Date 05/01/2060, Location 39.28462, 54.89387

Johanna climbed down from the chassis of the light strike vehicle, leaving the rest of the occupants where they were, and sauntered across the gap between them. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, her hair a blonde/brown colour. Two streaks of coloured sun block covered her cheeks, shielding her pale flesh from the rays of the sun. In her arms she carried a G36 rifle, with the tell-tale smooth pad of an induction smart-link on the grip. The rifle looked used – not the tarnish of a weapon not cared for or looked after, but an aged and worn-in look. Chips of paint and the odd glint of bare metal where parts had been cleaned and polished for quite some time. She wore a set of cammo fatigues that again looked comfy and old. The pattern was for a temperate zone, and the greens and browns hindered rather than helped disguise her – but for all that she looked comfortable in it, and she made no noise as she crossed the sandy space between the two vehicles – no betraying rattle of equipment, or loose straps flapping around. She looked quietly confident and competent. As the team climbed down out of the truck to greet her, she grinned. The corners of her mouth pulled up, forming little dimples, and her blue eyes seemed to glitter in the bright sunshine.

"Miss. Johanna?" said Kai, as he extended a hand to shake in welcome.

"And you must be Katana. It's a pleasure to meet you all." She looked at each one of the team for a moment, giving a little nod of greeting before her gaze moved on to the next in line. "I understand your previous business is concluded, and you're now available for work?"

Kai nodded, and then clarified the situation – they had completed their last job, and were away clean, with no baggage or complications that would interfere with their ability to take her contract. As he described the situation, Johanna nodded, appearing pleased with circumstances.

"Excellent news. Well, as you know, I work for Maersk in the area, looking after our operations here. We are not alone in Kum Dag of course. Dekita and Espirit also have their offices here, and have extensive operations nearby. There's also the local independents, who have a number of drills and prospects around the place. However, at the moment, I'm more concerned with Dekita. Their position is not strong, and it would be good if we can weaken it further. I am looking for a team that can interrupt part of their operations, and prevent export of product. A week would be good, but the longer the better, really. Do you think you can perform this type of task?"

Kai looked up and down the line at his team. Some looked less than happy, or at least uncertain – but nobody voiced anything specific.

"Yes, we can do this for you, as long as the recompense is appropriate of course."

Johanna swung around a little, and made a tapping motion with one hand, and one of the security team grabbed a tablet screen and headed over to her. She accepted it without a word, slinging her rifle over her shoulder, and holding the tablet with one hand and operating it with finger swipes from the other.

"Ok, we are here, in the hills about fifteen klicks east of Kum Dag. As I said, each of us have our headquarters there." She zoomed in on the map, the overhead view of the town filling the screen, and three areas were highlighted. "This is us. Over here is Dekita with their compound, and across here is Espirit, with their compound. This area to the north is the job market, where the independents hire crews for their rigs. Okay…." She pinched the display, zooming out until the map showed several hundred square kilometres of the countryside.

"Now, this area to the north of town, this is all licenced to Dekita. Their terminal is over in this bay, and all the pipelines meet up there, and a whole bunch of storage tanks. The crude product is shipped over the water to Azerbaijan and refined there. Swing the map south to here, and you can see our territory. We, too, have a terminal on the coast line. And further south, and all the way over to the mountains here is Espirit. Yes, yes, lots of territory. Espirit is huge… Dekita is hmmm, manageable, yes?"

Kai studied the map, with the rest of the team looking over his and Johanna's shoulders, getting the lie of the land. Maersk had the area to the west of Kum Dag, about six and a half thousand square kilometres of land, including a headland and a sheltered bay. Though Johanna had not identified the location of the terminal, it was good money it would be in that sheltered location. The Dekita fields were to the north, and covered over fifteen thousand square kilometres, with their terminal in a natural cover on the south coast. It also included several large hill ranges, and several small villages. The Espirit fields were to the south of Kum Dag, and were even larger, taking up nearly twenty five thousand square kilometres of land.

"Now, with us all being in town, it makes spying and counter spying a fun and interesting game, yes? We all watch each other, we all know what security and drilling crews we have, we all use drones and sat images to track things yes? But, no one in Kum Dag knows about you. I would like to keep it this way, is why we meet out here, ok? If they don't know who you are, they can't watch you. No one must know you work for Maersk. No papers, no contracts, no trail." She looked at Kai, and her piercing blue eyes fixed him with a hawk-like stare, until he nodded understanding and agreement.

"Good. So, you take your truck, you go north, to Dekita fields. You mess things up, stop the flow of oil. You break things, so bad they take a week to recover. I pay your team thirty thousand. You break things better, they take longer to fix, I pay more. You manage to steal Espirit equipment and frame them for the job, I pay you more. You steal Espirit and frak them up really bad, I pay you lots more."

"Sounds good to me," said Kai. "Yep, we can get right onto that… do you have any intel about where their gear is in the fields?" Hunter and Marius stared at Kai for a moment, before their gazes met each other, and they shook their heads very subtly, before returning to stare at the map again.

"This place here, Oglanly, I have rumours they have hit a new deposit. Lots of crews working in the hills there, lots of equipment. Lots of security, too, of course. So, if rumours are true, is a good place to hurt them. On other side of coin, maybe less security elsewhere, and can do more damage to more places. That I leave to you to find out. Oh, but if you do go up that way, mind the Cannons."

Several of the team looked at each other again, wondering what kind of cannon were involved – did Dekita have artillery support? Mortars? What exactly did she mean? Johanna didn't elaborate though, instead punching in a radio frequency and series of cipher keys into the terminal.

"Use this to contact us – not directly with me, but via a handler now. Make sure to give code phrases and get recognition. We can arrange for some explosives to be left at a place if you need them – generic stuff, not tied to us. But better if you don't need and use your own. Good luck."

She handed over the tablet to Kai, smiled, shook his hand again, and headed back to the strike vehicle, climbing up in the passenger seat. With a wave, the Maersk detail pulled out, threading their way through the defile to the north, and disappearing from view.

As soon as the Maersk contingent were gone, Hunter and Marius started to grumble a little at Kai, asking him why he hadn't even negotiated with her over the price.

"Look guys – it's our first job for her, we need to get our foot in the door. Yes, it's not a huge amount of money, not for the possible risks – but the pay was open-ended if we do well, and we need to establish our rep with the lady. Once we've got a good job under our belt, then we can ask for more pay." Hunter and Marius shared a look again and shrugged. They might not be happy, but they at least accepted the logic.

They gathered around the map again, zooming around the Dekita area and looking at the terrain.

Nobody had a deep knowledge of the oil industry. Marius seemed to be most familiar with the general concepts, having flown many delivery missions over or too refineries and drilling rigs. They shared their thoughts on how things worked, and how likely it was to be able to strike at the various locations.

The drill heads were fixed targets, but likely to have fences, cameras, quite possibly drones or active security troops. They were the first stage of the export process, and knocking out a drill head or setting a fire here could be difficult to recover from, with the pressure of the oil coming up from the reserve hampering efforts to enact repairs. The pipelines were the next stage, and were an obvious weak point, stretching for hundreds of miles overall, in a network across the area. They might have sensors and drones, but the coverage would be much sparser just by the very size of the area that needed to be defended. It would also be impossible to have any meaningful level of active personnel guarding the pipeline. Taking out a section would probably cause some kind of oil spill, but it was thought that flow sensors and systems in the pipeline would detect a leak and they must have some kind of valves or shutoff system in place, surely? A broken section of pipe would be easy enough to fix, if so, but would need a team to locate and travel to the break and replace a damaged section. If they were able to take out several such sections in quick succession, they could cause a backlog or severe interruption.

Next down the list were the pumping stations that must be dotted around the pipeline network at some intervals, ensuring the oil was pushed through to the coast. These had many of the same issues as the well heads – fixed buildings, so likely to have fences, cameras, sensors and possibly covered by drones. They were harder targets, but any damage to the machinery inside was likely to be much harder to repair or replace than simple sections of pipeline. This was especially true the closer they got to the coast, where the facilities would be larger and handle more product.

Last of all was the harbour facility and tank farm. Several of the team just shook their heads when this was bought up, clearly having reservations about attacking such a facility. With the massive storage tanks holding tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of litres of explosive gas and flammable oil products, it was naturally going to be heavily protected and under constant surveillance.

As they had been panning around the overhead footage, another thing occurred to them – the almost complete lack of traffic. Several villages were inside the Dekita area, but they spotted only a few farm vehicles, and almost no private vehicles showing up. Clearly the tech level of the local population was heavily skewed towards subsistence farming, but that meant that their truck was going to be noticed if they went driving around the area. Unless of course, they looked like a Dekita vehicle.

Eyes turned to Tadibya, and she nodded. Yes, of course she could make the vehicle look like something else – though that was now much harder for her to do because of the added bulk of the trailer. But if she was busy holding up an illusion spell over both parts of the vehicle, she was unlikely to be able to contribute much else during the run, and it could tie her up for hours at a time. At a pinch, it was a way to try and escape a situation – but she urged the others to come up with a better plan for her talents.

Whilst she had the conversational bull by the horns though, Tadibya did express some misgivings about any plan that would cause a huge oil spill. Aswon nodded in agreement – some spill was going to be unavoidable to perform their mission no doubt – but causing an environmental catastrophe was not something he wished to plan for.

Marius checked the specifications on his drone, and started to sketch out some plans for deployment, working out the maximum operational radius for a combat strike. If they got close to the edge of their area, and they knew exactly where they were going, they could probably cover nearly a hundred kilometres of the fields – but it would not include much loiter time, or much of an allowance for combat operations.

Kai appeared to reach a decision, and got everyone back into the truck, and asked Marius to head back to Ashgabat – it wasn't too far away, but was a reasonably major town, and likely had the supplies they needed. Kum Dag was clearly not an option for resupply. As they got back on the road and cleared the rocks, he asked Hunter to fire up the sat link, get on the matrix and do some research. First of all, he needed somewhere in Ashgabat where they could purchase a large compressor, some paint, and a spray painting system. Once he had that locked down – and preferably each part from a separate supplier, if possible – he was to get onto the corporate websites and get some images of Espirit and Dekita vehicles, and find out what their livery and logos looked like. Hunter nodded, and started to bash at keys furiously, then waiting for the limited bandwidth satellite connection to fetch him the data requested.

They were a third of the way back when Marius activated the speakers, and spoke to the rest of the team.

"Look ahead, probably about thirty degrees to the right of the road, just heading up that trail. Look familiar?"

The team peered in the direction described, and saw a man stumbling through the desert, his shoulders slumped, and one arm protectively tucked under his robes. A mobile phone was clutched in one hand, but obviously not in use. He didn't pay much attention to what was going on around him, and was trudging away from the road, up towards the foothills.

Hunter grabbed his rifle, checking the magazine and the safety, the sat connection shoved to one side.

"Are we leaving him be, or taking him out?"

It was quiet for a moment in the truck, as people heard the coldness of his tone. Hunter, quite clearly was prepared to shoot him in the back of the head as they passed.

"No, he's no threat. At least not anymore. He seemed to learn his lesson," Kai offered. Hunter shrugged and flipped the safety back on, and stowed his rifle in the straps overhead, grabbed his computer and returned to his search.

The truck sped past, and the man stumbled on, back towards his village, not realising that he'd had a second brush with death.

The rest of their journey to Ashgabat was uneventful, and they drove back past the motel and into the southern part of the city, near the station. Most of the light industry was concentrated around here, including the auto-workshops and manufacturing. Hunter directed Marius to a tool shop, and they picked up a large compressor with a seventy-five litre air tank, and a paint spraying kit, along with a bunch of spares and supplies for it. Kai did the talking, and Hunter and Aswon did the carrying, loading the boxes into the trailer with a minimum of fuss and interaction. They headed to another general suppliers and purchased a large white tent, barely big enough for the truck to fit into – but something they could use to try and create a painting area to stop the fine desert sand ruining their efforts. A third stop saw then picking up a large variety of paint in basic colours, some masking tape and card stock along with craft knives – so they could try and make stencils for the logos and text. A couple of thousand Nuyen later, and with their supplies purchased from multiple locations to try and hide the nature of their plan, they had all they needed to repaint the truck in either Espirit or Dekita colours.

Tadibya ensured they stopped off at the local market, and picked up fresh supplies and topped off their water tank, and shortly afterwards they were back on the road heading west, all of their new purchases stowed in the trailer.

Their journey was uneventful, barely passing any other traffic on the road, and not spying much in the way of movement – just miles and miles of rolling desert to the horizon. They followed the track again, and headed back into the defiles and chasms, until they arrived back at the overhung area and nestled the truck into the side of the clearing.

Aswon looked around as they climbed out.

"You know… this might make an ideal place to stash the trailer – if we wanted to leave it behind anywhere. It's not secure, sure… but it's hidden and somewhat remote. And we might be able to disguise it. And then we're not dragging something unarmoured into combat again."

The others considered this, looking around the area. It had a couple of ways in and out, but was off the beaten track, and other than the Maersk team, seemed to have no traces of activity or visitors.

They busied themselves with the kit, unboxing and checking their new supplies, and working out how to get the compressor running, and continued to discuss their plans for the assault on Dekita's oil production.