Guards, Part II: "The Encounter"

Rambo’s amazement quickly turned to anger: these villagers had defied him, defied him to the point of armed resistance and killing his own fighters – an example, a brutal example had to be made of them, and he could not let this challenge stand. “Kill them all!” he bellowed to his men, who needed no encouragement. He followed closely behind as they plunged through the ring of blazing huts and into an open space beyond, taking pleasure in treading on the dead bodies of several unlucky village defenders. Expecting to run into a last ditch group of defenders he brought up his magnum, but stopped dead in his tracks along with his men when he saw that the place was deserted.

He could see around him a circular open space in the middle of another ring of huts, some on fire but most of them still intact. Directly across from him was a low square building made of mud bricks and with a low awning crudely made of tree branches and thatch standing over a darkened doorway. There was no sign of the villagers apart from retreating sets of footprints in the dust as Rambo’s men spread out and surveyed the area.

Suddenly Rambo became aware of a distinctly human presence nearby and turned back toward the mud-brick building to see standing there, quite calmly, a middle-height, dark-haired man. He was clearly a foreigner and was dressed from head to foot in a long black garment like a long coat which bore no motif except for two distinctive shoulder patches: on his right shoulder a silver arc-like symbol, that Rambo did not recognize, was emblazoned against the black and on his left shoulder was the black symbol of an arm wielding a sword against a red background. Seemingly oblivious to the heavily-armed militia fighters of Rambo’s retinue, the man was staring straight at the warlord, his arms folded calmly behind him.

Rambo sniggered at the naivety of this foreigner, did he really think that the so-called “moral authority”, supposedly possessed by these Western NGO bastards, meant anything now? Rambo thought about putting a magnum round through the head of this idealistic fool but stopped himself, he might draw a rich ransom from World Vision or Oxfam or whatever other weakling aid agency that this overdressed bastard of a foreigner was employed by.

Rambo had just begun to call out the man, ordering him to surrender, but it was the stranger who acted first. Upon hearing Rambo’s threatening words, a faint smile appeared on the man’s lips and then all of a sudden all hell broke loose.

A loud explosion suddenly shattered the uneasy silence and Rambo spun to see the battlewagon torn apart in a ball of fire. By the time he had turned again, two shots had already rung out and the man who had just been standing so quietly now held a pistol in his hand and two of Rambo’s men lay dead on the ground, blood oozing from the wounds left by two headshots. A terrifying fusillade of gunfire from the surrounding huts cut down the rest of Rambo’s fighters, their once menacingly confident faces now frozen in a deathly scream of terror.

Now the warlord – so confident before – felt the sickening feeling of panic rise within his heart and he turned to run but froze immediately in terror when he saw who was behind him. Before the blazing wreck of the battlewagon stood another black-clad figure, this one a woman with her long hair tied back and a grenade launcher slung over her shoulder and a pistol in her hand aimed directly at him. A half-dozen armed men emerged from the huts around her armed with a type of assault rifle he had never seen before. With a grimly commanding voice the woman said, “Your men are dead warlord, there is nowhere for you to run.”

Rambo turned again only to see the black-clad man, now standing only a few paces from him, with his pistol in hand and aimed clearly at Rambo’s head. “Drop your weapon and get on your knees,” he said coldly. Like the woman he spoke the local language flawlessly even though both of them were clearly foreigners. The warlord felt his insides freeze in fear as he dropped to his knees as commanded.