Chapter 39: Interlude III

Dimitri's day wasn't going well. It had started on such a high note, and then rapidly gone to shit.

He had managed to find out who the bastard was who had stolen girls from him and killed some of his men.

A piece of luck, finding out that the cop on the scene that night was a friend of the arsehole, then a little chat with him had soon gotten that they needed. It turned out that breaking his legs wasn't enough, but when his teenaged daughter arrived home from some party or other, a threat to her had gotten him to talk quickly enough. She had provided a little fun for him and his two lieutenants afterwards, and her father's cries of protest had been sweet music indeed. It had been a bit of a surprise to see find that she had been a virgin, considering the way she had been dressed; but that had simply added some spice.

Gathering a group of his men had taken some time, as most of them had gone to ground after working most of the night.

Dimitri had been a little surprised to discover that there were guards at the guys house, and for a few seconds he had considered backing off to observe for a while before moving in, but quickly decided that it wasn't necessary; these weren't any mujahedin that knew how to fight. It was just some rich white guy with a couple of security guards.

It started off very well with the gate guard walking right up to their vehicle with no suspicion that anything was wrong. He went down easily enough. After that Dimitri had gotten the first inkling that things were not as they appeared.

The first sign was the speed with which the rest of the guards reacted, but even more telling was the way in which they reacted. None of them made the amateur's mistake of rushing out to see what was wrong, instead they all went to ground, and then within a few seconds, they were delivering fire from well concealed positions.

Five of his men were blown away in that initial exchange of fire, and that was with hand guns against their assault rifles. The twenty two of his men that were left after that started to waver, and for a second he thought that they might actually defy his order to attack and run away.

A few well phrased threats, backed up by his known propensity to shoot subordinates who disobeyed him, gave them the necessary backbone, and they formed up in a ragged skirmish line and started sweeping towards the house, firing at any possible cover.

Dimitri found himself almost nostalgic for the days in Afghanistan, where he had at least known that all the men were trained to fight like soldiers. This bunch was mostly just thugs, with only a few veterans among them.

The guards certainly acted like soldiers, and Dimitri was forced to re-evaluate his opinion of them as they fell back towards the house in good order; firing and moving backwards, something he knew most soldiers didn't do well, even the best trained ones.

As far as he could see, they only managed to wound one of them, while he lost another three of his men.

Once they were in the house, it became even more difficult, and Dimitri discovered, to his dismay, that the white guy's vehicle was gone. He decided that it was still worth his while attacking the house however, because it was one way that he could hurt the guy.

Dimitri considered his options for a while as his men traded pot-shots with the men in the house, then decided that he needed to take a couple of prisoners and destroy the house.

One of his men reported that he had seen the soldiers, as Dimitri had started to think of them, escaping from the back of the house into the bush. Dimitri ordered his best lieutenant to take fifteen of the men and follow after them, while he remained behind and set fire to the house.

It only took Dimitri and the four men with him ten minutes to sweep through the house searching for anyone who might have been left behind, and then to set it alight.

Once the house was burning properly, Dimitri set out to follow on the trail of the others into the bush. He had deliberately kept the experienced soldiers close to him; they shared a bond from their days in the terrible mountains of Afghanistan, and still remembered the skills learnt there.

It was soon obvious that the bunch he had sent ahead weren't much use outside the city doing their normal jobs of enforcing, extorting and pimping. The soldiers were moving quickly and leaving booby-traps on their spoor which were catching more than their fair share of victims.