Disclaimer: I don't own this franchise even if the memorabilia in my study makes it look like I do.

Author's Note: I know nothing about cyber security other than I pay a monthly fee for my home computer's protection and that every time there is a security update at work the email server goes down. Please bare that in mind as you read the last part of the chapter, it sound feasible and works for the story so there you have it.

Those Little Moments

Chapter Four

They were almost through upper Manhattan when their brothers' phones went dead.

Donatello slid to a stop on the roof he had been crossing and began fiddling with his phone, ensuring that the disconnect was not at his end. At first, Michelangelo hadn't realized he had stopped and ran past him only to pull up short from the jump to the next roof when he realized that his brother had stop. He turned and jogged back over to him, "Yo Don, why'd you stop?"

"Leo and Raph's shell cells just went dead," Don said as he restarted the locater program with the vain hope that it would pick them up again. "Somewhere over on the far side of Harlem."

Mikey wilted where he stood. "Seriously Don, let's call in some backup or at least get someone to bring us the Battleshell. My tootsies are aching."

"It's almost two in the morning Mikey," Don said as he tucked the now useless phone away. He could only hope that there was a lead to their brothers whereabouts when they reached the spot their cells went dead at. "April has to be up at six to get to work on time. Leatherhead's nightmares have been horrible lately and I would rather he rest if he could and Master Splinter can't drive the Battleshell to save his life."

That being said Don started across the rooftop again, gaining speed to make the jump to the next roof. "What about Casey?!" Mikey called after his brother as he hurried to catch up.

"You call and wake him up!" his brother yelled back over his shoulder.

Mikey thought about that for a moment before grumbling to himself. "Seriously unfair dude."

About the only person with a temper worse than Raph when being woken up early was Casey. And last time he woke him Casey threatened to deshell him. Mikey honestly didn't want to know if that was possible or if Casey would go through with his threat.

He liked his shell right where it was.

-Break-

Leonardo woke with a splitting headache and a raging thirst.

He groaned and shifted slightly only to realize that he was crumbled face first into a corner with all of his weight resting on his shoulders. It was like he was haphazardly thrown in the corner and left where he laid. Since the Dragons had him that made all the sense in the world.

He finally managed to figure out which way was up and slowly rolled himself to one side. Now that he was sitting more against a wall and his hands were free he rubbed at his face. It was numb and his tongue felt swollen. "Raph?" he managed to croak before coughing drily. "Can you hear me?"

"Ugh… freaking shellheads…"

Raph's voice didn't sound much better than his but at least they were still together. "You okay?" Leo asked as he blinked. This wasn't good. He knew his eyes were open but he couldn't see a thing.

"Peachy. Where the frag are we?"

"Not sure," Leo reached into his belt and pulled out his shell cell. Honestly he was surprised that he was still had it. The Dragons knew they carried cell phones so why hadn't they taken them? "Let's see," he opened the phone, bathing the area with the bright LED light coming off the screen, casting eerie shadows about the walls.

Raph was across from him still laying on his stomach on the floor and looking both sick and miserable. He gave him a halfhearted glare as he swung the light over him, checking for injuries. "Eh… bright," he grumbled but took the abuse with no other complaints.

After he made sure that Raph was alright and just suffering the same post drugging illness that he was facing, Leo turned the phone back to him, wincing in the bright light but unsurprised that there was no signal. "Can't call for help," he reported as he turned the phone around and swept the room.

"Hey, are weapons are in here too," Raph said as he picked up one of his sais. His other sai and Leo's swords were lying on the ground nearby as if they had been thrown in with them. "That's never a good sign."

"No it's not," Leo agreed as he frowned at what he was seeing. They were in an oddly familiar small room but one he was sure he had never seen before. It was fairly small, maybe only eight by five feet max. As Raph stood up he had to hunch forward to avoid hitting his head so the ceiling height was not much, probably less than five feet.

"Are we in the back of a cargo van?" Raph asked in disbelief and it was only then that Leo's mind finally clicked at why their surroundings were both unfamiliar and not.

"Looks like it," he agreed as he swung his phone towards the far end to reveal the back double doors leading outside. "In fact I would say yes." The motor obviously wasn't running so that meant they were wherever the Dragons wanted them to be.

Raph had already stalked over to the doors and tried to force them open with no luck. Leo took a moment to pick up his swords and tuck them back into their sheaths as his brother shoved and jerked the door handles before finally giving up and punching one of them. "They left us with our weapons Raph, I highly doubt that we would be lucky enough for the doors to be unlocked too," he pointed out.

Raph took a sai from his belt and twirled it about his fingers for a moment. "They shoulda," he said as he caught it and stabbed forward with the tsuba. There was a loud crunch of metal as it pierced through the door seam. "I wouldn't have given them such a beat down when we get out of here," he continued as snapped the sai from one side to the other. Bending the metal away from the door seam and utterly destroying the lock and latch assembly that was inside the door.

He tucked his weapon away and pushed at the door, expecting it to open and frowning when it didn't. He shoved with both hands and still it didn't move. "Yo, give me a hand with this," he said over his shoulder to his older brother.

Leo looked up from where he was trying to see if there was enough of a signal to get even a text message out. He was worried about Mikey and Don and there was something about this trapped that seemed too easy. Raph's sudden request for help only made the slight unease at their situation spike even more.

Together they each took a separate door and shoved but they didn't move. "Together?" Leo suggested as he shifted over enough so that they could both put their shoulders into the same door. While the door did shift slightly it wasn't easy. "There is definitely something holding the doors closed," Leo said as he looked the door over again wishing there was a window so he could see what they were up against. "The walls might not be too thick. If I can stab a sword through one we might be able to cut a door in it."

"I don't think that's a good idea Leo." He turned back to where his brother was standing, some kind of gray goop was dripping from his hand and from around the part of the door he had damaged. The goop was oozing through the damaged latch slowly like a sluggishness bleeding injury.

"It's cement."

-Break-

Donatello stayed low on the roof as he double checked the program running on his phone. Yup. It looked like both Raph and Leo had been at about the center of the construction site when their phones lost connection. This just reeked of a trap.

"This stereotype is so overused," Mikey lamented next to him. "I mean seriously, dark and spooky construction site? It's like the Foot and the Dragons have lost the flair for trap laying. It's like they're barely even trying anymore."

Don ignored him and double checked the information on his phone again. "I can only roughly guess the area that their shell cells went down to about thirty square feet." He tucked his phone away. "After that we're on our own."

"Joy," Mikey grumbled as his brother looked over the scene for what seemed like the millionth time. Bored, Mikey's eyes wandered about the rooftop and then down to the street below them. Something on the curb caught his eye and he let out a little 'huh' before going to investigate.

After completing another sweep of the area Don shifted slightly where he still knelt. This did smell like a trap but if they were going to be ambushed he wasn't sure where it would come from. There was a lot of open areas, few place for even one Foot ninja to hide let alone two. The building was still in the process of being framed out and most of the area around it was cleared, only a few low piles of materials, several large pieces of machinery and a single heavy duty tool box that was about the size of a twin bed. Even the fencing was chain linked and since they were several stories higher Don was confident that there wasn't an ambush set to spring.

What were the Foot and Dragons getting at?

Mikey came back and something lightly tapped his arm. "Here dude," Mikey said as he turned to face him. "I brought you a present."

It was a straight piece of steel tube about half an inch in diameter but about six feet long. "Where did you find this?" Don asked as he took it, slipping back away from the edge of the building so he wouldn't be seen as he stood up. He tested its weight and spun it a few times as Mikey spoke up.

"It was down next to the curb. Must've fallen off a truck or something and no one noticed it sitting in the shadow of the ledge. I wouldn't have seen it if the street light hadn't been hitting it right."

It was a little heavier than he was use too and maybe a closer to seven feet than he originally thought it was but it would do for now. "Thanks Mikey," he said as he tucked it away and moved back up to the edge of the building alongside his brother. "Keep your eyes peeled," he said as he looked over the area below them one last time. "Be ready for anything."

"No worries there. Even if Hun shows up in a tutu and starts the Macarena my camera phone is already ready for all the blackmail pics I'm going to be taking."

-Break-

Leo was going to end up dulling the shell out of his blade but he'd rather snap both his swords as long as it got them out of here.

Raph's discovery of the cement leaking through the door was all he needed to put the strange pieces of this trap together. They had been thrown into the back of a cargo van which had then been buried in cement, probably after the van had been driven into a hole. That would help to explain their odd half thrown half/half collapsed positions when they had woken up.

"Ready?" Leo asked only waiting for the small nod from his brother before counting down. "One. Two. Three!" Together they thrusted the sword up, their hands overlapping on the hilt. There was a resounding clang as the sword's point slammed into the roof of the cargo van and the vibrations wracked his arms and hands. They had been numb from the first few hits but now they were so numb it hurt.

"Uh.. shell Leo we didn't get through that time either." Their best course of action was to try and escape through the roof of the van. If they were in a hole filled with cement going through the sides would be a waste of time. Going through the ceiling, while they would both get coated in cement was the better choice. It was highly doubtful that the cement that leaked down through the hole above them would fill the van before they could crawl out.

"Give me a minute," he said as he too glared at the ding in the ceiling. "I can't feel my arms."

"I can't either but we're running out of time Leo," Raph pointed out.

"Alright, let's try again," Leo said tiredly as he held the sword aloft again and Raph wrapped his hands over his.

Both of them were already panting like they had gone on a run around the city and that was all they needed to figure out their air was running out.

-Break-

"Okay so what was the whole point of this again?" Mikey asked in frustration as they wandered through the construction site for the eight time looking for clues. They were both cautious the first four times but now it was more than obvious that there was no one there, possible since the construction workers went home the day before. "I think that your phone's on the fritz."

"No, everything is working correctly, Mikey," Don said from where he was standing, consulting his phone for a the third time since they got down into the site. "They were definitely here for a bit before the signals went out."

Mikey sighed and glanced around the barren site again. "Well maybe they buried them in the dirt and then hauled Leo and Raph off elsewhere?" He guessed as he kicked at a small stone and began to pout as he walked around trying to make it look like he was doing something besides waiting for Don to come up with a new plan.

"Unlikely," Don said as he looked over the confusing array of tracks and tire marks on the ground. He had been trying to make sense of it but the Foot and Dragons' activities were marred by the footprints of the workers from the day before. If anything he was just giving himself a massive headache. "A couple feet wouldn't have enough density to prevent the signals from getting out. Now if they put them in a metal box it would be like what just happened to us in the van earlier."

"Maybe they were thrown into another armored van like us? Oh no, if they got taken to Jerse- Oh ew! Ah gross," Mikey complained mid-sentence as he stepped back away from what he had thought was a solid concrete pour. "Shouldn't they have a sign saying wet cement or something?" He griped as he tried to shake the cement off his foot with limited success.

"Wet cement?" Don parroted as he looked back at where his brother was trying to flick the rest of it off his foot. Don started over, pulling his steel pipe bo from his holder. "Even if they poured that at five in the afternoon it would be set a lot more than that." He stuck his bo into it and it easily slid down about four feet.

"Don't tell me they buried them in cement," Mikey said looking very unimpressed as Don pulled his bo free and stuck it into the wet cement in a different spot and at a slight angle. "Seriously I'm going to have to have a talk with those guys the next time I run into them about creativity."

There was a dull thump from the end of his bo. "I found something, metal by the amount of vibrations I have traveling up my arm from hitting it."

"Ten bucks it's a truck exactly like the one we were stuck in earlier."

"You're on," Don said giving his brother a quick handshake as he dropped the cement covered pipe on the ground. "Tell me when I've hit something," he said as he pointed to an excavator that had been left on site before heading for it at a quick clip.

"Um… How are we going to cut through the roof of the truck? Or are we going to go ahead and just pull the whole thing out?"

The door to the cab was unlocked and it didn't take much to hot wire a bypass to start the rig up. "I'm pretty sure the hydraulics on this thing can open that truck like a tin can!" Don yelled over the sound of the engine kicking on. He knew he had to work fast but still be careful. The excavator was going to wake up half the neighborhood but if he wasn't careful he might accidently crush the truck.

Mikey had no training in ground signaling but it was easy enough to get the gist of things with a thumbs up or a furious kill sign as he looked at what Don was doing with absolute horror playing across his face. It was over the top and overly dramatic but it worked. Under his careful and exuberant guidance Donatello first scraped all the cement of the top of the truck and then settled the bucket down onto it. With a signal from Mikey and activating the actuators that rolled the bucket back towards him, Don pierced the top of the truck and then pull the arm back, ripping the top open like a cheap can of tuna.

Mikey gave Don a thumb up and drew a finger across his throat in the class kill it signal before peering back into the hole. "How are you guys holding up?"

Both Leo and Raph were still picking themselves up off the floor, probably having hit the deck and covering their heads when Don started on opening the roof. Both were sucking in air hard and Mikey was worried for a moment that they both were going to keel over from heart attacks. "We're good Mikey," Leo was forcing himself to draw air in and hold it for a moment before letting it out. Shell, fresh air had never been so good.

"Cut it a little close didn't ya?" Raph grumbled as he took Mikey's offered hand and pulled himself out of the truck with Mikey acting as a base. "Another few minutes and we would have both been passed out on the floor."

"On both accounts," Don said as he raced over to the edge of the hole and offered Leo a hand. Several dogs were barking nearby and there were sirens in the distance. "Let's get out of here before the cops show up."

The police arrived minutes later to an empty construction site and what appeared to be a van buried in cement and partially excavated with its roof ripped open. The senior office sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, "So much for a simple disturbance call," he griped while his younger partner shone a flashlight down into the open space curiously.

Neither of the officers were aware that they were being watched by a group of mutant turtles on the roof of a nearby apartment building. They had been fine leaving the scene but as Raph and Leo began to climb they started breathing heavier than normal. Don called a halt when they reached the rooftop. The elder two turtles were obviously still suffering from oxygen deprivation.

"I dodn't know about you guys but my feet hurt," Mikey whined from where he was sitting on not quite look out duty on top of the shed covering the roof access after both groups had shared the individual adventures with each other. "Seriously, I've been all over the city tonight and that's not even exaggerating anything."

"This was all just a cover up," Leo restated his early theory. "They were trying to distract us from something."

"And I say we go find out what," Raph growled in agreement.

"It's going to have to wait," Don said, acting as a voice of reason. "Neither of you are doing well, whatever that gas was that Hun got you with has only been exacerbated by the lack of oxygen in that van. I need to do a full toxicology set on both of you. Besides it's pushing four and Sensei is probably worried."

"And so is my bed," Mikey said continuing his pity party. "And Klunk! Shell at this rate he might miss breakfast!"

"Oh and Mikey," Don said with innocent sweetness. "It was a cargo van not a truck. You owe me ten bucks."

"Shell even my piggy bank is being made to suffer?! Will this night ever end?"

It did eventually end after a long discussion with Master Splinter at the kitchen table over a pot of tea as Donatello went back on forth from his brothers to the lab. After their Father was caught up on what had happened he let them off of morning practice and after Donatello declared that Leo and Raph's bodies would naturally break down and dispose of the chemicals that was only adding to their fatigue with no added complications, he order his sons to bed to catch up on some much needed sleep for the day.

It wasn't until around three in the afternoon, as Mikey was starting to make a late lunch and even later breakfast that Don came over for more coffee and some papers in his hand. "I think I figured out what the Foot and the Dragons were up too last night," he announced to his still waking up family as he dropped the papers on the table near Leo.

Leo took several and flipped through them as Don kept talking. "Last night a computer electronics company about a block from where we were ambushed was broken into and had several hundred thousands dollars in computer parts were stolen."

"A typical robbery like that doesn't sound like something that would warrant all the running around we did." Mikey complained from where he was starting to put pancake batter into the skillet.

"The robbery was most likely just a front," Don answered as he reached into the stack of papers he brought over and pulled one from it. Handing it to Leo, "Less than a year ago that same company was awarded a government contract to develop a new missile guidance program."

"Steal the computer parts and no one would check to see if there was an intrusion against the mainframe," Leo said grimly as he continued to scan through the documents.

"Oh no, they would have checked," Donatello corrected him. "But they wouldn't have checked to deeply. The Foot probably copied everything during a program update or piggy backed on a security scan. That wouldn't have alerted the company's cyber security programs and wouldn't be flagged in the history as malicious activity."

"So what? The Shredder has missile codes now?" Raph was still clinging for dear life on his first cup of coffee and had spent most of the conversation until now with his arms folded and his head down on them.

"No but he does have one shell of a good program to launch his own."

"Can you hack in and delete it off their servers?" Mikey asked as he flipped the first batch of pancakes.

"Considering the last time I managed to get in there was after convincing a bunch of hackers in Europe to try to get in and then slipped through the chaos of them bombarding the firewalls using some coding flaws the April pointed out and even then I was only able to navigate in there for about thirty seconds before I was detected and had a malicious worm program back fill into my system which took down three of my dummy servers and forced me to cut the power to the whole lair before it could trace our location and made me rebuilt half my mainframe." Don ticked off each instance with his fingers. Mikey at least had the decency to look contrite. "No I don't think that's a good idea. Especially since I know they have beefed up their security even more after that little incident."

"Besides by now they probably already have everything backed up, both on and offline," Leo dropped the papers back onto the table with a sigh. "About the only thing we can do is be ready for when they decide to employ it."

"And when they do," Raph said as he finally sat up off the table. "I got dibs on Hun. I owe him a knuckle sandwich or five for last night."

"Speaking of owe. Mikey! Where's my ten bucks?"

"Errr… Can you take an I owe you?"

"You were betting without money again?"

"Dude! Yesterday was new comic book day. I need to feed my need!"

Leo looked over at Raph as the argument continued in the background. "I want to say something along the lines of 'at least their arguments aren't serious' but Don's only on his second cup of coffee isn't he?"

"Yup," Raph agreed watching the scene in amusement. "That and he's only like ten bucks away from that shiny new welding hood he's been drooling over for the past month."

"Don, put down the tea towel! Put down the tea towel! SHELL! That hurts! Don! Stop it!"

~Fin~