Editing Mercenaries and Planes: Writefaggotry (section)

===Mission 2 Interlude===
====Bushwhack by Skyhawk====
Paul De Groot swore silently at the growing collection of razor grass cuts on his hands as he followed his local guide through the tall grasses and viciously tangled trees that surrounded the airfield outside of Kisanagi. The Dutch photographer gritted his teeth and attempted to push aside yet another large clump of grass that had somehow survived his native guide’s machete while simultaneously husbanding his cameras exposed telephoto lens from any dirt or whipping branches that might suddenly swing its way. ‘Next time you decide to go bush whacking,’ he mentally berated himself, ‘at least bring some gloves.’ He looked down at his camera and brushed at a bit of grass it had collected halfheartedly. ‘And the camera bag. Don’t forget the camera bag.’

It would be worth the pain and annoyance he kept telling himself. If the rumors were true and he could get some clear shots he’d have news agencies begging to buy them from him. ‘Either that or French agents trying to steal them,’ he thought in disgust. He’d already lost one camera to a sneering french man this trip. The bastard had flashed a holstered pistol, muttered something about nosy reporters, and snatched the little Nikon from Paul’s hands. Paul hadn’t bothered to argue or seek help...it was a waste of time in places like this where anyone toting a gun, and there were a lot of them about, could make his own laws.

The sound of a jet engine ramping up somewhere up ahead pushed Paul out of his funk and added a bit more spring to his step as he navigated the narrow trail. Coming around a twisted tree trunk he nearly ran into his guide. The local boy pointed with his machete at a gap in the razor grass several meters away through which Paul could distinctly see open ground and, beyond that, the pitted runway of Kisanagi’s airfield. Paul grinned and dug out another small wad of cash. “Rester ici,” he said in french, handing it over. ‘I certainly hope he stays,’ Paul thought as he turned and began his careful approach to the edge of the wild grass, ‘otherwise I’m gonna have trouble getting back.’ He’d had enough guides run out on him in his three years covering rebellions and civil wars in Africa that he knew unless he told them up front that he’d pay them half again as much if they got him home again they weren’t likely to stick around for very long.

The view from the edge of the razor grass wasn’t the best he could have gotten but the guide had at least gotten him to the proper side of the field. A small collection of tents and shipping container barricades at one end of the field drew his trained eye. It looked deceptively shoddy. Third rate tents, beat up shipping containers, and just enough local looking people milling around that anyone not looking for something suspicious might miss them. But he knew what to look for. New weaponry, alert guards, just enough well placed clutter and barricades to make getting a good view difficult...all the signs of a well funded and well armed mercenary outfit.

There were a lot of foreign mercs in Africa these days but only a few who could pull off what these guys were rumored to have done and still remain relatively discrete. He’d heard about the massacre at Bania. He’d heard about the rebels, the government forces, the Foreign Legion, and the fight that had left the town nothing but a scorched ruin full of the dead and dying.

Stories like that were a dime a dozen in Africa these days. But what had peeked his interest had been the mystery air force that had supported the FFL. The kind of aircraft survivors had reported weren’t common in this neck of the woods...and neither were the munitions they carried or the careless way in which they were used. Bridges, hospitals, markets...it didn’t seem to matter to them what they hit. Even boats full of fleeing refugees.

Paul grinned coldly as his telephoto lens zoomed in on partially concealed aircraft revetment and the warplane it contained. ‘Click, click, click’ went his camera. Aircraft types, weapons, maintenance equipment...faces. His camera captured them all in stunning detail.

He went through two memory cards before he felt he’d gotten enough. He slithered back into the denser brush and escaped to where he’d left his guide. He shouldn’t have been surprised when he found the tree and its surroundings devoid of people...especially young native guides with machetes...but he couldn’t help it.

“Godverdomme!”

====St. Claire Homecoming by NF====
Roslyn was the name her parents had given her. Well, her mother had given her. Mother loved the Lord, daughter of french missionaries, and Father, simple African fisherman, loved Mother, so Roslyn it was.

They'd raised her in St. Claire, the village her missionary grandparents had helped construct. Easy life, only child for years. Her sisters would come later 10 years later, for a time it was a simple family as happy as one reasonably could be in the third world. Then the government began to destabilize, crumbling. They lived in fear of rebel attacks, the village swelled with displaced refugees from the north. Doctors without Borders arrived and built a hospital to serve as a staging ground and to care for the stream of mutilated victims coming from rebel controlled areas.

With them came Jean Claude.

She'd arrived back home from a university in France to find the intrepid reporter living in her home. The summer they spent together had begun with subtle antagonism towards the person who'd invaded her family life and evolved over the few short months into sneaking off down to the river and sitting under the quay to watch the sun go down, the fumblings in the dark when night fell. Mother would never approve of moving so quickly and Jean Claude was scared to death of her father, so they kept quiet. Still, he was waiting for her behind the house before she left for the job at the embassy, held her a little longer than he had to, kissed her quickly and said "Write mon amour."

She'd worked at the embassy for a few brief months, savoring the letters from home. She ate cheap food from a stall down the block from her apartment for a month, bought ruggedized waterproof camera with it. She sent it off with her next reply to Jean, the shipping cost more than the camera did. She'd always been telling him that the expensive Canon he'd brought with him wasn't going to last long out here, he never listened.

Then the letters stopped coming. The newspapers read that the rebels had made a major thrust, and were plowing through settlements like a homicidal whirlwind. Then word came through embassy channels, shortly after on the news, that the French Foreign Legion had fought a decisive battle against the rebels, at St. Claire.

She got leave, her supervisor was understanding of that at least. By jeep, shit heap of a Cessna and jeep again she arrived a week after the attack. Smoke was still coming out of the village, the town's single pump gas station stubbornly refusing to be quenched. The FFL had set up across the river. already bridging vehicles had spanned the rubble of the crossings obliterated in the opening minutes of the attack, and a footbridge made of the few remaining boats bobbed gently down river.

She made her way into town on foot, the jeep driver wouldn't go any further, "To much death." was his only explanation. She wandered the streets, the landscape had changed so much it was almost difficult to find her way home. Children sat in the streets, to tired to cry, covered in brick and mud dust. Adults wandered the streets like ghosts, no one looked at her. A man was perched half on top of a mound of rubble that might have bee a house once. The blood and dust on his face had congealed into a kind of clay, gluing one of his eyes shut. She wondered why he hadn't bothered to scrape it away, then realized that he probably had the right idea, nothing to be gained from seeing this kind of devastation in further detail. As she walked nervously past she was struck by a stench, one she would have been happier not realizing that it emanated from the man's now obviously gangrenous leg, looking for all the world like a worm ravaged piece of meat having been shot through with shrapnel.

When she finally found her house she sat for a while on the low china cabinet. All the other furniture in the small kitchen was gone, mortar round having come in through the roof and landing in the middle of the dining room table. Her mother's corpse was in the resultant crater.

The flies were buzzing, the smell was absolute hell, but Roslyn didn't register any of these things. next to her mothers crumpled form were the remains of a fine china serving dish, a gift from her father. scattered around it were croissants, flaking and crawling with flies. She'd loved croissants.

She was to numb to cry, she stumbled from the house and made towards the river bank. Word was that some of the villagers had made it to the far bank in boats, although the official line from the FFL was that the rebels had killed many as they tried to cross. She didn't want to hope that her father and sisters had made it, didn't want to think about Jean Claude, afraid she couldn't bear the crash that would follow if she was optimistic and wrong.

As she neared the bank she saw white tents. The remaining personnel of the hollow crater that was once a hospital had set up a triage center, they were doing what they could, but still she wondered why so many wounded were in the streets. As she passed through the clinic the answer became clear. There were maybe two or three people with any medical training here, all clearly at wits end, ordering around some villagers who had volunteered to help. All the medical supplies had been in the hospital, these people were operating with kitchen knives for scalpels, inner-tubes from bikes as tourniquets and alcohol serving as everything from antiseptic to pain reliever.
She approached one of the doctors, washing his hands in rubbing alcohol. "Shouldn't the Legion be here, helping?" her french was practiced and clipped, unconsciously doing her best Embassy Official voice.

"The Legion saw fit to do triage as they moved through town, and donated a medic and some supplies. The Medic left after we objected to the froid salauds marking our hospital for an airstrike, and we ran out of most of the supplies within two days. We await resupply, but Médecins sans Frontières is hesitant to move into an area so soon after an assault, especially one that killed so many of their people, so for now we wait." The man was clearly haggard, but she had to ask.

"Where did the people who made it across the river go? Is there some kind of list of who made it, any way I can find out if..." She wouldn't let herself finish the thought.

The doctor looked at her wearily. "Mademoiselle, I spent the last hour tying off arteries in a man's amputated leg, and I will spend few trying to pull pieces of his femur out of his wife's back in the hope that she can move again without risking a shard of bone nicking her spine. I wish I could help, but I simply have n'ont pas le temps. Those that made it are either back in the village, hiding in tents near to FOB the Legion set up on the other bank or scattered to the four winds. Those that didn't are either at the bottom of the river or in that trench."

She made her way to the long pit, found easily enough by the stench of corpse rot and lye. She pulled a handkerchief with the Embassy logo on it from her pocket and pressed it over her nose, it didn't really help.

The sight that confronted her beggared belief. Rebels were mixed in with the townsfolk, limbs had been heaped in along with whole bodies, all caked with the white dust of sodium hydroxide. She found her middle sister and father first, head peaking out from beneath a jumble of legs and arms. She did them the courtesy of not vomiting directly into their grave.

She made her way down the trench, forced herself to walk and look, she had to know. Still each step felt like walking through quicksand. At the other end of the trench she found him. Jean Claude lay face up, at the top of the pile, his body baking in the sun. Mary was next to him, tossed into the pit in such a way that one of her arms rested across the reporter's chest. The tableau struck something like jealousy in Roslyn. She found it almost funny that she would feel something like that, but her ten year old sister was the last person to hold the man she had loved in her arms. She walked away without noticing that Jean had but one arm with which to return the dying embrace.

She sat under the quay were she and Jean Claude had spent those few happy nights, and finally let the tears come. She sobbed, wept. She held her knees under her chin and let the sorrow wrack her body, rocking back and forth. She opened her eyes after a while and spied something that stopped her quiet quaking.

A small yellow case had washed ashore. It was, she realized with a start, a camera. She got to her knees and shuffled a few feet towards the water lapping gently at the moors of the dock. Grabbing the camera by the strap she lifted it before disbelieving eyes.It was Jean's camera, the one she had sent him from the Embassy. Hesitantly she pressed the power button; when the device came alive she rushed back to her previous position and began eagerly paging through the photos.

Shots of her family, of the hospital, one of Jean Claude smiling at himself in the mirror, one of her as she walked out of the village towards a waiting jeep, full of hopes and ambition. Then shots of what she realized was the attack. A picture of her home, out of focus and shaky, on the run. One of a column of smoke and debris shooting up out of where the hospital had once stood, although she didn't know enough to recognize colored marker smoke mixed in with the black soot, nor the streak of jet exhaust in the upper corner of the photo. Shots of destruction in the streets, some of the same people she had seen on her way through, running down the road. A picture of a truck full of rebels firing a 12.7mm machine gun into a crowd. A picture of the boats. These were all at odd angles, she realized Jean must have set the camera to just take a picture every few seconds as he ran.

The last ones were clearly taken from the boats, the crowds packing into them, a close shot of his ever present satellite phone. One of the boats exploding, the trails of what were unmistakably even to her untrained eye rockets streaking into the water. A shot of an aircraft coming right at the camera, a gout of flame erupting from the nose. An arm holding a satellite phone spiraling away. then a splash of the arm disappearing beneath the water. The camera spun, people and faces, some caught in the middle of popping apart under cannon fire. The last shot as the memory card filled was of Mary's face, Jean must have collapsed atop her.

What stuck with her was the look on Mary's face, the sheer horror. Jean had by sheer happenstance managed to get one of those photos that would define a conflict even with one of his arms gone and his camera on autopilot hanging around his neck.

Then it occurred to her just what he was holding. Planes had hit the boats. The same planes that the Legion was being so evasive about explaining. The rebels hadn't hit the refugees, these pilots had. Someone had to see these, but she knew enough about world politics that she was holding molten plutonium. These would never see the light of day, no matter who she handed them to. As soon as she made their existence known they'd disappear, and she might go with them. She resolved then to do this herself, not really thinking of what it would take. She remembered Jean's words, something he had once told her about chasing a story "The smallest details are often the most important mon amour. You can tell much from them."

She paged back to the shot of the plane bearing down on the boats, zooming as close as she could. She was happy that she'd bought him a good camera, and the plane was ridiculously close. There, above the roaring spew of flame pouring from the gun was a word written on the craft's nose. In pixelated Teutonic script she could just make it out. "Baron" it read.

It wasn't much, but it was a start.