Hogs #2: Hog Down

by DeFelice, Jim

  Mongoose’s head nearly hit the canopy as he snapped back to the present. He tacked south a second, aiming to come back and orbit the site from above. A-Bomb, following off his right wing in a loose trail, actually had a closer position behind him as they turned.

  “You see any Scuds in there?” the major asked.

  “Negative. I think the report was wrong.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Screw the Scuds,” said A-Bomb. “I say we dust these mother fuckers. We’re gonna run out of sun in less than a half-hour.”

  “Yeah, hang loose,” Mongoose told him. “Let me think this one through a second.”

  They had given the area a fairly thorough search without finding the Scud site. Sunset was rapidly approaching. Tough hombre or no, the Hog was not a night fighter. Mongoose relayed the information back to the ABCCC controller, telling him that they had come up blank on the Scuds but found something almost as juicy. Unless someone aboard the C-130 had serious objections or a better read on the Scuds, they were going to expend their stores against the parking lot and then go home.

  The controller was juggling about ten million things at once. By the time he cleared Devil flight to make the attack, Mongoose had blueprinted the raid three times. He noted what were probably two four-barrel anti-air guns at each end; neither had activated its radar, either out of smart tactics or, more likely, because the Hogs were well out of range and hadn’t been spotted. Assuming they were ZSU-23s— the most common anti-aircraft guns the Iraqis had— the weapons would have to be respected, but were not an insurmountable problem, especially at medium altitude.

  What he’d seen as a bunker was actually a low-slung building. It could be the top of an underground complex, though there was no way of really knowing from here. He debated using the Mavericks against it on the chance that it would hold ammunition and make a really spectacular boom. But the building wasn’t going anywhere. With a good INS read, it could be attacked whenever the targeters back at Black Hole wanted to hit it. The trucks and tanks— two or three seemed to be dug into shallow trenches— were a different story.

  Mongoose would descend to ten thousand feet and use the Mavericks on the tanks. If the flak guns got annoying, they could go after them with the cluster bombs; otherwise the GBUs would be dropped on the trucks. They’d hold off using the Hogs’ cannons— and dropping below eight thousand feet— unless absolutely necessary, as per the general rules of engagement.

  “I’m going to roll and take the vehicles furthest from the building,” he told A-Bomb. “I think they’re tanks. Come around and see what’s left.”

  “Copy.”

  “Watch your altitude and don’t get too low. Keep your eye on that dune where the ground turns into the real desert? You see it?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “Got to be a ZSU. You see that one and the other one?”

  “Yeah. I’ll let you know if they open up shop.”

  Mongoose came around in a half circle, lined up before he pushed over into a rolling dive, swinging the nose of the plane toward his target. He could see the three tanks clearly now, their guns pointing east rather than south.

  The sand heaped around them would provide some protection against a near miss. But he wasn’t going to miss. He felt his way into a thirty-five degree glide, the turret of the tank at the right end inching toward the center of his screen. Mongoose moved eyes over the Maverick’s small targeting screen, probing for the heart of the shadow in the middle of the screen, sucked there like the tip of a compass seeking north. They wobbled, then stuck, glued themselves right in the center of the turret.

  Mongoose held his stick dead steady and pickled. He felt the Maverick slip away and blinked his eyes, pulling the next missile on-line. He had to work the crosshairs hard, nearly losing his target. His altitude was burning off faster than he’d planned; he was nearing eight thousand and was going to fall lower before he could fire. His recovery would probably bring him within range of well-managed AAA, but it couldn’t be helped; he was going to have that tank. Finally the cursor slipped in. He had a lock and the missile was off, winging toward the lollipop that marked the top of the northernmost vehicle.

  He moved his eyes up to the canopy, scanning the ground as he leveled off and began orbiting to the south. He missed seeing the first missile hit. He caught the second: a small, almost insignificant splotch of brown and black flared into the shape of a mushroom and then quickly flattened. The top of tank jerked up and down as if it were a warm can of soda being opened.

  The sky below his left wing began filling with black puffs of flak. In the same instant he realized the desert undulations had hidden two gun positions almost directly beneath his egress path.

  CHAPTER 12

  OVER IRAQ

  21 JANUARY 1991

  1810

  A-Bomb called the flak location about two seconds after it began, warning his lead to take evasive action. In the same moment he adjusted his course to eliminate the threat. He was at ten thousand feet with a clear view of the muzzle flash— it was a four-barrel ZSU-23, firing far too short to do any damage. Still, it had fired on a Hog, and its fate was sealed. He switched the Maverick’s TVM to six times magnification; his target was dead center. He locked and fired, looking up in time to see the two other emplacements begin firing as well.

  He wasn’t in the best position to take out either one, so he put them on hold, deciding to use his last AGM-65B on the remaining tank instead. It was already lined up in the TVM, just about blinking “kill me.” Nudging the cursor onto the big sucker, he locked and fired. The missile clunked off his wing with a sharp note of enthusiasm— one thing you could say about Mavericks, they sure liked to blow shit up.

  A-Bomb hit his armament panel to ready the cluster bombs as he recovered from the shallow dive. His altimeter read seven thousand feet, still well above the flak, though too low to drop the preset Rockeyes.

  “Saddam’s going to have a fire sale tomorrow,” he told Mongoose, whose tail appeared on his left as he climbed to get into a better position. “I count three dead tanks and one busted flak-feeder.”

  A dusty haze covered the ground, making it difficult to see what was left. Two big bubbles of black flak boiled well off his right wing as the Iraqi gunners did their best to shoot themselves out of ammunition. The Hogs wheeled above the site, moving into a circle approximately 180 degrees from each other.

  The ZSU’s were starting to annoy him; they made it tough to target the rest of the site besides. A-Bomb realized he was better oriented than Mongoose to splash them, and told his lead he would take them out.

  “I can get them both on one swing. Then we can shoot up what’s left downstairs.”

  “Go for it.”

  A-Bomb pushed the Hog into a dive, tightening his attack angle into a steep plunge, the A-10 screaming down at close to ninety degrees. He was going to pee on these bastards. No one shot at a Hog and got away with it.

  Bastards started dishing serious flak in his direction. The Hog snorted. She knew she was being fired at, and it pissed her off. She held her wings and tail stiff, urging her pilot to drop the Rockeyes and giving him an iron-stiff platform to do it from.

  A-Bomb pickled two of his four bombs on the first battery. Immediately he realized he hadn’t adjusted properly for the wind. But it was too late. Cursing, he pulled the stick back, determined to reset himself quickly for another attack. The Hog angrily slid her tail around, spanking the pilot for his miscue. But the CBUs were very forgiving weapons. A total of 187 spiked grenades, originally designed as armor piercing weapons, peppered out from each bomb. Though the majority fell well wide, enough fell close enough to silence the gun.

  “There’s another gun or something under netting on the northeast corner,” said Mongoose as A-Bomb got ready to pounce on the remaining gun. “Shit— did you see that?”

  A-Bomb twisted his neck like a pretzel, trying to see what Mongoose was talking about. By the time he figured it out, his com
mander had his nose just about on it. The Iraqis had done an excellent job of camouflaging the site defenses; there seemed to be another pair of ZSU-23s, or maybe larger-caliber guns, covered by the latest in desert wear.

  “Hell of a lot of defenses for some old trucks,” said A-Bomb. “You think Saddam’s got one of his whores in that bunker or what?”

  “Could be.”

  “Probably screwing her right now.”

  “I’m on that gun.”

  He watched Mongoose dive into the attack just as the Iraqi gunner opened up. This was a big gun, probably a ZSU–57; the black wall of its shells appeared nearly twice as high as the others, though they were a bit behind Devil One’s flight path. Suddenly the nose of the Hog veered upwards and to the left; two thin cigars plummeted past the swinging stream of anti-aircraft fire toward the position. The canisters burst with a spectacular pop, an entire Iowa cornfield doing the Jiffy Pop thing as the double-barreled gun and its crew got perforated.

  Mongoose wasn’t done— rather than breaking off the attack, he took his Hog just about sideways, lining up his last two CBUs on the last ZSU on the northwestern dune. A steam of red-hot metal engulfed the four-barreled cheese grater and the black cloud of flak it had been dishing suddenly disappeared.

  “Double bang,” A-Bomb told his lead before pushing into his own attack against the trucks.

  This time, the Hog just about did the wind calculation for him, nudging its tail up and screaming when it was time to fire. A row of transports turned into molten dust.

  “How’s your fuel?” Mongoose asked as A-Bomb fell into an easy orbit above the smoking debris.

  A-Bomb glanced at the dash. “Thirty minutes linger time, give or take a century,” he said.

  “Few more vehicles down there. You feel like cranking up your cannon?”

  “Does a private shit in the woods?”

  But as he slid around to get ready to cover Mongoose, something caught his eye. He let the Hog drift a bit as his gaze found a hard–packed road. Five, six miles off, it headed toward a highway.

  Something was happening there, something just beyond his vision.

  A-Bomb felt a twinge in his nose, as if he’d just caught a whiff of late-season Brazilian beans being freshly roasted.

  “Hey, Goose, hang tight a minute while I check something out,” he radioed, pushing the Hog to follow the road. The terrain below gradually became less of a desert and more a generic wasteland, though it didn’t look like anybody would be farming there soon.

  The road led back north to the highway, where it plunged below it. A line of trucks was just now pulling off the paved road, kicking off a bunch of dust as they moved.

  “Say, Goose, we got some sort of action going on south there, say three o’clock. You see that road?”

  Mongoose broke his orbit and slid south, trailing A-Bomb. They were still a good way off as the last truck in the caravan dipped off the highway, disappearing in the underpass.

  It was a trailer type of truck, with a long, roundish cylinder in the back.

  The sort of cylinder you made a missile out of.

  No wonder they hadn’t found the Scuds. The Iraqis had moved them.

  CHAPTER 13

  OVER IRAQ

  21 JANUARY 1991

  1825

  Mongoose yanked at the stick, angry that they’d wasted so much time and ammunition on the desert parking lot. Both planes had only their cannons left— excellent weapons, but it was going to be harder than hell to get a good shot at the bastards under the overpass.

  Not really. Not at all. Hell, they’d done this sort of thing maybe a hundred times in training, working over highways throughout Europe. Not one underpass ever got away. All he had to do was take the Hog down to where it was designed to operate, and the missiles would be easy pickings.

  Granted, they weren’t supposed to fly so low. But Scuds overrode everything.

  Besides, he wasn’t flying a stinking Strike Eagle or a BUFF. He was in a Hog.

  Mongoose mapped a quick game plan— a low-altitude scream and pop, quick away, then up for the border, head for a tanker, track directly south instead of KKMC. The tanker contingency was a nod to their dwindling fuel supply and any problems that might follow their close encounter of the Scud kind.

  A-Bomb practically took his ear off with a war whoop when he told him they were going to nail the bastards at fifty feet.

  “See, this is what I’m talking about,” said his wingman. “This is the way to fight with a Hog.”

  Mongoose could feel the mask pinching his jaw as he worked to keep his voice flat. “We’ll swing back and use what’s left of the sun,” he told his wingmate. “It’s lined up almost perfectly. Let the fucking chips fall where they may.”

  “Yeah, I’m on you. Show me the way.”

  The flight leader marked the INS and gave the ABCCC the location. Then he swung northwest, working to get into position to make a straight-on shot up the road, sun at his tail. He began picking up momentum, energy and speed fanning each other as the plane revved herself toward a feeding frenzy.

  “Ready?” he asked A-Bomb as he geared into the attack.

  “I was born ready.”

  Mongoose felt the plane roar as her nose sniffed out the underpass. The ground became a pebbly blur, the asphalt of the highway a thick black arrow pointing her toward hell. Mongoose sorted out the target area ahead in his windscreen, working his eyes deliberately, slowing the world down so he could nail the crap out of it. The underpass was very wide and deep, maybe even designed from scratch as a bunker area. There were three support vehicles in the front on his right, lighter trucks that as far as he was concerned were mere annoyances. Two Scud carriers were at the left end of the thick underpass. There was a big cloud of dust and sand beyond the roadway, a tractor or something moving. The terrain rose to the right; he saw more activity there, a truck moving around.

  If there was going to be any air defense, it would be there. His RWR was clean but shit, at this altitude, a guy with a water pistol could get a bead on you.

  The pilot blew a long, hard wad of air from his mouth, trying to control his adrenaline. Anger rumbled through his stomach— he wanted to nail the Scuds and wring Saddam’s neck personally.

  Bad.

  Push the buttons and do your job. Checklist mode. Getting angry got you killed.

  He was at two hundred feet, nearly dead on. He kept coming, nose in the dirt, eyes starting to itch, a vague pinch around the edges of his body, partly from the increasing g’s and partly from tension. He edged right slightly, felt himself falling into that perfect space, his spine aligned with the plane’s spine. The missile carriers had grown from distant cigarettes to thick, enticing sausages, and finally into big fat targets filled with very combustible fuel.

  Mongoose squeezed the trigger, the gun growling an angry roar as its one-and-a-half pound charges leapt toward the enemy. The pilot leaned into the trigger, his eyes following the smoke. He gave the ship rudder to hold the line of bullets into the rear of the missile truck nearest the road. The force of the gun was so awesome it held the Hog back, slowing it in mid-air so that the plane seemed to hang around him, defying all laws of gravity and motion.

  The underpass evaporated beneath the onslaught. He pushed his aiming point to the right without a clear target, searching for the next missile. He fired and he fired and finally the Scud’s rear fin or something was right there, right in the middle of his bullets. He fired some more and thought he could feel the heat of his gun firing. The plane rocked with the cannon, everything jumbling into one tremendous quake. He’d nailed the rear units of both missiles.

  Webbed in fine fuzz of total concentration, Mongoose pushed himself and the plane to get away. His throttle was full out as he zoomed away, beyond the attack.

  It was a vulnerable moment; he was moving quickly but well framed against the horizon. He pushed his stick, kicked his rudders and bent his body hard to the right. He hit flares as a precaution again
st a shoulder-fired weapon, and bolted from the bubbling cauldron of fire and burning sand. They were shooting at him. All Iraq was trying to kill him; even if their bullets were puny, a bullet was a bullet. He held it full bore, hell-bent on getting away, skimming the ground low enough to count grains of sand. Finally sensing he was clear, Mongoose started to nose up, grabbing for more sky. He felt his chest muscles relaxing. There was a vehicle now he hadn’t seen here along the highway; they were firing, too, a lot of shit reaching out for him but nothing he couldn’t handle. He pushed the plane to get around, to get back and cover A-Bomb’s run.

  He’d smashed the crap of Saddam, nailed both Scuds. Who knew? Maybe the stinking chemical crap the bastard intended dumping on the Americans— or maybe the Israelis— was now wafting below, killing his own men.

  Served them right.

  Mongoose took a long, relaxed breath, the easiest since they had cross the border, and keyed his mike to tell A-Bomb he could start his pass.

  In that second, something thumped behind him, and he felt a flutter in his stomach that extended all the way back to his engines.

  CHAPTER 14

  OVER IRAQ

  21 JANUARY 1991

  1840

  A-Bomb shouted when he saw the flash from the far end of the underpass. By then it was far too late for anything he could do to have much of an effect, but he didn’t think about that. He keyed his mike to give the warning, and in practically the same motion he pushed the nose of his plane down and smashed the trigger, hoping that his flailing bullets would suppress any more fire. He couldn’t hold the angle well enough to nail the target, which passed by in a blur; he tried rolling and diving back but even A-Bomb could only bend Newton’s laws so far. He got a good glimpse of the bastard, though— a Roland SAM launcher, sitting atop an AMX tank chassis and just about ready to dish up another missile.

  At him.

  He yanked the Hog hard to the north, goosing the throttle and hunkering down, wondering why the Scuds hadn’t caused a big enough explosion to take out the Roland. The Hog’s ECM unit was useless against the missile’s Siemens J-band low-PRF tracking radar, which used techniques perfected well after the pod came on line. All he could do was jink and fly like hell.