LOL - this is based on the computer game "Splinter Cell" - well, it is from one of the levels in the game... its so trashy, I wrote it in one day, I just sat there and kept writing, looked back on it and thought.. uh.. okay, If I was you I wouldn't read it all, it is really repetitive
You can tell I put little thought into this one.
It was late at night. The sky was a slate black. I made a silent, almost invisible parachute 'hot-drop' into the target's grounds. The rain was beating heavily on the lush grass covering the surrounding area. I had a quick look around. The area was almost completely dark with a few stationary spotlights shining on small areas. It was very sparse with only a few trees spotted around. I saw the building straight ahead. Getting in would be easy. That was when the trouble would really start.
Lamberth's deep, warm voice was streaming through my ear-piece. Crystal clear. This was top NSA equipment. He was re-iterating my objectives. I already had them ingrained in my head anyway, but he liked to be sure.
Simple, on paper. Access the CIA central server, deep into the heart of the building. In reality, the journey was long and arduous, made twice as hard by another clause - I couldn't kill anyone. This was a fellow American agency. I was here to trace the security leak and killing was simply not an option. Officially, I don't exist here - one agency doesn't spy on another.
I set off, running fast with a constant pace round the ground's outer fence. The turf beneath my feet was almost perfect and had a pleasing spring underfoot. I saw two guards at the front entrance to the main hall. They were leisurely chatting. Fortunately I could bypass them as they were clearly unaware of my presence and a side entrance had been created by a CIA inside agent. He had made a gap in the barbed wiring on top of the fence surrounding a small gap creating a way to get through the ventilation system and into the building.
The fan system was on a timed cycle and the clock was ticking and my time was running out. I had a minute before the cycle re-commenced and my side entrance became a huge tunnel of blades spinning at lethal speeds. I jumped high against the wall and took a firm grip of the ledge. I could already feel the perspiration of anxiety beneath my gloves. I pulled myself up hard against the shutter and wretched it open with a loud crack. I took a small look over my shoulder and was relieved to see the guards were still chatting.
I flicked on my night-vision, a set of goggles enabling me to effectively see in the dark and with a small, short hum a grey-scale view of the tunnel lit up in front of my eyes. I dropped down onto the metal grating from up high and soon after I heard the ventilation systems start up. I had made it with little time to spare.
From the metal grating I could see another fence five or so metres away. I jumped across to it, caught myself onto it and pulled myself towards it with a tight grip. I was in almost perfect darkness.
That was when I made my real encounter with somebody on the mission. It was a tall, lanky maintenance employee taking a sharp turn around the corner in front of the fence. I stayed invisible in the darkness. Slowly and silently I made my way to the top of the fence. I could hear him breathing and the only problem he posed for me was that he could hit the alarm trigger - it was well within his reach. I had to proceed with extreme caution. He walked past and after flicking a few switches on a small, dimly lit panel, he looped back round, heading back at me, still oblivious to my presence up above him. I was poised to drop from above, balancing on top of the thin metal fence.
I took him out perfectly. He collapsed to the floor with a futile attempt at a scream or shout. I dragged his unconscious body into a dark corner of the room and sat him down, propping his back against the wall. I had to make sure he would recover when he was discovered... hopefully a long time after I had left.
Spying on fellow American agencies was certainly different. The people you took out along the way were fellow Americans, innocent, simply caught in the crossfire between the NSA and a sole target, this time a server. I felt a small tinge of sorrow for the maintenance geek; but then, only small, and my past training and history kicked in and my mind was back on the job. The guy would recover in a warm hospital bed after all.
I took a right onto an empty corridor, lined high and low with rusty, neglected pipes all along it's length and round the corner. I took a left onto another dimly lit passage, this time with a slim, modern security camera at it's end. The fans in the background, behind the room I had just exited, were now at full roar and were impressive to the ear. Top class ventilation systems that served an enormous building such as this were rarely seem or heard close-up by anyone. "This job has its benefits," I thought wryly.
Getting past the camera would be fairly easy. Unlike humans, cameras are easily predicted. The place was dimly lit and very few parts were visible to the camera. On top of that, it only viewed parts of the corridor at a time, turning slowly with a loud mechanical hum. Employing fast, timed movements and sticking to the shadows, I would easily be able to bypass it.
Getting to the end of the passage felt like an achievement even though it was relatively easily accomplished and I steadied myself for the challenges still to come. At my three o'clock was a one-storey flight of stairs that connected onto a short landing currently being patrolled by a single guard. Once again the stairs were made of metal grating, like everything else I had encountered in the building. Cheap, easy to install, and almost impossible to make silent steps on. The perfect choice for a high security facility such as this.
I stood directly under the stairs, once again in darkness, and gave the metal a light nudge with my shoulder. It made a deep ringing sound, like a muted gong, and sounded natural. This is what I was aiming for. It meant the guard would casually come to investigate, thinking the noise he had heard was probably nothing, have a quick look round and give me a great oppurtunity to grab him.
As expected, he made his way down the steps. I stayed round the corner poking my head out just enough to see him. I watched as he looked about. He tapped the staircase with the flat palm of his hand, as if to acknowledge to himself there was truely nothing here. Just as he was about to go back up the stairs, I quickly ran up behind and gave him a sharp blow to the neck, in the ideal spot to knock a man out. I grabbed him as he was falling to the ground and propped him up in the dark under the stairs just as I did to the maintenance employee.
I walked up the stairs and past the landing, down another set of stairs. The landing was simply an observation platform of a large room of what seemed to be more maintenance equipment. At the bottom of this second set of stairs I made another right onto a further corridor. I spotted a guard making his way through a door and stayed close behind him, keeping the door open with my foot to see where he was.
He was using the room as a short cut. He exited and flicked off the light without looking back once. I turned on my night vision and noticed some ammunition - two shockers, for the DT-30K, the weapon I was told was waiting for me deeper into the building.
This weapon was top class. It had a silencer and sniper zoom fitted and could be used with other types of ammunition, not just standard bullets, such as shockers. These were high voltage discharges coated in an adhesive resin. Fired from the DT-30K at high speed, these 'stab' deep into the enemy's skin, giving them an incapacitating shock. Fortunately, they are designed to knock out an enemy, not kill. They would prove invaluable later in the mission.
Next to the shockers was a small medical kit packed with bandages, painkilling drugs and so on. I was fully fit at the current time but I couldn't be sure of this later on and grabbed the kit.
Another gadget I already had available to me was the optic cable. This was a wire with a tiny camera on the end that linked to a small, flat monitor screen. This could be placed under doors enabling the user to see exactly what was happening in the next room. I took it out and placed the wire under the gap at the bottom of the door. The room was a large hall, brightly lit and with the CIA logo skillfully painted onto the expensive marble flooring in it's centre. The hall had pillars around the edges, and my exit to it's right was guarded my metal detectors. Luckily these were not active. A guard sat working at a small reception-type desk on the far left of the hall. Another guard patrolled up and down at the back.
I opened the door just enough for me to squeeze through when the guard was patrolling away from me, facing towards the reception end rather than towards my exit. I quickly jumped behind a pillar and leaned with my back towards it, staying out of view. I took a short quick look round the pillar and saw that the guard was still patrolling away from me, so I jumped across to the next pillar and did the same.
I kept up this routine all along the width of the hall in the time it took the guard to make two patrols of its length. I dashed through the inactive metal detectors and looked through an empty door frame into another hall, this time smaller, and square. Once again it had a marble floor with the CIA logo in it's centre, although this time it wasn't quite so brightly lit and had a divider on it's right hand side which had a dark area behind it.
A CIA employee was stood in the middle of the marble flooring in partial darkness. He was speaking on his mobile phone. He sounded worried and tense. He was talking about what sounded like a hospitalised relation, about how he knew they would get out of there okay. It seemed the person on the other end of the line was not so sure. There was an elevator up ahead I was going to use, being guarded by a chubby security man.
I quickly flicked off the lights - three fingers, three switches and flicked on my night vision with another. My window of opportunity was limited - the security man was very near another light switch, although he would have trouble making his way there in the dark. I carefully crept up behind the man on the phone, making sure I grabbed him while he wasn't talking. In the darkness, the chubby guard wouldn't see us. The only worry would be him hearing the employee's conversation getting strangely cut short. I walked the CIA employee behind the divider. And dropped him to the floor with a knock out blow.
The guard was running about like a headless chicken. He had completely lost his cool, and instead of calling the maintenance area about a power shortage with his radio, or running for the light switch, he made an attempted sprint down the middle of the hall. I ran up behind him and give the same treatment as the man on the phone, and walked him next to his body. I propped them both up, next to each other against the divider.
I thought about making them hold hands, then quickly thought against it - knocking them out for hours was cruel enough treatment, especially for the man on the phone. While I heard him on his mobile, he was talking about going to see whoever was in hospital, probably his wife, or his son or daughter, or possibly a parent. Considering his relative was close to being on their death bed, I already felt guilty enough about forcing him to miss the chance to see them.
However, it had to be done. I flicked the switches back on, all but the third - leaving this off would be ideal, keeping the unconscious bodies in as much darkness as possible. I made my way up to the elevator and called for it with the plastic 'up' button. I quickly got inside it and pressed another plastic button, this time labelled
'-1.'
-1 was the basement, below the ground floor. I stepped out of the elevator into a corridor, this time carpeted with a blue diamond pattern. Once again it was very dark. Not even a dim light anywhere along it. I made a left and saw two doors either side of the corridor. An office worker, weedy and pale, made his way from the room on the right to the room on the left. I took my chance and quickly dashed into the room.
It was a tiny, cramped office, with a small wooden desk and some poor quality shelving. A laptop was placed in the middle of the desk and I found a data stick containing mostly redundant information. I walked back onto the corridor and decided not to risk confronting the office worker. The chances were that there would be more useless information in his office as well.
I headed towards a junction - a split, with one corridor on the left and one on the right. I spoke to Lamberth through the headset and he told me to go left, down the corridor and take out a guard in a room at the end of it. When I got to the room, it wasn't quite as simple as that. The guard was chatting through a plastic window looking onto the second corrdior to a different guard so I crouched in a dark corner of the room and waited.
They were talking about money, security funding to be precise. The man the guard was chatting to was the security boss of the basement and was complaining about lack of money and using it as an excuse for all the guards to do night shifts and extra time. "If Congress admitted security can't be run on a shoestring, we might all get along here better and have fewer hours with longer breaks..." The other man, the guard, was a little worried about the security situation in the building, but the boss told him not to worry, and told him the place was still almost impossible to pentrate anyway. The guard was not convinced.
The boss walked away, back to his post down the second corridor. The guard stood tall and firm and to make sure the second guard was well away I waited a touch longer. I looked around the room. It had about ten computers dotted around on beech desks, shiny but slightly worn out. There was also a few security monitors showing mostly empty corridors in full monochrome glory. I noticed the one I had crept my way down in the shadows was one of them.
The guard wasn't really paying much attention to the monitors. He was staring idly out of the window. His reflection on the shiny plastic looked tired. The guy needed a rest. I gave him one in the closet. I grabbed him, textbook style, from behind and layed his body down in front of the closet door. I pulled out my set of lockpicks and I soon had the door open. I slid the guard's body through and proped it against an empty shelve. I grabbed two sticky shockers that were on a cabinet in front of me. I spotted another medical kit as well.
I closed the closet door behind me and went back onto the corridor. A guard made a turn and was heading straight towards me. I waited in the room until I thought he would be making his way back up the corridor. I had timed it perfectly and did another textbook grab on the patrolling guard. I walked him all the way to the closet and delivered another knock out blow to his head.
I made my way to the junction and stepped onto the second corridor. I noticed another maintenance employee sorting out some equipment in a closet on the left side of the passage and the basement security boss in a brightly lit room in front of that. On the right hand side was a whole set of drinks and snacks dispensers in a dimly lit alcove, drinks such as "Soda Adrenaline Rush," ideal for guards needing a lift. Drinks not available commercially - far too powerful and dangerous to the public if abused. Stimulants heavier than caffeinne.
I kept to the shadows and took the maintenance employee out first. While he was reading some files I crept up behind him and punched him in the neck, catching him on his fall. His bulky shoulders were easy to grab and I rested him in the corner of the closet. These were procedures I had done countless number of times.
I walked back out onto the corridor and viewed the security boss. He had another set of monitors to view and was paying far more attention to them. He was facing away from me and taking him out should have been easy. I crept up behind him, but the surface was squeaky and my boots made a slight noise. Simply out of instinct the man turned round and whipped out his pistol. I grabbed the pistol with one hand and covered his mouth with another to silence him. He had a cold look of fear in his eyes, and he was silently pleading with me not to shoot as I pointed the gun to his head.
The pistol was heavy, and I delivered a blow to his head with its fairly short shaft. I was worried I had hit him too hard and checked his pulse as I hugged his limp body towards my chest to support him. He was still breathing and his heart was going strong. He was simply unconscious. He would survive. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. I propped him next to the maintenance geek in the closet and no ideas of practical jokes ran through my head this time. I was still mildly shaken, mild being the key word.
I rummaged through the security boss' jacket for a code to get through the password protected door I was to go through next. He had a data stick which I viewed on my hand held computer which listed the security code rotation over the next twenty four hours, a different code every half hour. I checked the time and noted the code in my head, walking over to the code input next to the door on the other side of the corridor. I typed in the numbers firmly, with a beep each number and and long tone at the end signalled to me that access had been granted.
I pulled out my optic cable once again and placed it under the door. I saw lots of small servers on equipment racks and a maintenance geek working on them with another security guard viewing some more monitors. The geek was working in almost complete darkness, pulling wires out of one piece of equipment and placing it in other. He was quick and efficient at his job, working with impressive speed. I put away the optic cable and pushed the door slightly open. I kept in the dark half of the room, keeping my eye on the guard who was heavily concentrating on the security monitors.
I slowly walked up to the maintenance employee, and timed my last step with him inserting another wire. I grabbed him round the neck and covered his mouth. He let out muffled, muted shouts for help. He must have been amazed anyone could get so far into a building without being seen. I layed him on the floor, still covering his mouth and pushing his kicking legs hard against the carpet. He was struggling hard, knowing if he made any noise at all I would be caught by the guard at the monitors. However his strength was no match for my years of heavy training and body building, and I gave him a relatively light punch to the side of his head to knock him out.
The security guard was, in comparison, easy. While he was still focussing on the screens, I crept up behind him past the rows of equipment and did a textbook grab and punch to the neck. I placed his body in the dark near where the maintenance employee had been working.
A computer was on a desk near another password protected door. I spent a few minutes finding the code and entered it once again into the input. A long beep signalled my success for the second time in succession. A heavy, thick door opened into a noisy room with a metal grating balcony with steps down to a floor of huge servers, though still not the central server. Two more maintenance employees were working together on fixing a problem, speaking mostly with long numbers, and the word 'check' after each one. The room had three thin corridors between each server, each server a massive metal box that towered high above us, each server about four metres long and each two metres wide.
I knew it would only be a matter of time before one of them walked my way. I had been trained to be able to do what is known in the business as a 'split jump.' This was a very difficult to master move where I jumped high up a wall with one leg and catching onto the other side of a thin corridor with the other, doing a kind of gymnastic 'splits' in mid air. The result was a very painful position, but very powerful one, where I could be high above the enemy ready to drop onto them. It was rarely used but worth the training when it was employed. The lights in the room were metal lamps, hanging from the ceiling from long wires. I grabbed the lamp shining down onto my corridor and placed it on top of the server, turning my passage pitch black.
I flicked my night vision on, and in more and more pain as time went along, waited. One of them finally walked below me, looking up to the ceiling, wondering why the light had gone off on my passage. While he was looking up, I dropped on him, sending a shooting pain up my leg in the process. I hobbled to the next passage and did a simple punch round the next maintenance geek's head. Once again I placed them next to each other in a dark corner. The technique was become routine in this mission alone.
Lamberth came streaming through my ear piece, crystal clear despite me being underground. As I said, top NSA equipment. It was pleasing to hear a friendly voice. "Your DT-30K is in place," he told me. "I'd be ignorant not to arm you, but keep it holstered. Any casualties and the mission is over - you're out of there." With a small beep, his transmission finished and I walked out of the server room up a flight of stairs.
Sure enough, at the top of these stairs was my DT-30K. I grabbed it and swung it round my back, and took a further shocker from the shelve. I was now loaded with five shockers and five ring foil rounds. These are high impact projectiles that knocked out an enemy if fired at his head. I also had a few sticky cameras. These are tiny cameras that fire at high speed from the DT-30K and stick to a wall and feed an image back to me on a small, flat screen similair to the optic cables. These are useful for firing into a room and observing at a distance. The cameras even have night vision capability and can zoom in and pan around, and can be picked up again and re-used.
I walked out of the room onto another corridor. A man was speaking on his mobile in a alcove further down the corridor and I cut his conversation short, dragged him into a dark part of the corridor and propped him against the wall after knocking him out. The alcove had more brightly advertised food and drink dispensers and a whole litter of cans on the table. I grabbed one and walked back onto the corridor and took a left and then a quick right.
Lamberth streamed through again. I was back on the ground floor and nearing the central server. He ran me through the details of allowing our technical expert access into the server's files so NSA could search through the network to find who had been leaking information to the enemy. There was a huge set of empty offices on my right and a single guard. The corridor was pitch black. I lobbed the empty can against his office window, bringing him out to investigate. As he turned his back to me I took him out and his body like the countless bodies before him.
On my left was entry to the central server. I stepped through two sets of automatic doors and typed in the code to get into the room. I walked through and there was another maintence pair working on a rack of equipment. High up above them on a structure similair to a balcony that ran around the room, I jumped onto them both. Both were instantly knocked out. After hiding their bodies I granted NSA access to the central server and my task was done.
It turned out a man named Dougherty was leaking information to the Georgians and I would have to kidnap him. I exited the server room by a flight of stairs and walked back onto the corridor I had been on only a short time ago. A guard was patrolling up and down the corrdior and I stuck to the shadows behind him. When he looped back round and past me, I took a right. There was a security booth with another guard.
Finally some action for my weapon, my DT-30K. I swung it off my back and inserted a shocker into the shaft. I fired it into the guard's torso and an electric shock rippled through his body like a wave. His arms stretched out and he slumped to the floor. I jumped through the gap in the wall into his booth and flicked the light off and shot out the monitors, turning the room a total jet black.
His booth led to a very thin corridor that then led onto a large hall that was dotted with plant pots filled with bushy plants giving a comfortable feel to the place. There was two armored cameras searching round the room with the patience of an eagle hunting down it's prey. The room was lit up by lamps similair to those in the first major server room, hanging high from the ceiling. I pulled out my weapon and zoomed into each one individually, bringing the glass surrounding them crashing to the floor. I made a dark path down the middle of the hall for me to run down and sprinted through.
I knew if I didn't kidnap Dougherty soon and get out I would be caught. Time was against me. I spotted a set of stairs on my left and walked down them. I saw another armored camera in a small entrance to the weapons testing room. I shot the light out and entered the room. There was another CIA employee on his mobile phone. Two large lights lit up the place, and I shot them both out in quick succession, plunging the room into total darkness. The man was scared witless and dropped his phone to the floor. He pulled out his pistol and looked round the room to investigate.
I flicked on my night vision and connected to his head with a ring-foil round shot from my DT-30K. He fell with a soft thud against the carpet and I hurriedly hid his body. The Weapons Testing room was filled mostly with incomplete weapons useless to me. It also had some stationery turrets set up against a shooting range. These sensed heat and fired at their target with over fifty rounds a second dropping the enemy to the floor quickly and effectively. On top of this, they could be programmed not to fire at friendly targets with tracers attatched to their clothes.
I didn't waste my time hacking the turret software and disabling them and got into the elevator back up to the ground floor. I was in a major rush now, and had to make my way to Dougherys office before kidnapping him. I stepped out of the elevator and with a brisk pace jogged down the length of the short corridor. The next room was an unknown to me and I fired a sticky camera high up on the wall. I panned around the room and saw three men viewing some intelligence gathered my American spys. They had the rooms lights dimmed to see the picture with perfect clarity and this gave me the chance to sneak behind their desks and make my way into a large scale office round the corner. I did just this and took a short hurried glance around the empty office.
Dougherty had a room seperate from the main office pool which had probably been cleared for hours since it was way after normal working office hours. Dougherty was exiting his office and this was the perfect oppurtunity to gather intelligence from his computer and to kidnap him while he was taking his smoke break. I entered his room and tapped away at the computer speedily. I opened a tap for NSA to use and Lamberth updated me on the situation. Dougherty had been leaking vital information through an insecure computer.
I made my way back into the office pool and round the corner onto a marble-floored corridor. At the end of it was a guard sat reading a magazine with a security camera facing down the corridor to the left. On my left was a room with a plaque next to it's door saying "Presentation Room." I looked through the door's glass window and saw a few men sat watching a presentation in a dark room. A projetor was beaming a strong light across the middle of the room onto a large screen and an army Colonel was giving a talk. I opened the door with a light push and crawled through a gap in the cinema-style seats to make sure I didn't cross in front of the beam. The door I had to get through had a member of the audience blocking it, standing watching from a distance.
I was slow and careful. Although I was running out of time I couldn't blow it now. I caught him perfectly round the neck and dragged him behind the projector into a small room with huge cabinets of slides. I punched his neck hard and softened his fall. I pulled out a disposeable pick which simply blew away the lock and got back onto the corridor. Once again it was marble floored. I was a few metres away from the camera's view as it was angled down. They probably didn't expect anyone to get through the presentation room. Dougherty was sat chatting to two security guards and a cleaner in a small café, currently closed, and was about to go outside to smoke.
He walked out of the café and I followed him, sticking to the dimly lit corridors shadows. Doughery was a massive man. He was fat, tall and wide. He was sweating heavily. He tapped in a five digit code through a password protected door. I slipped through it before it closed and grabbed him by his neck. I then hit him over the head and picked up his unconscious body. I lifted over my shoulders and walked along, hunched under his enormous weight. I put him down in front of a set of doors and dealed with a patrolling guard in the darkness outside. The rain was as heavy as ever and had persisted the whole night.
I walked back indoors and picked him up again. I had to get him to extraction. I carried him all the way to yet another maintenance room, this time filled with electricity generators. The CIA building had it's own generators. I guessed for power shortages on the national grid and for sheer efficiency. There was a total of about nine generators, each slightly taller than me and covering a four by four metre area with one metre gaps between each. I placed Dougherty's body down just in front of the room's entrance and glanced round the corner. There was another maintenance employee and another guard.
I placed a shocker in the gun and attacked. I shot the guard with the shocker before he had a chance to even see me. I swung for the maintenance employee and was amazed when he kept running towards the alarm. I had been sat a desk and I hadn't figured he was so small. He was tiny, and fast. He ran for the alarm and triggered it. I stayed calm, I knew extraction was near. I hit the shortie over the head and ran for Dougherty. Before I got to him two guards rushed the room from outside. Both started shooting me and I took a hit to my shoulder. Blood started running down my arm.
Despite this I still could not kill. It was simply not an option. I loaded my weapon with another shocker and fired it into one of the guard's chests. He fell to the floor with a gargled scream. I ran behind one of the generators and stayed hidden as I loaded another shocker. I jumped on top of the generator and aimed straight at the guard's back. He didn't realise I was up here and probably didn't think it was possible. He dropped hard against the stone floor as I stabbed the shocker into him with the gun. I took pleasure from this. I was wounded, and it was him that had taken the shot admist the ambush. I pulled out a bandage from one of the medical kits and wrapped it tightly around the top of my arm and shoulder to slow down the bleeding. I was in sheer agony.
I tried lifting Dougherty but the pain was too intense. I dragged his fat body round the generators and outside. I saw Keyes stood at the van waiting for my extraction. His presence here was completely legit - after all we were a fellow American agency. He was chatting to a security guard while I dragged Dougherty's body down a flight of metal grating stairs behind them. My presence, complete with an unconscious Dougherty, however, would hardly be copacetic with the guard. Keyes saw me but kept talking and fortunately his expression changed very little. I dropped Dougherty to the floor and left him behind me as I walked up behind the talkative guard and slammed him hard in his neck with my non-injured left arm.
I then pulled Doughery into the van and, arm still bleeding, Keyes reached out to give me a celebratory hug. I hugged him back, aware this was unlike my normal character. I show very little emotion... but it was the polite thing to do.
We sped away into the night and I mockingly waved a farewell to the tall black buildings behind me.
I think you actually put more thought in this than you think. There's some good story elements here already. Certainly don't get rid of this piece.
Indeed, I would agree with you wholeheartedly on that.
