NEO GOT MY BACK

Chapter 2 How We Got Here

Chapter 2-How We Got Here

Now you all know that Mark has gotten himself in a tough pickle of a situation. But for clarification, it wasn't totally his fault that he got kidnapped. You just have to let him explain how he ended up here. He just hopes that Taeyong will let him explain before he strangles him once he gets out of this. As he mentioned beforehand, this all started when they first got their current mission. When they were first given the job at the original debrief, they weren't given many contexts about what they would be doing. They were told that their mission was to infiltrate a large drug deal that was going down at the nightclub Empathy. From the information that the report told them, the drug deal was being run by some of Korea's notorious crime bosses. Human traffickers, poachers, mobsters, you name it, they were there. All of the Korean bigwigs were up in arms over a new drug that recently hit the streets.

"Cherry Bomb," as the drug was called, was a natural killer, and Mark doesn't mean that as a joke. The report that Taeyong had read to him sounded like the new drug was dozy. It was a mixture of ecstasy, fentanyl, and cocaine, with a dash of weed mixed in for funsies, plus artificial cherry flavor, hence the name. It sounded like it could give you a good trip and a half and then some. Needless to say, that was a lethal combination, and it really didn't need to be on the streets. So far, they were lucky, and Cherry Bomb hadn't been able to really make its rounds and circulate throughout the country. So their job was to head in, and stop the deal, and confiscate the drugs so that they could never correctly hit the streets. Which sounded more manageable than it actually was.

U spent countless hours over the next 4 days gathering as much information as possible for the job. With the date of the deal at the end of the week on Friday, they were already behind. They were going to spend the next four days in crunch time. Mark is pretty sure that he only got about 4 hours of sleep in the first 24 hours of recon. And he knows for a fact that Taeyong got even less sleep than that over the whole 4 day period. His heart went out to Hyung since he was under more stress than all of them. There was a lot of pressure on all of them, but Taeyong was more than the others because he was the leader. Lee So-Man held Taeyong to much higher regards than he did anyone else in NCT as a whole. Even Kun, a leader for the members that mainly dealt with operations in China, didn't get the grief that Taeyong got. Mark has to consider that Taeyong has been in SM since he was a kid. Lee So-Man practically raised him and his younger brother. Of course, he's going to be held to a higher standard than the others when your boss is your mentor and surrogate father figure. Mark really did feel bad for him, but there was only so much he could do.

The seven of them worked on and off in shifts to gather the information they needed. Taeyong had Doyoung hack into the nightclub's security camera feed, and their financial records, and anything else that he could dig up. Jaehyun and Jungwoo were sent in at night to scope out the average night at the club to get a better lay of the land than the blueprints they were given, plus whatever Doyoung could come up with. Taeyong and Mark were stuck on recon duty. Mark sat out in their van for hours on end while Doyoung tapped away at the computer in the back. At the same time, Taeyong would slip in and out of the building trying to find anything that he could on the club owner, manager, and the deal going on. Out of all 23 of them, Taeyong was one of the best stealth. The only other person who could possibly outdo the elder would be his little brother. And that left Taeil, Winwin, Ten, and Lucas back at base, packing all of the supplies and weapons that they would need for the night of the job. Mark's not going to lie; even though this job can be very long and tedious at times, he wouldn't trade his team for the world. They all work in sync like some sort of well-oiled machine, and Mark couldn't ask for better people to work with.

And while at times, Mark felt like this job was never going to be over, but it also felt like he blinked, and it was Friday morning. All of them had woken up early that morning to go over last-minute details and make sure that everyone knew what was going on. Once that was done, they all made sure that they had their gear and loaded up what they could. Then Taeyong had sent them all off to eat, shower, and do whatever they needed to do to get ready for tonight. They were meeting back in the war room, as they called their meeting room, at 6:30 to head out to the club. Mark felt jittery the whole entire day, and it was all that he could do to choke down some food and hope it would be enough to keep him afloat throughout the job. And before he knew it, he was pulling on his clothes and racing to the war room. All of the members of U were wearing all black in various styles. The black was to help them blend into the club's background as much as possible, but they were to style it up a bit so they wouldn't stick out as suspicious. In other words, they all showed up looking like some ragtag team of vampires or something. But Mark couldn't complain and went along with it. The sooner they get this drug off the streets, the better off everyone else will be.