[b]Patara Darbazi, Georgia[/b]

	Yaglian’s section took point, two jeeps moving through the winding roads in the Georgian mountains. They were far from home, the lights of the border installations long having vanished as they continued their questionably-legal mission through the rough terrain of bandit country. Patara Darbazi was vanished in the hills of Georgia, forgotten to many and home only to a few dozen civilians. Only a single raider encampment put it on any sort of map: the Armenian military’s. It was part of a network of supply camps that enabled small teams of bandits to poke and prod at the Border Service and try to find routes for their next smuggling operation. Hitting this one, in concert with an organized attack on two other encampments, would be enough to bloody the nose of the Georgian Mountain Wolves militia, albeit only mildly. A platoon of Armenian troops pulled their vehicles into the trees beside the ancient, overgrown path they were traveling on: it was the end of the road for those machines. A team from third section was assigned to watch them, much to the chagrin of its leader who was now missing the fight.

	The rest of the troops grabbed what they needed from their rucksacks and bounded off. Their light-olive green uniforms blended into the shadows of the woods as mud splashed onto their gaiters and brown leather boots. Most of them carried their carbines slung low at the ready, scanning the mountaintops as the sun rose. The machinegun teams, belts of ammunition wrapped around their torsos like the fedayi of old, took up positions in the march with their equipment ready to be emplaced. A kilometer on foot at this pace took twenty minutes to march, before they spread out into the hills to the south and west of the encampment. To their west, the town was stirring as farmers came out in the early morning light to check on their animals. In silence, like they had rehearsed on a small scale in the lot behind their barracks, they spread their sections into lines. Machine gun teams from the weapons section found good spots on their hilltop and dug in, aiming their bulky weapons at the silhouettes of the bandit tents.
	
	Yaglian’s section found cover behind an abandoned barn, its wood rotted and its roof having caved in years ago. His own team hunkered down by a pair of rusty bicycles and a stack of chicken coops that had long since been tossed away. He went back and forth across his three men as he checked them off: had they forgotten anything? Were they ready to fight? After ensuring everyone took a look at their weapons for any sort of mechanical errors, he ordered them to fix their bayonets. As quietly as they could, the knives were unsheathed and clicked into place underneath the barrels of their carbines. Yaglian tugged his into place to ensure its secure placement and slapped his curved, banana-shaped magazine into the rifle’s frame. Taped to its side was another magazine upside-down so that he could reload easily while clearing through the camp. Sergeant Ozanian came to Yaglian as he finished his preparation: “Are we ready?”

	“Yes, Sergeant. Everyone is good.”

	The section leader eyed the morning dawn as it crept over the jagged rocks of Georgia. The other section leader on the southern flank was jogging from his position behind a hill to the barn, waving his hand. The two NCOs exchanged words, before Sergeant Ozanian patted the other man on the back and send him off. “Corporal Yaglian, we’re all ready. I’m going to blow this whistle, our Lieutenant will hear it, and he’s going to start the gunfire.”

	“We count to sixty and then begin our movement,” Yaglian continued as Ozanian nodded.

	“Once we pass the line of view of the Lieutenant, he’ll blow his whistle to stop the guns as we move into the camp. It’s an easy raid, straight out of a textbook.”

	The border guards all nodded, overhearing the plan, and made final adjustments to their gear. Yaglian tilted his taraz soft cover straight onto his head, brushing one of the loose wool ends over his shoulder before he looked back towards Sergeant Ozanian. The mustachioed, middle-aged section leader had stood up from his position by the chicken coops and put a dull grey whistle to his mouth: he blew three dreadfully long bursts, followed by a hearty yell: “Onwards! Onwards!”

	The machinegun teams from their section fired their guns, streams of bullets hosing through the bandit guardsmen. Puffs of dirt and grass were kicked up violently from every impact as the bandits dove for cover behind rocks and sandbags. One after the other in a synchronized “talk”, these guns fired their bursts to pin down the enemy forces. Those who were not stuck behind cover down emerged from their tents, bewildered, before grabbing their rifles to return fire. Within seconds, the snaps of bolt-action rifles answered the Armenian guns. Tracers, linked every five rounds in a machinegun’s belt, inched closer and closer to their targets as the gunners began to adjust their fire. In response, the bandits’ shots tracked the direction of these and began to close in on their positions. Return fire kept some of the firing line down with their heads behind cover, but fire superiority was regained as soon as the other rifles on the line doubled down on the enemy positions.

	By the time Yaglian counted to sixty, the guns’ high-powered rounds had torn through much of the bandits’ cover. Several laid wounded on the ground, screaming as they clutched gushing wounds or, in some cases, the stumps of missing limbs. Others tried dragging them out of the way of danger, risking their lives for their partners. The troops on the southern flank heard the second set of whistle blasts, and Yaglian steeled himself before he rushed out into the open field beside the barn. As soon as the Armenians emerged from their position, the machineguns shifted their fire to the north, clearing the way for their comrades to advance. Yaglian threw himself towards the bandit camp just a hundred meters in front of him, but that distance felt like he was running a marathon. The Corporal looked back from the raid’s destination to his team, and extended his left arm straight out: “Get into a line!”

	The other three men sprinted out to form a straight line perpendicular to the camp’s perimeter, alongside the other team in their section. Every couple of meters, the troops would instinctively get down to a knee or behind whatever cover was available and begin covering their other team’s bound: a few rounds would be quickly fired off before they got moving again. Yaglian slid into the mud in the middle of the field just a few meters away from where he started and aimed into the radium-painted iron sights on his rifle onto the silhouette of a man. He squinted his right eye, gripped hard on the wooden rifle stock, and squeezed a trio of shots off from his carbine. Each one kicked into his shoulder, pushing the muzzle of his piece into the sky as the rounds flew towards their destinations. The bandits were still were focused on the machinegun positions, and had been caught off-guard by the southern flank’s first round of fire. Almost as soon as their shooting began, Yaglian’s team was off on a sprint to the position.

	This process could would be repeated a few more times until the southern flank reached the barriers of the camp. By now, the fighting had turned into a ferocious close-quarters match as the machineguns had called off their firing entirely. Yaglian’s team reached a sandbagged position where a guard was now laying, bleeding out against a rock. Another bandit was tending to his wounds as Yaglian’s youngest soldier, Lingorian, leapt up and over the barricade. Both of them stopped, only for a split second, and looked each other in the eye. Lingorian, without the betrayal of any emotion or thought, mechanically moved his rifle to his eye and took aim at the Georgians. He hesitated for a second as the rest of his team moved past him to clear through the encampment, before he saw the wounded bandit’s hand twitch. He didn’t look twice to find out if the men were armed or not as he shot both of them on the wet, dewy ground. Lowering the rifle, he moved up to join his team.

	As Lingorian bounded to the next piece of cover with Yaglian, he slammed his shoulder into a wooden box of supplies. The young Private caught his breath and fumbled to regain his footing. Both of them crouched down as another round of gunfire cracked through the camp. After looking back to Lingorian and the rest of his team, Yaglian peeked his head around the corner of the box and fired a few rounds in the general direction of the enemy. Two shots answered him, so he replied with another round of shooting. Another Armenian had come running up to their stack of crates and took aim, popping shots off as he slowed to a walk. Yaglian stepped out to join him, firing his own carbine until the Georgian militant ahead of him was knocked down to the ground. Inside a row of tents to the east, the two heard the report of a submachinegun rip through a section. A chorus of shots silenced the bandit, and the southern flank continued to move through the encampment.

	The largest structure was another wooden barn that housed the bandits’ supplies for its patrols. Sergeant Ozanian had consolidated his troops together around it as the rest of the camp was cleared. Enemy gunfire was lessened, and eventually silenced, and now Armenian troops had the barn surrounded. Inside, it was suspected that some Georgians were hiding in wait. Yaglian ordered his men to take up covered positions and watch the windows, and went to seek out his section leader. The Corporal turned back and jogged quickly to where he had killed the bandit just a minute earlier, finding Ozanian talking to the other team leader in his section. “Sergeant!” he called. “Hey, what are we doing about this barn?”

	Sergeant Ozanian glanced towards a guard position to the north as a short exchange of gunfire resulted in the injury of a Georgian as his knee was blown out. The wounded bandit tried to crawl away before he was stabbed in the back by an Armenian trooper’s bayonet. The Georgians were dead and all the tents had been searched. The only place left for them to be was the barn. The section leader looked back to Yaglian: “Are your guys hurt?”

	The team leader shook his head. “No, Sergeant, we didn’t have too much resistance on our corner. How’s everyone else?”

	“A couple troops in 3rd Section were wounded from that submachinegun, none very seriously. Our medic is with them, but that’s about it. We got lucky. Let’s hope it stays with us, George, because your team will be clearing that barn.”

	“Clearing it, Sergeant?” asked Yaglian, stunned. He looked back towards the structure, now surrounded by Armenian troops. “Can’t we just burn it down or something?”

	Ozanian frowned: “If we burn it down, it might set off the munitions inside. We might hurt ourselves in the process.”

	“And what happens if we get hurt while we clear it, Sergeant?” testily replied the team leader, before he stopped himself and calmed his tone down. “They’ve got the drop on us.”

	Ozanian twirled his mustache, a habit of his, and looked back at the barn. “We’re wasting time the longer we stay here. We have to finish this up so we can withdraw. This is a raid, not a siege.”

	Yaglian was about to argue further, but held his tongue. Frustrated at the prospect of leading his team into certain danger, he just nodded and acknowledged. “I’ll go in,” he said.

	Back at his team, Yaglian briefed the situation to his troops. Private Lingorian offered to take point as they kicked in the rear door, while the rest of the team would stream in and destroy whatever they found. It was suspected that there were two or three Georgians hiding, possibly up in the rafters of the barn, since visual inspection of the ground floor through the windows yielded nothing.  Without further word, Yaglian’s four troops jogged their way to the back entrance as the rest of their section covered them. Silently, they lined up behind the door, eyeing the rusty hinges keeping it in place. With two well-aimed rifle shots, the door’s hingeplates were blown off and a hearty kick was delivered by the Armenian soldier. The door collapsed inwards, breaking into two as it flew towards the inside of the barn while Lingorian stormed inside, sweeping the area with his rifle. The troops rushed in, underneath the cover of a covered rafter: Lingorian was the first to head beyond this, going into the clear open area in the center of the barn.

	Yaglian’s eyes were scanning a corner when he heard the gunshots: he looked back to Lingorian only as the young trooper fell to the ground in a crumpling heap. His other rifleman rushed over the wounded comrade and let loose a series of wild shots that reverberated through the entire barn. He, too, was felled by submachinegun fire. Yaglian and the only remaining member of his team both looked up to the rafter and began shooting through the wood floor. Bullets whipped up through the rafters and threw splinters of wood and hay around: one enemy was hit, falling to the ground with a thump and a cry. Yaglian fired until he ran out of ammunition, before quickly reloading and emptying his magazine at the rafter in a rage. He looked to Gagarian, the last member of his team, and nodded his head towards Lingorian and their other fallen partner. Gagarian, a veteran of the fighting, knew exactly what they were going to do. Both of them raised their rifles to cover the rafters as they walked backwards to the casualties.

	A Georgian militant popped out from behind a box and was swiftly eliminated by the two Armenians. They stopped at their comrades and kept scanning the rafters, looking for more movement. Yaglian thought he saw something and fired off four shots at a dark corner, but it turned out to be nothing. He turned to Gagarian and slapped his shoulder, signaling for him to get the casualties out of the barn. The strong, stocky trooper slung his rifle over his shoulder and picked up Lingorian, who groaned and grunted and clutched his stomach as he left a trail of blood out the door. Lingorian’s partner, Gaznian, wasn’t moving or making any sort of noise. Yaglian sidestepped closer to him, still keeping his rifle on the rafters, and lightly kicked him in the thigh. He didn’t stir. Gagarian arrived to drag Gaznian away, and Yaglian scanned the barn one last time before running out to find Sergeant Ozanian. The section leader had run to Private Lingorian along with the platoon medic as the other section withdrew to the north. “He’s hurt bad,” simply stated Gagarian as he dropped Gaznian beside Lingorian. “And Gaznian… I think he’s dead.”

	The platoon medic dropped his medical rucksack next to Lingorian, seeing the man groan and writhe in pain. It was a good sign, it meant that he was alive. Meanwhile, Gaznian was still staring at the sky with blank eyes and his mouth agape. The medic wasted no time, first pressing up the fingernail on his finger to try and evoke a response. When that failed, he scrambled over to Gaznian’s face and flicked his eyeball: still nothing. His last and most drastic option was to stand up, maneuver to Gaznian’s lower body, and deliver a swift kick to the groin that still wouldn’t rouse the man. The medic looked at Gagarian, and shook his head. “That one’s dead, but I think I can help the other.”

	Gagarian turned back to Yaglian, who had arrived to hear the medic’s report. He exchanged worried looks with Sergeant Ozanian, right before a yelp from Lingorian cut through the air as the medic stuffed dressing and gauze into his stomach wounds. Once the bleeding of the young trooper was stabilized, the medic gestured for Gagarian to come over and help him lift the body up and out of the way. The two took off running with Lingorian as Yaglian and Ozanian both dragged the body of Gaznian behind them. The section withdrew to the north to rejoin the other members of their flank, with the medic and Gagarian heading off to the trucks to rush Lingorian back to the border station where a medical team was being called up from the rear by radio. Within minutes, another whistle was blown and the west flank swept through just like the southern one just had. They encountered no resistance, blew their whistle, and the Armenians began running off to the trucks.

	As the troops withdrew, the order was given by the platoon commander to destroy the camp in its entirety. A single rifleman stopped atop the berm where the machinegun positions had just been located, withdrew a rifle grenade from his web gear, and screwed it onto the barrel of his rifle. Taking aim at the barn, he fired: the rifle grenade sailed through the air and impacted straight in the middle of its broad side. The munitions crates inside were detonated with the explosive and a brilliant fireball engulfed what had used to be the battle area. Bits of flaming debris ignited the tents and those began to burn as well. The platoon commander watched as his objective was destroyed, patted the rifleman on the shoulder, and both of them took off to rejoin their platoon. Within minutes, the Armenians were back in the trucks and gunning it back to the border as the sun cleared the morning mist. Elsewhere in the Georgian mountains, the other raids went according to plan as well: the Mountain Wolves would be stirred indeed.