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.
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