A Little Bird Told Me

The smell of gunpowder, burnt flesh and blood was drying on the inside of my nose as I crept around the rubble of yet another house. There were no visible bodies, but I could smell them.

"Fifty meters to your right Sparrow."

I scratched a little at my ear and grumbled. Two years with the little receivers, affectionately known as 'birds' because of their sounds, and I still wasn't used to having voices so clear in my ear that I might as well have thought them.

"Yes Golden Eagle," I whispered and the little receiver's partner caught it and transmitted the words back to base. I shifted my pace a little and carefully counted out the long steps I took.

Fifty meters took me to another mound of rubble, but there was something different about this one. The smell of blood had been replaced by the scent of ozone and I told myself to step lightly; this place was booby-trapped and that meant there really was something there.

"Huh," I said aloud. "I honestly didn't think that crazy man was right."

Static flared a bit in my ear, followed by giggles.  "Of course I was right. I was there remember?"

I scowled at thin air and carefully picked my way around the mound. "I don't trust you," I growled.

"Of course you don't," the voice giggled again. "I'm as crazy as my code name!"

"You were given that code name because you were a traitor, laying your secrets in other nests," I snapped as I made my way to a black bar lying on the far side of the mound. It was humming slightly. "Though I still think you were planted here to starve us."

"Think what you like, but I've been useful so far, haven't I?"

"Golden Eagle was too lenient with you," I muttered.

"This cuckoo was too useful to him," Cuckoo corrected mildly. "You may want to watch how you unhook those wires. Brown first, then yellow."

"I know how to deactivate a bomb," I growled. "You just better not be leading me into a trap."

The silence that greeted me was far from heartening.

I was willing to give Cuckoo this: the base for the invaders was fairly cunning-they had destroyed one of our major cities and then dug it out again to use as their own base, using the rubble as cover for their movements. It was likely that without Cuckoo's help, we would never have found it; we were looking for something a little more obvious or at least something more sustainable. This though was almost genius as it was ignored by others and easy to rig with traps. I carefully disabled the bomb and then slipped over to what may have been their entrance; a slid over panel of wall which concealed a roughly dug out hallway going underground.

Having found it now, I at least had vague hopes that this mission would get a little easier. The quarters were cramped, but any guards left behind would be on equally bad footing and I had faith in my ability to shoot my gun and use my knife as necessary.

The bird in my ear chirped again.

"Cuckoo says you have to keep going straight for ten paces and then stop and put your hand on the panel to your right. It opens a secret route to their database. Once there, download the information regarding their main stronghold and blow the rest out."

"Yes sir," I whispered and walked the proscribed ten paces. There was nothing obvious about the tunnel around me; it was all walled in with metal plates, twisted and burned from the fires that had ravaged my city. However, I laid my hand where Cuckoo had said and to my considerable surprise, the metal plate nearly fell down into the hall behind it. I managed to catch it and lower it before its crashing could alert anyone.

The area behind the wall was black and I had to shake my chemical lighter back to grumbling life. The green light threw weird shadows around me and made the blackness beyond even deeper. It was a risk to have any lights, but I also didn't like the idea of breaking my ankle this close to the mission objective. I hadn't spent two days skulking around in the shadows of home and narrowly avoiding soldiers for nothing.

"Crazy as a Cuckoo Bird I am!" Cuckoo's manic singing ringed in my ears and I flicked the bird irritably. He giggled again as though he saw my annoyance and cut out.

The hall ended in a heavy iron door with a small voice box panel in the center. I groaned a little and rested my hand on my hip. "Now what?" I said and my voice sounded small and insignificant in the tunnel.

"CRAZY TRAIN!" Cuckoo shouted and I swore.

"All right," I said and leaning over, with my face burning, I whispered, "Crazy Train," into the receiver and to my considerable surprise, it beeped cheerfully and the door cracked open enough for me to lever it open.

The shot that greeted me grazed my shoulder and caused me to swear in surprise and pain. The bullet hit the wall behind me, trailing droplets of steaming blood behind it. The man at the other end of the gun was staring at me with three parts bravado and two parts fear.

He was young.

"You should probably run for it," I said flatly, clamping a hand over my shoulder while my other hand held up my gun. "This whole place is about to go up."

"No," he said, levelling the gun at my head. I sighed and lunged; he was just a volunteer, not a trained soldier and so simply yelled in surprise and let me knock the legs out from under him. He stared up at me with terrified brown eyes.

"They told me that no one could find this place," he whispered. "How…?"

I lay the barrel of my gun to his forehead and leaned down so that strands of my dark hair tickled his face and ear. He jerked in shock against me as I pulled the trigger. "A little bird told me," I murmured into his ear, but there was no one there to answer.