Yekaterina was about to reply to the driver’s question when gunfire reached them from somewhere up the stream of traffic. She pressed herself flat against the truck to give the roving display of recklessness a wide berth. Normally, she would’ve been worried about where and when the bullets would fall back down, but she didn’t have time for that today as a grenade-like object landed right beside the driver, placing her well within the kill zone by the explosion’s overpressure alone. Stuck prone under the truck, poor Gunther was dead to rights and she only had two, maybe three seconds to change her fate from ‘dead’ to ‘maimed’. Yekaterina took off towards the front of the truck, silently counting as she did.

One. Two.

She threw herself into the drainage ditch, shallow as it was, but minimal cover was better than none whatsoever. Between that and the truck’s left front wheel, the amount of shrapnel that would reach her should be reduced by a not insignificant percentage.

Three. Four.

What?

Five. Six.

The Russian chanced lifting her head up to glance back, her gaze meeting the driver’s, looking as befuddled as she was as he crawled from underneath the ZIL. “Fuck that for a joke.” she cursed under her breath, dusting herself off as she rounded the truck again, careful not to get run over. A flyer tied to a rock and thrown from a moving car puzzled the mind. That was something unlikely to happen even in Russia on a Friday night, and she considered herself fortunate the advertillerist aimed true and didn’t hit her instead. But since someone went through all that effort to get the flyer to them, it’d be impolite not to read it. The driver was already handing it to her anyway

A corporate cookout at the SAMC headquarters? The office should be reasonably easy to find, and sounded like a place mercenaries could be found at. Mercenaries looking for work perhaps, but what of those who already had a task in their mind? It was an option, a good fallback if nothing else. Having skimmed the offered piece of paper, she shoved it into a pocket of her windbreaker and flashed the driver a smile. “Change wheel now, change job later.” She spoke German, leaving out some articles and ignoring conjugation to match the driver’s speech as best as she could, holding her hand out, “I’ll help, give light.” she said, more a demand than an offer. “Go here often? This normal in Matanbai?”

[hr]
Talking to Gunther as they removed the dead tire didn’t yield any results, and as she stopped asking questions he turned to complaining about his shitty lot in life. 30 minutes of work and two hours of driving later, she finally stood in the capital. Gunther refused to take her to the SAMC headquarters directly, wisely choosing to replace the busted tire and be on his merry way out of this shithole back home as fast as possible. At least she would stretch her muscles after half a day of sitting near motionless.

The city itself looked better than the impression her briefing left her with. Besides the amount of guns being higher than rural Texas and the average education of those who wielded them equal or lower than Chechnya. The SAMC headquarters was another nail in the coffin of that illusion of normalcy, looking more like an unusually luxurious forward operating base than a corporate office. Some distance away from the gate, she made sure her sidearm wasn’t printing, wrapped the halligan in a spare shirt and buried it as deep in her backpack as she could and fished the flyer out of her pocket before approaching.

“[i]Privet![/i] Was told there was a shindig around here, is this the place?” she spoke to the merc at the gate, waving the flyer.
“[i]Oui[/i]. Name?”
“Yekaterina Belyayeva.” she introduced herself, “Need that spelled out?” she added with a raised brow.
The guard declined with a chuckle and directed her to the garden. He didn’t have to, the noise and smell of meat and grease was easy to follow. She positioned herself within earshot of the only Russian she could hear - a trio of ex-marines from Vladivostok who by the look and sound of it spent a few years in prison. There was also French, German, a few languages she couldn’t recognize and a wide variety of English, from Yankees through Aussies and Irish to something that sounded like Wales. “Quite a menagerie.” the fourth Russian muttered to herself in English, taking in the scene.