Some Days, Part One.

That's it, accounting is now officially out of excuses for making me keep flying this piece of shit.

It's odd what goes through my mind when I should be panicking. After all, I had a cargo hold full of pissed-off PBE troopers, and something had just blown three feet off my left wing. There wasn't supposed to be any trouble on this mission, either. Hell, it barely qualified as a mission, all I was doing was picking up an off-duty squad from some shithole town in Azerbaijan before they got themselves in actual trouble.

For the record, it's a really bad idea for some dive brothel owner in a dive town in a dive country to post proof that he's got some absurdly hot women working at his establishment. Perhaps especially when it's within a 72-hour pass distance of some off-duty PBE troopers. They will show up. They will try to have sex with all of the women in the area. And some of the men.

And that will piss off the locals.

Some days, I go from combat jungle-owning aviator to airbourne taxi-driving wet nurse. Pay's the same either way, benefits of having a rare skill, but it's more fun to get shot at.

Except when something comes right out of fuckin' nowhere and kills my plane, I reminded myself.

This was going to be one of those days.

"GET THEM OUT OF THERE, WUT!!" I screamed over the intercom. I'll give the mudmarchers credit, half of them hard already jumped out. I mean, they're still just grunts, but at least they know when to get the fuck out of an airplane. I hope they got parachutes on before they jumped.

OK, fuel pumps off, the wing's not on fire, and I've got enough altitude to glide for a ways...we were on course, right?, which means that patch of sand down there should be...fuck.

I know we were on course. That's Turkmenistan. I know for a damn fact that's Turkmenistan, I've flown this way on more than one occasion in the past few months.

The glorious US gov't has a habit of paying off local gov'ts to ignore Air Force birds. PBE does something similar, only I've heard that our payments come in denominations like "horsepower", "kilogram", and "vintage". Our way is far more efficient, we generally get the stuff from the last warlord we knocked over.

Who the fuck just shot me down? I know we delived the payment, I was the fuckin' delivery pilot that time.

I hadn't been painted. Accounting doesn't normally spring for things like paint, performance upgrades, or seats that are younger than I am, but they do pay to make sure that the plane can alert the pilot to SAMs. Of course, it could have been one of those shoulder-launched heat-seeking types, but we were flying in a prop-driven plane.

I glanced at the wing again. That explosion was way too small for a Stinger, too small even for an RPG, even if it could have gotten up to 5,000 feet.

Flak? Of all the fuckin' things.

I checked the hold. More credit to the grunts, they'd exited the plane in under a minute. The plane had about five left, less if the mysterious enemy started shooting again.

Land now, stay alive, ask questions when the bodies are cold.

"Ace, call the Boss. Tell him we've been shot up, and we're about to crash on the Turkmen side of the Iranian border."

Accounting had finally assigned me a door gunner a while back. Athanasius used to do combat demo work for PBE, took a leg injury that keeps him from running, but he didn't want to leave the company, so they gave him to me. "Now you finally get that door gunner", they told me. Worked out well, too. He's just amazing with an M-60, would've made my Nam-era grandfather proud. My grunts were happy, too. It's amazing what CAS is worth, even when it's just a GPMG and the occasional satchel charge thrown out the door.

"They're sending help, but it'll be a while in coming."

"Of course", I muttered. "Wouldn't want to make this an easy we-just-lost-a-plane-full-of-mercs mission. Grab your chute, we're jumping."

I knew the plane was done for. The sooner we jumped, the safer we'd be. The kid was already out, so I threw the switch on the ceiling marked "FUCK YOUR SHIT", and jumped after him.

Maniac has this thing about not letting the enemy getting a look at our hardware, especially some of the more sensitive stuff that's on our planes. Exactly 181 seconds after I threw the "Fuck Your Shit" switch, four precisely-placed charges blew that plane into pieces. Both wings just fell right off, and a fifth charge, about 75% thermite, completely obliterated anything resembling a flight computer.

And the picture of my ex that I had taped to the window. God I miss her.

Of course, that switch was intended to be used while the plane was on the ground, preferably close to something that would feel bad for my plane...and explode along with it in a sympathetic fashion. Not all of the troopers realize it, but I have fairly strict orders to never let a PBE plane fall into enemy hands. The last thing we need is anyone getting our decryption gear.

I'm a pilot. I hate jumping out of airplanes. Even so, I've done enough jumps that I landed just fine. The troopers were already on the way over.

Good boys. We get out of this, they need a bonus.

"So where are we, exactly?"

"Wut, we're about 100 miles short of Asgabat, Turmenistan, which was supposed to be a pit stop. Nearest town is just north, named Geok-Tepe."

"And you just had to get us shot down. Near Gook-Tape, on our way to Asshat?"

"Dude, don't even blame me. Something blew a large chunk off our left wing, not a rocket, not a SAM. Had to be a flak cannon left over from some old war, and they did it without tracer rounds or radar assist. Also, the city's named Asgabat, but at this point, I just don't care."

Some days.