Hogs #4:Snake Eaters

by DeFelice, Jim

  CHAPTER 45

  SOUTH OF FORT APACHE

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1840

  Sergeant Rosen strained against the seat restraints in the AH-6 Little Bird, watching the narrow fringe of reddish light at the horizon sift into blackness. The desert before her lay empty, its vastness turned from idea to fact. Something in the human imagination hated the void, made it feel cold; Rosen braced herself against the frame of the small helicopter and stared. She had seen a great deal in her life: raised by her grandparents and aunt in a rough neighborhood; working her way through all kinds of crap growing up and then in the military. But she had not understood the fierceness at the edge of the horizon until the war. She had not understood that every human soul had a hollow place inside, a pocket where it could go to survive.

  A strong gust of wind smacked against the helo’s bubble nose, whistling over the Allison turbo shaft and its main rotor. Whipping over the desert at almost a hundred and fifty miles an hour, the crammed chopper drew a straight line toward its rendezvous, skids less than six feet from the sand. It was their third and next-to-last trip. Only a half-dozen troopers and their gear were left at Fort Apache now.

  The Little Bird had first undergone trials as the Army Defender light helicopter in 1963; christened the OH-6A Cayuse, the chopper saw extensive duty in Vietnam as a support and scout craft. The first production helicopter in the U.S. to use a gas turbine engine, the OH-6 was fast and maneuverable. It could sport a variety of weapons, starting with the smallish but popular 7.62mm minigun and progressing right up to TOW missiles. The versatile design had been enhanced several times after its introduction, proving more versatile than craft twice as costly.

  Rosen admired the simplicity of design. Despite the high-tech cockpit with its fancy night-gear and radar, the Spec Ops AH-6G melded function with design without excess. It was like a stripped ’63 Chevy Nova, all engine and drivetrain, no BS like leather or climate control. You gunned it and you knew what you had.

  “Sixty seconds to Sandlot,” announced Fernandez, the pilot. He turned his head slightly in Rosen’s direction; he’d donned night-vision goggles before taking off and looked more cyborg than human. Rosen turned back and looked over her shoulder at the three Delta troopers crowded into the back of the tiny helo; they all had heard and gave slight nods.

  She couldn’t see the big PAVE LOW they were meeting until Fernandez whipped the tail around to pull the craft to a landing. The pilot of the big bird had found a shallow depression to sit in, waiting there patiently as the two AH-6s ferried men and supplies from the clandestine fort roughly forty miles away. The troopers in the back jumped from the Little Bird even as it settled in near the big helicopter, no doubt glad to stretch their legs after the knee-crunching shuttle. They were the Pave Low’s last passengers; the Little Birds would return and top off by themselves from the tanks the Pave Low had brought north for them. Then they’d zigzag across the border on their own.

  “Okay,” Rosen shouted to Fernandez as the others got out. “Let me check the wires again.” The jury-rigged wire harness had slipped a bit on the last flight and she worried it would pull loose in mid-air, not a good thing.

  “You want the rotor off?” the pilot asked her.

  “Don’t get nervous,” she told him, grabbing her flashlight and screwdriver. The tech sergeant jumped from her seat and ran around the front of the helo, tucking her head down though with her short frame she had plenty of clearance. The repaired wire harness sat in the housing next to the AN/ALQ-144A omnidirectional infrared jammer, which meant there was less than a foot— a lot less than a foot— of clearance between the cover and the whirling rotor blades. But Rosen wasn’t attempting an overhaul. All she had to do was fight the damn tornado of wind and shine the flashlight in the right place.

  She threw herself against the side of Little Bird, toeing the rocket tube. Grabbing the rear radio fin with her right hand, she worked the flashlight with her left as she inched upward. She slid the screwdriver out along the flashlight with her thumb, then poked forward to nudge the metal back – she’d rigged the access panel for an easy view after the first flight, when her check cost them nearly fifteen minutes.

  She leaned in to look. The thick electrical tape she’d wound around the harness to hold it was still solid. She craned her neck just to check the front of the assembly when she felt her legs shifting out from under her. The Little Bird began to rise and move backwards. She lost her grip and started to slide in the rush of wind. Her instinct was to hold the flashlight and the screwdriver, but something inside made her let go. She found herself falling, and in that moment her eyes went hard and her hands turned to claws. She grabbed for the rear door handle, kept falling. For a second she felt herself getting chewed up by the rear rotor, sliced and diced into dog food. Her soul fell into its secret niche; she fought to remove it, not ready for salvation, or at least not death. Rosen managed to kick her leg into the helo’s body, then rolled her torso around to grab onto the rocket launcher tube, landing half in and half out of the craft. She managed to push herself into the back of the helicopter.

  Fernandez’s horrified face loomed over hers.

  “Okay,” she shouted, getting up. “Okay, okay. Go. Go.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Go! Go!”

  He waited until she had strapped herself in before pulling ahead.

  The shadow of the Pave Low in the distance told her what happened— the draft from its massive whirly nearly knocked the Little Bird over.

  “I’m sorry,” Fernandez shouted back to her. “Christ, I’m sorry.”

  “No problem,” she said. “Next time I’ll wear my magnetic boots.”

  CHAPTER 46

  OVER WESTERN IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1840

  Major Horace “Hack” Preston scanned the F-15’s instrument panel, moving quickly through the dials and indicators on the Eagle’s high-tech dashboard. The large screen at the top right was clean— no enemy radars were active, at least not at the moment. He had plenty of fuel for the two more turns they planned before going home; the rest of his instruments declared the F-15C in showroom shape. Preston turned his gaze back to the HUD, which was projecting its white lines, letters, and numbers in front of a steadily darkening sky.

  Their tour of Iraq had been extended due to some last-minute tasking snafus. Hack had welcomed the double shift, hoping it would give him a chance to redeem himself for the botched chance earlier in the day. But now he was just tired. Piranha One and Two were due to be relieved in less than fifteen minutes; he’d go home eagerly and very possibly fall asleep before the debriefing ended.

  He hadn’t necessarily screwed up the MiG shot. On the contrary— he’d followed procedure to the iota, hesitating only because of the friendlies in the vicinity. He’d locked and launched within the Sparrow’s optimum target range, then jinked his plane and launched countermeasures. Everything had been precisely by the book.

  But it nagged at him. He should have had nailed the damn thing. Anything less was failure.

  He acknowledged as his wingmate checked in with two more radar contacts. They ID’d the planes as F-111s en route to Baghdad.

  “All quiet on the Western Front,” added Johnny.

  “Affirmative,” he told his wingmate, expecting that the formal tone would discourage him from chitchat.

  It did. The two Eagles continued their silent patrol of the skies, trekking along their racetrack at a leisurely four hundred and fifty nautical miles an hour. Fuel flowed steadily through their thirsty engines. The video screens and dashboard lights filled the cockpit with a soft glow that faded from red to green to yellow. Hack worked methodically, fighting off fatigue, struggling to keep his focus as they completed their next-to-last circuit and headed north for one last run.

  Somewhere far below, triple-A flared toward the heavens in a steady, thick stream of tracers. The gunfire was so furious that the line looked unbroken— a fairl
y sobering thought, given that typically only one in four of the rounds fired would be a sparkler.

  “Coming to our turn in zero-one minutes,” Hack told his wingmate. They were in tactical separation, two miles abreast, with the wingman stacked above him about a thousand feet. The formation allowed each man to check the other’s “six” or rear, and provided clearly defined hunting spheres for their missiles. Offsetting each other’s altitude made it more difficult for an on-coming fighter pilot to spot both planes with one sweep of his eyes.

  But the abreast formation did make turns a bit more difficult, especially in the dark; they had to be closely coordinated or the formation would be broken. The planes moved like parts in an old-fashioned clock. Hack called the turn and they went at it textbook style, Two pulling three gs as it started left, One easing around with a tight turn and roll-out that picked up his wingmate precisely abeam, two miles apart, still stacked but heading south.

  Twenty-five thousand feet, four hundred and sixty nautical miles an hour. F-111s passing ahead of them, twenty miles.

  Hack got another contact below eight thousand feet about fifty miles to the east heading west. He tickled the identifier.

  A-10A. The Warthogs were all over the place today.

  “What do you figure that A-10 is doing this far north?” Hack asked his wingmate.

  “Got me,” said Johnny. “Maybe he’s lost.”

  Hack debated asking the AWACS if it really was an A-10. Before he could decide, his radar kicked out three more low-level contacts, all moving relatively slow further southwest, most likely helos. He began to query them when the AWACS broke in with an alert.

  “Two boogies coming off the deck,” screeched the controller. “No three, four— damn, they’re sending the whole air force after you.”

  CHAPTER 47

  FORT APACHE

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1854

  Rosen, peering over Fernandez’s shoulder, had just spotted Fort Apache in the distance when the AWACS called out the MiG warning. She sat back in the seat, stretching the headset cord to the max as the pilot leaned over and punched the controls for the radio.

  “We’ll monitor the interceptors,” Fernandez explained. “We don’t want them to see us at Apache but we have to make the pickup no matter what. We don’t have enough fuel to screw around. If we stay low they may miss us.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. They had to get their guys out.

  “There’s our other Little Bird— you see it? He’s just leaving the strip.”

  Fernandez needed both hands to control the helicopter, so he merely leaned his head forward. Rosen made out a low shadow ahead, darting across the left quarter of the windscreen. It was Apache Air One, the other Little Bird. There would now be only two men left at the Fort— Captain Hawkins and a gunner.

  One of the fighter pilots squawked something about different targets and called a bearing number. It sounded to Rosen as if the Eagles were having difficulty locating the enemy planes, but she had never heard live air combat before. The voices had a clipped excitement to them, a high-pitch that came through the static.

  Fort Apache with its fatally short runway lay a few hundred yards ahead in the dust. Fernandez slowed the helicopter as he crossed over the concrete, looking to land near the ruins that had served as the base’s command post.

  Rosen thought of Lieutenant Dixon as she whipped off the com set and threw it into the front of the helo. His broken body lay somewhere to the north, unburied for all she knew, abandoned. She felt a cold blast of air from the open door, pulled her arms around her and walled off the part of her mind where his memory lived, sealing it away permanently as a dangerous keepsake.

  Parallel to the ruins, Fernandez tilted the back end of the craft up to spin around. Suddenly the control panel went dark and the AH-6 slammed against the ground.

  “Shit!” said Fernandez, slamming his hand on the top of the panel as if the electrical short were there.

  “It’s the harness, it’s the harness,” yelled Rosen, jumping out of the craft. She pulled herself up to examine the panel before realizing she had left her flashlight on the ground back at Sand Box when she’d slipped. She had to lean back and get Fernandez’s light.

  But her jury-rigged harness had held. What the hell?

  It was difficult to see beyond the wires. She began to slide her hands along the harness but found them blocked by a jagged piece of metal. The metal moved when she moved her hand— it was part of the infrared jammer, which had come loose from the back of the motor assembly cover.

  Not good.

  Rosen slid her fingers around, gingerly touching the unit. The rotors were still revolving over her head; it was hard to shine the light and hold on at the same time. She used her fingers to feel for the problem. They slid across wires and a narrow tube and metal. Finally, her pinkie slipped into an empty hole. Her forefinger found another and then a third.

  “Turn everything off!” she yelped. “Off! Off!”

  “It’s off! It’s dead! It’s dead!” Fernandez yelled back.

  Rosen draped herself across the topside of the helo, craned between the rotor blades. Exactly one bolt, no thicker than a Bic pen, held the entire AN/ALQ-144A and its ceramic radiator in place. One of its flanges had severed several wires as the helicopter tipped to land.

  That was lucky. Had it flown off into the rotors, they would have gone straight down as fast as gravity could take them.

  Rosen slipped down to the side of the helicopter and held the wire harness assembly aside. She pushed the jammer housing away about six inches before the bolt caught tight and refused to budge.

  “Fuck you, Saddam!” she screamed, throwing her weight and fury headlong at the assembly, pushing it toward the side. The bolt hung on stubbornly, then sprang loose, sending her rolling head first across the cement. Parts of the ALQ-144 spewed around her as she fell.

  Oblivious to what was happening, Hawkins and the other Delta trooper had been trotting nonchalantly toward the helicopter from a sandbagged position north of the landing strip, seemingly reluctant to leave. They saw Rosen fall and ran to her, yanking her up so fast that the blood that wasn’t pouring from her scraped-up face rushed to her feet.

  “Into the helicopter,” she said, trying to shake them off. “Come on, come on. There are a bunch of Iraqi airplanes headed this way. We got to get out of here.”

  “Are you okay, Sergeant?” Hawkins asked.

  “No,” she said, grabbing the flashlight from the ground. She pulled the roll of black electrical tape from her pocket as she threw herself back onto the helicopter. The wires were all color-coded but she had no play; she had to yank the tape off her harness to get some. She pulled at the tape and then twisted the pairs together as quickly as she could, hoping her tape would hold.

  She leaned down and yelled for Fernandez to see if he had power.

  He did.

  She had to add more tape to the front of the wire strands to make sure they’d stay put, now that they were exposed. The wind from the rotors threw sand into her eyes, but Rosen was operating in another universe now, one beyond the throb in her head and the screaming fire of her battered face. She punched the remaining shards of the jammer assembly base with her fist, bending or clearing away everything she could. Then she found a plastic wire clip flopping loose and managed to secure it against an exposed pin near the wires. Not pretty, certainly not permanent, but good enough.

  “Go! Go! Go!” she yelped, flinging herself back into the back cabin feet first. “Why the hell aren’t you going!”

  “We are going,” shouted Fernandez, emphasizing his point by slamming the helo forward, full-throttle.

  CHAPTER 48

  OVER IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1900

  Doberman acknowledged the AWACS snap vector with a grumble, putting the Hog into the directed turn at nearly a right angle.

  Not that he resented the E-3 Sentry and its powerful airborne radar. What re
ally irked him was the fact that he had to climb to fifteen thousand feet, per standing orders. Granted, the altitude kept him safe from the triple-A nasties, but it was a piss-poor place to be with a flock of MiGs coming for you. Besides, the Hog didn’t like flying this high, and neither did he.

  Fifty feet above ground level, dark be damned. That was where he belonged.

  Doberman got his Hog on the new course east, then dialed into the intercept, listening as the interceptors began to break down the approaching enemy flight. Unlike most Iraqi scrambles, this one seemed intent on actually doing something— the bandits, tentatively identified now as MiG-29s, weren’t running away.

  Doberman tacked their courses on the blackboard of his mind. They were north and west of him, heading in the general direction of Fort Apache.

  His RWR screamed something, and the AWACS controller yelped another warning. A ground-control radar for a high altitude SA-2 had turned itself on directly ahead on the AWACS directed course.

  Doberman cursed and threw his plane into a fresh maneuver, beaming the radar by temporarily heading north. The radar went off as quickly as it had come on. He judged that he was already outside the range of the missiles, but there was no sense taking chances; he took the plane three miles north before pulling around to the southwest.

  As he did, the AWACS announced it had discovered a MiG-21 Fishbed flying under cover of the larger MiG-29s. The plotted course had it headed straight for him, and now the controller rattled Doberman’s helmet with a warning that it was juicing its afterburners.

  That was the last straw. He kicked the Hog over into a full dive, gunning down to where the air was thick and the ground effects heavy. If the Iraqi kept coming, good. Doberman had snapped his last vector tonight.

  Let the bastard come and get him. They’d slug it out, mud fighter to mud fighter— if the Iraqi had the balls to take on a Hog.