"Jesus Christ."

Landry had been watching the tango with the lantern come down the steps too, sighted up in the Clinton girl's fun little Israeli import. He figured she'd probably take the shot that dropped him and bided his time, just staying on target just in case.

For a split second he'd been confused over how she'd actually missed and hit the guy's lantern instead, but when he saw the sequence of knee and torso shots, and the very intentional delay before she finished him off, there was no way he could convince himself it all hadn't been for show.

Rebecca's voice in his ear startled him, making him wonder for a panicked moment if he'd had his shit on voice activation. "Echo to Lima. Go for contingency, with caution. One and two on overwatch. Four, commence transmission if possible."

Well, tiptoeing was done. Landry glanced at Epstein and nodded towards the poor saps on the crosses. They were the most exposed and at highest risk, so just like this branch of the plan called for, Epstein started chucking smoke cans downrange for visual concealment.

Once that thickened up, they both advanced. Landry took cover behind one of the vacant crosses — too fucking few of those, these assholes — and watched for movement through the smoke. Epstein ran from cross to cross, heading for a couple of the more coherent prisoners they'd noted from the shadows. He probably scared the shit out of them, showing up out of the gloom wearing NVG's like some bug-eyed cyborg. Landry could hear his confident tones as he reassured each in turn — "US Marines - we're here to help" — over and over.

Landry thought it was a little silly since Epstein was the only Marine he knew of within a good fifty miles, but explaining in detail wasn't really expedient. He must have gotten a handful of people loose because he was ordering someone around now, telling them to help the weak, sending them to circle around the barn away from the dangerous open ground.

"Lima, contact left range twenty!" Rebecca's bark over the radio sent his goggled eyes towards the back of the house, peering through the smoke. Once he knew where to concentrate, he could see the shapes that wouldn't have caught his attention for another moment or two and opened fire. Even with the triple-stack 60 round Surefire mags he was getting to play with, he stuck to his training. Double-tap center mass on each then check to make sure he didn't need more. Both were out of the fight, good enough.

The crash of breaking glass led his attention back to the house, and he saw movement in a second floor window, above the thickest of the smoke. Two more double-taps in that direction to suppress. Epstein was ushering the last of the moving prisoners back, that poor kid slung over his left shoulder. Goddamned Marines, always making like the hero.

Landry started to withdraw, one thick cross to the next, plotting his route to check the pulse on the two bodies Landry hadn't cut down. Sure, Epstein probably had done the same, but he didn't want to miss anyone.

"We'll come back for you brother," he promised the last, before he hauled ass around the back of the barn too.

Epstein was telling several shocked but excited grubby-looking civilians to stay down, handing the kid over to one of the more coherent. Landry skidded to a knee near him, looking back the way he came. "Good?"

Epstein turned and jostled his M4 back up into ready position. "Good. Door?"

"A-firm."

Both men readied up, moving around far side of the barn from the house towards the front corner. Landry switched to VOX as he moved. "Echo, Lima. Alphas cleared to bravo 'black side'. Approaching bravo white. Request cover."

"Echo still has solid overwatch, Lima. Execute. Three, four, have transport ready for civ evac if needed." Suppressor or not, he could still hear the snapping sounds of Rebecca's hypersonic projectiles around the corner, punctuating her message. Seemed like things were still pretty under control with only her firing, Conroy, the feisty tech, hadn't gone loud yet. No reason to reveal their position, right?

Elroy, the lucky guy riding around with the three killer cuties all this time, answered back diligently. "Three copies." These kids were pretty on top of it, Gunny hadn't been kidding.

Not that it was surprising, given they were her personal proteges.

The smoke by the crucifixes was drifting — a minor help, since it was starting to spread across the wide open kill zone in front of the house — but it was thinning, so Landry popped two of his own smokes.

After some rustling, Epstein sidled up on his flank again, stacked up on the wall behind him. "Cutters ready."

"Copy. Echo, moving!"

The kids didn't answer, but he heard several more angry snaps off to the southeast and flowed around the corner, gun up and switched to full auto. Be nice if they had a ballistic shield for this bit. Or a tank. But Epstein worked fast, clipping the padlock off the barn and shoving the swinging door closest to the house wide open. Convenient that whoever built this went for simple hinged doors, not more elegant tracked sliders.

The door made for decent cover once they had it open, and again Epstein started his mantra, liberating the desperate souls to their inconveniently clamorous excitement.

Clinton's staccato sniping suddenly picked up the pace, volleys of two, three at once, much closer together. She came on the radio just as Conroy's M4 cracked repeatedly too. "Getting a little hot, Lima. Hostiles in windows of both houses. Three, maybe four automatics in Charlie, five in Delta. One rifle in Charlie, two in Delta."

Civilians were filing out of the barn, sticking close to the wall and heading around back to join the others. Landry heard an odd clanking and spared a glance to see Epstein jogging towards him from the depths of the barn lugging a big silver fire extinguisher that might have been older than he is. Landry tried his best to cover him while the kid ran to two braziers on their side of the smoke — keeping them between him and the houses, smart — and doused each of them. A large oil lamp on a fencepost across the way, well, he borrowed a move from their vengeful guardian angel — ducked back in to the barn after he'd dropped the extinguisher and put a couple rounds into it through the doorway.

That left only a few pinpricks of light in the outer reaches of the property, most of the surviving lights were near, on, or in the houses.

"Good thinking, kid. Everyone out?"

"Just checked, we're clear."

"Outstand... fuck!"

Three Molotovs burst out in the smoke, and a volley of massed blindfire chewed at the door as the two of them ducked back inside. Landry's eyes widened when he heard the distinctive "bloop" of a grenade launcher, but was relieved when the "only" thing that landed nearby was a couple of teargas grenades.

Sure, he and Epstein had to deal with it back at Boot, it was still gonna make things unpleasant around there.

Clinton clearly disapproved. "Lima, confirm house occupants with friendlies?"

Epstein and Landry looked at each others' pale two-dimensional images in their goggles, trying to figure out how to accomplish that. Landry nodded towards the back of the barn. "Through the wall!"

The kid figured out he meant pretty fast and ran to the back wall and started yelling through it. Landry heard a woman's voice reply after his third try, and then Epstein came on the radio. "Charlie has noncombatants inside. Delta should only be hostiles."

Rebecca's voice was more strident. "Should? Confirm!"

Landry heard Epstein yelling again, then he was back on the radio. "Confirmed! Tango billeting only. Charlie has... house staff and hostages n' shit."

"Thank you, Lima. Echo three and four, put a missile into Delta. Say again, Delta, Delta."

Landry lifted his eyebrows behind his goggles. They'd brought a single AT-4 disposable anti tank rocket with them, at the Gunny's insistence in case they ran into Black Tusk, and Clinton had similarly insisted a demonstration on its deployment for all of them. The assholes in the house on the right didn't know what they were in for. But he was okay with a force overmatch, given that he was currently being shot at.

The seconds stretched out as gunfire chattered and popped, enough that she called out on the radio again. "Three and four, status?"

The blonde answered. Good thing for her they had the low back blast model, with that long hair... "Here it comes!"

Landry heard the distant sharp thump and watched a bright dot streak from the woods and across the farm fields in a slight arc... had they compensated for the range correctly? Pro shooters could skip the rounds off the ground, but — well, okay. They did range it.

A millisecond's flash and a loud bang blew a good third of the two story farmhouse's front wall out, and probably a bunch of the sides too. Debris clattered down across the open ground for several seconds, and even more smoke wafted into the hovering cloud. Fuckin' A. Between torching that poor asshole and the way she knocks on a door, that girl knows how to make a point.

As the hillside echo faded and hostiles in the main house were still too stunned to make more noise, he heard Clinton's voice yelling at the top of her lungs from the darkness. "Any further hostility will be met with the same response! Stand down!"

There was no signal of surrender from the larger residence, but nobody pulled a trigger, either. An eerie silence settled, and once Landry hustled out of the barn and behind it to safety with Epstein, he spotted some of the more able bodied civilians straggling out of the woods, collecting weapons from the downed guards out at the gate, the first jackass Clinton dropped, and the one they'd ninja'd behind the barn. He managed to wave most of them back, but the ones who'd found weapons clustered loosely between him and the woods, like they were waiting for an opportunity for payback.

Clinton's voice was calmer, cooler in his ear this time. "Lima. Survivors exiting Delta. Order them down the road to you and apprehend them. I don't want to further risk revealing my position."

Well, this just got more complicated. He'd thought he was done being stuck between two groups of people who really wanted to kill each other years ago.