by Jim DeFelice
Glenon eased his stick back gently, the Hog’s fuel-filled wings lifting the plane easily into the sky. Unlike nearly every other jet designed after the 1940s, the A-10A’s wings were not swept back, part of a design strategy to enhance low-speed/low-altitude maneuverability. The fuselage’s rather odd shape— it looked like a beached whaleboat with wings— was the result of two other design strategies: survivability and maximum firepower. A good hunk of the front end weight came from a ring of titanium that protected the pilot’s sides and fanny from artillery fire. The rest came from the Avenger 30 mm cannon, arguably the most important feature of the plane. The Gatling-style cannon spat a mixture of incendiary and uranium-tipped slugs custom-designed to unzip heavy armor— and not incidentally obliterate everything else.
Airborne, gear stowed, Doberman walked his eyes across the wall of gauges in front of him, checking his sense of the plane against the cold data of the indicators. A small TV screen used to target Maverick air-to-ground missiles sat in the upper right-hand corner of the dash; without any AGMs aboard, it would remain blank the entire flight. Below the screen were two sets of gauges monitoring the General Electric turbofans that hung in front of the tail. Relatively quiet as well as efficient, the TF-34s hummed at spec, propelling the A-10A toward its 387-nautical-miles-per-hour cruising speed, which Doberman would achieve at five thousand feet, give or take an inch.
“Devil One, this is Two. I have your six,” said A-Bomb, drawing his plane into trail position behind Doberman.
“One,” acknowledged Doberman over the short-range Fox Mike or FM radio.
“Kick butt sun,” said A-Bomb.
Doberman grunted at the scenery and checked his INS guidance system. Preprogrammed way-points helped the pilots make sure they were on course as they flew. Hog drivers also carried old-fashioned paper maps, though by now Doberman and A-Bomb had so much experience flying over northern Saudi Arabia and Iraq that they could almost tell where they were by looking at the dunes.
Almost.
“So Dog Man, what’s the first thing you’re going to do as squadron DO?”
“Who says I’m going to be squadron DO? I’m only a captain.”
“You’re a high-time Hog driver, the squadron’s longest in service pilot, and all-around peachy-keen guy,” answered A-Bomb. “Besides, Skull loves your ass.”
“They’ll probably bring somebody in from the outside.”
“Nah. You da man.”
“I don’t want the headaches.” Doberman snapped off the mike button and rechecked his instruments. DO stood for Director of Operations. Traditionally, the DO rated as the number-two man behind the squadron commander. Devil Squadron wasn’t particularly traditional— it had been thrown together from a bunch of discarded planes, its pilots shanghaied and “volunteered” from other units. It had an extremely bare support structure, with a short chain of command and a relatively thin roster of fliers. But it also had an amazingly high sortie rate and had already dropped more than one million pounds of bombs, missiles, and curses on the enemy. A lot of bang for the buck, as A-Bomb would put it.
All of which meant Devil Squadron’s DO worked twice as hard as he would in another unit. The last DO, Major James “Mongoose” Johnson, had been sent home after being shot down, injured, and rescued. Doberman had never gotten along with him; from his point of view, Johnson tended to be a bit of a prig and was always on his butt for little bullshit things. It wasn’t just Doberman, either. He seemed to think he had to be everywhere, looking over everything. He rode the maintenance people especially hard; Glenon couldn’t go near the hangars without hearing somebody bitch about him. But Mongoose hadn’t been the worst DO Glenon had ever served with, and Doberman could have put up with the jerk for as long as necessary, especially if it meant he didn’t get tagged with the gig.
“Ah, you’re bullshitting me,” said A-Bomb. “Once you’re DO, you’re on your way. Stepping stone to general. Shit, with that shootdown, you’ll be wearing stars next week. Just remember me when you’re in the Pentagon. Score some tickets for a RedSkins game, okay?”
“Seeing stars, maybe.”
“General Dog Face. Probably have your own box at RFK, right?”
“Who the hell said I ever, ever wanted to be a general?” blustered Doberman. “And I thought we were flying silent com.”
“Silent com? Can you do that in a Hog?”
A call from the AWACS controller monitoring their sector ended the banter.
“Devil Flight, this is Coyote,” said the controller, who was aboard the Boeing E-3 Sentry aircraft orbiting to the south.
Doberman acknowledged, verifying their course and status.
“Can you handle a detour?” asked the controller. “Army unit near the border has a situation and needs some support. You’re the closest flight.”
“Give us the coordinates,” answered Doberman, touching Tinman’s medal with his thumb before nudging the Hog northward.
CHAPTER 4
APPROACHING KING FAHD
27 JANUARY 1991
0530
Captain Lars Warren took a deep breath— his fifth in perhaps the last twenty seconds— and fixed his glare on the runway in the distance. It was his second approach to King Fahd; he’d aborted his first landing attempt when he realized he was going too fast to land safely.
That was an excuse. He’d aborted it because he’d panicked. And it was happening again. Even worse than before.
His pinkie began to quiver. Lars glanced at his hands on the steering yoke of the big four-engine plane. His fingers’ light-brown flesh had turned violet from the pressure he was exerting. Lars pushed his right elbow further into his stomach, trying to keep the tremor from extending to the rest of his fingers. It was terrible flying posture— it was terrible posture, period— but he wasn’t thinking about that; all he was trying to do was land his Hercules C-130 in one piece.
The thing was, he’d landed Herks maybe a thousand times before. He’d landed this very plane at least twenty times, including twice on this long, sturdy, and accommodating strip. It wasn’t difficult— the high-winged transport was an extremely stable and generally forgiving aircraft. In many respects it was actually easier to fly than the 737 he had been flying three days ago when his Air National Guard Unit was ordered into the Gulf to spell other units.
Lars was a good pilot. In fact, he was better than good; he’d been up for an assignment as a training supervisor at the airline before the Gulf War complicated things. He had had flown 707s and Dash-8s and C-141s and a KC-10 and so many C-130s he could do it all in his sleep.
But he was having trouble landing. He was having trouble flying. And everyone on the flight deck knew it.
“Gear set,” said his copilot. His tone was gentle, but part of Warren bristled as if the man had cursed him for being a failure and a coward.
The rest of him trembled, just afraid.
Afraid of what?
Afraid of flying.
Hell no. No way. Flying was walking, with a checklist. Shit. He could fly in his sleep.
Afraid of being shot down?
He was flying a transport, for christsake. He was behind the lines— he always flew behind the lines. Way, way, way behind the lines. No one was going to shoot at him. He’d been here for two whole days and last night’s random Scud attack was the closest he’d come to anything remotely warlike.
But that had unnerved him. He’d been preparing to take off when the alert came in.
The warhead had landed on the other side of the country, but it had shaken him up. Still, when the all-clear came they went ahead with the mission, a routine supply hop. He’d done okay, though little things had bothered him. He’d forgotten to ask the copilot for the crosswind correction— not a big deal. He’d bounced a little on takeoff to come back— something he never, ever did, but no big deal.
Now though, this was a big deal. Lars felt his legs turn to water as the edge of the runway loomed ahead. Hot air rose in waves from the con
crete. In just a few seconds it would be buffeting his wings.
If he let it.
Shit. All he had to do was skim in. Everything was perfect. Let the plane land.
Give it to his copilot.
No!
His copilot was talking to him. The tower was talking to him. A plane— a loaded Warthog— was on the runway, on the runway.
In the way.
What the hell?
Abort.
Abort!
“Captain?”
Lars snapped his head toward his copilot. As he did, he realized the A-10A wasn’t moving on the runway. It was well off to the side in the maintenance area, being prepared for a morning mission.
Nothing was in his way. His brain had done a mind flip, constructing bogies to spook him.
God, help me, he thought to himself. I’m losing it.
A pain shot through his chest, striking so hard he lost his breath mid-gulp.
Heart attack.
It’s just panic, he told himself.
“Captain?”
“Yeah, I’m landing,” Warren said, not caring how ludicrous it sounded. He pushed his elbows in and closed his eyes— actually closed his eyes— as the wheels skipped and screeched but finally rolled smooth against the tarmac. For a second his entire world turned black; for a second his addled mind completely lost its grip, furling and swirling in a darkness filled with bullets and missiles, Scuds and MiGs and SAMs. Then slowly, very, very slowly, the fog lifted. He was able to open his eyes; he realized he had already begun applying brakes. His copilot was busy on his side of the console; they had landed in one piece.
“No offense, Lars,” said the copilot as they found their way toward the hangar where they were assigned, “but, uh, you okay?”
Warren bit back the impulse to ask if the man— a young, white captain whom he didn’t know very well— was going to report him.
What would he report? That he came in too fast? That he seemed to hesitate at the last second?
That he closed his eyes?
That Lars Warren was petrified, twenty-three years after his first solo. That Lars Warren, who as a fourteen-year-old had single-handedly broken up an armed bank robbery by tackling a robber, had suddenly become a coward at forty-three. All because of a random Scud attack that had been thwarted by Patriot missiles miles and miles away.
Or because he’d always been a coward, deep down.
Lars said nothing, blowing air out through his clenched teeth and nodding instead.
CHAPTER 5
NORTH OF THE SAUDI BORDER
27 JANUARY 1991
0650
Doberman scanned the ripples in the sand, mechanically moving his eyes back and forth across the terrain as he pushed Devil One toward the trouble spot just over the Saudi border. Intelligence and the mission planners divided the desert into neat kill boxes, subdividing Iraq into a precise checkerboard that could be measured to the meter. But the nice clean lines got wavy as soon as you pushed your plane low enough to actually see anything. Distances blurred, coordinates began to jumble. For all the high-tech paraphernalia, war in the desert still came down to eyeballs and pilot sense. Glenon had a healthy helping of both— but he wasn’t Superman, and he felt himself starting to get pissed as he stared down at the area where the American troops should have been. The pilot had a notoriously short fuse, but even he knew he was in a particularly bad mood all of a sudden. Maybe it was because he hadn’t had that much sleep; maybe he was angry with himself for getting tongue tied with Rosen.
Or maybe it was what A-Bomb would call PBS— Pre-Blowup-Syndrome.
The ladder on the HUD altimeter display notched steadily downward as Doberman hunted for the slightest sign of the conflict the AWACS had sent them to contain. He kicked below three thousand feet without any sign of the unit that had called for air support— without, in fact, seeing anything but yellowish blurs of sand. Finally, a thick scar edged against the earth in the right quadrant of his windshield. Doberman nudged his stick, steadying the A-10 toward what he thought was the thick trench that marked the Saudi-Iraqi border for much of its length. But the manmade trench was actually a British army position two miles back from the border and not precisely parallel to it; when he realized his mistake he cursed over the open mike.
“My eyes are screwing me this morning,” he told A-Bomb.
“Sun’s wicked. I got dust bunnies, northwest, uh, off your nose at eleven o’clock, no, let’s call it five degrees on the compass. Could be our friends.”
A-Bomb was behind him by a mile and at least two thousand feet higher. But sure enough, when Doberman looked in the proper direction he found a small bubble of dust.
“How the hell did you see that?” he asked, snapping onto course.
“Carrot cake,” said A-Bomb. “No better source of Vitamin E. Enhances your vision rods. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of grabbing another bite, so long as I’m playing Tonto back here.”
“You’re eatin’ carrot cake?”
“Hey, man’s got to have breakfast,” replied A-Bomb. “I figured the bacon would have been cold by the time I got a chance to eat it. One of these days, I’m figuring out how to get a microwave in here. Course, nuked bacon tastes like cardboard. What I really need is a deep fryer. Could slot it in over the radio gear, if I can get one of Clyston’s techies to order the parts.”
Anybody else would have been kidding.
Doberman reached to the armament panel, readying the cannon. He could now see two distinct smudges on the ground. One seemed to consist of a dozen ants surrounding a small pickle they’d stolen from a picnic. The second, behind them by about a mile, looked like two large and angry bees.
He nudged toward the bees, setting up for a straight-in dive across their path. They were tanks, moving at a fair clip.
“Rat Patrol to Devil Flight, Rat Patrol at frequency ten-niner looking for Devil Flight. Understand you are in our box. Please acknowledge.”
“Devil Flight,” answered Doberman. “I have two enemy vehicles in sight. I’ll be on them in about ten seconds. Keep running.”
“Negative, negative. We’re stationary. We see you. We’re southeast of you, a mile directly south of the truck and the men,” said the soldier. “They’re not the problem. Repeat, they’re not the problem. Don’t hit them.”
Before Doberman could ask what the hell was going on, the tanks stopped moving. A large mushroom appeared near the truck and its attendant ants. They veered off to the right, followed by another mushroom.
“T-72s or maybe Chinese 69’s in that second group,” announced A-Bomb. “What’s the deal, Dog Man?”
“I don’t know. I see the tanks but I don’t have Rat Patrol. Let’s take a turn while we sort this out. Cover my butt.”
“Butt’s cleaner than the floor of the Route 17K diner in Monroe, New York,” said A-Bomb.
Doberman took that for a compliment.
“Rat Patrol,” added A-Bomb. “I like that. Nothing like taking your inspiration from a sixties TV show.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Better than Ozzie and Harriet. Or My Mother the Car.”
As Doberman swung the Hog around, he nudged the GAU to its high setting, the preferred choice for breaking serious armor; roughly 65 slugs a second would pour from the nose when he pressed the trigger. Though it allowed for a more potent burst with less time on target, the higher rate also increased the amount of gas expelled by the powerful cannon, not insignificant at low altitude because it was possible to choke the engines. Besides, the high rate was overkill for soft targets, where the normal 30 bullets were second were more than enough to guarantee obliteration.
“Devil One to Rat Patrol. I see tanks firing on a truck. Are these both Iraqis? Explain to me what the hell’s going on,” he told the ground unit.
“They’re both Iraqis, yes. The first group is trying to surrender to us,” the ground unit’s com specialist explained. “Armor’s trying to stop them. We’re not sure exac
tly what’s after them. They started out talking to us on the radio but we’ve lost contact. They’re about to get nailed.”
“I don’t have your position,” Doberman warned.
The last thing he wanted to do was whack good guys. But the coordinates the soldier started feeding him only made him more confused, and there wasn’t time to pull out the paper map and sort the whole damn thing out. He had dropped through 1,500 feet and was lined up perfectly to cross the path of the lead tank— he had to go for it now or bank around, let the tanks get off another four or five shots.
Doberman pushed his stick, putting the Hog into a shallow dive. He saw something on his left, a U with dots in the sand, a mile and half away, closer to the tanks than the truck.
Had to be Rat Patrol.
Balls.
A pair of mushrooms erupted on the ground about two hundred yards from the truck. It veered to the right, then stopped moving.
“Okay, Rat Patrol. Hang tight. I got ya,” said Doberman. “A-Bomb, the Ural is surrendering to our guys, so leave him alone. I got the tank.”
A-Bomb’s acknowledgment was lost in the fuzz of another transmission overriding the squadron frequency. Doberman wouldn’t have heard it anyway— he was all cannon now, the targeting bulls-eye centered on the front end of the Russian-made T-72. While not to be taken lightly, the 40-ton tank was at a severe disadvantage against the Hog; having stopped to get a better shot at the fleeing deserters, it was an even easier target. Doberman nudged his stick gently to the right, then squeezed the trigger. The first shells, fired at just under 750 meters away, missed low, but that was merely a technicality— the stream moved up, following Doberman’s stare and the plane’s momentum, uranium and high explosive dancing through the steel plates as if they were paper. The T-72’s gun retracted, then burst apart, choking on its own charge. The turret opened like a rose bursting to meet the morning sun.