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+--- Thread: No Man Left Behind (/thread-781.html)
- Jacques - 03-30-2014
Continued from: Something To Do
Provost Boipello and three other men that had made up part of Mr Danjou's personal entourage for his visit to the ancient holy city stood in one of the Bedouin camps that dotted the city's outskirts. Gone were their FELIN 2 armour and gear, replaced with the traditional tob (robes) of the desert tribesmen. Each man carried a rifle brazenly slung over their shoulders, and khanjar knives tucked into their sashes.
The four men did not stand out much; they were African born, and the Bedouin tribes were known to travel far and wide, with the Islamic faith being a dominate one in Africa as well. They moved as a group, working their way among the tents and past the corrals of horses and camels and goat pens, their gaze focused on a crude cross with a body boldly tied to the rough timber planks.
The four men recognized Cpl Ime's remains only for the tattered and stained uniform and armour; the radicals that had taken his body had deemed his equipment unworthy of looting, apparently. All the better, as the FELIN armour included a GPS tracker that had led the Provost and his men straight to them.
They stopped at the edge of the tents as they gave way to the wide open space in which Ime's remains had been left. Dozens of men still lingered there sharing inflated stories of the attack on the foreign reporter and her camera man, and of the killing of the 'infidel' that now decorated their camp.
Boipello glanced at his watch briefly, then nodded to one of the men with him. Sapper Aberash caught the signal and pulled a strange green plastic device from a pouch among his robes. He cupped it in one large hand, and pulled a small antenna from it's housing, extending it fully. A simple hard plastic dial next to the antenna was quickly checked, and he waited for the Provost's signal.
The four men shifted impatiently, and some of the men in the clear area around Ime's remains glanced their way suspiciously.
Boipello's watch beeped once, and Aberash's hand squeezed down on the clacker in his hand. Somewhere in the camp a tiny charge went off, barely audible even if one were standing close to it. Wood and rope of a horse pen gave way and part of the pen wall collapsed. And with it's collapse, so to did a flash-bang grenade.
He turned the dial and struck the clacker again. And again. And again. Other pens collapsed, other flash-bangs detonated. A store of camp fuel went up from an incendiary grenade. The night sky was lit by flashes of bright light and flame. Horses screamed in the night and trampled out of their corrals. Camels groaned and panicked, much like their distant cousins, the horses. And then women and children screamed in panic as tents were trampled and fires spread. The carefully stacked and separated stores of fuel detonated as sealed cans detonated, spraying burning petrol onto nearby tents.
The camp erupted into total chaos; people were running, the men in the clearing around Ime's remains were distracted from the four suspicious strangers, rushing off to try to contain the chaos. And the four Legionnaires strolled in and took down Ime's body unmolested. Sapper Aberash took the dead man's weight across his shoulders, and they walked out into the night to their waiting vehicle.
Firetrucks and ambulances raced towards the Bedouin camp, arriving far too soon to be responding to the actual initial incident. They'd been called ten minutes before the first detonation. The Legion was brutally efficient, but they were not inherently brutal. Of course, it sat well with them that the camp was mostly young men, the fiery-hearted youths who were eager for war.
This would be just one more spark in the dry tinder that was Dominance V. Little did any of them know that there was a far brighter match struck at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University that very night.
A few hours later, Provost Boipello and his men, with Cpl Ime's now bagged remains, raced down the road towards the port city of Jedah, where a chartered ship waited to bring them back to African soil and a waiting private jet to finish their journey to Casablanca.
- Jacques - 04-22-2014
What awaited the team in Jedah was a bureaucratic nightmare. CCD forces had the place locked down, and if it hadn't been for Jacques' warning they would have been caught with their pants down. The might of the company's lawyers had been hard at work all night to help clear the way, and when the men reached the first checkpoint, they weren't simply arrested on the spot. They were, however, held for hours.
Their gear was seized and searched, Cpl Ime's remains were given a cursory autopsy to make sure the body was whom they claimed it to be, and that it wasn't being used to smuggle anything. Their weapons were taken, but nearly twenty four hours after arriving in Jedah, they were allowed to their chartered ship.
Which was still locked down in the dock, and would remain so for at least another full day till it's own papers cleared. But at least aboard the ship, they were relatively safe.
Jacques checked in on them via video conference twice during their nerve-wracking wait aboard the ship, but eventually they were cleared to leave port. Even in light of so vile an attack, time was money. The longer the ships were held in port, the more it cost for everyone involved, and in the end capitalism won through. Ships were searched one last time, then set free, so long as there was nothing even the least bit suspicious.
And Provost Boipello made damn certain there was nothing suspicious on their ship. He had a man to see home, after all.
The trip across to Port Suddan was blessedly short, and two days after retrieving Cpl Ime, they were on a private jet bound for Casablanca, Morocco, where the good Corporal would be buried in the Legion's graveyard.