UNACT / WRAITH HUNTER

High tech intrigue and Cold War
Post Reply
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

UNACT / WRAITH HUNTER

Post by Siege »

Part one of at least two. More stuff to come... Y'know, eventually.

UNACT

Image

In September 2016 the Secretary-General of the United Nations chaired a meeting attended by 52 envoys representing virtually every developed nation in the world. At the end of this the session the representatives signed the charter of the United Nations Counter Terrorism Organization. The primary objective of UNACT was to “avert, neutralize and/or apprehend any and all individuals or groups affiliated or engaged in operations with the international terrorist organization calling itself WRAITH”.

OPERATION: WRAITH HUNTER (2017 – 2026)


It was an event thirty-five years in the making, but the day had come at last. Malcolm Kroner, the arch-anarchist, public enemy number one, hostis humani generis, the Genghis Khan of mercenary terrorism, definitively fell out of favor with power-brokers in both the West and the East.

His reach had been long, and his puppets in the power structures of the world had managed to forestall this moment for decades, but now Kroner's erstwhile allies in the Warsaw Pact were dead or persecuted, and with tens of thousands of Soviet dead weighing on her conscience Prime Minister Kiralova was howling for his blood. And even that might have been survivable, were it not for the fact that at the same time on the other side of the Pacific covert plots were fraying around the edges and secretive conflicts spiraled out of control on the streets of American cities, and the ever-paranoid American generals who for years had fancied themselves Kroner's masters nervously began to wonder if the tyrant of terror had perhaps become a massive liability. The mogul of madness had crossed too many lines, burned too many bridges, had shown himself to be a problem that could no longer be considered under some form of imaginary control – in other words, he could no longer be ignored.

Kroner's sanity had been slipping for years, and with it went his grasp on reality – and on his very own organization. He had long believed himself beyond the reach of the world's traditional power structures. But that was not a belief those power structures shared, and come 2016 the world that Kroner had pushed around for so long finally decided to push back.

Key perhaps yet again was the enigmatic director of the underground 'Entente' network, Samantha Savage. Combating WRAITH had traditionally been a task assigned to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but over the years all attempts to eradicate the syndicate met with repeated dismal failure. The terror network proved uniquely resistant to infiltration and elimination, and indeed its multi-layered near-monopolization of international crime and growth to pseudo-state levels in some of the underdeveloped areas of the world demonstrated that it was a unique threat to civilization. Come 2015 NTET was the only player on the board with a track record of success against Kroner, but having been left to fend against the many-headed cartel for over a decade with few allies, even fewer assets and continuous opposition from thoroughly compromised power structures Savage finally had enough. She threatened to pull the plug on SOLIDSIX and all anti-WRAITH operations if the international community did not step up to the plate.

It did. Stunningly in the eyes of many, but after years of bitter struggle Kroner's opponents – those that survived, anyway – had finally managed to work their way into positions of power influential enough to sway the balance of international power away from apathy and firmly in WRAITHs disfavor. UNACT was formed. WRAITH HUNTER was a fact.

Order of Battle


The Warsaw Pact

Arkangelsk Mighty Arkangelsk is Marshal Iosef Sechalin's final legacy, a battleship for the 21st century. Displacing just over eighty thousand tons Arkangelsk is the only warship ever constructed around a mobile fusion core and can extract its own fuel from seawater, effectively enabling it to stay out at sea indefinitely and reducing its radiation signature to nearly zero. Brimming with enough guns, missiles and energy weapons to level entire countries and reach into space, Arkangelsk was built as a broadsword to cleave NATO carrier groups and lay waste to the US West Coast, but mercifully the tyrant Sechalin fell before it could be used. Now its future and purpose are uncertain, and the massive ship spends most of its days as a mobile bastion guarding the port of Vladivostok.

When it does sortie however Arkangelsk is commanded by rear admiral Veronika Kravec, formerly an ardent Sechalin supporter who avoided the post-Crisis purges for reasons that thus far elude Western military intelligence agencies. Whether it is Kravec's skills or her ship's array of next-generation Soviet technological wizardry is difficult to say, but on multiple occasions Arkangelsk managed to slip through the mazes of NATO orbital surveillance nets to show up deep in the Pacific, or even in striking distance of San Diego. If there is one ship in the entire Soviet arsenal that gives Western admirals nightmares, Arkangelsk would be it.

Nikolaev is a Kedrov-class missile cruiser, the main workhorse of the Soviet Navy in the early 21st century. It is a sleek, fast and nimble nuclear-powered ship and one of the first of its class. Nikolaev is part of the Ukrainian Naval Forces, but assigned to the 'Ninth Eskadra' Detached Military Flotilla, a Soviet warship squadron that does not belong to any specific fleet but rather is assigned to hot spots around the world. As such she saw action in the Mediterranean during the Libyan Intervention, in the Arabian Sea and the South China Sea; during the Russian Crisis she was part of the loyalist blockade in the Barents Sea that prevented the nuclear submarines of the Northern Fleet from sortieing; and now Nikolaev is the vanguard of Kiralova's fury as it vengefully unleashes its high-tech weapons on those deemed responsible for the thousands of Soviet dead during the Crisis.

Uniquely among Soviet missile cruisers is the fact that Nikolaev is equipped with a moon pool and internal aquarium habitat for six dolphins of the Ukrainian navy. These 'killer dolphins' are fitted with custom cybernetics and trained to attack enemy frogmen, attach limpet mines to underwater targets and even act as a biological extension of the ship's sonar web.

ORP Akademik Warszawski The 'Academics of Warsaw' is one of three Polish amphibious assault warships originally intended to facilitate a hypothetical invasion of Denmark and Norway in a post-nuclear Europe. When the possibility of a globe-encompassing conflict faded however these ships and their contingents of Hussar stealth attack hovercraft were tasked with more arguably benevolent purposes. Akademik Warszawski was deployed to show the flag and represent a newly invigorated Polish navy around the world, as well as assist in relief efforts in the wake of of humanitarian crises and natural disasters. The ship's guns were first fired in anger during its assignment as part of the post-Crisis cleanup, when its embarked units of GROM and Formoza commandos participated in the dismantling of ultramilitant remnants in Somalia.

Vektor Red The nuclear icebreaker Vektor Red spends most of its time in the farthest reaches of the Arctic Circle. There is good reason for it to do so, because it is the Soviet Union's premier pathological research facility, and its vast titanium hull holds samples of practically all the most lethal biological and virological substances known to man. Though technically not a military vessel Vektor Red is heavily defended, and has its own onboard detachment of naval infantry.


The United States

USS Leviathan Long gone are the US Navy's glory days of the mid-sixties, when its United States class carriers struck fear into the hearts of its enemies. Gone too is the early-1980s belief in a revival of those glories through President Harlan Hunter's hopelessly optimistic 600 ship navy plan. A succession of lost budget wars, a perceived lack of need for a large navy shared by the Pentagon and several White House administrations and the reprioritization of national defense towards aerospace and 'small-imprint high-impact' commando action left the USN in critical lack of funds. By the mid-2010s its once-proud fleet of nuclear carriers is rapidly shrinking, the armada of cruisers and destroyers that shook the Gulf in 1993 is rusting and obsolete, and what equipment it has left is surpassed by sleek and superior Soviet and European warships.

There is one exception though: USS Leviathan, 'the great gray hope', the last of the supercarriers. At 118,000 tonnes displacement it is the largest aircraft carrier ever built, a one-of-a-kind with a heart that beats the triple thrum of Universal Atomics nuclear reactors. It is derided as a white elephant by its detractors in the US Army and USAF, but with a belly full of F-114S Advanced Tomcat fighters, patented Saint Industries plasma arc defense system and Captain Glen Goodlin Jr. at the helm, carrier battlegroup Leviathan is ever ready to demonstrate that the US Navy is maybe down, but far from out.

USS Huron is neither the most fearsome, modern nor capable warship in the US Navy, but if there's one term that fits this aging destroyer like a T it has to be 'plucky'. As part of the 7th fleet it chased communist missile boats in the Gulf of Oman during Gulf War 3; it shadowed Soviet missile cruisers in the Sea of Okhotsk for operation SHADE BACKER in '03; it took part in clean-up operations around Las Cinco Mujeres in 2005; and it served as a naval staging point for PICKPOCKET in '11. During the Russian Crisis it was docked in Istanbul as part of an unofficial and much-denied taskgroup providing covert assistance to select elements of the Kiralova government, and afterward it was assigned to UNACT's clandestine WRAITH HUNTER strike force in the Red Sea, conducting detached solo operations as far south as Zanzibar.

All of this the Huron and its crew survived, despite numerous close scrapes, with little more than a few scorch marks and bullet holes in its superstructure, thanks to a mixture of guts, quick wits and (admittedly) no small amount of luck. The ship is amongst the most seasoned in the US Navy when it comes to covert naval operations, and therefore one of the first the USN turns to when it finds itself in need of a subtle fix for a quick pickle. Its seasoned and slightly eccentric Captain Dixon 'Danger' Dale has so far managed to skillfully evade Pentagon politics and a long-overdue promotion to a desk job in an admiralty building somewhere, mostly by staying out at sea and out of communications for as long as humanly possible, and preferably slightly longer than that.


The Western European Union

Protected Control Platform Atlantis An artificial island off the coast of Gabon in West Africa, Atlantis is built by the Western European Union for the express purpose of serving as a base station for a prospective space elevator. Atlantis is not permanently attached to the seabed and thus weakly mobile; it is also quite enormous, hosting a runway, C5I facilities that monitor WEU military activities across Africa, and internal harbor facilities capable of completely enclosing a cruiser or nuclear submarine. Construction of Atlantis began in 2012 and expansion continued throughout the 2020s.

Vulcan The stealth cruiser Vulcan is one of a class of three designated covert action vessels commissioned by the Western European Union. Its primary purpose is to facilitate infiltration of WEU personnel into enemy territory, such as in 2005 when it landed a commando detachment near the American AVALON WOOD facility off the coast of Costa Rica as part of the Star Chamber operation SUNDER JOINT. The operation was an utter fiasco: special operations team SIG-19 and its attached Star Chamber operatives were wiped out completely only shortly after arrival on the island. On the upside however Vulcan remained undetected despite the presence of elements of the US Navy's 5th fleet in the area, and lessons learned were incorporated into the operation's spiritual follow-up BROKEN TWIN in 2019, in which the by then heavily refitted Vulcan played a crucial role.

Medusa & Proteus are twin ConEurope observation, tracking and research vessels. They are very large ships easily recognized by their massive, irregularly shaped superstructures, bulging radar domes and warrens of cranes, as well as the highly energetic energy signature of their onboard nuclear reactors. Oddly both ships share the same registration number and neither is named anywhere on the hull; indeed ConEurope is said to have gone to painstaking lengths to ensure that both ships are exactly similar to each other, allegedly to the point where spare parts and computer chips have their serial numbers filed off to ensure it is impossible to tell which ship is which. This has lead American naval intelligence experts to jokingly suggest that there is in fact only one of these ships out there, despite the fact that Medusa and Proteus have been spotted on opposite sides of the globe with mere minutes between observations.


The United Kingdom

HMS Tyrant is a Terror-class nuclear attack submarine of Her Majesty's Royal Navy, part of Prime Minister Adelaide Drake-Carringdon's towering 1980s ambitions to put the 'rule' back in 'Rule Britannia', and one of the most silent submarines ever built. Outfitted with state of the art sensors, sublime sound-dampening propulsion and a variety of torpedo-launched missiles the Terror class do their name justice, and Tyrant is perhaps the most famous of its class. It has infiltrated commandos onto Antarctica, shadowed Vektor Red in the Arctic Circle, and it was Tyrant that during operations off the coast of Hong Kong first picked up the sonar signature that lead to the discovery that the rogue ballistic submarine HMS Perilous had survived operation: PICKPOCKET and had fallen into the hands of Korovin's cartel.

HMS Black Hood HMS Black Hood is the first of three new 'fast strike carriers' commissioned by the Royal Navy as a counter to the increasing proliferation of Soviet battlecruisers. Sleek and stealthy, with a much lower profile than is usual for carriers, they are faster and more difficult to detect than the Europa class carriers built by ConEurope. Black Hood was commissioned in 2000 and first saw action during the Third Gulf War; her sister ships Black Empire and Black Centaur were commissioned in respectively 2004 and 2008. Between 2015 and 2020 all ships of the class were refit with powerful coil gun artillery systems to augment their firepower. By the start of the 2020s the Royal Navy developed the strategy of pairing each strike carrier with at least one Blackfyre SSCN to further strengthen the striking power of its fast action squadrons.


Non-Aligned

SS Proper Lady The Proper Lady is a large overhauled container freighter that serves as a mothership and mobile base of operations for the Caesium Cats mercenary group. Its area of operations is mainly in the East China Sea / Philippine Sea / South China Sea area. Officially stateless but sanctioned and supported (at times, anyway) by alternatingly the governments of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia, the Caesium Cats make a living by selling their services to the highest bidder. Those 'services' initially revolved mainly around curtailing growing Chinese influence in the region, but in the second half of the 21st century's second decade the machinations of Samantha Savage resulted in the Cats and their unique expertise being roped into WRAITH HUNTER. This in many cases meant that Marion Durant's eclectic piratical crew was forced to awkwardly work with the same People's Republic's special forces unit Xiangliu they had previously locked horns with.

Rusalka The Rusalka is a fast stealth frigate designed by Freya Korovin and built in secret by Sudarto Shipbuilding of Indonesia for WRAITH sometime in the first decade of the 21st century. Initially deployed to furtively transport persons and illicit substances between remote bases of the far-flung terror syndicate it was used in the final tumultuous years of Kroner's reign for more direct assaults on high-value targets, again demonstrating the true scale of the threat WRAITH had become. After Kroner's final death and the splintering of the syndicate the Rusalka was once more appropriated by Korovin, who used it as a pirate mothership from which she ruled a criminal cartel that operated from the coasts of Somalia as far east as Hong Kong and Taiwan -- the largest corsair threat the world had seen since the 17th century and the 'golden age of piracy', and one of WRAITH HUNTER's most immediate targets.

Imelda's Revenge The mighty Imelda's Revenge is a one-of-a-kind flying wing ekranoplan helicarrier acquired (or more accurately: stolen) from the Indonesian navy by the flamboyant and highly piratical Filipino smuggler-prince Christobal Dakila Cho III and his second in command Mordecai Santos, leader of Cho's eskrimador bodyguards.

Imelda's Revenge ranges far and wide: indubitably Cho's most high-profile triumph was his raid on the factories of Chennai, India, where he made away with dozens of tons of expensive luxury electronics. The sweep earned him the enmity of globe-spanning corporations, but also immeasurable support and devotion amongst the poor and downtrodden at home, across whom he distributes much of the liberated goods like a latter-day Robin Hood. Less well known are Imelda's Revenge's exploits in the service of WRAITH HUNTER, during which Christobal Dakila Cho III's encyclopedic knowledge of the reefs, atolls, islets, cays and islands of the South China Sea proved instrumental in combating the joint threats of Freya Korovin's pirate cartel and the nefarious Enoch Razaq's Phantom Thule.

Black Bishop is a Wycombe Traveler 67 ocean-going yacht owned by Jinx and Medley Farley. It is a multi-masted ship rigged as a racing schooner and completely computer-controlled which allows the ship to be run by only two people. The yacht is named after the legendary ironclad the Farleys' great-grandfather Bedlam stole in 1865 and lost in Cuba shortly thereafter. The retrieval of that ancient ship and the cache of Confederate gold aboard allowed the twins to facilitate the yacht's procurement. Despite the black mark on their name and their father's questionable past involvement with Kroner's cartel Jinx and Medley worked for WRAITH HUNTER on an on-off basis, their family's connections and reputation providing them at several times a plausibly deniable means of ferrying goods or persons into or out of ports and locations on all sides of the Pacific.

Halcyon Rhapsody The Halcyon Rhapsody is the stealthy superyacht owned by the notorious infobroker, erstwhile WRAITH commander and CEO of Exchange East, the Comte Le Feuvre. The ship is almost as mysterious as its owner, whose real name continues to elude even NTET. Built by a Turkish wharf sometime in the 2010-2015 timeframe the massive yacht is known to have been fitted with magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, all-electric systems and shrouded screws; its swimming pool and helideck can be recessed within a main hull fashioned at fantastic expense out of dielectric composites. The result is a fast and extremely efficient yet low-observable and supremely quiet ship for something its size -- ideal for a man who makes a living out of secrets. The ship was thought destroyed at several occasions, but always reappears, leading some to theorize that the Halcyon Rhapsody might in fact be capable of limited subsurface travel.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: UNACT / WRAITH HUNTER

Post by Siege »

Order of Events

The descent of the odd-looking tangle of sleek black curves and angled edges was barely visible against the red sunset. The helicopter – if you could even call it that – had made it all the way to the heart of the Taiheiyo Belt without being spotted, and Murayama Kazumi realized she had trouble keeping sight of it even now that she was looking right at it. Samantha Savage, Kazumi thought, still knew how to make an entrance.

The helicopter touched down and its black mirror cockpit folded open. The NTET director was tall and athletic, with a lean face, high cheekbones and hard, steady eyes. Savage could be anywhere between thirty and sixty years old. She wore a white men's dress shirt and a knee-length coat that would look good on either side of the Iron Curtain over well-worn black fatigue pants and hunting boots. The wind whipped strands of straw blond hair around her shoulders as her gaze slid across the half dozen soldiers assembled on the skyscraper roof. When she recognized Kazumi the faintest hint of smile flitted across her features. Savage nodded minutely. “Colonel Murayama. It's good to see you in good health.”

Sashiburi, Miss Savage.” The head of TENGU unit made a small, formal bow and gestured toward the elevator perilously mounted to the side of the skyscraper. “Come with me please. You have our briefing?”

“I do. Your people are sure he just... appeared?”

“I would not say 'just'. At zero eight hundred local yesterday KoTokei Tower was hit by an electrical surge powerful enough to short out every computer and camera in the building. That includes the hardened ones. The source of the surge was inside the main vault – its thirteen guards remain hospitalized with symptoms that range from electrical burns to cardiac arrest. This greatly concerned KoTokei, not in the least because nine hundred billion yen in gold and another eleven hundred billion in securities and T-bills are stored in this vault.”

“Sounds like a job for your treasury agents.” Savage injected without breaking her stride.

“Indeed. I did not hear of it until our data crawlers alerted us to two things. One, the timing of the power surge coincided with an unexplained neutrino burst recorded by the Meson Science Laboratory in Tsukuba. Two, once KoTokei brought its cameras back up they realized there was a man in their vault. The door had not been opened. The walls had not been breached. You must understand. This is KoTokei Bank headquarters. This is the safest vault in Tokyo. It cannot be cracked.”

“And yet there he is. He move? Do anything? Say anything?”

“He's just sitting there, on a pile of gold, looking at the cameras. He said... only two things. First he asked for you, by name. And then he asked what
year it was.”

Intro

A Pharaoh in Japan – THE RETURNER

A man has materialized, seemingly out of thin air, inside the deepest and most secure bank vault in Japan. Colonel Murayama Kazumi, once an invaluable asset to long-disbanded SOLIDSIX, calls in the aid of Samantha Savage when he turns out to have knowledge of something only very few people know - her name. When he identifies himself as Osiris Chance, time-traveler from an apocalyptic near-future, it is up to Savage and Murayama to figure out if they are being conned or if perhaps his crazed stories are based in terrifying fact. The ante goes up dramatically when Chance escapes TENGU custody by using what can only be highly advanced technology.


Two years have passed since the events of World's End and Malcolm Kroner's top lieutenants have heard nary a word from their boss since then. Without Kroner there's nothing keeping the disparate clique of warlords, terrorists, criminals and businessmen together. WRAITH is coming apart at the seams, but if anything the unraveling syndicate is even more dangerous that way. It is against this backdrop that the first stages of WRAITH HUNTER go into effect.


2017

Caduceus Unbound – A PIRATE'S LIFE

Roped into working for the UN through a combination of thinly veiled threats and promises of a lucrative payout, mercenary captain Marion Durant and his Caesium Cats set sail for Brunei where according to Australian intelligence none other than Freya Korovin, the number twelve of the WRAITH deck, has surfaced. But what looked like a simple dope-and-grab soon goes pear-shaped in a big way when Durant and his crew find out that none is as it seems in the pleasant tropical Sultanate. Korovin, once lauded as the greatest nautical genius of her time and whispered to have been Malcolm Kroner's occasional lover, has kidnapped the Sultan's three infant children and turned Brunei into her private fiefdom. It's clear she's planning something big, but what? And do the Cats have what it takes to find out and escape in one piece?


Water and Sand – UHLAN SURF

After tropical cyclone Cassandra tears into the Kenyan and Somalian coastlines in early 2017 international help materializes quickly and one of the first ships in the region is the Polish amphibious assault ship ORP Akademik Warszawski. But Captain Jankowski soon finds his efforts to provide relief to the stricken areas complicated when his ship's sensors are jammed. As more and more warships show up the continuous electronic interference not only threatens efforts to stave off disease and starvation but also raises the risk of an international incident. Jankowski has few men to spare, but if he is to do his job he will have to find out who is jamming him. Is it really, as the commander of HMS Black Hood suspects, the Vulcan that is blacking out the area? Is its presence somehow tied to the heavily armed Star Chamber ground teams his men encountered on the ground in the border regions? And what is the 'Black Pyramid' they're looking for?


The Shores of Tripoli – MOPUP CREW

Fresh from cleaning up the Army's mess on AVALON WOOD the USS Huron is dispatched to the Solomon Islands. Its mission: to exfiltrate a group of federal agents who've been collecting information on the Snow Lotus Society's ties to the rogue MIDNIGHT conspiracy. Gunnery Sergeant Mateo 'Gazza' Garza's squad begins to make its way inland, but during the trek inland the marines become increasingly convinced they are not alone. They soon find the meeting place annihilated and the agents wiped out, with only FBI special agent Sierra Call alive though badly injured. It's only then that Garza's men find out they have inadvertently strolled into the middle of a deadly game of cat-and-mouse between Lucien Vargas' metahuman killers and a group of elite Soviet cyborgs. Both groups have their own hidden objectives and neither has much regard for American lives...


The Man Who Sold The World – THIRD OPTION

When war is done there's always, it's commonly understood, winners and losers, and in that respect the Secret War was no different. But less universally recognized is the fact that there are also always the people that got stuck in the middle. The footmen that ask no questions, the lieutenants that trust their superiors a touch too much: the not-quite-traitors who nonetheless end up on the wrong side of the line. Maxwell Night is one of those people. Not so long he served in the White House and unwittingly aided MIDNIGHT during its failed coup d'etat. Now his wife and friends think he's a traitor, the vengeful US authorities are hot on his trail, and the only thing he's got going for him is a briefcase full of state secrets and conspiratorial plans that only implicate him further. Locked in a dirty motel room on an LA highway Night is nearly done writing his own suicide note when the phone rings. The man on the other side identifies himself as Chaos Farley, and he tells Night that if he wants to work for him, redeem himself and maybe have an outside chance of saving the world, he has precisely ninety seconds to get out the door before LAPD knocks it down.


Stone Seraph – RED TIDE

When the Soviet nuclear cruiser Nikolaev and her escort pull into Hong Kong for a goodwill visit it's supposed to be a happy occasion: a sign of thawing relations between the USSR and the United Kingdom painstakingly engineered at high levels by some very influential people. To the Nikolaev's resident security officer Serhiy Chaika however this visit is more than a simple show of the flag. He has sealed orders from the Red Room itself to make contact with a local representative of Jack Ridley's SIS at a time when Chinese and European fleet elements are engaged in a Mexican stand-off near Manila and the Arkangelsk itself is shadowing elements of the US 5th fleet near Taiwan. When the Nikolaev is attacked by pirates just outside Hong Kong harbor it becomes rapidly apparent that there are people who don't want this meeting to take place and the whole region is on the brink of war.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: UNACT / WRAITH HUNTER

Post by Siege »

2018

“I wondered how long it would take for someone like you to show up.” Even now, at the end, the German looked impeccable. His chin was smoothly shaved, his gray STASI dress uniform freshly pressed. Its white aiguillette and silver buttons glinted dimly in the dim and decrepit living room. An old revolver sat on the table next to his chair. The appearance of the Soviet ghost clearly had not come as a surprise. “It's heartening to see my estimation of your timing was broadly correct.”

“Sweet-talking won't get you out of this.”

“And I don't wish to. I was never- out there, I never-
damn you! I thought I was doing it for the Union.”

“When did you learn who you were working for?”

“Even after Sechalin died,” the German said in an injured tone, “I thought I was working for the enemies of NATO. For something
rational. It's only after Semyhorod and Kiribati I realized I was working for... For...”

“For?”

“I can't say his name. He did something to my- to my head!” The German looked up with a bent smile. “But you know who he is.”

“Where can we find him?”

“I don't know. I quit. Do you know how hard that is?” The fallen colonel made a tired gesture. “Of course not. He hides in the recesses of the world. And-” He gritted his teeth. Pearls of sweat beaded on his forehead. “Even now- something, some
knot in my mind is trying to stop me talking. Me, who made a life out of secrets. Ironic, is it not? I should be above this! But I- I know someone who knows. Someone who can tell you.”

“Who?”

“I'll tell you in a moment.” He lifted a finger. His other hand shifted to the gun.

“That won't cut it against me.”

“It's not for you.” He scowled contemptuously and raised the weapon. “I'm not going to spend the rest of my sure to be short and miserable life in the cellars of Lubyanka. And I don't believe you're here to take me alive anyway. Just give me this.” Anton Stahl put the barrel against his temple. “You can check my pulse after.”

“The name?”

A pause. “Doktor Annika Kilian.”

The shot rang out through the small Wismar apartment. The body of WRAITH's erstwhile number four sagged lifelessly in his chair.

It ends with a name. It begins with one, too.



Cardinal Breach – BLOODLINES

It's hard to be a Farley, especially in the wake of the MIDNIGHT fiasco and General Chaos Farley's crucial role as a two-timing, back-stabbing, double-crossing son-of-a-bitch. As much as they would prefer to stay out of their family's sordid and treasonous affairs Jinx and Medley Farley, newly settled in San Francisco, cannot help being drawn back into their father's plots when they come into possession of a black attaché case full of some of their country's worst secrets. Suddenly it seems everyone is out to get them again: the CIA, a Saint Industries' aegis team and perhaps worst of all, remnants of the MIDNIGHT cabal desperate to cover their tracks. With no-one to trust except each other it's up to the twins to untangle the webs of conspiracy and trace tantalizing clues about MIDNIGHT's ties to the international criminal underworld from a deserted Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility in the middle of LA's Chinatown to a hidden MIDNIGHT facility near Puerto Vallarta in Mexico where some of the cabal's most dangerous survivors are gearing up for an operation called SNOWSTORM.


Red Flag Fleet – BUDDY COPS

For years the Dragon Head of the Snow Lotus Society has controlled the largest criminal empire of the Pacific. Daiyu Xifeng's smugglers run Chinese weapons into South America and Colombian cocaine into the United States, and were instrumental in getting WRAITH paramilitaries into Russia during the Crisis. But with Kroner gone and WRAITH HUNTER gearing into full swing the Lady of Macau knows her time is running out. When Freya Korovin contacts her with promises of a secret weapon Xifeng smells her chance and promises to sells Korovin to the UN in exchange for immunity from international prosecution. An uneasy duo consisting of MI-6 operative Rhianon 'Ritzy' Sayer and Chinese public security agent Big Xi are dispatched to act as UN liaisons aboard Xifeng's flagship, the commerce raider Widow Ching, while it is shadowed by a British submarine to the meeting on one of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. But Korovin is one step ahead of them: the meeting is a trap, and the Widow Ching is bombarded and sunk by the rebuilt Rusalka. Presumed dead and with HMS Tyrant nowhere to be seen, Sayer and Xi have to find a way to tell their superiors of Korovin's plans to wrest control of the international sea lanes. But to do that they first have to survive long enough to escape the island, its ruined World War 2 fortifications crawling with Triad survivors, and the strange nightmares that lurk in its deep jungles.


Data Jammers – STATELESS SOCIETY

The job looked straightforward: engineer a tunnel collapse to gain access to the data vault, hack the mainframe, copy a few terabytes worth of ones and zeros, hand off the disk and get paid a suitcase full of untraceable gold by the Snow Lotus Society. In and out in like greased lightning: no way Hanoi police could respond in time. It's the high-tech holy-shit throw-the-breakers kind of job that 'Jazzy' Jack Roze and Jenny Falcone like and specialize in. But this time they've crossed the wrong adversary. Because that data belonged to the man of a hundred faces and a thousand aliases, WRAITH's number eight, the Comte Le Feuvre. And he wants it back. Now they have only twenty-four hours to retrieve the disk from the Triad or the head of Exchange East will put a bounty on their heads high enough to send every killer in South-East Asia after them.


The Enemy Of My Enemy – MOPUP CREW / A PIRATE'S LIFE / BUDDY COPS

For unknown reasons Jack Ridley, MI-6's very own 'prince of darkness' ordered HMS Tyrant to turn around and make for Hong Kong at best speed, and the Royal Navy isn't answering calls from UNACT. As a result it falls to the USS Huron and its marine contingent to extract a pair of UN agents from the Paracel Islands. They manage to warn WRAITH HUNTER of the Snow Lotus Society's Incense Master's role in the death of Daiyu Xifeng. The Triad's erstwhile number two is now in command and has aligned the criminal empire with Korovin. But to what end? One way to find out would be to talk to the Incense Master's greatest enemy – who happens to be a Filipino pirate called Cristobal Dakila Cho III. And because an American warship can hardly just sail into Manila Bay and make an appointment with the most wanted man in the country it falls to someone a little less... legitimate to make introductions. Someone like Captain Marion Durant, for example, who will have to chaperone Agent Call, Ritzy Sayer, Big Xi and Sergeant Gazza as they go meet the infamous 'Robin Hood of the seas' on his flying ekranoplan helicarrier called Imelda's Revenge.


Buried History – AEGIS AUGMENTED

When Soviet augment Artaka Istomin left Wismar he had accomplished his mission: Anton Stahl was dead, a major embarrassment to Warsaw Pact intelligence permanently silenced. But Stahl's last words intrigue his superiors in the Red Room: who is Doctor Kilian, and what is her relation to the infamous and elusive Enoch Razaq? Their only lead is a set of ancient records dug up by the STASI dating back to 1898 and the days of Imperial Germany's secret field police. They mention three agents sent abroad to New Guinea, a German colony at the time, amongst whom notably an anthropologist called Annika Kilian whose job it would be to recruit native agents for Emperor Wilhelm II. But that was over a hundred and twenty years ago. Could this be the person Stahl talked about? It seems unlikely – but in the crumbling depths of a Hindu monastery far from modern civilization Istomin will find out just how long a shadow history can really cast, and catch a terrifying glimpse of what Razaq may be capable of if he is not brought to account soon.


Perilous – TYRANT'S TOW

HMS Perilous has survived, and it's somewhere in the South China Sea. Those two simple sentences are enough to send every British agent, warship and intelligence arm in South East Asia to the highest of alerts. Because the rogue submarine Perilous and its cargo of nuclear ballistic missiles was supposed to have been destroyed in 2010, but now she's been seen taking on supplies off the coast of Brunei. HMS Tyrant is the only British attack submarine that stands a chance of intercepting her, so it falls to her to find out what Korovin plans to do with the ageing boomer... And then Tyrant's mission is complicated when it picks up the faint but unmistakable sonar signature of a giant supercavitating submarine. No nation on Earth is supposed to have that kind of technology yet – although the signature does closely match old reports made by Perilous' captain Kingsley. When he went rogue Jacob Kingsley was about to be removed from his post for his singular unhealthy obsession with an ancient myth among sailors and submariners: the Nautilus. Kingsley insisted he had repeatedly caught glimpses of the legendary submarine, and suddenly that crazed insistence does not seem so crazy anymore...


Snowstorm – BLOODLINES / THIRD OPTION

A trail of breadcrumbs scattered by their father and the help of a fatigued traitor called Maxwell Night has caused the Farley twins to become aware of a plot by American remnants from the Secret War and a handful of surviving Ultramilitants to attempt to break into Vektor Red. But how do you prevent the hi-jacking of a mobile Arctic biolab when nobody trusts you? Making the best of every ounce of their family's much-vaunted resourcefulness Jinx, Medley and Night have set off from Alaska in an ancient Soviet helicopter 'liberated' from MIDNIGHT in the hopes that it and its set of outdated clearance codes will get them close enough to the nuclear icebreaker to somehow prevent the conspirators from carrying out their ruse and making off with the deadliest bioweapon known to mankind...
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Invictus
Posts: 1306
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 11:44 pm

Re: UNACT / WRAITH HUNTER

Post by Invictus »

Sic transit Anton Stahl's first and last appearance!

In the absence of epic unfinishable literature, I do like these exciting story summaries.
"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
-
REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 1 - Rey Quirino Versus the Dark Heart of the Philippines
"...a literary atrocity against the senses..." - Ford

REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 2 - Advent Rey Returns: REVERGELTUNG
Coming NEVER
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: UNACT / WRAITH HUNTER

Post by Siege »

Interlude

The turbines howled as another torrent of ice-cold wind battered the helicopter like an invisible freight train. “Of all the god-damn-” Jinx yelled as she wrestled with the bucking cyclic stick. For a blood-curdling moment it felt like the age-worn Mi-14 was free-falling but Jinx yanked the throttle open and the helicopter jerked back with a bone-jarring shudder as its blades clawed their way back into the gathering arctic storm. “Was it too much to ask for power steering?”

“Where did you learn to drive a helicopter again?” yelled Night from the back compartment. The unwitting conspirator wore a ridiculous over-sized Alaskan anorak and had strapped himself haphazardly into the crash webbing in a way that made him look like a deeply unhappy pile of fur-lined misery.

“Army ROTC,” Jinx hissed. She kept a vise-grip on the controls so tight it rattled her teeth every time the shaking helicopter was buffeted by the ice-cold winds. “And this one time dad sent me on a summer piloting course.”

Fuck.

“If you think you're- dammit!” The helicopter tilted abruptly under a sudden assault of wind, draining a dangerous amount of momentum and necessitating Jinx to frantically push the stick forward. “I have a certificate!

“And a black belt in fuck you!” added her sister. Medley had her head wedged against the side of the Mi-14's right canopy hoping to spot the ground, some icy ridge or bluff, anything to give them an idea of just where they were. Her forehead was bruised blue from all the times it had found itself unexpectedly battered into the laminated safety glass. “I can't see a god-damn thing!”

“I got nothing on global positioning either.” In the darkness of the troop compartment Maxwell Night was trying to make sense of the electronic static on the receiver screen of his military GPS set. “It must be the storm.”

“It's not the storm.” Medley replied straightaway. “It's Russia.”

“Say what?”

“GPS doesn't work in Russia, jeez man. Everybody knows they jam our satellites.”

“Not everyone knows-” Night was interrupted by another violent bout of bucking and shaking bad enough to scramble his line of thought. “Never mind. Please tell me that at least means we're getting close?”

“Could be,” Jinx strained against the torrents. “Could also be we're just lost. I could probably drive us by the stars... But I can't see anything in this shit, much less the North Star. We're flying on instruments, and these are at least forty years old. I'm not sure your MIDNIGHT buddies did proper maintenance on this thing either.”

“They're not my fucking buddies okay?” Night's voice abruptly shifted from its long-suffering tone to something deeply vitriolic and hateful soon as she brought up the conspiracy that had destroyed his life. “They ruined my name. They took everything from me. Don't associate me with those fucking traitors.”

“Oh get over it,” Medley murmured indignantly, but her sister shut her up with a strident sideways glance.

“Look Night, I- alright, yeah, you're right. Look, I'm sorry, okay?” Jinx sounded genuinely apologetic. “We know what that's like. Kinda. I didn't mean to bring it up like that. I'm sorry. But I'm also kind of trying to keep us from crashing into freaking Siberia here, so gimme a break, yeah?”

“Right.” Night suddenly sounded deeply tired and crushed. “Right.” An uncomfortable silence settled against a soundtrack of howling turbines, the whoop-whoop-whoop of the rotors and the howling of the wind. “Shouldn't we be there by now?”

“We should have been there twenty minutes ago,” said Medley. Her voice had an edge to it.

Her sister nodded. “Yeah but gauging our airspeed in this frost blizzard insanity nonsense is a crapshoot.” Jinx' eyes tracked across the Cyrillic instrumentation panels. “I think we should have fuel for maybe another ten-”

She was interrupted by the radio erupting in garbled noise. For seconds it wailed with electronic static before abruptly settling into crystal clear Russian. “... repeat, this is Naval Aviation Station Chukchi to unidentified helicopter. You are about to enter a restricted military air space. Please identify yourself or we are forced to take defensive emergency measures. We repeat...”

“... Huh,” murmured Jinx. The eldest of the Farley twins was so surprised she for a moment nearly forgot to keep the helicopter in the air, and it promptly responded by nearly catastrophically falling out of the sky. Jinx responded by slamming on the anti-torque pedals and wrenching the helicopter into something approaching alignment with the artificial horizon. “Your turn, Meds.”

Her younger sister gave her an unsure look. “I guess we now know why dad always wanted us to speak Russian.” When she picked up the microphone she looked every bit the uncertain twenty-four year old she was, but when she spoke her Russian came out with the harsh Georgian slant General Chaos Farley had known and had insisted the twins practice over and over and over again. “Have a care Chukchi, you should see the shit we're trying to fly through, it's thicker than the crap in my pants right now. Check your lists for Transport 1138 and be quick about it, 'cause we're running low on fuel here and we could use some proper directions right about now.” With a flourish she put the mike down, and promptly gave her sister a hesitant look. “Was that right?”

“We'll find out soon enough. But if they don't go for this,” Jinx whispered between her teeth, “we're gonna have to get out pretty quick.”

The disembodied voice from the naval air station hundreds of miles south of them came back to them after a brief silence. “Transport 1138, we have you on our screen now. Please transmit the PAROL code for air defense identification zone passage.”

Night looked from one of the twins, to the raging blizzard outside, to the other. He didn't speak Russian, but he could understand enough to realize things weren't going completely sideways – yet. “How do they even see us through this mess?”

“Millimeter wave? Fuck if I know.” Medley frantically punched in the numbers they'd cribbed off a faded page of Russian paper before burning it a few dozen miles north of Seattle. As far as they could tell MIDNIGHT had gotten the codes from Vargas, who'd gotten them from God only knew who. It was anyone's guess if they were still actual. Still, they'd come this far. There was no turning back now. “Transmission commencing,” Medley radioed.

Jinx' eyes were transfixed on the radio set.“Please God take this,” she whispered.

“'Shuttle Tyderium, what is your cargo and destination'?” mumbled Medley under her breath. The youngest of the Farley twins was holding on to the edge of her flight seat so tightly the white of her knuckles was showing.

“Shut up, just- shut up.” Jinx sounded frantic. “If this doesn't work...”

“We get vaporized by crazy lasers. Don't think I don't know.”

Silent seconds passed like so many eternities. Then: “What is your cargo and destination?”

With shaking hands Medley grabbed the microphone. “Uh, Chukchi Control? We carry parts and technical crew from Novo Pevek bound for Vektor Red.

“Transport 1138, air defense identification zone passage granted. It appears you're some ways off course.”

Medley released a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. “Yeah, I don't know if you can see what we're dealing with out here Chukchi, but it's pretty bad and getting worse. We have maybe seven minutes of fuel left, so we sure could use a guiding light right about now.”

“Copy that, no worries ma'am. You're maybe two minutes off your destination, we'll light the way for you.”

Medley made sure to flick the microphone back off, and abruptly sagged back in her chair. “Jesus Christ,” she whispered. “It worked. It actually fuckin' worked. I thought for sure we were going to die out here.”

Jinx grinned madly. “Right? This is pretty nuts. We're doing it sis, we're actually doing it.”

“What? But why...” Night stared at the both of them. “I mean, what the actual fuck? If you both thought this wasn't gonna work, why bother coming out here at all?”

Medley leaned around to look at the kind-of-traitor in his silly anorak. For the first time in the whole flight there was no trace of the sharpness that was so typical of her when she spoke. “Because it's the right thing to do, Night. I mean, sure, papa's a bad guy, and we got some A-grade daddy issues to cope with, but it really goes way further than that. Our family has fucked up for, like, generations. You go back fifty, one hundred, two hundred years... It doesn't matter, seems there's always a Farley making things worse. Well, fuck that. We're gonna do something right for a change. Does that make sense?”

“I don't know.” Night listlessly shook his head. “I just don't. Me, I got nothing to lose. But you two, you have lives back in Frisco. You could sit this one out. Seems like coming out here on the outside chance we actually make it into Soviet Russia in one piece is one hell of a chance you're taking.”

“Look,” Jinx scowled and forced the shaking helicopter onto the course beamed from faraway Chukchi to her instrumentation. “Someone's going to try and steal the Romero strain from Vektor Red in, like, a day or two from now. If we 'sat back' as you put it that would be making things worse.”

“Besides it's not like there isn't plenty chance for us to die real badly ahead,” Medley added flippantly. “We're about to land our American asses on a nuclear icebreaker chock-full of some really bad bio-viral crap and hundreds of angry Russians with lots of guns. And we have, like, one flare gun between us?”

Night let out an actual chuckle, the first the twins had heard of him since they'd set off from Barrow in the north of Alaska. “I suppose if you put it that way it all makes sense.” He made a grand Napoleonic gesture that, given the silly anorak he was wearing, looked patently ridiculous. “Lead on then, ladies. Into the bears' teeth because we can, because we have to... And because we really have nothing better to do.”
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: UNACT / WRAITH HUNTER

Post by Siege »

2019
She was a testament to Sechalin's mad ambitions and Soviet engineering prowess both, and for a long time the Warsaw Pact was at a loss for a purpose for her. But finally now, in a time when ships of all kinds could and indeed were swept away in an instant, perhaps only Arkhangelsk in all its stupefying dimensions could stand against the tides of a new conflict.

“If you saw a huge wake with nothing in front of it,” says rear-admiral Cormick St. John, “you knew you'd found the Arkhangelsk. I'll readily admit, she's the only thing that ever gave me- hell, that gave all of us down in San Diego nightmares. Here's the thing, see. You'd think something designed to cleave our carrier groups would stand out like a sore thumb, but she just... Didn't. The reds built her with a tumblehome, used miles of faceted carbon fibre and other tricks I'll leave for the boffins to explain. But the short of it was, here's this massive floating mountain topped with guns that can reach a hundred miles inland or shoot satellites right out of orbit... And you wouldn't see her until she was right on top of you.”

Lord Anstruther nods in solemn agreement. “I'll tell you, all big Soviet cruisers are bloody great at taking large pieces of things and making them smaller in very messy and imprecise ways. But Arkhangelsk could do that with entire countries. At the point in time we're speaking that was all very much theoretical, of course. But we still knew she was on another level entirely. As was her captain, I should add. We all got the briefings and read the files, we knew who was at the wheel. I myself knew Kravec from when she used to drive the Diaghilev into the North Sea in the late nineties just to scare the crap out of Admiralty House and the Dutch.”

St. John looks at his counterpart accusingly. “By 'we' you mean 'you'. The Royal Navy never told us any of that at the time.”

Anstruther: “Right back at you old chap. Remember, you Americans had only just got done repeatedly stabbing yourselves in the back, and we only found out about that when half of New York was on bloody fire. We didn't know what was going on in the Pentagon at the time, and that Baylor fellow you put in charge of joint intelligence... Well, MI-6 told us it would be prudent to keep our mouths shut much as we could.”

St. John, dejectedly: “Right. Not our finest hour. I know how it was. But we were still allies.”

Anstruther: “Quite right, but as the saying goes hindsight is 20/20. And you may console yourself with the knowledge that we really didn't know all that much to begin with. In fact we knew as much about Arkhangelsk as we did about Richard Nixon's casket. We knew who was in it, but that was about the extent of it. Even so, Veronika Kravec had a reputation to uphold, and nobody had ever been quite stupid enough to give her a good reason to unload. “

St. John: “Nobody except Korovin.”

- Excerpt from To Guide and Guard: the US Navy and Marine Corps in the Asia-Pacific Wars, by Brig. Sarah McDonnell, published 2026

Jailhouse Rock – BLOODLINES

The past few months have been less than pleasant for the Farley twins and their conspiratorial comrade Maxwell Night. Their arrival on Vektor Red caused enough confusion to prevent MIDNIGHT from obtaining the second half of the Romero Sequence but the trio was arrested in the process and have spent the last three months in a top-secret prison in a numbered city on the frozen edge of the Bering Sea. Now the tedium of daily KGB interrogations is broken by the arrival of Red Room operative Naum Chervyakov. Disconcertingly, he seems to know exactly who the Farleys are, something they had managed to keep from the Soviets. After threatening to puppetize them with nano-electrodes if they do not comply the twins find themselves bundled into a succession of military cargo planes. And then, without so much as another word, Chervyakov unceremoniously straps parachutes on them and throws them out of the back of his aircraft, leaving them completely by themselves on a deserted beach in the middle of what looks to be Africa...


Towerbusters – MOPUP CREW / BUDDY COPS

According to Cristobal Cho the Snow Lotus' Incense Master has moved his base of operations from Hong Kong to Taiwan, where he holes up in a skyscraper-fortress called the Keelung Belfry. Get to the Incense Master, says Cho, and you get to Korovin. With local authorities deemed untrustworthy it falls to Call, Sayer and Xi, ferried into Taiwan on the Huron and escorted by Gazza's marines, to launch a lightning raid on this fortress, grab the Incense Master, and get out before authorities can respond. But the meticulously planned operation goes completely haywire before it can even start as alarms go off in the Belfry a full minute before the UN agents make their move. With their plan in disarray, the Belfry in lock-down and swarms of alerted triad gangsters blocking every hallway it's up to the four agents to somehow accomplish their mission and make their way out alive.


Mindjackers – STATELESS SOCIETY

'Don't be late', he said, and he wasn't kidding. After Hanoi Jack Roze and Jenny Falcone have found themselves conscripted into the shadow army of the mysterious Comte le Feuvre, whose plans within plans would give even Machiavelli headaches. Fighting a private little game of simultaneous chess against both his erstwhile WRAITH allies and the UN the Comte has given the hacker duo a unique challenge: infiltrate the Keelung Belfry and upload a specially designed virus into its mainframe in order to scramble the Incense Master's encrypted networks. Like always their approach was spotless, but no sooner have they made it into the server room that the shit hits the fan several times over.

First, the server room turns out to be nothing but an elaborate decoy, its the drives full of random numbers and its processors churning nothing but nonsense. All actual data is pumped in from somewhere off-site through a hidden data trunk. Second, the Incense Master is dead, and has probably been for years. His body is controlled by the thing that lives in a distant mainframe: one of Kroner's crazed AI fragments, shackled by ghost protocols to the whims of the long-dead terror baron. Oh, and the simple act of noticing the fiber-optic trunk has triggered every alarm in the building which, to the best of their ability to tell, now also seems to be under attack from unknown assailants.

Jack and Jenny aren't big into fighting, but they are big into staying alive, and escaping the Belfry in one piece will be their greatest tour de force ever.


Hazardous Materials – TYRANT'S TOW

HMS Tyrant shadowed the Perilous and the strange sonar signature that the rogue submarine seemed to be chasing all the way through a strange deep sea portal in the South China Sea. Now the Royal Navy's most technologically sophisticated attack submarine finds itself stranded in a scummy sea of dying red algae on planet that quite definitively is not earth. Strange constellations whirl through frighteningly dark nights, impossibly tall mountains pierce the thin skies in the distance, gravity itself seems to be off and most of the submarine's instruments are dead or returning nothing but hazy static. And perhaps even worse, there's no sign of either Perilous or the mysterious Nautilus. It is up to Captain Clementine and his crew to somehow find their way back to earth.


Killing In The Name Of

For nearly a decade now the city of Mogadishy and most of its African hinterland has been the uncontested domain of warlord Guleed Abukar Gheeddi. His word is the only law on the Somalian peninsula, but his reign also means stability. He has come a long day since his days as Kroner's lieutenant in the horn of Africa. In the aftermath of Hurricane Cassandra his irregulars even worked together with the international community, granting his rule a modicum of respectability. On a continent plagued with problems Gheeddi, it appears, is on his way to international propriety.

But all that is undone in a single afternoon when the Rusalka sails into Mogadishu harbor at the head of Korovin's pirate fleet. Freya Korovin demands to speak to her old WRAITH colleague. Gheeddi knows it is a trap, sets a counter-trap of his own, but is ultimately outwitted and captured by a squad of Korovin's metahuman mercenaries. Brought before his nemesis, Korovin implants the Somali warlord with remote-controlled explosives in order to bring the warlord and his troops firmly under her control. With the death of Anton Stahl the year before and Thao Soeur missing presumed dead, that leaves as the only credible rivals in the the Asia-Pacific criminal underworld the Exchange East of the Comte Le Feuvre.


Bombtrack – BLOODLINES

Is this some kind of practical joke? Or an elaborate plausibly-deniable execution? Kicked out the back of a Soviet transport aircraft with nothing but a pair of parachutes, their Soviet prisoner garb and each other, Jinx and Medley Farley find themselves on the outskirts of Mogadishu. Freaking Mogadishu. Where a pair of unarmed pale-skinned twenty-something American girls stand out like a bespoke suit in a spotlight on Skid Row.

That's what you get for saving the world.

Luckily for them, perhaps, someone appears to be bombing the city, handily distracting whatever passes for law enforcement in these parts. In the chaos of Korovin's attack on Gheeddi's stronghold Jinx and Medley make it a priority to acquire location-appropriate clothing and weapons, but that seems little use against the superhuman killers roaming the streets of the deserted streets of the central districts. But just when it appears their only chance of making it to a place with a satellite phone is braving Korovin's metahumans they are found by someone who is perhaps the oddest person the Farleys have ever met. He says his name is Osiris Chance, and he's been looking for them specifically...


Comes a Horseman – AEGIS AUGMENTED

Soviet agent Artaka Istomin chases the riddle of clues he received from the impossibly old woman in the depths of a Hindu monastery from a long-abandoned excavation site on an unnamed island in the Sulu Sea to the Choir, Razaq's base in Norther Cambodia that was bombed with an American nuke in 2010. Amidst the ruins and radiation he finds that Razaq's array of Qlipothian artifacts are anything but destroyed, and may in fact be impossible to annihilate completely. Was this really what Anton Stahl was hinting at? And what eldritch goals is Razaq pursuing that he would attempt to harness these terrifying forces? Whatever it is, the answers may lie with a series of antediluvian artifacts Razaq calls 'Markers'.


Iron Friars - RED TIDE / UHLAN SURF

A Soviet fleet centered around the Nikolaev and the ORP Akademik Warszawski is bearing down on Mogadishu. Their orders come from the Premier herself: Gheeddi's collusion with Korovin is unacceptable, he must be found and eliminated. Only Serhiy Chaika and a select few others in the fleet know of the second set of secret orders. Since the end of the Crisis the hinterlands of Kenya and southern Somalia have been a refuge for Soviet traitors and deserters. Now the KGB has uncovered disconcerting evidence that behind the seemingly disorganized cliques of turncoats and treasonists there may be a well-coordinated network of former Soviet officials conspiring to unknown ends. Chaika and his men are to use the chaos of the Soviet naval action as cover to slip inland and find out what is really going on.

Meanwhile however the Europeans have not forgotten the Soviet invasion of Libya earlier in the century, and are intent to prevent a repeat of that incursion into what Brussels believes to be its sphere of influence. Word from Cairo Station is that a massive WEU fleet has transited the Suez Canal with the intent of dislodging the Soviets from the coast. The world holds its collective breath as the two fleets barrel down on each other in a repeat of the Missile Crisis of '62...
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
Post Reply