“Dude, I will give you twenty bucks for that candy bar,” Kip drawled from his bunk.
“I’ve told you. Touch these, I will shoot you in the leg.” Alec munched a sweet combination of peanuts and caramel, savoring the melty chocolate in the dry heat.
“But I ate all mine, and I really, really want one. Forty bucks.” Kip wheedled.
“Fuck you Tex. These are mine.” Alec stretched the caramel from his plump lips and luxuriated in lapping it up.
“I could just take one next time you use the john,” Kip grumbled.
Dave raised a pale eyebrow and shot a look at the top bunk cradling the short Texan,
“Kip, you steal offa one of our guys, I’m gonna shoot you myself. Quit bitchin’, you’re gettin’ on my last goddamn nerve.”
Jones looked up from the after-action report he was writing on the insulated laptop and took in the crew. The plywood cabin was stifling. The raided air-con unit the previous team had hooked up barely fought back the heat given the flimsy insulation-less walls, but it at least stirred the stale air. The three sets of bunks horse-shoed around the door, clearly arranged by operatives that were used to rolling from REM sleep to combat in mere seconds, the clear path to an escape a necessary comfort blanket for them all. He could taste the stress. It sat fat and bitter in the middle of the room, flinging tentacles of bad temper and itchy tension around them all.
Jones wished for the nine-hundredth time he was better at people-ing. He’d never had brilliant social skills, but the combination of military training and being buried under a slew of tech supporting black ops for years had stripped what little he’d had.
Kip twisted on his bunk and dangled his head over the edge to look at his crew mate,
“Dude, I can smell the damn thing, and hearin’ you smackin’ your chops is fuckin’ disgustin’.”
Alec extended a middle finger and deliberately slurped again.
Dave twitched with unresolved tension, flooded with guilt and desperately looking for an outlet to dump it. They were on lock-down until Mason got out of surgery. Goddamn booby-trap on a doorframe that would’ve taken his head off if Mason hadn’t shouldered him bodily into the room and put his stupid heroic bulk between him and the shrapnel. He tried to focus on his own after-action paper, the words blurry and dancing as he heard over and again the quiet snick of the trigger and the breathless, still heartbeat as Mace turned to him.
He’d never forget the unnatural whiteness of his bosses’ skin as he’d reached for Dave’s flack vest and heaved them around. Their size difference had never been so wholly thrust into his face as when Xander wrapped both massive arms around his head and fell on him, brick dust and echoing panic surrounding them while the team scrambled to pull them out. The tangy, copper taste of blood on his tongue, and the rising bile as he realized he wasn’t bleeding.
Dave heard ringing in his ears, he shook his head to clear it. He wasn’t in that godforsaken hut, he was with his guys, in their bunkroom. Mace was safe, or as safe as he could be. All he had to do was wait. He was good at that.
Usually.
Usually his commanding officer Xander ‘Mace’ Mason wasn’t having half of his back stapled back together while a medic screamed at him that they didn’t have room or fuel to take them all, and they had to let him go.
Usually they didn’t have to watch as the chopper dwindled to a black spec on the blood-stained horizon, taking their hope with it.
Jones watched Dave blink angrily. He knew what guilt looked like. Had seen enough of it on the faces of the drone pilots he’d trained. They needed a distraction. They needed to get out of this miserable bunkhouse. Xander would be in surgery for hours yet as the doctors tried to rescue his shoulder and upper arm from too much damage. Dave didn’t need to regret anything else today, and he’d take Kip’s head off in a minute just because he was the nearest loud voice.
Jones looked around for a distraction.
He spotted the box of candy bars on Alec’s bed.
He met Alec’s gaze. His opposite number was thinking something similar. He nodded.
“Kip, we could always just get more candy bars,” Jones couldn’t manage a wheedling or persuasive tone. He just stated the fact as a potential solution and waited for Alec to pick up the conversational baton.
“Yeah, man, that is definitely an option,” Alex stroked his beard, somewhat bedraggled from weeks on deployment.
“We’re on lockdown. We don’t get to go to the store, guys. It’s the desert,” Dave’s usual lilting tones flat and depressed.
“I refuse to believe one of the most experienced special ops teams in the world can’t solve a simple lack of candy on a well-supplied base,” Jones pushed carefully. He glanced up to Kip and cast his gaze to Dave meaningfully.
Kip’s entire aspect changed, as much as the guys teased him for being blunt and uncouth, he was finely attuned to the feel of the team. Itchy and out of sorts now because they were confined and scared. He knew Jones well enough that he followed,
“I do declare Jonesy, you have a plan?”
Jones nodded and looked to Alec pleadingly.
“I believe our buttoned-up colleague here intends us to do crime, I think he’s maybe looking at a covert op targeting the cookhouse store tent?” Alec eyed Jones, smiling as the man’s shoulders sagged in relief.
“I think, gentlemen, that we’re looking at a robbery!” Kip rubbed his hands gleefully and swung down from the bunk.
Alec reached for one of the small whiteboards they used for tic tac toe, or mission planning if Xander was around.
Jones unearthed the markers and some detritus to represent them.
Dave ignored them, tense and stuck in his sharp recollection. Kip eyed the outline of his back and raised his voice slightly.
“So we’re toolin’ up for this caper, right gents?”
Dave turned; an incredulous look plastered on his face.
Kip grinned winningly and cocked his head to one side,
“That’s a no then bossman? You only said you’d shoot me if I stole offa one of our guys. Cookhouse stores don’t count. That’s spoils of war.”
Alec and Jones murmured agreement, sketching out the path from their hut to the storage unit and using their standard tags for potential risks. They could feel Dave staring, wavering between giving them all an earful for insubordination, or joining in.
Jones looked up and held out the small, yellow-haired Troll toy Kip had christened ‘Dave’ when they’d found it in the hut on their first day. It had been used as his avatar in all their mission plans, along with a cut-out logo from a beer can for Kip, a bullet casing for Mace, the ‘J’ key from a keyboard for Jones and an origami crane for Alec. He caught Dave’s eye and aimed a sincere look of understanding straight at him,
“We need some snacks up in this joint for when the boss gets back, don’t we? You know what he’s like when he’s hangry, man’s the size of a bear, has the temper to match, and he is coming back. You only have to babysit this one,” Jones threw a thumb towards Kip, “Until then. Just for a minute.”
Kip grinned around a candy bar, clearly stolen from Alec, who had yet to notice, or was pretending he hadn’t as if his life depended on it.
Dave reached out to take the toy, turning it over in his hands. He looked up, dropped his shoulders, and smiled a little.
“So, what I’m hearing is that we have a heist to plan?”