Mercenary Army Aviation Special Operations FARP Team? Where to recruit?

[Icelander]

As these mercenaries aren't supposed to be able to blow J.R. Kessler's operations or any important connections to the central hubs of his networks, they'll have to be recruited by cut-outs who aren't linked to Kessler and, ideally, don't have a clue for whom they work.

Fortunately, Kessler has a very old and loyal friend, Antonio José Villareal y Herrera (b. February 19, 1913; Santiago de Compostella, Spain; d. November 16, 1992; Roseau, Dominica), who was still alive in 1991, living on Dominica with his much younger wife, Elena Cartagena Blanco de Villareal (b. April 2, 1941; Havana, Cuba), whom he married while running a casino with Kessler in pre-Castro Havana. And Antonio Villareal had a son out of wedlock before that, while serving in the French Foreign Legion during WWII, Rafael Villareal (b. May 5, 1941; Paris, France).

By 1991, Rafael Villareal is a senior intelligence officer in the DGSE. And Kessler, his (unofficial, on account of the German defeat of France and the occupation of Paris having prevented either Antonio or Kessler from attending the baptism) godfather reached out to him to find the right people to recruit men with a very specific set of skills from the former Soviet Union or other Warsaw Pact countries, which Rafael was in an extremely good position to do, as the DGSE, just like other Western intelligence services, was making deep cuts in their former Soviet departments, to enjoy the 'Peace dividend'.

So, with the enigmatic Jean René Marie Souètre (b. October 15, 1930; Ayguemorte-les-Graves, France) acting as the go-between, two former DGSE officers are hired to act as recruiters and talent scouts in the chaotic, still-in-flux former USSR and other Warsaw Pact countries in 1991. They were previously presented with their redundancy and pension packages by DGSE, as well as rather a lot of official NDAs enforced through the French version of an Official Secrets Act.

The senior intelligence officer was born at some point between 1946 to 1950. His paternal grandfather came to France in 1920 with his aristocratic mother and siblings, fleeing from Russia, and married a French-born White Russian woman. He was raised speaking Russian at home and French at school, as well as valuing Russian culture, attending military academies and graduating from St. Cyr, before becoming a combat arms officer in the French military.

I'm trying to figure out what a normal junior officer career might be, after graduating from St. Cyr in the 1970s, but after some 6-8 years in the military, depending on when exactly he's born and how French officer contracts and careers are usually structured, might even be 10-12 years, he moves over to SDECE or DGSE, depending on the exact year he makes his career change, and becomes a paramilitary officer there. He's trained in fieldcraft and as a case officer, but his expected role in the field is to recruit and control locals for those rare covert operations where there is a stabbing, shooting or an explosion.

I need his name, which would probably consist of a noble surname from a family who lived in St. Petersburg (but might have had estates somewhere else), but the given names should work in both Russian and French.

Then there would be a Ukrainian of Cossack heritage, born around 1955, whose father defected to the UK, along with his family, when he was a teenager. While his father was paid a small pension, it wasn't enough to provide the whole family with the decadent lifestyle they'd been hoping for, and the son had an angry, resentful, rebellious reaction to the whole thing, and after several arrests for brawling and being expelled from more than one school, in 1973, the youngster ended up crossing the Channel and signing up for the French Foreign Legion, like he'd seen in movies.

He served fifteen years in the Legion, ending up in the Commandos de Renseignement et d'Action dans la Profondeur of the 2e REP Legion parachute regiment. Because of his origins, he spoke Ukrainian, Russian, English and French well. The combination of his capacity for ruthless violence, his extensive training in its application and his language skills led to a job offer from DGSE in 1988, but while he had the skill set to be the perfect operator for a personal security detail, surveillance and overwatch for officers on dangerous assignments, there were concerns that in a new post-Cold War world, he wouldn't fit into a gentler, more civilized DGSE.

Going to need an original Ukrainian name for him, as well as maybe a variation of it he uses in France.

The third isn't actually a DGSE officer or even contractor, yet. He was born in Marseille in 1966, to a Corsican French father and a mother of Moroccan origin. He enlisted in the military as a contract soldier, served for a couple of years in the 33e Régiment d'Infanterie de Marine (33e RIMa), stationed on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean, and then made it through the selection to join the paratroopers of the 1er Régiment de Parachutistes d'Infanterie de Marine (1er RPIMa).

At the moment, however, he is in the brig, after he was caught running a sizeable black market scheme selling various military supplies over the border to Basques in Spain. Apparently, he had no political motive, he was just trying to make enough money to get his 'girlfriend', a teenage prostitute with a drug habit, out of the life, so they could marry and be happy. Apparently, they've been together two years and he's already learned her language, which, with her being a Moldovan from Transnistria, is Russian.

Even when offered freedom and all charges dropped, the boy wouldn't cooperate until they brought the girl to him. When he heard she'd been released, as she didn't have anything illegal on her when they were arrested, he was frantic that she'd go back on heroin wandering alone without him, and insisted she be found immediately.

He gave up a list of safe houses where she might have gone, which revealed quite a bit of organization and preparation, as well as suggesting others were involved, but when asked if she might be back with her pimp and the men who trafficked her to France, he didn't appear too concerned. Said that was over and they weren't looking for her any more.

Only, about three months before that, there was a fight at a whorehouse. A bad one. Left six dead, all Eastern European men. Three stabbed, five shot, not a wrong count there, one was stabbed in his lower back, below a tactical vest, his gun apparently drawn and used to kill three other men, who shot back without immediately incapacitating hits, then he was shot in the side of the head from contact range.

Then the two other men on the top floor, they must have tried to flee. A Romanian AK-type rifle apparently belonging to one of the men downstairs was used to stop them climbing out on the roof. One hit in the back of the knee and the upper arm, of his right. Maybe he had a gun? The other might have been a miss, it didn't get the knee, but the thigh. Messy scene, with the femoral artery ruptured, even though the wounded man tried to keep pressure on it. He didn't manage it for long, anyway, as someone stabbed him where the neck meets the shoulder, must have been a good-sized, long blade, as it reached through a lung and ruptured the aorta. Bled out pretty quick, then.

The other one, with the busted kneecap and shot-up arm. He got the worst of it. They're up on a roof, it's raining, a bit slippery, and even if it's out in the sticks, you have to figure gunfire will bring cops eventually. So, it wasn't slow, not as such. Just pretty thorough. Broke his left wrist and elbow, must have been some kind of grappling move to hold it still while he did what he did with the fingers. Cut them all off, even the thumb. Then rammed the knife up the peritoneum, through the jeans, and cut forward, until the knife came out at the zipper. Didn't nick an artery or anything.

Man was still alive when police arrived, just hoarse from screaming so long. He couldn't climb, even with assistance, and the cops couldn't get him down without equipment. While they were waiting for a fire truck or EMTs, the man slipped into unconsciousness, like he'd screamed out all his energy. They got him to a hospital, but it didn't matter, in the end, he never did wake up. Slipped into a coma and I don't know who they call to decide whether to pull the plug. Too much blood loss and oxygen-deprivation to the brain.

Anyway, those six guys, they all had Yugoslav or something passports. One of those new Eastern European countries, maybe. Refugees, they said they were, but they'd been here longer than just a few months. They were the heavies running the house and maybe a few more. Until somebody closed them down. Didn't even look like they came in there with guns. Don't know how many it was, but there was a lot of blood and inevitably, some bloody footprints. If it was more than one guy, they was all wearing the same size Nike sneakers.

I'll need a name for the Marseillais kid and his Moldovan girlfriend.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by thrash

Refueling helicopters is not rocket science. The only hard parts are managing condensation and other contaminants in the tanks (which I'm not sure Soviet aircraft are even sensitive to) and maintaining the fuel pumps or setting up a gravity feed system.

It's not rocket science, but you do want to have people who've done it before, in a shooting war, teaching your people the right way to do it. Mi-24 and Mi-8 helicopters operated pretty far from Soviet bases in Afghanistan, but even more so, they operated continents away in Angola, Mozambique, etc.

Originally Posted by thrash

Re-arming is more technical, but still not difficult. Actually re-arming in a non-permissive environment is highly unlikely. Once the shooting starts, the local military and/or gendarmerie will take a very dim view of any armed combatants that stick around too long. Note, though, that Hinds probably have enough internal cargo capacity for one reload of ammunition, if needed.

Since Panama in 1989, the 160th SOAR has done this, in non-permissive environments. So much so that they were in a firefight while re-arming Little Birds, which they went and unloaded on the enemy which were firing at them.

I find it somewhat implausible that the Soviet never tried to train anyone in that capability, given that they sent Mi-24 and Mi-8 helicopters to take part in proxy wars in a lot of African countries, and sent KGB, GRU and Army Spetsnaz with them to develop helicopter doctrine in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary warfare.

If no Soviet serviceman ever trained to re-arm a Hind or a refuel a Hip under combat conditions, then I guess we can't recruit from former-USSR countries, but then other users of USSR equipment would be possibilities. Angola must have re-armed helicopters while not secure in possession of the ground. As must Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mozambique, Botswana, etc.

Originally Posted by thrash

Parachute rigging is a special skill -- but only on the packing end. If you don't care about re-using the parachute(s), you don't need any training at all to de-rig a load on the ground.

The US Army 160th SOAR has aerial delivery experts who have the parachute rigger MOS and specialize in preparing loads for parachute drops to supply FARPs, being deployed ahead of everyone else (along with the aviation fuel and ordnance MOS guys) by parachute or helicopter, and then receive the drop capsules and in as little time as possible, make it no longer parachute drop capsules and turn it into fuel or ordnance that can be used to arm and fuel helicopters.

It's like how any proficient motorist at TL7 and early TL8 could change a tire with a spare, but only a highly trained NASCAR pit crew could do it under maximum time pressure.

There are generally three approaches to this problem:

Originally Posted by thrash

[*]Bring fuel (and maybe ammo) with you, in logistical support aircraft. These could be fixed-wing tankers or even other cargo helicopters with aux tanks. Support personnel can accompany the aircraft or onboard crew (crewchiefs and pilots) can resupply themselves.

In case you do anything overt enough to seize air fields, that's perfect.

Originally Posted by thrash

[*]Use agents in place (with or without hired local help) to receive airdropped supplies and set up caches. The actual replenishment is still probably carried out by the crew themselves.

Yeah, that's why I want to recruit actual intelligence officers or Advance Force Operations special operations personnel, to do this part, which makes everything else so much easier.

Originally Posted by thrash

[*]If it can't be done any other way, the equivalent of pathfinders or combat control teams can set up a DZ/LZ as a deep FARP. This is risky, however, as a considerable number of people are hanging around in bad-guy territory, waiting to be discovered.

Deploying a company-sized Commando into a sovereign country which did not ask for help and is not aware of the supernatural threat you are protecting it from is inherently risky. Because the network you serve exists to prevent the end of the world, though, you still train for it, because if such a deployment is ever necessary, you better be the best in the world at it, and able to do it without blowing the organization wide open.

That's also why the mercenaries doing this part are cut-off from knowing any important secrets. They are people doing a job. Like them or hate them, if they are caught, they can't compromise the entire organisation, all they can do is compromise a support structure that exists to support them, because they don't know about anything else.