Chapter XXIX: Disunity
1732hrs, 27 November 2013, Somewhere in Unity State, South Sudan/Sudan Border
"It's hard to look back on some parts of human history, because when heard about injustice, we cared, but we didn't know what to do. Too often, we did nothing." Jason Russell, Kony 2012.
"Throw the rules out the window, odds are you'll go that way too." Max Payne.
"SAILOR Mercury, come in, over."
"I hear you Artemis, for Christ sake, I can hear you." Amy was still pissed off at the incident in India despite the rest; it could have gone a lot better in their handling of the situation. Here she was, in the field again, having to unlearn urban combat and relearn fighting in the open. At least Artemis and Luna were on board in her skepticism of things that were going on with Nakanishi. They were lucky that the 108th SIDF was still getting its act together and despite their outstanding performance in destroying the terrorists, their investigative techniques left something to be desired.
She and Mina had still not told any one of the meeting that was supposed to be happening within two weeks, and they didn't have to heart to say anything to the other three members. They were so…it was something was going on that nobody could control. Raye and Serena bickered constantly, Lita cleaned her room obsessively, Mina sat in her room and sung stupid J-Pop songs all the time and Amy recited poetry by Matsuo Basho. This obsessive-compulsive behavior was temporarily treated with Adderall and some other nootropics but it was only a temporary fix.
"Target is ahead, located about one kilometer to the north of your position," Mina said over her radio.
"I have the target in sight, standby."
Amy lifted the binoculars to her eyes and peered to see what the target represented; a MP5-PDW lay by her side, just in case. She was wearing some old chocolate chip desert camouflage, like the rest of the team as they were operating in a semi-arid climate; no need to wear that stupid ACU stuff that the US Army had adopted then dropped in favor of Multicam.
The village was nothing special, several thatched huts along with a few concrete buildings, with a small wooden church in the center. This area was somewhat Christian with a nice dose of the local animist religion mixed in; A church here and there was not an uncommon sight. Supposedly, there had been a series of attacks on several Japanese owned pipelines in the area, and maybe the Chinese had something to do about. Of course, just like the SAILOR team, they couldn't be personally responsible so they used proxies, hiring out some local thugs or soldier wannabes to go blow up pipelines through South Sudan that led through the other Sudan, toward the Red Sea.
"See it?" Artemis said over the radio, looking at the satellite feed coming in on his computer. He sniffed a little bit and took a sip of coffee, wondering what the hell was going on with the SAILOR team as of late. They had been snippy, argumentative, forgetful and constantly cut him off on the radio nowadays; a few months ago, that wouldn't have been a problem.
"I see the dammed target, Artemis!" Amy hissed into the radio. "I heard you the first goddamned time, so you don't have to repeat yourself unless needed!"
"Sorry." Artemis gave a look to Luna at her workstation. She just shook her head and went back to micromanaging the other couple of girls, who were making their way slowly to the village.
"I'm running a scan now," Amy announced to the rest of the team. "Standby."
Amy started doing a scan the village ahead of her, combined with the live satellite feed they were getting from that KH-13 "borrowed" from the CIA. The village was hardly significant, made only a point of interest because there "might" be some insurgents camping out there that had been attacking the aforementioned pipelines.
Not today though.
"Whoa!" Amy's HUD lit up with red dots, almost blanketing the entire village with the indication that there were many hostiles there.
"Artemis, are you getting this?" she said excitedly over the radio.
"Yeah, I'm seeing a whole bunch of movement down there from the satellite." Artemis put his coffee cup down and sat up in his chair. Whatever was going on, it was going to be exciting.
"I'm sending it to everyone in the group here." Amy transmitted the information to Mina, who was on a small ridge five hundred meters toward the village and armed with a M24 Sniper Weapon System, chambered for the powerful .338 Lapura Magnum cartridge.
"Shit, that's a lot of targets," SAILOR Venus replied. "I'll keep my weapon on standby."
Lita, Raye, and Serena were double timing it on the main road leading to the unnamed village when Amy sent them the information.
"Oh, this is going to be so much fun," SAILOR Mars said with glee. She would finally get to use the flamethrower in real combat; all of their other missions had to be more discreet but not this one. An M16A4 with a M203 grenade launcher was slung by her side, ready to go when the flamethrower was out of fuel.
SAILOR Jupiter was carrying a M240 7.62mm general purpose machine gun like it was nothing, ready to use it when the time came.
"That's a nice target rich environment," she commented, hefting the machine gun from her shoulder to the ready position. "Glad I brought this."
SAILOR Moon was carrying her compact M4 CQB Receiver, and cursed not bringing something more heavy. At least she had Raye and Lita to pick up the slack. "Thanks for the information, Amy. We are preparing to assault the village in five minutes, standby for contact."
She focused in on the village, and took a deep breath in, inhaling the dust and the soot in the air from some of the burning campfires.
Something wasn't right though.
"SAILOR Mercury, I see women and children in the village," Mina reported. "They have designated as hostile, over."
"Hold on, let me see." Amy lifted the binoculars to her eyes, but there was a lot of dust in the air, reducing her visibility. She coughed, trying to remove some of the dust from her throat.
The desertification of the area had really made an impact, and the normally lush areas of South Sudan were slowly become dry and dusty due to soil erosion, farming, and poor land management.
"All units, I am deploying the UAV." Amy picked up an unpacked a RQ-11 Raven that she had brought along and tossed it into the air, letting the GPS guidance take over. "Receiving video feed now."
The UAV flew over the village recording the inhabitants, looking for anything hostile. Unfortunately, it also set the record for shortest UAV flight ever when a burst of heavy machine gun fire brought it down.
"Oh shit!" This was not turning out very well…at least it was just a UAV.
Amy by this point, had traversed the terrain to Mina's position on the small ridge.
"Glad of you to join me," Mina said when Amy plopped down next to her, winded slightly from the 500 meter run.
"Did you get anything from the video feed?"
"No, there wasn't enough time to get a proper analysis. And the wind is kicking up again. Artemis, are you getting anything?"
"That's a big negative, SAILOR Mercury. Satellite is getting kind of fuzzy on this end, probably interference some solar flares or something like that." That was complete bullshit; the CIA was wondering who the hell was taking up all of their bandwidth and was trying to cut whoever was using their satellite.
"Dammit," Amy said. She looked again through her binoculars; there were women and children in the village, but now she could see some men running about with rifles in hand.
"I don't understand," Amy said confused, trying to refresh her HUD. Everyone still came up as a target. "Why has everyone been designated hostile?"
Several more men came out, this time, lugging an ancient PM M1910 machine gun that had been probably used in the First World War, of all places. The Lee-Enfields that the men carried also were also very old.
"Why…" Mina was also confused by the situation. "Amy, you have to call off the strike by the others. These aren't terrorists; they're just protecting their homes!"
It was too late though.
"This is SAILOR Moon, we are going in! Cover us!" Serena charged forward, flanked by Lita and Raye.
"Wait!" SAILOR Mercury yelled to no avail.
What followed was something out of a nightmare.
SAILOR Moon, SAILOR Jupiter and SAILOR Mars had spread out, covering a one-hundred meter line of fire in front of them. Several of the village militia were now firing their archaic bolt action rifles, the rounds skipping off of the arid ground and zipping past the attacking team. Mina saw several men get the M1910 machine gun into a firing position.
"I'm sorry," she muttered to herself. SAILOR Venus pulled the trigger, sending a .338 round into the gun itself and destroying it. Shrapnel wounded the crew of the gun, who staggered about.
"Venus, kill those bastards!" SAILOR Moon yelled. They had closed to within fifty meters of the village. Raye opened up with her flamethrower, dousing several people with her flames. SAILOR Jupiter had set up her machine gun and had started firing indiscriminately into the village, at all the targets marked on her HUD. The targets that included women and children.
"No…no…" Amy said. "Guys, please, fall back!"
Her calls went unheeded.
SAILOR Venus saw a woman's head turn to a bloody pile of goo due to SAILOR Jupiter's machine gun fire. People were being cut down left and right, and several more were running toward the village church.
"Mina, for fuck's sake, open fire!" SAILOR Moon yelled into her radio. She fired from the hip into a hut, then tossed a grenade in just to be safe.
"I got these guys!" SAILOR Mars shouted with glee. Her flamethrower was torching everything in sight, people, livestock, houses…it was all burning so beautifully.
More and more of the survivors started to run into the church, having been driven away from the other part of the village by the onslaught.
"I have to stop them," Amy said quietly. "Mina, cover me!"
"There's nothing to cover!" Mina said back. All gunfire had ceased mere seconds after the SAILOR Team had begun their attack; most of the defenders had been killed in a hail of gunfire or engulfed in flames. There was no opposition now.
"Then come with me! Hurry!" SAILOR Mercury and Venus scrambled up from their position and started to run full tilt toward the smoldering ruins of the village.
"Die. Die. Die! Die! DIE! DIE!" SAILOR Mars was completely unstoppable at this point; having become so detached from her other comrades that she was in berserker mode. She was almost at the church now, where the remaining villagers had barricaded themselves inside in a last ditch effort to protect themselves.
For a second there, SAILOR Mars stopped her flamethrower as she looked at the church. It was a simple wooden one, one room for the worshippers and an altar at the front of it. She could hear the screams and the pleading from the people inside there, and for a moment thought of not torching the entire place.
Then she remembered her dad and the years of stupid Catholic school. Going to mass, being yelled at by the strict nuns, having to go to Mother Superior's office more than once, hail Mary, full of grace, hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, rosaries, Nuns are not Mikos for the last goddamn time, no, I don't take mass, please, leave me alone, go away, yeah I'm popular here but I don't like it here, I hate you dad, I hate you dad, I hate you dad, I HATE YOU DAD I HATE YOU DAD I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU!
She depressed the trigger and for two seconds, emptying the remaining fuel pack on her back, spraying the entire church with napalm.
The church immediately burst into flame, the dry wood catching on fire and killing everyone inside from either the heat, flame, smoke inhalation, or the church collapsing around them.
"Oh God." Amy and Mina had finished running from their position to catch up to the rest of the SAILOR Team.
"What…what have you done?" Mina said in a hushed tone, watching the church come down. The smell of burning flesh filled the air, mixed in with the foul stench of death from the people killed outside. Bodies littered the village, twisted and contorted, blown apart into pieces, snapped like twigs during a hurricane.
"They were targets!" Mars shot back. "They were the enemy!"
"They weren't the enemy!" Amy screamed, waving her submachine gun that she was carrying around in the air, in complete violation of weapons safety. "I was trying to tell you that, but you guys went in there and blew everything up!"
"They shot at us!" SAILOR Moon retorted.
"You didn't have to blow up an entire fucking village!" Mina yelled. "We're no better than the people that have been killing each other here for the last decade or so!"
"But they were the enemy!" Mars understood what Amy and Mina were getting at, but she didn't want to believe it. "I saw them!" Tears started to stream down her face. "I saw them…"
"Saw them do what?!" Amy asked her. "What did they do?"
"They…they…" Raye dropped the now empty flamethrower off her back and collapsed on the ground.
"Serena, do something!" Lita pleaded with SAILOR Moon. She had been completely silent during the exchange of words between Amy, Mina and Raye.
"Thanks, illustrious leader for making such a decisive decision!" Amy snarled at her, diverting her rage from Raye to Serena.
"Look," Serena tried to say calmly. "There has to be a reason for this. Why was the entire village marked as a target, Amy?"
Amy glared at her, but could offer no solution. "I don't know. I'll get on the horn with Artemis, Serena, talk to Luna and ask her what the hell is going on."
Artemis was watching the entire thing go down, safe in his hanger/office and was impressed with the efficiency of the SAILOR Team in taking out the targets. He had not been listening to the radio chatter, frustrated with Amy cutting him off all the time, he had temporarily muted the audio channel, telling himself he would turn it back on went the mission was over.
"Nice job out there guys," he said nonchalantly commented after seeing them congregate in the center of the village.
"What the fuck are you talking about?!" Amy yelled into the radio. "We just wiped out a defenseless village full of old men, women and children!"
Artemis sat up in his chair and looked harder at the screen. "I don't understand, SAILOR Mercury."
"Artemis," SAILOR Venus said to him, very calmly. "Did you designate the targets beforehand?"
"That a negative," he replied. "I just uploaded the coordinates and told where the KH-13 should be looking. The enemy strength was unknown, but assumed to be high, like we said in the briefing."
"Are you absolutely sure?" Amy continued. "Please, because there's not a single insurgent here, I'm looking at the bodies of twenty middle age men here that barely put up a fight before we killed them."
"I…I don't understand," Artemis said. He looked over at Luna. She also had a very confused look on her face.
"SAILOR Moon," she asked. "What do you mean, went berserk?"
"Mars went absolutely batshit insane and burned down a church with noncombatants," Serena said, looking at Raye sitting there, crying her eyes out. Lita was down there, trying to comfort her. "We're trying to make sense of this situation. Everything was designated a target, and we reacted appropriately."
"Standby," Luna said. She did a systems diagnostics check, her fingers flying over the keyboard, typing in commands in the command prompt. The system had only been accessed by her, Artemis and Col. Iwasaki, as it was supposed to be. But there was a huge spike in activity five minutes before the assault went down when Amy had scanned the area for targets. There appeared to be a remote user that had been granted root access to all of the operating systems that the SAILOR Team used.
"I have an unknown user here," Luna stated. "The system was accessed five minutes prior to the assault, and designated all noncombatants as hostile enemies."
"Understood," Serena replied, although she didn't really. "Amy…"
"Somebody has remote access to our command and control systems," Amy said. "We've been compromised."
"That is correct," Luna said, monitoring the information on her end. The user was long gone, hidden behind seven proxies and god knows what else, probably bouncing his or her packets all over the globe in a wild goose chase that would probably lead to an internet café in some developing country.
"That's helpful," Amy muttered.
"Is there anything else?" SAILOR Moon asked Luna.
"Negative, I have no further information about the developing situation. Standby."
Meanwhile, Artemis had pulled the satellite feed out to cover a wider area. To the south, he saw long dust trails, emanating from another remote area in Unity State.
He tightened the view up, focusing on the strange dust trails.
"Guys…hey guys! Problems!"
"What is it?!" Serena snapped. "Do you have anything useful to say?!"
"I have ten…no fifteen…twenty technicals headed toward your position at high speed, unknown combatants in vehicles."
"Do they have radios?" Amy asked. "Try to disrupt their communications, we need time to get out of here!"
Luna looked at the area to see if there were any portable radios in use. There were.
"I'm going to try to jam their frequencies," she said. Luna sent a short, garbled radio message that would clog up their radios for at least a couple of minutes.
"The attacking force is losing cohesion," Artemis reported. The satellite feed had gone a bit wonky, but had recovered, showing the vehicles weaving all over the place now, trying to get reorganized.
"SAILOR Moon, you have about fifteen minutes before hostile force approaches your position, recommend that you get to the RV point for extraction." The extraction point was more of the "self-service" variety; a couple of Land Rovers Defenders had been tucked away in a gully a kilometer and a half north of their position.
"I don't think we can make it in there in ten minutes," Serena said into the radio nervously. "We're going to need some support."
"I'll see what I can do," Luna replied. "Artemis, are there any allied units in the area?"
Artemis did a quick search for any units that might be of use.
"Negative, the nearest friendly unit is at least one hour away in Djibouti," Artemis said.
"Uh…no thanks," SAILOR Moon replied. It didn't seem to be a good place to be cracking jokes, but when you had twenty technicals bearing down on you and faced with the horrifying fact that you might have participated in a massacre, some humor was going to be involved.
"Ha ha, very funny," Artemis said. "Get moving."
"Roger."
Lita strong armed Raye into getting up, and started running toward the extraction point, as marked by Amy.
"Mina, can you get those guys to slow down or something?" Serena asked her as they approached the small ridge that Mina had set up her sniper rifle; it was still there.
"Fine, I'll get on it. You'd better come back and get me though." Mina and Amy flopped down on the ground and trained their weapons toward the rising dust cloud in the distance.
"Give me a target," Mina asked Amy. "And don't scan for anything, I don't want to shoot more innocent people today."
"Agreed, I'll look for targets manually and highlight them when I see em'."
Amy retrieved the binoculars from where she had left them on the ground and trained them toward the south.
"Hostile force is approaching at thirty kilometers per hour," Artemis stated. "Coming from the south."
"Could you be any more helpful?" Amy snarled into the radio.
"Just trying to help."
Amy exhaled, smelling the burning town and the stench of death in the air. "Thanks Artemis," she said, switching her tone and trying to remain calm after what had just happened. "Can you tell me the size of the force now?"
"Still unknown amount of hostiles in the technicals," Artemis replied stoically, upset at the yelling that he was getting from all members of the SAILOR Team.
"Got that."
Amy kept looking through the binoculars, and spotted the lead technical, a beat-up Toyota Hilux with a Browning M2 bolted to the back of it.
"You see that?" she asked Mina.
"I have the target," SAILOR Venus said quietly. Her demeanor had completely changed from a caring person, worried about killing innocents from the before the mission to a serious, determined and cold killer. This was getting out of hand, and the mission needed to stop before anything worse happened.
"Illuminating the target."
Mina's HUD flashed the truck, noting that there were two people in the front and a person on the machine gun in the back. She calculated (with help from the HUD), the distance to target (500 meters), how fast the target was moving (30 kmph), how many targets there were (four, including the truck itself), the wind speed (a light wind, 5 kmph from the south), the humidity (10 percent), and a host of other factors necessary to get a shot in. She lined her scope on the driver of the vehicle.
"Acquired."
"Send it," Amy ordered.
Mina exhaled and gently pulled the trigger back. The .338 bullet exited the M24 rifle going at about 900 meters/second, and reached the target in under half a second, shattering the windshield and vaporizing the driver's head. The truck swerved violently to the left, into another technical and flipped over, immobilizing both of them.
"Nice shot," Amy commented.
"Give me another," SAILOR Venus whispered calmly. She retracted the bolt, the cartridge flying through the air and landing on the hard soil; pushing the bolt forward, she chambered another round.
Amy had never seen SAILOR Venus like this. "Uh…okay. Technical, at 500 meters, going 30 kmph, out of the south, at 11 O'clock."
"I have it." SAILOR Venus targeted the driver.
"Send."
Again, Mina exhaled and pulled the trigger back. Another head blew up in spectacular fashion.
"Next target."
"At 500 meters, going 30 kmph, out of the south, at 12 O'clock."
"Acquired."
"Send."
Another vehicle came to a halt. The gunners on the technicals had finally wisened up and were firing into the general area of their location.
"Taking fire!" Amy said into her radio. "Could use your support, SAILOR Moon!"
"We're almost to the vehicles!" Serena yelled. They had sprinted all the way to the camouflaged position where the two Land Rovers had been stationed. "Lita, get that tarp off of that one over there!"
Lita ripped the tarp off, reveling a worn, but certainly usable Land Rover, armed to the teeth with a HK Grenade Machine Gun (GMG) and a MG4 light machine gun.
"Raye, get on the GMG!" She ordered.
Raye looked confused at her. "I…"
"Just do it!" Lita screamed. "We gotta help Amy and Mina!"
That snapped Raye out of her daze. She quickly climbed into the swivel turret of the GMG and charged the weapon, pulling the handle back and chambering a round.
Serena climbed into the other Land Rover and started it, flooring the acceleration petal and speeding toward the gunfire that was going on the distance.
A round snapped by Amy's head as she fired a burst from her MP5PDW at an approaching technical.
"I have another target!" Amy screamed, highlighting a technical only 100 meters from their position.
"I've got it!" Mina replied. She fired a shot, then quickly pulled back the bolt to chamber another round.
The gunner of the technical went down, as well as the driver.
"More contacts!" Amy looked again at the South of the village to see fifty or so infantry charging toward their position. "Engage at will!"
"I have them, engaging at will." Mina kept a cool head, firing shot after shot, retracting the bolt and chambering fresh rounds.
"I'm out!" She yelled, ejecting the magazine and searching for a fresh one.
"It's here, right here," Amy said, giving her a new one.
"Thanks." SAILOR Venus shoved the magazine into the feed and chambered a round, firing off more rounds at the approaching force.
"Could use that help!" Amy frantically said into the radio.
"We're right here!" Serena yelled back.
Lita hit the accelerator and punched the Land Rover over a ditch to Amy and Mina's position. She then slid the vehicle into place, with Raye bringing the GMG to bear.
"Marking the targets!" Amy individually selected the infantry, but it didn't really matter at this point because SAILOR Mars had already opened fire.
The 40mm grenades spat out of the GMG at 350 rounds a minute, blanketing the attacking infantry in a hail of explosions and shrapnel. The grenades detonated in the air, raining down their payload on the exposed attacking force. Lita got on the MG4 and started firing with that gun as well, the empty cartridges and disintegrating chain collecting at her feet as she pulled the trigger, spitting out death. Within thirty seconds, all the attackers lay dead or dying, their vehicles shattered by sniper fire, grenades or machine gun bullets.
"Is that all of them?!" SAILOR Moon asked. "Does anyone see anything else?"
"I have nothing," Mina replied coldly.
"No movement," Amy said.
"Nothing," Lita and Raye commented.
"Artemis, Luna, do you have anything?"
"I have no movement besides you," Luna responded. "However, recommend getting out of there, there is a large South Sudanese Army convoy headed your way."
"Affirmative," Serena said. "Amy, Mina, get in."
SAILOR Mercury and Venus picked up their gear and tossed in the back of the Land Rover.
"Let's get out of here," Amy quietly said, looking at the torched village, the smashed vehicles, and the dead bodies that littered the ground around them.
"You've got that right," Serena replied.
The SAILOR Team drove off, heading toward their pickup point somewhere north of their position, where a JASDF C-130H would pick them up for transport home.
A couple of hours later, the South Sudanese Army would discover the carnage, and it would be flashed to all major news outlets. Soon thereafter, the foreign news desks of those news outlets would send reporters there, sparking claims of a new genocide going on in the Sudan.