Hunters Chapter Two
Chapter One
Two - The BeginningThree years ago
They had been chosen selectively from different divisions. They were the best of the best, young and hungry, and that’s exactly what the NIS wanted in a special unit.
--
Kim Jonghyun entered the apartment silently, one ear plugged with a bud to his mp3 player.
He was carrying a duffle over one shoulder, a suitcase in one hand, and then a large long case that looked like it was an instrument case. In reality, it held Jonghyun’s prized SPAS-12, a riot shotgun he had gotten in Italy and then smuggled home since the gun was considered too powerful for import. It also held Jonghyun’s other shotgun, the Heckler & Koch Fabarm FP6 Entry, a gift from his former teammates.
Jonghyun was the type of person that made people laugh and smile. A bit loud and obnoxious, he had been that kid in the neighborhood that somehow always managed to get into trouble in snap and yet, get out of it with just one charming smile.
He had been a just little too fearless and just a little too adventurous for his own good, starting with simple sports like soccer and diving and then working his way up to more extreme sports like street luging and BASE jumping.
How he got into guns and CQC was a complete accident. He had been running late to meet friends at a karaoke bar, so he had decided to take a shortcut through a red light district. Just his luck, the then seventeen year old Jonghyun had barged into a standoff between an undercover cop and the drug lord who had managed to bust his cover.
One of the gangsters had grabbed a surprised Jonghyun by the throat, slamming the boy into the ground and then holding the barrel of a Grandpower K100 to his head. Jonghyun had laid there, nose bleeding and staring at the cop in horror. The man had taken one look at the boy and dropped his own Beretta Cougar and kicked it aside, holding his hands up in surrender. The main drug lord had laughed, kicking the cop to his knees and tapping him on the cheek with the barrel of his pistol.
Jonghyun would never forget the look on the gangster’s face when the cop had suddenly grabbed the man’s wrist; twisting it unnaturally and turning to it fire a shot at the man holding him down. He immediately pulled away from the fallen gangster and hid in a corner, watching as the undercover cop moved quickly and swiftly, using only his gun to disarm and knock out his opponents.
After reaching home, Jonghyun had researched fighting styles to learn how the cop had been so powerful and found out Close-Quarters-Combat, a style of fighting used by military and cops in short range situations. Within a few months, Jonghyun had learned the basics and by the time he graduated high school, he was already well known to quite a few law enforcement trainers. It wasn’t a surprise then when Jonghyun had joined the police force after graduating from high school.
After spending three years on a SWAT team, he had been picked up by the National Intelligence Service. Specializing in weapons and assault, the young man was a juggernaut, capable of performing anything from assassinations to becoming a one-man army capable of taking down up to a dozen opponents on his own. When he had been chosen for a new special unit, the young man had been honored, but at the end of the day, Jonghyun was still just the loud kid from Seoul who was a little too fearless and a little too obstinate for his own good.
The young man stepped into the main room and realized he wasn’t the only one in the apartment.
--
Lee Jinki looked up from the pan which held his eggs to see a young man loaded with luggage walking in. The man had a strong muscular build without being overly large or tall, but Jinki could see by the way he held himself that the young man was skilled.
The young man bowed, surprisingly bending to a full 90 degrees.
“I’m Kim Jonghyun,” he introduced, setting down his suitcase to hold out his hand.
Jinki took it immediately and found himself impressed by how casual the young man’s handshake was, with no undercurrent of posturing.
“Lee Jinki.”
Jinki watched Jonghyun nodded and headed over to the table where a note from the commander was sitting. Turning back to his eggs, Jinki continued to sneak glances at the young man as he read.
Jinki knew of Jonghyun, mostly from gossip in the canteen, but he knew that enough of it had to be true to warrant Jonghyun’s presence on the team.
Jinki himself had been surprised when he had been chosen. He knew he wasn’t the most skilled with firearms or explosives. Frankly, Jinki sometimes wondered how he ever got through basic cadet training. He was constantly either pinching his own fingers in a gun’s slide or forgetting to remove the safety before firing.
Jinki had been the klutz in school, tripping over anything from tables to shoelaces to plain old dust. His affable smile had earned the nickname of ‘Dubu’ and he always been the boy that everyone assumed to get married straight out of college and then be taken over by his wife and children. What Jinki had never advertised was a childhood filled with learning traditional forms of combat.
Jinki wasn’t sure how it had started. Had his grandfather just looked at him one day and nodded, thinking ‘This kid will be a great fighter someday’? Whatever had prompted the man, Jinki had been barely three when his grandfather started drilling him in basic Taekwondo. By the time he was ten, Jinki was winning Taekwondo competitions left and right. By thirteen, he had mastered both hapkido and judo; and at seventeen, he had spent two years living Hong Kong, learning Wing Chun from the family of its greatest teacher, Ip Man.
The young man had no idea his favorite pastime would take him out of a normal life and into a lifestyle that movies were based on. He had just graduated university with his degree in psychology when the NIS had approached him. Within a few months, he had managed to not only impress his superiors with his skills in the traditional forms, but also his ease at picking newer styles like Krav Maga and Muay Thai.
“So you’re our leader, huh?”
Jinki jumped at the sound of Jonghyun’s voice, nearly dropping his plate of eggs. He then realized that Jonghyun was referring to the set pecking order of the team.
He blushed.
“Is that okay with you?”
To his surprise, Jonghyun grinned, his face lighting up warmly.
“Yeah. After all, I’m kind of a fan. I used to watch you spar all the time,” the young man admitted.
Before Jinki could respond, the door opened again and another young man entered the room.
--
Lee Taemin hadn’t planned on joining the force.
Taemin had grown up with a normal, if boring, life. A stay-at-home mother, a working father, and an elder brother. He had been a good student, perhaps a little shy but dedicated to his studies. Sure, he loved to dance in his free time, but Taemin had always had his eye on the prize and that perseverance had won him many awards in science and gotten him into the best colleges in the country. He still remembered the look of pride on his father’s face when they had read his acceptance letters together.
But then, his second year of being a chemistry major at Korea’s top most university, his father was suddenly diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Realizing that someone needed to take care of the family, the young man had withdrawn from college and enlisted with the knowledge that his service would at least pay for his father’s care. To the young man’s surprise though, the army had told him to re-enroll into classes and continue his education in chemistry.
Within a few years, he had graduated with top marks and become the army’s best known chemist, capable of anything from purifying drugs to making the best smokeless bombs. The army allowed the young man to experiment and Taemin had found himself limitless with the resources available. Joining bomb squads and working in narcotics, the young man made a name for himself as being quick-witted and sharp, earning more experience than most men twice his age.
Shyly, Taemin bowed and greeted the two men standing in the main room of the apartment. The young man couldn’t help but feel awkward in his black suit staring at the shorter man in jeans and the taller man in sweats.
“Hello. I’m Lee Taemin,” he introduced after a moment of standing awkwardly.
To his surprise, the shorter man in jeans smiled and reached out a hand.
“Kim Jonghyun. I’m not surprised to see you on here. Your record is amazing.”
The other man also smiled, albeit sheepishly.
“Lee Jinki,” he introduced, holding out his hand as well. “I’m not as familiar with records as Jonghyun, it seems.”
Taemin found himself smiling in response.
“It’s not that big of a deal. I just had a few big cases that got talked about a lot.”
The snort behind him made him pause.
“If you’re gonna equivocate, I’m gonna barf.”
--
When he was ten years old, Kim Kibum’s parents decided that their lifestyle as high fashion photographers was too deviant for a young child and dumped him in Deagu with his great-grandmother. The unexpected move to a place he never been before to live with a woman he didn’t know had been the hardest thing for the boy. He had responded with fits of anger or bouts of starvation, refusing to even drink water.
It had taken once smack from his grandmother to stop his whining.
It had taken one hug from his grandmother to have him falling apart into her arms.
Within months, Kibum had forgotten all about his parents and fallen in love with his grandmother and the simple, happy home she gave him. Kibum’s grandmother was an old-fashioned woman, simple in her ideals and taught Kibum everything she could. She spoiled the boy with food and stories of the past while keeping him grounded with chores and a normal day-to-day schedule. It was boring, but it was heaven on Earth for Kibum.
When he was sixteen, his great-grandmother passed away after battling kidney disease and Kibum’s idyllic life was torn away again. His parents hadn’t been able to attend the funeral and had only sent an envelope with a plane ticket tucked inside. Having no other choice than be dragged all over the world with his parents, Kibum boarded the flight and watched his life disintegrate. The teenager found living in countless foreign countries was boredom, his parents keeping strict rules and leaving him locked in an apartment or hotel room more often than not. Having no other outlet, Kibum acted out the only way he knew how to, by throwing himself into his laptop.
Within a month, he learned how to write in BASIC, java, and C++. Within six months, he was rewriting codes of all the programs on his laptop. Within a year, he had hacked into his parents’ bank account, transfered over 300,000 British pounds sterling to his own, and created emancipation documents in order to escape his parents.
Too bad the second he landed in Incheon International, he had been arrested and placed in military custody.
The military had given the seventeen year old a choice, either join the army or rot in jail for thirty years for grand larceny and age fabrication. Kibum had laughed at the man’s face before commenting about how it wasn’t much of a choice. Fast forward seven years and he was the best hacker the army had. Kibum had written most of the army’s firewall protections along with all of the phishing and pharming traps that the army used for intelligence gathering.
“So are you just going to stand there?” Kibum asked dryly as the younger man gaped at him.
Taemin flushed and jumped out of the slender hacker’s way. The slender man passed the youngest by to walk over to the orders left on the table. He skimmed it quickly before turning back to his new teammates.
“Are you going to keep staring?” he asked, smirking.
“Stop being such a whiny bitch, Kibum-ah and move out of my way.”
--
Choi Minho wasn’t your average special agent, especially since he looked like he deserved to be in Armani underwear ads rather than being a special agent.
Minho had been a world cup team hopeful as a teenager, exceptionally talented on the field and his good looks had helped, earning him advertisement deals even as an amateur league player. His parents hadn’t like the idea of him being so popular, but Minho enjoyed it, coming alive when performing to his audience, whether on the field or in front of a camera. The young teen had found himself able to charm his way through almost anyone from the reporters to the make-up artists to his teachers.
Perhaps his own feelings of being in his perfect elder brother’s constant shadow prompted him to do riskier and riskier things, but Minho loved the adrenaline rush of taking on a different role and winning his way by using the right words, the right look, the right body language. He spent so much of his childhood comparing himself to his brother and finding himself lacking, that the sudden shift in being the sought after one became an addiction for him.
It all came to a head though, when he was nineteen and tried charming someone better than him. He had been invited to an exclusive poker game by an actress. Minho barely remembered who she was, recalling only that she smoked heavily and wore too much mascara, but her décolletage was always open and she seemed not to care what he did when she was too drunk to watch him.
The man who had caught him was an agent for NIS working to trail a new drug that was being dealt in high end clubs, a hallucinogen that was had no distinctive feature that made it hard to find. Minho had just been at the poker game in order to get sponsors for his national team bid when the agent had grabbed him, pulling him into the bathroom and slamming into the wall. Minho found himself being accused of being an accessory to possession and distribution of an illegal narcotic unless he helped the agent bag the actual perpetrator.
Minho had managed to find the dealer by dancing with the many women as the game was played. He teased and flirted, plying them with alcohol until they began to whisper and tell him the rumors and gossip. With just a few charismatic looks and touches, he found a girl that had been with the dealer and she was more than willing to talk when Minho placed his hands on her thighs and his mouth at her neck.
The agent had been impressed with his casual command of a room and recommended him to the NIS. Minho’s family had been surprised when he had announced his attention to enter the military, giving up his football career. But Minho had been convinced by that incident. The adrenaline rush he had been chasing after was right there; the perfect audience being those he could charm and con, and the added benefit of catching the ‘bad guy’ was exactly what he wanted. The army had agreed with him and he spent years learning foreign languages, body language techniques, and special ops training along with traditional cadet training. When it came to joining a new special unit, Minho had jumped at the chance like he did anything else in life, with endless charisma and ambition.
Minho smirked at the affronted look the shorter man shot him before entering the main room and dumping both his and Kibum’s bags to the side. The hacker just rolled his eyes as the tall man straightened up and flashed their new teammates a warm smile.
“Hello,” he bowed. “I’m Choi Minho.”
The other three stood there for a second until the muscular man with earphones dangling around his neck stepped up.
“I thought you were a model or something?” he asked confused.
Minho grinned.
“I have been a model and an actor and a football player,” he confirmed with a smirk.
Kibum rolled his eyes at the man’s posturing.
“Meet NIS’s best kept secret, Choi Minho, chameleon extraordinare.”
--
The chairman stared at his subordinate.
“Do you think they’ll be able to do it?” the younger man asked, nursing a scotch with ice.
The older man sighed, setting down glass.
“They have the potential to be as good as the first team if they do,” he replied before raising his glass in a salute. “I wish them luck.”
-TBC-
(A/N): So we're flashing back. I have a vague idea about what I want to accomplish, but I think I might need to write out an outline or else I'll forget everything.
I know the biggest shock is Taemin being the wiz rather than Jinki, but I think Jinki is more determined than just natural ability while I've heard rumours that Taemin is very intelligent naturally. Plus, I had already decided on Jinki being the martial arts genius, so he couldn't have both. As for Kibum, I know I went a little cliched by making him a little bitchy, but I hope to make him grow with the story.
To be honest, I think only Jonghyun and Jinki are fully thought out, while the other three need work. So we'll see where this goes.
Leave me a line to let me know what you think! Your input always means so much to me!
PS. This is totally dedicated to
kiyabaybee for reminding me about this project. I had pretty much forgotten about this because of Make Me Warm.
Chapter Three