"At midnight, when the shift changes, we strike." That's how it always goes in the movies. Idiot writers, when the shift changes, that means there's two shifts in the building. One fresh, one tired, but still twice as many men.
Twice as many guns pointing the wrong direction.
Twice as many bullets flying the wrong way.
Only a a fucking idiot would attack then.
Wut's men waited 55 minutes after the midnight shift change to strike. By that time, he told me, the shift that had just finished would be in bed, or close to it, and that would slow down the response time. It also gave me and Athanasius time to get the plane ready.
At 0055, Camo Cowboy backed the bus into the front doors of the local military headquarters at a fairly high speed. Their sturdy construction prevented them from breaking, but they flew right through the front desk intact. A flashbang followed, and the game was on.
We knew FPoP was being held on the top floor. Basement holding cells are a nightmare to deal with, but top-floor cells are easy. Or so Wut told me while we were planning it. Apparently, anyone being held on the top floor is too much of a security risk to let them talk to other prisoners, which meant that everyone in the path of the shooters was hostile.
The first alarms went off at 0057. The Iranian equivalent of a beat cop had driven past the headquarters by chance, and had seen the bus embedded in the lobby. He'd radio'd it into his boss, then gone in for a closer look. He'd been taken down by the two troopers guarding the bus, but it was only a matter of time before the local PD sent in another unit.
At 0100 exactly, I started the engines on the C-47. It would take about ten minutes to get to the end of the runway. The bus should arrive about five minutes after that.
At 0103, the troopers found FPoP. Apparently, the shooters had to clear a few extra rooms, they'd seen some lights on. In most situations, civilians would have been simply detained, or bypassed entirely. In a hostile country, with no way to pick out who's gov't, who's off-duty or irregular military, and who's simply working the wrong shift, the shooters took no chances.
FPoP was in surprisingly good condition for being a prisoner of the Islamic Republic. He wasn't up for running, but he didn't need carried. They said he started laughing when he saw the patches. It was certainly the last thing he expected in that situation. Apparently, he'd been hoping that some internal connections would lead to his release, some prominent politicians owed him some favors.
At 0104, the first cops showed up. Like most cops around the world, they at first attempted to set up a perimeter to contain the problem. Unlike most cops, they had Kalashnikovs, but they still weren't soldiers. The soldiers were being called, though, and it was now a race.
The shooters got FPoP, with a briefcase retrieved from the CO's office, back to the bus at 0107, and it was moving before the back door shut. We hadn't had time to up-armor the bus, but we'd stocked it with as much ammo as we could. It was 5.4 miles from the headquarters to the airport, with one major turn. No one was expecting much traffic, which meant that the bad guys didn't have to worry about collateral damage.
I have no idea what the cops were expecting. There's no section in the manual for what to do when a school bus starts spraying accurate bursts of small-arms fire into the cops attempting to contain the situation. The ones that didn't dive for cover died almost immediately.
The school bus smashed the cop cars aside like they weren't even there. Unlike the US, Iranian cop cars were tiny little things, about the size of an old Honda civic. Fast, but completely useless in a combat situation. Which by that point, it was.
The old phrase "kicking open a hornet's nest" applied. People who had been woken up for the assault on the building were on the way by the time the bus started moving. Once it became a war, all pretenses of "Protect and Serve" were gone. Cop cars and military jeeps started showing up from all corners of the city, and it was a shoot-first, don't ask questions situation.
I'd have loved a video of the battle. It would have outshined every Hollywood car chase ever filmed. Nine very pissed-off men, fighting for their lives from the inside of a school bus, being chased by all the cops and soldiers a large city could throw at them. Wut later said that it was beautiful in the way that only war can be.
I reached the end of the runway at 0112. We had enough fuel for a 3600-mile journy, and in the closest direction, it was over an hour to safety. We expected to be shot at, and Iran's Air Force was more than a match for a C-47. Now it was a waiting game. We couldn't move, all we could do was hope the troopers got here before a tank did.
Airports are a strategic resource. At 0114, some cops showed up to defend the airport from the terrorists shooting up the city, and decided to investigae the only plane on the tarmac. They should have kept their lights off, it was really easy to aim just above the headlights. The first car coasted to a stop 30 yards from the plane, and for a second, we thought that might be all of the airport guards.
Then the tower hit us with a spotlight, and all hell broke loose.
It turned out that the Iranian Air Force had a small presence at the airport, which we hadn't noticed because we couldn't read the writing on the closed hangar doors. With that presence came the kind of firepower that can kill C-47s with ease: A pair of old F-14 Tomcats. If we didn't kill those planes or the pilots, we were well and truly fucked. The soldiers were suddenly the least of our worries.
I threw Athanasius his rifle and grabbed an extra ammo can for the M-60.
"GO! Take those planes out!"
"What the fuck with?"
"Don't you have any grenades? I'll cover you, just keep them from taking off!"
He hit the ground running as fast as he could towards that cop car, pulled the diver's corpse out, and took off towards the fighters. I jumped out onto the wing, and started sending short bursts towards the soldiers, hoping to keep them suppressed enough to give him a chance.
As it turns out, these were not crack troops. They scattered almost immediately, diving behind anything they could find. Fine by me, I thought. I just need to keep them scared for another few minutes.
Jet fighters are amazing pieces of high-tech machinery. They've got thousands of moving parts, many of them with tolerances of less than a thousandth of an inch. They're extremely effective at dealing death once they're in the air. However, if they're sitting on the ground, they might as well be piles of scrap metal, especially when a frag grenade goes off underneath one of them.
I was a bit disappointed, actually. I was expecting a huge explosion, maybe for the plane to split in two, but all that really happened when hundreds of metal slivers shredded their way through the plane was it started leaking everywhere. High-pressure hydraulics and explosion-resistant fuel tanks simply gave way, and fluids started coming out of the plane all over. It kinda looked like the plane pissed itself.
The grenade Athanasius threw at the second plane was a Willie-Pete, and he landed it on top of the plane's back. I think he wanted to see what the difference would be. Explosion-resistant fuel tanks are designed so that the fuel-air mixture inside a half-empty tank is never explosive. That way, if a red-hot sliver punctures the tank, it won't kill the plane. White phosphorous grenades aren't aware of those rules, however, and this particular one decided to simply melt through the plane itself.
The difference was dramatic. There was a brief burst of flame out the back when the tank was breached, and then a lake of burning jet fuel poured out the belly of the jet. It was glorious. It got even better a minute later, when the wave of fire from the second plane met the fuel that had gushed out of the first.
I wish I had a picture. That would make a wonderful photo for the "Services Offered" portfolio.
Athanasius had just made it back to the plane when the bus arrived. By arrived, I mean they smashed through the entry gates at 40 MPH with a string of cop cars and military vehicles chasing them.
Shit, this is going to be close.
The bus pulled up alongside, and it was clear that the fight had not been one-sided. The inside was spattered with blood, and it appeared that not everyone had made it to the airport alive. Athanasius and I added to the fire headed towards the locals while the troopers loaded the plane.
"Soren!!"
"Yes, Eff-Pop?"
"Get me the fuck out of this country!"
"With pleasure."
I rammed the throttles forward, and the second the last man was on, I let the brakes go. The old warbird jumped forward, and we were on our way. The old girl left the pavement about 2/3 of the way down the runway, and I heard cheering from the back of the plane. It wasn't time for that right now, and I keyed the intercom.
"Everyone who can, get to the left side of the aircraft with a rifle NOW, and kill that radar!"
The Douglas DC-3 has had a long and varied history. It was originally a passenger liner, until WWII happend and Uncle Sam ordered 10,000 of the cargo variant, designated the C-47. I didn't know this at the time, but this was one of the WWII birds. Some of those C-47s that survived were later outfitted with a trio of 7.62 miniguns, designated AC-47 "Spooky" gunships, and charged with scaring the shit out of NVA troops.
We didn't have miniguns, but we did have two M-60s, three AR-pattern rifles, one Kalashnikov, and someone had grabbed my Tavor. One slow loop around the tower, and the radar dish stopped rotating, the lights went out, and I heard laughter as they threw the rest of the grenades out the door.
I suppose it's not enough to simply shoot our way out of a hostile country. Payback Enterprises occasionally sees the need to add a little extra "Fuck You" to the shame of defeat, and I certainly enjoyed seeing the tar on the terminal roof catch fire from one of the Willie-Pete grenades.
I pulled my night-vision gear from my backpack, switched it on, and settled in for a low-level night flight. I told Athanasius to get back to the cargo hold and send Wut up to see me in the cockpit. Their job was over, mine would be over when we hit the Afghan border in two hours. If we made it that far.
"What's up, Soren?"
"Who didn't make it?"
"Liquid. Caught one above the vest, tore his aorta open. Bled all over the bus before we could get it stopped, it was too late."
"Fuck, I'm sorry, man. Is anyone else critical? I can fly a bit higher if we need a more stable platform."
"No, everyone else is just bleeding. We'll be fine, just keep us from getting killed."
"Alright, can you send FPoP up here when all the medic work is done?"
"Sure."
A half-hour later, a Persian man sat down in the copilot's seat.
"You have some talking to do. What do you have that the Gov't wanted, and how the hell could it be so important that we got sent in to get you out instead of simply bribing the guards to let you out?"
"Porn."
The explosion of profanity that resulted from that statement mixed together words from five different languages, eight countries, covered the topics of procreation, genetics, destiny, God, Hell, defecation, drug users, various ways of dying slowly, cannibalism, black magic, and philosophy, and lasted for ten minutes. I was later told it shocked even the grunts in the back.
"Porn. Of. What. Exactly?" I finally managed to say.
"Mrs. Ahmedinejad."
"You've got to be fucking kidding me. You've got a sex tape of Mahmoud and his wife? Is it any good?"
"I didn't say it had Mahmoud. Apparently, his wife is quite the freak, and her partners in this video are, shalll we say...not the usual porn stars."
"Who?"
"Wait for the screening."
"What screening?"
"Oh, don't worry. When HM finds out about this, there will be a screening of it at the Chateau. Red-carpet affair."
"I'd rather get shot at."
FPoP went back to sleep in the cargo hold. The troopers had all zonked out by then, except for the two who decided to look out the windows for any sign of a pursuit.
My phone rang about then. I don't normally carry a drop phone, since our cell phones are pretty much the definition of "unlisted numbers" anyways. The ringtone told me who it wasn't, so I picked up.
"Soren, Illuminati. Leak is proven and precise. Don't file a flight plan home anytime soon."
Some days.
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