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John 'Hood' White
Birth name: Keith Alexander
Origin: Hartford, Connecticut.
Current Resident: Sea-can cabin, south-east city limits, old industrial park and train yards.
Occupation:
Ex-American Special Tasks operative.
Tentative asset for the Atharim.
Psychological Description:
Once upon a time, John was a charismatic teenager. The classic 'Captain of the Football Team' high school all star, coupled with a sharp mind had him as everyone's bet for most likely to succeed. Seventeen years later, there's little of the energetic and optimistic boy left. John has become introspective and quiet. The years have not been kind to him, and he has seen more then his fare share of the horrors the mundane world has to offer. And a few of the things of the not-so-mundane. He is a quiet man, hard working and rarely seen to actually relax.
Physical Description:
John is exceptionally fit, although his usual attire doesn't advertise it too openly. He often wears a shemagh, a type of traditional scarf that has been long adopted by combat arms troops the world over. There is an ever-present intensity to his stare, the sort that few are willing to meet for long.
Powers and Supernatural Powers:
None.
Bio:
John watched, with front row seats, the decline of the American war-machine over the past few decades. Gone were the bottomless pockets and the blank-check operations. Moving a fleet of warships is an expensive thing; millions of dollars in fuel, food, and supplies, not to mention man-hours and maintenance fees.
He had graduated with solid marks in school, but in light of the floundering global economy, a university education was out of reach on his own. At that time, military service still offered huge discounts towards university in exchange for years of service, and with little work to be found elsewhere in the country, he joined the Marines. Three years and two deployments to hot-spots in Africa and South America saw him singled out for bigger and better things. The next five years were spent in training. Language and culture training, escape-and-evasion, foreign weapons use. Demolitions, history, questioning techniques, psychology, and more. As far as his parents knew, he had died in a helicopter crash while on a training exercise in California.
Gone was the age of huge troop deployments and long, drawn out wars. Instead, they were turning back to the brush-fire wars and black book operations of the Cold War. Small, elite teams would be sent in to train militias, rebels, and military's that were opposed to the spread of the CCD, often no matter what their own policies might be. These teams were tasked with assassinations, kidnappings, industrial sabotage. They helped establish a net of contacts and double-agents, or to set up automated spy stations to eavesdrop on the heart of the CCD.
John was nicknamed 'Hood' after a practical-joke gone awry when a few of the more senior members of the team he was attached to arranged to kidnap him while on a low-threat mission in South Africa. Over the next 6 years he traveled all over Africa and South America, as well as forays into Europe and the Middle East.
His last mission was to the Middle Eastern country of Oman, District V. Smuggled in through merchant vessels, delivered on site by teams similar to the one John was member of, a communications relay.
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"It's fucking hot."
Hood could only grunt in agreement. The two men wore shemagh's wrapped loosely about their heads, and with the scraggly beards and deep tans, they almost managed to blend in with the crowd of men around them. Both men held tickets and chickadees (slang for CCD dollar bills), although neither were really paying much attention to the camel race, even as a dozen of the beasts and their jockeys thundered past scant yards away.
Hood adjusted his sunglasses as he turned a bit to scan the crowd around them. The glasses were more then just protection from the sun; fixed with a tiny camera and computer, it scanned faces in the crowd, referencing them against a facial recognition program. "Got him."
The HUD on his glasses flashed the outline of a man in the crowd, and Hood nudged the other man. The two made their way through the crowd, and the man they had been looking for didn't spot the two Americans until the last moment. The man visibly started, and turned to try and make a quick get-away. He was stopped in his tracks by two more American men who were approaching from behind him, boxing him in.
The man spun around to face Hood and his friend, quickly adopting a pleasantly surprised look as the two Americans loomed in on him. "Ah! My friends! You are early, aren't you? I did not expect you for two days!"
"That's the point, Nizam. Now, lets go for a walk." The Americans dropped their wager stubs and tucked away their money as they made their way back out of the crowd. Hood stuck with Nizam, while the other three fanned out into the crowd as if nothing were amiss, and to make sure they hadn't drawn any unwanted attention.
"Yes early is good, my friend! Very good. Expecting storms soon, and we would not want that would we?" Nizam wasn't hard to read; the man wasn't loyal to the CCD, but he wasn't loyal to the US either. Just to who ever had the deeper pockets at the time. They just had to make sure to keep him off balance enough that he couldn't get second thoughts on who had the deeper pockets these days.
The crowd thinned then ended abruptly as they moved away from the camel races, revealing a vast swath of open, featureless ground and towering mountains in the distance. "We need to move quickly, Nizam. Is everything arranged on your end?" Hood's tone was one of carefully checked annoyance. Between the heat, the bugs, the crowd, and a cockroach like Nizam as their guide, none of the men on this detail were particularly chipper.
"Oh yes! Yes of course friend! All is ready! Well, almost all. I have only one buggy for you. The other does not work, you see. Most unfortunate. The mechanic tells me the wheel wells are broken, my friend." The man wrung his hands together nervously; he played the same game every time they had to work with him. Come up with some sort of last minute problem that could only be solved with more money. If only he would come up with things that made any sense.
"How much, Nizam?" The other men had emerged from the crowd at various intervals and distances apart; six in total, all similarly dressed. None blended in perfectly, but they didn't scream foreigner at first glance, asides that they were taller then most folk in these parts.
"Very expensive, sadly. To get a new buggy on such short notice. $5,000. CCD, of course, my friend." Nizam knew full well that the Americans had no choice but to pay. They could not risk threatening him, nor could they find another supplier that they could trust not to just sell them out.
They approached Nizam's vehicle; a well used, but equally well maintained Land-rover, and Hood dug out a fat envelope which he slapped against Nizam's chest before he and one of the others climbed into the back seat of Nizam's vehicle. The other four had acquired an old beater Toyota Corolla, a dime-a-dozen vehicle in the region.
-----
Ten hours later, two dune buggies tore their way through the rocky foothills west of the town of Sur, in Oman. Established ten years ago, an automated electronic espionage station had been set up in the mountains near Jebel Kadhar. It picked up a broad range of frequencies, which were then transmitted by laser-comms to satellites in orbit once every week, when one of the necessary satellites passed directly overhead. But the machine's on board computers had gone wonky, and were in need of maintenance. Since there was no local Maytag service station that they could phone, the higher ups figured the next best thing was a six-man special operations team, smuggled in by civilian transport and packing light.
The six men were no longer dressed in their man jammies (Shalwar kameez, for men of course), instead favoring cargo pants and t-shirts in browns and tans, with load-bearing vests stuffed with magazines and gear. They were ready for trouble, but hoping for none as they tore through the Oman country side, away from small villages and isolated family compounds. They drove with no lights, the drivers of either vehicle instead sporting compact NVGs, and neither's foot lifted far from the floor, tearing along as fast as the old buggies could manage.
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It took the six men two days and one flat tire to make it to the malfunctioning machine. The machine had proven to be an easy fix; it had apparently fallen victim of an angry mountain goat, which had managed to knock the machine off balance and cracked the case. A scorpion had crawled inside and fried itself on one of the motherboards. The scorpion in question had spent most of the ride back taped to the top of the second buggy driver's helmet until the man had finally found out and nearly put the vehicle into a ravine, thinking it was a live one when he caught a glimpse of it in the rear-view mirror.
They continued to travel mostly at night, and were less then 50 klicks out from Sur when their luck ran out. They had arranged to meet with Nizam and some of the man's people at a small abandoned hamlet some twenty kilometers west/south west of the town of Sur. From there, Nizam would take most of their gear, which he would likely sell for a tidy profit, and smuggle the team back to the harbor and a ship waiting to take them back out to international waters and relative safety.
They stopped a few minutes out from the little collection of compounds and spent an hour just watching and listening, to try and judge if there were any unwanted guests waiting for them. None of the men trusted Nizam further then they could throw him. The sun dipped over the horizon, and there continued to be no signs of movement among the dozen or so compounds below. No sign of unwanted visitors, but no sign of Nizam or his people either. A problem.
"Hood. One finger right of the well. Reference, open door. Window left. You see anything?" Zoolander, lovingly nicknamed after his unintentionally perfect impersonation of the 'Blue Steel' stare, handed over a pair of binos, and Hood scooted out from behind his comfy rock to grab them and take a look.
It took him a moment to find what Zoolander was talking about, but soon enough he was able to focus in on what seemed to be a piece of fabric fluttering from the window. "Looks like the scarf Nizam was wearing the other day. They're probably hold up in there waiting for us, right?"
The binos were passed around as the rest of the team took a peek and they all came to the same conclusion. Minutes later they were back in the buggies and working their way closer to the village. They parked the buggies a kilometer out, where two of them waited with the vehicles and the other four proceeded on foot, with one of their number jogging ahead, another hanging back a ways. A few minutes later, their point man was pressed to the wall of the first compound, and peering through the narrow cart-track that spaced it from the next walled home. The team took a knee, surveying their surroundings with NVGs, the sun now long past the horizon and no moon yet to offer any light to work with otherwise.
Another few minutes were spent listening, and when nothing was heard they started moving again. The point-man vanished down the alley as the rest of the other three moved up. One man put his back to the compound wall, knees bent and hands cupped, and Hood took a few running steps before stepping on the man's knee, lunging up, other foot into the man's cupped hands. The man stood up quickly, throwing his arms up to help launch Hood over the wall, and he landed on the opposite side in a crouch, weapon up. He scanned the area quickly, then slapped the dried mud wall behind him before he started moving, and seconds later another man dropped over the wall to follow him.
The man that had been rear-guard took a knee in the alley, watching the way they had come, while the point-man moved up to the alley's mouth, watching the street ahead as Hood and Zoolander moved through the courtyard and up the carved steps to the home's roof. They both took a knee, studying the street and other roofs, the entire team waiting in silence for a few more minutes before moving on. They continued like that, entering and clearing some of the compounds on their way to the town square and the well.
Hood would glance back towards the buggies occasionally, and the HUD on his glasses showed the green triangles which represented the IFFs of the two men waiting there, indicating their distance, and even their heartbeats and vitals. He could see the same of the other two men, who were working their way through the next compound as he and Zoolander readied to check the last one that would lead them into the town square. None of them had spoken since departing the buggies, and all six men were calm and focused as they secured the area.
But then a warning flashed on his glasses. Heightened pulse and movement of the two men waiting at the buggies, and before he could even turn his head to look at them, the warning had changed to indicate one of the men had suddenly flat-lined. The entire team froze and looked in the same direction for a moment. One green triangle was moving away from the buggies, before stopping suddenly and changing to red as well. None of them had heard any weapons fire.
Hood's eyes worked furiously, pulling up a map and way-point system. Locations were indicated and fed to the other four men in the team. The other two would fall back and take over-watch of the way they had come, placing themselves on separate roofs where they could cover each other to at least some degree, while he and Zoolander would advance to the hut that had Nazim's signal. Hopefully the weaselly little man hadn't sold them out, and had vehicles there waiting to get them the hell out of here. Another flick of his eyes activated the two dead men's last-resort packages. Thermite charges would incinerate most of their bodies and gear, making it next to impossible to identify them.
The four remaining men moved quickly. Hood kicked open the shoddy old sheet-metal door of the compound's gate, and Zoolander ran through before sliding to a stop at the town well, using it as a bit of cover to scan the area. The other two men ran back the way they came, doing much the same to gain access to previously cleared compounds and thundering onto the roof-tops. Hood followed in Zoolander's tracks and moved to the window where Nazim's scarf still fluttered, and he pressed himself to the wall next to it, scanning the buildings around him. "Nazim! It's us. Jig is up, someone's on to us. We have to move, now."
There was no answer, and Hood and Zoolander shared a glance. Warnings popped up on his glasses again; the other two men had spotted movement, coming towards the village. Three bogies, that were as of yet unidentified. "Nazim. I'm coming in." He crouched low past the window and came to the open door. There had been a door in the frame until recently, but now there was just jagged splinters of wood littered about the floor. Hood froze, then quickly ducked through the door and hugged the wall within, weapon sweeping the room. Body parts were everywhere in the otherwise empty room, but more disturbing was the relative lack of blood.
The two men on sentry's pulses suddenly spiked, and they both opened fire. Short, controlled bursts at first, two from either man. Then curses of disbelief. "Movement! No bloody idea what they are! Good hit, no effect!" The two men thumbed the fire select, and the next bursts of fire were longer. Full-auto fire ate through their magazines, and the movement indicators continued to draw closer to the village.
"The hell is going on? Did Nazim sell us out or what?" Zoolander snapped at Hood when he stepped out of the abandoned house. He took one look at Hood and was able to surmise that things had gone tits-up bad. "Well fuck. So the hell do we...the hell is that?!" Zoolander's gaze moved to the corner of the house, and he staggered to his feet to take a step back. "HOOD! The fuck is that?!"
Hood had needed a moment to catch his bearings after what he had seen in the house, and hadn't even heard Zoolander at first. Not until the man started yelling anyway, then he glanced dumbly at his friend before turning to where the battle hardened man was aiming. What he saw didn't even fully register at first. Something snapped in the back of his brain, broke like a dry stick. Everything went numb, and he just started firing.
Tattered black robes seemed to drift out of the darkness, too long arms and a too-narrow head coming towards him. The details of the thing stood out so painfully clearly in his mind; it had no feet. None. The robes just sort of...hung, tattered. And they didn't really seem to move much either. Just hung off the thing. The face was pasty white, and so long. And the eyes...his finger jerked on the trigger by muscle memory more then conscious thought, and everything seemed to snap back into motion.
He steadied his stance, tucked his rifle and kept firing, squeezing the trigger repeatedly. Rounds passed through the thing, occasionally ruffling the robes, but mostly just sending up puffs of dust from the wall behind it. Zoolander followed suit, as if he too had been jerked away by the sound of weapons fire. The thing seemed to lunge at him, but then a round seemed to bite into something and it jerked back. Both men flipped to full auto and continued firing, rounds tearing into the mud wall next to it, and the thing jerked and twitched before letting out an impossibly loud screech before it slammed into the wall and fell to the ground in a wash of sand and dust and old, bleached bone.
Both men froze, staring at the remnants of the thing. Another warning flashed on his glasses, the green triangle of one of the other team members flashing red. The man had made a run for it, apparently, and was a few hundred meters out of the village back towards the buggies. The other man was running too. He seemed to be mumbling to himself as he ran. Hood and Zoolander shared a look, then started running towards their remaining team member, empty magazines clattering to the earth and fresh ones slapped into their weapons.
They ran full tilt down the street, and Zoolander peppered an alley with fire as another of the things seemed to loom towards them. Again, most of the rounds seemed to pass through it unnoticed, but a few found some purchase and the thing jerked back, falling behind them. They charged around into another street in time to spot their remaining team mate throw himself through a closed gate, tumbling into the street in a puff of dust. He was rambling incoherently between ragged sobs for air and had lost his weapon along the way. The man scrambled to his knees but made it no further before one of the creatures fell upon him, emerging suddenly through the now open compound gate.
It grabbed the man by the shoulders, lifting him with frightening ease. Hood and Zoolander slid to a stop, and in a brief moment of silence they could hear bones shattering in the man's arms before he started screaming and struggling. The creature bit into the struggling man's skull, and he started struggling and screaming even more. Even over his screams Hood and Zoolander could hear the sound of bone shattering and crunching, and a horridly lewd sucking sound.
They shared a glance, then started walking towards the thing and their dying comrade, weapons up and firing. The man jerked a few times then went limp, while the thing holding him threw the dead body aside. As before, most of their rounds didn't seem to hit anything, but enough found purchase that the thing was driven back then expired much like the first one had, leaving dust and cracked, aged bones.
Hood didn't remember much after that. Their fallen comrade's body, arms shattered and twisted. There wasn't much blood either, his body seemed...dehydrated, maybe? Like a mummy. He and Zoolander were running and gunning. Trying to get out of the village, but there were more of those things. They actually managed to put down another one before they got separated. He kept running, till he heard Zoolander's screams. His identifier was a long time before it went red. Hood stopped running then.
By morning, he had killed two more of the creatures. One he managed to lure into a claymore; explosives proved to be far more effective then gunfire. The second nearly got the jump on him. It managed to break his arm before he was able to break free and toss himself through a window, a grenade dropping behind him. Again, the explosion killed the creature, but the pain of the arm, made worse with throwing himself through the window and landing on it, knocked him out.
He awoke some time after sunrise, to a group of five men; locals, but not Nizam's people. They spoke in Arabic, probably unaware that he could understand what they were saying, but he wasn't opposed to what he heard. They needed to clear out of the area quickly; they had already burned the few bodies they had found, and wanted to be long gone before the authorities might wander over to check things out here. They were far from Sur, but there was always a chance someone had heard the commotion during the night. And they had decided to take the American with them.
In the following days, Hood learned about the Atharim and what they did. Hunted monsters. Kept people safe. It was an easy sell. He never quite signed on the dotted line, never fully joined their ranks, but if they needed a heavy hitter, he was on call. He worked in Oman, and throughout District V for a year before the Atharim pulled some strings and got him moved to Moscow.
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