Hogs #4:Snake Eaters

by DeFelice, Jim

  “Get over it,” he barked at the plane. She stopped her whining, rolling freely and poking her tail surfaces around as A-Bomb helped steer her around with a touch of the pedals.

  Rosen’s fixes to the hydraulic system couldn’t be properly tested until he was in the air. Under other circumstances, the checkflight would have been conducted very carefully, according to a rigidly prescribed to-do list. Here though, A-Bomb was basically going to make sure everything worked and go from there.

  Which suited him just fine. He’d never been much of a test pilot.

  Actually, under other circumstances, he’d have been under strict orders to return to a “real” base for “real” repairs, but heck, who’d listen to orders like those when there was good stuff just waiting to be blown up?

  Besides, the controls were responding just fine. The Hog had two sets of hydraulic systems as well as manual controls; even if Rosen’s fix fell apart A-Bomb figured he’d have an easy time flying the plane. When he lit the GE TF34-GE-100 turbofans on the back hull, the Hog roared her approval. She bucked her nose up and down and began striding down the short run of concrete, willing herself off the ground. A-Bomb had the wheels coming up as she thundered over the dark crease at the runway’s end. She gave a wag of her tail to the men working to bury the tanker, as if she were saying goodbye to the blood donor who’d helped her carry on. A-Bomb brought her to course, cranked “Born to Run” – kind of mandatory, when you thought about it – and reached for his customary post-takeoff Twizzler.

  And came up empty.

  “Now I’m starting to feel really mad,” he said, sweeping his eyes across his instruments and then the rest of his readouts. Speed brisk, compass doing its thing and altitude moving in the proper direction. The master caution on the warning panel – no light, good. Enunciators clean, good.

  The controls were sharp; with only the Sidewinder missiles and ECM pod under her wings, the Hog felt clean and light, and gave no hint that she was flying with a patched hydraulic system.

  “Devil One this is Two,” A-Bomb said over the squadron frequency, contacting Doberman as he set course in a loose trail roughly three miles behind his flight leader. Their initial direction was south, towards open desert where it was unlikely they’d be spotted as they climbed. “I’m up.”

  “About time,” grunted Doberman.

  “You get the helos on the air yet?”

  “They’re on the back burner,” Doberman told him. That meant things were going according to plan – Fort Apache’s two helicopters had dropped off their men a few miles from the site a short time before. They had moved south a few miles to hide in case they were needed. “Ground should be positioned in fifteen.”

  “My math has us there in ten,” said A-Bomb, who actually was just guessing. He hadn’t been very big on math since Sister Harvey’s class in fifth grade.

  “Yeah, twelve,” said Doberman. “Conserve your fuel.”

  “I go any slower I’m walking,” A-Bomb told him. “I’m surprised you can hear me over the stall warnings.”

  “One,” snapped Doberman, an acknowledgment that basically meant, shut up and drive.

  The two Hogs were to fly up and orbit south of the highway that led to the village, which was supposedly sparsely populated, with no known Iraqi army units. They’d be at eight thousand feet, ready to pounce once the Delta troopers gave them a good target. Captain Wong had gone along to help make sure things worked right; with Braniac on the job, A-Bomb figured they’d be working the Gats within five minutes of the fire team’s first transmission. That still left them a good twenty minutes worth of fuel reserves before they’d have to head back to Al Jouf.

  Ten officially, but Doberman always padded those calculations.

  Doberman had insisted on the ground that he would make all of the cannon attacks, not wanting to push A-Bomb’s plane and test the repairs. But A-Bomb knew once the fur started flying, he and his plane would do what was natural – leaky hydraulic system, missing wing, whatever. Doberman might bitch and growl, but in the end he’d understand.

  His leader’s tail was a small black line in the upper left quadrant of his windshield. The loose trail formation was a de rigueur Hog lineup for a two-plane element. It was basically follow-the-leader with a slight offset; the trail plane off the right or left wing back anywhere from a half-mile to three, depending on the circumstances. The planes would generally fly at slightly different altitudes, making it a little more difficult for an approaching enemy to pick out both in one glance. Freelancing attack gigs like this sortie and the others typically flown by Hogs tended to be somewhat less precise than the carefully orchestrated plans employed by vast packages of advanced bombers and escorts, but they were well suited to the ground support mission. The Devil Squadron’s trail formation was almost infinitely flexible, the wingman protecting the lead plane’s six while allowing for a quick, two-fisted ground attack or a more leisurely figure-eight wheel and dive when it was time to boogie.

  “How’s that repair holding up?” Doberman asked.

  “Fine,” A-Bomb replied. “I’m dyin’ up here, though. Nothing to eat.”

  “You didn’t check the seat for crumbs?”

  “Now that you mention it, there’s probably a gum drop or two under the sofa. Probably full of cat’s hair, though.”

  “This is war, Gun. You have to rough it.”

  “It’s what I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb. Now that he thought about it, he probably had dropped something on the floor during the morning’s mission. He rocked the Hog left and right and pitched the nose up, trying to shake something loose.

  Then the plane jerked hard to the left, much harder than it should have. A-Bomb felt the G’s snap into his body as he muscled the stick, got the Hog back.

  He knew by the feel even before he checked his gauges that it wasn’t the hydraulics. He’d lost power in his right engine.

  Gone. Dead. Dormant.

  What the hell?

  A-Bomb worked through the restart procedure, thought he had a cough.

  Nada. He tried twice more and came up empty.

  Serious caution lights; the damn cockpit looked like a Christmas tree.

  Well, all right, a slight exaggeration. But this is what came of flying without even a good luck Three Musketeers bar.

  A-Bomb cast his eyes toward his last resort – the lone Twinkie. Then he snapped the mike button in disgust.

  “Devil One, this is Two. I’ve got a situation.”

  CHAPTER 15

  IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1540

  Three weeks ago to the day, Bristol Wong had been enjoying a leisurely game of chess in a small club frequented by Pentagon and CIA intelligence specialists in Alexandria, Virginia. With its thick leather chairs, horse paintings, and British decor, the club appealed to the Air Force captain’s innate sense of culture and decorum. The fact that a good game of chess and reasonably decent sherry could always be had there didn’t hurt. But on that very day, Wong had no sooner settled into a Sicilian defense— old hat to be sure, but he was playing a former CIA agent well known for his love of extreme symmetry— when his beeper vibrated. Wong knew immediately that he was going to hate the next four or five weeks of his life.

  An hour after returning the call, Wong found himself aboard a Navy transport plane, en-route to Saudi Arabia, armed with a title several sentences long that had little to do with his actual mission. Officially, his job was to “consult and brief” Centcom on Iraqi air defenses. His actual task was to gather information about any and all advanced Soviet systems in the theater, which would be provided back-channel to the Pentagon G2’s chief of staff. The dual nature of his mission was nothing particularly out of the ordinary, at least not for Wong who was, after all, the world’s greatest expert on Soviet weapons – outside the Soviet Union, of course.

  In due course he made his way to Hog Heaven and Devil Squadron at their Home Drome, also known as King Fahd Royal Air Base. He was c
hasing down a lead on the use of a shoulder-fired weapon that both the CIA and the Air Force claimed the Iraqis didn’t possess: the SA-16, a relatively sophisticated shoulder-fired weapon in some ways comparable to an American Stinger. While publicly expressing skepticism with the initial report, Wong in fact already had ample evidence that the missile was in Iraqi possession. He suspected that they were even using an improved version, only recently issued to Russian troops themselves. A member of Devil Squadron— Captain Glenon, in fact— had had the misfortune of encountering one during the first day of the war.

  Unfortunately for Wong, the Devil Squadron commander, Colonel Michael Knowlington, had taken an inexplicable liking to Wong and managed to pull all manner of strings to have him assigned to his command. Naturally, Wong realized that he would be a prize jewel in any command structure, and had employed a vast array of tactics to get himself removed and returned to Washington, D.C., where he might play chess with some regularity, not to mention challenge. But his efforts had been misinterpreted. Colonel Knowlington now considered him an essential cog in the machine, and detailed him to help the advance elements of Devil Squadron supporting Fort Apache.

  That was how he found himself here, close to two hundred miles inside Iraq, sucking dirt as the interminable wind whipped up through the hills surrounding the small pimple of a settlement called Al Kajuk. He and the Delta troopers accompanying him had at least a mile of climbing to do before getting a clear view of the village, such as it was.

  Wong had worked with Delta and other Special Ops troops before. Aside from a predilection for running when walking would have been sufficient, he found them competent, professional, and taciturn, characteristics he thoroughly appreciated.

  The sergeant in front of him held up a hand, signaling a stop. Wong passed the signal along to the team’s com specialist behind him, who in turn passed it on to the tail gunner. There were only four troopers on this ad hoc team: Sergeant Mays at point, Sergeant Franks at the rear, Sergeant Holgrum with the satellite communications gear, and Sergeant Golden, the team leader. Golden was in charge; Wong was in theory just along as an adviser and knew better than to interfere.

  “Let’s rest here a minute,” said Golden, coming back. “We have a house or something over that hump and down the slope, maybe half a mile, a little more. That way, there’s a road and the village. Over there’s the highway, on our right. Looks like when we get to the peak, we’ll be exposed, the sun in our faces. We should be able to position the Satcom up there somewhere, but let’s scout the area first. Kind of weird we got vegetation on that side of the hill and pretty much nothing here,” he added. “Must be water underground or something.

  Wong nodded. He suspected that the vegetation on the long, sloping hillside to their left had more to do with the wind pattern, which would amplify the modest moisture effect produced by the nearby river. But he knew from experience that meteorological matters hardly ever interested anyone, except while waiting for a train.

  “Captain Wong and I will go on ahead,” the sergeant told the others. “That okay with you, Captain?”

  “It would suit me.” Wong dropped his pack on the ground, pulling his M-164 and its 203 grenade launcher up under his arm. It was not his preferred weapon, but it would serve.

  “Captain Hawkins said you were with him when he jumped into Korea,” said Golden. The sergeant was short for a Green Beret, about five-seven, and fairly skinny. Wong, at six-two, towered over him, even on the incline.

  “Yes. An interesting mission.”

  “You killed two gooks?”

  Wong smiled at the racial slur, but didn’t answer. Golden was white, but obviously of mixed ancestry; no one ethnic group could have produced a face quite so ugly. Wong himself was fifth generation Chinese-American born in Hong Kong to a Scottish mother — not quite classic “gook,” but undoubtedly close enough for the sergeant.

  “We may be doing some killing here,” said Golden. “I know you Pentagon boys don’t like to get your hands dirty.”

  “I would not be surprised to find mine are dirtier than yours,” Wong said, starting up the hill ahead of him.

  CHAPTER 16

  OVER IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1555

  Doberman eyeballed the paper map on his kneeboard as A-Bomb gave his wayward engine another shot at relighting itself. He had already decided he was sending his wingmate home, no matter what, but he realized the news wasn’t going to go over very well.

  “Damn, Dog Breath, she won’t catch for me no way, no how,” cursed A-Bomb. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah, okay, you think you can make Al-Jouf?”

  “You sending me home without supper?”

  “You want me to come with you, no sweat.”

  “Shit. Shit.”

  “You have to go back, A-Bomb.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know. Damn. You ever, ever heard of one of these engines giving out? Ever?”

  There was only one acceptable response. “No. Must be a fluke,” said Doberman. “All right, let’s go.”

  “I don’t need you holding my hand,” answered A-Bomb.

  “The most important thing is that you get back in one piece.”

  For some reason, that unleashed a fresh stream of curses loud enough to nearly shatter Doberman’s shatterproof helmet.

  Flying solo with one engine— frankly, even with two— over hostile territory was not exactly risk free, but A-Bomb pointed out that Doberman had a job to do. There were plenty of Coalition aircraft to call on if needed. Besides, there were worse things, especially as far as he was concerned.

  “See now, this is the kind of thing that really pisses me off,” said A-Bomb, his tirade fading down. “This Spec Ops coffee tastes like green tea.”

  Doberman nudged his stick, widening the circle he was drawing over the Iraqi scrubland. Al Kajuk lay ten miles to the northeast. Iraqi air defenses were thin but still potent. The village could easily be hiding flak guns and mobile missiles. He was at eight thousand feet, circling high enough so he couldn’t be heard, but the sky was clear and anyone with a good set of eyes, not to mention binoculars, ought to be able to spot him from the ground. And if a radar was turned on— well, that was show business.

  “If you think you can make it. . .” Doberman started to say.

  “It’s what I’m talking about.” Hell. Unless you don’t think you can handle things.”

  “Screw you,” snapped Doberman.

  “Anytime.”

  “Yeah, all right. Sorry about the coffee,” Doberman told his wingmate.

  “Coffee’s the only reason I’m going to Al Jouf,” said A-Bomb. “You want anything?”

  “Taco with beans,” Doberman answered.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said A-Bomb. “Devil Two, gone. You’re solo.”

  A-Bomb had a million personal call signs, signoffs, nicknames, curses, and slang sayings, but that was one Doberman had never heard before.

  “Yeah,” was all he could reply.

  ****

  The Warthog’s top speed was supposedly 439 miles an hour, though there was considerable debate and not a little bragging among Hog drivers about the “real” speed. It was a kind of inverse of bragging— pilots liked to say how slow the A-10A really flew, even going downhill with the wind at her back.

  Normal cruising speed was less than four hundred miles an hour, so slow that a World War II era propeller-driven fighter could easily keep up. Cutting his circles around the Iraqi desert south of his target area, Doberman’s indicated air speed was exactly 385 nautical miles an hour.

  Vital flight data was projected in front of his eyes via a HUD or heads-up display. While it was easy to see out of the airplane, the front windshield area was narrow and even cluttered by the standards of planes like the F-15 or F-16. But it was also better protected. A thick frame held armored windscreen panels, a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that the people a Hog driver most wanted to meet weren’t welcoming him with open a
rms. Doberman sat in what amounted to a bathtub constructed of titanium. The mass of metal protected the airplane’s most vital part— him. If at times he felt a bit like a bear in a cave, it was a highly secure cave.

  The ground team, “Snake Eaters,” was supposed to come on the air at precisely 1600, or in one minute and thirteen seconds. Doberman, impatient by nature, tried to divert himself by starting a very slow instrument check. He began with his fuel gauge, a large clock-faced dial over the right console, just above a selector switch that allowed him to separately measure the stores in the various tanks. He moved deliberately, slowly, precisely, expecting to be interrupted— hoping to be, actually— but concentrating on what he was doing.

  There were two kinds of pilots, in Doberman’s opinion. There were guys like A-Bomb, who were really birds in disguise, equipped with some sort of sixth sense about planes. And there were guys like him, who had trained themselves essentially by rote and repetition. Doberman had an engineering background, and he thought like an engineer, or at least tried to, leaving nothing to chance. He calculated the fuel readings against his estimated time over target and reserves, running the numbers quickly through his mental computer to make sure he had all his contingencies covered. Then he walked his eyes over the rest of the readouts and instruments: temperatures, pressures, speed, altitude, heading. Check, check, check— gun ready as she would ever be, threat indicator clean— check, check, check.

  And where the hell was Wong and the rest of the ground team? It was already 1603.

  He started to click his mike button to hail him when the AWACS controller cut in with a warning: enemy planes were coming off a runway less than fifty miles northeast of him.

  CHAPTER 17

  NEAR AL-KAJUK, IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1603

  At the precise moment Doberman was wondering what was going on below, Wong was holding his breath and sliding down between two very large and uncomfortable rocks ten feet from an Iraqi soldier.