NationStates Jolt Archive


A Stallion in the Sand and a Public Enraged

Agronian States
06-12-2005, 19:22
Intermittent streams of light static interrupted the thought and attention patterns of the two crewmen as their aircraft motored high above the Northwestern Roughlands. The Northwestern Roughlands, a band of rough and unforgiving territory that forms the fringes of the Great Plains through-out the Federation of Agronian States, was rough in nature and near-impassable to most motor vehicles which rendered it the prime place for an insurgency to take hold. However, the region wasn't desolate in terms of population; the region was scattered with ranches, settlements, and even the occasional sizeable city... Trotters was one of those cities. At one time, the bustling regional hub had been populated by several hundred. However, with modernization the town dwindled. That is, until the outbreak of the Agronian War, the war fought between the four Agronian States over how they were united. At that point in time, Trotters became the regional headquarters for a radicalist insurgency group, the Coalition for Agronian Freedom. The group sought to destroy the central government and turn this single nation into four. Why? They believed solely in the ability for the states to run themselves, ignoring the strides in freedom, economy, and in the quality of life that the unification brought. Needless to say, they were a prime target for the Federal government.

The twin-engined counter-insurgency aircraft, an OV-3B Stallion, maintained its slow loiter, watching for a suspected arms convoy to bring surface to air missiles to a settlement forty miles away. The two flight crew, Captain Paul Jensen and his copilot First Lieutenant Tanner Perhus, each maintained a watchful eye on the flat, passable terrain which snaked through the juttings of rock, canyons, and pits. Behind them, two more crew, both enlisted, watched through windows fitted with spotting scopes. A fifth sat in the rear immersed in the video feed from the small dome on the bottom of the aircraft which housed a video camera and a thermal imager. Instantly, his shoulders perked up and he cued his mic, "Captain, I've got targets on thermal at your eight o' clock, but I can't get them with the camera... Jay, can you see em'?"

The enlisted man manning the spotting scope on the left side grunted, "Negative. I've got nothing... Wait. I can see a shadow. Shit. They've got camoflauge netting up and what looks like the shadow of..."

In response to the imager operator's statement, Captain Jensen banked the aircraft around to get a better look, he scanned the area before noticing the shadow. Instantly, the aircraft's radar warning receiver lit up, sounding its alarm. Jensen glared at the thing, "What the fuck?! They've got radar guided missiles?! I thought they only had infrareds!"

"Apparantly not, sir! But let's get the fuck down in that canyon!"

Grunting, the pilot pushed down on his controls, pitching the nose of the aircraft down. His right hand moved the throttles and he pushed both engines to their maximum output as he aimed the nose of the bird towards a vast canyon below. "SIR! INCOMING MISSILE RIGHT SIDE SEVEN O' CLOCK!" The left side spotter was shouting with all the air in his lungs now, much louder than the twin turboprops as they whined. The white streak of condensation and exhaust neared the aircraft and he ducked for cover, bracing for an impact that would detonate at the right wing-tip. However, the aircraft dipped below the horizon line and into the depths of the canyon at the exact moment. The radar warning receiver alarm immediately disengaged and the missile roared overhead as it aimlessly sought a foe which had disappeared. It detonated several miles out.

With chest heaving, the pilot lessened the fuel load to the engines and let the aircraft slowly meander through the canyon. He looked over to Perhus, "Okay, once we get up-top, break radio-silence and tell command that we've got radar guided weapons here and that we can't do much, we've only got twin machine guns and a 57mm rocket pack with a thermal imager. If we try and strafe them, we'll have a missile rammed up our ass. We were meant to engage a convoy out of Trotters composed of thin skinned vehicles with infrared guided surface to air missiles and not a deployed radar guided surface to air missile site, fuck... I bet before command even reacts they'll have moved the bastard." Captain Jensen rocked his head as he thought, glancing out the windows and back at his crew. "Shit, should we engage them anyways? I'm willing to bet they're packing up and leaving... You guys agree?"

The First Lieutenant nodded in agreement, "Yeah, in my last assignment that's all they did with everything. Hell, if they fired their rifles at you they were gone and moved somewhere else. I'd think with a radar guided missile set, which they've never had before, has to be far more expensive than some pissy SKS. They're probably already gone and loaded up..."

The enlisted crew in back released a collective agreement. It was a close call, but they survived and now they had a triumphant surface to air missile crew likely celebrating their destruction of a Federal aircraft by packing up and getting drunk. They'd likely catch the group off guard and tear into them with their twin 12.7mm cannons and rocket pods.

"Alright, then its settled... Here we go!" He pulled back on the controls and lifted the lumbering bird from the canyon. He leveled its flight profile out at just a few dozen feet over the flat, and relatively unchanging terrain. "Where were they again?"

Tanner Perhus lifted up a pair of binoculars and scanned the horizon. He locked onto a newly appeared semi-tractor and trailer. "Beyond that next bluff..." He pointed with his index finger. "You see that semi? That must be the launch platform." He glanced over his shoulder to the right side spotter, "Say, Jay, how big was that missile?"

He shrugged, "Not sure, I saw the condensation trail and I saw a black dot coming. It was bigger than those infrared junkies we normally encounter."

"Medium range SAM, I bet. I wonder if they're planning on making the entire Roughlands inaccessible to us?" He shrugged and then followed through with his superior's commands, calling on the radio to command to inform of the insurgent's having radar guided weapons.

"Who knows..."

Captain Jensen readied his weapon set, activating the rocket pod and preparing the dual fire buttons, both located on his flight controls. "Thermal! Is anything up there that's still hidden?"

"I'm cross-tracking with both, nothin' sir. They've got two trucks, a semi, and I'm spotting about twenty insurgents. Wait. There's one more truck coming over that ridge. Not sure if its got any weapons."

"Aye... Ducking down now, they won't see us or hear us until its too late. Ready?"

The group responded with their usual response to requests to engage, "Hell ya!"

Grinning, the Captain pulled up on the controls and lifted the aircraft well into the sky, he kept his watch out his side window at his targets. Nothing changed. He leveled out and pitched the nose downwards, lining up the rudimentary external sight onto his target, a truck. He pulled the machine gun triggers and opened fire with the twin heavy machine guns. Two lines of impacting bullets led up to the truck and then a thousand showers of spark as the rear of the truck, its cab, and its engine compartment shredded apart. He banked a few degrees and depressed the rocket release button, dispatching about twelve rockets into a group of men assembled around another truck. A dozen impacts led to a dozen explosions. The flaming truck catapaulted over and smashed two flaming men. The rest were easily vaporized. A hundred yards ahead awaited the semi-tractor with ten more insurgents. Gunfire erupted as they plastered the skies with their assault rifles. A heavy machine gun opened up and rounds perforated the wing and fuselage of the counter-insurgency aircraft. Jensen unleashed the remainder of rockets at the targets before firing a few bursts of machine gun fire at the running insurgents, knocking the remaining ones down. The semi-tractor, with its trailer loaded with medium range radar guided surface to air missiles and two launcher units, all covered in camo netting, burst into flames before the missiles detonated from the intense heat. The sequential balls of flame arched into the sky before dissipating and leaving behind a hulk of charred, and burning, metal.

The crew cheered although aware of the damage they sustained, several rounds had perforated the cabin, but none had hit a crewmember. The pilot quickly spoke "Shit, where'd that third truck go?"

The thermal imager technician replied, "No idea. I lost it in the fireball haze on my imager. I'm sure it went back down that ridge and is probably hiding."

The pilot spoke, "Alright, well, we're losing fuel in the left wing, not much just a squirt a minute but we better head back. We did accomplish our mission after all?" His copilot agreed with a visual nod. Alright, let's bank around and head for Bowman." He pulled on the controls and banked the aircraft around, aligning her nose with the chevron marking South on his compass. However, as the aircraft motored away, that third truck again peeked over the ridge...





"There! Hurry up! Get out! Take it down!"

The second man grunted and leapt from the passenger seat. He quickly grabbed a Stinger man portable air defense weapon and kneeled in the dust. He pulled the hefty weapon onto his shoulder and aligned the reticles on the target, a not-too-distant 300 yards away and still relatively low. 'Heh,' he thought, 'must be drunk upon their success... This is the best time to get them.' The shrill tone emitted stating he had a lock upon the target, the missile had found its infrared signature emitted from the left hand wing. He depressed the release control and his shoulder jerked backwards as the Stinger missile erupted from the end of the launch system, streaking out and upwards towards the aircraft. He moved the reticle away from his face and watched the missile close in on the unsuspecting crew... The missile found its target and detonated, showering the aircraft with a pressure wave and shrapnel. The left-hand engine was ripped from the wing and spiraled towards the floor. Captain Paul Jensen died instantly as the pressure snapped his head to the right and severed his spinal cord. Several pieces of aluminum sealed his death. The left side spotter also perished, receiving four pounds of aluminum shrapnel in the face, chest, abdomen, legs, and arms. The pressure of the detonation of the left wing's fuel forced the tail of the aircraft to crumble away and fall of, thrusting the thermal imaging technician out the gaping hull and to his death several hundred feet below. The right side spotter was killed instantly as a piece of the missile severed his skull in half and shattered his viewport. His body hung out the hole. First Lieutenant Tanner Perhus received several pieces of aluminum in his upper left arm, as well as one which, after hitting the pilot and losing most of its velocity, his him in the side of the head, knocking him unconcsious.

The insurgent screamed in delight as he threw the surface to air missile launcher to the ground. The first man also cheered but quickly reminded the other that the potential for a counterstrike was imminenent. "Good shooting, but come on! We have to get out of here!" The insurgent complied and picked up the launcher, throwing it in the back of the pickup and covering it with a tarp. He pulled himself into the cab and closed the door as the vehicle spun around and quickly returned down the ridge. The insurgent, however, watched the plane spiral towards the ground. As it neared, it leveled off and then skidded into the desert floor, spinning as it lost its velocity. Finally, it came to a halt, thick black smoke eminating from the former counter insurgency aircraft.





Within the aircraft, nothing stirred except the warping of aluminum to the heat of the fires which burnt underneath, within, and outside the aircraft. The skin cracked and peeled away, the paint evaporating into the sunlit sky. A groan lifted itself from the copilots seat and First Lieutenant Perhus's head rolled to the right. His eyes fluttered open before becoming aware of what had happened. His right hand moved across his abdomen before releasing the harness which held him to the seat. He slumped forward into his flight controls. He didn't know what happened, but he was accutely aware of the fact that the plane managed to pull the nose up in the final seconds before crashing, saving his life... But the puzzling thing was the fact there was no tail and thus no elevators. He glanced over to the body of his captain, a piece of aluminum strut secured his dislocated head to his seat as the rest of his body was charred and littered with shrapnel. "Thank you..." He said with a hushed, quieted voice. He glanced over his shoulder at the bodies of the two spotters. The thermal imaging technician wasn't there, 'Maybe he got out,' he thought. Tanner glanced out his shattered window at the smooth sands and dust which categorized the landscape. The heat was unbearable now, the flames were licking at the cabin and soon to move in.

Moving his left arm, but not being able to operate his elbow or hand, he used his right hand to help push and then lift himself out the window. He tumbled out and landed with a grimace and a shriek of pain. Finally, he got a view of the aircraft. Flames engulfing the entire right side, and now the left. Realizing that it could very well detonate, he quickly got to his feet and scurried away, and then thrust to the ground as the fuel in the right wing detonated under the heat and pressure. Shrapnel impacted the dirt all around him, but he managed to escape being punctured by a two pound piece of aluminum skin or ribs. He lifted his head up to take a final glance at the crystal blue sky. He let his head drop and his consciousness faded away...



Since the end of the Agronian War, not a life had been lost to the actions of the Coalition for Agronian Freedom. Shots had been fired, vehicles and aircraft destroyed, but not a life lost on the Federal side. The insurgent destruction of FA-2055, an OV-3B Stallion counter-insurgency turboprop aircraft, had been the worst loss of life since the end of the Agronian War. Five deaths were recorded in the incident, and the public was inflamed and galvanized to act, especially considering that the CAF was often believed to be nothing more than a joke of a rebel group. Within a week of the destruction of FA-2055, decisions had been made, and publicly agreed upon, to bring the war to the Coalition of Agronian Freedom. The next few weeks would bring total war to the scenic Roughlands in the Northwestern tier of the Federation of Agronian States, and the elimination of any and all oppositon to the Federal government.




OOC- This is open to RP as long as you are a capable RPer of substantial quality. If you're interested please inform me. I'll be posting in this as often as I can. Its a relatively localized conflict, which will see heavy losses on all sides and is seen, at least to the Federal government and people, the time to cement the Federal government as the true government of the Agronian States.