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Chapter XV - Funnel Descending

Getting in hadn't been tough. Arlen just used his climbing harness to hang from the two pitons he'd tamped into the building and pulled out a glass-cutting blade, then drew five or six circles on the heavy glass and giving it a few good hits to knock the big circle loose.

Emerging into the unoccupied room Tamra's intelligence had found for them was likewise simple. Arlen pulled himself inside, detached the harness, and reached out to grab Buck's forearm and help him inside.

Unharnessed, they both checked hteir weapons, then prepared for the hard part; both knew getting down the halls of the occupied hotel armed to the teeth and dressed up like someone's black operations nightmare would be rough, especially if there were incognito guards as they expected.

Thus, they'd brought a few extra tools for this mission. One of them, a fiberoptic camera, was fed under the door by the big tiger, and he used it to check the hallway in either direction.

With a frown, he noticed furs were still awake - in this case a pair of foxes, male and female, standing in the hall talking - and gave Buck the wave-off, signaling him they couldn't move yet.

Tamra blinked and yawned, stretching her arms over her head as she leaned back against the side of Sato's tall bed, and blinked in curiosity as the lights dimmed.

Brownout? Weird...

She shrugged to herself, and kept typing, the lights coming back up as the hospital's backup generators went online. The calico waved to the guards as they looked inside, checking up on the sleeping silver wolf and his cat friend.

Tam gave the machines next to Sato a glance, saw they were going along just as before, and shrugged at the guards as if to say 'no problem I guess?'

Gavin, being a demolitionist by specialty and a sneak by profession, had found the generator room in virtually no time at all by moving through the various ducts and abandoned hallways that were ubiquitous in large, expensive hospitals.

The lithe male reminded himself to thank the rough economy. Even the super-rich had started traveling less, leaving the private hospital with entire floors empty of anything but dust and the occasional janitor.

Having found the main line into the building, he'd brought the power down, and was affixing several small blocks of C-4 to the computer controlling the backup generator.

Too bad, he thought, they were smart enough to put the generator somewhere unreachable.

He raised a paw to his lip, and gave two scratches to the lash mic.

Several floors above, Black Team moved out of the parking structure and into the stairwell, a pair of balaclava'd wolves checking above them with their MP-5's, while the rest of the team watched other angles, on the off chance the remnants of Rangefinder and Shield teams had put up some kind of defense.

Collin the lion was now leading the mercenary operation for Gecko, and it gave him a grin to realize he was what this whole op rested on. He scratched his lash mic, and called out to the others not present with his team of six in the stairwell.

"Hey you guys out of the van yet?"

Two seconds passed before a response came through, sounding terse.

"Affirmative. Moving now."

Collin smirked and reached to pat his M60, belatedly realizing he'd had to leave the heavy weapon behind thanks to the tight corners of their operational environment. It dampened his battle lust for a moment, but only a moment, before he remembered the new toys he was getting to play with.

The lion made hand signals to continue advancing, and as they were reaching the second floor and the top of the first stairwell, he ran a loving finger down the back of his new favorite non-LMG toy.

A wolf in front of him messed with the balaclava, adjusting it, then shouldered his carbine in order to pull out a map of the floors and give it the once over. Over his shoulder, he spoke in a muffled accent.

"Guard station faces the stairwell up above. Should be no more than four guards, lightly armed. Past that, hallway that leads to the lobby and the elevators and next set of stairs on the other side."

Collin nodded and gave the wolf a pat on the shoulder.

"Good good, I was worried the plan was too good."

The wolf turned his head, the balaclava shifting as he raised a brow, one ear flicking to the side in momentary confusion.

"What?"

"I was worried we wouldn't get to kill anybody."

"Kiyosato-sama, should we not let the hospital's guards check this? That is what they are paid for, and the pay is substantial."

The elder silver wolf responded while striding purposefully towards the guard station he knew to be above the main circuit board area of the building.

"Maasa, you are a young wolf, so I will teach you instead of reprimanding. Never allow a man's paycheck to color your judgment of his quality, competence, or diligence."

The younger black wolf concealed a wince, though the skin around his eyes whitened a bit at the realization of how lazy he must have sounded.

"Ah...O-of course, Kiyosato-sama."

The kobun just gave a light nod, showing no sign of anger in his upright frame, ears forward, shoulders back and body ready as always. Flanking the two of them, two tall bodyguards walked, heads swiveling as they passed down a mostly-abandoned hallway on the first floor of the hospital.

"What exactly are we looking for, sir?"

"Explanation as to why the power fluctuated. My nephew is on enough life support that such disruptions could be dangerous. Also, potentially a sign of trouble."

"Ah...I see."

Kiyosato stepped around the corner, his body in balance, his mind calm. The guard station before him was a pair of built-in counters about four feet high, giving the impression of a tiny castle given how they were stacked and crenelated with security monitors and five guards behind them having coffee.

As he approached the guards, one of them stood, setting his coffee down, and bowed in the Japanese style despite being a local.

"Good evening, Mr. Goza. Can I help you?"

Goza looked around, scanning the clean lavender walls, as his bodyguards moved to face down both sides of the hall, and his assistant shuffled nervously under the eyes of the rat addressing them.

"There was a power fluctuation a few minutes ago, and I wished to check in to see if everything is all right."

The guard nodded understandingly, and gestured to his four compatriots.

"We'll check into it, Mr. Goza, but the power fluctuation was likely just a power grid issue with the city. Our generators can run the hospital completely independently of the city's power plants for a full forty-eight hours."

Goza nodded his head, noting the guard's assumptions...That they hadn't checked the systems, and was about to press his inquiry when the scene around him seemed to pause. His instincts, honed with decades of mental and physical training and experience in the underworld, told him something was about to happen. To his right, one of his guards started to turn towards the stairwell door behind the security station, having had the same instinct...

The door suddenly slammed open as a burly fur in full black tactical armor and a balaclava hurled a pair of devices into the room. Goza's eyes tracked them, noting a pair of cylinders his mind rapidly identified as probably a flash bang and concussion grenade.

Trained reflexes and perceptions didn't allow him to break the rules of time and physics...But they did give him a head start. Before the guard in front of him could even begin to show surprise, before his bodyguard's paw had even reached his coat to go for the hidden pistol there, Goza had tackled his assistant to the ground, covered his head, and said a mental prayer that the guard station's counters were solid enough to stop the concussion

Even his well-conditioned mind couldn't distinguish both blasts. The flash he simply put his eyes to the ground to avoid, squashing his stunned lupine subordinate, and the bang filled his ears with ringing...But not the dizzying vertigo that went over anyone still standing.

To his left, his bodyguard fell to the floor soundlessly, though his muzzle was open in a yell and his right paw was firing a heavy pistol even unable to properly aim. Goza didn't bother considering the guards at the station, who were in the center of both blasts. The bodyguard to his right was blinded entirely, windmilling his arms a moment before his body jerked with half a dozen staccato impacts that seemed to sprout from his suit all in one instant.

The hallway was a kill zone. He could see that near-instantly, as the smooth satin-gloss paint of the walls started exploding out with automatic fire from their attackers.

Sloppy. Unnecessary.

He quickly slid a paw into his coat, drawing a slightly curved pearl and wood-handled combat knife, as the wolf under him tried to move underneath his boss. To his left, the bodyguard's pistol clicked on empty, and he was drawing another from the other side of his coat when bullets stitched up his chest, spurting pink into the air as the wolf thrashed and went still.

Effective.

Kiyosato counted to two, then hurled himself sideways, using the solid counter as cover for his movement. His left paw flew out, throwing a device of his own upwards to stick into the ceiling. Amidst the cacophony of bells ringing in his ears, he heard someone yell, and by the tone it was imprecations.

The smoke bomb he'd hurled had a triple-bladed tong at its end, designed to stick into whatever it hit, and the blast of smoke it let out filled the hall so quickly that all his opponents could do was fire blindly into it.

I must remember to reward Sanro for building that little device.

The wily kobun knew better than to stand and fight. He could avenge his dead soldiers later. For now, he turned and ran, bent over at the waist, snapping out his free paw to grab his subordinate and keep him low as he rushed for the lobby.

To his grim satisfaction, the frazzled young wolf had done something smart, despite being deafened and in his first combat ever. He had pulled out his phone, and was shouting into it. By the look on his face, it wasn't panicked shouting either.

Good boy, Maasa. Calling the others to warn them.

Arlen waved his arms in annoyance, throwing them in the air before looking back down at the display on his fiberoptic camera.

Are they going to start FUCKING out there? Is she trying to eat his face? Goddamnit!

Buck glanced at his chrono, noting fifteen minutes had passed while they waited for the two foxes in the hall to go the hell away. He walked right past the silently aggravated tiger, pushed the door open, grabbed the two furs, bashed their heads together with a resounding clonk, and dragged the stunned teens into the room.

In moments, the teens bound and gagged, the two mercenaries were in the hall, stalking down it towards the room Tam had indicated.

Arlen reached it first, Sato's submachine gun held low with one paw on the pistol grip as he put an ear to the door. He heard sounds on the other side, rhythmic, repetitive...Music?

He glanced back to Buck, who waved a paw at Arlen's boxy fiber optic display. The tiger crouched down, putting the barrel of his weapon to the door, and fed the cable underneath it.

Shit. No Gecko.

However, he did spot a black shape in the camera's somewhat grainy feed. Someone large, sitting on the couch with his back to the door, and another large dark shape leaning against the back wall, his cigarette resolving as a bright white pinpoint on the low-light camera.

Slowly, carefully drawing the camera back, Arlen made the hand-signs.

Two. One right, one straight ahead.

Buck tapped Arlen's shoulder and pointed to the right, then to himself and straight ahead. Paw sign showed instruction to subdue. The big tiger nodded, and got a dark but uneasy smile, knowing what that meant for the two.

Tasha threw herself flat, paws slapping out to ablate the impact by sheer instinct, as she heard the unmistakable sound of a breaching charge going off, the sudden PLAM! noise sending her from the relaxed activity of mixing drinks for herself and Tristan directly into self-defense mode.

To her right in the other room, Tristan turned his head, looking startled and unsurprisingly failing to take immediate action. The vixen ignored him for now, knowing she was closer to the door and thus the enemy, and prayed she'd have the chance to do something to effect their survival, as she yanked open a dresser drawer and pulled out the pistol she knew Gecko had given Tristan the night before.

It was no cannon...The sociopath was crazy, but not stupid enough to give a high-powered pistol to an inexperienced shooter. She checked the magazine on the 9mm weapon as she ran into the room Tristan was in, gesturing with sharp cutting motions of her paw for him to get down, expecting any moment that their opponents would leave Simon Gecko's room and come for hers as well.

Tristan, still looking startled and suddenly frightened, dropped to the floor and crawled behind the couch, and she joined him a second later by vaulting over it and dropping down to a knee in order to look around its side.

Her voice was a hiss when she spoke, sharp and quiet.

"Stay down and for god's sake, don't try to fight!"

He stared at her and nodded his head in understanding, clutching his laptop to his chest like it would somehow save him.

For tense moments, she listened, trying hard to hear anything through the sound-proofing, keeping her head low in case they came in with flash bangs or spraying bullets. Somehow, deep in her flopping gut, she knew they were here for her...For what she'd done to their friend. Or at least, she assumed it.

She happened to be right.

The blast had hurled the door inward, slamming the black canine by the windows into the things with a sickening crunch of broken bones, knocking him out of the fight before Buck could move to him and finish the job by smashing the door aside and raising his rifle to butt-stroke the goon.

Arlen had gone right, bulling his muscular body into the couch and knocking it over on top of the larger black canine. Surprised, the dog reacted by going down, then trying to draw a gun to fight back only to have its paw stomped, ground, and broken by the burly black tiger's steel-toed combat boots.

Then, its vision filled with stars as the boot came up and smashed it across the face.

After another minute of checking the room for signs of intelligence or other enemies, Buck came back in to find Arlen had bound and gagged the unconscious couch-dog with zip ties and cloth, leaving the one behind the door to bleed from its ears.

"Simon Gecko was here not two hours ago."

As evidence, Buck held up a half-finished plate of Italian food, then threw it aside to break against the window glass above the dying door-dog's head.

"Fuck. Did Tam tell us any other rooms?"

"No. Calling her now to find out if she knows anything else."

As the stag picked up his phone to dial, it vibrated, and he flipped it open with a curious eyebrow, putting it to his ear...And scowled, the way he scowled when other furs might go pale with surprise.

He hung up the phone, pulled his pistol, and emptied the head of the door-dog, holstering it and making for the door.

"Bring him. Hospital's under attack."

Arlen's heart skipped a beat.

"Rene's on his way to get us in a stolen fucking air-ambulance."