252 252 - Air Raids (1/2)
Recommended music - Black Sabbath - Panaroid
Skies over Sin City
Blue Thunder grumbled as he did another lazy circle over the tiny city below. ”Must we keep doing this? I'm getting dizzy...”
”Stop your whining!” Airforce Sergeant Stamford snapped. ”Keep circling till we get their reply!”
”Look!” One the crew cried out, ”They are signaling!”
Stamford and even Blue Thunder craned their necks over to look at the city, seeing flashes of light coming from some spot in the city.
”All... set... ready... for... operation... ” their radio operator with the binos glued to his eyes read out the morse code he had memorized by heart. ”eleven... tonight... out...”
”Got it!” Dek the radio operator looked up, ”Ops to begin tonight at 11 pm!”
”Good!” Stamford replied and smacked the side of Blue Thunder. ”Now give them a roar to acknowledge the message!”
Blue Thunder sucked in a large lungful of air and roared out while spewing flames as they flew off towards Orwell's Point, leaving behind a city of bewildered people.
-----
As night fell, the men of Claymore One split into three teams and headed towards the crude sewage system of the city. The men dressed in dark cloaks with weapons and armor hidden under crawled through the sewage tunnels, carefully casting counterspells to hoodwink the detection runes carved into the basic sewage system.
Climbing out of the grates, the men cleaned themselves off as much filth as possible and used spells to remove the odor from their bodies to prevent the enemy from sniffing them out. After which they split off to their own objectives.
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Tyrier with Tavel led the newest member of the Team, Wolf towards the most heavily guarded objective of their mission tonight, the Treasury. Rows of braziers lit the perimeter walls of the Treasury building with shadows of patrolling Orcs moving up and down the walls.
They cast Agility Up, Stealth, Grace, and Non Detection spells over themselves before sprinting across the wide expanses that separated the civic building from the other structures in the inner city.
Reaching the walls, they hid in the shadows between two light globes of the lit braziers. Tyrier and Tavel gripped hands to form a step and gestured Wolf who is the lightest among them to jump up the four meters tall walls. Wolf took a short running start and landed one foot on the hand step while the other two tossed him up over the walls.
Landing nimbly on the walls, Wolf checked his surroundings before uncoiling the rope he had over his back and dropped it down to the rest below after securing it to the battlements of the wall.
Shortly, Tyrier and Tavel joined him up on the way. ”We got 20 minutes before the guard's patrol here! Drop the package on the roof and get back here before the patrol is back!”
Wolf and Tavel nodded and they disappeared down the wall and into the shadows.
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Hitsu and Loke, forming Squad Two, headed towards the main barrack's Armory. They slipped between the paths of patrolling Orcs and the occasional wind wolf, thankful that they have cleansed the odor of the sewers away.
Seeing the large blocky stone structure across the street with several Orc guards milling around the gates, Hitsu and Loke stopped and took a moment to find the best point of entry. They had spent the whole week recceing the place and had identified a few entrances they can use to enter the walled barracks.
One of through the side wall where they could swing a rope across from the roof of a local's residence to the walls of the barracks and crawl their way in.
The other was to scale the walls up by the far end of the barracks as the walls there were built more unevenly, allowing plenty of footholes for anyone who is proficient enough in climbing, could do so.
The last option was to wait till the Orcs guards were changing shifts as there will be a short period where the guards will abandon their posts to go rouse the taking over Orcs awake from their beds.
”Wait or climb?” Tavel asked as he watched the chatting Orcs at the gates.
Hitsu glanced at his watch and frowned. ”We got some time still, the Orcs should be changing shift soon!”
Tavel nodded and they settled down to wait.
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Altied and Young carefully slipped over the walls of the Factory, bypassing the magic detection runes and guards easily. They kept to the shadows and climbed up the roof from the stack of empty crates and carefully made their way over to the main Factory building and peered into the windows to confirm the location of the fabricator.
They had recced the factory a few times in the past week, getting the feel of the area and making sure the high tech fabricator was in the factory. To their surprise, they actually found one more of the machines beside the original fabricator that was stolen. The new fabricator looked cruder compared to the original and that had alarmed Tyrier who pressed for the Operation to go ahead sooner in case they had replicated more fabricators.
The rest of the time, they spent searching the inner city for more fabricators and weapon stockpiles. It was only these three locations that Claymore One has positively identified to hold the means and results of the weapons that Tyrier finally sent word to begin the bomb raids.
Altied pulled out a slim tube out from his pouch and gave it a twist on the head. The beacon beeped softly and an infra signal invisible to the naked eyes started pulsing. He taped the infra beacon onto the roof of the Factory and nodding to Young, the two Claymore One soldiers proceeded to sneak off the premises to safe ground.
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Orwell's Point, Airfield
Airforce pilot Goldan, started flipping switches after he buckled into his seat. He and his co pilot started to run the usual pre flight checklist before taking off. ”Batteries okay, checking brakes and hydraulics.”
”Check!”
”Fuel tanks? Tanks one, two, three and four?”