.
"Mindy!"
"Who's on first watch?" Abby asked.
"Me and Patrick," Lucy responded.
"Don't fall down any crevasses," Mindy quipped as she and Dave made for the tent which they were sharing with Jennifer and Patrick.
"Funny!" Lucy groaned as she headed towards one of the covered Vikings.
Abby Hunt watched as Dave and Mindy vanished before she solemnly headed for her own tent. Abby was worried about future events. She had already suffered torture and humiliation in the desert and those events haunted her dreams almost every night. It had almost reached the point where she was scared to close her eyes each night when she lay in her bed. She could see that grinning bastard as he had raped Dakota while in her nightmares it was her that was raped.
She hoped that the demons would not come to her that night as she was very tired.
..._...
For Eric Cunningham, seeing his colleague so morose when she was normally so happy and always smiling, was demoralising.
He knew that she had suffered in the Sahara Desert, but she had not said much about what she had endured. While their relationship had eased and they were not fucking at every opportunity, they were still very close. He watched as Abby silently smiled before she pulled off her jacket, boots, and over trousers and slid into her well-insulated sleeping bag. The other occupant of the tent were not exactly a bag of laughs, either, Eric reflected: Chloe was simply staring at the ceiling of the tent. However, Chloe did turn to face her best friend and they both exchanged a weak smile as they each considered their own demons.
"Night, Abby."
"Night, Chloe."
"Sleep tight, guys," Eric added.
The two friends closed their eyes and they both hoped that the nightmares would not return.