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.
No comments:
Post a Comment