Time Sensitive Target

Part 3 - For Something Greater

Jase gulped down a soldering mouthful of coffee, it tasted like shit. It could have been the hangover, he realised, but regardless, it tasted like shit. He relaxed his body into the uncomfortable chair and drummed his fingers on the cool metal table. He was seated amid sixteen other people in a grey, windowless operations room. Only two of the other attendees were women, and only maybe seven of the group had his respect. The remainder were the brass; the ones too focused on procedure and numerical targets than people's lives and the safety of his team. Jase would have loved to pluck them from the comfort of their mahogany desks and drop them in the shit to see how they fared without his men to rescue them.

"Still waiting on the connection, they're piggybacking off another address, this could take a while," Agent Lorres tapped various buttons with elegant fingers and shook her head, glossy highlighted hair shining in the reflection of the light. Jase knew the briefest of summaries of why he was there; a group of aid workers had been smuggled from a refugee camp in Greece and were being held hostage by a wannabe terrorist, a lone wolf attempting to make his mark and earn the respect of the elders.

"They'll do anything to stop us getting a signal,"  a suit commented, another nameless face who wielded influence and did too little with it. Jase rolled his eyes, it was a similar routine each time; the bad guys never made it too easy for them. There were always politics and red tape involved, and the fact that contact had even been made told Jase that if all went well, there would be some kind of bullshit meet and swap, probably with a handover of several dangerous terrorists back to their homeland with no further questions asked. Jase much preferred to storm a place and fold bullets into bodies.  With irritation he grasped his polystyrene cup and took another swig of the bitter liquid, forgetting he had sworn against the terrible batch of acrid coffee.

"Okay, we're coming in now. Is everyone ready?" Agent Lorres stepped back after adjusting some of the settings on the wall length screen in front of them, taking a steady breath as she always did. Cool and collected, Lorres possessed an almost unnerving ability to remove emotion from situations. She was all process and deliverance, and it was what made her so excellent at her job. Jase couldn't help but respect her tenacity; if he was the soldier holding the gun, she was the soldier behind the desk.

"With bated breath," Sonny murmured next to him, the faintest whiff of liquor coming from his mouth. Jase smirked in response, his friend had outdone himself the previous night, drinking nearly his considerable body weight in alcohol and still raising himself at the emergency call that afternoon.

"Can I remind Alpha team your participation in this meeting is silent until after the live feed is suspended," Lorres raised perfectly manicured brows in Sonny's direction, who clenched a meaty fist under the table. The screen sparked alive and a dark skinned man came in to focus. Jase did the obligatory physical observations; he may have the opportunity to kill him later, if the team did their job correctly and located the hostages before their time ran out.

"Who am I speaking with?" The man asked in a easily recognisable British accent. It was no surprise, his clothing was western, and with his carefully groomed hair and beard he hardly fit the bill of most of the profiles that crossed the table. European fighters, a majority of them being British, were no rare occurrence in any of the terror cells. They fled their home country in the call to arms, the biggest concern being that they would come back with their nationality intact and a head full of extremist ideologies.

Agent Lorres provided a brief round of introductions to the man on the screen, quickly identified by researchers in the furthest corner of the ops room as Bazish al-Raheem, a thirty-four-year-old male from east London known to have travelled via Turkey to Syria nine months ago. His profile was illuminated in a second screen beside his grainy and moving image, and Jase digested the information quickly. As Lorres announced names around the rectangular table heads nodded one by one, almost by way of greeting. Jase acknowledged the habitual formality with distaste, and as the round of introductions skipped over his team, sat in an orchestrated position out of view of the camera, they stared squarely at the screen. We will find you, their eyes collectively promised.