Operation Glitterberries

Chapter 01: Red Parrot Down

** I ** II ** III ** IV **

Disclaimer: Daria and associated characters are owned by MTV and Viacom. This is fan fiction written for entertainment only. No money or other negotiable currency or goods have been exchanged.

** I ** II ** III ** IV **

While looking for a tool to free herself from this new mess she muttered so low that only she caught her words. "Just another day for Melody Powers…"

She left the confusion she was feeling behind, it didn't matter that she had no idea why was she there; those kinds of doubts were best left after the combat was over. The first thing to do was to establish just what she was going to be fighting against, and what she had to fight with.

For starters physically she was in a pretty bad situation; she felt her ribs hurting, and they were hurting bad for the pain to even register, she was more than used to pain that would let most men crying in the ground. And her ribs weren't the only thing hurting, her body felt just as if she had fought hand to hand against one of the augmented Bolshevik's super soldiers attempts, and then drunk more vodka than a Red General during a veteran's reunion.

The lack of strength and coordination would make her escape an even more difficult proposition. And the light was too bright, a sure symptom of either drugs or a contusion, and by the lack of corresponding injuries in the head she would put her money on drugs. And why was she wearing glasses?

And why was her body not restrained? Last time she had been captured she had been tucked more tightly than a Thanksgiving Turkey, and even then they gave her an escort of an infantry platoon all for herself. The answer was literally at her feet. A set of hand and leg restrains like the ones used on the helicopter's other prisoners were in the floor. She must have been able to take them off just before whatever drug they gave her knocked her out.

And thinking about her freedom directed her attention to her fellow captives; for what she could see they were a middle age man, a similar aged woman, and a teen girl; they were all healthy and well fed, even if the girl was a little on the thin side it looked more like a question of diets and relative beauty than one of starvation and mistreatment; the man had a few bruises and scratches here and there, but nothing that suggested a long incarceration or systematic abuse.

The women were wearing comfortable outdoor clothes, nothing professional nor military issue, but she could see at least a couple of U.S. brands, mostly on the little girl; probably middle class, almost upper middle class. The man had only his underwear, but even then it was of an American label and of a higher quality that you could find in the Eastern Block, and he looked quite roughed and dirty; combined with the hair of the woman and the evidence in her own body and clothes it meant that they had been all captured in the woods.

As far as she could tell they were the normal American family that ate apple pie and enjoyed camping in the woods, and now all of them were crazier than an Arab terrorist, screaming nonsense nonstop. They had probably been tortured into insanity, by the lack of telling injuries with a combination of electric shocks and mind bending drugs. And by the smell of the woman at her side she had been raped. Repeatedly…

'I swear I'm going to make them pay!'

Then she focused once more on her surroundings, the pilots were sit in the front in a place were they weren't able to react in any meaningful manner against anything that she could do in the back. They also didn't seem to care, chatting merrily nonsense about… Rangers! Were they part of a U.S. Army outfit, NSA maybe? No, the grunts of the NSA were a lot more competent that these clowns, many of their mistakes would grant them a bullet in the back by any responsible superior. Therefore they were mercenaries, survivors of the conflicts in Asia and the Middle East, people who knew how to fly and fight but that weren't trained for Black Ops. In other words: Amateurs.

Even then, she had been captured by these amateurs, or the individual who hired them, and she is in a bad enough shape that escaping once they reach their base might be impossible. She needs to get out of here while they're on transit, and for that she needs an equalizer.

She felt something on her right pocket, something bulky. Eyeing the pilots she carefully slipped her hand and felt the general shape of a radio, maybe one of the Company's Satellite Ringers. This gave her hope in more ways than one; not only she had a way of communicating to the base for a Sitrep once she was free; but now she also knew that her captors ignored who they were dealing with or were incompetent in the extreme and with a little bit of luck maybe both.

Then she directed her attention to the black and long box her feet were on, just bellow her abandoned restrains. The general shape was one that she recognized, and if it was what she thought, then her escape would be a lot easier. Maneuvering with the boots she was using, and those were some of the worst footwear she could think for a mission, she opened the box, no, case, carefully not to attract the attention of her minders.

What she saw inside made her smile, just as if it was Christmas Eve in her childhood home in Massachusetts.

** I ** II ** III ** IV **

The Eurocopter AS355N TwinStar call sign Parrot2 had been in operation with the Oakwood County Emergency Response Unit for the last two years, and in all that time its main pilot had been captain (retired) John Abrams, former U.S. army UH-60 pilot during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. After been overlooking one field of mechanized death too many he decided to resign his commission as soon as that particular war was over and find a stable work in a place where he could enjoy his wife and sons in peace. The first opportunity for that arose in the county's emergency services, just in time to miss the mass deployment into Somalia, and the nasty Battle of Mogadishu.

From this chopper he had seen many things, acts of courage that would have been worthy of a statue if the world had been perfect, but here were paid with a beer at the end of the day. Situations so funny and incongruent that his on-board camera had been used a couple of times for a local comical news program called Sick, Sad World, and most people believed those were fakes.

And of course tragedies, those occasions were no matter how fast did they arrive and no matter how perfect their actions were, dead and suffering had been inevitable. Operations so sad that he just wanted to forget them altogether, and that on the bad nights he wondered if he could have skimmed an additional second, or if he could have flown a little closer to the victim, just a little…

When the 911 dispatch sent a request for a six seater chopper he had his ground crew add four seats instead of the usual two stretchers. Then once that was done he took alongside Henry Miles, his trustful EMT and unofficial copilot, a serious boy, but fast with the hands and quite good with a deck of cards. He only knew that there was a family in distress in the middle of nowhere and he needed to carry the cavalry to save the day.

Then he picked up the cavalry, four rangers at the Oakwood National Park Conservation Office; once they were in the air they explained the current situation to him in far more detail. A moron took his family deep in the woods of the Oakwood forest, following a trail built for the maintenance of the cell towers that crossed the whole forest and wasn`t supposed to be used by the visitors, and somehow three of them had managed to get high on hallucinogen mushrooms.

They expected that the afflicted tourists would be wandering deep in the woods, and that they would need as much support in the air as we could give before running out of fuel. With a little bit of luck they would be able to rescue the eldest daughter and maybe one of the others before darkness. Additional reinforcements would be dispatched by land, but those wouldn't be able to reach the camp for hours.

He had been as impressed as the rest of the hastily assembled team by the brunette's accurate directions and the use of a smoke beacon to mark her chosen Landing Zone; most people in distress just limited themselves to waving with their hands in the middle of a forest with zero visibility and expected to be seen by men flying hundreds of feet from the ground. And in the way his new buddies, the park rangers, had told him just how close to impossible was to keep three different persons who were flying higher and harder than an Air Force F-16; for that little slip of a girl to herd them for more than two hours was unbelievable.

He kind of wished that today had been the first time he had seen a man in underwear go berserk, or even his third, but he had been in air support missions for the police for long time now, and many of those had been on whorehouses raids. The only novel thing about it was that this time he had been on the ground smoking and not just pointing a searchlight and laughing at the poor uniformed guys chasing them.

Putting himself between the nutso and the girl had been natural, and it would have probably been painful if the girl hadn't taken control of the situation herself by hitting two sticks together and talking, not screaming, just talking some sort of nonsense. He didn't even had time to think that she had gone bananas too before watching the man go from screaming fury to a gibbering mess in a second, and action that was enough to convince him that a child so small keeping her bigger and meaner relatives controlled and safe wasn't lucridious, it was just the natural order of things.

But now the dangerous part of the mission was over, all the members of the family afflicted by the glitterberries, and the girl swore that the name came from her sister's mouth not hers, were strapped to their seats so hard than Miles had to loosen the straps a little to prevent gangrene. The only remaining sane member on the other hand was so tired that not even the racket from the rotor stopped her dreams.

He just loved happy endings.

"Do you want to go to the Drunken Dog when we arrive? I bet we can get some free beers if we tell our story of how four big bad rangers were bested by a naked pirate and his wrench, and then their hides were saved by an eight year old girl with a stick?"

"Eh? He wasn't naked, just in underwear; the woman is his wife, not a wrench; and the girl is sixteen not eight; and more important, she didn't save them, she saved US."

"Nah, we didn't need to be saved, once the loon had come within arms reach I would have taught him what does a blanket party means in the real army. And I bet if we tell it my way it will not only sound better, but that we won't pay a cent in the whole night."

"I guess you're right, and it might improve the chances of me finding some company for the weekend, so wh…"

It was then when Abrams saw in his peripheral vision a thin hand stab Miles in his arm with something, something white and red: Miles swiftly retired the object, but before he could identify it the effects made themselves obvious, he was trying to speak, but for some reason no sound came from his mouth. Despite the fact that there wasn't any blood and the wound was as far as possible from an organ or anything vital, in just a few horrifying seconds his eyes just rolled and he was down like a puppet with his strings cut.

"If you make any unnecessary move I will kill you."

The voice that said that was cold, colder than the Rangers, with Capital R, he picked up in the middle of the desert after playing games of cat and mouse with the Republican Guard. Almost instantly he himself felt a needle like object almost piercing his flight suit.

Then he finally realized what the object that had been on his partner arm. A dart, a goddamned tranquilizer dart that those idiotic rangers left inside his chopper after Miles prohibited using them on the family; and the morons had to left them behind, they just couldn't be bothered to carry those with them. 'I hope that Yogi eats those rangers in the way back,' he mercilessly thought.

"Tell me where in world are we, and which are the coordinates of your base. If you do then you may get to see another day."

And now he had the eldest daughter of the family on his six where he couldn't defend himself, the supposedly sane one, menacing him with enough juice to stop a crack addict in his tracks; and on the one place where those darts were as lethal as a machine gun.

"Look, Daria right? Why don't we talk about this? Your parents and sister need medical attention, you too need help. And if I fell asleep with a tranquilizer dart then I will not be able to take them to the hospital. So why don't you calm down and lower that dart before someone gets hurt? Please?"

"As if I would believe the words of a dirty traitor for even one single second; where did the commies get you from? Fifth Air Force, Air America, or maybe you decided to turn on your comrades rather than expend a night on the Hanoi Hilton?"

It was useless, she was talking nonsense. Before he could say something else he managed to see her face in the rear-view mirror, and her dilated pupils were more than enough to freeze his blood. She had the crazies, the glitterberry crazies!

"Look kid, you ate some hallucinogen berries in the forest, they took longer to have an effect, but now you're having delusions. I'm not a traitor, I proudly served twelve years in the army, and I've served another four in the county's Emergency Response Unit. Please, now I'm going to call to the base and tell them that I'm taking you wherever you want."

"So that they sent a couple of Migs to blow us out of the sky? No, give me the coordinates and then land in the first clearing."

He decided to do as she told him, a fight in the middle of the air could easily be fatal, even if she used her hands instead of one of those thrice cursed darts. While he descended to a more reasonable altitude he kept talking. Maybe he could gain her trust long enough to slap that toy out of her hands?

"I promise you that no one will hurt you in any way whatsoever. But about your question, we're roughly in the border line between the counties of Oakwood and Lawndale. Look, I'm going to land th…"

He didn't felt the needle penetrating as much as the creepy feeling of its payload entering his body. He had scant seconds before whatever sleep inducing concoction they filled the dart with would make effect so he dived as steep as the machine would allow him, aiming for the nearest clearing he could see. Worst case scenario only the people inside the craft would die.

Then came stabilizing the helicopter for the landing, a basic maneuver that can be performed after a few hours in the simulator; even completely losing the sense of balance wouldn't impede a pilot from landing, that's why Jimmy Doolittle had invented the navigation by instruments. Unless of course the sense of sight is lost midflight, and with it both the instruments readings and the ground itself. Now he could only put his faith in his memory and his instincts to perform a crash landing instead of just a crash, even as his hands felt numb and unresponsive and the engine chocked from the hard maneuvers and the extreme handling of the throttle and the collective lever to reduce their air speed at the last second.

By the time they hit the ground he was completely unresponsive.

** I ** II ** III ** IV **

When the world stopped moving and the G-forces finally stopped pushing her from one side to another Melody groaned; even if her own voice was covered by the desperate cries of the rest of the passengers. This wasn't her worst air accident by far, but every crash was horrible in its own unique way, from the anticipation of knowing that your Cessna is going to crash in the middle of Cambodia and being unable to do nothing about it to the way the peace suddenly shattered when on a routine high altitude transport you're hit by a Surface to Air missile of a supposedly friendly nation. To know that this particular incident was her fault just made it worse.

She had screwed up. Just as she had expected the pilot had been quite cooperative when under the treat of being given a place in the elevator to hell and he was complying her orders and descending to find a proper place to land, but then her balance had failed her and she had pushed the needle hard enough for it to unleash the pharmaceutics inside. Even when she had just as fast removed the dart, the quantity injected had been more than enough to knock out the pilot.

Luckily the man, while a pathetic Black Ops soldier was contracted for his magnificent skills at piloting; and in a maneuver as complex as she had ever seen he had done an extreme dive to reduce the altitude and then somehow bleed the speed and landed safely against all odds; and only in the span of about ten seconds or less.

Even then the roughness of the landing was enough to let her ribs loudly complain once more, and she was sure that she would be dead with a broken neck if she hadn't been properly secured by her seatbelt, for that matter the rest of the prisoners were still alive, and by the acrid smell at least one or more had soiled themselves, thanks to their own sets of restrains. But since they were still crying and screaming she considers them healthy enough, as least when ignoring the torture they already suffered. Likewise the pilots in the front had survived the crash, not even having the decency of saving her the effort of killing them herself.

Having little time to waste she unhooked herself from the seatbelt and immediately opened the door to escape the downed craft only taking the clothes on her back and the black box that contained the tranquilizer rifle that her enemies used to capture her.

Once she was outside she was able to rein her reasonable impulse of running to the nearest cover, and besides there wasn't one close enough in case the helicopter blew up anyways, and instead hastily examined at the helicopter to evaluate the damage. I wasn't too bad, its skids were crushed, and its tail was damaged by the impact, plus the frontal windshield was cracked, but there wasn't the characteristic smell of leaking fuel and not a single spark anywhere. It could probably be able to fly again if there wasn't any structural damage.

She would have as much time as needed to gather provisions and then torch it.

It was a shame that she couldn't wait until the animals that captured her were awake before doing it. At it was she would have to cut the throats of their victims to prevent a horrible death while those two slept like babies. If there was even the slightest chance of survival she would take them with her, at least the young girl, but with their minds on their current state, the commies would capture them all in a matter of hours, and the only outcome would be another round of torture followed by a bullet, if they were lucky. The only humane thing to do was to end it quickly and as painlessly as possible.

While thinking of her next movement she hasn't been idle, she had gone and checked on the sleeping pilots, measuring their necks for the moment she could find a rock sharp enough. Just to be safe she turned off the engines, an action that was far more complex that she thought possible by her inability to find the ignition. As a fairly competent pilot of both powered aircraft and gliders she should have been familiar enough with the cockpit to find it instantly, but for some reason she couldn't recall her training at all.

While searching for the ignition she emptied their pockets in an attempt to find some more clues of what had happened. The older man had in his wallet a few bills and couple of photos, the first one of him with a woman and two children a little younger than the teen in the back. How could he do this and still went home with a family? The other picture was of an aircraft crew in front of a military helo painted in desert camouflage. It was evidence that he served in the Middle East, maybe in Afghanistan against the reds, probably where they recruited him. The younger only had a few more bucks and a couple of condoms that she kept just in case, those were vital to protect a gun from the climate.

Then she checked for additional clues and gear in the baggage compartment, in there she found a duffel bag filled with clothes a little too small, probably from the girl, a surprisingly well supplied first aid pack, optimized for trauma and once more her knowledge failed her when trying to identify the purpose of some of the drugs and devices in the pack. She took some dressings and bandages, Paracetamol and all the codeine in the kit, even some Lidocaine gel was added after hastily rubbing a little on her chest to relieve the pain; a utility knife which she let at arms reach in one of her pockets, some disposable gloves also went to the bag, and smelling salts, those were used frequently in her line of work. From another compartment she extracted a flare gun with three white flares. It wasn't a GOOD (Get Out Of Dodge) kit but it would do.

Then she realized something; unlike what she would have expected from a soviet craft, the lettering of the copter wasn't written in Cyrillic, neither the language was Farsi, or glyphs characteristic from Asian languages; it was written in plain old English. In any other circumstances she would have assumed that it was an attempt of hiding their operations under the flag of an American or British organization, but then why use the Oakwood's Emergency Response Unit.

A unit like a county's ERU wasn't capable of doing nothing on its own, they couldn't cross state borders, much less used for contraband, they didn't have the flight priority for cover missions or the freedom of movement to go where they please, and even a state trooper would laugh any attempt of them to muscle their way, an helicopter working for a organization like that would raise suspicions in almost every activity imaginable other than SAR, and even then someone would realize that there were more choppers than usual in the air.

The only thing that made sense is that it probably was a local operation, therefore the pilot had told her the truth and they were somewhere in the middle of the U.S. it meant that there was hope for the family. Now she could call for the cavalry and they would be able to take care of them while she worked into unraveling this particular mystery.

She then checked the phone, it battery was half charged so she tried to call the local office of the Farm, a place masquerading as a Pizza King.

"Pizza King, where you reign over all flavor. How can I serve you?"

"Good afternoon, I want an EBA, and a diet coke."

"An EBA, could you repeat your order please?" Melody frowned, that wasn't the correct code phrase.

"An EBA, Everything but Anchovies, are you sure do not have it on the menu?"

"No sorry, do you want something else." The voice on the other side sounded annoyed

"Could you pass me the manager; I really would like an EBA." In theory her call would be transferred to a secure line.

"Damn morons, stop doing prank calls!" When the attendant hanged the phone Melody felt as if they had hanged her from the Kremlin. She hadn't said any of the pre-established code phrases, neither for communicating her with the agent on guard nor to indicate that something was wrong. Even on the case of enemy action, they would have tried to keep the line open as long as possible to track the call and limiting her movements.

She decided to throw caution to the wind and introduce a long, long string of numbers in the phone, thirty seven digits to be precise, so different from the current numbering for national and international calls that a monkey with a dial could have a better chance of stumbling into it that a human ever could. The code would also bypass the phone companies altogether, connecting her to the main headquarters of the Farm.

"This number does not exist, please check the number or call to our offices…"

The HQ wasn't responding, and that could only mean that either Nomad Protocols were on operation or that there wasn't anyone left to talk. Either was a synonym of an attack on intelligence facilities in the Continental United States, in other words, an act of war.

'And that means that I need to get out of here as fast as I can.' She thought, and then added a little louder. "But first I need to deal with some loose ends."

The family, that until now had been talking amongst themselves, more like rambling, about dogs, wishes and the moon, or something like that grew silent without any prompting when she opened the front passenger door and with a sharp movement took the head of the young man, Miles his badge said, and left his neck exposed. The other hand with the knife ready.

He was the one that probably had raped the woman, and therefore he was going to be the first to die. Now she just needed to perform a single, clean, cut. Like dozens of times before, just turning the artery to the side to avoid splatter and…

"NO, KIDDO, NO!"

"How's the old self-esteem coming, kiddo?"

"My self-esteem teacher says that being addressed all my life with childish epithets like 'kiddo' is probably a key source of my problem." Her remark was done with both sarcasm and a monotone that betrayed no emotions.

"Really?" His dad sounded sincerely worried about it.

"No."

"Isn't she great? She's the greatest." He laughed as her joke, even if he wasn't sure she was joking.

Where did that memory come from?

"No! … No! … No! … No! … No!"

"nonononononono"

"Noooooeww"

They were trying to stop her, these men tortured them to the point they weren't able to say their names, and they wanted to stop her.

"I won't kill him" It was their right to decide, not hers.

"Suck it Mad Dog! I'm better than you!"

She still couldn't let them free so she used her own restrains to hold the veteran pilot tight, and then some cables that she removed from one of the maintenance doors to tie his partner on the hands legs, and as painful as she could from the neck, using a hook for IV drops to not quite hang him.

"I call for help as soon as I reach the road. I'm sorry I can't do more."

Their landing zone was a beautiful flower field with a clear vision of about a mile and not a single man made structure nearby, farther away a hill masked their position from prying eyes. And if her calculations were accurate from what she had seen from the chopper's windows, a road was beyond it.

She would arrive to the road in about thirty-forty minutes at a brisk pace.

** I ** II ** III ** IV **