FSE

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formerly SoFurry search engine

Hi everybody. Trying to keep up my pace here, so I hope this doesn't seem rushed.

Be warned - violence, mention of rape, etc.

Chapter XII - The Hunt

Three am. Been out here since six pm.

The black tiger checked the dim red-light clock on his wrist, then shook his head sharply to help keep his wits about him. Fatigue was an enemy on this long of an operation, especially one that had been so fruitless so far. He'd never thought stealth-moving their way through a hostile labyrinth like the Rocinha could actually get boring.

Buck spoke through the lash system, from the other side of the building they were scouting, in a whispered tone.

"Last one for tonight. Start looking for a place to bunk up. Got to be some abandoned flop around here."

Arlen nodded, tapped the mic twice to indicate he understood, and started looking around in the urban jungle for a good spot with a roof, good visibility and concealment, and signs of abandonment. Spotting a likely place a couple of 'stories' up the mish-mash of corrugated tin they were on, Arlen started gingerly testing the stability of the building and pulling himself up to the next elevation.

"Hold one..." came over the headset. Arlen paused, then lowered himself back down, muscular arms flexing as he touched his footpaws to the roof instead of just dropping down.

"Figures it'd be the last one we check. Hold position, get ready to go in."

Arlen smiled, a curved predator's smirk, as he took the UMP down from where he'd strapped it over his shoulder, checking the magazine before slapping it back home and readying the deadly tool for use.

"Drop down to the level below us. Should be a balcony on your side. Guards expendable. We need the leader. Sounds like some kind of big cat, there's a rumble in his voice like a purr. I'll come in from my side. Try to use stealth if possible. Enter on the count of three."

Arlen tapped the mic again to confirm, and re-shouldered the smg. A big paw went back to his bag, pulling out a pair of Kevlar tactical gloves. Once those were slipped on, he took out one of his other favorite killing tools...A simple length of piano wire, coated in weapon blacking, attached to two wooden dowels.

Then, he walked to the edge of the roof and peered over. Below him, a rat in a pair of badly wrecked jeans held an AK-47 in its paws, and was nervously scratching at its neck. He could see the fleas hopping around on it, and curled his lip in disgust as he looked away from the rat to figure out a way to get down unnoticed.

Perfect.

Predator's instincts guided him around the edge of an outcrop in the oddly shaped cancer-like favela building, and once there he lowered himself over the lip of the roof, dropping maybe four inches to land in near-total silence...A soft thump the only herald of his landing, something that could be easily written off as background noise in the restive ghetto.

Arlen glanced around the corner, his black on black fur making him virtually invisible in this area of the city, bereft as it was of any real street light. The rat had its back to him, and was leaning on old wooden crates, having dug out some kind of hand-roll to smoke.

Silent as death, the tiger slipped up behind his prey. Smooth, not missing a beat, he slid the wire garrote over the rat's head, put his back to the fur's back, and yanked his paws forward while curling himself away from the rat.

The poor rat never had a chance. It thrashed, it tried to scream, but the wire had cut off all its air before the fur had even realized it was being attacked. He flailed with the desperate strength of his terror, but Arlen had spaced himself well, and the rat couldn't even reach the building's wall to pound on it and call help. As the rat kicked and ineffectually elbowed thanks to the bad angle, the tiger walked back to the corner he'd initially dropped down from the roof into, keeping a grip on the dowels until he felt those few last, desperate jolts of energy from the creature that indicated its brain was shutting off due to lack of oxygen.

When the rat stopped moving, he waited a few seconds to make sure, gave the cord another jerk for good measure, then carefully turned around and lowered the corpse to the floor as it was making its final nerve-death twitches. That done, he slid the garotte back into his belt and drew his combat knife in his left paw, held blade out along the length of his arm. The UMP went back into his right paw, the suppressor screwed into its barrel giving the thing a sinister look in the shadows.

Over the mic system, he heard a single tap, and moved back to the doorway the rat had been guarding. Crouched down, using the wall to cover himself, he extended a tiny mirror on a stick and gave the room a look.

Inside, a pair of tawny-furred mutt-furs were lounging on rickety looking old garden-style furniture, watching a staticky tv set they had somehow found a way to power.

They get I Love Lucy down here? Wow.

Then two more taps came over the mic system, and Arlen instinctually came up with a plan for engaging the room while not alerting the rest of the building. The suppressor would be too loud in a place with such thin walls. The UMP went over his shoulder again, and he drew the holdout pistol from a holster on his left hip.

When the three tap signal came, Arlen bolted into the room and fired two rounds into one of the dogs' heads, before turning and slamming his knife into the throat of the second. Two down in three seconds, before either could figure out what was going on.

Moving around the gurgling, dying dog, Arlen kicked the Uzi away from its paw, then finished him with two more bullets to the head, quietly thanking the small-caliber gods for not making much backspray he'd have to clean off. He then took a moment to signal Buck with two staccato taps to his mic to indicate successful entry. From somewhere else in the building, he received the slightly scratchy countersignal while reloading the pistol's clip. No sense going into the next room with just more than half a clip left.

Arlen put his ear up against the door as Buck tapped onto the mic to indicate a cleared room, and heard multiple voices. Though he couldn't understand what they were saying, he could pick up on the fact that it was at least four individuals, relaxed, but one was loading clips. He moved back to the balcony, so that he could whisper into the mic without chancing alerting the enemy.

"Four to six tangos, likely armed. Central room of building. Advise."

Five seconds passed, before Buck came back over, whispering back.

"Will be coming through opposite door. Use flash, go as loud as needed. Target is in the room, repeat, target is in the room."

Arlen nodded, and responded with "Roger, moving. Signal is the boom."

Padding footsteps carried him back inside, the pistol and knife going soundlessly back into their holster and sheathe, and he unshouldered the smg, setting it to its two-shot burst option and hefting its comforting weight.

Here we go. Don't do me wrong, buddy.

Arlen thought the prayer to Sato's weapon, checked to make sure the safety was off, then reached to his belt to draw off the flash grenade. A quick yank tugged the pin loose. He counted one, two...Then smashed his combat-booted footpaw into the rusty metal door just above the handle.

As the door slammed into the wall behind it with a clang and a spray of puce, Arlen tossed the flashbang straight into the center of the room before swiftly ducking behind the wall. With a thunderous 'CRACK!' and eye-searing flare of light, the device exploded in the mist of five furs, who'd been sitting at a card table covered in AK-47's in various states of assembly.

The next moments were a slow-motion in Arlen's mind. He flew around the corner, weapon already tracking to the first target, a skinny mouse who was flailing around with his paws, screaming, trying to fight back.

Blam-blam!

The staccato two-tap of his weapon struck the rot-toothed mouse in the upper chest, blasting him straight over backwards, dead before he hit the floor.

Turning, Arlen sighted down on an iguana who'd managed to cover its eyes with an arm, and sent two rounds sailing into its chest as well, blowing guts against the far wall.

That same second, the stag booted open his door and came storming through, his M-4 carbine pumping death into the two others in a close mirror of Arlen's own machine-like carnage.

The fifth fur, a scraggly-looking, skinny little lion, had fallen flat during the sudden carnage, blinking and rubbing at his eyes while yelling out to his dead or dying men, trying to get some sense of what was happening with his hearing, sight, and smell all blown to crap by the grenade.

Arlen strode forward, boots squelching as he stepped into a puddle of blood, and tugged a syringe from his belt. With a quick move of a finger, he had the cap off, and knelt down, grabbing the struggling lion by the throat as the fur tried to leap at the terrifying black blur that had slaughtered his guards.

Arlen jabbed the syringe into the fur's neck, depressing the plunger as Buck covered the ladder that led up from the lower floors, through which Arlen could already hear paws pounding and furs yelling.

"Hurry it up, two," Buck gruffed, just before his carbine spat several rounds through the ladder hatch, causing a scream of agony as someone down there slammed into the floor with a metallic thud.

Arlen held the lion down by the throat, his fingers twitching with the temptation to crush the scrawny little warlord's throat like a bundle of pocky, glaring rage into the terrified male's eyes as he urinated himself...Then the lion's eyes rolled back, and its struggles abruptly ceased, as the powerful anesthetic knocked him unconscious.

Arlen stood, depositing the syringe into a belt pocket, then grabbed the limp lion, zip-tying its footpaws, then handpaws, as Buck quickly affixed several small blocks of C-4 around the room. The stag smirked as he set remote detonators, innocuous little black plastic squares, by jamming their spiked bottoms into the plastique. As a last little act of rudeness to the furs who had helped ambush them, he removed his last claymore and set it facing the ladder, chuckling to himself as he read the "do not eat" stenciled on its back. On its front, just for his own amusement, he had used a red pen to draw a sad cat-face.

"We're good to go. Move!"

Arlen nodded once, then made for the entrance Buck had come through, knowing it to be off an area they could run through, rather than having to climb with an unconscious lion over his shoulder.

Running through the favela was so much simpler at night that Arlen could hardly believe their luck. Last time, they had entered in the bright of day, the heat beating down all around them, the poorly-equipped locals able to see their every move and utilize their knowledge of the maze-like neighborhood to every advantage.

This time, they were the kings of the battlefield. Dressed as they were, the stag and the lion were like shadows, zipping through the blackness of the Rocinha like predatory ghosts. Twice, Buck had moved ahead of Arlen to attack a searching gang member. Once, he just reached out of an alleyway, grabbed a skinny red-clad cat around the neck with his burly arms, and choked him to unconsciousness. The second time, he encountered a burly bull, grabbed him around the neck with an arm to steady him, and drove his combat knife up and into the bovine's skull from behind.

Twenty minutes later, they arrived at Zebra's safe spot, a small fortification of another favela gang, who waved them inside, their faces covered in looks no different than the furs they had just killed or subdued.

Fucking favela politics. Can't even tell these people apart...

The muscular black tiger laid his lion captive out on a table, cut the zip ties, then re-tied him with his limbs spread-eagle, stretched to prevent him getting any leverage. Then he looked over to Zebra and gave a grin and a thumbs-up, panting from the adrenaline as much as the exertion.

"How long till he wakes up?"

"Oh...Maybe an hour or so, tigre negro. He going to have one hell of headache!" The burro brayed out a laugh, and was joined by the locals who were hanging around to see what their drug-runner friend had brought.

Buck, no sign of joviality on his face, was digging through a pair of black cloth duffels they'd left here earlier in the night...His purpose a grim but necessary one.

The first device he drew out quieted some of the laughter around them. Even the favela-dwelling gang members weren't big fans of this sort of thing.

Half the city away, Tasha was all ghillied up again...At least in a sense. Camouflage, she mused, came in a wide variety of types. Its real heart was simple; don't get seen, and its good camouflage.

She was dressed in simple local clothes, a loose cotton top over raggedy shorts, cheap sunglasses, and ragged shoes, and had taken pains to groom herself in such a way that she looked overworked, underpaid, and just generally poor.

Soaping my hair till it looks this bad is just...Ugh. The things I do for my job...

The flippant thought caught her badly, and she winced, as it reminded her of what she'd had to do earlier, trapped in Simon Gecko's hotel suite.

Tasha shoved the ugly memory aside, as she wandered into the emergency room doors of the fifth hospital she'd visited that day. Hunting through the places had been hell, taking hours apiece, and her legs were burning from all the walking, bus-riding, and general stealth work.

The most difficult part, she mused, was having to avoid being noticed at all. Sneaking around public hospitals was child's play in this bustling city. Getting through the private hospitals she'd been assigned, so much more well-organized and less well-crowded, was much, much harder. Tasha caught herself hoping Gecko would remember she was a sniper, not a damn spy.

Still, the skills were really about the same, to her mind. To be a spy, one needed to be observant, unseen, quick and quiet. To be a sniper, all one had to add was a well-rounded love of all long-ranged methods of killing people. Well, that and a lot of training having to do with hiding for long periods in painfully uncomfortable positions. Also field craft.

Okay, so spies and snipers are pretty different. Head in the game, girl.

She shuddered at the thought of what he might do to her if she failed him again, and once again re-ran the possibilities for escape in her head for any chance of something she'd missed. The best option kept going back to getting help from Gecko's nephew, Tristan, who'd already probably saved her once from getting raped again by that fucking black dog.

She fought down the urge to fall into self-loathing revulsion, struggling against it as she leaned up against a pillar in the ER of one of Sao Paolo's largest private hospitals, feeling her traitorous groin heat up a bit at the flash-memory of having that dog's dick lodged and knotted into her ass.

No time for that. Be traumatized later, goddamnit...

With a frustrated grunt, she dug her clawtips into her paws hard enough to draw just a bit of blood, focusing on the pain as a way to center herself.

Moments later, she'd followed a family past the first nurse's station, listening with disinterest as the doctor leading them talked in Spanish about some kind of 'condition' and 'specialized unique treatment.'

She broke off from the group with no one the wiser at an elevator, stepping into it when she saw it empty, and hit the button for the ICU floor she knew her target would be confined to, before flattening herself against the wall just next to the door. Being spotted by the staff in a private hospital would lead immediately to her being ejected if they believed she wasn't one of their wealthy patients. The only reason she could enter at all was that the hospital ran a philanthropic emergency room for the public as a way to buy the Brazilian government's acceptance of their...questionable...legal status.

When the door slid quietly open, she glanced into the hall, and cursed inwardly at the open design of the floor. Glass, transparent from waist-level up, everything brightly lit and no real corners to use. With a soft gritting of her teeth, she crouched down, and proceeded down the hall, looking into rooms furtively whenever she could find one that didn't have anybody obviously standing inside that could see her in return if she lingered too long.

It was when she turned a corner and nearly walked into an obvious bodyguard that her heart started to race with the realization that she'd gotten lucky. Swiftly shifting her weight, she fell back behind the corner, thanking whoever was watching that the guard had been looking the wrong direction.

The serpent tattoo sticking out of the fur's sleeve was a dead giveaway. She knew the Goza family's traditional tattoos, well enough to be nearly sure. But nearly wasn't quite good enough. She snuck back until she could find a nurse's station, then waited a good ten minutes for it to be unattended before quickly and quietly proceeding to the rear of the room towards its supplies area.

He'd been lying in darkness for what felt like forever. Sato knew he was conscious, or at least close to it, based on the voices that played around the edges of his awareness, giving him only bits and snippets of conversation to attempt interpreting.

Sato could recognize the voices. Rene, the hare pilot, who he remembered as being an enthusiastic horn-bun who hid behind a veneer of curmudgeonliness. Tamra, the calico cat, young fixer for his father's company, who had volunteered to go on-mission in order to get some field experience.

They are worried...That was Arlen's name...And Captain Buck...What have you gotten into, my tiger?

Rene perked up when the nurse arrived. She wasn't the usual matronly grey mouse he'd gotten tired of being glared at by. This time, it was a pretty if tomboyish vixen nurse, red-furred and athletic-looking, that passed through the mobsters guarding the door after exchanging some pleasantries with them.

The nurse proceeded inside, smiled brightly at the hare, and set down a tray on the table attached to Sato's bed rail. Her voice, when she spoke, had a touch of some odd accent he couldn't place thanks to the Portuguese it was speaking.

Tamra tilted her head at the vixen, and scrunched her brows, looking interested, and spoke to her in fluid Portuguese.

"You must be new. I'm Tam, that's Rene."

"It is a pleasure, both of you. I'm just here a minute to deliver an early breakfast, but if you need anything, ring the nurse's station?"

Rene nodded, and in his own less well-studied Portuguese, spoke.

"Many things I'd love to ask for, but none from the nurse's station."

He waggled his brows at her to make a joke of his admittedly lame pickup line, which received a laugh that oddly didn't seem to reach the vixen's eyes.

Weird...Maybe hares aren't her type?

The vixen left shortly thereafter, having exchanged some pleasant conversation in that odd accent of hers, and left them with a small plate of mushy hospital food.

Tasha left the hospital as quickly as she possibly could, not even stopping to change out of the nurse's garments. She knew it wouldn't be long before someone put two and two together and realized their pretty new nurse wasn't local or part of the hospital staff.

Or that the 'food' she'd left there had been comprised of smashed-together and hastily re-heated food out of the employee fridge.

She made it to the street and immediately held out a paw to hail a local cab, trying to stop the adrenaline-pounding of her heart by will alone and finding it impossible, feeling as if a dozen red-dot sights were playing over the goose flesh on the back of her neck.

Bodyguards were armed to the teeth under those suits...And those two in the room were both marks from Rangefinder team. Fuck me.

She cursed inwardly that she hadn't been able to get close to Sato without drawing attention to her. Sometimes being a pretty face had serious disadvantages, and any move towards the IV to inject drain cleaner would have had the guards on her in instants.

Tasha shuddered at that thought, somehow in her mind replacing the two yakuza lizards with the faces of the black canine and Simon Gecko.

Once she was in the cab, she pilled the cell from her pocket and with calm fngers despite the rest of her body's shaking managed to dial up Tristan Gecko.

"H-hey, is everything okay out there?" His voice was caring, soft, worried, stressed...Tasha frowned at herself for feeling a twinge of something. Gratitude, maybe, but it could be a dangerous emotion in this business.

"Affirmative, everything is fine. Could you tell your uncle that I have located the lost package, and that he needs to arrange for re-shipment?"

On the other side of the line, she could hear words, though they were muffled into incoherence by Tristan's noise-canceling cell. The voice that responded wasn't Tristan's.

"My bodyguard tells me little Tristan stood up to one of my guards for you, my dear."

The shiver ran from the base of her spine all the way to her neck, and she nearly pitched the phone out the window in a sudden panic, fought down only through the logical reasoning that to do so would only lead to more trouble.

"I...H-he..."

"I saw you in bed together."

Was that a touch of jealousy in his voice? No. He's toying with me.

Sure enough, her deduction was confirmed when his voice abruptly changed tone to amused and malicious, his baseline.

"Tristan tells me you found what you lost last time. Come back to the hotel. While I organize what we need, you get to have a...Little reward."

Oh great, that sounds fucking reassuring...Bet my 'reward' is more dick-in-my-ass.

She scowled at the ugly thought, and curled up in the back seat of the cab as if trying to warm herself despite the heat. The cabby just figured she had a stomach ache, by the sour look on her face.

"Y...Yes sir. I'm on my way."

She pressed the 'end' button with more vindication than her poor phone deserved, and had to cover her face with a paw to hide tears from the driver.