11-03-2013, 08:58 PM
Continued from: A glittering spider
"It's getting cold, Makar. How long we have to sit on this brat?"
The younger of the two men, Giedrius, still into his early thirties, tugged irritably at the collar of his puffy jacket then shrugged the strap of an SMG higher onto his shoulder. He chose not to wear gloves despite the chill evening air; they interfered with one's weapon handling after all, and any that would be warm enough to keep the chill off would be too bulky to use the weapon properly. Besides, that's what pockets were for.
He had just stepped out of the building, into the pool of ugly yellow light cast by the light above the door and moved to stand next to his fellow guard, an older Lithuanian man. Both were martial men; long years of military service in the CCD had hardened the two, but left them without many applicable skills in life outside the service. Hence their choice of career. Hired muscle, kidnappers, murderers, the usual.
Makar sat on an old wooden crate used to cart bottles of vodka, his own rifle straddled in his lap and staring down the length of the alley, and hadn't any input to offer to Giedrius' question. A bear fur cap and a heavy high collared great coat gave the man a very classic Russian look. At his companion's silence, Giedrius grumbled irritably and zipped his coat to his chin.
The radio sitting in Makar's lap squawked, their boss demanding his hourly radio check. Makar didn't stir, and after the second request he slapped at the sleeping man's shoulder to wake the old fart up. When his hand came back warm and sticky and wet he let out a sickened yelp and quickly scrubbed his hand on the older man's back, "Damn it Makar, too much to drink again?"
He looked down at the seated man, who still hadn't stirred, then frowned in confusion. Something wasn't quite right. Giedrius tapped at Makar's shoulder again, then carefully grabbed the man by the forehead and tilted his head back, gawking at the sight. A knife, a KA-BAR, jutted from the bottom of Makar's jaw, the hilt resting against the dead man's chest at the right length to keep his head up as if he were sitting awake.
Giedrius blinked once, then reached for the radio instinctively, but the world spun suddenly before he could reach it. An explosion of pain tore through his chest then suddenly vanished with all the air in his lungs. He blinked, then realized he was looking up at the back of the nightclub they were holding the girl in. He could hear a voice, a familiar one...
"Makar. All quiet. Giedrius complains of the cold."
The older man's voice was unmistakable and calm. Bored even. Unsurprising, considering he had said that very same thing a dozen times or more in the past two days. Giedrius calmed down, but only for a moment as the boss responded in the affirmative. A figure stepped over him, dropping the radio and a digital audio recorder on his chest as the man passed. Not Makar...too tall, too...not Russian looking. He tried to move, to look at the man, to reach for the radio, but nothing seemed to work any more. His mind frayed and panic began to overtake him; the man stopped at the door, and snapped his fingers as if he had nearly forgotten something, then turned back to Giedrius and knelt to rifle through his pockets. The keys to the door were plucked from Giedrius' pocket.
"Shouldn't give the outside guards the keys to the door."
The man's accent was hard to place; middle-eastern maybe, but speaking in Russian so fluently. He patted Giedrius on the chest with the key and rolled Giedrius onto his side. There was a strange pulling sensation and a quickly fading flash of pain and he was dropped onto his back again, to see the man holding a knife dripping black in the sickly yellow light. "Also shouldn't pass a door without checking your corners. Thought you lot were soldiers. Guess you weren't good ones."
Then the man turned and walked back to the door, holding of all things a tiny little .22 pistol with a silencer; an absolutely ridiculous weapon. Giedrius chuckled at the sight; then choked and gurgled as his lungs filled with blood. He was dead before the door fell closed.
-----
Stepping through the door into the building, Hood listened to the muffled sounds of techno garbage playing in the club proper, somewhere beyond the unfinished walls of the back storage areas of the club. The turn-coat guard had made it easy to hunt him down; he had made great efforts to hide his repeated patronage of a nightclub in the red light district, one of the countless that rose and fell in a matter of months. Those efforts were just what Hood had been looking for. Scants days after the meeting with Mr Talanov, Hood took a casual stroll through that neck of the woods and zero'd in on the tracking device the man had planted on his own daughter. The range was minuscule as such things went, a few hundred meters at best, but with the right scanner in hand he had little trouble finding it and confirming his suspicions.
Had Mr Talanov been a 'good' man, then that would have been where Hood's work would finish. Daughter found, the police would be informed and would execute a raid to rescue her. But in the sort of circles Mr Talanov walked, that was a sure sign of weakness. Hence why Hood had already killed two men and was off to do in a few more yet. He casually adjusted the shemagh he wore wrapped about his face, and with a few practice flicks of his eyes his Land Warrior's HUD brought up a variety of programs. Motion tracker a thermal imaging filter, and a map display of the building's layout which he had acquired from public records. A microphone system registered subtle sounds, displaying intensity and direction. Most of it was redundant and ignored, but he wasn't so arrogant as not to pay some small attention to what all the high-tech gear had to say.
The door had led into a wide hallway which led to storage rooms where stocks of liquor, spare couches and furniture were stored for the club proper. The rooms were dark, save one that sported the constant flicker of a television, although no sound registered above the distant thrum of the garbage music kids listened to these days. Hood muttered under his breath as he approached the open door, kneeling near the opening and keeping a few inches off the wall. Another tool was produced from his pocket, the telescopic camera he had used in the sewers when hunting the Rougarou some short weeks ago. A quick peek revealed exactly what he expected; another man, sprawled on a couch and facing a television with headphones on so he could hear the program he was watching over the music.
The man was facing the door, but with the television between him and it, he couldn't actually see into the hallway; the light of the television would blind him to anything beyond it. A moment was spent to assure himself that there was no sort of warning system; no string nor laser waited to warn the lounging man shoulder trouble come knocking. Hood sighed quietly as he stepped into the room, walking up behind the television. The lounging man, absorbed in his programs, didn't notice anything amiss until the silencer of Hood's little pistol emerged into the light cast by the television. A dumb expression crossed the man's face before Hood pulled the trigger. A nice, tight little grouping into the man's chest and throat; from so close, the .22 rounds had little trouble piercing meat and bounding off bone. Between the low caliber, the silencer, and the loud music, there wasn't much to be heard of either the weapon firing or the man's gurgles.
He dropped the magazine from the little pistol and slid in a fresh one as he moved back into the hallway and headed for the stairs up to the second level. With a little under an hour before the next radio check, he had no need to hurry, and it took him many long minutes to make it up the two short flights of stairs. There was little of interest in the narrower hallways of the second floor, leaving only the third. According to the building's plans, the third floor was entirely devoted to office space, and was the most likely area that Mr Talanov's daughter was held.
He froze near the top of the stairs, eyeing the closed door that resided there. The audio display spiked occasionally, a tiny read-out indicating two voices beyond, although the program was unable to guess at what was being said. He knelt, carefully snaking the camera beneath the door, tilting it left and right to better understand what was ahead. A large room, sporting a few desks and computers, and two men stood arguing. One he recognized as the turn-coat, while the other seemed to be a business man, possibly the club's owner.
The images were recorded to his Land Warriors, and Hood tucked the camera away. He had finally come to his first major obstacle; electronic security. Closed circuit cameras, one in the corner far left of the door, the other across the room in the far right; a simple enough set up. Unimaginative but efficient, as such things went. Hood adjusted the shemagh around his head. It was more then mere cloth of course; the fabric was treated with a military grade chemical designed to confuse thermal imaging. The same chemical was on the clothes and gear he wore. Not that the cameras beyond had any thermal capacity; hell, he'd be impressed if they were HD. But it wasn't those cameras he was worried about. Surely they had more useful security measures in place if they were sitting on the daughter of a man like Mr Talanov.
Satisfied that he was as ready as he was going to be, Hood calmly opened the door and walked through. The turn coat and the business man both turned to look at him in surprise. The suit's surprise quickly changed to horror; presented before him was a clearly large, powerfully built man, without a trace of skin showing beneath clothes of darkest black and grays. Strapped about him were pouches and weapons and wicked knives.
The turn coat was a bit more collected about it; surprise flickered briefly to concern then to the practiced calm of a man who had stared down a gun barrel a time or two before. The man glanced briefly to a desk scant feet away, where sat his trusty Kalashnikov, carelessly set aside. When had he grown so complacent? He knew better then this; he should have known a heavy weight like Talanov wouldn't go to the police, that the man would try something like this. A show of force was exactly what was required to save face, after all.
Hood and the turn coat locked eyes; or as best they could through the impassive lenses of Hood's Land Warriors. The suit started to babble; demanding to know who Hood was, pleading innocence, the usual drivel. He didn't actually pay the man any attention, but as the man's voice grew more shrill with panic Hood just growled and jerked his pistol up. "Shut the hell up. Just running a little errand."
A few quiet pops and the well dressed man dropped. The turn coat took the chance to lunge for his gun, and a side door burst open to reveal a washroom and another armed man surging out the door, an auto-shotgun tucked to the man's shoulder and the trigger held down.
Buckshot tore through the drywall to Hood's right, the bursts of dust and wood chips quickly sweeping closer to him as the gunman drew closer to his mark. Hood dropped to the floor on his back, tugging a black cylinder from his vest. A grenade spoon flittered free as the item was held in an open palm, and when Hood's back hit the floor he tossed it deeper into the room and rolled to his chest, face down and hands to his ears. The flashbang went off as it bounced from a desk, filling the room with bright flashes of light and deafening claps of sound. Of course, Hood's Land Warriors had flash suppressant capability, and he wore ear defenders to ward off the worst of the sound, but being in the same room as the detonating flash-bang was never a pleasant experience.
The gunman was good; he dropped to a knee and squeezed his eyes shut just before the thing went off, but the turncoat was caught off guard; rifle in hand he had just enough time to spot the bouncing grenade before it went off and he dropped to the floor screaming in pain and clutching at his blinded eyes. The gunman rose, blinking rapidly to try and banish the sunspots in his eyes, shotgun up and at the ready as he aimed to where he had seen Hood leap to the floor. He almost managed to jerk his weapon to the ready when Hood did pop up again, some meters right and dangerously closer then the man had expected.
Hood had dropped the .22, now that noise discipline was no longer an issue. He came up with his Mateba instead, and the heavy caliber revolver barked as viciously as the shotgun had as Hood put three rounds into the gunman. The fellow had been wearing a simple ballistic vest, steel plate instead of the oft preferred ceramic. It stopped the first round, the metal denting alarmingly and likely breaking a few ribs. The second round hit too close to the first for the plate to stop it, and it punched through at an angle, exploding out the side of the man's torso and painting the wall behind him red. The third slipped through unobstructed, at least till it hit the second plate on the man's back. It probably bounced a few times before emerging from the top of the man's shoulder, but the fellow was already dead by then.
Hood rose to his feet as the third round was fired, and swiveled the pistol towards the turncoat, who was still writhing on the floor and screaming obscenities, but before Hood could put the fellow out of both their misery, another door was kicked open, revealing a stairwell that probably led down to the club proper, and another guard that had been standing on the 'civilian' side of the line. Like any good bouncer, he was a large, intimidating looking bald black guy, wearing a too-tight shirt and dress coat that pulled tight at the shoulders. Hood immediately recognized the sunken knuckles, the cauliflower ear and the oft-broken nose. A boxer, eh?
Hood was able to notice those important details so quickly, mostly because the man had emerged from a door far closer then Hood would have expected for such a stairwell. Quite the odd location for it, next to the bathroom, so close to the stairs to the back half of the building. Seemed like a poor choice, in regards to fire hazards and such. He stepped back and twisted his revolver to bear on the big man, but the fellow turned out to be far quicker then his size indicated. A meaty fist impacted with the Mateba, knocking it out of Hood's grasp, and he barely managed to duck a quick jab at his head.
Hood was forced to give ground initially, batting at the huge man's forearms to deflect or slow incoming blows. Hood took a wide swing against his shoulder and forearm, ducking into the man's reach, and quickly turned the situation around. He ducked into the man, rolling his shoulder into the fellow's chest, then snapped one arm back and up to drive his elbow into the fellow's chin. His other hand reached out to lock an iron-fisted grip onto a tendon at the back of the man's knee, twisting it sharply as the fellow staggered back from the elbow hit.
The fellow yelped in pain but didn't drop, instead awkwardly staggering back and giving his leg a kick to try and work the kink out of his knee. Hood followed close, grabbing the fellow by the lapels and driving his knee into the big man's crotch, at the same time as cracking his forehead into the man's nose. Blood exploded from the wrecked cartilage, and the fellow gasped in pain. The bouncer took an awkward swing to try and keep Hood at bay, and regretted it instantly.
Hood caught the man's arm against his side, pinning it beneath his own arm and grabbing the wrist, which he twisted sharply. The bouncer's arm twisted and straightened out, locking the elbow, and before the fellow could use his superior strength to try and toss Hood away, Hood's elbow snapped down into the bouncer's own elbow. Cartilage tore and bone snapped, blood spurting free as bone tore through flesh. The man screamed in pain, jerking away from Hood instinctively to try and cradle his ruined arm, dropping to his knees. Hood let the man go, but once the man had fallen, he stepped in with his side to the fellow's back and drove his elbow sharply into the bouncer's cauliflower-ed ear.
By the time the bouncer dropped to the ground, unconscious and bleeding out, the turncoat had finally recovered enough to be staggering to his feet, using the AK as a crutch. Hood crossed the room quickly, kicking the weapon out from under the man before he could get his footing, and pulled a kukri from it's sheath in the small of his back. The blade was shaped much like a boomerang, with the sharpened blade along the inside edge, and that edge was quickly situated at the kneeling turncoat's crotch. Hood held a fistful of the man's hair, jerking his head up to be looking the man in the now panic-stricken eyes. "Who hired you?"
The conversation was short; just as Hood had expected, the turncoat's selling price was always negotiable. Keeping one's testicles was a highly agreeable payment. Content with the man's answers, Hood struck the man unconscious then produced a hypodermic syringe, giving the fellow an injection to keep him soundly unconscious for a few hours. He had a special treat for Mr Talanov. The man's daughter was easy to find; she was tied and gagged in one of the offices. A little worse for wear, but alive and relatively healthy, all things considered. She didn't fare well with the view on the way out the back of the building, and was more then a little confused when Hood wasted a few minutes running a powerful magnet over the various computers and hard-drives. One of them were likely connected to the cameras, and he had to hope the recordings weren't forwarded and stored off-site. A little messy, but it would get the point to Mr Talanov's enemies.
Hood carried the unconscious turncoat out to a waiting van further down the alley, which had pulled in shortly after he had cleared the two guards at the door. Another member of Pervaya liniya Security waited there as the getaway driver, and they were all long gone before the police arrived to do their 'investigation.' It would be written off as some sort of mafia-related incident and be quickly forgotten.
An hour later, Mr Talanov was reunited with his daughter, and a blindfolded and bound turncoat sat in the man's boathouse, waiting for Mr Talanov's personal attention.
Continued here: A Blind Eye
Edited by Hood, Nov 6 2013, 08:27 AM.
"It's getting cold, Makar. How long we have to sit on this brat?"
The younger of the two men, Giedrius, still into his early thirties, tugged irritably at the collar of his puffy jacket then shrugged the strap of an SMG higher onto his shoulder. He chose not to wear gloves despite the chill evening air; they interfered with one's weapon handling after all, and any that would be warm enough to keep the chill off would be too bulky to use the weapon properly. Besides, that's what pockets were for.
He had just stepped out of the building, into the pool of ugly yellow light cast by the light above the door and moved to stand next to his fellow guard, an older Lithuanian man. Both were martial men; long years of military service in the CCD had hardened the two, but left them without many applicable skills in life outside the service. Hence their choice of career. Hired muscle, kidnappers, murderers, the usual.
Makar sat on an old wooden crate used to cart bottles of vodka, his own rifle straddled in his lap and staring down the length of the alley, and hadn't any input to offer to Giedrius' question. A bear fur cap and a heavy high collared great coat gave the man a very classic Russian look. At his companion's silence, Giedrius grumbled irritably and zipped his coat to his chin.
The radio sitting in Makar's lap squawked, their boss demanding his hourly radio check. Makar didn't stir, and after the second request he slapped at the sleeping man's shoulder to wake the old fart up. When his hand came back warm and sticky and wet he let out a sickened yelp and quickly scrubbed his hand on the older man's back, "Damn it Makar, too much to drink again?"
He looked down at the seated man, who still hadn't stirred, then frowned in confusion. Something wasn't quite right. Giedrius tapped at Makar's shoulder again, then carefully grabbed the man by the forehead and tilted his head back, gawking at the sight. A knife, a KA-BAR, jutted from the bottom of Makar's jaw, the hilt resting against the dead man's chest at the right length to keep his head up as if he were sitting awake.
Giedrius blinked once, then reached for the radio instinctively, but the world spun suddenly before he could reach it. An explosion of pain tore through his chest then suddenly vanished with all the air in his lungs. He blinked, then realized he was looking up at the back of the nightclub they were holding the girl in. He could hear a voice, a familiar one...
"Makar. All quiet. Giedrius complains of the cold."
The older man's voice was unmistakable and calm. Bored even. Unsurprising, considering he had said that very same thing a dozen times or more in the past two days. Giedrius calmed down, but only for a moment as the boss responded in the affirmative. A figure stepped over him, dropping the radio and a digital audio recorder on his chest as the man passed. Not Makar...too tall, too...not Russian looking. He tried to move, to look at the man, to reach for the radio, but nothing seemed to work any more. His mind frayed and panic began to overtake him; the man stopped at the door, and snapped his fingers as if he had nearly forgotten something, then turned back to Giedrius and knelt to rifle through his pockets. The keys to the door were plucked from Giedrius' pocket.
"Shouldn't give the outside guards the keys to the door."
The man's accent was hard to place; middle-eastern maybe, but speaking in Russian so fluently. He patted Giedrius on the chest with the key and rolled Giedrius onto his side. There was a strange pulling sensation and a quickly fading flash of pain and he was dropped onto his back again, to see the man holding a knife dripping black in the sickly yellow light. "Also shouldn't pass a door without checking your corners. Thought you lot were soldiers. Guess you weren't good ones."
Then the man turned and walked back to the door, holding of all things a tiny little .22 pistol with a silencer; an absolutely ridiculous weapon. Giedrius chuckled at the sight; then choked and gurgled as his lungs filled with blood. He was dead before the door fell closed.
-----
Stepping through the door into the building, Hood listened to the muffled sounds of techno garbage playing in the club proper, somewhere beyond the unfinished walls of the back storage areas of the club. The turn-coat guard had made it easy to hunt him down; he had made great efforts to hide his repeated patronage of a nightclub in the red light district, one of the countless that rose and fell in a matter of months. Those efforts were just what Hood had been looking for. Scants days after the meeting with Mr Talanov, Hood took a casual stroll through that neck of the woods and zero'd in on the tracking device the man had planted on his own daughter. The range was minuscule as such things went, a few hundred meters at best, but with the right scanner in hand he had little trouble finding it and confirming his suspicions.
Had Mr Talanov been a 'good' man, then that would have been where Hood's work would finish. Daughter found, the police would be informed and would execute a raid to rescue her. But in the sort of circles Mr Talanov walked, that was a sure sign of weakness. Hence why Hood had already killed two men and was off to do in a few more yet. He casually adjusted the shemagh he wore wrapped about his face, and with a few practice flicks of his eyes his Land Warrior's HUD brought up a variety of programs. Motion tracker a thermal imaging filter, and a map display of the building's layout which he had acquired from public records. A microphone system registered subtle sounds, displaying intensity and direction. Most of it was redundant and ignored, but he wasn't so arrogant as not to pay some small attention to what all the high-tech gear had to say.
The door had led into a wide hallway which led to storage rooms where stocks of liquor, spare couches and furniture were stored for the club proper. The rooms were dark, save one that sported the constant flicker of a television, although no sound registered above the distant thrum of the garbage music kids listened to these days. Hood muttered under his breath as he approached the open door, kneeling near the opening and keeping a few inches off the wall. Another tool was produced from his pocket, the telescopic camera he had used in the sewers when hunting the Rougarou some short weeks ago. A quick peek revealed exactly what he expected; another man, sprawled on a couch and facing a television with headphones on so he could hear the program he was watching over the music.
The man was facing the door, but with the television between him and it, he couldn't actually see into the hallway; the light of the television would blind him to anything beyond it. A moment was spent to assure himself that there was no sort of warning system; no string nor laser waited to warn the lounging man shoulder trouble come knocking. Hood sighed quietly as he stepped into the room, walking up behind the television. The lounging man, absorbed in his programs, didn't notice anything amiss until the silencer of Hood's little pistol emerged into the light cast by the television. A dumb expression crossed the man's face before Hood pulled the trigger. A nice, tight little grouping into the man's chest and throat; from so close, the .22 rounds had little trouble piercing meat and bounding off bone. Between the low caliber, the silencer, and the loud music, there wasn't much to be heard of either the weapon firing or the man's gurgles.
He dropped the magazine from the little pistol and slid in a fresh one as he moved back into the hallway and headed for the stairs up to the second level. With a little under an hour before the next radio check, he had no need to hurry, and it took him many long minutes to make it up the two short flights of stairs. There was little of interest in the narrower hallways of the second floor, leaving only the third. According to the building's plans, the third floor was entirely devoted to office space, and was the most likely area that Mr Talanov's daughter was held.
He froze near the top of the stairs, eyeing the closed door that resided there. The audio display spiked occasionally, a tiny read-out indicating two voices beyond, although the program was unable to guess at what was being said. He knelt, carefully snaking the camera beneath the door, tilting it left and right to better understand what was ahead. A large room, sporting a few desks and computers, and two men stood arguing. One he recognized as the turn-coat, while the other seemed to be a business man, possibly the club's owner.
The images were recorded to his Land Warriors, and Hood tucked the camera away. He had finally come to his first major obstacle; electronic security. Closed circuit cameras, one in the corner far left of the door, the other across the room in the far right; a simple enough set up. Unimaginative but efficient, as such things went. Hood adjusted the shemagh around his head. It was more then mere cloth of course; the fabric was treated with a military grade chemical designed to confuse thermal imaging. The same chemical was on the clothes and gear he wore. Not that the cameras beyond had any thermal capacity; hell, he'd be impressed if they were HD. But it wasn't those cameras he was worried about. Surely they had more useful security measures in place if they were sitting on the daughter of a man like Mr Talanov.
Satisfied that he was as ready as he was going to be, Hood calmly opened the door and walked through. The turn coat and the business man both turned to look at him in surprise. The suit's surprise quickly changed to horror; presented before him was a clearly large, powerfully built man, without a trace of skin showing beneath clothes of darkest black and grays. Strapped about him were pouches and weapons and wicked knives.
The turn coat was a bit more collected about it; surprise flickered briefly to concern then to the practiced calm of a man who had stared down a gun barrel a time or two before. The man glanced briefly to a desk scant feet away, where sat his trusty Kalashnikov, carelessly set aside. When had he grown so complacent? He knew better then this; he should have known a heavy weight like Talanov wouldn't go to the police, that the man would try something like this. A show of force was exactly what was required to save face, after all.
Hood and the turn coat locked eyes; or as best they could through the impassive lenses of Hood's Land Warriors. The suit started to babble; demanding to know who Hood was, pleading innocence, the usual drivel. He didn't actually pay the man any attention, but as the man's voice grew more shrill with panic Hood just growled and jerked his pistol up. "Shut the hell up. Just running a little errand."
A few quiet pops and the well dressed man dropped. The turn coat took the chance to lunge for his gun, and a side door burst open to reveal a washroom and another armed man surging out the door, an auto-shotgun tucked to the man's shoulder and the trigger held down.
Buckshot tore through the drywall to Hood's right, the bursts of dust and wood chips quickly sweeping closer to him as the gunman drew closer to his mark. Hood dropped to the floor on his back, tugging a black cylinder from his vest. A grenade spoon flittered free as the item was held in an open palm, and when Hood's back hit the floor he tossed it deeper into the room and rolled to his chest, face down and hands to his ears. The flashbang went off as it bounced from a desk, filling the room with bright flashes of light and deafening claps of sound. Of course, Hood's Land Warriors had flash suppressant capability, and he wore ear defenders to ward off the worst of the sound, but being in the same room as the detonating flash-bang was never a pleasant experience.
The gunman was good; he dropped to a knee and squeezed his eyes shut just before the thing went off, but the turncoat was caught off guard; rifle in hand he had just enough time to spot the bouncing grenade before it went off and he dropped to the floor screaming in pain and clutching at his blinded eyes. The gunman rose, blinking rapidly to try and banish the sunspots in his eyes, shotgun up and at the ready as he aimed to where he had seen Hood leap to the floor. He almost managed to jerk his weapon to the ready when Hood did pop up again, some meters right and dangerously closer then the man had expected.
Hood had dropped the .22, now that noise discipline was no longer an issue. He came up with his Mateba instead, and the heavy caliber revolver barked as viciously as the shotgun had as Hood put three rounds into the gunman. The fellow had been wearing a simple ballistic vest, steel plate instead of the oft preferred ceramic. It stopped the first round, the metal denting alarmingly and likely breaking a few ribs. The second round hit too close to the first for the plate to stop it, and it punched through at an angle, exploding out the side of the man's torso and painting the wall behind him red. The third slipped through unobstructed, at least till it hit the second plate on the man's back. It probably bounced a few times before emerging from the top of the man's shoulder, but the fellow was already dead by then.
Hood rose to his feet as the third round was fired, and swiveled the pistol towards the turncoat, who was still writhing on the floor and screaming obscenities, but before Hood could put the fellow out of both their misery, another door was kicked open, revealing a stairwell that probably led down to the club proper, and another guard that had been standing on the 'civilian' side of the line. Like any good bouncer, he was a large, intimidating looking bald black guy, wearing a too-tight shirt and dress coat that pulled tight at the shoulders. Hood immediately recognized the sunken knuckles, the cauliflower ear and the oft-broken nose. A boxer, eh?
Hood was able to notice those important details so quickly, mostly because the man had emerged from a door far closer then Hood would have expected for such a stairwell. Quite the odd location for it, next to the bathroom, so close to the stairs to the back half of the building. Seemed like a poor choice, in regards to fire hazards and such. He stepped back and twisted his revolver to bear on the big man, but the fellow turned out to be far quicker then his size indicated. A meaty fist impacted with the Mateba, knocking it out of Hood's grasp, and he barely managed to duck a quick jab at his head.
Hood was forced to give ground initially, batting at the huge man's forearms to deflect or slow incoming blows. Hood took a wide swing against his shoulder and forearm, ducking into the man's reach, and quickly turned the situation around. He ducked into the man, rolling his shoulder into the fellow's chest, then snapped one arm back and up to drive his elbow into the fellow's chin. His other hand reached out to lock an iron-fisted grip onto a tendon at the back of the man's knee, twisting it sharply as the fellow staggered back from the elbow hit.
The fellow yelped in pain but didn't drop, instead awkwardly staggering back and giving his leg a kick to try and work the kink out of his knee. Hood followed close, grabbing the fellow by the lapels and driving his knee into the big man's crotch, at the same time as cracking his forehead into the man's nose. Blood exploded from the wrecked cartilage, and the fellow gasped in pain. The bouncer took an awkward swing to try and keep Hood at bay, and regretted it instantly.
Hood caught the man's arm against his side, pinning it beneath his own arm and grabbing the wrist, which he twisted sharply. The bouncer's arm twisted and straightened out, locking the elbow, and before the fellow could use his superior strength to try and toss Hood away, Hood's elbow snapped down into the bouncer's own elbow. Cartilage tore and bone snapped, blood spurting free as bone tore through flesh. The man screamed in pain, jerking away from Hood instinctively to try and cradle his ruined arm, dropping to his knees. Hood let the man go, but once the man had fallen, he stepped in with his side to the fellow's back and drove his elbow sharply into the bouncer's cauliflower-ed ear.
By the time the bouncer dropped to the ground, unconscious and bleeding out, the turncoat had finally recovered enough to be staggering to his feet, using the AK as a crutch. Hood crossed the room quickly, kicking the weapon out from under the man before he could get his footing, and pulled a kukri from it's sheath in the small of his back. The blade was shaped much like a boomerang, with the sharpened blade along the inside edge, and that edge was quickly situated at the kneeling turncoat's crotch. Hood held a fistful of the man's hair, jerking his head up to be looking the man in the now panic-stricken eyes. "Who hired you?"
The conversation was short; just as Hood had expected, the turncoat's selling price was always negotiable. Keeping one's testicles was a highly agreeable payment. Content with the man's answers, Hood struck the man unconscious then produced a hypodermic syringe, giving the fellow an injection to keep him soundly unconscious for a few hours. He had a special treat for Mr Talanov. The man's daughter was easy to find; she was tied and gagged in one of the offices. A little worse for wear, but alive and relatively healthy, all things considered. She didn't fare well with the view on the way out the back of the building, and was more then a little confused when Hood wasted a few minutes running a powerful magnet over the various computers and hard-drives. One of them were likely connected to the cameras, and he had to hope the recordings weren't forwarded and stored off-site. A little messy, but it would get the point to Mr Talanov's enemies.
Hood carried the unconscious turncoat out to a waiting van further down the alley, which had pulled in shortly after he had cleared the two guards at the door. Another member of Pervaya liniya Security waited there as the getaway driver, and they were all long gone before the police arrived to do their 'investigation.' It would be written off as some sort of mafia-related incident and be quickly forgotten.
An hour later, Mr Talanov was reunited with his daughter, and a blindfolded and bound turncoat sat in the man's boathouse, waiting for Mr Talanov's personal attention.
Continued here: A Blind Eye
Edited by Hood, Nov 6 2013, 08:27 AM.