Sunshine and Death: Aftermath

The bombing mission had made worldwide news. Ivan, now "Crazy Ivan", had fundamentally changed the way Mexico viewed the US. They'd decided that "war on drugs" was a losing proposition, and had formally declared War on the United States. Which, amusingly, consisted of posting half of a division on the border, split between Tijuana, Nogales, and some shithole in Texas. Every couple weeks, they'd shoot at, and miss, some of the Guardsmen assinged to "drug interdiction" work, who would dive for the dirt, complain about their ROE, then go back to the base.

When it hit the papers, though, a bunch of congressmen had decided that if this was the "War on Drugs" that they'd been promoting all those years, it smelled to much like real war, and the assholes legalized pot. Since the Mexican cartels were only traffickers of coke and heroine, and not producers of illegal drugs, we lost our contract.

The CIA spook cited some technicality about "excessive force" (which pleased everyone in PBE) and canceled the contract, which we thought was totally unfair. We downsized the Arizona base, bringing staffing down to just a few new guys and some drones. We'd keep it open for business, but only as a training base. It wasn't going to make us money anymore. Those of us assigned to combat duties went back to Florida.

Crazy Ivan decided that he wanted to keep killing cartel members, so he took his paycheck, reinstalled the MAFFS unit, filled that thing with gasoline, and started firebombing coca fields in Colombia. It worked for a week or two, then his plane exploded in midair. That incident also made the papers, and some commie asshole in Venezuela worked out a deal wherein the Colombians would accept VZ help in the same manner the old Soviet satellite countries accepted Soviet help.

Six weeks after the bombing mission, a man arrived from India, with a briefcase full of gold and a contract to start a war.

Sunshine and Death (Part Eight)

A modern shoulder-launched missile can reach out as far as 25 kilometers if the shooter can see the target. It also leaves a quite visible trail back to the shooter's location, not that the outskirts of Hermosillo had all that many places to fire such a weapon. As I turned towards the city, we saw a green pickup speeding away from a taller building that was roughly where the guy who saw the missile said it came from.

"Ok, let's kill that truck, and see if anything else shoots at us." I snarled.

"Got it!" came the reply from the back.

I dropped down to roughly the level of the tallest building I saw, hoping that would prevent too many people from being able to shoot at us. They obviously spent some money on missiles, I didn't want to risk getting hit with a SAM. The driver was trying to go down side streets to dodge us, but the buildings weren't tall enough for him to lose us. The guy in the back was shooting back, something small and one-handed. I didn't care what he had, we had more.

"Fire as you bear, gentlemen!"

I love those old naval terms.

Just as the truck reached a particularly wide intersection, I stood the plane up on its left wing and drifted slightly to the right, and the three men sitting on that side of the aircraft held their triggers down. Three streams of lead stitched pockmarks into the street, then into the vehicle, which suddenly swerved and slammed into the corner of a large adobe building.

The side door opened, and a man slumped out of the truck, but he was down. One of the troopers had reloaded, and a second burst went into the cab. They were dead, no doubts about it.

By the time we got back to the base, we all wanted blood, and now we knew that only only were the drugs being stashed in the cities, but the cartels had spent money on weapons that posed a serious threat to us. Intel was providing us with nothing worthwhile, and how they couldn't find drugs in Mexico was beyond the grasp of anyone who was in harms way.

Ivan, who'd recently gotten his contract signed, was in a particular foul mood.

"Fuck! Is bullshit! I go fix problem!" He finally yelled. "I need barrels!"

"Barrels of what?" One of the troopers asked.

"Fuel. Time for bombing raid!"

The entire room went silent, and men who'd seen it all had blank stares.

"Uh...what?" Athanasius asked. "What, exactly, are we going to be bombing?"

"Drug cartel owns city, we find warehouse in city, blow it to hell. Next day, we find fancy house of cartel Don, blow it to hell. Next day, we find power plant, blow it to hell. Eventually, no cartel."

Well. I'm rather embarrased that I didn't think of that. This is certainly an option we hadn't thought of. Should work, too.

18 hours later, the MAFFS had been unloaded, and three dozen 55-gallon drums had been filled with gasoline from, wired with detonators, and loaded into the back of the C-130. Our plan was to fly to the towns industrial district, line up with the railroad and kick barrels out the back at one-second intervals. We weren't even going to bother waiting for night to fall, we'd hit them at noon.

I volunteered to help with the mission. I had more experience with timing jumps than Ivan did, and that sort of experience would somewhat translate to timing bomb drops. Also, I'd just gotten a video camera, and wanted to make sure we got what would certainly be a glorious serious of explosions on video.

Ivan was flying the mission, I had the right-hand seat. He'd been giving me some basics on multi-engine flying, but I wasn't ready to take over yet. I'd head to the back when we were over the target, then fly the return route.

A flight in is a flight in. Most of them are pretty boring. This new guy, Talbot, was arming the detonators, he'd done some demo work while he was in the military, and had volunteered to arm the weapons while we were in flight. Not a job I'd want, but it's not like it was safe to be in the same time zone as those things anyways.

At three minutes out, Ivan opened up the back doors, and the desert streaked past in shades of brown. Then we were over the city, the green light went on, and barrels started being rolled out the back. I'm not going to lie, it was amazing, and the hi-res video camera I had did an amazing job of catching the details. The barrels were all gone in less than a minute, and the entire warehouse district seemed to be on fire.

Cause fuck you, Michael Bay.

"Hang on back there, time to turn for home!"

We barely had time to grab the nearest piece of crash webbing before the plane made a hard right turn, and we zoomed north over the city on our way home. I started to make my way back to the cockpit when I heard someone fire a burst out of a side door. I didn't have my rifle on me, so ran to the guy who was shooting, hoping to see if there was a threat that needed to be dealt with.

"What are you shooting at?"

It was the guy who'd thought his prior service had made him worthy of the right-hand seat.

"Oh, hey there, General-sir. Fuckin' Mexicans, man. They're all in on it!"

Another burst out the door. I hadn't seen return fire.

"Who the fuck are you shooting at?"

My hand went to my sidearm.

"Haha! There's one of them!"

A short burst from his weapon hit a lady who was hanging laundry on a rooftop. She spun like a top, then collapsed.

"My God, what the fuck is wrong with you?!"

He glanced back at me, slightly lowering the rifle. I didn't like what I saw in his eyes. It wasn't human so much as it was...wild.

"The whole country's in on it, man! They're all making money off the drugs, so let's waste them all!"

I saw a group of kids playing soccer in a field, and he started to raise the rifle. The corner of his mouth twitched into a smile, then a look of shock crossed his face as a bullet from my 1911 hit him under his armpit, smashing first one lung, then his heart, then the other lung.

"Vendimus mortem" I snarled as I reholstered my pistol. I grabbed his vest with one hand, his belt with another, and threw him out of the plane. "Rest in peace."

Sunshine and Death (Part Seven)

PanamaJack had been having one of THOSE days. Aside from being stuck with a pair of FNGs, the folks who ran the shipping and receiving department at the Chateau had misplaced his most recent order of tobacco products. He'd been out of cigars for two days, and was alternating between wanting to murder someone and wanting to murder everyone. When his turret gunner, a new guy named Rimfire Lincoln, sent a long .50-cal burst into a cluster of trees a half-click off, he snapped.

"What the fuck! Are you fucking retarded? Why did you shoot that tree?"

"I saw somethin'!" The kid shouted. "There's something in there, I saw the reflection!"

"OK, we'll check it out, but if you just wasted some hippies, I swear to fuck you're going to be walking home."

As the truck drew near, the nearest tree started to shake, fell over, and a small SUV dragging camo netting took off across the desert, quickly followed by two more.

Well, would you look at that? PanamaJack thought. "Looks like we get paid today! Get after him!"

"Yee-haw!" one of the new guys shouted over the radio.

Evoking all the best parts of an old western, a Humvee full of hollering mercs started chasing across the desert after a trio of SUVs full of contrabandistos, guns a-blazin'. The cartel men, trying to hang out the window and shoot at the mercs, were unable to slow the vehicle down, and Rimfire, trying to see through the dust and being new to the ways of war, couldn't see well enough to aim his weapon properly, but was shooting anyways.

"Soren, PJ. We flushed a group of hidden jeeps near Hermosillo. We're trying to get them before they make it into the city!"

I hope that flying asshole makes it in time. PanamaJack thought. Or we're going right into the city after them. We're not going to lose these guys, and we'll follow them right to their goddamned front door if we have to.

"Ammo! I need more ammo!" Rimfire yelled.

"What the fuck, man. Did you even hit the guy?" Seraph yelled at him. "Wait until you can at least see the fucker, new guy!"

"What? I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome this machine gun is!" Rimfire replied.

"If he survives this, I'm going to kill him" Seraph muttered.

"Soren, it's getting close, how far away are you?" PanamaJack asked over the radio.

"Not far. A minute out, " came the reply. "We'll kill the first vehicle, then work our way back."

"How original!"

"Yeah, fuck you too."

As the first rounds shredded the lead vehicle, PanamaJack noted that the cartel men had stopped shooting back, and idly wondered if they were out of ammo. Then, out in the distance, he saw the white streak of a missile being launched, and slammed on the brakes.

SAM? Where's it going?

"Troopers! IT'S A JAVELIN!"

Then the missile hit the apex of it's arc, and he started yelling at the troopers to get out. Four PBE troopers bailed out of a perfectly good truck, and started running for cover. Rimfire Lincoln, happy to finally have a decent shot at the retreating vehicles, never saw the missile coming.

It hit the humvee just in the grill, just below the hood. As the missile detonated, the initial charge ripped the hood off and sent a spray of hot metal into the windscreen of the truck, the gunner's shield, and the gunner. Then the second portion of the warhead, designed to penetrate Soviet-model tanks, detonated, and a blast-focused jet of hot copper obliterated the engine.

Rimfire collapsed into the now-smoldering vehicle, and Seraph sprinted towards the truck to get him out.

"Soren! Kill that launcher!"

"On it! Casualties?"

"One, the new guy Rimfire. It's bad."

"Fuck. We'll be back for him as soon as it's safe."

Sunshine and Death (Part Six)

War.

Another day, another briefing, another list of targets we can't find, and another list of places we can't search.

"HM, why the fuck are you wasting our time in the desert again? We know the shit's in the cities, and we know they're in there, hiding from us. Can't we go waste them and be done with it?"

Everyone who'd been with the company for more than a month dove for the floor. The FNG was saying what most of us were thinking, but we didn't want to get in the way of a bullet.

"Because, fucktard, we don't have intel on where in the fucking cities the drugs are, and we're not in the business of wasting money doing cop work. Intel is working on it, and for now, time is on our side. We will find the right building, but we don't have the ability, for now, to hold down the city while we go door-to-door," PanamaJack said. His team had been out in the field more than most, and had turned up a lot of intel, but "They're in Victoria de Durango" is not a precise enough statement to launch an operation on. "Now, shut the fuck up before you get someone killed."

HM was up at the front of the theater laughing.

"Yeah, pretty much. Soren, you're in the air again today, but you're doing overwatch on that little gulf between Baja and the rest of Dustico. Take a jump team...fuck it. Who wants to fly with Soren today?"

Way too many of the new guys raised their hands, but a few of the veterans were bored and raised their hands as well.

"OK, Possum, take a squad of new guys and get them some field time. Do try to bring them all back this time. The rest of you...split into your usual teams and go blow something up."

War never changes.

Another day, another flight, another group of FNGs that will bug the shit out of me.

Fifteen minutes later, as I'm running a magneto check on the engine, one of them monkeyed his way into the right-hand seat.

"What."

"Oh, hey, General-sir, I just wanted to introduce myself, my name's..."

"of zero fucking interest to me."

"Hey man, before I got here, I was in the.."

"Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of the cockpit before I crash the plane just to piss you off."

My icy-death voice was getting better, the guy scrambled back to the cargo hold faster than I thought possible. It's not that I don't care for these guys, but I don't let a single thing come between me and my job proficiency any more than the shooters would stop and talk to kids in the middle of a firefight.

Throttle up, brakes off, watch the gauges, stick back, check gauges, retract flaps, check gauges, radio the tower...the deadly monotony of flight in a combat zone always feels the same, yet the danger is always there. One mistake, one thing I don't notice going wrong, and everyone's dead. The shooters have the same problems, but Bushwacker and Echo0sierra are miracle workers when it comes to patching their mistakes up.

I flew to the first waypoint, then dropped to the deck and flew a short path over Mexico and out over the Gulf of California. It was going to be a wonderful day of swooping low over any boat we saw, hoping to see one that just happened to have a bunch of pallets marked "COCAINE" in bright letters openly sitting on the deck.

The radio crackled. PJ's voice, more excited than usual.

"Soren, PJ. We flushed a group of hidden jeeps near Hermosillo. We're trying to get them before they make it into the city!"

"Gimme coords, dude! I'm on the way!"

Within seconds I had a flight path. We'd intercept them about 15 miles shy of the city, and the troopers in the back could waste them from the air. While PJ's team was having a grand old time playing cowboys and indians down in the desert. I could hear Panama and Seraph laughing over the radio, apparently the desert was too rough for them to hit anything during the chase, and some FNG was up in the turret eating dust. I got there 20 minutes of flight later. It's funny how long firefights can last when no one can line up a shot.

"Oh, merry men! Three vehicles, 12 miles to the city, 10 minutes to fight. Kill the fuck out of the lead vehicle first, then go to the second."

A mixed chorus of cheers and groans came from the back. The guys on the right side had the first pass, then the guys on the left would get a chance as I started orbiting the fight.

The first pass went well. The right-hand guys had a pair of SAWs, so the lead vehicle ate a few hundred rounds of ammo and came to an abrupt halt. I started to pull into a hard left turn to get into orbit when one of the gunners started yelling.

"SAM! SAM! SAM!"

What the fuck?

And if war has a single constant, it's that no stalemate is permanent.

"Call that shit out, where's it headed?"

"It's gaining altitude, headed right for us! Pull left!"

I pulled left as hard as I could, praying that the wings wouldn't fall off the airplane, that no one would fall out, that the missle would lose us, and that I could keep everyone alive for at least one more day. As I came around and got my eyes on the missile, I realized that it was still gaining altitude.

Cruise missile? I briefly wondered, then the horror of the situation hit me.

"Troopers! IT'S A JAVELIN!!"

Sunshine and Death (Part Five)

As we all left the theater, the team leaders and I walked over to Maxi's garage. They had to check out what they'd be working with, and I figured that since I'd be flying supplies out to them, I'd better know what to expect. Major Maxillary's a weird cat. He's got a grin that's about two miles wide and NEVER leaves his face. He'll be under an engine, covered in mechanical fluids from head to toe, and that grin is still there. It's unsettling, to say the least, but if you want a car upgraded, he's the guy to talk to. He's a mechanical genius.

HM had told him to make five uparmored SUVs that would be able to hold four guys, resist medium-caliber fire, drive for three days days on the onboard fuel. The first four were flat tan Humvees. He'd taken the original military version, worked his magic under the hood, then found a beautiful desert-colored paint that barely showed up from 200 feet in the air. Apparently, even after the armor job, they handled quite well. The Long Range Desert Group would have sold their souls for these vehicles back in the day.

The fifth was an abomination unto the LORD. He'd taken a Humvee, cut it in half, then stretched it out into a limosuine and lifted it. By my guess, it was well over 30 feet long and eight feet tall. It had two roof ports for mounted heavy machine guns, could resist fire from a Mosin-Nagant rifle at point-blank range, had enough fuel onboard to drive for a week, enough space for ten men, with gear, and a GPS/Comms sweet that looked like it belonged on an AWACS. It would have been the greatest vehicle ever driven into a war zone...but it was yellow.

Oh, I wish I could say that it was some sort of subdued-desert-sand yellow, but no, this thing was the brightest shade of Canary Yellow that I'd ever seen at a car show. It glowed in the shade, the damn thing was so bright. Not only that, all the trim had been done in black. It looked kinda like a 30-foot-long wasp.

We all just kinda stood there, not sure what to make of it.

"Well, it'll be easy to see from the air, that's for damn sure," I said.

"I could set up a clean room and do surgery in that fuckin' thing" Bushwacker added.

"They'll never know what the fuck just hit them when we show up in that," Kain quipped.

"Maxi, it's perfect. I decree that anyone assigned to this vehicle must wear a top hat while in it," Hotaru Maniac stated with certainty. "Wonderful work."

That was all it took, and we suddenly realized just how perfect it was. And in a way, it was a perfect vehicle for what we were doing. It would take a pounding, and fit the personality of the company to perfection. We were not trying to compete with WhiteDirt for the title of Most Professional Kill Squad, we were simply out to make a name for ourselves as ourselves.

Three days of planning later, the teams had been assembled. PanamaJack, Gravspec, Kain, and Possum each had their own, while a fifth, larger team had been assembled under Balci's command to fit the limo's new role as a C3 and reinforcement vehicle.

Our MO was simple. The teams would leave at dusk, drive two or three hours into Mexico to a site that satellite or mini-drone imaging had suggested might be a pot farm or cartel house, investigate with extreme prejudice, then travel to another site a hundred or so miles away and repeat the process. It worked well enough to become a routine thing, and pretty soon guys who weren't even in grunt contracts were taking "The Tour", as it was starting to become called.

Mexico just wasn't big enough for drug runners to travel down the highways and not be seen by the myriad of drones we had up , and after a month, everything and everyone on them within 300 miles of the border had been shredded, yet the drugs were being made further south than the troopers could go without supply drops. my biplane simply couldn't carry enough weight to handle bringing them fuel, ammo, and supplies in a large enough quantity to take them to where the drugs were coming from. The orders soon came down to start spreading the word that we were looking for a real cargo plane, something that could handle supply runs.

Two weeks later, an old C-130 painted in US Forest Service colors lands on the runway. We weren't expecting it.

"I have landed. Where is tower?" The voice said in a thick Russian accent.

We didn't have a tower per se, having only two aircraft, so our secretary normally handled radio work.

"Sir, you've landed on a private runway. We'll send someone to help you find your way to a public airport," She said. "Stand by, they're on their way."

"My name is Ivan. This is Payback Enterprise base, da?"

There are better ways to get our attention than to land on our airfield with no warning and ask if it's us. Our Arizona base looks enough like an airport that lost pilots land on it on a weekly basis. An unmarked car will drive out to them, and someone not wearing a PBE polo will check their maps and help them out in getting to where they need to be. This guy, by naming us, earned a hot reception, and within minutes every rifle at our base was pointed at him.

HM, this time wearing a pink dress, walked out on the tarmac. "Get the fuck out of that plane before we kill you!"

The back hatch opened.

Beer cans rolled out.

Followed by a small black man clad in track pants and shoes.

"Shit!" We heard the man say. "Is hot out here!"

To say we were laughing at this point wouldn't cover it. We'd been stressed-out and on full alert for so long that the utter absurdity of the situation was simply too much. The entire welcoming party was laughing to the point of tears, much to the chagrin of the pilot, who simply refused to drop the accent or admit his name wasn't Ivan.

The plane turned out to be a c-130E model with the MAFFS tanks for wilderness firefighting already installed. No one really wanted to knoww where it came from, but our mechanics promised that they could convert it to a mobile gas station without much trouble at all. The Long Range Desert Group would have sold their souls to have our logistics. With the additional capability that the C-130 afforded us, our teams could roam anywhere in Mexico that wasn't inside the cities.

Within another three months, the cross-border drug trade had dropped another 37%. Human trafficking was down 91% from when we started work, and the Coast Guard was reporting a 287% increase in ocean-based drug smuggling. Which wasn't even our problem, as we saw it.

If the original YouTube video had made us infamous, our sustained campaign and lethal efficiency had made us famous. The Mexican government was screaming at the US gov't to stop us, and the US gov't was officially telling us to knock it off, but unofficially paying us. It was working great, and for the first time ever, we actually had full selection classes stacked up and waiting. Apparently, a large portion of the US population appreciated our stance on the drug trade, and since we started working, the level of day-to-day violence in Mexico had gone down somewhat.

While various groups of assholes had tried to "militia up" the border before, they now saw that the best way to do that was to join PBE. For the first time since we'd started, full selection cycles were a regular thing. It was a very good situation for the guys at the Chateau, indeed, and new graduates were starting to trickle out to the base in Arizona.

Sunshine and Death (Part Four)

What we hadn't prepared for and had no way to predict was that we'd be filmed in action. 18 hours after we'd wiped out the kill squad, an email landed in HM's inbox, and a half-million others, that had a link to a video. The cartel squad had laid a trap for us, and had filmed their entire operation, from their first shots until we'd taken off to go back home. It was shot in good-quality infrared, and had everything: Paratroopers landing, the biplane circling and trashing vehicles, and PBE troopers going from body to body making sure the kill squad was dead.

That would have been bad enough, but it also went to various news outlets and gov't agencies. The news agencies immediately and predictably thought that the US Marine Corps was sending a US Navy SFOD-A team to wipe out suit-wearing Mexican stock traders.

The DEA knew it wasn't them, realized that we were why they'd been losing bribe money, and called the ATF. The ATF lost their shit when they saw the video of us wiping out a tactical team with automatic weapons fire, and called both the FBI and various Senators. The Senators called press conferences, while the FBI assigned a large team of agents to start collating all the rumors they'd picked up over the previous six months about an "elite paramilitary organization" operating in the area, then called a caterer for the local field office's field team. The CIA operatives working in the DEA, ATF, FBI, and the Legislature called their bossess, who turned down the lights, put in their earpieces, and adjusted their ties, then called us on our FOB's unlisted land line.

The Central Intelligence Agency. The C. I. Motherfuckin' A. They're elitists, they have absolutely no concept of right and wrong, they can't be trusted to not stab everyone involved in both sides in the back, and they're the absolute definition of an anachronistic organization. While the FBI gets bogged down in public-relations productions like chasing down Anonymous and high-profile serial killer cases, the CIA has never much cared about their image, and is probably the only agency left that's still obsessed with their original mission: Quietly kill as many people as possible in the name of Protecting America, Fuck Yeah.

So naturally, while the shit was hitting every fan from Los Angeles to New York, the CIA watched the video a few times, realized that they'd get rid of us faster by paying us to wipe out a Mexican cartel, and decided to work with us.

31 hours after we'd returned from our failed attempt to rescue the rancher, a Lear jet landed on our runway. It hadn't told us it was incoming, and everyone who could walk grabbed a rifle. Even the Boss had grabbed a rifle to greet the plane. When only one man got off, wearing a white T-shirt and a flak vest, the Boss strode out to meet the man in true PBE style, wearing his finest top hat...and nothing else. No one was going to tell HM to put clothes on when he had a weapon on him.

I was impressed with the Langley cat, he didn't even blink. He obviously knew to expect a large amount of weirdness, and after few quiet words with HM, they walked into HM's office. Ten minutes later, both of them walked out, and HM called us all into the theater.

"OK, that was the called we'd been waiting for. Agent Smith of the CIA has just handed us a contract to go South across the border to begin anti-cartel operations in Mexico. We're being paid by the US government now, but we're still not officially working for them, which gives us a lot of freedom in how we do things, and a lot of room for them to cut us loose if things go bad.

"We start in three days, Major Max and the vehicle teams have been working on refitting some vehicles for long-range recon into Mexico. You'll be taking those and doing basically the same thing the SAS did in Africa. We'll do resupply work from here, and your jobs will basically to kill everything with two legs and a weapon, no questions. All available intel says that the only folks with weapons are the guys working for one of the cartels, so they're all legal targets.

"Officially, you're not trying to start a war, so there's no point in trying to take ground. Kill cartel members, burn the drugs, steal everything else. You have your orders, get to it. Vendimus Mortem!"

"FUCK YOUR SHIT!!" we all yelled back.

Sunshine and Death (Part Three)

Southern Arizona was at that time a very empty place, no one who wanted out was still there, and no one who wanted to stay was considered to be a civilian. The few folks who were still flying American flags in the area slept in shifts and shot at anything that moved, which suited us just fine. As far as we were concerned, anyone who shot in the same direction we were shooting was a friend, and it was a pretty common attitude.

It didn't take long before the local holdouts were reaching out to us, and it was easy to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. We'd spend a day or two at some guy's ranch, and in exchange for beds, water, and intel on movement, we'd provide security while we were there and promise a QRF if they got in trouble when we weren't. Deep down, we all knew the ranchers were getting in over their heads, and that it was going to end badly for most of them, but sometimes the only way to fight a dragon is to lure him out of his lair.

For the first several months, things went pretty well. The cartels were a little slow to react to us since cell comms were spotty, and they didn't have the radar capability to catch me flying above visible range, so they didn't realize what was wiping out their shipments. When we first got there, a shipment of drugs would come in a single SUV, which is ridiculously easy to kill with small arms fire. Then they started sending armed escort vehicles, technicals in the Arab fashion, but those are even easier to kill.

The cartels were losing large numbers of men, and the only thing we left in the kill zones were corpses, shell casings, and burned cars containing burned drugs. It wasn't a popular move, a lot of our men thought taking and reselling the drugs would make us more money, but the command decision was that if we burned the drugs, the locals would support us instead of seeing us as simply another cartel, even if we were every bit as murderous as the cartels.

Partly due to our "no survivors" policy, and partly due to the fact that we were loved by the ranchers, things were mostly kept out of the press. Vigilantism had been a growing trend on the border for years, but it was being kept very low-key, and we certainly played on that as much as we could. We knew it was only a matter of time before it hit the press, but we also knew that the moment it happened, if things didn't go perfectly, we were going to become wanted outlaws in minutes.

We'd been there less than six months when the first rancher got hit. We got a frantic radio call at about 0200 from this crotchety old bastard that always gave us shit when we stopped by to check on him, letting us know that some cartel boys were shooting up his house. He told us he'd be returning fire, but said he didn't know how long he could hold out against them.

It was the fastest we'd ever been in the air. Most of the shooters were still putting on their clothes when I got us into the bird, and it was a very tense thirty-minute flight to the drop zone. I red-lined the engines, and hit the green light the instant we hit the drop zone a half-mile short of the ranch house. Low-altitude drops are never the sort of thing we like to do at night, but we're good at it. All eight men got out in less than 30 seconds, and I throttled the engine back until the warning lights went out, then pulled in a slow port turn that would have us orbitting the firefight.

By the time the shooters had landed and formed up, I'd gotten a good look at what was going on, and what I saw was not comforting. There were four SUVs of some kind, and one technical with something really big mounted to the trunk. While that was bad, and would make short work of anyone inside, what really bothered me was the guy with the RPG who was slowly demolishing the house and had already started a fire in one corner of it.

Anyone involved with night operations has a love/hate relationship with light. We've gotta have it to see what we're shooting at, but we don't ever want to look at it, or anything that's lit up too brightly, or we're going to miss a guy who's hiding in the shadows. Our guys know that by heart, and were sneaking up behind men not only lit up by a burning house, but watching it intently. Not only would we have the element of surprise, they wouldn't be able to see us when they turned around.

"OK, Shooters, we've got four SUVs full of bad guys, at least one has an RPG. The house is on fire, so we've got a time limit, but they're also real easy to see in the light. Gravspec, grab your machinegun and kill those vehicles, technical first, then try to find the fucker with the RPG. Swissguy, you take the first shot, then give us the signal to kill."

The guy with the RPG was the first to go. He stepped out into the open to avoid backblasting any of his own guys, and Swissguy put a rifle round into the back of his head and started shouting "GO, GO, GO" into his radio. Gravspec took the cue and started pouring fire into the vehicles, and the rest of the grounded shooters immediately followed suit.

The cartel shooters reacted faster and more intelligently than I would have expected, but they simply never had a chance. Caught between the house, PBE's grunts, and CAS support from the sky, and unable to see us because they'd been watching a fire, they went down in less than five minutes. As soon as the last cartel shooter went down, Kain busted into the house to get the rancher and his family out.

We got them out, but we were too late to save them. The smoke had been too thick, and since they were stuck inside by the firefight, they'd been unable to breathe. The rancher and his wife were in their 70s, and hadn't been in the best of health before the fight. The combination of combat stress and massive amounts of smoke inhalation had simply been too much.

I put the plane down on the access road and ran in to help with cleanup. We got the cartel squad piled into their cars, lit them on fire, and threw the weapons into the plane. The bodies of the rancher and his wife were carried into the plane, we weren't going to leave them there for the coyotes.

Our flight back was one of the saddest flights I've ever been on. The man had called us for help, and we had failed to get there in time. We'd let him down, and he and his family had died because of it. By the time we landed, no one was in a mood for a debriefing, so HM let us get some rack time. There wasn't much to say anyways, and we all knew that no matter how quietly we'd kept things so far, that part of the game was over.

Sunshine and Death (Part Two)

There were three of us left. Three, 3, tres, drei, troi, THREE. That's how brutal selection was. Out of the fifty men that started selection in our group, 23 were dead, 24 had quit, and there were only three of us left. The other group must have had it easy, they had four guys left. To this day, I don't know how we made it through, it was simply the most grueling experience I'd ever been through. I've heard that if you debate quitting during selection for other elite groups, like the SEALs and shit, your mind will eventually decide that quitting is worth it. In ours, quitting didn't necessarily mean survival, and everyone was debating it constantly.

Anyways, the three of us were sitting in the infirmary a few days after selection, and HM walked up to us and handed us each our first paycheck. I'd never made that much in a year, and I'd only been in PBE for six months at the time.

"That's for making it through. Once you actually start work, that will get bigger, and once you start learning something usefull, it will keep getting bigger. I pay for what I want, and I get what I pay for. Remember that, it will benefit you...or cost you dearly."

I was only in the infirmary for a week, and then I was taught to shoot, move, and communicate. I made the mistake of remarking to the cadre that I was a pilot, not a shooter only once. Within ten minutes, a crate of 2,000 rounds of ammunition was sitting next to me, unboxed, and the cadre informed me that I was to shoot, move, and communicate until it was all gone, even if I was shooting, moving, and communicating alone and in the darkness. That's just how PBE works, though. Every mistake is punished by more training, and in our fashion, you never forget the lesson. Things that start as punishment become muscle memory.

I finally got an aircraft three months after selection was over. It was, for lack of a better term, a flying junkyard. Well, slightly worse than that, the thing was a antique flying junkyard. I shit you not, it was an An-2, a single-engine biplane that was built in the 1960s. HM told me that it was going to be our jump and transport bird for the shooters, and I remarked that he must have stolen it from a skydiving company.

"Well, something like that. You can make this work, right?"

HM's questions were always meant to be answered in the affirmative. He never gave anyone with less than several years in the company what they actually asked for, he'd always give them not quite enough. No one asked why, we all kinda knew the answer. HM believed that everything was training, either good habits or bad habits, and "making do with what ya got" is a good way to instill good habits.

It was a full six months after selection until we got our first contract. Fuck if I ever figured out how we were being funded during that time. We were doing something related to training six days a week, with not a single week off. It had to have cost a small fortune, but by the end of it, we were pushing the limits of human capability. I never caught a fly with chopsticks, but inside my cockpit, I could literally push any button I needed to with my eyes closed, and I could fly the plane with fireworks going off on the copilot's seat.

By the way, HM thought that one was fucking hilarious. I was supposed to spend the day giving lifts to a group of jump troopers, but right as I started the takeoff roll on the third round, someone pushed a button, and a remote set off one of those 16,000-count rolls of ladyfingers. Those things went off for ten full minutes, smoke filled the entire plane, my eyes were watering so bad I could barely see, I had numerous minor burns, and my ears rang for days, and the things I said on the radio once I was airborne earned me my very first fine for an FCC violation.

One day, HM called everyone in to the theater we used as a briefing room. There were 26 of us now, none of whom had done anything since selection and basic training [i]but[/i] various types of training. We were ready to do something real, to actually get to work.

"Gentlemen," he said. "It's time to earn your keep. I'm sure you've all been wondering how and when we're going to start doing jobs, and the answer is Arizona. Shit's gotten so bad down there that we think they'll look the other way if we move in and quietly clean the place up Wild West-style, so that's exactly what we're going to do. We are going to set up small FOBs on the border, we are going to kill everything that comes across, and we are going to take anything and everything that glitters in the sunlight as we do this."

Sunshine and Death (Part One)

I guess I should start at the beginning. We're famous now, everyone knows who Payback Enterprises is. We're the world-famous mercs, and everyone knows what we do. Back then, it was a totally different world. We were broke, we were rookies, and we didn't even have a slick plane to get us out of nasty situations.
The "casting call" was what we called it. Hotaru Maniac posted it, the first time he'd used a picture of Hotaru herself to start a thread in months. He'd been acting wierd for a full year. A single post to start a thread, with a hint that something was being planned, that progress was being made, and that more info would follow. He'd post normally in other threads, as normal as HM ever got, but with those threads, it was always one post, no comments of any kind. It was never specific, not until that day.
That day, it had a set of GPS coordinates in Florida, a date and time two weeks out, and a simple statement that if anyone wanted in, they'd best be there. "Bring your own weapons and gear", the last line said. It was discussed for less than 12 hours, then we packed bags and got in our cars. I don't know how many people thought it was legit, and how many expected to find a sign with "LOL I TROLL U" on a post in the parking lot.
I was living in Idaho at the time. I'd just been divorced, and had lost my position as a missionary pilot because I'd killed eight men. Actually, that was the reason I'd gotten divorced, too. My wife had seen a part of me that she hadn't known about, and couldn't handle it. So when the casting call came, it didn't take much for me to give it a shot.
It took me three days to drive out, the GPS data corresponded to a parking lot in Florida. I got there a day early, and was surprised at how many people were there. There were very few familiar faces, but the wierd part was how many names we all knew. I don't remember who thought of it first, but I know that it was Bushwhacker who first got everyone to stop trying to remember real names, and stick to trips.
I guess I should explain. There was a website I used to hang at. It was full of the usual internet types: fat, lazy, and opinionated, although we did have a pretty solid core of military types. We never really got anything finished, we'd just spend hours raging and complaining about some bullshit someone would find and post. The thing was, we'd been talking about PBE for years. It was always next time, next summer, another couple months. No one ever expected it to happen, it was just our inside joke, our dream of someday being the storybook heroes.
Anyways, so we're all there, and we're finally putting faces and voices to names we'd seen for years. About a hundred of us actually made it all the way. No one was even claiming to be Hotaru Maniac, which in any other situation, someone would have done. Sure, we all knew that HM wasn't the blonde guy in the video, and we all knew that he wasn't likely to really be the character that posted, but we didn't really know what to expect. Hell, we didn't even know how many people to expect. No one had ever seen his face.
That's when a burst of rifle fire shredded Kain's car. He'd been leaning on the hood, too, and a mag dump went right into the engine. He's a big guy, but he jumped a full two feet into the air. The rest of us dove for cover and starting flicking safeties off.
"Ho-lee shit. If I didn't know better, I'd think I just saw the biggest group of suckers on the entire internet. Only, they've all got guns, and they all act like they know each other, so I guess I better call the cops, right?"
I'll admit, I was surprised when I first saw him. It wasn't that he was big or especially scary-looking, he didn't have a facial scar or glowing eyes, he simply looked...normal. He looked like everyone else, albeit more fit. And older, even though some of us were in our thirties at the time.
"Alright, faggots, on your feet. Yes, I am Hotaru Maniac, and yes, you are the first batch of recruits that Payback Enterprises will be training. No, I will not be your only trainer. I won't even be doing most of it, actually, I've got a few friends that will be handling that. Yes, we will be using live ammunition, no, not all of you will survive it. For those of you who are dumb enough to think that this won't be all that bad...you will not survive if you don't take this to be the most serious thing you've ever done.
"Now, follow these men, and have a nice day, gentlemen."