The Kidon

Chapter Seven

Attack of the Were-Monkeys

A loud buzzing woke Ron up slightly after 2 A.M.

Waking up between the hours of two-AM and five-AM is rarely leads to anything good, and when Ron checked the caller ID from his buzzing smartphone, he knew right away that this was not going to be one of the rare exceptions.

"What?" he asked groggily.

"Problem," Marty responded, "get moving."

And then he hung up.

Ron cursed profusely in three languages.

But he was a good soldier, so he dressed in jeans, a dark grey hoodie, work boots, and slipped a Glock 26 subcompact 9mm into an ankle holster before getting on his motorcycle to ride to the predetermined meeting location.

In this case, the location was a small airstrip about twenty minutes outside of Middleton. Marty had drilled into him dozens of code phrases from early on. If he had wanted Ron to meet him at his house for example, he would have said, "We have an issue,", if Ron had to bug out, then he would have asked to return a copy of The Hobbit that he had borrowed. It went on like that.

Former Spec-Op soldiers turned shadow-operatives took paranoia to whole new levels.

Ron sped through his search-and-detection-route on the back of his bike. Only when he was certain that no one was tailing him did he rev the engine of his Indian motorcycle and speed away towards the meet.

Marty was waiting at the airstrip with a large duffel bag in one hand, and a beige folder in the other.

Ron pulled up a few feet in front of him and removed his helmet, "What, no coffee?" he asked.

Marty smiled— having long since grown used to Ron's propensity towards snark before a dangerous mission. And in their business, nothing was more dangerous than the unknown.

To help alleviate this, Marty handed over the dossier. Ron flipped it open and skimmed the mission overview. He paled.

Marty clapped him on the shoulder in a gesture of comfort, "You don't have to do it, you know. Management can find someone else."

Ron shook his head emphatically. "No." He declared flatly, "I mean, I've been recommending this for years. These two are just too dangerous, not just to Israel, but to the world."

He gave Marty a grin that looked a little-too forced, "Besides, you know me, blood like ice. I can do it, and I'll deal with the fallout if I have too."

Marty nodded his respect and said, "You're a freaking creamsicle kid."

Ron's smile relaxed. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, they did look cold. It would have been difficult for anyone who wasn't close to Ron to spot the changes: he was more relaxed, he didn't stand any taller, but he still managed to look more confident. There was something eager and anticipatory in his movements.

Ron looked like a predator about to hunt.

Ron gave Marty a smile that would have made anyone else wet themselves. Then he grabbed the duffel out of Marty's hand, and bounded towards the plane.

Once he was in the plane's small cabin, he burst out laughing.

There was a bag of what smelled like hot blueberry muffins sitting next to a travel cup of coffee on his seat.

Ron jumped out of the plane.

He really wished that people would stop making him do that.

As he plummeted towards the small clearing that had been designated as drop zone, he tried to get himself in the right headspace for what he was supposed to do. He had killed more people than he cared to remember, but this time was different.

Killing Monkey Fist and DNAmy would be the first time that he would assassinate someone who knew in his life as Ron Stoppable.

Ron reminded himself that the two were perhaps the single biggest threat presented by Kim's enemies. Monkey Fist had knowledge and control over forces that the most brilliant savants in the world could only describe as magic. And on top of that he was former SAS, England's elite Special Air Service. A special-ops force that Ron knew could easily rival anything the U.S. or Israel could field.

DNAmy was even worse.

Ron theorized that if she ever decided to create one of her mutant hybrids that was capable of reproduction, then it could potentially rival a nuclear bomb in its destructive capabilities. A biological weapon of mass destruction that could destroy entire ecosystems or overrun continents with horrors straight out of a Lovecraft story.

The assassin landed silently and began to cut the parachute cord.

He had his orders. He had his targets. He knew what needed to be done.

The assassin began to check his gear. His intelligence knew little about the capabilities of his targets hideout, so Mossad had equipped him with a fairly standard assault kit.

A suppressed M4A1 carbine equipped with an Aimpoint red-dot sight, a suppressed 9mm Glock 19 as a sidearm, a SOG combat knife, a pair of Spyderco folding knives, a night-vision monocular, a IIIA1 bulletproof vest, and a first aid kit.

Additionally, there was a pair of combat boots, a pair of dark fatigues, a pair of shooting gloves, a web-belt, and several magazines of subsonic ammunition for the firearms.

The Assassin had checked all his gear on the plane. So, he stealthily headed his way through the woods towards his targets.

Moving through a heavily wooded area in the dark was hard. It was even harder to do it silently. The footing was treacherous, there were annoying animals, and it was surprisingly easy to walk into a tree… even with night vision.

So, the assassin went slowly. Pausing often to check his surroundings. Even crawling occasionally. He remembered one of his trainer's favorite sayings,

"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."

The assassin was very smooth. It took him little time to arrive at his target's hideout. Still, the assassin didn't go in. He worked his way around the perimeter slowly, the last thing he wanted any surprises.

It took him over an hour of circling the dwelling before he was ready to make his move.

He chambered a round and then slung the carbine over his back. He crawled towards the side of the cabin which had the exposed brick of a chimney and began to climb.

The assassin scurried up the side of the building like a spider-monkey. He had planned to avoid the alarms on the bottom windows by going through a window on the upper floor, but his entry window was locked.

The assassin cursed while dangling off the roof. Getting a window open silently while hanging off a roof would be tricky, and because he needed one arm to keep himself from falling the twenty feet to the ground, he would have to do it one handed.

The assassin began to reach into a pouch on his belt for his lock-picking kit; but then he felt it.

A noticeable tremor coming from inside the house. A noticeable tremor coming towards him!

The assassin didn't think, he just acted. He let go of the roof and fell the two stories to the earth. The assassin threw himself into a roll the moment his boots hit the ground.

It still hurt though.

The assassin didn't care. Because before he could so much as spit out a single curse, the second story wall of the building exploded outward as something large and black burst through it.

The assassin's reaction was smooth and instinctual. He brought up the carbine in an instant, flicked the selector switch to full-auto, and let loose with a stream of 5.56x45mm hollow-point rounds into the thing.

Luckily, it hadn't calculated its jump to fall on the assassin. It fell no more than two yards from the assassin's spot on the grass. It rose the moment that it touched the ground and whirled to face its attacker.

The assassin shot it some more.

Bullets raked across the things wide chest. Stitching it from the middle of its belly to the crown of its enormous skull. Even with the suppressor, the subsonic twenty-caliber rounds made a lot of noise.

Fortunately, the sound of both the gunfire and the beasts dying scream were drowned out.

Unfortunately, it was drowned out by several other screams. And somehow the assassin doubted that whatever was making enough noise to drown out gunfire and a dying monster was friendly.

The assassin dropped the magazine from the M4A1 and inserted another just as something large and dark and terrifying charged out of the dense brush right at him.

It was followed by another.

And another. And then another.

The assassin opened fired.

Moving on long training and instinct, he fired a three-round burst on the nearest as it crossed the distance towards him at an alarming rate of speed. It didn't fall, but he switched targets to the next nearest anyway, and fired off another burst. The recoil from the last burst had moved the carbine's barrel up, so that the bullets tore into the face and head of the monster. The creature behind it slammed into it at about thirty-miles-an-hour; this bought the assassin another few precious seconds.

The assassin re-sighted on the nearest creature just in time for it to grab the carbine by its long suppressor. The force of the creature's grip was incredible. Enough to pull the assassin off his feet and force him to one knee.

The assassin pulled the combat knife from its sheath on his left hip and cut through the sling that connected the M4A1 to his chest. Then he sprang up into the much taller creature and buried his blade under the things chin - straight into its brain.

At least, that's where the assassin thought that its brain was.

The creature fell with the assassin on top of it. The assassin drew his pistol automatically, only to have it slapped out of his hand when the third creature knocked aside the Glock's suppressor.

The assassin dove away out of the monster's reach.

He never touched the ground.

The creature snatched the assassin out of midair and threw him like a sack of rice twenty feet away. The assassin rolled several times but didn't get up.

He didn't have time. The creature was coming right at him, and it was coming fast.

The creature was ten feet away.

Still lying on the ground, the assassin scrambled to pull the Glock 26 holdout pistol from his ankle holster.

The creature was five feet away.

The assassin aimed for the creature's overly-large head.

The creature was with an arm's length.

The assassin fired off the entire magazine as fast as he could pull the trigger. Ten rounds of 9mm hollow-points entered the creature's brain; and if that didn't exactly kill it immediately, then it was pretty damn close.

The assassin dropped the Glock 26's magazine and reloaded with one of the fifteen-rounders that were intended for the Glock 19.

After waiting for a moment to make sure that nothing was going to leap out of the forest to try and eat him, the assassin rushed to retrieve his other weapons. Only when he had the M4A1 in hand and reloaded did he allow himself the luxury of a question.

"What the fuck?!" thought the assassin.

The assassin collected his sidearm and knife before pulling his flashlight and going over the inspect the first of the monstrosities.

The one he came to was rolled halfway over on its side. Ron put a pair of shots into its head with his carbine before grabbing its shoulder to leverage it onto its back.

The creature was enormous! If it wasn't quite seven-feet tall, then it was certainly tall enough to play for the NBA. Moreover, it was laden with layer upon layer of thick, hard muscle. The kind of musculature that is generally associated with champion bodybuilders on juice.

But the creature's immense size wasn't the strangest thing.

It was covered in a blanket of thick dark hair.

No. Not hair exactly; fur.

The monster's hands (for the assassin could only call it a monster after examining it), they were disproportionally large. And they were tipped with three-inch talons that appeared to have been artificially sharpened. Although, the assassin would be the first to admit that he wasn't an expert on nail care.

The assassin left the body where it was. There was no way that he could physically move the thing without some kind of help. And the assassin wanted to get a look at the face of one of the monsters before he started doing a sweep for Monkey Fist and DNAmy.

The assassin didn't think that they were still at the hideout. He could think of a few reasons that could explain their absence, and none of them were good.

When an operation went this bad this quickly, it was usually due to bad luck, bad intel, or incompetence.

Usually.

The very last thing the assassin wanted to believe was that there was a leak in the extremely tight-knit and secretive assassination branch of Mossad's intelligence operation. But getting jumped by a group of B-horror-movie monsters made him suspicious.

The creatures hadn't left signs of activity outside of the cabin. And the assassin hypothesized that things of that size must eat a lot. There were no signs of foraging, or the excrement that one would imagine that the creature would leave.

The most disturbing thing that the assassin found about the creature was its ruined face. Contrary to the assassin's expectations, the creature' s mouth was filled with large flat teeth, more suited for grinding plants than tearing flesh. Except… the assassin leaned in closer to the creature's shattered skull, yes, part of the creatures back teeth had been filed to a razor-sharp point.

The assassin sat back on his haunches. This was confusing, DNAmy was too good a geneticist to have to resort to primitive dentistry. He couldn't imagine what would possessed someone to stick their hands down one of the creature's throats, but the assassin figured that whatever it was wasn't anything good. He pitied the poor bastard who was going to have to deal with this clusterfuck.

The assassin cursed silently in Farsi to himself. He was going to have to report this to Mossad. Mossad would want the matter taken care of quickly, quietly, and permanently. There were very few operatives who would be able to handle this.

"Fuck," the assassin swore, why kid himself? The moment Mossad received his report, he would be assigned to "handle it". And the worst part was -the single worst thing to come out of this entire royally screwed up scenario- was that Marty was still going to bitch about him not completing the mission.

Marty poured him a glass filled with the last bit of Macallan scotch. Okay, so Marty hadn't been that pissed that the mission failed. He hadn't been happy, but Ron thought that he was more upset about the bad intel than anything else.

It was nice to work for someone who got it.

They sat in Marty's living room. Ron had been able to grab a quick shower before seeing to the minor wounds that he had accumulated during his latest brush with death. Still, Marty hadn't wasted much time with the debriefing. Ron always found after-action reports tedious, doubly so because Marty often insisted on getting his account immediately unless there was a pressing medical reason not to.

Ron took a sip of scotch before asking, "So, what's the next move?"

Marty shrugged his large shoulders from his place in the easy chair across form Ron, "Now? I kick this upstairs and we wait for orders."

Ron frowned, "Are we sure that's the best idea? I mean, we have no real idea about what these things are capable of. I barely managed to take them out while I was heavily armed and expecting a trap. And if DNAmy—"

Marty cut him off, "I know. I know. Look, we've heard your concerns about the danger of one of her creature's reproducing. And I agree. Mossad realizes the potential danger, we all do. You've brought it up enough. The Americans can handle it. What's more pressing is the creatures' creator. …And Fiske too."

Ron's frown deepened, "What's the deal with Mossad suddenly wanting those two eliminated anyway?" he asked curiously, "…Not that I'm complaining," Ron finished hastily.

He had been recognized the danger that DNAmy posed immediately after reading her file. As for Fiske… well, after Yamanouchi, Fiske had made things personal for Ron. And Ron hated mixing his personal life with work.

Marty shrugged, "Don't know, could be a lot of things. Doesn't really matter though. Like you've been saying, they need to go. They're not the worst people that we've ever gone against, hell they're probably not even really the most dangerous, but they are fucking unpredictable. And that will get you killed more often than anything else."

Ron nodded, he had used similar methods throughout his career. Attack when people least expect it, attack from angles they don't see, attack in ways they can't predict. It was all fairly-standard tactical doctrine.

"I don't like being a mushroom," Ron complained.

Marty laughed, "Not a fan of being kept in the dark and being fed on bullshit? Join the club."

"So," Ron asked, "what do we do?"

Marty leaned back in his chair and took another sip of scotch. "Now, we wait until more intel becomes available."

Ron sighed. He hoped that being patient would pay off.

That took longer than expected...