S02E17 - Foxhole

"Foxhole" is the seventeenth episode of Season 2 of We Can Fix Pawbert. It continues the siege arc opened by "The Wall", picking up three hours after Clawrence Lynxley's first public broadcast with the pack's safehouse under tactical assault.

Synopsis

Three hours after Clawrence Lynxley's broadcast, tactical teams under Javier Croft surround the safehouse at Site Two. Nick, on watch, hears the silence that precedes an attack and wakes the others. The Precinct 99 audit's upgrades hold at the back door and roof hatch, but attackers come through the kitchen window behind smoke grenades. Luther and Nick put down three of them. Nick has Luther and Judy fake a defense at the front windows, sends Pawbert down the interior hallway, and crawls a duct to the garage roof to drop smoke. The pack drives out through the garage. At Precinct 1, Clawrence hijacks the broadcast again. He holds the second weather wall junction and will bring it down unless his nephew comes alone to Pier 39 by midnight. He says Pawbert has something he needs. Chief Bogo splits resources between the junction, the harbor, and the precinct, and sends Luther to the junction over his objection. The wall's functionality fluctuates all day; both positions stay quiet. Ninety minutes before the deadline, Pawbert reads the demand as Lynxley misdirection. The harbor is a diversion, and the split has pulled every tactical unit away from him. Judy spots an operative at the front desk by his tactical boots moments before twelve armed mammals blow the doors open and the lobby becomes a firefight.

Plot

At three in the morning, three vehicles park in the residential street outside Site Two with their headlights killed. Javier Croft runs the target briefing from the lead vehicle, working through surveillance photographs of the pack: Luther is to be treated as lethally capable, Judy as fast and unpredictable, Nick as clever. Pawbert is the package, wanted alive and functional; the rules of engagement for everyone else are to neutralize. Javier splits his mammals into three teams for the back door, the roof, and the kitchen window, and gives them two minutes.

Inside, Nick is holding the watch position when he notices a hole in the city's ambient noise, the kind of quiet that only happens when mammals are working hard not to be heard. He learned to read it on the street years before the badge. He wakes Luther with the single shoulder squeeze that serves as their code, and Judy is already awake and armed when he reaches her door.

The upgrades ordered after the Precinct 99 audit do most of their work in the first minute. The reinforced back door frame refuses to give, the upgraded roof hatch lock defeats the team on the ceiling, and the re-angled kitchen camera puts three attackers on the monitor as they cross an approach that would previously have been a blind spot. The one gap the audit could name but not close is the kitchen window, whose security film and sensors are still on order, and that is where smoke grenades and the assault come through. Nick strobes the overhead lights into eyes adjusted to the dark and Luther takes the blinded jaguar from the flank; Nick shoves the kitchen table into a wolverine's stride and Luther puts him down; a caracal makes straight for Pawbert and Luther intercepts her before she covers half the distance. The three of them are down inside twelve seconds.

With at least four more regrouping outside and the position no longer holdable, Nick builds the escape around what the attackers expect. Luther and Judy stage a defense at the front windows, throwing books against the glass and shouting positions to each other until the remaining shooters commit and stack for a front breach. Pawbert crosses the windowless interior hallway alone to the garage door. Nick climbs into the HVAC access he crawled during the heist, comes out on the garage roof, and fixes the positions of the three mammals covering the doors below before dropping a smoke grenade lifted off a downed operative. Luther comes through the pedestrian door with suppressive fire, Nick drops from the roof onto the hyena Gnashton and chokes him unconscious, and the pack takes the ZSI vehicle out through a garage door that is only half open. En route, Luther reports to Agent Ross: eight to ten hostiles, three confirmed down, Javier Croft coordinating.

Chief Bogo meets them at Precinct 1, takes the report, and checks the pack for injuries. The building has not stopped moving since the wall came apart. Screens across the bullpen carry climbing casualty counts and infrastructure estimates, and a young gazelle named Springwell recognizes Nick from the Lynxley case and asks whether the safehouse attack is real. In a secure briefing room, Ross reports partial plates and shell companies, and Pawbert tells the room that Clawrence will not be found — having failed to take him at the safehouse, he will simply try again.

He is right within minutes. Every screen in the precinct cuts to Clawrence, who tells the city that the second weather wall junction between the Rainforest District and Savanna Central is within his reach and will join the first unless his conditions are met by midnight. The condition is one mammal: his nephew, delivered alone and unescorted to Pier 39 at Zootopia Harbor, in exchange for the junction and the technical specifications to restore the damaged wall. He calls it family business rather than punishment and says Pawbert has something he needs. Every officer in the bullpen turns to look at Pawbert, standing in the briefing room doorway.

Bogo refuses outright to hand over a protected witness, and Ross concurs. Pawbert catches on the verb: Clawrence said needs, not wants, and Clawrence does not waste words. Bogo splits his resources three ways, sending ZSI tactical teams to the junction with Reacher's unit on point, ZPD surveillance to the harbor, and keeping the pack inside the precinct as the most defensible position in the city. He assigns Luther to the junction. Luther refuses the order outright and only moves when Nick tells him to go and Pawbert repeats it. Pawbert says he will come back, and Luther answers, "Always."

The day passes without either watched position producing anything. The weather wall's functionality slides and recovers while engineers fail to hold a full restoration, and Bogo tracks the numbers from his office with Judy. Nick keeps Pawbert company through the waiting, trading grim jokes about the Lynxley name until Pawbert gets off his first one, and turning over the question of what Pawbert could possibly still have that his uncle needs. Pawbert has no money, no connections, and no information he did not already give ZSI at trial.

Ninety minutes before the deadline, with the harbor and the junction both quiet, Pawbert finally names what has been bothering him about the silence. His father never made a demand he expected to be met; demands were theater, the real operation always ran somewhere else, and Milton learned the method from Clawrence. Judged that way, the harbor is far too tidy to be genuine. Pawbert works out the rest from where he is standing: he is inside a position that feels safe precisely because every tactical unit in the city has been drawn away from it. He takes Nick's radio and tells Bogo that the target is not the junction or the harbor but himself. Bogo assigns him a two-officer detail, an oryx sergeant and a badger officer, and begins increasing internal security.

As the detail starts moving him toward an interior office, Judy stops. The armadillo who has spent the evening arguing a parking ticket at Clawhauser's front desk is wearing tactical boots, and footwear in Zootopia means a mammal came prepared for violence. His posture confirms it; he has been mapping the exits and the officer positions the whole time he has been complaining. He sees her see him. Nick walks over asking him to step aside, the armadillo reaches into his jacket, and Nick calls the weapon and tackles him as the front doors blow inward. Nick strips a knife off him and zip-ties him while twelve armed mammals come through the shattered entrance in formation and open fire. Judy hauls civilians into cover and steadies Clawhauser behind the reception desk, and Bogo's voice from the stairs orders the precinct to return fire.

Key Moments

• Javier Croft briefs three assault teams outside Site Two, designating Pawbert for extraction and the rest of the pack for neutralization
• Nick, on watch, hears the pocket of silence outside the safehouse and wakes the pack before the breach
• The reinforced back door and upgraded roof hatch defeat two entry teams; the kitchen window, the one gap the audit could not close, is breached
• Luther and Nick put down three attackers inside the safehouse in twelve seconds
• Nick stages a false defense at the front windows and takes the pack out through the garage
• Clawrence Lynxley hijacks city broadcasts again, demanding Pawbert be delivered alone to Pier 39 by midnight
• Luther refuses the junction assignment and goes only when Nick and Pawbert tell him to
• Nick gets Pawbert's first joke out of him during the wait
• Pawbert identifies the harbor demand as Lynxley misdirection and warns Bogo that the precinct has been stripped
• Judy spots an operative at the front desk by his tactical boots
• Nick tackles the operative moments before twelve attackers breach Precinct 1
• Bogo orders officers to return fire as the lobby becomes a firefight

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• Site Two - Pack's safehouse; assaulted and abandoned
• Precinct 1 - Pack relocates here, then it is assaulted

Items

• Green sweater - Worn by Pawbert throughout; the only possession he leaves the safehouse with
• Security index cards - On the safehouse corkboard; back door, roof hatch, basement window and kitchen camera checked off, kitchen window still flagged
• Squad Pawlaroid - Hangs on the corkboard beside the cards
• Kitchen security camera - Re-angled after the audit; the corrected angle catches the northeast approach

Notes

• The title "Foxhole" references both the military term for a defensive position and Nick's central role in engineering the escape.
• The exchange point Clawrence names, Pier 39 at Zootopia Harbor, is a reference to San Francisco's tourist waterfront.