---------

The cargo door to the tank hangar slid open, internal security measures disabled to allow the ingress of fourteen boots, two sneakers, and a pair of wingtips. The RED team charged into the hangar, whooping and hollering, kicking up a mess of noise as their spy cloaked and peeled away from the pack.

The soft beep of a detonator activating was all the warning Scout had to skid to a halt and fling himself away, bringing his teammates to a stop as a line of sticky bombs rimming the entryway exploded, sending shrapnel and chips of concrete flying.

"Boom, you owe me five bucks, Cyclops!" the BLU Scout hollered, slugging his teammate in the arm as the Scot cursed and threw his bottle of scrumpy down from the catwalk to shatter on the ground below.

"Ahem."

"Wh—" Scout turned, only to find the barrel of a revolver pointed at his face, the RED Spy holding the gun aloft. He shrieked and dropped as Spy fired, the bullet missing him and managing to lodge itself into Demoman's shoulder, wrenching a scream from him.

"Go! Go! Go!" RED Soldier hollered, and the team charged into the room, bombs and bullets flying amid the roar of men now locked in combat.

*

The sound of screaming and an explosion made Miss Pauling's eyes shoot wide open. She pressed herself to the wall of the second floor basement, storage rooms forming a near-maze filled with trap doors around her.

Charging out of a hole that looked like it had been blasted into the wall ran an old man with a moustache, dressed like a cowboy. She knew from her mission prep that he was Revolver Ocelot. What she hadn't been prepared for was the fact that the man was now missing his right hand, severed just above the wrist. His stump bled profusely, and his face was white as a sheet as he charged down the hallway and toward the elevator, assumedly to seek medical help.

It was a clean slice, not ragged or choppy, so it wasn't from an explosion or crushing, but a blade of some sort. Even the Eyelander didn't cut that cleanly, so she knew the mercs couldn't have gotten down to this level yet. She pulled herself from the wall and threw herself in the direction of the blasted-out hallway, only to collide head on with an invisible man and crumple to the floor, her cloak shorting out.

It was him again, the cyborg ninja. Sparks arced across his suit, and he was shuddering and quaking, hissing and creaking out cries of pain as his stealth camouflage failed.

"You!" Miss Pauling gasped, pitching up onto her knees to check on him. "Are you—"

"Don't touch me!" Fox shrieked, backpedaling away from the tiny woman. "No! Not again! Never again, Clark! No more!"

"What?"

He reactivated his camouflage and scrambled to his feet, sprinting out of sight without another word, leaving Miss Pauling kneeling there in confusion.

"Colonel! Are you listening?!"

Pauling didn't have time to dwell on the cyborg, as a man's pained, panicked screaming about the Pentagon echoed down the hallway, followed by a gravelly voice. He sounded angry and terrified all at once.

"Now he's dead too! Don't lie to me!"

Pauling reactivated her cloak and headed for the sound, listening to one side of what was clearly a two-sided radio conversation.

"Some kind of poison?

"Damn!

"Can I trust her?

"Naomi, what was that ninja thing? A member of FOXHOUND?"

Pauling slowed down, moving as silently as she could both to avoid detection and to listen. Sure, the cyborg ninja wasn't part of her mission. But she'd ran into the man twice now, and her curiosity was getting the best of her.

"Are you sure?

"Is that right?"

The conversation yielded no more information, but soon enough the quiet footsteps of the man who'd been talking echoed in the hall, and Pauling pressed herself against the wall and went still to let him charge past. He was younger than his voice betrayed, a man who couldn't have been past his mid-thirties, with brown hair and an angular face. He wore a blue sneaking suit that hugged his body tightly. Any other woman might have lingered more on his startlingly fantastic ass, Pauling mused as she watched him go.

So, that was the legendary Solid Snake, huh?

When he was gone, Pauling stole through another bombed out wall into the room Snake had left, where a metal support for the building had been sunk into the earth. There were bullet holes pocking the walls, and the soot and chipping of explosives used inside. Most importantly, there was the slumped corpse of Arms Tech president Kenneth Baker with no fresh signs of physical damage, merely the wounds of torture, halted midway through a slow healing process.

Miss Pauling sighed and knelt beside him, then rifled his coat and pockets. Nothing. She tugged the oversized satellite phone from her belt and extended its antenna, then dialed in.

"Administrator, ma'am?" "What is it, Pauling?"

"Kenneth Baker is dead, ma'am. Nothing of value left on him; so either FOXHOUND's taken the data disk, or he's passed it off to someone else. Possibly Solid Snake, who was just with him."

"Annoying," the Administrator's voice hummed over the satellite phone. "I'll just have to get the succession plan for Arms Tech underway, so it doesn't interrupt business. They're already treading thin ice financially, close to becoming a liability as a subsidiary."

"Of course, ma'am."

"Shame. Baker was useful. He was good for outlandish projects like Shadow Moses. Understood that he couldn't say no. How did he die?"

"There aren't any marks on him, so it looks like something internal, possibly. "I heard screaming, so it was likely Baker. Maybe a heart attack?"

"Ah," the Administrator replied, a sigh following. "They deployed it, then."

"Deployed what?"

"Miss Pauling, whatever you do, do not come into contact with Solid Snake."

"I passed him in a hallway, ma'am."

"How close?" "Probably eight feet or so?"

"You should be fine."

"Ma'am?"

"Don't worry about it. More importantly, you're going to need to be more creative about getting to the cache without alerting FOXHOUND now that Baker's dead and unable to get you there. I trust you'll have that well in hand."

"Yes ma'am; I'll handle it. Over and out." Pauling hung up the phone and reattached it to her belt. She stood, looking down at Baker with a frown.