But then, being a Hog pilot was all about roughing it.
He reached his left hand to give his steed more throttle. The TF34 GE power plants whinnied hungrily, winding their turbofans into a snorting frenzy. The plane jumped forward, her nose sniffing the air for the smell of battle as A-Bomb nudged toward the firing line. She gave the pilot a snort and a gentle shake as she flexed her muscles and strained for the sky.
He still had the coffee cup cradled in his lap. He liked to hold out as long as possible for the last sip. There was nothing like the feeling of a perfectly-timed takeoff— one where gravity forced the final gulp of joe down your throat.
CHAPTER 3
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA
21 JANUARY 1991
1704
Lieutenant William Dixon shuffled through the listing of Republican Guard units the army wanted bombed, in theory reviewing their priorities as targets. In reality he was doing nothing more than providing a fifth check on someone else’s math. One of Devil Squadron’s most promising young pilots, Dixon was currently assigned as a “floating liaisonary aide” to the FIDO, or fighter duty officer at Black Hole. It might sound semi-impressive outside of Riyadh, but it was actually a make-work job created especially for him, a velvet-barred temporary exile cum dog house.
Black Hole was the nickname for the command staff under Lt. General Buster Glossom in Riyadh. They prepared the daily air tasking order, essentially the daily game plan for the air war. The ATO was, in effect, Lt. General Charles A. Horner’s main tool for directing the battle, and Black Hole amounted to the right brain of USCENTAF and the allied air effort against Saddam. Everything that flew higher than a grasshopper, from Marine AV-8B Harrier jump jets to U.S. Air Force F-117 stealth fighters, got its marching orders from Black Hole.
The FIDO— a rotating assignment from each squadron— was a pilot who acted as a liaison and advisor to both the planners and the guys on the line. But as the FIDO’s sidekick, Dixon wasn’t here to liaison with anyone, much less give them advice. His squadron commander, Colonel Michael Knowlington, had shipped him over after the lieutenant had screwed up on a mission the first day of the war and then glossed over exactly what had happened. Before being shipped out, Dixon had partly redeemed himself by shooting down an Iraqi helicopter and becoming an instant celebrity— a good thing, as far as he was concerned, or he would now be cleaning latrines somewhere in Alaska.
Dixon’s contriteness after the affair had also played in his favor. Knowlington had as much told him that, if he kept his nose clean for a few days, he would rejoin Devil Squadron by the end of next week. And that meant he would find himself back in the air— the only reason to be in the Air Force at all, as far as Dixon was concerned.
So he was on more than his best behavior. Staying out of trouble wasn’t all that hard, actually, since his exile was more than just symbolic: The FIDO needed less than no help, and no one else at Black Hole had any place to put him. He’d been given a back desk in a back office carved from a custodian’s closet in an auxiliary building some distance from the main Black Hole contingent in the Royal Saudi Air Force building. He was so far from the action scorpions didn’t even bother to visit.
Which was why the knock on the outside wall literally scared the hell out of him. Dixon jerked his head up and saw the door frame filled by a six-six bruiser of an air force officer, with round, dark black cheeks and a smiling face that seemed semi-familiar.
“Ben Greer. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Dixon, rising to shake the major’s hand. He and Major Greer had shared root beers together at King Fahd his first night in Saudi Arabia— neither he nor Greer drank alcohol. “How are you?”
“In one piece. How the hell are you? I hear you’re a hero.”
“Nah. I came around behind my lead and bam, there was a chopper in my face. I don’t know which one of us was more surprised.”
“That’s not the way they tell it on CNN.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily believe everything I heard.”
“This is your reward, huh? Looks more like purgatory. I didn’t even know this was an Air Force building.”
“Kind of a long story.”
Greer flew an MH-53J Pave Low Super Jolly Green Giant chopper, a serious piece of whirly meat specially fitted for clandestine missions behind enemy lines. Based at Fahd like the A-10As, the Pave Lows were under the direction of the Special Ops command, a special group that combined army, air force and navy commandos. They were tasked with a variety of jobs, most importantly— at least as far as Dixon was concerned— SAR or search and rescue missions. They spent a lot of time in the hot and dusty regions of the war zone.
Because SAR was not specifically an air force operation, there was friction at the command level and a bit of grousing from some pilots, who questioned whether they would get the operational priority they needed when the shit hit the fan. Nonetheless, the crews who manned the Pave Lows were full-blooded members of the right-stuff fraternity, and Dixon felt a little awed by the much older Greer.
“Want to go grab dinner?” Greer asked.
“I’d love to but, uh, shit, this guy invited me to his house, and– ”
“Coffee? Just take a minute.” Greer had a strange look in his eye, as if this wasn’t completely a request.
“Well sure, what the hell.”
“Off-campus, so to speak.”
“Off-campus?”
“I wanted to talk to you about something where we won’t be disturbed. I got just the place.”
“Um, OK. Let me just tell the sergeant where I’ll be.”
Greer gave him a “you-weren’t-listening” squint.
“I mean, let me just tell her I’ll be out for a while,” said Dixon.
Ten minutes later, over some of the sweetest yet strongest coffee Dixon had experienced outside a hangar, the major laid out a plan for a Special Ops strike of Scud sites.
It was, as Dixon told him, a brilliant plan. But why, exactly, was he hearing it?
“We’ve been getting nowhere with the brass, and when I heard you were at Black Hole, I figured that was a message from God.” Greer gave Dixon a huge, Special Ops grin— his twentieth, at least, since they had sat down.
“I don’t have much influence,” Dixon told him.
“You can talk to some people, right? I heard Glossom likes you.”
“General Glossom? I’ve never even met him one-on-one.”
“Shit, guy like you? Splashes a chopper with a Hog? They’ll listen to you. Just bring it up in a meeting, offhanded kinda. We can take out the Scuds. I guarantee that. We’ll blow those little fuckers into so many pieces no one’ll even know they were there.”
“It’s just I don’t think I can talk anyone into it. Shouldn’t you guys be working on the CINC?”
“His Cincship?” Greer gave him a disrespectful grin. “Boss is working on Schwarzkopf personally. This is more a guerrilla operation me and some of the guys are drumming up.”
There was that smile again. Then something lit in Greer’s eyes, a bit too obvious to have been anything but rehearsed.
“Hey, I just thought of something,” he told Dixon. “You ought to sign up for some Special Ops yourself. As an observer. I can get you in, no sweat. We can use Hog pilots.”
“Go on.”
“No shit. A lot of pilots are bitching about the SAR flights. You could tell them what’s going on. That’s how we sell it from your end, and I’ll take care of it on mine. Shit, you’d be perfect. Forget SAR. You can come with us and blow up Scuds. I’ll pull strings and get you on board. My colonel is an A-1 guy. Man, he loves Hogs. Love ‘em. I think he creams just thinking about them.”
“I’d love to, but –”
“It’s done then. My colonel’ll make the call. In the meantime, make the pitch for us, OK? This is the kind of thing we’ve been training for.”
A half hour later, Dixon found himself in his supervisor’s office, repeating word for word— except for an occa
sional stutter— what Greer had told him.
The answer came quickly.
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Major, I knew you wouldn’t –”
“At ease, Dixon, relax. You’re the fifth guy who made this pitch today. Special Ops is putting on a full court press to get into the Scud game. I think they’ve assigned someone to work over everyone in Riyadh.” The major drew back in his chair, cracking his knuckles with a full finger spread. “I hear you’re getting bored around the office.”
“Who told you that?”
“Little birdie gave me a call just five minutes ago. Listen, I know the only reason you’re up here is that some general somewhere wanted to make sure the press could get a look at you. Well, they have. You’re chomping at the bit, aren’t you?”
“I would like to get back to my squadron.”
“I’ll be honest with you, BJ. I know there’s nothing here for you to do, I mean, besides waiting for somebody else to catch a cold. I know you’ve been bored. So I’m going to see what I can do about your request to ride with Special Ops as an observer. Not a bad idea, actually. We need more of our guys looking over their shoulders. Keep them from getting taken over by the god damn Green Berets. Pretty soon, these guys are going to be driving tanks instead of helicopters.”
Dixon sucked a quick, deep breath. He hadn’t exactly expected Greer to follow through on the offer, especially this fast.
Truth was, he’d be surplus material in the highly trained and capable crew that worked Special Ops.
On the other hand, this might be a kind of backhanded way of putting him back at King Fahd where he could just walk across the tarmac to Hog Heaven and get back in the starting rotation. It might be a way of getting around all the paperwork normally involved. Knowlington knew everyone in the air force; hell, he probably set this whole rigmarole up.
“I certainly wouldn’t pass up the chance to do anything, uh, anything important for the air force,” Dixon said.
“Good. If it was up to me, SAR would be entirely an air force mission. Special Ops is fine, don’t get me wrong, and I’m not against joint commands and all that bullshit, but— hey, this will work out. I’ll get on it right away,” said the major. “Listen, if anybody asks, you can handle a rifle, right?”
Dixon hesitated a moment. Since getting in trouble, he had made a solemn vow not to lie or even shade the truth.
“Absolutely, I can handle a rifle,” he said finally, deciding that handling wasn’t necessarily the same thing as aiming, firing and hitting anything he happened to point it at.
CHAPTER 4
APPROACHING THE IRAQI BORDER
21 JANUARY 1991
1732
Three-quarters of the world was blue— the light, delicate blue of a woman’s summer dress, inviting, scented with a fragrance that tickled and enticed.
The last quarter was hell, dirty yellow and brown, punctuated by black splotches and fingers of smoke and fire. Mongoose looked down through cockpit glass as the Hog chugged upwards, struggling to make the lofty twenty thousand feet prescribed as the “safe” altitude to cross the border. The A-10A was designed for smash-mouth, chin-in-the-mud flying. While other aircraft might consider twenty angels medium altitude, a heavily laden Hog worked up a serious sweat getting up there.
And to a Hog pilot, twenty thousand feet was just about in orbit. Hell, once the altimeter cranked over a hundred feet most guys called for oxygen and maybe a stewardess. But the brass had ordered the planes high to put them out of range of what was left of the Iraqi air defenses; though they’d been pounded pretty well on Day One of the air war, Saddam still had a formidable array of anti-aircraft guns and low-altitude missiles.
An Iraqi highway appeared in the distance as Mongoose oriented himself. It ran in a faint, gentle arc across the earth, like the scar left from a botched suicide attempt. Somewhere along it was an artillery encampment that Mongoose and A-Bomb had hit on their last run a few hours before, a five-clawed puppy paw of a site they had left mangled like a teenage girl’s wad of chewing gum. The pilot stared to the east, looking for the dark blotch of blackness that ought to mark it and the graves of the Iraqis who had worked the guns. There had been no resistance to speak of; the run had been quick, in and out, their bombs and missiles released from no lower than nine thousand feet, precisely as briefed. If anyone had fired at them, they hadn’t notice.
That was just fine as far as Mongoose was concerned. The medium altitude tactics felt awkward, but you couldn’t argue with the goal of getting everybody back in one piece. As the brass were fond of saying, there wasn’t anything worth dying for up here.
Which wasn’t to say that they wouldn’t get down and dirty if the situation called for it. Mongoose pushed his back against his seat, trying to undo a knot that had been tightening practically since leaving King Khalid. Part of him was convinced that the Hog had knotted his muscles itself because it didn’t like flying so high.
He double-checked his INS, mentally calculating that they were about ten minutes south of the quadrant in their assigned “kill box” or grid where they were to look for their target, another artillery park. Mongoose edged his eyes in that direction, his anticipation starting to build as he let the Hog nose ever so slightly into a very shallow dive. He aimed to arrive over their target at about fifteen thousand feet. The plane, happy to be on track for thicker air and sensing that she’d soon get a chance to do some snorting, gave him a happy growl, picking up speed.
Devil One and Two were each carrying a pair of Maverick B air-to-ground missiles and four Mk 20 Rockeye II cluster bombs. The Maverick B models were relatively primitive versions of the tank-busting weapon; a video camera in the nose displayed its target in a small television screen or TVM on the right side of the Hog’s control panel. Once a target was designated and locked, the pilot could launch the missile and move on; the Maverick’s own guidance system took over, flying its 125-pound shaped-charge warhead to the crosshairs. Newer models featured better seekers with infrared targeting and a heavier payload, but the B was still a deadly piece of meat, and only cost the air force about $22,000, a relative bargain— especially when compared to what it blew up.
The Mk 20 Rockeye II weapons were unguided but devastating; their bomblets spread out when dropped, a deadly hailstorm particularly suited for “softer” targets. The bombs were preset for this mission to be dropped from ten thousand feet; their need to be calibrated before taking off removed some of their flexibility, which was their only real drawback.
When the Hogs were about five minutes from their target, Mongoose did one more check of his paper map and coordinates. He was just rechecking their egress route back to base when their airborne controller, Red Dog, squawked out his call sign.
“Stand by for new tasking,” said the controller after running through the acknowledgment codes.
That meant: We got something juicy for you, so get your pen and paper handy.
Or in this case, your Perspex; Mongoose scrawled the heading and way markers directly onto the canopy glass with a grease pen. The nine-line brief began with an IP— an “initial point” to fly to that acted as the marker for most of the rest of the instructions.
The numbers on the glass were sending them about sixty miles further in Iraq, and well to the west, up in the direction of the Euphrates River and the better sections of the Iraqi air defense system. It was a hell of a long way to send the Warthogs, and Mongoose immediately guessed why.
He asked anyway. “What are we looking for, Red Eyes?”
“Scud launchers. F-111 crew saw them on the way out. Two, possibly more. Some auxiliaries.”
“Copy,” said Mongoose, immediately bringing his plane to the new heading.
The Iraqis had started launching the ground-to-ground missiles shortly after the start of the air war. Because of their range and ability to carry chemical and biological agents, Scuds had top priority as targets. So far, none had actually done much damage— but the allies’ luc
k couldn’t hold for very long.
The controller added that a Phantom Wild Weasel was being vectored into the area and would suppress any surface-to-air nasties. Like all the Weasels in the theater, the F-4 had a “beer” call sign: Rheingold One.
“The one Weasel to call when you’re slamming more than one,” sang A-Bomb in Devil Two. “I hope this Scud launcher is the son of a bitch who woke me up last night. Man, he pissed me off. I was in the middle of a wet dream.”
The rest of his transmission was covered by another flight. In theory, the squadron frequency should have been reserved just for them, but the large number of allied sorties and the fog of war had a way of mangling theories.
Mongoose wasn’t a particular fan of chitchat anyway, especially in this situation. If his map and memory were right, the suspected launch site was pretty close to several Iraqi SAM sites. The missiles had been hit at the beginning of the war, but that didn’t necessarily mean a few weren’t still there. But that’s what the Weasel was for.
He took a quick glance at his instruments. Everything was at spec. His heart was well into its pre-action rumble and his throat tightened a half-notch. Something inside his brain flicked a switch and the irises in his eyes widened. His situational awareness— a mental balloon of wariness around him— expanded as he gripped the stick between his knees, nudging the Hog toward the first reference marker.
Hogs #2: Hog Down Page 2