Hogs #4:Snake Eaters

by DeFelice, Jim

  And they were firing on him. He was at a hundred feet, barely higher than the hill. The Iraqis threw everything they had at him— anti-aircraft guns, rifles, pistols, maybe even a knife or two.

  No rational man would have turned back for another run. But Captain Glenon wasn’t rational. He was a Hog driver. And having come this far he wasn’t about to go home.

  The Gatling mechanism began pumping beneath his seat as Doberman whipped back toward the hill and immediately found the tank front and center in his HUD aiming cue. He mashed the rudder pedals back and forth, lacing the top of the tank. Two swishes and the tank disappeared, steamed into oblivion.

  Dark black spitballs arced past his windshield, spewed by an optically-aimed ZSU-23 posted below the village. Doberman tucked his wing in and got the barrels sighted as they swung toward him. He rushed his shot, the enemy spitballs turning into footballs; he pushed hard on the stick, ramming his stream of bullets down into the target. His wings bounced up and down. He had a hard time putting the Hog where he wanted it to go, even though he didn’t think he’d been hit. He leaned on the trigger and finally squashed the gun, saw parts of the treads and one of the barrels flying upwards, but no more bullets. He pulled his right wing up, feeling his way back across the village, hugging the ground and looking for something big to shoot at.

  Nothing. The anti-air fire seemed to have temporarily exhausted itself. One of the tanks was on fire. He pulled up into the darkness away from the Iraqi positions, quickly scanning his instruments. His heart pounded so fast it sounded like a downpour on a tin roof.

  At spec. Controls good. Steady climb.

  He’d made it. And hell, he even had a good twenty minutes of fuel to spare.

  He was one lucky SOB. A good pilot, maybe even great— but luckier than anyone had a right to be.

  Doberman relaxed a little, shoulders sagging ever so slightly as he leaned backwards against the Hog’s ejector seat. His legs were cramping; he rocked his knees toward each other gently.

  “Devil One, this is Bro leader,” said the leader of the F-16 two-ship. “Request you stand off while we attack.”

  “If you can find something standing down there to hit,” Doberman told the late-arrivers, “be my guest.”

  CHAPTER 41

  NEAR AL-KAJUK, IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1830

  Dixon was pinned there, behind the bodies, by a fury of machine-gun and heavy-weapons fire. The air boiled with explosions and metal and heat. Flames flew in every direction and he had to hunker into the ground, barely aware of anything more than a foot away. He couldn’t even get up to retrieve his AK-47, even though it lay on the side of the hill only a yard or two away. Every time he rose or crawled or leaned in its direction, the ground exploded with bullets.

  He wasn’t sure how long he stayed there, or why the Iraqis firing at him didn’t just charge and get it over with. The machine-gun seemed to be shooting from a good way off, though in the dark he couldn’t really tell. Shells from a tank or artillery piece peppered the top hill, most landing well behind him; even so, they threw up fierce amounts of dirt and grit.

  Dixon’s lips pressed into the ground, waiting for something to happen. Images crowded at the corners of his brain, ghosts trying to haunt him— his mother, the first man he had killed at close range, the Iraqi woman caught in the crossfire below, the baby. He sat in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean; the ghosts clawed the sides from the icy water, reaching for him, crying to be saved. But he knew that if he let one into the boat, if he even reached for one, it would be the end; Dixon himself would sink, swamped by their pain, dragged to his own death. He resisted; he closed his eyes against the tracers and the smoke and the shrapnel and the metal and the gunpowder and the death. He told himself that the Iraqis had killed the woman and her child, not him. He pushed his body close to the dead soldiers, protected by their freshly wasted bones. He slipped his sleeve over his mouth, trying to breathe the last air unpolluted by the hot winds of death that flowed over the battlefield.

  One of the bodies before him began to move. It sprung up, laughing in his face, leering over him.

  He fought it back down, forcing his eyes to see and his brain to know that the man was truly dead.

  The body collapsed as the foot of the hill exploded with a tumultuous hiss. The red flare of flames shot up toward the sky.

  Dixon’s body burned with the heat, though the fire was far away. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He got to his knees, looming over the dead men, making himself an easy target, not caring that he would soon be dead.

  And then he heard a sound in the distance, a low, familiar whump— the exact sound a Blackhawk helicopter made as it flew. He heard it over everything, the explosions, the curses, the wails of wounded men. He heard it and knew it was coming toward him.

  He didn’t know if the Iraqis were still firing or not. He didn’t know if he was pursued by ghosts or bullets or bombs or corpses or curses. He knew only that he was on his feet and he was running, pushing toward the growing but still distant whomp of the helicopter, a heavy, continuous thud that drummed him full of hope.

  CHAPTER 42

  NEAR AL-KAJUK, IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1840

  By the time Wong reached the roadway, the four Delta troopers had set up the Satcom and were talking to the Blackhawk helicopter detailed to pick them up. The helo— technically an Air Force Special Operations MH-60G Pave Hawk, call sign Dark Snake— had located them with the aid of its FLIR imager and had a calculated ETA under forty-five seconds. The troopers could hear it but not see it; the southwest horizon was now a dark blur. Two F-16s were about to make a run on the Scuds.

  “I suggest we request that the F-16s hold off their bombing run until we have egressed,” Wong told Golden. “And in any event, it would be prudent to don our chemical gear.”

  Golden tapped the com specialist indicating that he ought to follow the captain’s suggestions. The rest of the men silently reached to their rucksacks, pulling out the moon gear.

  Wong had lost his rucksack back on the hill, and thus had no NBC suit to put on. Instead, he pulled out the papers he’d taken from the Iraqi, examining them with the aid of a small penlight he borrowed from Golden.

  One of the folded sheets contained two photos, both fairly battered. In one, an older Iraqi woman waved hesitantly. In the second, a younger version of the dead captain waved in front of a stairway to the Chicago El. The paper had some writing on it in Arabic; it was faded and difficult to read, but Wong guessed it was a personal letter or will of some type.

  The other papers were two small sheets from a notebook. These had numbers as well as letters on them, instructions or map coordinates. There wasn’t time to study them before the ground started whipping with grit thrown up by the helicopter’s whirlies.

  “Incoming!” shouted someone as the team began scrambling for the Pave Hawk.

  A shell exploded at least fifty yards short of the highway. Tossed by either a mortar or the light armored vehicle that had harassed them back at the hill, it proved more inspiration than nemesis. The team bolted for the helicopter as one; Wong caught up and leaped through the wide open door of the helo, colliding with the gunner as the helicopter pitched away. In nearly the same instant the F-16s launched their attack, pickling their 2,000-ton Mk-84 iron bombs in an impressive send-off.

  Wong rolled to his back and sat up, shaking his head as the helicopter’s pilot slid into Warp drive for home.

  “What’s wrong, Captain?” Golden asked. For the first time since they had met, the sergeant seemed actually concerned and almost friendly.

  Obviously an aberration, thought Wong.

  “The aircraft tasked to strike the S1-B or so-called Scud missiles were obviously early model F-16 without precision instruments,” Wong informed him. “Perhaps not as inappropriate as A-10A Thunderbolt IIs, but a bad match nonetheless. We can see evidence of this in the fact that they resorted to droppin
g Mk-84 bombs, which naturally will result in a tonnage to devastation ratio frighteningly close to that experienced in World War II.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “A pair of missiles at the lower, less expensive end of the Paveway series, or perhaps even the AGM-65s used by our friends in the Thunderbolt IIs, would have been the weapon of choice. Unless, of course, one belongs to the accounting branch.”

  “You think they missed?”

  Wong chortled. “Hardly. We saw clear evidence presented by the numerous secondary explosions.”

  “So what’s the big deal?”

  Wong reached into his pocket for the Iraqi’s notes without answering. People either understood efficiency or they didn’t; there was no use explaining it.

  Modified for covert and special operations, the MH-60G Pave Hawk began life at Sikorsky as a plain-Jane UH-60 Blackhawk, the muscular successor to the UH-1 Huey, arguably the most successful military utility helicopter of all time. Powered by a pair of General Electric T700-GE-401 turbo shaft engines that were rated for 180 knots cruising speed, stock Blackhawks had a range of nearly 375 miles. All Pave Hawks, however, were rigged for extra internal fuel; this particular bird also carried two large 117-gallon tanks off her side, increasing not only her range but her ability to linger in the war zone. A long airborne refueling probe stuck out from her nose, making the craft look something like a medieval knight and horse rushing to battle. Mounted on each door was a .50 inch machine-gun. Pintle mounts for 7.62 mm Miniguns were set on the sliding forward cabin windows, though at the moment the posts weren’t manned. The chopper’s equipment set included FLIR or forward-looking infrared, ground mapping and weather avoidance radar, advanced INS and global positioning, and com gear. While similar to the gear in the larger Pave Lows, the avionics set was not quite as advanced or powerful, though the difference would hardly be noticeable on most missions, including this Injun-country extraction. The men manning the craft were hand-picked veterans, trained for a range of missions from rescue to covert action. Painted in a brown chocolate chip scheme somewhat similar to the troopers’ camo fatigues, the Blackhawk bore three white bands around the fuselage behind the cabin, a recognition code for coalition forces.

  Wong’s Arabic was rusty and the captain’s handwriting poor. Jostled in the tight cabin, he stared at the scribbles for more than two or three minutes before finally realizing that they were in code. Wong looked up suddenly, realizing that Golden was staring over his shoulder.

  “What do you have?” asked the sergeant.

  “The first sheet contains a set of coordinates which are useless without the map they refer to,” said Wong. “But the second has hand-copied instructions, I believe. Can you decipher them?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No.” Wong took the paper back without asking why everyone thought he was always playing the comedian. “Incidentally, your diversion proved useful, as it sent most of the Iraqi force away at an opportune time. How precisely did you acquire the AK-47?”

  “What AK-47?”

  “You did not fire near the northern base of the hill?”

  “The north side? Hell no. We were in the village. We came back up the east slope. I didn’t even know you’d been captured until the shooting started. You saved us, not the other way around.”

  “You were never on the northwestern side of the hill? Or on the ground there?”

  Wong asked the question, though by now he realized that was impossible. He reconsidered the battle, sorting it into its different components.

  Wong rose slowly, grabbing one of the long belts at the side of the bird’s cabin to steady himself as he passed forward. The helicopter’s pilots sat at a pair of well-equipped consoles, separated by a wide console with more dials, buttons, and indicators than the average nuclear power plant.

  “Excuse me,” said Wong, bending across the central console. “I’d like to speak to the commander.”

  “Yo,” said the pilot on the right.

  “I will require immediate transportation to King Fahd Royal Airbase,” said Wong.

  “Uh, Captain, first of all, don’t put your hand up there, all right? You’re too damn close to the throttle.”

  Wong removed his hand without noting that it had been nowhere near the control in question.

  “Thank you,” said the pilot. “Now as for King Fahd— that’s where we’re headed, assuming we cross ten million miles of SAMs, anti-air guns, hostile troop positions and rattlesnakes. I would appreciate it if you took a seat.”

  “Very good,” said Wong. “Let me assure you that there are no known species of rattlesnakes in Iraqi, or in Saudi Arabia for that matter. Indeed, they are a New World species exclusively.”

  “Ha, ha,” said the pilot. “Very funny.”

  At a loss to understand why, Wong merely shrugged and went to the back.

  CHAPTER 43

  OVER IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1840

  Doberman hunched to the side of the cockpit, leaning over the throttle console as he tried to get a good view of the highway. Four British Tornadoes had been detailed by the AWACS controller to mop up. Doberman had been asked to play impromptu spotter for them, mapping out the site. The F-16s, meanwhile, were swinging south to shadow the Pave Hawk in case it got into trouble.

  There were three or four good-sized fires going where the Vipers had dropped their bombs on the highway. Red and yellow mixed with a black smoke so dark and inky it stood out in the heavy twilight. Doberman leaned the Hog gently on her wing, fixing his eyes on the largest and nearest fire. It seemed to be a fuel truck, not a missile, though from six thousand feet even in the daylight it would not be easy to tell. A second hulk further along seemed definitely to be a missile; only the tractor cab was burning. He continued south, spotting three medium-sized shadows near where he’d hit the erector. They looked like the most likely targets, though he wasn’t sure what they were.

  He banked northwards, making sure the SA-9 sites were smashed. The ground looked flat— no flames, no smoke, nothing. The Vipers had reported a hit on the remaining launcher and they looked to be correct— if there had been a live SAM launcher down there, Doberman would be swinging from a parachute.

  “Devil One, hay-low Yank, this is Tory Leader. We are five klicks south of you and request target guidance.”

  “Yeah, One to Tory, hang tight,” he told the British pilot, who was under thirty seconds away. “I got three trucks near the erector. Hang tight, I’m coming back low and slow to eyeball this mess.”

  Doberman lined up his weary Hog for one more walk through. He pushed his nose toward the ground, coming over the highway toward the smashed tanks and hill in a straight-at-the-road diving, dropping his altitude below two thousand feet. There was an armored vehicle of some sort, smaller than a tank, at the corner of the hill beyond the tanks he’d unzipped. He stayed with the road over the village, no longer drawing anti-aircraft fire. The idiots had shot themselves dry.

  Doberman felt his heart beat picking up as he nosed closer to the road, down at a thousand feet now. It was low for a plane flying in the dark without ground terrain radar, even though he felt he knew the area pretty well. He arced toward the burning fuel truck, its flames flickering toward his hull. Two long cylinders lay in the dirt about a hundred yards away. One was definitely smashed – it looked like a broken crayon stomped into a carpet.

  He couldn’t be sure about the other. He steadied the plane, riding out to the erector south of the highway. One of the shadows he’d seen was clearly a tent; the other two were small panel vans.

  Not much for the Tornadoes to hit, but that was their business. He gave Tory Leader a quick rundown, offering to mop up himself with his cannon while they went on to another target.

  “Thanks Yank, but we’ll stay with this tea party all the same,” said the British pilot cheerfully. “Our primary was scratched which was why we were sent here originally. And I’ve just received word that our secon
dary target has been hit out as well. You Americans are putting on quite the show. Hogging all the glory, eh?”

  The Englishman meant it as a joke and even something of a compliment, but it struck Doberman the wrong way. He punched the mike button, intending to snarl that nobody here was doing it for the goddamn glory. Nobody. He wanted to scream that he’d lost a squadron mate today, a good kid, to this bullshit, and worried that he’d lose more.

  He didn’t say it, though. For one of the few times in his life, Doberman controlled his temper and gave only a brief acknowledgment. Then he pumped the throttle and gave himself stick, setting course for the long and hazardous trip home.

  CHAPTER 44

  NEAR AL-KAJUK, IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1840

  Dixon heard the helicopter’s engines whirl into high gear. He pushed himself to run faster, conscious now that his salvation was within reach. He ran and he ran, long legs striding, lungs wrenching against his ribs, eyes scratching the dark night to make out the helo. Finally he saw it, out ahead across the road, its dark hull stuttering, the rotor blades whirling. It seemed like a mirage.

  It wasn’t. It was real and less than a half-mile away. He could feel the ground pounding with the heavy twin motors. He ran and he ran, forgetting his wounds and his hunger, his thirst and his fear, forgetting most of all his conscience and the ghosts.

  And then he realized that the helicopter was moving, speeding away; already it was growing slower, already it was too far to stop. He ran another few feet and launched himself, arms grabbing the empty air in despair, two hundred yards away from being saved.