FF Hunting Tigers Chapter 26
Title: Hunting Tigers
Author: Dark Wyldchilde (wyldchilde37@yahoo.com)
Rating: I don't think I'll ever be anything other then NC-17.
Pairing:Faith/Tara, Abby/Ziva, Buffy/Angel
Setting: The Lock, if you don't know you need to start back at "Life on the Farm" otherwise you may wonder how all these familiar characters got into such unfamiliar situations.
Summary: An old enemy returns.
Spoilers: Buffy, Angel, NCIS, The Executioner all are fair game in this AU. As is Supernatural.
Disclaimers: This is a nonprofit work of fanfiction and is in no way a challenge to anyone's copyrights,intellectual properties, or similar.
Wyld's Notes: Seven stories in and eight is plotted out...
Chapter 26.
Terrorism was an undeniable fact of life in the twenty first century, it had become a fact back in the twentieth so Tara had grown up with that knowledge an undeniable part of her life.
Sure it hadn't been part of her day to day existence in Still Water Pennsylvania, apart from her father and brother's own home grown version, but some had actually used it as a virtue of small town life, that you were safe from such madness as long as you stayed there.
Again, unless your family considered fear as useful a motivator as any middle eastern fanatic.
Tara still grew up with those tales as part of her cultural heritage, some she knew were true, some she knew where made up, and some she was pretty sure were getting confused in her mind with movies she had seen.
She was alone, a hostage, without even a fully working body available to her. Fear was not only natural, but inevitable, and with her spending all her time alone it was only natural for her mind to wander, and her mind wandered to those fragments of facts, and recollections, and what she knew was likely just her imagination getting the best of her.
The problem was that even if her imagination was getting the best of her, she couldn't underestimate the danger she was in. Alone, disabled, surrounded by fanatics who's image of a woman's "proper" place would probably be extreme even for her father.
Her only ally was the man who had put a pistol to her head and forcibly taken her from all she knew, who had likely masterminded the situation to be just as it was to help induce Stockholm syndrome in her.
The fact that Faith would be tearing the world apart looking for her was a given, but it was a big world, and she was just one woman in it. Though she would never doubt her darling would ever give up looking for her she would have to be ready to go it alone, and to go the long haul.
One advantage would be that she would keep exercising her legs as best she could as she healed so she could restore her mobility to make an escape possible.
The disadvantage would be that the longer she was missing the more frantic her Slayer would get. Tara worried about how that could lead Faith to make a mistake, she just worried about the emotional ringer her lover would be going through, she worried if that was part of Ari's plan to return Faith to her dark path, she actually worried more about Faith then she did about herself.
Still, wasn't that what love was?
Then she heard, and felt the explosion, and she couldn't help contain her grin. Yes, it was a big world, and yes she was but one woman, but her Darling, Darling Slayer was a VERY motivated woman, and while the sedation made it hard to know exactly how long she had been in enemy hands the two to three days she estimated had apparently been enough for Faith to find her.
Though it was entirely possible someone else entirely was attacking her captor's she swore she could hear Faith's voice in her mind, or more likely her heart saying.
"Hold on Babe! I'm comin!"
She KNEW she could hear the lesbian version of the song that would go "My girlfriends back and you're going to be in trouble."
Gibbs had wanted to be part of the penetration team. Tara's his family, and she's in there, and he wants to be the one kicking in the doors she's behind and carrying her out of there, but not even on his best day in his fittest of years could he match the physical capabilities of even one of the Twins, let alone the things that they accomplished when they were linked up.
Not to mention Slayer, who was just as motivated as he was, and was graded on a curve all her own.
He did however know flat out man to man warfare, and with the human nature of their enemy that was exactly what they were doing. Which made Gibbs the best man for this task.
Slayer's "Knock, knock" was barely a whisper over his radio, but it set off a roar as the Israeli missiles briefly turned night into day. More importantly it turned the once reinforced gate, as well as the thick stone wall it had been set in to widely scattered rubble.
No order was needed as they all knew that was their signal to attack.
Even before they past the ruins of the main wall they had blacksuits dropping to one knee to fire disposable rocket launchers at the outbuildings they knew were uninhabited, with essential spots like the motor pool getting two rockets to make sure that avenue of escape was thoroughly closed.
Some might have called the maneuver ruthless, but it was warfare, while some conventions should be followed there was a point when a person was trying to delude themselves to it's bloody nature.
A delusion that could claim their lives, or the lives of their comrades. Even as enraged as Slayer, and Boss Man himself, were he knew that they would accept honorable surrenders.
He just knew that such a concept was fairly alien to the fanatic mindset of the Jihadist.
It certainly wasn't present in the forces now streaming out of the main house to confront them.
DiNozzo had a preference for the feel of the M-16 design even before coming to the Lock, and was carrying the M-16 with an under slung M-203. It was to his shoulder and the grenade launcher was firing an anti-personnel round at a group that had broken one of the most basic rules of warfare.
Don't cluster too close. That feeling of security having allies nearby was never worth the carnage a sufficiently large attack could cause. Whether it was Sun Tzu and his rules on the use of fire in warfare, or Anthony DiNozzo sending a massive cloud of explosively driven, flesh shredding metal.
The assault force on the other hand formed three skirmish lines. Six Blacksuits, three slayers, and three war wizards went left while the same numbers cut right, leaving Gibbs and his three people to take the middle, but in a slightly slack position as the idea was a pincer movement to encircle their enemies and wipe them out.
The fires set off by the airstrike, and fed by their initial rocket attack was providing more then enough light for them so to his left Ziva had taken it upon herself to snipe the floodlights that had fired up as they invaded.
DiNozzo was to his right, but to the outside to keep McGee between himself and Gibbs. While the younger agent had adjusted to his new role at the Lock, as DiNozzo often teased he would always be senior to McGee, and while that often led to behavior had Gibbs literally slapping sense into the back of the head of the senior agent it just as often led to him keeping an eye on the junior agent.
With Gibbs senior to them both he understood the feeling. He had it for all three, but all three knew their jobs and were doing them as they pressed farther into the terrorist stronghold.
Up above them Ari Haswari pulled back before he could be seen, but still speaking quietly to himself.
"Hello Jethro."
Behind him the door crashed open to admit the white bearded form of his benefactor Matan Emny. While the man had always spoken lovingly of Jihad his flushed face, heaving chest, and wide fearful eyes were telling Ari the reality wasn't quite as palatable to the oil magnate.
"Martyr! The Americans have found us!"
He couldn't help it he didn't want to, but he did manage to take the full blown laugh the sentence wanted to elicit and muffle it to large smile.
"Are you sure?"
For a brief moment Matan seemed incredulous, but then he realized that the Returned Martyr was mocking him, and from the ease at which he came to the conclusion it was obviously not first time.
It caused the older man to scowl. "We must flee!"
Ari's smile mellowed, but he couldn't get rid of it completely. "And how would you propose we do that?"
With that Ari stepped close enough to the balcony to point outward without being seen from ground level.
First he pointed to the magnate's helicopter, a flaming ruin, taken out in the initial rocket attack.
He didn't know if Jethro was deliberately throwing his own tactics back in his face, but he liked to think so. Of course Gibbs troops were well trained men and women with a mission while his troops had been fanatics with a taste for bloodshed, and the differences were making themselves obvious.
The Returned Martyr then pointed at the motor pool, also a victim of the initial volley of rockets fired by the soldiers of the Lock before they came inside the walls.
One had actually made sure to hit the large gasoline tank that was used to fuel all the vehicles, so anything that wasn't taken out by what appeared to be a pair of rockets now sat in a pool of liquid fire.
Seeing that had Matan's face twisting in frustration, and then smoothing in resolution, and Ari had to muffle the sigh that knowing what was to come created in him.
Sure enough Matan took a pistol from his hip. "Then we must fight!"
Ari's mocking smile returned. "When I had the element of surprise I had ninety-five percent causalities, and now..." He made a sweeping gesture with his hand to show how the Lock had already taken the first floor of the manor house, and he knew Matan could hear the sounds of battle echoing upward.
Finally there was just confusion on his benefactor's face. "Then what should we do?"
Haswari pulled his own pistol, and shot the man twice in the heart. He then dropped the pistol on the man's chest. Reaching the small of his back he dropped a fighting knife on the man's chest he spoke the last words Matan Enmy would hear, at least in the living world.
"We answer for our sins."
Author: Dark Wyldchilde (wyldchilde37@yahoo.com)
Rating: I don't think I'll ever be anything other then NC-17.
Pairing:Faith/Tara, Abby/Ziva, Buffy/Angel
Setting: The Lock, if you don't know you need to start back at "Life on the Farm" otherwise you may wonder how all these familiar characters got into such unfamiliar situations.
Summary: An old enemy returns.
Spoilers: Buffy, Angel, NCIS, The Executioner all are fair game in this AU. As is Supernatural.
Disclaimers: This is a nonprofit work of fanfiction and is in no way a challenge to anyone's copyrights,intellectual properties, or similar.
Wyld's Notes: Seven stories in and eight is plotted out...
Chapter 26.
Terrorism was an undeniable fact of life in the twenty first century, it had become a fact back in the twentieth so Tara had grown up with that knowledge an undeniable part of her life.
Sure it hadn't been part of her day to day existence in Still Water Pennsylvania, apart from her father and brother's own home grown version, but some had actually used it as a virtue of small town life, that you were safe from such madness as long as you stayed there.
Again, unless your family considered fear as useful a motivator as any middle eastern fanatic.
Tara still grew up with those tales as part of her cultural heritage, some she knew were true, some she knew where made up, and some she was pretty sure were getting confused in her mind with movies she had seen.
She was alone, a hostage, without even a fully working body available to her. Fear was not only natural, but inevitable, and with her spending all her time alone it was only natural for her mind to wander, and her mind wandered to those fragments of facts, and recollections, and what she knew was likely just her imagination getting the best of her.
The problem was that even if her imagination was getting the best of her, she couldn't underestimate the danger she was in. Alone, disabled, surrounded by fanatics who's image of a woman's "proper" place would probably be extreme even for her father.
Her only ally was the man who had put a pistol to her head and forcibly taken her from all she knew, who had likely masterminded the situation to be just as it was to help induce Stockholm syndrome in her.
The fact that Faith would be tearing the world apart looking for her was a given, but it was a big world, and she was just one woman in it. Though she would never doubt her darling would ever give up looking for her she would have to be ready to go it alone, and to go the long haul.
One advantage would be that she would keep exercising her legs as best she could as she healed so she could restore her mobility to make an escape possible.
The disadvantage would be that the longer she was missing the more frantic her Slayer would get. Tara worried about how that could lead Faith to make a mistake, she just worried about the emotional ringer her lover would be going through, she worried if that was part of Ari's plan to return Faith to her dark path, she actually worried more about Faith then she did about herself.
Still, wasn't that what love was?
Then she heard, and felt the explosion, and she couldn't help contain her grin. Yes, it was a big world, and yes she was but one woman, but her Darling, Darling Slayer was a VERY motivated woman, and while the sedation made it hard to know exactly how long she had been in enemy hands the two to three days she estimated had apparently been enough for Faith to find her.
Though it was entirely possible someone else entirely was attacking her captor's she swore she could hear Faith's voice in her mind, or more likely her heart saying.
"Hold on Babe! I'm comin!"
She KNEW she could hear the lesbian version of the song that would go "My girlfriends back and you're going to be in trouble."
Gibbs had wanted to be part of the penetration team. Tara's his family, and she's in there, and he wants to be the one kicking in the doors she's behind and carrying her out of there, but not even on his best day in his fittest of years could he match the physical capabilities of even one of the Twins, let alone the things that they accomplished when they were linked up.
Not to mention Slayer, who was just as motivated as he was, and was graded on a curve all her own.
He did however know flat out man to man warfare, and with the human nature of their enemy that was exactly what they were doing. Which made Gibbs the best man for this task.
Slayer's "Knock, knock" was barely a whisper over his radio, but it set off a roar as the Israeli missiles briefly turned night into day. More importantly it turned the once reinforced gate, as well as the thick stone wall it had been set in to widely scattered rubble.
No order was needed as they all knew that was their signal to attack.
Even before they past the ruins of the main wall they had blacksuits dropping to one knee to fire disposable rocket launchers at the outbuildings they knew were uninhabited, with essential spots like the motor pool getting two rockets to make sure that avenue of escape was thoroughly closed.
Some might have called the maneuver ruthless, but it was warfare, while some conventions should be followed there was a point when a person was trying to delude themselves to it's bloody nature.
A delusion that could claim their lives, or the lives of their comrades. Even as enraged as Slayer, and Boss Man himself, were he knew that they would accept honorable surrenders.
He just knew that such a concept was fairly alien to the fanatic mindset of the Jihadist.
It certainly wasn't present in the forces now streaming out of the main house to confront them.
DiNozzo had a preference for the feel of the M-16 design even before coming to the Lock, and was carrying the M-16 with an under slung M-203. It was to his shoulder and the grenade launcher was firing an anti-personnel round at a group that had broken one of the most basic rules of warfare.
Don't cluster too close. That feeling of security having allies nearby was never worth the carnage a sufficiently large attack could cause. Whether it was Sun Tzu and his rules on the use of fire in warfare, or Anthony DiNozzo sending a massive cloud of explosively driven, flesh shredding metal.
The assault force on the other hand formed three skirmish lines. Six Blacksuits, three slayers, and three war wizards went left while the same numbers cut right, leaving Gibbs and his three people to take the middle, but in a slightly slack position as the idea was a pincer movement to encircle their enemies and wipe them out.
The fires set off by the airstrike, and fed by their initial rocket attack was providing more then enough light for them so to his left Ziva had taken it upon herself to snipe the floodlights that had fired up as they invaded.
DiNozzo was to his right, but to the outside to keep McGee between himself and Gibbs. While the younger agent had adjusted to his new role at the Lock, as DiNozzo often teased he would always be senior to McGee, and while that often led to behavior had Gibbs literally slapping sense into the back of the head of the senior agent it just as often led to him keeping an eye on the junior agent.
With Gibbs senior to them both he understood the feeling. He had it for all three, but all three knew their jobs and were doing them as they pressed farther into the terrorist stronghold.
Up above them Ari Haswari pulled back before he could be seen, but still speaking quietly to himself.
"Hello Jethro."
Behind him the door crashed open to admit the white bearded form of his benefactor Matan Emny. While the man had always spoken lovingly of Jihad his flushed face, heaving chest, and wide fearful eyes were telling Ari the reality wasn't quite as palatable to the oil magnate.
"Martyr! The Americans have found us!"
He couldn't help it he didn't want to, but he did manage to take the full blown laugh the sentence wanted to elicit and muffle it to large smile.
"Are you sure?"
For a brief moment Matan seemed incredulous, but then he realized that the Returned Martyr was mocking him, and from the ease at which he came to the conclusion it was obviously not first time.
It caused the older man to scowl. "We must flee!"
Ari's smile mellowed, but he couldn't get rid of it completely. "And how would you propose we do that?"
With that Ari stepped close enough to the balcony to point outward without being seen from ground level.
First he pointed to the magnate's helicopter, a flaming ruin, taken out in the initial rocket attack.
He didn't know if Jethro was deliberately throwing his own tactics back in his face, but he liked to think so. Of course Gibbs troops were well trained men and women with a mission while his troops had been fanatics with a taste for bloodshed, and the differences were making themselves obvious.
The Returned Martyr then pointed at the motor pool, also a victim of the initial volley of rockets fired by the soldiers of the Lock before they came inside the walls.
One had actually made sure to hit the large gasoline tank that was used to fuel all the vehicles, so anything that wasn't taken out by what appeared to be a pair of rockets now sat in a pool of liquid fire.
Seeing that had Matan's face twisting in frustration, and then smoothing in resolution, and Ari had to muffle the sigh that knowing what was to come created in him.
Sure enough Matan took a pistol from his hip. "Then we must fight!"
Ari's mocking smile returned. "When I had the element of surprise I had ninety-five percent causalities, and now..." He made a sweeping gesture with his hand to show how the Lock had already taken the first floor of the manor house, and he knew Matan could hear the sounds of battle echoing upward.
Finally there was just confusion on his benefactor's face. "Then what should we do?"
Haswari pulled his own pistol, and shot the man twice in the heart. He then dropped the pistol on the man's chest. Reaching the small of his back he dropped a fighting knife on the man's chest he spoke the last words Matan Enmy would hear, at least in the living world.
"We answer for our sins."