Part 10: Session 009: Wares

Hi folks, Private Smilie here to give you the whole account of our heroic team's battle with Marselo Carmona's shipment hijackers! Since some of the events we have screenshots for occur without Beacon there to personally bear witness, I'm just going to give you the whole story myself so you don't miss any of the fun.


Contact was established at 1228 hours on day 12, near the crossroads south of Sagrada. Carmona had said they wouldn't be far from the city, and he was right. The team dismounted the GAZ away from the road and relocated to a more defensible position.


Remember what Squint said about mercs traveling in a tight cluster? He had to give each one a separate move order and space the orders a couple of seconds apart so that they wouldn't get hung up on each other.


The team found a plateau with two entry points. Pitch sets up a sniping overwatch on the first entrance and covers the rest of the team as they take up positions at the top. If you look closely you can see bandits just starting to come up the road. Pitch is already drawing a bead on them.


Pitch wastes no time breaking in his Mosin-Nagant. Look at how much damage that round does! The 7.62x54R round is essentially the Soviet version of the venerable .30-06-it really reaches out and leaves a mark.


Meanwhile, Scotch gets busy booby-trapping the other point of entry with a block of TNT attached to the tripwire we found way back in Session 003. Whoever is first on the scene here is in for a nasty surprise. The tripwire itself is invisible, but I've highlighted the post Scotch has already set.


With both entry points secured, Deadmeat takes advantage of the elevated position and puts the slug-spitting Benelli (and her good shooting skill) to use on bandits caught out in the open.


A slug round generally has more kick to it than buckshot, but this tough Israeli merc shows her target just how much kick there is on the business end of one!


Beacon helps keep Pitch from being rushed by laying down 6-8 round bursts from his Uzi.


Yep, I think that Mosin-Nagant is working out just fine.


iastudent may be a crazed (and rather confused) warrior but he is also very protective of his brothers and sisters in arms. After detecting an effort by the enemy to flank Pitch and shut down his extremely effective sniping, he hucks a grenade into the foliage opposite the road where he last saw the enemy.


After the grenade has sent the flankers into cover, he runs in to flush them out himself.


And by "flush them out" I mean "stab them to death." There's one.


Torpedo moves from the hilltop to pull security for Pitch while iastudent is out stabbing people. On the other side of the hill, Beacon has to stop laying down suppressive fire to treat some injuries that Deadmeat sustained while plinking at bad guys. Scotch has the entry point covered with his Benelli in case one of the bandits avoids the tripwire, which this one does.


The bandit stops when he sees the force at the top, but Scotch doesn't let him off that easy.


iastudent finds and guts the other flanker, who, unfortunately for him, was armed only with a knife. Getting into a knife fight with a viking is probably the worst thing you can do.


iastudent gets back onto the road and throws another grenade around the corner before returning to the team.


There were three bandits coming up this hill a moment ago. Thanks to Scotch's TNT trap, this guy is the only one left who is not a puddle, and with Deadmeat already looking down her ACOG at him, he's not long for this world.


It took a little too long for her to aim, however, and the bandit got a shot in on Scotch before bidding farewell to this life.


The body count at the second entry point continues to rise as Deadmeat turns another head into pink mist (twelve-gauge slugs really don't leave much left). Look at the 1911 suspended in midair, that's how recently the bandit died.


Not one to be outdone, Scotch, running on adrenaline, fights through the pain, blasting another bandit while Beacon stems the bleeding.

Fun fact: During a real-life "adrenaline rush" your body is being pumped full of more than just adrenaline! In moments of extreme stress, anger, fear, or pleasure, the cocktail of endorphins, cortisol, and other adrenal stimulants coursing through you allows your body to focus more on the stressor and less on something that might inhibit its ability to perform (i.e. pain).


But how are Pitch and Torpedo doing? Is everything secu-


...I guess so. That's a headshot. If you look carefully, you can see Pitch and Torpedo's orange name tags in the distance. With the Mosin-Nagant, Pitch is getting "outstanding" chance-to-hit at that range... without a scope. Yikes! Also, you can see that he's already dropped the bandit who had taken the MP5 to use himself.


Pitch celebrates the headshot as he cycles the bolt.


Some time goes by, and all is quiet. His energy barely contained, iastudent runs out to do some scouting and draw the remaining forces into the team's double funnel of death. There is a bug in the game that doesn't reliably remove the red "M" tags from mine positions after the mine has exploded, which is why you still see it there in this screenshot.


Over hill and dale he runs, through the underbrush, his long hair flapping free in the breeze, the sunlight making it as the color of Brísingamen, the famed necklace of Freya, goddess of-


Oh hey, he found some guys.


In an exploratory mood, iastudent decides to try something he hadn't yet thought to try: his gun. You did remember he had a gun, right?


Proving himself no slouch in the shooting department, iastudent shoots a bandit from a concealed position. His partner had no idea where the shot came from.


He never gets a chance to find out, either, because he soon joins his comrade on the ground with a .357 bullet lodged in his chest. The first man, however, seems to still have some life left in him...


...so iastudent just runs up and punches the fuck out of him. Even when shooting a guy, iastudent makes sure to get some melee in.


Call me crazy, but I don't think these last four bandits were armed. I mean, I can't find their weapons in the screenshots. Not a pistol or knife or anything. Maybe it's another glitch, and it may explain why they didn't attack with the rest of their group. At any rate, iastudent is more than happy to loan them some of his ammo. He even delivers it straight to them. After these last two are killed, the game autosaved, signaling the end of combat.


Here is the weapon that Carmona said we could keep. The Heckler and Koch MP5SD5 fires the ubiquitous 9x19mm round and is the first weapon we've received with a selectable burst-fire mode. It fires on full-auto as well, of course. This is but one model in the line of German-made firearms that have defined quality in submachine guns for the past 25 years. Poor Torpedo didn't get much action pulling security for Pitch in this session, plus he's the only one still using the weapon he joined up with, so he'll be getting this bad boy.


This was the largest fight yet, with the total enemy kills at 21. For killing nine of those 21 and completely shutting down one avenue of approach with nothing but a seventy-year-old rifle on iron sights, Pitch gets the Badass of the Session award for Session 009. Congrats, Pitch! It's time to gather up all the loot into the GAZ, including the shipment Carmona needs, and get it back to Sagrada.


Beacon and the others are quickly becoming Carmona's favorite people. He pays the team five thousand for the job and buys all of the dropped loot for another eighteen thousand. Noice!


Our standing in Sagrada is now +30, Santa Maria is +15, and Las Vacaciones is +13. Decision time! So what do we do now? We can have a look through the cities and see if our reputation has gone up enough to get some more jobs as well as locate new mercenaries to put into the queue, or we can go back out into the forbidden zone and hunt down the captured officer that Minister Caderas needs returned.