So we're moving by day. And I get word that there's a visual contact on a plane. Whoa.
Context for the young people: Back before the Plague there were always planes in the sky. Fucking always. One of the weirdest things about the few days post-9/11 was the lack of planes. And when they started coming back we all cringed. Compared to the Plague, 9/11 was a kiss on the cheek. But it was all we had as comparison back then.
They're coming back, but still not up to the level they were in 2018.
Since the Plague, if we saw something in the sky it had been a bird. I'd never even launched our UAVs. (Hadn't had to. The Scouts had them at the moment and we still hadn't used them.)
Zero planes. Nada.
So when we got reports of a plane, we went on really high alert.
Okay. The LOG had had a lot of shit in it. Among other things, it had had Stinger missiles. Not sure why. The only air threat around was the U.S. Air Force. And while having been under blue-on-blue fire once I could see some benefit to blowing up an Air Force plane, they frown on that sort of thing.
But the fucker had had swaggersticks. What can I say? Maybe the guy running it was from Minnesota.
Point being, we had Stingers. We didn't have any qualified Stinger guys, but we had Stingers. And it wasn't as if my guys couldn't read the manual. And a Stinger is very easy to use.
So we might be able to take out a fighter if it got low enough for a good bomb drop. Probably wouldn't, but then we'd just take our chances.
Problem being, the guys said this was a big one. A transport.
This I had to see.
That was tough.
The commo van didn't have a good way to see out except the commander's cupola. So I pulled the commander out, over his protests, and climbed up in his seat.
Binos. Old fashioned optics.
It was a plane. A big transport. And it was just sort of lazing around up there.
Suddenly it turned and passed south down our west side near Baghdad. Banked around and headed back.
The edges of the Baghdad suburbs were in view to the west. Barely. We were staying as low as we could given the terrain. But while there was some terrain it was mostly pretty flat. There was a bit of haze and I hoped that would let us get past unnoticed.
But this transport had apparently noticed us. I thought, maybe, possibly, could it be a supply drop? Nobody had called ahead. Didn't seem likely.
I had to climb up on top of the vehicle, not a good exercise normally, to see over the box on the back. There were grab handles, thank God. It was lining up behind us. It was a transport but transports can drop bombs. Didn't seem likely, but I was starting to get a puckering feeling. It definitely seemed to be looking for somebody like us.
Passed overhead at about two thousand feet over ground level. Flaps down, going slow. Russian Antonov. What the fuck?
We're still on that flat fucking plain. Still farms and occasional irrigation canals. More widespread on the latter, bigger on the former. More "industrial." Sunni Triangle. Saddam made sure the good farmers got the good equipment.
So we're bounding over this field at about thirty miles an hour and I'm trying to get back in the commander's hatch when the bird starts dropping shit. Not bombs. First there's a set of personnel parachutes. Standard static-line drop, the easiest kind in the world. Then a bunch of parachute bundles.
Are we getting reinforced?
I get back into the commo van and everybody is "what the fuck"ing. So I spread the word we don't know what it is and the scouts are to check out the drop. And I go "what the fuck?" and get on the horn to Brigade.
Brigade knows fucking diddly. No, no transport drops. No transport planes that they know of outside U.S. states and posessions. Most grounded. Cannibalization. Bad here.
Scouts come back while I'm on the phone with Brigade.
"Sir . . . No threat. Need you up here."
It's reporters.
Flying assholes from the sky.
They're scattered across a field but the scouts have helpfully gathered them up and gotten all their bundles for them. It's a team of six. One of them I vaguely recognize.
"Graham Trent, Skynews. Bandit Six, I presume."
(Look, it was his reference, not mine.)
Most people have probably heard the story. It's still in reruns. If you haven't, here goes.
Skynews (I tend to call it SkyNet. Kids, get your parents or grandparents to explain the reference) along with Fox and a bunch of other "media" holdings were owned by this guy named Rupert Murdoch.
Fairly conservative, for a Brit, and a bit of a character. He'd used the character, and a fucking ruthless business sense, to build up a pretty fair business empire.
Skynews was a British satellite news service. The Brits, then and now, had the BBC, the Beeb, which was paid for by the government. (From taxes on TVs. If you had a TV, you paid a yearly tax to watch it, I shit you not. And it went to the Beeb.)
Going up against a government monopoly was hard. But Murdoch knew there was money in giving people something other than the relentless propaganda of the Beeb. Oh, the Beeb occasionally had "alternative view" programming, but not in its news. It's news was pure liberal tofu-eater, rainbow this and global warming that.
So he founded Skynews. And it had made a fair amount of brass. (Brit for change. Got brass in pocket. Money.) That was, up to the Plague when shit was falling everywhere.
The Brits, despite being overall much more socialist than the U.S., had not been seizing businesses left and right. But they also weren't propping them up. And they especially weren't propping up Murdoch. He was barely holding on. He knew that he needed a gimmick to get some viewers. Preferably something he could sell to other networks that still had money.
(Oh, the U.S. "networks," NBC, CBS and ABC, were all being supported by "government emergency support spending." Fox, which was owned by Murdoch, was not. CNN somehow, though, had gotten in on the money. Politics? Nah.)
He needed a show that people were going to watch.
What was the biggest news story in terms of viewership in the U.S. and Britain?
You guessed it.
(The U.S. for reasons previously described. The British because they had a thing for the Nepos as well and, having a bit better history program in school, the whole "Ten Thousand" thing had caught on.)
So he, and it was Murdoch, got a brilliant idea. Send out a news crew to embed with us. It was going to take cash he didn't have, but if it worked it was going to be big news. His stocks, where stock markets were still trading, would go up. He would get more viewers. Might sell subsidiary rights.
He was putting most of his remaining wad on a roulette square marked Bandit Six. Yeah, some days I still dream about walking up to him and whispering "Residuals."
I got this, more or less, from Graham Trent when I pulled him over to the side to get a brief conversation away from the troops. By then the rest of the unit had caught up. Scouts were out forward, the unit had spread automatically. The Nepos were grinning in their turrets. No immediate threats.
There was some sort of building. A pumping station, something, by one of the irrigation canals we were going to have to cross. I could get out of sight for the conversation by pulling him around to the side. Unfortunately, that left us nearly at the waterline.
He laid this all out for me grinning ear to ear. What a lark! Wasn't this grand! Russian bird. Flew in from Greece. Good luck we found you, eh? Make you famous.