Editing Mercenaries and Planes: Writefaggotry (section)

==Mission 4 Interlude==
===IMINTnent Domain by NF===
Smith was a data analyst. He lived comfortably in a 2 floor apartment near his job, got payed well to do what he did. He had a mind and an eye for pulling information from the tiniest details. His specialty was intelligence analysis, especially video or photographic surveillance sources. It was a skill he'd honed during his time as a counter sniper with the Treasury Department, but he'd always thought there might have been a some nepotism in his hire to The Company.

Regardless of how he'd gotten the job, it had brought Smith into this dark room in Langley. It was an overlong conference room with not enough furniture. Veneer paneling, gray carpet floor, some poor interns had hauled a monster of a conference table in here and deposited some office chairs in a corner. Smith was in the process of rolling one of these across to the monolithic table when there was a rap on the door. Opening it Smith was confronted by the craggy features of one Operations Officer Partridge.

Partridge nodded to him and pushed past, dropping the cardboard file box he was carrying unceremoniously on the table. Smith stared at it for a moment, it sat slightly askew in the middle of the table, exuding an almost palpable sense of foreboding. Partridge was at the other end of the table now, fiddling with a projector.

"Ander, pull the screen over there down and take a seat."

Shiiiit... First names already, this was not going to be a good news day. Still smith did as he was told, bringing the thin white screen mounted on the wall down with a yank and pulling his chair up along side the box.

"Been following the news lately son?"

"Nothing aside from what comes across my desk sir."

"You should do it more often, less tendency to get myopic about whatever corner of the world they've got you putting under a microscope. Few days back, you might have heard, the Liberians moved on the Crown Prince of Morocco."

"Jesus."

"More or less my words. The first operation involved the Diplo flight getting rerouted in the air by a merc outfit the Frogs have been working with. Of course that got the attention of the APLAA and MENA boys pretty quickly, and then that got the ball rolling. That's where these come in."

Partridge pointed to the screen, the projector now running and throwing a surveillance photo up on the screen. A port in the Congo, Pointe-Noire, according to the notation in the corner. Three objects were highlighted in red marker, aircraft.

"Same jets from the diplo take down?"

"The very same."

Something clicked in Smith's head. It'd been nagging at him as soon as he saw the shot, but now he knew what it was.

"Wait a minute. What is this, Congo? We didn't have any KH-11 KENNANs over there, and this looks too close anyway, I can count the flaps on that Sukhoi. Come on, Partridge did we have a bird in the air?"

This only elicited a nod from the old man.

"Well what did we send out there that that Sukhoi didn't just pick it out of the sky?"

"SR-71U"

"Partridge, there's no such thing as an SR-71U..."

The old man cleared his throat "Not at your pay grade no, do you want to see the rest?"

Smith stifled his curiosity and nodded. A nagging voice in the back of his mind wanted to tell him what that "U" probably stood for, but Reaper Drones creeped him out enough and he stuffed the thought into the hole from whence it slithered and tried to forget it. Partridge continued.
 
"The Liberians gunned straight from the airstrip to the border, made a mess in the doing of it. Morocco squeezes the DRC, who hardly need the urging, and this is where things go a little funny. We got that bird in the air for a different reason, the whole Moroccan situation was just icing on the cake. Few minutes into the hell storm these boys bring with them a number of things stop making sense."

"I'm guessing that if they hadn't I wouldn't be here?"

"Smart boy." Partridge clicked and the image advanced, drastically zoomed. Three Hummers made up a roadblock. Another click, and the roadblock disappeared. Smith mulled this over, nothing particularly weird about that, surplus wasn't hard to come by. Another click, two more Hummers, but something was off.

"Fuck."

Partridge just nodded.

"An Avenger?"

Another nod. Click, the Avenger mid firing. Click, What looked like half of a Mirage spiraling out of the air, the pilot rocketing out at an oblique angle. Click, further back again, four ovoid tubes plummeting to earth. Click, the whole dockside industrial complex bathed in flame. Smith actually gaped, an expression not common on the face of an IMINT spook.

"Jesus Christ Partridge, they naped it?"

"223 incidentals is the latest count, anything we might have traced or anyone we might have talked to directly bout where that hardware came from is now melted into the asphalt."

Smith sat for a minute. "Well what are we waiting for, this is actionable, let's get it moving. We can drop the hammer on these guys, probably their whole company with this."

Partridge shook his head slowly "The hammer goes nowhere, and we're going to make sure of that. We've got them nailed, and we're going to keep them that way." Smith gave him a bemused look and Partridge sighed. "Keep up now. These guys went megaton when one of their pilots got splashed, they dropped a helicopter on a traffic jam, little while back they blew up a hospital because the Frogs tossed a smoke grenade at it. This is what we call an asset, and thanks to these" he gestured at the screen "They are a free one if we need them."

Smith raised his eyes at the hospital part. Partridge caught it. "Now you're getting it, yes, these are the ones you let slip, these are the guys that you let the director of APLAA find out about on CNN. That--" Partridge pointed at the box."Is your second chance. You fucked it bad, here's your second chance. The box is aircraft specs, company background and dossiers for the pilots as well as some of the support staff. Keep an eye on them, indefinitely. It's in your power to yank on the leash a bit if you need to, and keep us appraised of anything you think warrants our attention, but other than that it's your call. While you're cutting through that you're also following up any leads you come across of suss out with that beautiful brain of yours as to how one of our stinger trucks got into the Congo without me putting it there. My money's on somebody skimming off the Chilean order, but that's for your to figure out."

Smith sat numb for a beat, this was not what he had been expecting. Transfer, demotion, not this.
Partridge offered a final shot as he left, "Don't fuck this one up son, this is your new office now, I'll have a coffee maker and the rest of the files sent in shortly." He didn't quite slam the heavy door on his way out, content to let it "thunk" shut with all the finality of a nail being driven into the lid of a coffin. Smith sighed deeply, slumped a bit, and pulled off the top of the box.