Hogs #4:Snake Eaters

by DeFelice, Jim

  “I thought I asked you not to break my planes.”

  Doberman felt his face turn red. “Yeah, something jammed up the decelerons. I couldn’t get it to deploy at first. That’s why I took the lap. Must’ve been a lucky shot from somebody on the ground. I didn’t feel it.”

  “Not your plane, sir,” said Rosen. “She looks like you just took her out of the showroom. It’s Captain O’Rourke’s I’m talking about.”

  “What’s wrong with my plane?”

  “Aside from the coffee stains on the console, you have a hole in the hydraulic line.”

  “No shit,” said A-Bomb. “I thought the controls felt a little woody.”

  “Woody, sir?” Rosen made a face. “I’m surprised you landed.”

  “Nah. Come on.” A-Bomb shrugged.

  “Well, it’s so small, you didn’t lose much fluid. But five minutes more and you would have had a hell of a problem. I’m telling you, Captain; you’re lucky.”

  “You’re going to fix it, though, right?” asked A-Bomb.

  “I don’t know if I can,” said Rosen.

  “Shit, we’re talking a Hog here,” said A-Bomb, now fully serious. “All you got to do is stick some bubble gum on the line and fill the reservoir with piss, I’m flyin’ in no time.”

  “There’s no bubble gum on this base,” Rosen told A-Bomb. “I’ll be honest with you, I’m not sure I can fix it.”

  “Fuck.”

  “If I patch it,” she said, “we have to worry about having enough fluid.”

  “There’s two separate systems, right?” said A-Bomb. “Tie one off, the other’s good to go.”

  “Not quite that simple,” said Rosen.

  “Yeah, but you can do it.”

  “What I need is something to make a patch,” she said. “I need some clamps and a narrow hose, at a minimum.”

  “Shit, there’s probably something you can use on those helos, no?” asked A-Bomb.

  “No, sir,” said Rosen as Hawkins bristled behind her. “I don’t know if Captain Hawkins has told you or not, but there’s no Hog juice on this base.”

  “Use the helo fuel,” said A-Bomb. “It’s jet fuel, right?”

  Hawkins took a step toward A-Bomb and glared at him.

  Shotgun shrugged. “Just an idea.”

  “Jet fuel’s jet fuel,” said Rosen. She looked at Hawkins. “But the helos are already low. I don’t know if they’d make it down to Saudi if they have to. Their orders are to keep two hours’ worth in reserve, and they say their inside that now.”

  She glanced at Doberman. Did the glance mean she thought there was more fuel than Hawkins was letting on? Or did it mean something else?

  Doberman wanted it to mean something else, something like:

  I wish I could kiss you but there are too many Delta types around and they’d get jealous.

  Doberman had had the hots for her since Al Jouf, and he suspected— hoped, really— the feeling was mutual.

  “Why don’t you use the fuel you have?” suggested Wong.

  “Yeah right,” said Doberman. “I landed with ten minutes of reserve left, if that.”

  “Me, too,” said A-Bomb.

  “Take Captain O’Rourke’s fuel as well,” said Wong. “Ten minutes plus ten minutes will give you twenty; enough to make the border. You could meet the tanker, top off and come back. Once on the ground, half of your fuel could be loaded into Captain O’Rourke’s aircraft, allowing him to take off once repairs are completed.”

  “If repairs are completed,” said Rosen.

  “Ten minutes and ten minutes won’t make twenty,” said Doberman. “For one thing, getting off the ground is going to eat up a lot. I doubt there’d even be enough for takeoff.”

  “You know what, Dog man? I think Brainiac’s onto something,” said A-Bomb. “I had a good amount sloshing around when I landed. Must’ve been three thousand pounds, at least. Maybe more. Could be five.”

  “If you had so much fuel, why didn’t you fly back to Saudi Arabia?”

  “What, and leave you all alone?” A-Bomb grinned and shrugged. Five thousand pounds translated into nearly half-full. “We ought to at least check it out. You might be able to do it. Hell, you know every gas gauge ever invented is pessimistic. It’s some kind of oil cartel law or something.”

  Hawkins gave a noncommittal grunt.

  “Captain Glenon is right,” Rosen said. “Even if we can suck every last drop out and get it into the plane, I don’t know that you’ll have enough to take off and fly to the border, no matter what the gauges say. I don’t know, Captain. You’d be taking a hell of a risk.”

  She turned her green eyes toward Doberman. In that instant, he knew he could do it. He knew he could do anything, except stay here where he couldn’t touch her.

  “Yeah, well, let’s find out,” said Doberman, his eyes locked on hers. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here useless on the ground.”

  CHAPTER 3

  HOG HEAVEN

  KING FAHD AIR BASE

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1205

  Colonel Michael “Skull” Knowlington slid back in his office chair and craned his neck upwards so he could stare out the small window of the trailer that served as Devil Squadron’s headquarters. All he could see from this angle was blue sky.

  Not very appropriate. But at the moment the colonel lacked the energy to find something else to stare at. He’d just come from the “Bat Cave,” where a general in charge of Special Operations had informed him that Lieutenant William James Dixon, temporarily assigned as a ground FAC or forward air controller with a special Delta Force unit, was MIA and presumed killed in Iraq.

  Knowlington had been with the Air Force a long time. He’d had three tours in Vietnam in two different aircraft. He’d lost a wingman there, and had punched out once himself. Since then, he’d witnessed three fatal mid-air mishaps, including one where he was flying chase. The colonel knew death; he knew how delicately balanced life really was, how the chance movement of a thin wire at the wrong time upended everything, momentum twisting backwards into flame and destruction. He’d seen death not merely in the lifeless eyes of a pilot tossed from his plane, but in the empty stares of men who’d survived one mission too many. The ones who’d traded their souls to get down to ground safely, only to find the bargain too dear.

  And yet, Dixon’s death hit him harder than any other. It hit him physically, pinching the ends of his liver like a forceps plunging into an un-anesthetized body. BJ was just a greenhorn kid, a nugget lieutenant not bright enough to steer clear of hair-brained Special Ops schemes. He’d volunteered for the Iraq mission— volunteered, the asshole!— without Knowlington’s permission.

  The fact that the kid had sacrificed his own life to save the life of one of the Delta Force team members angered Knowlington even more. It wasn’t that he begrudged the wounded sergeant Dixon had saved; it was the fact that, in Knowlington’s mind, neither sacrifice was worth what the mission was supposed to achieve. The Delta teams had been planted to finger Scud missiles for Hogs and other fighter-bombers. In Knowlington’s opinion the missiles were tactically useless.

  The colonel had reluctantly helped plan the Scud hunting mission and arranged for its support. He had heard all of the arguments for attacking them. They were all political, which in his opinion, was the exact reason not to proceed.

  More than the plan irked him. The colonel had banished BJ to a do-nothing desk job in Riyadh the week before as punishment for not giving a full and proper report of a mission on the first day of the air war. At the time, it seemed like the wisest thing to do— a harmless slap on the wrist. But it must not have seemed that way to Dixon. The kid must’ve figured he had to make up for it somehow, even if it meant volunteering to commit suicide.

  If Dixon had gone down while flying, Knowlington’s insides might not have stung quite so bad. Flying was a difficult business, even under the best circumstances. In combat, it was always a matter of time and luck. When you clim
bed into the cockpit and snugged your hat, you knew you were making a deal with Fortune. You could work to put the odds in your favor, but the fact was that X amount of hours equaled Y amount of problems, and Z percentage of those problems were insoluble, no matter how great a flier you were. Sooner or later, you would have no choice but to go for the yellow handle next to the seat. That was the deal, and at some level, conscious or unconscious, you knew the deal and bought into it.

  But dying on the ground, in a firefight he’d never been trained to deal with in a place he shouldn’t have been? What sense did that make? Whose deal was that?

  Knowlington felt the bile eating all the way out from his gut to his skin. It seared the rims of his eyes and melted the sensation from his hands.

  There was a cure, and he knew it well: three fingers worth of Jack Daniels sour mash, straight up in clear glass tumbler. Three fingers worth, barely four ounces, just enough to burn the throat going down, just enough fire to sear the acid, snuff it out.

  And then?

  More and more and more, a never-ending fire.

  The colonel focused his eyes, straining to see something in the blue rectangle of sky. He had work to do, a lot of work. He had to oversee the squadron’s “frag” or fragment of the Air Tasking Order, basically its to-do list for tomorrow’s action. He had to make sure he had the planes and the pilots and the ordinance to carry out his portion of the air war. He had to check on his two Hogs at Al Jouf, assigned to provide air support for the Delta Force at Fort Apache and beyond. He had to find a replacement DO or director of operations, who would serve as the squadron’s second in command. There were two or three personnel matters that Sergeant Clyston, his first sergeant, his top crew dog, his capo di capo, wanted to consult on.

  He also had to notify Dixon’s next of kin.

  He wanted to work. But more, he wanted, he needed a drink.

  Twenty-two days, nearly to the minute. That was how long it had been.

  An immense amount of time.

  Skull snapped his eyes away from the blank blue rectangle, forced his hands to move into his desk drawer. He took out the computer sheets with the frag and a lined pad, along with notes and a sortie list.

  He’d gone through the frag twice already. He had a plan and a backup plan and a contingency plan. He had the next day’s lineup figured out, knew how he was going to rotate the pilots for the next ten days, knew which planes would go where and which would back those up. He had every possible mission configuration covered for the foreseeable future.

  Three fingers. Barely a trickle.

  An informal AA meeting started at noon every day in one of the chaplain’s quarters in Tent City. If he walked quickly, he could make it.

  The Depot, a theoretically off-limits black market club in a bomb shelter just outside the base, lay in the opposite direction, exactly 713 long strides away.

  Skull put the paperwork away, took a long breath, and rose from his desk, not quite sure which direction he would take.

  CHAPTER 4

  FORT APACHE

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1310

  Sometime in the early 1960s, in the steaming jungles of Vietnam, a young man pushed the controls on an ancient A-1 Skyraider and fell through a wall of small-arms fire to drop a stick of bombs on a cluster of Viet Cong rebels. The bombs fell with uncanny precision, killing enough of the enemy soldiers to allow a small patrol of Vietnamese regulars and their American advisor to escape the ambush that had trapped them.

  In the grand scheme of a horrific war, it was an insignificant event. A few more people dead on either side, one way or the other, didn’t make much difference in Vietnam. But this bombing run was very different than most up to that point— it was at close range, damn accurate, and it did what it was supposed to do: kill bad guys. With all due respect to the brave men who’d flown missions in fast-moving pointy nose jets in the months before the Spad’s sortie, it was a nearly radical development.

  And it was radical not because this particular pilot was very well trained or especially brave, though it goes without saying that he was both. What was radical was his plane; a geezer engineered during World War II and pulled through the air by technology the Wright Brothers would have been familiar with.

  Intended as a torpedo bomber, the Skyraider could carry a lot of bombs to the fray and provided a very stable platform to drop them from. It was also completely outclassed by jets in every performance category, a slow-moving, low-flying aerial barge.

  Which proved to be a serious asset. Flying lower and slower than a jet meant it was better at blowing little stuff up— little stuff like tanks and machine-gun nests and armored cars and mortar sites. It was exactly the sort of thing that mattered the most in that war; and, in fact, in any war.

  There were more Spad missions after that first one, a lot more. And it didn’t take the brass long to realize that if the Air Force was going to be in the business of supporting grunts— not that they unanimously agreed it should, but never mind— it needed planes that were more like the A-1, less like the high-tech, go-fast, never-see-ya F-4s. The Spad’s success led, more or less directly, to the Attack Experimental program of 1967, a program that eventually resulted in the A-10A.

  Among the many specifications for the AX was the ability to take off from “austere” forward air bases. Fort Apache was about as austere and forward as air bases got. The plank of concrete Doberman was about to walk was actually five hundred feet longer than the original AX specifications called for— but then, this Hog was quite a bit heavier as well.

  Uglier, too. But ugly was good.

  Snug inside the titanium hull of the ground pounder, Doberman leaned toward the side of the Hog and gave his ground crew, Rosen, a thumb’s up. Then he got ready to go to work. The plane had been positioned at the very edge of the runway, fanny over the sand, nose into the wind. Hawkins had anted up a few gallons and A-Bomb’s tanks had held more fuel than they’d hoped. Even so, with a good clean takeoff Doberman would only have under a half-hour to make the rendezvous with the tanker. The AWACS airborne command post coordinating the air war had been alerted, and he’d been promised priority at the tanker— but Doberman knew from experience that could be a difficult, if not impossible, promise to keep.

  Trained as an engineer, the pilot tended to break things down by numbers. The numbers in this case said, no way. There was too little margin for error. But he’d been through so much in the past few days that he was almost comfortable ignoring them.

  He took a breath, and told himself he was going for it. He needed a clean crank from the plane’s starter, so he could take off the second his wicks lit.

  Another breath; then his fingers flew around the cockpit, push-buttoning himself into gear. The turbines sputtered a half moment, then caught. He was off the brake asking the Hog for full kick-butt-and-let’s-go power as the whine of the GE powerplants revved up and down his spine.

  The Hog gave it to him, winding her engines with a cheerful roar. No A-10A liked sitting on the ground, and this one seemed to relish the challenge ahead. She leapt into the fresh breeze more than three hundred feet before the specs said she ought to, snorting at the fools who’d underestimated her.

  Doberman nudged the throttle gently once he was airborne, adjusting, adjusting, adjusting, determined to give the plane just enough fuel to fly. The Hog seemed to understand, holding steady as her pilot banked toward the south. She jostled in the air until she found a wind current to help push her along.

  Earlier in the air war, heavy weather had clogged the sky. The winter had been unusually stormy, even considering that they were in the middle of what passed for the rainy season. Today there was nothing but blue, punctuated above Doberman’s canopy by the contrails of allied jets crisscrossing as they sought to eradicate Saddam’s ability to fight. Over 2,700 sorties would be made today, bringing the war to Iraq with unprecedented ferocity.

  The radio was heavy with traffic. Wingmen offered each other advice and reas
surance, flights warned others what lay ahead, and controllers scrambled fighters to meet different threats. Doberman caught some chatter from a group of F-111s well behind and above him on his squadron frequency; the bombers were making their way back from an open house hosted by Saddam’s interior ministry. This was apparently the first time they’d attacked during the day, and the pilots were making jokes about how they had to close their eyes so they knew what to do.

  Doberman nudged the stick, pushing his nose to the proper compass point slotted in the thick dial in front of his chest. He nailed it, then took a quick run through the fuel and navigational data and glanced at his kneepad, where he’d made a cheat sheet of his fuel calculations to show him whether he was going to make it or not. He was right on course with fifteen minutes to go to the tanker and four minutes of fuel beyond that; assuming Rosen’s measurements and not the somewhat pessimistic fuel gauge were correct.

  Had to go with the girl.

  He hit his first way marker and made a minor correction. It was just a straight run south now. The course would take him over two known Iraqi positions, and possibly others as well. Doberman checked his altitude; he was at twelve thousand feet.

  “Devil One this is Tiger,” said the AWACS controller, checking in.

  Doberman acknowledged. The controller confirmed that the tanker, an Air Force KC-135 known as “Bluebeard,” had been alerted and would be ready at the northern end of its track. The planes circled in patterns similar to extended oval racetracks. Depending on the track and circumstances, several tankers could be lined up, with half a dozen thirsty planes queuing to “tank.” Doberman was getting seriously special treatment due to his mission and his fuel state. The KC-135— basically a 707 with jet fuel instead of passengers— not only had to fly to the northern-most point of her orbit just in time to meet him, she was coming down from her usual twenty- or twenty-five thousand feet as well. And nobody was going to give the crew a medal for the extra danger.

  Doberman thanked the AWACS controller and worked his eyes carefully through his instruments, triple-checking the gauges and indicators that accessorized his office. With eight minutes left to the border, he was just about to spin his radio over to the tanker’s radio frequency when a warning from the AWACS boomed in his ears.