A-Bomb keyed his mike and shouted his warning to Mongoose again. Then he concentrated on his own plane, his own body, pushing it away. He had the throttle to the firewall. The Hog leapt forward with the lust of a race horse leaving the gate. He let the plane have her head for a few seconds, then took another hard turn, rolling out at the same time and just about cracking the plane’s back as he whacked it sideways, exploring new dimensions in geometry. He flew the Warthog harder than an aerobatics plane, pushing it over, and under, and back again, trying to undo the knot the SAM had tied.
The Roland could move just over Mach 1.6. She had a limited range, though; he could win if he could run just a little further.
He glanced back and saw it coming for him, just about softball size and getting bigger in the rear quarter of his canopy.
Maybe he didn’t see it at all; maybe his imagination was painting it there for him, because no way in real life could you see a Roland this long after it had been fired. He’d gone what? Ten miles at least. And still he felt the damn thing homing in on his head like Saddam had painted a big bull’s eye there.
No way it could still be coming for him. Damn thing weighed less than 150 pounds, and it couldn’t all be fuel.
He jinked again, this time so low to the desert floor he would have had to look up to change the oil on a Jeep. There was a thud or something behind him; the Hog seemed to gain speed. A-Bomb pushed his stick hard and held on, fingers crossed, one more gut-smearing turn before he was finally sure that the cloud of dirt and shrapnel represented the last remains of the French and German missile.
A-Bomb blew a breath and caught a glimpse of Mongoose’s plane, well east and much higher than him, flying in the opposite direction toward Kuwait.
“Jesus, ‘Goose, I thought they got you,” he told his wingmate.
Devil One continued to climb to the east, rising from its run as easily as if were on a training mission. The ugly dark green shades of camo smudged into a black blur, its pudge nose and fat tail as pretty as a black Ferrari steaming around a race track. The late sun gleamed off the front of the canopy, its glint refracted into reddish-white fingers of light.
Then he saw the Hog waddle in the air, its left wing flailing upwards, out of the pilot’s control.
Most of the other wing was gone. One of both of the missiles had blown right through it.
“Bail out, Goose!” A-Bomb called. “Bail the fuck out!”
CHAPTER 15
OVER IRAQ
21 JANUARY 1991
1841
The emergency indicator lights were on. The engine was screaming. The plane was trying to pull herself over.
Hit.
Engine, must be. Right side.
Checklist mode.
Compensate for the dead engine, push the rudder, hold the stick.
Wing took something, too.
Rudder not responding. Hydraulics out. Go to manual reversion.
Shit, there’s no plane here.
Manual reversion.
Is there time?
Checklist mode.
Caution panel dotted with more lights than a power grid station.
Controls still not doing their job.
Blue sky ahead.
Air speed dropping.
Still climbing.
Momentum’s a beautiful thing. Still moving somehow.
Stick feels like it’s not connected.
Do I have Kathy’s letter?
Restart the other engine.
Not this slow, no way.
Five thousand goddamn feet, a miracle to be this high.
Pointing north. Wrong direction.
Shit, no wing.
Can’t hold it.
Have to jump now while the jumping is good.
Shame to leave this old Hog. Hell of a plane. Rescued from the scrap heap to whup Saddam’s butt.
Got two Scuds at least.
* * *
Less than three seconds passed from the moment he was hit until Mongoose’s eyes shot down toward the big yellow ejector loops at the edge of the ACES II seat. His body was still going through the motions but his head was already outside the plane.
Eject. Eject.
He reached up and made sure his crash visor was down, hard hat secure, passport punched.
Eject. Eject.
He felt a soft pop, then closed his eyes as a powerful force yanked his legs back and pushed him against the seat. Wires below were severed by razor knives as the canopy blew out with a rush and the space below him exploded with a mad froth. Mongoose felt himself hurled upwards, enveloped in an icy whirlwind, then wrapped in a dark, blank void beyond time or place.
CHAPTER 16
OVER IRAQ
21 JANUARY 1991
1843
A-Bomb pulled eight or nine g’s in the turn, whacking the Hog down into the dust and going like all hell. He had to take out that Roland or no way anybody could get close enough to pick up Mongoose when his chute landed.
He saw, or thought he saw, an ejection, even though Mongoose didn’t acknowledge. He’d have to go back for him; the Roland had to be taken out first.
A nice little Spark Vark jamming plane flying overhead right about now would have been immensely convenient. That or an up-to-date ECM pod on the right wing, where the ancient ALQ-119 was hanging.
But hell, A-Bomb told himself. He didn’t need that fancy stuff. He was flying a Hog.
He came at the site about twenty feet off the ground, so low and close he could see the Roland crew members working frantically on the top of the mobile missile launcher. They had rolled it out from under its hiding place, whether to reload or get away from the fire on the other end, he couldn’t be sure.
And he really didn’t care. A-Bomb pressed his trigger and tore the hell out of the lightly armored piece of French dog meat, framed by the roadway behind it. A dozen armored piercing and high explosive shells ripped through the tank chassis, the metal steaming with death. The four or five men who’d been atop it literally vaporized as the pilot sat on his trigger.
Some enterprising troops had set up a fifty caliber machine gun at the edge of the packed dirt road about twenty yards beyond the overpass. A-Bomb gave them the finger as he zoomed out, whipping back for a run at the Scud carriers. As he came back and started to get into position to take his aim, he saw that both missiles were lying in splinters beneath the underpass.
They’d been decoys.
No matter— he danced his bullets into the underpass as he galloped forward, working his pedals to rake the area right to left. Then he turned his attention to the machine-gun, awarding his own personal medals of heroism to the soldiers manning it.
When he came around for another pass, all he saw were dead bodies.
One more quick turn revealed nothing else was moving. He started climbing, heading in the direction he had last seen Mongoose’s plane take. As the Hog gained altitude, he tuned his radio to the emergency band, hoping for a locator beacon.
All he heard was static.
CHAPTER 17
OVER IRAQ
21 JANUARY 1991
1843
He was thinking of the hospital. His wife Kathy was lying in the bed, scrunched up, her face red.
She was grunting. The doctor was standing at the edge of the bed.
Robby was being born. He felt himself trembling, worried that something was going wrong. But the nurse who had been with them was smiling. He trusted her, more than the doctor.
“You have to push harder,” the nurse told her. “Get into this one.”
Kathy looked at him. She didn’t say anything, but he felt fear in her eyes.
“You can do it,” he told her. He stepped forward and gripped her hand, pushing confidence into his voice. The wave hit her and she pressed against him, her muscles contracting to push their baby down the birth canal.
“Here,” said the doctor. “You can feel his hair.”
Johnson smiled as he let the doctor guide his fingers. T
he sensation was wet, oily even.
“That’s your son.”
The idea barely registered. The head slipped back inside Kathy’s body.
“Here comes another one,” said the nurse.
He leaned toward his wife, who raised her body with the push. She groaned and screamed and suddenly the baby squirted out, born, alive, his body all red. He looked like a wrinkled Martian.
Jesus, that’s my son, Johnson thought.
* * *
The vision snapped black. He whirled around, the moving eye of a tornado.
* * *
He was tumbling.
His visor and oxygen mask were in place, shielding his face somewhat, but still the wind was a sharpened icicle, chiseling at his face.
It was so cold that his nerve inputs couldn’t process it all and told his brain that he was on fire. He was hot and frozen cold at the same time.
Mongoose thought about his arms and legs. It was easy to break them getting out of the plane. He tried to move them closer to his body, belatedly trying to protect them. The base of his skull hurt and his neck and shoulders burned.
A stiff, hard hand whacked him backwards. The breath ran out of him; by the time he could breathe again he saw that the ejection seat’s drogue parachute had deployed. He was falling, but much slower now.
The wind was still a bitch. It was whipping cold against him, and dragging him east. But he was lucky— the seat’s canister of emergency oxygen was making it easier to breathe, easier for him to clear his head.
The main chute kicked in. He fluttered, head whirling; he reached his hands to his chest and blanked again, momentarily.
Now surplus material, the seat that had saved him fell away. He had a vague notion that he was still moving forward in the air— he’d come out an angle, propelled like a performer from a circus cannon, right over the big tent, way out past the parking lot. The sun shimmered in the hazy edge of the dirt a few yards away, as if it had gone out three seconds ahead of him and its chute had failed to open.
Mongoose felt the harness pulling against his body, his parachute being pulled by a stiff wind. He felt like he was going faster than the damn airplane.
There was a way to steer. He knew how to steer, he’d practiced it before.
It hadn’t been like this. The wind had been calmer and the air warmer, his heart beating much slower.
Checklist mode, he told himself. One item at a time.
“There’s nothing in Iraq worth dying for.”
Who had said that? General Horner? Colonel Knowlington?
Checklist mode. Item one— steer the chute away from the enemy. Steer south.
Assuming the sun still set in the west, he was already headed in that direction. The chute responded and moved even faster.
For a second he thought he might actually steer all the way back to Saudi Arabia.
But then the ground started moving faster than he did.
CHAPTER 18
OVER IRAQ
21 JANUARY 1991
1845
The thing was, there ought to be more smoke. A Hog going down ought to make a hell of a big splash. Tear a hole in the desert and send a half-million Iraqis to hell with it.
Here there was nothing, not even dust. Just a vague whisper of gray in the air around it, haze only.
Or a soul, taking one last look at the bent body.
It was the Hog, all right though, no question. Even with the light fading, A-Bomb could see the wing section flat against the sand. The end had sheered and mangled, but a good hunk of it was intact.
Hell, you could probably dust it off, bang out the dents and put it on another plane, no sweat.
Couldn’t do that with the fuselage. It lay in a twisted tumble almost a mile away, crunched worse than a candy bar wrapper. The plane had been a trooper to the end, flying nearly ten miles before finally pancaking.
No way Mongoose would have survived that.
He’d gone out, though. A-Bomb knew he had. He had a memory of seeing a seat vaulting in the air.
Or at least, he saw how it should have happened. And at the moment, that was good enough for him. Because any other way, his lead was snuffed. They were damn close to the Euphrates, way far north in bad guy territory at the edge of the desert, within gum-spitting distance of the Republican Guard. No way Mongoose was catching it here, no way. Guy was going to live to a ripe old age and bounce grandkids off his knee.
So where was he now? The survival radio didn’t seem to be broadcasting. A-Bomb keyed his own mike a few times, hoping for an answer.
Worst case, the radio ought to at least be putting out a locator beacon. Mongoose carried two, so he had a backup.
Nada.
A-Bomb rode his Hog higher in the sky, scanning the ground for a parachute. By now the sun had set and the desert was starting to turn into a twilight fog. Wind whipped the loose dirt below, making it even harder for him to see.
But hell, anybody could spot a stinking parachute.
A-Bomb saw a clump of trees and scrub vegetation to his northwest, and another to his east; he rocked over both in a wide figure-eight but found no one.
A trio of squat buildings sat about two miles south of the wrecked plane. He investigated them next, flying low enough to read the number on the mailboxes.
If there had been mailboxes. All three buildings were in shambles, roofs blown off. There was a narrow road nearby, not so much a road as a path, dirt of a different color.
A-Bomb checked his radio and keyed the mike again.
“Yo, Goose. How’s it hanging?”
Still nothing.
Maybe he hadn’t seen him eject.
Damn it, Mongoose was alive. Stink-ass Iraqis could not kill a Hog driver. No sir. Hog driver was a serious entity, not quite superhuman but not susceptible to fingernail breaking crap like this.
Even if the missile had been a NATO job, better than the Russian crap, it still wasn’t good enough to take out a Hog driver, especially Mongoose. He was an anal son of a bitch who played engineer in the cockpit, painting by numbers and more careful than a goddamn girl scout.
Well, almost. Point of the matter was, he was a kick–ass pilot and squadron DO besides and could not be taken off the board by the Iraqis.
Most likely, he was hiking back to the Saudi border by now. Probably halfway home. Maybe even sitting at the bar in the Depot, ordering a double bourbon.
On the rocks.
A-Bomb edged the Hog higher, pointing the nose southeast, as if he really did expect to find the flight leader hiking in the sand below. There was a town— or at least a group of buildings that could be a town— six or seven miles further east, back toward Kuwait. Mongoose would stay away from that, for sure, but would the people there stay away from him?
“Devil Two, this is Red Dog. We have two Vipers approaching your location. Stand by for frequency.”
A-Bomb waited impatiently for the airborne controller to read off the numbers. He would have preferred a pair of Hogs instead of the F-16 “Vipers” or “Falcons,” but the fast movers would have to do. He was running low on fuel and would have to leave soon to tank.
The single-engined fighters were using the call sign “Boa,” as in boa constrictor. A-Bomb snorted when he made contact, but didn’t bother commenting on the cuteness of the name. You had to expect that sort of thing in a pointy nose.
The irony of snakes hunting up a Mongoose, well that was a different story. That was almost karma.
“Boa One to Devil Two, do you have a location on the emergency beacon?”
“Negative. I have the plane, but I haven’t made contact.” He ignored their ominous silence, reading off an INS marker and giving them a vector as he picked up their location.
“You sure he got out?” asked Boa One as the two fly–by–wire jockeys approached.
“Bet your fucking ass he did.”
“Hey, relax buddy. We’re on your side, remember? We’ll find him.”
A-Bomb didn’t a
nswer.
The two F-16s, diverted from another mission, were flying at about eighteen thousand feet. Using the buildings and the wrecked Hog as landmarks, he sketched the area out for them. Even though they were pointy-nose types, they seemed relatively good-natured. They had no problem putting their chins down to get a good look at things.
Eagle pilots, though, those guys would cop attitude. Now that would be something to deal with.
He checked his fuel. Even an optimistic run at the math left him with two minutes less flying time than it would take to find a tanker.
But hell, this was a critical moment. Night was coming on, and no way Mongoose had thought to pack his flannels. Somebody had to find him and fast.
But really, if he waited much longer before going for gas, he was going to join him on the ground. That wasn’t much help.
It wasn’t like he was leaving Mongoose alone up here. The ABCCC had tasked a force to sponge the area clean of any more Iraqi missiles hiding in the bushes; the sky was starting to get busy. A-Bomb knew that the Special Ops troops working with Air Force Pave Lows had been tasked to air rescue operations. A-Bomb had a high opinion of the commandos, especially the Green Berets— and their coffee, which he had helped himself to during a visit to one of their forward airbases a few days ago.
But even they couldn’t mount a rescue if the pilot was nowhere to be found. The crews had orders not to cross into Iraq until the man was found and verified.
One more pass, then he’d tank. A-Bomb made sure the volume on the radio was full blast as he edged the Hog down, running along the dark ribbon of a road not far from the buildings.
Why the hell didn’t Mongoose use his radio?
Hogs #2: Hog Down Page 7