We didn't end up having to wait around for nightfall. Wut's boys did a fantastic job of walking onto the highway and pointing a lot of rifles at the first bus to drive past. I don't think driver knew what the hell was going on, but we paid him for the bus.
In gold coins, which has been one of Maniac's more genius ideas. I like not having to dick around trying to get some third-world mud eater to take American currency. Small gold coins are accepted in places that VISA just doesn't cover.
Everywhere we'd want to be. Except no one ever wants to be here, so we pay in gold.
Turned out to be a fairly nice one. Air conditioning, a radio (which of course couldn't pick anything worth listening to), and enough gas to get us well into Iran.
After we smoke that AAA. That's personal.
One of the benefits of working with PBE is that we have a fairly good intelligence group. Not perfect, obviously, but we've got a pretty good reaction time. Considering our recent work in Afghanistan, we still had air assets in the area. 18 hours after the shootdown, there was a drone circling the area at 20,000 feet. It took the drone controller another two hours to find the gun. By that time, we'd eaten, acquired a bus, driven off the beaten path and gotten some sleep.
It was on.
The gun was situated on a mountaintop. Someone had at some point build a small villa up there, featuring a low wall, a pair of adobe-looking buildings, and a vehicle gate. The gun was in the courtyard, which was maybe 50 yards on a side.
A PBE tactical team should never be mistaken for a US Infantry team. We're not going to charge up the hill, waving a flag and shouting battle cries, fighting for glory, honor, and liberty. We fight for money, and we've got to be alive to spend it.
Tactically, that means we generally try to be as lethally efficient as possible. We're not going to be concerned with taking things intact, or trying to hold a certain building. Which, in this particular case, meant that at precisely 0230, Sageless and NSWG took out both gate sentries. Suppressors are standard issue with PBE, the only real rule for choosing a personal rifle is that it must accept a suppressor. We're not big fans of being heard, and it wasn't any different this time. Both men went down silently.
At the same instant, OCG threw a ten-pound block of Semtex in a window of the taller of the two buildings. For lack of a more precise term, the building exploded. Pieces of it showered the area, along with pieces of the men who'd been sleeping inside. Mud brick buildings have one beneficial attribute: Hit hard enough, they collapse completely. The four-man team tasked with taking the building simply ran over it.
The other building turned out to be an outhouse. A frag grenade in through a window eliminated anyone who may have been inside. None of us wanted to look anways, a spray of shit and piss came out the single door when the grenade went off. I hate third-world countries.
I wish I could give a better account of the battle. I never remember much of the few infantry jobs I've helped on. Too frantic to ever get a good idea of what's going on. We came over the walls from two directions, four men each. Athanasius and I had the job of making sure no one came in or out of the front gate. Not glorious, but we're not grunts.
The whole thing took less than five minutes. There were 22 men in the compound. I personally only killed one of them, a man returning from the village in a truck. 3-round burst, in through the windshield. He never saw it coming, but he wasn't meant to.
The AAA turned out to be some old Soviet cannon, a single-barrel repeating thing probably left over from the Cold War. We sabotaged it, the next idiot to fire the weapon was going to be in for a nasty surprise, it'd probably take out the whole crew.
Back at the bus, I noticed that someone had spraypainted pedobear on the back door. I started laughing, some things never change. Ten armed men, trying to infiltrate one of the most hostile countries on the planet, and we're still making jokes.
"What the hell is this for?"
"Panda Force, Soren. A super-scary bear."
"Pandas don't even eat meat, you retard."
"Yes, but these idiots don't know that."
Some days.
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