Cpl. Maria "Anya" Allen
Task Force 141
Task Force 141 Land-base, location classified.
When Yuri, Soap, and Anya arrived back in the land-base, they were greeted by Price and Nikolai.
"How are you feeling, sweetheart?" Price asked Anya after giving her a big hug. She had seemed much better since they had left her just mere hours before. At least there was a bit of light in her eyes that been restored.
Anya nodded. "A little bit better, thanks to John," she answered. "We broke into my father's brandy."
Price chuckled. "Good to hear," he said, walking with the rest back into the living quarters of the base.
"Alcohol, good for everything," Nikolai commented, giving Anya a hug as well.
"We would have been dead if Yuri didn't warn us," Soap said, giving Yuri a fist bump. "We could beat the few goons that came to the house, but there were two cars full of them."
"They were mercenaries," Yuri noted. "It seems that Makarov is getting desperate." He believed that Makarov would send his men from the Inner Circle to do the job, but Anya could not find any indication that they were.
Nikolai agreed. "I had a word with the rest of the Loyalists," he said. "Apparently Makarov wasn't happy that the Ultranationalists that sided with him during the war went begging to Vorshevsky for leniency. They all said that they had only worked with Makarov under threat."
With those words, Anya's mouth went agape. She now knew why Makarov had targeted her parents. "I gave Vorshevsky the list of ministers and party members that worked with Makarov," she said. "He used it to purge the party…"
"Without the support of the party, Makarov can't pull off what he did again," Soap continued. "He was backed into a corner and started to retaliate."
That meant that Makarov had killed Anya's parents because he had blamed her for the loss of his list of allies. She had revealed everything to Vorshevsky, everything that she had learned from Makarov. She was a soldier, and she carried out her orders. She was sent into deep cover to gain intel, and it was intel that she gave. She could not have prevented the carnage in Europe and in the US east coast, but she gave Vorshevsky everything that she learned. Her mission had been a success in all metrics, seeing how many men the Russian President had thrown to face the International Court of Justice.
In retaliation, Makarov took her parents from her.
Anya gulped. She reached for Soap's hand and felt him squeeze it. "We have to kill him," she said. Her voice was now filled with iron and bile. She had always feared Makarov, she feared him because of what he could do, and what would happen if she could not stop him. When she learned how to face her fear of him, she had only felt disgust in the face of his actions in Europe. He had given her a choice to join him, or to see her world burn, and she was now reaping the consequences.
"We don't know where to start looking, sweetheart," Price said. "It's like how he disappeared after we met him in Kandahar." They had hunted him all over Africa before realizing that he was in Prague. Makarov had always slipped past their fingers just when they were able to reach him. If they started their hunt without information, they would be doing so in the blind, and it could lead to disastrous effects.
"I do," Anya answered. It was a long shot, but it was a chance, nonetheless.
In the coming weeks, Anya got to work. With all their accesses and clearances restored, the Task Force 141 could tap into the resources that they had when they were under General Shepherd. She collaborated with the CIA and provided them with Makarov's underworld network to try to locate him. Those days made her busy. If she was not poring over countless amounts of data, she was revisiting the notes that she had sent back from her days in Moscow, or training with Soap and Yuri.
But during the nights, all the pain that she had hidden by burying herself in work came to the surface. She had retreated from Soap's room to her own, save for some nights when they were intimate with one another. In those nights when she was alone, her dreams haunted her once more. She saw the corpses of her parents, the corpses of the victims that she had massacred at the airport, and so she barely slept. When she thought that she could have been free of her nightmares, they had returned.
The more she tried to hide, the more it was evident that she was troubled. Each day, when she had stopped working, her playful jabs would decrease, and her eyes would be vacant. She would retire to her room and stay there until the morning came. When she emerged, her eyes would be bloodshot, and her complexion pale.
"Stay with me," Soap told Anya one night when she stood up to walk back to her room. She had come to him that night, barely speaking, but content to be in his arms. She did not respond but felt his lips on her neck and held her from behind her. Her body began to quake, and soon, she started to sob quietly. "Maria?"
Her reaction had not taken by surprise. He knew that she was already past her breaking point. However, he had let her take the lead.
Anya knew that Soap would move the world for her if only she had wished it. It was this very fact that she had tried to rely on herself, but she was failing spectacularly. She had been tired, but she felt that she could no longer stand on only his shoulders. "I don't want to burden you any further, John," she responded, turning towards him. "I don't…" She could not finish her sentence, for she felt Soap's lips on hers, his arms wrapped around her waist. His patience with her seemed to have been infinite. With every moment, she felt only his love, his caring.
It scared her. She could not fathom how this man that held her, that knew that only his presence could grant her a good night's sleep, could have so much patience for her. She had thought that she had been able to overcome the horrors that she had seen, but now when they have all returned, they were still here. She had thought that she had overcome her own weaknesses, but with the death of her parents, everything came crashing down again.
"Maria, look at me," Soap said, raising her chin so that he could look into her eyes. "I need you to learn to cut yourself some slack. You don't have to hold everything by yourself." His words were stern, but he said them so softly, they might have been just sweet nothings. "I know that it's hard, but you need to trust me, love. Not everything that you are facing must be done alone."
"You shall be my partner, in every sense of the word."
When Makarov offered her a place next to him, she did not feel the relief nor joy that she had heard when Soap had offered to shoulder her pain with her. She looked into his eyes and found only love.
"I'm afraid that I'll let you down, John," Anya replied. "You've already done so much for me…"
"You, love, have fought to the death to come back to me more times than I can ever count," Soap recounted. He had never kept score, but he knew that it was what Anya needed to hear. "Whenever I thought that I had lost you, there you are, fighting to come back. Maria, you are worth every single effort. I love you."
Anya sobbed and held him tighter. Those words brought her so much reassurance that she felt the thorns in her mind had started to melt away. It was as if it had been magic. She was once again reminded that she did not need to be worthy of his love, that she already was.
She smiled. It was a genuine smile, not the one that she had hid beneath. Soap touched his forehead to hers and gave her another kiss. "I'll stay," she reassured him. He returned the smile, picked her up in his arms, and then carried her to his bed.
"You're losing too much weight," Soap commented disapprovingly halfway from the door to the bed. All it took was just one lift to tell that she had felt considerably lighter than she had been previously. "That's it. You will be having dinner with me, no buts, love."
Anya pouted. "You know I can't eat when I'm busy, John," she tried to reason.
By then, he had known her too well, and said, "You won't find the energy to fight if you don't eat, Maria."
"Absolutely not," Soap said, when Anya roped himself and the others into a meeting to propose their next target. With the use of CIA data, and her experience while in deep cover, Anya had provided them with the profile of a Chinese triad boss that was currently based in Hong Kong. She had intended to go to Hong Kong to seek out this triad boss to interrogate him of Makarov's location. Soap had been the first one to refuse, not because he doubted her ability, but because they had too little grasp on the situation.
"The weapons that those men that attacked my parents' house were armed with Chinese weapons," Anya continued despite what Soap had said. "I couldn't trace them to Beijing, but I found that the trail ended in Hong Kong. I believe that Frankie Chan is the one responsible for arming Makarov's mercenaries."
Yuri, however, did not disagree with Anya. "This man is indeed one of Makarov's contacts in the East," he said. "However, he is known to be slippery like an eel."
Price looked doubtful. "The political situation in Hong Kong is changing," he said. "If the Chinese government has so much of a whiff of any international involvement, we're done for." Price was right, of course. Ever since the government Hong Kong was returned to China by the British in 1997, the Chinese government had started to implement policies that would undermine the One Country, Two Systems premise that it had agreed to. Beijing was raising its claws towards Hong Kong, and it was guarding the island jealously. On the surface, Hong Kong was as cosmopolitan as ever, but the Pearl of the Orient was starting to lose its lustre, due to the influence from Beijing.
Soap looked at Anya and sighed. "What do you plan to do when you get there?" he asked her. She must already had prepared for this question because she started to show them slides of Frankie Chan's bars and clubs.
"These are Frankie Chan's holdings in Lan Kwai Fong," Anya explained. "They are very popular amongst foreign tourists. I'll blend in as one of them and have a catch up with him in his office."
Yuri chuckled. Anya had clearly not planned it through yet. "This is the woman that somehow managed to save us during the fall of Prague," he whispered to Price, who rolled his eyes and shrugged. Price was wise enough not to participate in the ensuing lover's tiff that was being disguised as a work meeting.
"Anya…"
Anya looked directly into Soap's eyes and smiled. "Of course, I won't go in guns blazing, Captain," she continued. "Unfortunately, Frankie Chan has seen me in Makarov's company before. He would have already known that Makarov has been brought down from inside the Ultranationalist party. The moment he sees my face, he'll know that he is being pursued by the authorities. That's the last thing we want."
Soap gave Anya a look of utter suspicion. Price, on the other hand, looked as though her understood where Anya was going with that thought of hers. "We need someone who is less public, and is also as proficient in going under cover," Anya added.
"Someone who was always in the action, but was always unnoticed," Price trailed. "Someone who already knows this triad boss, but the triad enforces would not recognize immediately and alert their boss."
All eyes looked towards Yuri.
"Thank you for volunteering, Yuri," Price said. "You're the best man for the job."
"Don't worry, Yuri," Anya said. "I'll come with you to make sure that the gangsters play nice with you."
Yuri
Task Force 141
Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong.
For a place of international appeal, Lan Kwai Fong was an area that was made up of two cobblestone streets that formed an L shape. However, it housed many world-class bars and restaurants, which was precisely why it was filled to the brim with expats and tourists from far and wide.
No longer requiring the assistance of the Loyalists and Anya's financial backing, the 141 was able to find him a suit that had been made by a local tailor, cut to the latest fashions so that he could seemingly blend in with the smartly dressed crowds. Anya was taking watch over him from another rooftop bar in the vicinity.
"Radio check, Yuri, come in," Anya said into the comms.
"I am in position," Yuri said. "I've gone past the bouncers." The bouncers had been the easy part. He had looked equally as menacing to them, anyways, with the tattoos on his hands and the cold expression of a seasoned soldier. He was also given a camera to wear so that they could record everything that he was seeing.
"Frankie's office is on the third floor," Anya instructed. "There are less people there, but more security. I count around eight men on there."
"How do you know that they're his men?"
"They have golden tigers on their belt buckles," Anya answered. "You can't miss them." Yuri did a discreet sweep of his surroundings and found two such men on the first floor. "Why didn't we get golden belt buckles, Yuri?"
"You've got a diamond necklace, Anya," Yuri answered. "I got shot to show for it." He knew that Anya tried hard to stifle a chuckle. Their relationship had been an easy friendship, and they were able to joke freely about their shared experience with Makarov.
Yuri then made his way to the bar on the third floor. The bartender himself had a golden tiger belt buckle. "One gin and tonic, please," Yuri said politely in English. The bartender nodded and proceeded to make Yuri's drink. When the gin and tonic arrived, Yuri then passed an Inner Circle patch that they had made to the bartender.
"What do you want?" the bartender asked, recognizing the patch instantly.
"I need to see your boss," Yuri said coolly.
"Wait here."
"That was too easy," Anya commented. "Keep your guard up."
A few minutes later, the bartender came out with Frankie Chan. He was a man of medium stature and wore a ring on his pinkie finger that looked like a golden toad. The man did not seem to recognize Yuri at first, but after scanning him up and down, he seemed to have remembered something. "I saw you three years ago in Brussels, right?" Frankie asked in halting English.
"Yes, yes you did, Mr. Chan," Yuri replied. He was not lying. It was true that he had met Frankie with Makarov in Brussels for a trafficking deal three years ago.
"Ah, see! My memory is still good!" Frankie replied. "Come, come to my office. We'll chat there!"
Yuri nodded and followed Frankie into his office.
"His men are coming with you, five of them," Anya said. "They are armed."
Yuri went through a series of doors that led through the kitchens, and then into Frankie's office.
"What does Mr. Makarov need of my services?" Frankie asked, sitting down at his office chair. Behind him was a counting table of untold amounts of cash. Clearly, subtlety was not this man's main trait. "I've already sent the last shipment and I saw on the news that it was already used well."
"He needs further reassurance that the relationship is to continue," Yuri said. By then, five men that Anya had indicated already entered the office. "He has sent me to negotiate another shipment."
Frankie tutted. "Your boss doesn't know who he is any more," he said. "Last year when he came, he was a man on the rise with the powers in the light and the dark in his hands. Now, he has lost the war that he started. He has no more bargaining power."
How the mighty had fallen. Yuri could just taste the bile that Makarov had felt, having to deal with rats like Frankie Chan who had no qualms in kicking him when he was down. Of course, it was all in the name of good business.
"He will agree to whatever price you set up, surely," Yuri replied.
"Aiya, Mr. Makarov is most understanding," Frankie continued. Around them, his men had already started to ready their weapons.
"Yuri, be careful, they're ready to fire." Anya's voice rang in his ear.
It was evident that Makarov had been one step ahead of them, as always. While they knew that there was no possibility that they would encounter Makarov in Hong Kong, there was also a high possibility that Makarov would have warned his allies that they would be in pursuit of them. It could be possible that Makarov knew that they would be able to chase him down, and that his suppliers would be the first place that they would strike.
"Mr. Chan, I thought we were friends," Yuri said, holding his hands up. There was no need to show Frankie that they were going to be antagonistic to him. They just needed information.
"It is all good business, Mr. Yuri," Frankie replied. "He would pay me very good money for your head, and even more for the girl's. Better than what I got for the weapons that I sold to him."
"If you give us what we need, Mr. Chan, you will get even more than what he gave you," Yuri replied. "We just need you tell us where he is."
Frankie laughed. "I am a businessman, Mr. Yuri, why in the world would I ever do that?"
"Repeat after me, Yuri," Anya said.
"Mr. Chan, your weapons were found on US soil," Yuri repeated Anya's words. "If the Americans are able to trace those guns to you, what makes you think that your businesses would have any longevity?"
At this moment, all the guns that were pointed to Yuri were lowered.
"You are working for the Americans?" Frankie asked with a raised eyebrow, clearly confused.
"Who I am working for does not matter, we need information," Yuri added, according to what Anya told him to say. Frankie was silent. He was clearly making all sorts of calculations in his head. "If you don't give us Makarov's location, all it takes is just one report and the Chinese government will know that you have been supplying their weapons overseas, to Russian terrorists, no doubt."
There was Frankie's pressure point. Although he had no qualms selling weapons to Makarov, it was the Chinese government that he had feared. While he did have contacts within the army where he got the guns from, the officials that sold the weapons to him needed utter anonymity. If their names ever came up in any reports, or even his name, he would not only be a dead man, but the whole supply chain would be destroyed. Each triad gang and the government had always been in an uneasy alliance since time immemorial, and he would not be the one that destroyed the system, destroying the livelihoods of the entire ecosystem.
"Dubai, he is in the Hotel Oasis in Dubai."
"Good job, Yuri! Get out of there, now!"
Just as Frankie Chan gave Yuri his answer, his men started to fire at Yuri. If Yuri was dead, and it would be as if the information had not been leaked. However, Yuri had already anticipated it and he jumped towards Frankie and held his pistol to Frankie's head.
"Nobody moves, if you shoot, I'll blast his head open."
"Idiots! Put your weapons down!" Frankie shouted. His men quickly obeyed. "Open the door, let Mr. Yuri go."
Yuri walked of the office unscathed. He quickly joined Anya in the bar opposite Frankie Chan's. She gave him a high five.
"Hotel Oasis it is," Anya said. She then changed the frequency in the comms. "Captain Price, Captain MacTavish, come in."
"We're here, Anya," Soap's voice came into the comms in reply. "What have you got for us?"
"Makarov is in Hotel Oasis, Dubai."
"Great work, the both of you."
Before anything could be said further, there was a loud blast. Frankie Chan's bar had been blown to pieces. It was a miracle that Yuri had exited the building before it happened.