[b]Hotel Suleiman, East Istanbul[/b]

The boulevard leading up to the modest hotel that Abbasian's platoon had entrenched themselves in had been blasted to look like the surface of the moon. A rain had passed through the previous night, soaking everything and leaving a curious mist in the air. Craters were filled with water from either the storm or from ruptured sewage pipes, leaving the bodies rotting inside. There were bodies everywhere, cut down by Armenian machinegunners behind the bullet-ridden facade of the hotel. Most of them wore the uniforms of Turkish regulars, tan uniforms, puttees up to their knees, brown web flak jackets and web gear, and a helmet covered with a khaki fabric cover bearing their regiment's number: 806. Mixed in was a healthy dose of reservist corpses, wearing the same uniform but lacking such protective equipment like a helmet or vest. The typical Armenian rifle platoon maintained a weapons squad that brought two medium-machinegun teams to bear: they were the singlemost casualty producing weapon in a regular unit's arsenal. Abbasian had funneled them down this boulevard to deadly efficiency. Covered behind brick walls with a healthy sector of fire, these machineguns were the first line of defense for the platoon and were responsible with massacring incoming troops before the riflemen could get a good view.

The machinegun, designated the K44 in Armenian service, was a modified version of a popular Polish design. It could carry two hundred rounds on a linked belt, capable of intensely fast automatic fire. The caliber was another 7.62mm round similar to the standard one used in the service rifle: the difference being the rifle cartridge was 39 millimeters long while the machinegun round packed more powder into 54 millimeters of length. The results were devastating: Abbasian had personally seen Ottoman troops ripped in half by a single bullet, or simply exploded into a fine pink mist. It was rumored that, in close combat, the speed of the bullet whizzing past someone was enough to heat up the surrounding air by friction and produce light burns on the skin. The boulevard was slick with dark red blood and guts. It made Abbasian sick, but he couldn't show. Infantry combat was visceral and intense, a far cry from his time looking through the lenses of a set of binoculars while radioing artillery batteries to adjust their fire. He had seen battle before and had watched people die, yes, but it had been from kilometers away. He never saw the detail of what a shrapnel-producing shell would do to a man unless they were driving through an impact area on their advance, and even then the mortuary affairs personnel had already covered the enemy bodies and were loading them onto trucks to send to one of the many mass, unmarked graves.

There was no mortuary affairs team to take care of the dead Ottomans laying in their craters: at best, they would be taken care of after the battle was over. At worst, Abbasian or his platoon sergeant would an incendiary shell into one of their tube-like portable grenade launchers and torch the bodies. It was too damp for the latter option, at least for now. Their dead would have to stare the living in the face, unblinking and unflinching. It did something to morale, seeing the dead for so long. It was easy during the reconquest of Erzurum, passing by towns and trenches that had been shelled and cleared hastily. Now, with the fight turning into a slog over the east of town, both sides had to come to terms with their actions. For all the jingoism and hawkishness of the general population and the military itself, war becomes terrible when faced head-on. Abbasian had heard, before his deployment, that killing begins to affect a man in terrible ways even when that killing was necessary. For all the glorified depictions of war in the cinema or the patriotic literature, they neglected to tell him that the human mind will wander. After all, these dead Ottomans had lives just like he did: favorite childhood toys, first kisses, dreams for civilian life outside of the army, and inside jokes with groups of friends.

They had asked the officer candidates when they think they'd start registering guilt for their actions. After ten dead enemies? Five? For Abbasian, and for quite possibly every human being who had ever carried a weapon into combat since the dawn of mankind, the answer was closer to one.

It was around noon when Abbasian realized that there had been no fighting in the general area for a few hours. He talked to his platoon sergeant and wondered if they had beaten back the enemy. His RTO, however, had informed him that nothing had come over the radio. The night prior had seen intense fighting, the clatter of fire and the booms of artillery coming in nonstop. Were the Armenians beating the Turks out of the city? It was hard to tell, being confined to one building in the center of a thick urban neighborhood. The last news he had heard was that only one bridge remained standing: if that fell, they would be trapped on the other side. There were three endstates to the conflict that they had been briefed on: Plan Blue, where friendly forces would control the entirety of the city and maintain the status quo; Plan Red, where the Turks would regain their capital and all the pride that came with that; and Plan Purple, which divided the city along the Bosporus into a friendly west and a Turkish east. If Abbasian was to be left behind in the event of Plan Purple, he would be trapped in enemy territory. His fear was that they had bypassed his position completely and were to deal with him when mopping up after pushing the Armenians across the strait.


"Platoon Sergeant!" he whispered, gesturing over to his post behind a blown-out brick wall where his rucksack leaned against an upside-down chair. The NCO scrambled his way over, taking note to keep down behind cover lest a sniper end his career right then and there.

"What's going on, Abbasian?" the man asked quickly. He adjusted his helmet - which bore a Bible verse and a cross across the front - and nabbed a cigarette from the helmet band.

"I think the front might have passed us," the Lieutenant suggested. He reached for the folded-up map in his pocket. The front had been drawn out every morning as intelligence was relayed over the radio. As of yesterday, there were right at the tip of an Armenian bulge. It was easy enough for that bulge to be collapsed by Turkish forces in the night. The RTO had been working on the radio all morning and wasn't getting signal: Abbasian gave the order to disassemble it and figure out what was wrong while he continued talking to PSG.

"I've been hearing sporadic gunfire to our north and south, it could be moving west towards the strait," Abbasian continued. He turned his eyes back towards the RTO, furiously unscrewing the back panel of the radio with his screwdriver.

Abbasian's platoon sergeant wiped the sweat out of his short, black hair. "Sir, I'm not sure if the line has held either. I'm inclined to agree... they've stopped coming down the boulevard, they must have found another way past."

"And they've stopped the shelling," observed Abbasian. "That could mean they're close, marking us as a holdout to encircle later."

"So that makes us trapped," the PSG announced grimly. He turned his attention towards the RTO: "How's the radio?"

The young radioman nervously held up what looked like a shattered piece of glass from the radio box. "I think the shockwave from a grenade or something might have shattered this little vacuum tube here. Broke the radio without us knowing."

The PSG looked to Abbasian, who nodded solemnly. "So our radio is down, what do we want to do?"

"Reestablish communications," the Lieutenant answered immediately.

The RTO shook his head: "Sir, this thing is fucking broken... I can't fix it, they don't tell me this shit. I ain't no electrical engineer, I just change the battery and turn dials."

"Alright, then I want you to rejoin your squad and toss the thing. Take up a position on the line and wait for further guidance."

The RTO scrambled off with a hasty affirmative, leaving the platoon leader and platoon sergeant to figure out the situation by themselves. The platoon sergeant sighed deeply, clutched his rifle by the handguard, and looked back towards the hotel's boulevard. "Sir, I'd send a runner out if I were you."

And so Abbasian sent a runner team out. Two volunteers from the platoon reported to him and were told the mission: head west until they encountered a friendly unit with working communications. Borrow the radio and call into company headquarters to inform them of the situation and get guidance. Return to the platoon and link up with the platoon leader. The RTO provided a notepad with frequencies and a step-by-step manual to change the channel on the device, a task more complicated than it sounded. The whole mission was to last no longer than three hours, with the platoon executing a withdrawal if the runners did not return in that time: it would be assumed that they were dead and the Turks had indeed encircled them. Passwords were exchanged and pre-combat checks and inspections were conducted. They took two magazines and a canteen of water with them, everything else staying with the platoon to potentially fend off an Ottoman attack in their absence. The Lieutenant wished them luck and sent them out through the back door of the hotel, where we watched them run through into the labyrinth of alleys that went behind the row of businesses on that street.

An hour later, a brief exchange of gunfire broke the silence a few blocks west of their position. The Lieutenant, with an icy feeling in his stomach, ordered his men to stand fast as quiet once again fell on East Istanbul. The runner team would not return by the designated time. The platoon would have to pull out the hard way.

[b]Istanbul Treasury Complex, East Istanbul[/b]

Just a few blocks north, Apollo and Genghis rigged an improvised explosive charge to the chained, reinforced metal front doors of the Istanbul treasury building. The NSS agents stepped off and took cover by the stairs leading up to the entrance and detonated the bundles of Semtex. With a roaring whoosh and overwhelming force, the doors were blown inwards along with a sizeable chunk of the wall. The special agents shouted for the Armenians to breach, and the gaggle of MPs and intelligence clerks cleared straight into the marble lobby of the building. Weapons drawn, they scanned the room only to realize that the Istanbul militia were staring right back at them, astonished at what had just happened. The militiamen were dressed in blue police fatigues and bore whatever weapons they could find in their own homes. Many of them had bolt-action hunting rifles and leather belts to store ammunition, with a few using brown Turkish surplus equipment and more modern firearms. They were a motley looking group of older, overweight gentlemen who were outside of their element. Corporal George Yaglian guessed that these might have been less capable militiamen stuck guarding the treasury instead of immediately responding to the invasion.

Genghis stepped forward out of the mob of Armenians: "Who is your leader?" he asked in fluent Turkish, lowering his own weapon and presenting a friendly appearance.

One of the Istanbul militiamen raised his hand and stepped off from the wall. He was a middle-aged man who appeared to be an active police officer, based off of his rank epaulets and the cap he wore. He was armed only with a revolver and wore a black belt slung across his shoulder like a European constable. "Who the hell are you? Greeks or Armenians?"

"It doesn't matter," Genghis answered. The policeman rolled his eyes.

"Armenians, I bet," he almost spat. "I have a radio in the back, you're leaving this half of Istanbul to die."

"I don't make the decisions, friend."

"What do you want?"

The NSS agent turned to the group behind him, Yaglian in particular, and flicked his eyes towards the guards. [i]Make sure they freeze,[/i] he mouthed. Then he whipped back to the police officer and drew his automatic pistol from his leather holster. "I want you to fucking drop your weapons and face the wall."

By the time the militia had figured out what had happened, the Armenians had all raised their weapons at them. Yaglian had eyes on a portly fellow who looked like he might have been a chef in real life, not at all suited for defending the Istanbul treasury from two apparently crazy Armenian intelligence agents. Genghis called an advance, leading the Armenians to walk methodically up to the Istanbul militia and press them against the wall.

"Drop your weapons! Face the wall!" called out Apollo, waving his rifle around. He switched back to Armenian and added: "If anyone goes for their piece, put 'em on the ground!"

Yaglian watched as the clerk next to him tackled a militiaman who was apparently too slow to get on the wall, smashing his head into the ground and kicking him in the spleen. The clerk had the common sense to kick the man's rifle away before grabbing his collar and forcing him back up. With a push, the militiaman went tumbling into the wall and kept his hands placed firmly above his head. Yaglian's chef had no such problems, obeying instantly. Apollo had evidently seen what had just happened and issued out a warning: "No heroics! You cannot win here. You fight back, we leave you behind when we destroy the bridge."

The militiamen turned and placed their palms on the wall, staring down at their boots. Yaglian pressed the muzzle of his rifle between the Istanbulite's shoulders and kept it there while he looked to Apollo for further guidance. This was insanity. These were their allies, after all. The NSS, apparently, had more important goals. The second-in-command, revolver still drawn, called out in Turkish again: "I want the map of this place and the skeleton key."

The police officer that Apollo had captured protested: "The key won't get you what you want... Fucking Armenians, after the goddamn gold. Thieves. Filthy Armenian thieves."

"If a key won't get me what I want then I'm going to blow the door off its hinges. This is just for convenience's sake," Apollo retorted. "And how many of you guys are left?"

The police officer growled as Apollo pushed his revolver against his neck.

"Tell me or I'll start shooting," the NSS agent warned.

"You wouldn't dare."

"Bitch, I might."

He cocked back the hammer on his revolver, an unnecessary step but an intimidating sound nonetheless. This was enough to persuade the Istanbulite officer, who reported that this was it. Their contingent of a dozen men had been ordered to secure the treasury almost as an afterthought: most of the men had to go to the outskirts of the city to stave off an attack. The Armenians were unfortunate that there was anyone there at all. Apollo softened his grip, but still kept the officer under observation. He didn't know if this completely true, but the intimidated whimper from the pistol's action was enough to convince him to go ahead.

"Genghis, take the MPs and bring them down with you. The intel clerks can tie these guys up and toss 'em in the back." Apollo turned to the militiamen and added: "Don't worry, we'll let you go afterwards."

Yaglian let a bespectacled clerk take over, his shaky hands leveling a rifle towards the Istanbulite's back. Yaglian tapped out and wished the kid good luck, before following the raid group towards the stairwell with Genghis taking the lead. The above-ground portion of the treasury contained mostly administrative facilities: meeting rooms, offices, workrooms, record rooms, and break rooms. Underground, however, was a concrete-reinforced bunker that held the reserves of the Turkish government before its splintering. Genghis, as it turned out, was interested in two things: the gold and the cash. Each one had a decidedly strategic use for the Armenian government.

The gold's initial benefit was obvious. The Armenian financial elements would be selling this stolen Turkish gold on the quasi-legal grey market. Persian businessmen, Greek socialites, and Ethiopian royalty alike would have an interest in purchasing these things. If it wasn't sold, it would be squirreled away in Yerevan's vaults to back the dram as national currency. In addition, it would deprive the Ottomans of their gold reserves if they were to retake the city: this was becoming more and more crucial as it appeared that the Ottoman forces would pry East Istanbul from the locals' hands.

The cash served its purpose for the NSS. Ottoman bills were still used in some parts of Georgia where lawlessness still reigned and the government could not stand up its economic system. NSS operatives inserted into the country would be using these stolen bills to bribe and barter with warlords. The money was also to be kept in a reserve in NSS warehouses in case of another war with Turkey, whereupon it would be quickly injected into the local economy with operators and airdrops to rapidly drive up inflation. Counterfeit bills would be mixed in with the real notes, spreading widespread distrust of the money that had just recently appeared. Economic warfare was shaping up to be an effective concept in the asymmetric fight between the Armenians, who needed every advantage they could get, and the Turks.

At the base of the stairs was an auxiliary generator room that contained a diesel generator for the electrical systems. Seeing the gates to a freight elevator ahead, Genghis pointed out Yaglian and a buddy to start it up and get it ready. This was a simple task: fuel the generator and flip the switch. Lights clacked on throughout the concrete bunker and cast a flickering yellow shade on the barrenness. Genghis sheperded the MPs onto the freight elevator that occupied a central space in the room before hitting the switch. With a laborious groan, the elevator began moving down slowly while the Armenians checked their equipment. Two minutes later, they had dropped down into the vault.

The lights were already on, illuminating a massive underground warehouse. Shelves stacked with crates of gold bricks stretched on as far as they could see. Piles of money alongside printing presses and plates lay behind prison-cell-style bars. Guard positions lay empty, the occupants long since captured on the first floor. A few of the soldiers wandered over to the crates filled with golden bars and inspected them with a mixture of curiosity and amazement. Many of them had never seen this much money in their entire life: the wealth of the Ottoman Empire, all in one place. Still, many of the shelves and cells were emptied, evacuated by helicopter during the riots and protests when the Sultan was killed. Some trucks had tried to move the gold out of the city before, but the public was tipped off and the convoy was ambushed in the ghettoes by poverty-stricken minorities.

The NSS agent picked up a bar from the floor and turned it over in his hands, weapon slung at his side. He turned to a soldier beside him and handed off his green backpack that contained a portable radio: "Call for helicopters to help out. If they balk, use the authorization code 'Peppers.' This will key them in that it's an NSS operation with full priority. Request as many cargo helicopters as they can spare to land in the treasury's parking lot. We'll move the paper money out that way."

Genghis turned to the other Armenians: "Load up the gold into the trucks. Take the elevator to the shipping dock on the ground floor and move it from there. This needs to be back at the airport as soon as possible: our flight is waiting. Let's move."