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."
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