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File 04: Tunnel Rats
Location: Bamiyam, Afghanistan
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Normally when a group of armed and armoured individuals come in breaking down your door the typical reaction where I come from is to shout, scream and take out a sewing machine... to start suing people.
In this instance, when KONG kicked down the weak wooden door with a strong plated boot, the people inside immediately started shooting at us. One amazing reflex reaction time if you ask me.
Of course... we were ready for them.
BRIGGS and SHACKLE took the left and right while KONG, SIERRA and I took the centre. LONGSHOT stood at an angle to the door from a distance. My first moment in real foreign combat was somewhat similar to the experience in one of my computer games... one of the Call of Duty series, "Ghosts" maybe. Either way, I felt nothing.
For the brief moment that the people inside were standing the moment seemed frozen in time.
I gazed at their faces...
Their expressions...
...startled... alarmed... furious... oh and one of them was in the middle of sneezing....
I've never been angry or hostile with someone who I'd run into who was yawning or sneezing. So I shot at everyone else. For some reason that seemed okay...
Hmm, the recoil was not as bad as some of the rifles I had used before, and recoil was dampened by the suit's gyro systems. They were not as obvious when you look at it, but when you've held a gyroscope in your hands you'll recognise the same sensation I did. The stock rest kicked into my shoulder more like a baby with a hiccup than a shotgun. Well it was a semi-auto M1A1 custom after all.
We were loaded with tranquilizer rounds which were basically hollow - point rounds coated with a thin chemical layer of fast acting frozen gel that only thaws when fired through a barrel.
The gel is forced into the skin through impact and with a few fragments of metal for good measure. These fragmentation-tranquilizer rounds, effectionately nicknamed "Frank"-rounds were effective and didn't leave as deep lacerations as other types of ammo did.
We all aimed for the chest area. These at the top weren't as important as the ones at the bottom of this snake hole. For them we were allowed more lethal rounds.
After a few seconds the man left standing amongst all his fallen brothers had finished sneezing around 6 times (due to all the dust that we had let in after opening the door), SIERRA handed him a tissue.
He seemed confused...
Not as confused as I was when the man then sat down and nodded to KONG who promptly shot him in the chest. The man gritted his teeth then relaxed.
The two of them shared a grin and a high-five. RUSSEL gave a smirk.
LONGSHOT smirked,
"Who says chivalry is dead?"
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Ironically enough, I was the first to spot the secret entrance to the tunnels below. Okay, maybe it was a lot more obvious than it seemed. Hah, it was literally 'under the rug'. I'll given them credit for thinking about it well though.
If you just step back and think about it, this was a small single storey house among many other single storey houses.
Thermal scans showed a honeycomb of tunnels underground.
YOU ARE READING
EXO Legacy
Science FictionMy Father was a soldier... a tough one. He had to be. One day he broke his back while off duty in a wrestling ring. He built a high-tech exo-skeleton with the help of some friends and a few favours that could support himself and give him strength ba...
