*Editing magic performed by Shyqash, plus contributions by the regular gang of brigands and neer-do-wells*
*Honor is not for the weak of spirit nor those devoid of purpose *
*And so the First Book Concludes*
[PRELUDE]
[PULAU SETAN WANITA, INDONESIA (ISLAND OF THE DEVIL WOMEN)]
The 150 Condottieri mercenaries stealthed onto the Island of the Devil Women pre-dawn, but waited until the island was fully awake before launching their assault. They did this because the majority of the women slept in one conjoined area while during the day, they spread out, thus were hopefully easier to overwhelm in bite-sized chunks.
When the attack went in, Khalid Adzharia, Brian Fung and Trent Grant were in different areas of the Havenstone compound. When neither was being milked of their seed, they had jobs to perform on the island. Neither was permitted a job which allowed them access to either transport off the island nor any long-range communication gear. All computer access was monitored and by LAN line only.
Trent Grant remained a financial investigator though he currently reported to someone not nearly as high up in that branch of Havenstone as he once enjoyed. Brian was in the same boat in Acquisitions with the high hopes of working himself up in importance to the point he would leave this prison-island — at which time he would leave Havenstone for good.
Khalid, who had been there the longest, had a different outlook on things. He realized this was where his life ended. There would be no escape unless he managed to vacate the island under his own power and with his own initiative. Worse — for him — he had begun to develop an emotional attachment to three of the ladies on the island. He was screwing them constantly even after being milked.
Worst of all — one of the ladies was now pregnant with a child who could only be his. All the ‘old male’ population had been sent away (exterminated) so he, Brian and Trent were it … on an island of roughly five hundred Amazons. Neither of those two men had the stones to cross him on this matter and he’d made it clear to both those three women were ‘his’. The surveillance officers monitoring the trio found that sense of male possessiveness ‘amusing’.
Trent? Trent had developed a personal hatred for Brooke and, by association, all the women in her sorority. After all, Trent had all his lies perfectly balanced inside Havenstone only to have Brooke stop by and fuck things up for him. Now he was a prisoner, milked of his seed daily and was constantly being hit on by a bevy of beautiful Indonesian women. His predicament was ALL Brooke’s fault.
Like Khalid, he realized the only escape from this feminist hell was in his own capable hands. Again, the security women tasked with monitoring the two of the three found their plans to escape to be amateurish and filled with a willful misunderstanding of what Amazons were all about — aka they were all sneaky bitches.
They had tracking devices sown into their clothes along with some of their jewelry — offered to them by women the men had slept with as signs of their gratitude for being chosen — being tiny microphones. All their plans were immediately reported and recorded for further examination — in case there were actually any flaws in the island’s security.
The one monitoring Brian was deeply depressed though. Her ‘guy’ was an utterly dull ignoramus. He made no realistic plans to escape, formed no essential bonds with any of his captors nor with his fellow prisoners, and was an otherwise diligent little weasel. These Indonesian Amazons didn’t hold much reverence for the weasel btw.
The Condottieri did a good job of spoofing the island’s defensive net. Their one mistake was purely accidental. As they closed in one of the office complexes, they stumbled upon and were encountered by two Amazons out for an early morning run. They were avid joggers who normally ‘did their thing’ around dusk, but had an important teleconference that night so improvised.
Even as the two ladies went for their sidearms they were ‘neutralized’ by the Condottieri squad they’d encountered. At the main security hut, the guardian on duty noted two heart signals spike — then stop. The odds of both having immediately fatal accidents was so unlikely as to be impossible.
Even as she reported the incident to her superior, she put the whole island on silent alarm. If nothing else, it would be a good surprise exercise for her fellow Amazons. All around the island, the women went into instantaneous defense mode, gathered up their assault rifles & PDWs and, not being attacked, went hunting for their attackers. That was standard protocols.
Back at the security base, all those Amazons went for their body armor first. It was normally too hot and humid during the summer day to wear them. That accomplished, they dispatched their sole squad of SD’s (Security Detail) to the sight of the first incident — the death of the two runners.
At the same esenler escort time the on-sight Condottieri commander accelerated his own plans, indicating all units to immediately launch their assault on the closest work areas instead of waiting for all the other teams to be in place. In one instance, a Condo team ran smack into the stealthing forward SD team. Bullets were exchanged.
The SD came out on top as they were more accustomed to making head shots than their opponents. They also reported their situation to the Security base before continuing to advance. Since ten men invading the island made no tactical sense, the islands ‘War Chief’ went to full alert — it was time to hunt down and exterminate the enemy presence in their home.
The Condottieri leader knew he was in trouble when one team reported coming to the sanitation work base only to find it unoccupied — those Amazons were already out hunting down their foes, while another detailed the alertness of the Amazons in the area they were assaulting. The sounds of automatic weapon’s fire and grenade explosions began echoing all over the island.
Needless to say none of the men had firearms though they knew each Amazon was armed with a knife and pistol. They also knew were they kept the heavier weaponry yet were afraid to approach that area of the complex because they had little doubt the Amazons would shoot through any human shield they had just to make them suffer. Besides, none of them knew the combination to the gun locker — yet.
When death came calling, each man approached the situation differently. Brian’s Acquisition section was in the same part of the complex as Banking. There, day in and day out, he looked over prospective properties for the Amazons to purchase. His reviews were entered into the system by another Amazon. Gaining so much knowledge of how the Amazons operated, he promised himself he would one day expose them … once he was safely away, of course.
“Pick up the pistol,” hissed a coworker across the hall where Brian cowered. He was not so much terrified — he was definitely afraid, but not unmanned by it — as he didn’t feel this was his fight, so why become involved? The Amazon supervisor had been moving down the hall, when she was suddenly taken out by a sound-suppressed PDW. She had dropped her pistol as she expired.
The two of them — the coworker Amazon and Brian — were now being pinned down by that same fire pattern and the lone Amazon wasn’t enough to keep them at bay for long.
“Pick up the damn pistol,” she growled his way … and then the grenade came bouncing down the hallway.
It went off, stunning him and knocking him over, further into his cubicle. When he came to a man in jungle camouflage came rushing forward and put a three-round burst into the woman across the hall — he thought her name was Citra — then turned on Brian.
“Don’t shoot,” Brian pleaded. “I’m a guy — their prisoner. I can tell you all kinds of things about their organization. Please, don’t kill me.”
“Command — I have a male prisoner here,” the merc said over his mouth mic. “Roger that.”
“Let’s go,” the man directed. “We are getting you out of here.”
Brian couldn’t help but smile. He was escaping and sooner than either of those other two idiots were. He wanted to laugh out loud, but decided against it. The merc pushed him ahead of him and the two began racing away from the battlefield. Indeed, Brian had escaped, but only into Condottieri’s cruel custody.
Trent’s space in Financial Investigations was larger than Brian’s small unit. Because of that it received attention from two Condottieri squads, moving in from different directions, trying to catch the Amazons in a crossfire. It almost worked too. Only the team’s supervisor’s quick thinking kept that from happening. Still, their situation was dire.
“Here,” Laras, the team supervisor handed Trent a pistol. “Today, everyone fights.”
“I … this isn’t my fight,” he shook his head. Laras glared. She was about to turn away when Trent called out, “Wait! I’ll do it.”
She gave him the firearm and pointed to a thick support column.
“Stay there and be prepared for Amazons to fall back to your position if things get bad,” the Amazon commanded. Almost as an afterthought she gave him a spare magazine as well.
As she rushed off in another direction, Trent contemplated shooting her. At the last moment, before he raised the gun, he decided he didn’t mind the captivity as much as he would risk trying to join up with the attackers. After all, they could be much, much worse. Instead he took his position at the column, and just in time. He saw a grenade flying through the air, coming his way.
He ducked behind the column and hunkered down. The grenade went off as an airburst blew less debris in his direction. It was still a staggering experience. Trent shook the cobwebs out of his brain then peaked around the column bayrampaşa escort in the direction the grenade came from. Two men in body armor and camouflage clothing were rushing forward toward the downed Amazons in his section.
“Fuck this shit,” he muttered before steading the pistol with his left hand. He was by no means a marksman, but had taken an anti-kidnapping course when he was eighteen. Up came the pistol and he began firing. Alternating between the two combatants every two shots until he was empty.
“Oh God,” he nearly wept. “I’m about to die.” Neither man was dead.
Then a body slammed into him, knocking him to the floor. He was about to start showing the fucker some martial arts moves when he realized it was an office worker of his — Nadia by name — and she had brought along a coworker Trent had never gotten to know all that well. Those two ladies brought up their PDW’s and opened up on the two men Trent had been holding at bay.
Trent crawled back behind the column and behind Nadia. When she stopped to reload, she stole the pistol from his grasp, popped out the magazine and reloaded for him — even chambering the round.
“Good job Trent,” she grinned. “Now let’s kill these bastards.”
“I — ah — okay,” he meekly agreed. Honestly, he was terrified, but even the changing dynamic — his gun being reloaded — hadn’t changed the prisoner-warden mindset which drove him to survive. Off the two women went, Trent in tow. Battle wasn’t as glorious as his ancestors had described. It was awful and he never wanted to experience that again if he could help it.
While Trent’s group sought out financial opportunities within the scope of Havenstone’s possessions, or new acquisitions, Khalid’s group sought out the same information concerning operations of Havenstone’s enemies. Though he had never admitted it, even to himself, he relished the challenge. This was some James Bond bullshit he was caught up in here at Havenstone.
When the assault began, he was at the water cooler, chatting up his — he hated the term — baby mamma. She and the other Amazons found his lack of understanding of the pregnancy situation to be amusing. After all, she had only known a week thus was only seven weeks in that condition. Then the silent alarm went off.
“I didn’t know we were having a drill?” Mutia, his lover, commented.
“Then this might not be a drill,” one of his coworkers replied. The ladies began sprinting toward the gun locker even as they checked the readiness of their sidearms. At the locker the supervisor was directing the women to their battle stations — Mutia was in the ‘reaction force’ — even as another Amazon handed out the assault weapons and the bandolier of spare magazines.
“What are you doing here?” the supervisor asked him. “Go back to your station and take cover there.”
“No,” Khalid protested. “I want one. This is my home too.”
“Wait here,” the supervisor said. Khalid nodded.
“How do we know you can be trusted?” she asked once the last of the Amazons had been armed and rushed off to their station.
“Mutia is carrying my child,” Khalid explained. “That is who I’m fighting for.”
“Here,” the supervisor said,” as she repeated the process with Khalid. “Join the ‘reaction force’. When there is a breach, you will go to it. Kill everyone who isn’t one of us.”
“Understood,” Khalid nodded. Inside of him a fury was building, but for the first time in months it wasn’t aimed at any woman, or group of women.
Someone was threatening his lover and his child, for fuck’s sake. They had to pay. Khalid jogged off to join Mutia and the others. The supervisor began going over her positions so was on the opposite side of the building when the Condo team blew an emergency door and penetrated the building from that direction. In this case, their object was not just to kill as many Amazons as possible, but to locate their on sight computer network and download whatever sensitive data lay within.
As the sounds of the fighting echoed through the building, the supervisor ordered the ‘reaction force’ to proceed to the ‘sound of the guns’. Khalid, ahead of the others, began jogging in the general direction of the bullets.
“Khalid, wait,” Mutia called out.
“They are going to the computer room,” he intuited. “We need to hurry.”
With him in the lead, the Amazons rushed to keep up. Khalid was saved by the expedience of the Condottieri sentry looking the other way for an instance combined with the sponginess of the wooden floor absorbing the sound of his foot falls. The two men collided, but Khalid was both the bigger man and consumed by rage. He slammed the stock of his PDW into the man’s face once — twice — three times. As the enemy slumped down, he stomped on his neck, breaking it.
“Let’s go,” he whispered to the rather impressed Amazons.
And Khalid led the way. As the ‘reaction force’ burst into the Computer Room, they caught arnavutköy escort the Condo’s unprepared for their sudden arrival. Bullets began to fly around the room. In the exchange of lead, Mutia was hit in the chest — a really bad wound. Seeing that, something inside Khalid snapped. His military lineage was nothing compared to that of Trent, but some of his poorer relations had gone on to become police officers.
Still, he had an ancestor in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Civil War. When he first saw the film Glory his heart had swelled with pride. In that instance, he felt that ancestor calling to him the way Denzel Washington’s character had cried out to his fellow warriors in that climactic final scene. After that, he didn’t remember much else.
In the classic sense, he went berserk. He fired his weapon on fully automatic until it was empty then he charged. He was hit twice yet refused to succumb to the shock and pain. He slammed into the closest Condottieri, lifted the man up and threw him at two others. He jumped on that jumbled pile of humans attacking with inhuman ferocity.
His fists, forearms, elbows, knees and feet were all weapons and he didn’t stop until an Amazon pulled him off. Then she finished off the mangled men with her pistol — each earned a shot to the nose bridge. For a second no one said a thing.
“We’ve got a breach on the other side of the building,” the Amazon related. “Can you still carry on?”
“Sure,” he slurred slightly, coming down from that organic combat high.
“You’ve been shot twice and stabbed once … so I’m just curious,” she pointed out.
Khalid looked down at his own bloody body then back up to the Amazon.
“Mutia?”
“She might pull through,” the Amazon shrugged.
“Let’s go then,” he shook his head a few times to clear the lingering cobwebs. The Amazon took his PDW from him, put in a fresh magazine then returned it before turning and headed out the room, Khalid followed along to the best of his ability. Only later did Mutia explain things to him. He hadn’t experienced ‘Black Rage’. What he had gone through was much older and more primal — a trance-like fury in which he never lost focus on who the enemy was — and who wasn’t.
It was something the Amazons had a long history with — those special warriors who could set aside pain and debilitating wounds for the sake of one’s people. His hate had never been focused on the Amazons, and that was a critical thing and noted by all who saw him fight, or recover.
“Maybe we were wrong about you,” the supervisor said to him after the battle was over and the surviving Condottieri had escaped back to their boats.
Even then, over eighty littered the island dead — the Amazons were not interested in taking prisoners. In contrast, the Amazons suffered thirty-eight dead and seventy-one wounded enough to need some time to recuperate. Khalid and Trent — but mostly Khalid — were given new respect by the Amazons and the offer was given for them to return to ‘the World’ and Havenstone if they so desired.
Brian had been recaptured, but also was given the possibility of returning to the outside world. After all, his genetics hadn’t turned out to be all that exceptional when put in the crucible of battle. Needless to say, all three men agreed to return to the World. Captivity, no matter how attractive, or meaningful, was still slavery in their minds.
Brian signed every bit of paper they put before him, such was his anxiety about being caught trying to escape with the Condottieri. Trent signed with greater trepidation. Though he had acted with some sense of martial ability, his heart hadn’t been it. Khalid showed the most regret and it took both Trent and a recovering Mutia to convince him to return to his world and his family.
Since he harbored the desire to see his child come into the world, he decided to remain in Havenstone — not even a ‘Runner’, just a male. When he finally met up with Cáel and Felix, he was clearly surprised they’d both made it on the outside. The lunch they shared on Khalid’s second day back in New York City was eye opening for the lot of them that was for sure. Still, each of the five of the New Hires had survived … in one form or another.
[FINALLY BACK HOME]
[HAVENSTONE HQ, NEW YORK CITY]
I biked into work early Tuesday morning. I had spent most of Sunday recovering from the Great Hunt and my grievous wounds inflicted on me by Elsa. Monday had been devoured by my flight from Buenos Aires to New York. I had stumbled into my apartment late Monday night to find Odette, Timothy and Sovann waiting for me.
They hugged me and congratulated me on my victory in the Great Hunt without me telling them a damn thing. They read it on my face and in my posture. Afterwards I showered and went to bed. Odette cuddled up next to me, but didn’t demand sex so I went without. I was so damn tired inside and out from the three day ordeal.
In my mind’s eye, I went back over the events as they unfolded, Felix’s stunning reversal of fortune saving my ass, and even my whispered memory from Alal. I made a mental note to contact my blood brother, the Great Khan, and thank him for his gift of the ninja team which also saved our combined asses on more than one occasion.
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