Metal Goon Solid

[Heinlander]

It's after midnight. Moonless. The starlight deadened by stormclouds. Rain needles down in sheets that buffet the dock and churn the shorewater. Only the hardiest guards can stand to be out in it, and even they are hunkered down in their slickers under the cover of squat shipping crates left waiting for their truant cargo ships held off the coast of Hyggebo by the storm. The gale screams into the black morning, and through the maelstrom comes the intruder.

He rises from the water beneath one of the far piers. He wraps his elbow around the rung of the access ladder and strips off his SCUBA gear, which he lets fall into the water below. One rung at a time he pulls himself through the downpour and rolls silently onto the wooden slats, crouching low like a wolf spider. His camouflage is an inky blue, dark like the bottom of the ocean and the night swallows him whole. He moves.

He is unarmed, but that is soon rectified. He slides around a cargo container and in a single deft motion wraps his forearm around the mouth of a watchman delirious from the storm and with his other sinks the four inch carbide blade of his folding recon knife into the man's right kidney. He can almost feel it pop. Shock washes over the guard like a cold tide and his skin pales and his hands shake, and then they stop shaking. He evacuates. The intruder strips him off his sidearm, ammunition, rations and, last of all, his cigarettes and a silver lighter with the words "UOKMB Unified Military" emblazoned on its finish. He throws the guard into the surf.

He carefully peels a film from the top of his suit. The dark blue camo pulls away like cellophane, revealing a matte gray outfit underneath. No name. No insignia but for a black grenade born on his shoulder. He's an ocean and half a continent away from Bronti Laos, but strange as he is in this strange land he presses on, moving phantomlike into the heart of the complex.

Hyggebo has recalled its military and secured it one and all in the depths of its territory. That alone is the reason for this man's intrusion. He screws a silencer onto the end of his foraged sidearm. To address a problem, you use the one proper tool. A sharp knife. A few bullets and a suppressor. To destroy an army you raise a force greater than its own. But when a country hides its soldiers and leaves its boarders helpless, a single man can do the work in the hours between twilight and sunrise. The correct tool.

The sidearm coughs and another guard crumples into a pile. He reaches the dead man and searches him. Ammunition. Grenades. Pills. A rolled up girly-mag stuffed into his back pocket. A lanyard around his neck holds an access card and the intruder yanks it free. He's in. Just one man and a pack of semtex.

They're building tanks. Big ones, ones that walk with supercomputer brains. Hyggebo's science far exceeds Bronti Laos's but wanderlust fails to strike him. Security is tense but inefficient. He bursts from lockers and shanks watchmen in the back. Picks them off in isolation. Over the course of two hours he systematically depopulates the entire facility. Coldly, wordlessly. He pauses in a bathroom and smokes. He thumbs through the girly-mag. He smothers the butt in its glossy pages and crams it into a toilet bowl in which he has just drowned the head of research and development for the base. He's a haunting.

By the time anyone figures it out it'stoo late . They send spies to bring him down. Specialists. A sniper. A machine gunner. A gunslinger. A spymaster. A commander. Another hour passes and they're all dead, the hallways and factory floors where they chose to make their stands turned into de facto tombs to their inadequacy. The pride of Hyggebo turned on its head and smashes out like a used dogend. A senseless waste of life expunged in the manner befitting its value.

His demolitions are placed. It hardly seems to matter now. The factory is a ghost town, but the machines continue to toil away independent of their controllers. Left to their own devices they would happily build war machines into perpetuity, but GOONS has other ideas. Their soldier decked the halls with semtex affixed to stress points. Their remote fuses blink on and off like macabre decorations in perfect synchronization. Staring down one of the darkened corridors, they seem as it red eyes winking in the shadows.

Daybreak comes. The storm is settled. He commandeers a motorboat and sits off shore, fingering the switch on the radio detonator. The facility looks like an ugly and profane temple, an altar to the nation's false god now burning in the morning sun like fire fallen from Sinai. He turns the safety key and without a second thought flicks the detonation switch.

Millions of dollars. Hundreds of tanks. Spies and personnel and all the technology and infrastructure tied up in the skunkworks. All of it heaves upwards from the water in which it is planted as a coordinated cascade of explosions rip it off its foundations. If there was anyone left alive they'd be panicking. But the one soldier is the sole witness as the factory lists like a sinking ship and in minutes disappears beneath the water, dragging its ruin into the rocky shelf. He smokes. He chews a stolen ration. He waits for the boiling deathroes to end, and when they do he turns and charges the motor and sails westerward.

[Haquertal]

Well played, sir.

Great read, as always.

[agafaba]

I look forward to Metal Goon Solid: Guns of the Kerberos

[Owney OSullivan]

Great read, I like.

[Heinlander]

This piece, as with my others, is based on actual events. The names have not been changed to protect the parties involved.

[Bavaricar]

[quote name='Heinlander' timestamp='1284525414' post='2454462']
The intruder strips him off his sidearm, ammunition, rations and, last of all, his cigarettes and a silver lighter with the words "UOKMB Unified Military" emblazoned on its finish.
[/quote]

I hear those are really nice lighters. Would you be interested in selling it?

Or I could trade you an MK spy issue lighter I picked up a few weeks ago.

[img]http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/3756/cameralighter.jpg[/img]



[size="1"]/nice write-up again[/size]

[thekirbyfake]

Could ye write one about how I nuked ye and spent the last week pummelling your puny warchest?

That would be fab

[Jakome]

[quote name='thekirbyfake' timestamp='1284929678' post='2458403']
Could ye write one about how I nuked ye and spent the last week pummelling your puny warchest?

That would be fab
[/quote]
Looks like some bitter betty didn't like the story