13096/La Madrina: Counterpunch

La Madrina: Counterpunch
Date of Scene:	16 October 2022
Location:	New York Docks
Synopsis:	Robbie and Janet are forced to respond to a surprise attack on one of La Madrina's outposts.
Cast of Characters:	Janet van Dyne, Robbie Reyes

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Janet van Dyne has posed:
"...and thanks to an increase in DEA and Coast Guard operations thanks to our intel, shipping of drugs into the New England area is down by eighty-three percent," Arthur says. Janet's soft-spoken assistant is also her right-hand man in this operation, and he's running down the numbers for their recent batch of acquisitions. It's just a few peope; Janet, Robbie Reyes, Arthur, and a couple of other highly trusted individuals with a personal connection to Janet.

Janet's anti-drug operation is a spectacular exercise in logistics, and thanks to a lot of good intel and decisive action, she has effectively created a cartel monopoly on the cocaine trade in new England. And put a pretty fair dent in the heroin import market as well, as dealers start trying to diversify unsuccesfully.

"What's the total reserve we have in stock?" Janet asks Arthur. He flips through his notebook.

"We have twenty thousand kilos, give or take. Five thousand kilos here are earmarked for distribution, and the rest are in secured facilities. The current market price for a kilo is..." Arthur flips through his notes.

"Ninety thousand dollars per kilo," he concludes. Janet beams a smile and looks around the room. "Cocaine now costs four times what it did when we got started," she clarifies. "And inventory is low enough that the wealtheri users are willing to pay a premium to keep their supply steady. From what I've heard from NYPD's sources, a dozen distributors have rolled up and fled the area after they couldn't pay back the Columbians. Dealers are resigning in droves," she declares, and slaps her palm against the table excitedly.

Robbie Reyes has posed:
Robbie's not *entirely* sure why he's been dragged by his ear into this meeting. He does not consider himself a trusted anything where Janet's concerned, so the summons was a bit of a surprise.

He is, nevertheless, here and ferociously loitering. He's swapped the battered leather jacket for a black hoodie with 'IntoxXxicateD' scrawled across the back, dark jeans with the knees shredded to oblivion, and his usual shit-kicking boots. The talk of kilos of coke and market control practices doesn't appear to overly interest him, but the palm slapped against the table sure wakes him up.

His eyes flick to Janet, then across to Arthur, and back again. "Heroin, huh? What happens when the Columbians roll up here lookin' for their money, though?" He seems genuinely curious, rather than simply argumentative. For once.

Janet van Dyne has posed:
"Natasha's been working up that angle," Janet assures Robbie. "Most of the heroin we're destroying or ensuring it gets 'confiscated' by the DEA and other agencies. She's also planted some larger stashes and laid paper trails to gangs like the Jamaicans and the Triad. It looks like they stole it from local distributors that we've hit. She did a pretty good disinformation campaign."

"The coke will get the same treatment. Obviously we can't just drop it in the toilet, it'll wreck the water supply. Nadia's working on a chemical solution that'll--"

Janet's cut off by the sound of a loud BANG, then shouting, then a great deal of noise from the warehouse floor. The socialite puts her veiled hat back on, resuming her guise of 'La Madrina', and moves away from the table to look downstairs.

"Looks like we're under attack," Arthur says grimly. "A raid?"

Janet squints downwards. "No. They're not wearing badges. Looks like they rammed a heavy truck into the front gate to breach."

She looks around, then makes a decision. "Arthur, burn everything we can't take with us," she says, and nods at the files and plans and the computers nearby. "Robbie, you get downstairs and slow them down. Try not to go all skull-y unless you have to, but for god's sake don't get killed," she orders him. "Let the mooks do the fighting and get our people out quickly. I'm going to call this in to the local DEA office." She picks up an old-fashioned land-line phone, plugs it in, and starts dialing a number.

Robbie Reyes has posed:
Robbie doesn't look entirely convinced. "You don't think they're running counter-intel on your 'disinformation campaign'?" He puts the words in air quotes with two fingers. "Maybe you don't know how bad these cholos want their money back, you think they're gonna let it just walk out the door like that."

He's about to offer his unsolicited opinion on the water supply treatment plan when *something* hits the building hard enough to make it shudder in its foundations. Immediately he shoves out of his lean, head on a swivel, lip curling like he wants an excuse for something to sink his teeth into.

Well, when *doesn't* he?

"Ain't that easy to kill, sunshine," he tells Janet, winks without breaking his stride, and prowls off to go do exactly that: slow them down.

Janet van Dyne has posed:
"Obviously, that's why I'm sending you down there," Janet tells Robbie-- but she flashes a grin at his determination, and turns her attention back to the task at hand.

Downstairs its turning into a bit of a situation. Gunfire is bursting out, automatic and handguns alike. Janet's people are either dealers recruited off the street, or carefully selected vigilantes aware that La Madrina has them on a short leash and aimed exclusively at dope dealers. It's not hard for Robbie to start giving subtle sigals for the core crew to start backing off and letting the cannon fodder move up and throw themselves into the enemy's teeth.

More vehicles show up, one crashing into the back of the first truck, the other colliding with the wall as they misjudge the location of a support strut. More men get out of the vehicles, armed for bear with rifles and grenades-- and it looks like someone's converted one truck into a lighr technical, and they're trying to mount a belt-fed machine gun up on it!

Robbie Reyes has posed:
It's definitely getting ugly, and fast. Robbie's no battlefield commander; and if he was, he wouldn't be in the back lines shouting orders at the cannon fodder. No, he's going to wade right in, all six feet and maybe one hundred seventy pounds of him, and make damn sure he draws the interlopers' attention.

Which, for a guy with tattoos scrawled up and down his arms, and a way of moving like a well-fed apex predator, does he even *need* to light his head on fire?

Two of the men with semiautomatic rifles pivot to fire on him, and he rips the top off a crate to use as a shield. Bullets thud, thud, thud, thud into it at a high rate of fire as he puts on a burst of speed, and flings the thing at one of them Captain America style. With.. middling results. Because he's no Captain America. It goes winging into a wall and shatters, and stunned thug #1 is met with a fist cracked into his skull. Thug #2 gets a thug #1 sandwich as Robbie tries to grab and slam one guy into the other.

And then, vaguely aware of the round he took in the side, he's making a beeline for the truck getting a machine gun mounted on top of it.

Janet van Dyne has posed:
Robbie plows into the first couple mooks pretty handily, but there's at least two dozen of them now, maybe more outside. It's turning into a full-scale assault, and another team breaks through the east wall and starts engaging the crew in a flanking maneuver. The defenders are forced to divide their attention and it abruptly changes the battlefield dynamic.

From high up, Arthur shoots out the headlights on the encroaching cars, and then the power gets cut. Abruptly the battlefield lurches into inky blackness, with both sides seeing very little except dazzling stars from errant bursts of gunfire. One attacker decides to pop up and hip-fire a half a magazine, and for his trouble is promptly ventilated by a substantial amount of return fire.

"Fuck, I can't see shit," someone hisses, from near enough to Robby that he can almost smell the guy's lack of bodyspray.

Robbie Reyes has posed:
Yeah, that guy doesn't need a weapon; he could kill these mooks with his BO alone. "No shit," Robbie mutters, attention focused on that truck. He shoulders his way past, dives low to the floor as another hail of bullets RATATATATATs past, and scrambles closer to the vehicle. Gripping the bottom edge of the frame, he attempts to flip it up and over onto its back with a growl of effort as the strain tears at muscle fibre and pops a tendon or two.

The goal? To crush that machine gun and the guy manning it-- and whomever he can catch on the other side.

Another attacker takes this opportunity to unload half a clip into the back of his leg, and he's knocked forward with a muffled grunt of pain, before turning around to face the guy. His eyes ignite one after the other, trailing embers and smoke into the dark, illuminating it like a pyre. "Your aim sucks," he snarls, his voice already starting to twist and bend and shear like metal under strain.

Then tink, tink, tink, tink, tink as the bullets start dropping to the floor and the wounds close over-- and he starts approaching the guy slowly while his face melts away. Hey, Janet wanted him to distract, so he's distracting.

Janet van Dyne has posed:
The truck goes over and the gunner jumps clear, but unlike in the movies he doesn't escape harm. He lands badly and breaks an ankle on impact. His buddy next to him isn't so lucky; his escape route's cut off by a heavy crate and he screams as the vehicle crashes down on his legs, crushing them and pinning him to the ground.

Then, of all things, a helicopter flies past and a spotlight floods the warehoues from behind the attackers. It blinds the defenders very effectively, and then the choppper gunner cuts loose with a machine gun, driving the defenders back.

"Jesus! Where did they get that kind of firepower?" Janet buzzes past Robbie's ear, raising her voice to be heard as small as she is. "I can't get near that chopper, Robbie, see if you can disable it or shoot it down or something. Otherwise it'll cut us to pieces. We're almost done with the evac!" she assures him, and flits off again to the rear of the warehouse to continue directing the retreat.

Robbie Reyes has posed:
Robbie should probably care about the guy he doomed to a slow, unpleasant death under the flipped truck. Maybe if he were someone like Cap or, say, Batman, he might. But he isn't. And he doesn't. Not with Eli screaming in his head, suffocating any rational thought.

Not when he's enjoying the sound of the mook with the rifle screaming as he's burned alive, burned to the ground where he stands.

Janet's orders barely make it through the roar of noise and bloodlust in his head, and he briefly seems to consider trying to snatch her out of the air and *crush* her just to see if she burns, too.

But she's gone, and he turns, takes a look up at his next target. Watches it maneuver in in that almost detached fashion of his, as the machine gun lights up with a spray of fire that turns one wall of the building envelope to dust.

Disable it is. The Ghost Rider's chain manifests out of.. well, probably Hell or something, but functionally nowhere. He winds up, and whips it at the chopper's landing gear, aiming to snag one of the skids and throw it off balance with a hard tug.

Janet van Dyne has posed:
Robbie is strong and powerful, no doubt. Even with the barest hint of the Ghost Rider's strength he's got juice to spare under the hood, more than most mortal men.

Robbie is-- for the moment at least-- still a victim of physics. And when the chain wraps around the skids, the helicopter fails to notice the tug. It jukes sideways and pulls Robbie up off his feet and into the air on an unplanned ride-along, his path forming an arc with a terminus right in the middle of a bunch of worn out old shipping crates.

The helicopter turns around and brings that gunner's door to bear on the gunmen below, bullets buzzing angrily through the air and the cacophany drowning out the rifles and pistols chattering beneath it. More of La Madrina's 'soldiers' go down, and it's enough for the rest to abandon their glorious stand and start fleeing in panic for the back of the warehouse and hopefully, safe exits beyond.

The machine gun stops singing for a moment and several loud *clanks* punctuate the deafening silence. Holes appear in the helicopter's hull and the gunner ducks from a near-miss, scrambling around out of the way. The pilot shouts into his headset and the rig banks back and away, hard, trying to clear the line of fire.

"<I'm out of precision ammo,>" Arthur says over the short-range radio. "<The chopper is lightly armored and I don't have anything that can penetrate the hull.>" There's controlled gunfire from the rear of Robbie's position, Arthur now laying down supporting fire meant to suppress rather than just eliminate enemies.

Robbie Reyes has posed:
Raw power will only get you so far, it turns out. And Robbie has a lot to learn about the concept of 'brains before brawn'. In other words, nobody would call him the sharpest knife in the drawer-- or maybe they would, but not in reference to his ability to think a situation through.

His boots dig into the ground, and for a just a moment it seems like he's going to gain traction. But the chopper's engines are simply too powerful. It veers off, strafing the building under attack, and his body crashes into the stack of crates, sending shards of splintered wood and whatever the hell was stored in them absolutely everywhere.

Snarling in pain, he grips the chain more tightly, then begins hauling himself up. Scaling it quickly one hand over the other-- SMACK into another crate as the chopper banks away sharply, but it doesn't deter him. Genius he may not have, but determination? Oh, he's got plenty.

Janet van Dyne has posed:
The helicopter is a small four-man unit, it's not meant for heavy work. So a two-hundred pound weight dangling from a chain off one of the skids, that's hard to miss. The gunner even sticks his head out the door to look down, then yells something at the pilot over their headsets. He descends two steps and starts trying to stomp at the chains. The real mysticism here is how neatly those got knotted around the skid with just a single whipping motion! Either he's doing something wrong or Robbie's chains are just too stubborn for some fool to kick apart, and he's making very little progress. When Robbie swings into view the guy grabs a handgun and fires down at the young biker, with nothing even approaching accuracy despite the short range. There's just too much bucking and moving going on for him to get a stable shot as Robbie climbs up to meet him.

Robbie Reyes has posed:
Robbie's no speedster, but he's got strength and agility in spades and a powerful desire not to play bowling ball with any more crates. Up and up he goes, teeth gritted as he hauls himself by his arms-- and resists Eli's voice screaming over and over and over to let him OUT.

Gripping the skid in both hands, he ducks his head as the shots are fired, managing to take a couple grazing hits to the top of his head and shoulder with a sharp hiss of discomfort. Then the guy's forced to reload, and he hauls himself up and inside, moving quickly. Disarm him if he can; break his hand if necessary. The helicopter's swinging wildly, and he nearly falls back out again as he's thrown to the floor.

If he's lucky enough to wrestle that gun away, now's his chance to shoot the gunner with his own weapon. And then two more shots to the back of the pilot's head. If he's lucky.

But the real question is, where did Janet go?

Janet van Dyne has posed:
The result is predictably gory. But yet again, physics proves to be a cruel mistress. Without a pilot's sure hand at the rudder the helicopter rotates left, then abruptly pitches right. The rotor blades smack into the warehouse and the dock and leave deep gouges in both, the arms shattering in a spray of aluminum and composite materials. The rotor pulls the cab of the helicopter around like a plaything, crawling and scrambling in circles like a top until it finally comes to a halt.

The sudden crash into the attack's forces seems to have more or less taken the fight from them. Bullets are one thing but very few people have the mettle to stand there unphased when metal screams and rends itself apart atop you. They're scattering in all directions, and the angry aftermath of the crash, police sirens can finally be heard approaching.

Robbie Reyes has posed:
Robbie tries to leap free before the chopper hits, and manages to hurl himself full force at -- you guessed it -- another stack of crates. Which fucking *hurts*.

Climbing back to his feet with a grimace, he takes his time tugging the chain loose from the wreckage of the helicopter and winding it around his wrist and forearm. The gun, unneeded, is tossed aside, and he casts about to try to spot the socialite as he picks through the remains of the warehouse. Who might still be a buzzy little thing.

Hopefully Arthur managed to get everyone evacuated in time.

Janet van Dyne has posed:
It seems there's little left but to flee. Flames lick the office above; it will look like a dealer war broke out and the dead were the unlucky participants. Evidence of Sinaloa and Columbian soldiers, international cocaine shipments, everything but the old burro hauling coca leaves down the mountainside. Of Arthur and Janet there is no sign, either. Best Robbie leaves before the cops arrive.

When the uniforms do get there it's quite a mess to untangle. Fires to put out, dealers to arrest, bodies to bag. The surprise assault looks like just another deal gone bad, but as Robbie leaves, he knows it suggests a much greater threat to the plan, lurking somewhere out of sight.