“Keep your turn coming,” Bear told him. I have one more. He’s up. He’s dotted.” The pitter’s slang referred to the icons on his screen that said the enemy radar had been located and targeted by the Phantom’s gear.
“Handing off,” Bear said, giving the target information to the missile so it could attack while he concentrated on finding more threats.
“Optical launches on those twos,” warned the pilot.
“Ready light!”
“Fire.”
“Away. Shit— we got that six. Mama! Secondaries. There we go! Got the trailer on the two! Whole damn thing’s burning like all hell. Oh yeah, baby! Kick ass!”
The HARM’s warhead was designed to explode large, nasty shards of tungsten into the control facility of the missile’s radar. By doing that, the HARM wiped out the valuable electronics gear, rendering the battery useless. It was a more effective way of destroying a threat than blowing a hole in a radar dish, which could be easily repaired.
It also generally meant you got the men working the missile. The good ones were harder to replace than the gear they worked.
Parson caught a glimpse of the damage through the top of the canopy as he rolled the Phantom and began letting off chaff. One of the SA-2’s that had been fired before the site was hit was now headed in their direction.
“Telephone pole’s gunning for us,” the pilot told his pitter— his way of apologizing for the six-and-a-half g’s he pulled as he yanked the F-4 around to confuse the missile’s guidance system. The force of the maneuver squeezed his mouth and made his words sound strange, even to him. As he recovered, he juiced the throttle, accelerating to put a good chunk of real estate between the Phantom and the Iraqi missile. But the missile, fired without proper targeting to begin with, had already fallen away.
“Hogs are still with us,” reported the backseater.
“Devil Flight, this is Rheingold One. Sorry for the excitement,” Parsons told the A-10s.
“No problem,” snapped Devil One. “We like things hot.”
The colonel did a quick check of his systems, made sure he hadn’t caught something in the nether reaches of the plane. His fuel was still pretty good, but they’d fired all their radiation missiles; time to call it a day.
“How you doing in your cave back there, Bear?”
“’Bout ready to take a nap,” said the pitter.
“Miles to go before you sleep,” said the pilot.
“Hey, I’m the English teacher. When did you study Frost, anyway?”
“Haven’t you heard? Mandatory training for all airline pilots.”
“I’ll be impressed when you quote Whitman.”
“’Flood tide below me, I see you face to face’,” said Parsons, reciting the beginning to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
It was the only part of the poem, or Whitman for that matter, that he knew, but it was good enough to elicit a snort of surprised approval from Bear.
CHAPTER 10
KING FAHD
JANUARY 21 1991
1800
The plane the A-10A reminded Knowlington of wasn’t the Thud, which, after all, was a straight-line in-and-out mover. It reminded him of the Spad, the propeller-driven A-1 Skyraider, a Navy plane adopted by the air force for close-in ground-support work. Drawn up at the tail end of World War II as a torpedo bomber, the Spad was a throwback to an era when sticking really meant sticking.
Knowlington had never actually been assigned to an A-1—he’d been a pointy-nose, fast-mover jock from Day one— but he wormed his way into the Spad’s cockpit a few times to satisfy his curiosity. He’d even once volunteered for a combat mission, though he was probably lucky he’d been turned down. He was flying Phantoms by then, and if a Viet Cong gunner hadn’t gotten him, the shock to his system would have.
Still, the A-1 was a hell of a plane, all stick and rudder, able to eat bullets with the best of them. She had her quirks. Skull always had a bit of trouble with the armament panel; it was right above his knee but he had a bad angle while flying. Still, the plane felt substantial around him, like a big old Mercedes. He had a fairly good flying position high up top, unlike the Phantoms and especially the early Thuds, where it felt like you were in a cave. And she did what she was told. Think left and you moved left. She could stand just about stock-still if you wanted, and pound the bejezuz out of what you were looking at.
The Hog was like that, only a bit faster.
Well, maybe not faster, come to think about it.
Skull thought right bank and the Hog went right bank. He pulled the stick back and she corrected, her forked tail snapping into place like a slot car coming out of a turn. He pulled a few more turns, each one a little sharper, making sure the control surfaces were still in place and working well.
Even though he’d flown the Hog back in the States as much as he could, Knowlington had been awkward as hell his first few flights over here, muscling the plane through her paces, hitting his marks mechanically. It wasn’t physical, it was mental — like he was thinking about flying, or maybe worrying about what some of his more senior pilots must be thinking: old man in a plane, old washed up hack shuffled into the wrong command.
No one said that, of course, but he could read it. More than one Centcom staffer just about told him he was washed up, though the generals were much more tactful— most of them, after all, had been his friends for a long time. Inside the squadron, there was plenty of resistance, even from Major Johnson, maybe especially from him. Johnson felt with some justification that he could lead the squadron, and probably resented being number two behind a guy who’d hardly even flown the plane. A-10 drivers were a special fraternity among combat pilots; their mission and plane was different than anyone else’s, and they tended to be different, too.
Good pilots, definitely, but with maybe the tiniest of chips on their shoulders about it.
A few realized that Knowlington had helped save the Hogs and possibly their jobs from the scrap yard, volunteering when he got word through the back channels that the CINC himself wanted more Hogs in Saudi Arabia for the ground war. They were grateful, but even they thought he was too far removed from “real” flying to lead them into battle.
Nobody mentioned his drinking. No one ever had.
The gray-haired colonel in him agreed that he ought to stand aside for the younger men when it came to flying missions; most of them were better Hog pilots than he’d ever be. But this afternoon he felt something ease into place as he snapped himself into the A-10A’s ejector seat, something familiar; as he pushed the nose up and started to climb toward ten thousand feet, Colonel Thomas “Skull” Knowlington lost track of the line that separated him from the plane. Some awkwardness lingered. He kept expecting more in the HUD, and maybe a better view out of the side of the canopy; his eyes tripped when they felt for the fuel gauge. But he knew this plane the way he knew the others; after so many years of estrangement, the sky had welcomed him back.
No reason I shouldn’t go north, he told himself. As long as I’m not a liability, it’s where I belong.
Except that the generals above him wouldn’t like it. As long as he didn’t screw up, they wouldn’t court martial him over it, of course, but they could force him to retire.
Then his string of non-drinking days would surely end.
Knowlington pushed the Hog through a series of twists and turns, gradually increasing the pressures against the control surfaces. He had written down a cheat sheet with all the maneuvers, just to make sure he didn’t miss any. But he didn’t even have to glance at it. His hands were slower, true, and his eyes— damn, his eyes weren’t the telescopes they’d once been. But his head was still there; that was sharper than ever.
Your head could also be a liability. Memories were like bullets in your wing. One slipped into his brain now as he pulled the Hog into a steep dive. He tried to work it away, ignore it. He even closed his eyes. But it came back, hard and fresh.
He was in a Phantom. They had just pulled out
of a dive every bit as steep, bombing a bridge near the Laos border. Knowlington recovered and started the long run home. His wingman called out a SAM launch.
Soviet telephone poles coming for them. The SA-2 was relatively new then, very formidable. But he had encountered them a few times before; so had his wingman. He jinked the missile onto his beam, pulled a few g’s and let the engine roar. Nothing to it.
But his wingman couldn’t break free. Somehow, some way, Captain Harold “Crush” Orango had taken a SAM right in the tail. Skull’s backseater saw the hit. He saw, or thought he saw, two ejections and chutes. By the time Skull recovered from his evasive maneuvers and made sure his six was clean, they had lost track of the stricken Phantom’s crew. Skull cranked back, unable to find the parachutes in the low-lying clouds or draped in the jungle below. They found the wrecked Phantom soon enough – the sucker kicked up more smoke than a flaming oil tanker – but the pilot and weapons officer were nowhere to be found.
Skull keyed his mike and called in the crash. At the same time, he greased his Phantom down to treetop level, looking for his buddy in the thick canopy of trees. He’d flown with Crush on something like twenty missions; he wasn’t about to lose him.
Hell damn, he’d have to start paying for his own drinks.
There was no ground beacon, no signal from the pilot’s emergency radio. They were over Laos a few miles, not the best area to be. For all Skull cared he could have been pulling circuits over the Kremlin. He crisscrossed twice, low and slow, he and his pitter taking turns peering out the side, looking in vain for a pucker of nylon or a flash from a signal mirror.
He spotted a village–sized clearing at the edge of the canopy just to the east, probably straddling the border with North Vietnam, though he wasn’t about to get out a map and check. Holding the F-4 about as slow as it would go, he eased toward it. The clearing was a perfect place for a chopper to land. With luck Crush would be hiding nearby.
Red and brown rocks rose from the jungle to his left as he approached. There was a long rift in the ground, a mountain ridge heaved up by some ancient geological pressures that had dented the South Asian peninsula. He passed the clearing.
“See anything?” his backseater asked.
They called him Little Bear. Not exactly original, but he claimed to be part Cherokee.
Might’ve been bull.
“Negative. I’m trying another sweep.”
“Copy.”
Skull brought the Phantom back around, her engines whining. Fuel burn was light. Flaps felt a bit sluggish for some reason. He was at five hundred feet, slipping toward three hundred as he made the pass, lower than the top of the nearby ridge.
Nothing. And nothing again on the third run. He brought the plane up. This much flying over any one spot in Southeast Asia was extremely dangerous, especially at low altitude.
But where was Crush? On the other side of the ridge? He took the Phantom around, still craning his head toward the ground for a sign of something.
“I’m going to run along that escarpment a way,” he told Little Bear.
“Shit— a mirror. Right wing. See it?”
His backseater leaned forward past his equipment to poke him in the back and make sure he had his attention. Skull looked over his shoulder out the F-4’s canopy, but couldn’t see the light, couldn’t see anything but the infinite variations of green below.
“Where?” he asked.
“Back there. It was something.”
“Yeah, hang on. I’ll go back.”
He could barely contain himself or the Phantom as he pulled around for a better look. He put his wings almost on the trees, holding the jet barely above stall speed, begging the mirror to catch a fresh glint of the strong, overhead sun.
He got a nose full of heavy machine-gun fire as a reward. What seemed like a hundred thousand 23mm anti–aircraft guns opened up on him from the ridge.
There was a disconnect for a second, a short between his brain and his body. Knowlington’s hand threw the throttle to after-burner, or maybe beyond; the rest of him reacted to push the plane into a line over the ridge and out of fire. None of this registered in his brain. All the pilot saw was black lead headed straight at him from all directions, red muzzles burning into his eyes.
Breaking off was the prudent thing to do, the thing any commander would have insisted he do, the thing that was right. He did it as soon as his limbs began taking instructions from his brain again.
It felt very, very wrong.
They were back at twenty thousand feet, still climbing and halfway to Burma before his backseater’s voice pulled him back to the plane.
“Throttle stuck,” Skull answered lamely. He began pulling the Phantom back, but he was spooked. They were now low on fuel, so low that he couldn’t have made another pass even he wanted to. He radioed a warning about the anti-air and headed back to home base in Thailand.
After that, the real drinking started.
No one ever found Crush or his pitter. They weren’t among the prisoners released at the end of the war, nor did their names show up among the dead, either in the North or interred in Laos. Their names were on the Wall in Washington, D.C.; Skull had traced his finger over them himself.
Officially, the Air Force decided that the two men had gone down with the plane; unofficially, Knowlington knew that was a bunch of bull, since the Vietnamese would have recovered the bodies. The reds had definitely found the plane; they had released propaganda photos of it as part of a campaign to prove that America had no respect for Laos’s borders.
As if the scumbags did themselves.
Despite the fact that he’d driven through a cloud of flak, Skull’s Phantom didn’t have a nick on it when he landed. A lot of guys interpreted that as one more sign of his incredible luck. Even Little Bear was amazed.
Knowlington saw it as confirmation that he had chickened out and was a coward at heart.
All the recognition, all the medals that had come before that flight— and certainly those that came later— couldn’t counterbalance those dark five minutes on that sortie.
He never talked about it with Little Bear. In fact, he started avoiding his backseater, worried that he might want to talk about the mission, about his chickening out. The weapons officer would have known the throttle sticking was a bunch of bull. He would have felt the second of indecision. He would have known they should have toughed it out despite the gunfire— prudence be damned.
* * *
“Devil Twelve, Devil Twelve, this is Fahd control. Colonel, how are you reading me?”
“Twelve. Go ahead, Control.”
“Sir, we need to move you around a bit.”
Snapped back to the present, Knowlington did a quick check of his instruments before responding. The plane was flying at spec and had passed all her tests; no need to keep it up any longer than necessary. Tightening his grip on the stick, the colonel pushed a long breath of air out of his lungs into his face mask, reminding himself to stay in the present, to work on just today. He told the controller that what he’d really like to do was land.
“Ah, Miller time, is it?”
“Something like that,” he told the kid.
Spinning back to take his slot in the landing pattern, Skull admired the way the Hog picked her tail up and put her nose right where he wanted, He tried hard not to think of anything else.
CHAPTER 11
OVER IRAQ
JANUARY 21 1991
1800
Mongoose heard A-Bomb. He had his bearing, but still couldn’t see him. He continued climbing, spotting the highway they’d been flying along earlier, still without his wingman in view. Finally he caught the plane in the distance, much lower than he thought it would be.
He keyed the mike and asked A-Bomb if he was all right.
“Yeah, I told you I’m fine. Iraqis couldn’t hit a zeppelin.”
Damned if A-Bomb didn’t sound like he was munching on something. And did he have his music cranked?
&nb
sp; “Can you see me?” Mongoose asked.
“Yeah. Gonna take me a minute.”
“We’ll come east and follow that highway again. You see it?”
Their little adventure in advanced jinking and jiving had taken them a good distance from the road and the bunkers they’d been aiming to inspect, before the SAMs interrupted. Mongoose kicked the throttle open and slipped the A-10A into a straight tack north, calculating a new plan of attack as he went. The brown ribbon that marked the highway gradually grew wider. He decided they would cross it, then slide down out of the northwest.
A-Bomb caught up to him as they reached the road. They angled northwestward, making just over 380 knots.
Combat did weird things to time. The actual encounter with the surface to air missiles hadn’t lasted more than two or three minutes, yet it seemed to fill several hours. Everything immediately before it felt like it had happened days ago. Everything now felt like slow motion.
And yet, sitting on the strip at King Khalid while waiting for clearance, that seemed to have just happened. Mongoose glanced at his pocket where the letter was, then reached his hand over and patted it, as if for luck.
He’d left his wife and baby in the living room. He’d kissed her, kissed him, kissed her again. He walked backwards to the door. A leather and fabric duffel bag sat there, worn from a thousand hellos and good-byes. Through the screen door he could see his ride waiting impatiently by the curb.
He lingered, watching her feed their baby, Robby. The infant’s eyes were closed. The deep frown of worry on his wife’s face gradually faded as she stared at her child.
“Hey, are those your bunkers at two o’clock?” asked A-Bomb. “Shit, look at that. Goddamn Saddam’s got a used car lot down there. And I’m in the market for a flamed-out APC.”
Hogs #2: Hog Down Page 5