Chapter Text
The flight was…..very long.
None of Bravo got any sleep, they all sat dispersed randomly around the plane, sitting silently and thinking to themselves. Despite being ordered to grab some shut-eye. They all knew that they needed to be at their best, at 100%. But none of them could get their minds off Spenser long enough to fall into any type of slumber.
This was especially true for Jason. He sat, staring at the metal side of the plane, stuck miserably in his own thoughts. As the team leader, he was supposed to protect his men and have their back always. He didn’t and that was the reason Clay was in the situation he was in. Clay would’ve never been in Africa, in a war zone, without any backup if he had just done his job as a leader and a friend.
“30 mikes until landing, get everything ready to go” Blackburn voiced from the other side of the plane, pulling Jason out of his thoughts. The rest of the team began to stir, gathering their hammocks and securing other personal items. Soon they strapped in and prepared for descent, preparing for what was to come, occasionally casting quick glances around the pane to each other.
Forty minutes later Bravo found themselves standing in the middle of a makeshift command room, once again being shown pictures from the town, but now there was a video. They watched, containing any nervousness and anger they might have felt, as the hostiles began rounding up a few of the missionaries, Clay being one of the unlucky ones used to make an impression on how serious they were, pointing guns at them and screaming that if their demands were not met in the next 6 hours they would begin killing the villagers and missionaries one by one until they had what they wanted. After, Bravo came up with a plan to subdue the hostiles and get the bystanders to safety, to get Clay to safety.
“Let's go get our boy”
Clay remembers the last time he was here. He was 14 years old, coming up on 10 years calling the village home and in an eerily similar situation. Except last time they weren’t here to make a statement to a powerful government. They were here to rape and kill. To take with no remorse, and they did, they took the lives of his grandparents as they fought to protect him and the other children they cared so much about.
He remembers a little girl running back to the village yelling about bad guys coming, and how she had barely escaped when they had attacked their group while coming back from an afternoon walk and how they had kidnapped her friends and killed his grandmother.
He remembers the adults gathering the remaining children and him in a house and the metallic feeling of the gun his grandfather pressed into his hands, telling him to stay in the house and help to protect everyone, making him promise that if the bad guys got too far into the village, he would take everyone and run. He remembers the feeling as they advanced further into the town, seconds stretching into hours, praying that something would happen to make it all stop.
Then his friends around him yelling about running like his grandfather told him to, eventually, moments before they would have been caught, he gave in, giving one last glance to his grandfather fighting back before taking charge and running with nine other children out of the house and out the village to safety. When the insurgents left, and the dust settled Clay came out of hiding with the others, to find his grandfather lifeless.
So, when it started this time, and he saw people being dragged into the street, screaming, and scared for their lives, he made a decision, he was no longer a scared and weak little teenager, he was prepared to fight.
He was brought out of his thoughts by one of the hostiles who pointed a gun at him, grabbing him by the arm and roughly pushing him to stand with a few others in front of a camera. He felt the hostile push the barrel of a gun to the back of his head and began to speak into the camera. When the video was successfully made Clay and the others were pulled back up against the wall they were previously at. Clay took this as an opportunity to assess the situation. Unlike last time, the insurgents wanted something other than the people in the village, they were just being used as leverage. This both worked for and against them. It worked for them because they wouldn’t kill all of them immediately, they need them alive to negotiate as hostages. On the downside, he knew that these individuals had nothing else to lose, so it could be only a matter of time before they started getting impatient and started killing innocent people. He knew that someone would be sent to try and stop the hostile, but he didn’t know when. So, he needed to be ready in case things escalated and they didn’t get here in time. He looked around and spotted a few other missionaries of fighting ability and began to formulate a plan.
Bravo team had left their command center, fully geared and ready to go about an hour ago. They had been making their way towards the village at a pace that felt agonizingly slow, wanting to get to Clay as soon as possible. When they got to a position up a hill where they could see down into the village. Gaining eyes on the hostiles and closely searching for their boy.
“I don’t see Clay Boss” Sonny noted nervously
The hostiles were getting impatient, they were going to start hurting people and soon. Suddenly the village came to life, one of the hostiles had pointed a gun at a woman about to pull the trigger and....
“Never mind” Sonny exasperated as he saw Clay lunge at the hostile.
“Ray Metal you two stay up here and take out as many as you can, everyone else come with me,” he said as he started heading down the hill.
Full Metal grinned “Never out of the fight huh Spense” as he started shooting, taking out a hostile that had been trying to come up behind Clay.