Wings of Death

Deceived

The bandits on the road hadn’t spotted them yet but time was running out. The team needed to get moving fast or their oxygen supply would run out. Lieutenant Amy had asked them to wait inside the vehicles and disappeared among the buildings at the side of the road. Nathan and Alex started panicking. Meanwhile Margaret tried to get in touch with Dr. Erica but was unable to make any outgoing calls. Mr. Harris tried to call his wife but he too was unable to establish a connection.  In fact none of them could manage to make any calls or even send text messages. Alex understood that a cell phone jammer had been activated nearby.

Three minutes had passed since the Lieutenant had walked away. Now Nathan and his friends were quite certain that she wasn’t coming back. It seemed she had decided to save her own hide. The soldiers inside the vehicles still followed her order and waited patiently. Mr. Harris wanted to get out and make a run for the base but the soldiers stopped him.

“She is gone. Are you stupid? She isn’t coming back", he shouted angrily.

The Lieutenant however hadn’t abandoned them. She had made her way to the fifth floor of an abandoned school. After entering one of the rooms on the fifth floor, she walked up to the window and unzipped her black bag. She pulled out a custom made Dragunov sniper rifle from the bag and attached a suppressor to the barrel. The window offered her a perfect view of the bandits. She mounted the rifle on a detachable tripod and took aim. Her eyes were glued to the scope and slowly her index finger pulled the cold steel trigger. Instantly the bandit with the RPG dropped dead with a bullet in his head. Since the Lieutenant had equipped a suppressor, the bandits could not understand where the shot was fired from. They started panicking and looking all around them. Lieutenant Amy had just warmed up. She kept firing and every bullet hit its mark. The bandits started dropping like flies. As soon as her magazine was empty she would change position and start firing from a different floor.  In less than 6 minutes she had managed to kill 30 of them. Unable to locate her they started firing blindly at the nearby buildings. 2 more minutes passed and she killed 8 more. Only a dozen of them were left now. The bandits were so terrified that they decided to toss a smoke bomb and run for their lives. The Lieutenant’s sight was disrupted by the smoke but she wasn’t ready to give up. She took the rifle in her hands and ran to the roof. Once on the roof she again had a clear view of the targets. She kept shooting till only one bandit was left standing.

“It’s your lucky day”, she grinned and took aim. This time however she aimed for the leg. The last bandit let out a scream and collapsed on the ground. His ankle had been split open by the bullet. Lieutenant Amy’s job was done. She put the tripod back inside her bag, slung the sniper rifle around her shoulder and made her way to the ground floor.

The people inside the vehicles had been observing the bandits on the screen. They were shocked to see them collapse on the ground one after the other. There were no Bloodwings nearby and they hadn’t fired a single bullet. It seemed as some invisible demon was hunting them down. Their questions were eventually answered when Lieutenant Amy emerged from a nearby building with the rifle on her back. Nathan and his friends were awestruck by this sight. They never expected her to even kill a fly and she had ruthlessly slaughtered an entire gang of bandits within a few minutes. What surprised them the most was that the Lieutenant had a joyful smile on her face. She talked to the civilians in her usual cheerful tone and ordered a couple of soldiers to go outside and disable the mines.

When they returned to the base, Nathan and his friends told Captain Elijah about the incident on the road and it was then that the Captain revealed the truth about Lieutenant Amy Williams.

Lieutenant Amy Williams was an excellent shot with a sniper rifle and skilled at carrying out covert operations. Captain Elijah had personally recruited her to assassinate targets of priority, deep behind enemy lines. She had a total kill count of 656 which had earned her the nickname, Angel of Death. That day Nathan and Alex realized the Lieutenant wasn’t just a pretty face. They understood that looks could be very deceiving.

The Lieutenant had brought the surviving bandit to the base. She hadn’t killed him because she wanted to interrogate him personally and find out why they chose to attack a military convoy. She was also curious to find out how they had managed to get their hands on such high grade military weapons and signal jammers. The injured bandit was kept in the hospital for a couple of days during which the bullet was removed from his leg and he was patched up. After that he was thrown into one of the basement cells under the barracks. The Captain decided that it would be best if he carried out the interrogation instead of Lieutenant Amy.

Captain Elijah was a good soldier, a great leader but a terrible interrogator. He had only interrogated 10 people in the past and all of them had become permanently disabled after the interrogation. He knew how to keep his calm in dangerous situations but he couldn’t tolerate lies. When the prisoner had recovered sufficiently, the Captain told the guards to bring him to the Captain’s office. Captain Elijah’s office had just two chairs and a table. The paint inside the room was scarred in several places and cracks had started to appear on the walls.  There wasn’t even a light bulb in the room. Although it was his office, he never worked here. Instead he used the room as an interrogation chamber. The Captain didn’t like small talk and got straight to the point. He asked the bandit to identify himself. It was hard for him to refuse since Captain Elijah was waving a red hot poker in front of his face. The Captain’s methods were simple but brutally efficient. After staring at the tall imposing figure of the Captain he decided it wouldn’t be wise to lie to him. The bandit revealed that he was a mercenary just like the others in his group. They had managed to get their hands on military grade weapons by looting the corpses of the soldiers who had been killed by the Bloodwings. The Captain asked him a few more questions which the former mercenary answered in great detail. When he had satiated his curiosity, the Captain ordered his men to take the prisoner back to his cell. It was the first time that a prisoner managed to walk out of that room with all his limbs intact. The bandit had given him valuable information about the locations of the other bandits in that area. There were a total of two more groups of bandits; one of them had taken over an abandoned movie theater while the other had made a police station their den. Captain Elijah decided to gather his best men and take care of the bandit problem as soon as possible.