The Debt Collectors War

by Tess Mackenzie

They walked a little way through the trees, picking their way around the thickest shrubs, until they reached the edge of the patch of forest, where there was a view out over the fields towards the militia compound.

  The three of them sat there, hidden just inside the foliage, and watched the compound through binoculars. They watched, but they couldn’t see a great deal. They were a long way away, far enough they could really only expect to see vague movement and vehicles, but not the detail of what the movement was.

  Ellie studied the fields between her and the compound. It was open grass, with a couple of fences, and gates which looked like the one they had just opened. They could probably drive if they needed to, she decided, weaving their way through the gates. Or they could walk. She peered at the back fence of the compound for a while, and although she couldn’t see it completely clearly, it seemed to be three or four meters high and closed-mesh wire, which would be tricky to climb and trickier to cut. And very obvious if they did either.

  That changed things a little, she thought. Going in the front gate might be better after all, if they decided to go in at all.

  She sat, and watched, but nothing much seemed to be happening. Everything was quiet.

  Now they were here, she wasn’t sure what to do.

  She’d already had all the non-intrusive data collection done that was possible. She’d had the operations centre run their sweeps and send the results to her tablet. She had heat scans and millimeter radar scans and topographic modeling of historic satellite data showing patterns of construction and moving vehicles and people coming and going over time. Based on an analysis of those patterns, she also had estimates of the number of people currently inside, and also, from phone triangulations and voiceprints, details of their probable identities and biographic data pulled from intelligence and debtor files. She had all of that information, but none of it was helping.

  She still didn’t know if the kid was inside.

  She could do more. She could gather more intel. She could have drones fly over to conduct narrowband sweeps, or she could slip in closer tonight herself and leave a sensor net around the compound, watching it. She could even have a drone drop hundreds of tiny sensor capsules all over the compound and see what she learned that way. She could do all sorts of clever near-magical things to see what was going on inside, but any of those was a risk. Once their prying became more intrusive, if someone inside the compound noticed it, then the militia would immediately know they were being watched, and that could end very badly.

  In a lot of ways this was better, just quietly observing from a distance, close enough to react if anything happened, but far enough away to be hidden.

  It was what she and Sameh had done often enough before, other places, and it still felt like the right thing to do here. It felt right, but it might not be, Ellie thought. Since all they were really doing was sitting outside the compound, watching, and learning nothing.

  And since sitting there wasn’t actually helping them find the kid.

  Ellie sat for a while thinking. Sameh was lying on her back in the shade, apparently asleep, and Joe was sitting a little way away from Ellie and Sameh, looking towards the compound, as Ellie was.

  He still seemed quiet, after their earlier conversation about elderly people. Ellie wasn’t quite sure how upset he was, or whether she should do anything to cheer him up. She wondered for a while, then decided it wasn’t her business. He could say if he needed to talk, or wanted her to apologize for bringing it up, but otherwise she would leave him alone. Managing Joe’s mood wasn’t really the biggest problem she had right now.

  The biggest problem was doing something about the missing kid.

  She sat and thought and glared at the compound. Sitting here wasn’t helping. Nothing was helping.

  She decided they needed to act.

  “Okay,” she said, after a while. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. I think we need to just go down there and ask them if they’ve got the kid.”

  Sameh sat up, and grinned, and suddenly seemed a lot more interested in what was happening.

  “Are you insane?” Joe asked.

  Ellie looked at him.

  “They’re a resistance militia,” he said. “That’s their base. You can’t just walk in and ask….”

  Sameh kept grinning. Ellie did too.

  “Shit, Joe,” Ellie said. “They’re only a bunch of debtors. Calm down.”

  “Armed debtors.”

  “But still debtors. So sort of by definition they’re too half-assedly disorganized to do anything right…”

  Joe looked at her. “I don’t think…”

  “Yeah, I know. Joke. I’m being silly. But still, they’re just debtors. That’s nothing scary.”

  “Nasty debtors.”

  “Not that nasty. Not nasty like her and me are used to.”

  Joe didn’t seem convinced.

  “We hunt insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Ellie said. “In the old Tribal Territories. That’s nasty. This is just a bunch of sulky debtors in the middle of Měi-guó, and that isn’t nearly the same thing.”

  “They might be worse than you think.”

  “Maybe. But probably not.”

  “They might be.”

  Ellie shrugged. “Well, so are we.”

  “There’s only two of you.”

  “So?”

  “You’ll be outnumbered.”

  “Only if we deal with all of them at once. Which we won’t.”

  Joe opened his mouth again.

  “Stop it,” Ellie said, mildly. “We’re the best recon and hunt team a major corporation has. Her and me. We’re the best. So stop being difficult and arguing and just help us do this because I don’t want the bother of having to get a new driver right now.”

  He hesitated. “Can I say one more thing?”

  She nodded.

  “Why not have an assault team come in and do this properly?”

  “Because assault teams get the hostages killed half the time.”

  “Not really half...”

  Ellie shrugged. It was a point of pride for hunt and recon people, and she actually thought it was true as well. Crashing through gates and doors and throwing stun grenades everywhere made plenty of noise, but it also gave plenty of warning there was trouble coming. Especially to bad guys at the other end of a compound from where the assault team went in, who then had plenty of time to kill hostages and prepare ambushes. It was better to knock on doors politely and talk to people quietly and kill everyone you met. It was better to stay gentle and discreet and unobtrusive, like a hunt team would.

  Like she and Sameh were going to do.

  “No assault teams,” she said. “We need to stay low-key. I don’t think the kid is actually in there, so we need to be a bit careful about what we do.”

  “The kid isn’t in there?” Joe asked.

  “Nope.”

  “So why are we…?”

  “I think he was there, but he isn’t now. If he’s still alive, anyway. Because if I was some group of debtors living in shacks in the middle of nowhere and I took a Chinese tourist hostage, even if I didn’t know how valuable he was, I’d move him on quickly. I wouldn’t keep him in the nearest possible location to where he was taken, because that’s the first place everyone will go and look.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “Okay. I suppose so.”

  “I do too,” Ellie said. “So that means we need to go in and ask them where the kid is. But we need to do it quietly. Just in case there’s a camera pointed at this compound from out here somewhere, a kilometer away, a camera someone else has set up, one that we’ll never find, but which is enough for someone to notice when a swarm of drones and helicopters and tanks hit the place. And then start killing hostages and disappearing.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “Absolutely yeah. And also, we’re going because assault teams shoot the shit out of everything and get hostages killed. That too. This way is better.”

  �
��All right,” Joe said. “Thank you. I understand. Can I come too?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’d like to. You might need…”

  “Don’t start this again. Sameh and I work well together. We know what each other will do. It’s better if you aren’t helping. It’s safer for everyone.”

  “If I’m not getting in the way?” he said, a little resentfully.

  “Yep,” Ellie said, bluntly. “And also you don’t have tac armor. And I bet you haven’t been taking field meds either. Which we both have.”

  “I don’t care…”

  “I do,” she said. “I’m not getting you killed because you weren’t properly prepared. And besides, they’re probably just the same as hajjis. If they see two women at the door they’ll think we’re not a threat, and they’ll keep thinking that even after we’re pointing guns at their faces, which gives us a second of them being surprised to put them down.”

  Joe didn’t seem sure.

  “We’re doing this,” Ellie said. “Thank you for your concern, but we are. So stop arguing.”

  After a moment, he nodded, reluctantly. He seemed disappointed, but at least he’d stopped feeling guilty about what they did to old people here, Ellie thought, which was half of why she’d talked about this so long with him at all.

  She stood up, and put her tablet away, and got ready to walk back through the trees to the SUV.

  *

  Ellie and Sameh took their bags of gear out the back of the SUV, and hunted around inside, finding equipment, getting it ready, and putting their heavy, outer tactical armor on too.

  The armor took a while. It needed to be buckled and shifted and settled into place to work. It needed them to remove their thicker outer clothes as well, so the shock-absorbent gel packs in the outer layers, those they were pulling on now, sat reasonably snugly against the lighter inner layers they were already wearing against their skin. It also meant helping each other, tugging at each other’s armor as it went on, making sure everything was sitting properly, and fastened tightly, and wasn’t going to shift around as they moved and leave gaps a bullet could pass though.

  They put on their armor, and then they checked their guns, and checked their equipment, and began clipping gear onto the fastening points on the outside of the armor, then moving and jumping to make sure everything was attached properly while leaving them free to move.

  It looked a bit silly, Ellie thought. There was a lot of bending over and turning and doing squats to make sure nothing was chafing. It looked silly, and Joe seemed to understand. He went around the other side of the SUV, and didn’t watch them.

  Ellie dressed, and then thought about clothes. She wanted to wear something to try and hide the armor, as far she could do so. It wouldn’t be easy. The armor was bulky, and obvious, and fairly distinctive to anyone who’d ever watched TV. Even though theirs was a plain grey shade, and not quite as conspicuous as camo or matt-black color schemes were, it was still fairly clearly tac armor, rather than overalls or motorcycle trousers or whatever other kind of safety gear it might possibly be.

  She looked in Joe’s clothes bag again, and found a couple of larger-sized long jackets. She pulled one on, over the armor, and handed the other to Sameh.

  “We’ll be hot,” Sameh said.

  “I know. It’s only for a few minutes.”

  “Really hot.”

  “Please,” Ellie said. “Don’t argue.”

  Ellie knew why Sameh was complaining. This was a lot easier in the MidEast. The last few times they’d done this, in Afghanistan, they’d both just worn the loose-fitting local trousers and tunics which were baggy enough to hide anything beneath.

  “I’m not arguing,” Sameh said.

  “Please?”

  Sameh grinned, and pulled the jacket on. She’d probably only been teasing. As she did, she said, “What about gloves?”

  Ellie nodded. “They won’t be obvious when someone first sees us.”

  Sameh took hers out of a bag, and said, “And helmets?”

  Ellie hesitated. They should wear helmets, she knew. They always should. Helmets saved your life, and sometimes they stopped you thumping your head on a low door you hadn’t noticed, and knocking yourself out at the wrong moment, which saved your life even more by sparing you an embarrassingly silly death.

  Helmets saved lives, but they were also big, and obvious, and looked exactly like what effective full-face visored helmets looked like. Especially carbon-polymer compound visored helmets with heads-up display packs and rear-facing sensors and comm net aerials. There was no way they could be mistaken for casual visitors with their tac helmets on. Not for a moment.

  “I don’t know,” Ellie said. “Probably not helmets. Not unless you want to?”

  Sameh shrugged.

  “This shouldn’t be too bad,” Ellie said. “There shouldn’t be that much risk.”

  “So you say.”

  “There shouldn’t,” Ellie said. “Not here. Not these guys. Just try and shoot them in the face before they do it to us, yeah?”

  Sameh grinned. “Of course.”

  Ellie looked in the bags again, and found a couple of caps. She gave one to Sameh, who put it on, and Ellie decided that costume was enough. The armor on their legs still showed, beneath the jackets, but if someone didn’t look too closely, or was peering through a high-mounted camera and mostly seeing their heads, then the knee-pads on their legs weren’t particularly obvious, and otherwise, with the jackets on, they mostly just looked bulky.

  It wasn’t ideal, she thought, but how they were dressed would do. It was only a few minutes, just to get in the door.

  For that, the jackets and caps should be enough.

  Especially if they started with the submachine guns hidden in a bag.

  She looked around in the back of the SUV, and emptied out one of their smaller bags, then slipped her gun into it, to make sure it fit. It did, and there would be room for another inside too. She showed the bag to Sameh and said, “We’ll use this at the gate. I’ll go first, and then you hand me my gun once we’re in.”

  Sameh nodded.

  Ellie looked through the rest of their bags until she found the spare magazines and clips for the submachine guns and their sidearms. She sorted through the magazines, carefully, and picked out two of each, and held them out to Sameh.

  “We should use these,” Ellie said.

  Sameh looked disapproving. The top round in each magazine had a green dot on the side. That meant it was a hollow-tipped self-crumbling hostage-rescue round, bullets which broke apart inside people, so there was no chance of through-and-through wounds or through-wall woundings and bystanders like the kid getting injured.

  They were a sensible choice for this situation, but even so, Ellie already knew Sameh would make a fuss.

  “Please?” Ellie said.

  Sameh sighed. She thought hostage-rescue rounds were boring. She liked bullets that did excitingly painful things inside people, or went through body armor, or ideally, which set people on fire. She was the only person Ellie knew who had actually tried to use the remote-tracking smart rounds which had been available for several years. The smart rounds never actually worked properly. The sensor packs inside the bullets were too small and delicate, and always ended up failing when they were used because of the explosive shock of the round being fired. The inbuilt sensor packs always failed, and then the smart rounds instantly became nothing more than very expensive, very unstable, and fairly ineffective inert rounds. Sameh had tried them anyway, excited, and had been disappointed. She had tried them again a year or so later, and still did every so often, always hopeful of some improvement, but she never had any success. Smart rounds just didn’t work, but Sameh hoped, because Sameh liked her ammunition fancy.

  Just not the kind of fancy that was actually helpful.

  Sameh sighed, and made a face, but Ellie kept holding the magazines out. “Use these,” she said. “Please.”

  “Fine,” Sameh said, and to
ok them.

  “Thank you,” Ellie said, and kissed her.

  Sameh shrugged, and went back to clipping equipment onto her tac armor, underneath her jacket.

  Ellie tapped her comm earpiece, and spoke to the operations centre, and explained what they were doing in case they were injured or killed. She did it partly so there was some hope of rescue or recovery if things went badly wrong, but also so that the next team to come looking for the kid knew what had happened to them, if need be.

  While she talked, because she suddenly thought of it, she also went over and opened the back doors of the SUV, making sure the child-locks on both doors were off again. They were, and she had thought they were, but it was best to be sure.

  She finished her report, and glanced around. They had their equipment, and had done what they could to prepare.

  Sameh was just standing there watching her.

  That was it, Ellie thought. They were ready. She closed the back of the SUV, and then she and Sameh got back inside, awkward and a bit ungainly in their bulky armor.

  *

  They drove back over the field, the way they had come. Ellie got out again to open and close the gate. They drove down the road, back towards the militia compound.

  “Not too fast,” Ellie said to Joe. “Don’t draw attention.”

  He nodded, and kept their speed slow.

  Ellie’s plan wasn’t complicated. It was pretty much exactly as she’d said. Going and ringing the doorbell, if there was one, and otherwise just banging on the gate. Knocking on the front door, anyway, and saying hello, and then pushing their way in and shooting whoever they had to shoot to get inside.

  “All right,” she said to Joe, when they were a kilometer from the compound. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Act normal when we get there. Just drive up and stop at the gate, all slow and calm, just like we’re just visiting or something, and let Sameh and I get out.”

  He nodded.

  “And try and look boring,” she said. “As much as you can, anyway. Drive slow and don’t brake too hard. Drive like nothing interesting is going on.”