by Jim DeFelice
He tensed when he saw the truck. It was a pickup, not a troop carrier, not what he expected. Two men were in the cab; two more in the back. They weren’t civilians, though; they wore yellowish-brown khakis.
As he pulled his gun to aim at the driver, the pickup veered off the road into the dirt in front of the house. Dixon froze, thinking for a moment they had seen him, waiting for them to grab guns and fire.
But he could have been a ghost as far as the Iraqis were concerned. The two men in the back grabbed something, someone, from the bed of the truck. He struggled as they dragged him— he was short, two feet shorter than them at least. They pulled him along the ground to the front of the burnt-out building.
It was a boy, a kid somewhere between seven and nine years old. The child crumbled to the ground. One of the men scooped him up, trying to make him stand against the wall.
Shit, they’re going to shoot him.
As the idea flashed into his head, a shot rang out, then another, and another. The man to the right of the boy fell down.
Dixon didn’t realize he had been the one who fired until the hollow metal click of the clip emptying shook through his fingers and reverberated up through the bones in his arms. He grabbed for a new clip, fumbling as he cleared the rifle, fumbling as he ducked behind the wall.
He wanted to live now, long enough to stop them.
The soldier with the boy was crouched down, one hand on the ground, wounded, returning fire with his pistol. The two men in the truck were scrambling to get out.
Dixon burned the fresh clip. The two men from the truck folded in the ground, writhing and bouncing with his gunfire. By the time BJ turned his attention back to the man with the pistol, he’d disappeared.
The boy was curled up on the ground. Dixon couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive.
He needed to get the other man.
Reloading, BJ began walking sideways behind the wall, half-stooping, eyes pasted on the front of the building. The hillside behind the house was dotted with scraggly bushes and vegetation, but there was nothing big enough to hide behind.
Dixon walked until he had the rear corner of the house in sight. He moved a few more yards to his left, then stopped again, watching for any sign of movement from the building. He put his hand on the stones carefully, gradually shifting his weight as if testing to see if it would hold. He rose, then raised his leg to step over the wall.
A shot came from the house. He dove forward as the Iraqi soldier fired a second round, dust kicking up as he rolled and tumbled toward the road. He winced as something hit the ground nearby, then pushed himself to his feet. Despite the surge of adrenaline he ignored the impulse to fire blindly. The sound of a shot whizzing near his ear sent him diving back to the ground, then he launched himself almost like a sprinter, plunging across the road toward the pickup. Bullets flew near him, but if he was hit he didn’t feel it. When he was within five feet of the pickup he tripped; as BJ flew forward glass from the mirror splattered over him, broken by the Iraqi’s errant gunfire.
The man had to be inside the ruins, shooting from the front of the building close to the corner. But Dixon couldn’t see the Iraqi, nor could he get a good shot at him without coming out from behind the truck. BJ pulled his legs up, trying to squeeze himself into the tiniest target possible. He swung the rifle up toward the building; a bullet ripped through the side of the truck a few inches from the barrel. Lowering the gun, BJ began edging along the ground toward the front of the cab. Another round sailed into the side of the vehicle, passing through the metal with a loud crackle.
The house was about ten yards away. Dixon leaned his head away from the truck, craning his neck as he tried to see the building. The edge of the road a few feet away popped with a fresh slug. Sooner or later the Iraqi would manage to get a bullet through the truck and hit him.
Dixon looked down the side of the truck for the gas filler, thinking he might set the gas tank on fire and use it as a diversion. But it wasn’t on his side of the pickup.
A shot sailed into the cab of the truck, spitting out near the dirt a few feet away.
He might be able to toss a grenade into the house.
If he missed, or even if he didn’t, the explosion could kill the boy he was trying to save.
Dixon crawled along the ground behind the truck, trying to see the kid. The slight slope up toward the house, which was probably helping shelter him, made it impossible to see where the child was.
Another shot ripped through the pickup, almost exactly where he’d been huddled.
Dixon took the grenade from his pocket, holding it in his hand. Jacketed in painted steel, it weighed about half a pound with a diameter about as wide as a matchbook. The smooth skin and elongated shape made it very different than the pineapple grenades he’d seen in World War II movies.
And those movies were as close as he’d ever come to a real grenade.
The round pin hung off the side. Pulling it released a clamp at the top; the mechanism wasn’t difficult to figure out, though Dixon wasn’t sure how long the delay was.
In the movies, there had been scenes of grenades being thrown, landing, and then thrown back before they exploded. The actors solved that by setting the fuse, counting, and then throwing.
They had dummy grenades, though.
He leaned the AK-47 against his knee and rocked his body back and forth, grenade in his right hand, left forefinger looped into the pin. He pulled as he swung away from the truck, but the pin didn’t budge; Dixon just barely kept himself from tossing the grenade without setting it.
A bullet ricocheted off the truck bed two feet away. He pulled desperately, but the ring still held. He yanked, trying to lever his weight against the catch. The rifle fell over in the dust, his right hand flew against the truck.
The pin was in his left hand.
Panicking, he wailed the grenade into the air, throwing it well beyond the house. He grabbed for the rifle, scooping up dirt and rocks as well as the stock, fumbling it into his hands as he levered himself to his feet. Dixon caught his balance and dove around the bumper of the truck, raising the rifle to fire blindly. A bullet passed so close to his head he felt the breeze.
As he pushed the trigger on the gun the grenade exploded on the hill behind the house, sending dirt and serrated metal in a wide spray. Dixon squeezed off a three-burst round at the corner of the building, then began running forward full-speed, expecting the Iraqi to nail him at any second. He smashed against the wall of the house, rolling from his right shoulder to his back to his left shoulder, pushing along to an opening that had held a window until yesterday. He pulled flush with the space, firing as he did, working it like he truly was a commando and not a misplaced pilot, assigned here by mistake and then stranded in the confusion of a mission gone way wrong.
His bullets burst in the dusty rubble, dragonflies snapping their wings. He stopped firing, seeing the Iraqi on the floor just below the window, dead.
Letting go of the trigger on his rifle somehow made Dixon lose his balance; he stumbled backward, caught himself, then whirled around with the thought— the fear, really— that one of the men he’d shot in the front yard wasn’t really dead and might be holding a gun on him.
But the three bodies lay where they’d fallen, arms akimbo, heads jerked at bad angles in the ground. One man’s eyes caught him as he sank slowly to one knee. The corpse watched him force a slow breath into his lungs, glared at him as he stood and began checking each body carefully, making sure his enemies were truly dead. After he did so, he returned to each man, searching their bodies quickly for anything that might be useful. He found only a knife, but in the truck bed were four rifles similar to his; along with two full boxes of clips. It was only when he tried to load one of the clips into his gun that he realized the guns were actually different models— AK-74s, which used smaller caliber bullets. BJ left his and took two of theirs, stuffing banana clips into his pocket and belt. He fired off one of the guns, making sure it worked.
>
As he lowered the rifle, he heard a sound behind him. He spun quickly.
The Iraqi boy stood six or seven feet away, trembling.
“It’s okay,” Dixon told him. He shook his head. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
The boy’s white pants were torn and badly stained. His T-shirt was a faded yellow, entirely intact and fairly clean, though he’d obviously been wearing it a long time. He wore a pair of sneakers at least two sized too big; they seemed to be Nikes, though their markings were missing.
“You’re all right?” Dixon lowered the rifle. “You okay, kid?”
The boy opened his mouth but said nothing. He started to cry.
“It’s all right,” Dixon told him.
It surely wasn’t all right, but what else could he say? What could he do?
“Why did they want to kill you?” Dixon asked. “What were they doing?”
The Iraqi boy took a step toward him, then another. Fear leaped inside Dixon’s chest— what if the child was booby-trapped or had a weapon or saw the strange American who had appeared from nowhere not as his rescuer but as his enemy?
Before Dixon could do anything else, the boy threw himself into him, clamping his arms around his neck as he draped himself across BJ’s chest. Tears streamed from the kid’s body, soaking through Dixon’s shirt, mixing with his dried sweat and coursing down the side of his chest and stomach.
“It’s all right,” the lieutenant told the boy, patting his awkwardly with the gun still in his hand. “It’s all right. You’re okay.”
The boy began to wail, his voice starting as a low moan and quickly rising. Dixon started to push him away but the child held on tightly, his body shaking with his cries. There was nothing Dixon could do but pat his back, hoping somehow that would calm him.
Grief ran from the kid like water from a busted pipe. Dixon felt his own eyes swelling; he remembered his mother dying, tried steeling himself against it, walling himself off, but finally there was no stopping the tears. He let the rifle fall and took hold of the kid as he sobbed. The first few drops felt like ice, but those that followed were like warm oil, soothing the corners of his face, soothing the aches of his body.
BJ lost his sense of place. He lost his sense of himself. His hopelessness, his fear— most importantly, his determination to die here in a blaze of gunfire— slowly ebbed away. The frightened William James Dixon— the one who trembled before battle; who froze at one point in every combat sortie; the one that was paralyzed by confrontation, the part of him that wanted to give up, the self that had closed his eyes the night his mother died instead of taking one last look— left his body with a shudder and a sigh.
The man left behind wasn’t beyond fear, but he understood it in a different way now; he neither welcomed it nor ran from it, he simply accepted it as a fact.
His tears eventually stopped. Dixon lifted the boy and gently placed him on the ground. The kid, too, had stopped crying. He took a step back, looking at him with an expression of shock, as if he had finally realized that Dixon was an enemy soldier. He cringed and threw his arms around his thin chest, holding his tattered shirt.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Dixon told him.
The kid shook his head. It wasn’t until the boy pointed in the direction of the road that Dixon realized the kid was scared not of him but the sound of a vehicle approaching down the road from the direction of the village.
CHAPTER 17
HOME DROME
27 JANUARY 1991
1320
Skull tried to keep his face military neutral as Major Preston continued his speech. Any other guy new to an important post in a combat squadron would keep his remarks— if any— briefer than hell. But this was vintage Preston, the full-of-himself officer Knowlington remembered from their stint together at the Pentagon a little more than a year ago. People who knew him then said the major could out-talk a congressman; Skull now had proof.
The worst thing was, he kept telling the assembled Hog drivers that, even though he was a pointy nose fighter jock pukehead, he was really one of them. Really.
Not in so many words, of course, but the drift was clear. And it went over like a Big Blue fuel bomb tumbling out the back of a Combat Talon I.
Being a pilot in the Air Force meant that you were one of a very select minority, the cream of chocolate milk. Being a fighter pilot— any fighter pilot— meant you were the cream of the cream.
And yet, there was a severe prejudice against Hog drivers because of the planes they flew. Unlike the sleek F-15 Eagles and F-16 Vipers, A-10As couldn’t come close to the sound barrier. They could pull maybe half the g’s a pointy nose could. Now granted, they were kick-ass at the job they were designed for— close-in ground support, tank busting especially. And the first few days of the ground war, which saw them flying far behind the lines and doing things their designers never dreamed of, proved not just the mettle of the planes but the skills and sheer balls of their pilots. Given all that, there was definitely a feeling out there that A-10s and their drivers were second-rate. Hog drivers definitely tended to react to it in various ways, none of which were particularly pretty.
They were reacting now, grinding their teeth as Preston told them once again they had nothing to be ashamed of.
“Uh, hey, no offense, Major,” said Lieutenant Jack Gladstone finally, “but we ain’t ashamed of nothing.”
“Damn straight,” murmured a couple of the other lieutenants. “We’re not second-rate at nothing.”
“I didn’t mean you were,” said Preston.
“Yeah, but you’re making it sound like we are,” said Gladstone.
“No. I didn’t mean that.” Fortunately for Preston, nearly all of the squadron’s front-line pilots were out on missions. Even so, the audience was pretty riled. Doberman, studiously trying to ignore the proceedings in the back, was frothing. Wong was his usual nonplused self— he wasn’t a pilot, so apparently he didn’t care.
And A-Bomb was stuffing his face with what looked like an apple pie, though God only knew where it came from.
Doberman’s lips started moving. A bad sign.
Skull cleared his throat, getting up from the folding chair near the side of the squadron room. “We’re all glad Major Preston is aboard,” he said. “Now we have some work to get done. Hack, I think one of those newspaper people is waiting outside to talk to you about that MiG you shot down yesterday.”
Preston hadn’t mentioned the fact that he had nailed a MiG— probably he thought everyone knew already— and Knowlington’s seemingly offhand comment was enough to temporarily calm the rising tide of dissension. The new D.O. had enough sense to finally shut his mouth after a line about how much he was counting on everyone to help him out. He nodded to Knowlington, then joined the men filtering out of Cineplex.
“Class A farthead,” Doberman said as he approached Knowlington.
“Relax, Captain,” said Skull.
“Come on, Dog, he ain’t that bad. I was in a unit with him couple of years back,” said A-Bomb. “Good pilot. Very clean turns.”
“Very clean turns? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Very clean turns?”
“Doesn’t spill coffee when he pumps the rudder,” said A-Bomb. “What I’m talking about.”
“Captain Glenon informed me that he and Captain O’Rourke will be on the mission,” said Wong, bringing toddler time to a close. “Who are the other two pilots?”
“Oh they did, did they?” said Skull, frowning at them. “Yeah, they’re coming. If they don’t fall asleep.”
“I might catch some Z’s on the way back,” said A-Bomb. “I’m thinking of packing a pillow, just in case.”
“The other pilots?” asked Wong.
“I’m flying this mission,” Skull said. “I have Bozzone in mind to take the last slot. I told him to be ready to fly tonight but I haven’t given him the details.”
“Billy’s kind of low-time,” said Doberman.
“True,” said Skull. Lt
. Bozzone was a good pilot, but had only been on one mission since the Gulf War started. He hadn’t flown much before coming to the Gulf, either. On the other hand, he had been training for night flights and was used to using the AGMs to read targets. Skull didn’t doubt his abilities, but there was no arguing with the fact that he didn’t have a lot of cockpit time.
“What about Duck?” A-Bomb asked. “He’s always up for an adventure.”
“I need Captain Dietrich to lead a mission in the morning,” said Skull. “He’s taking four Hogs out to Al Jouf after a bombing run. If both of you guys are going, he can’t.”
“Billy’s just a kid,” said Doberman.
All of them were to Skull. But he didn’t say that.
“I’ve been reviewing the latest satellite data and other intelligence,” said Wong. “The missiles we spoke of have been positioned. I have a ninety percent confidence that they are SA-11s. There are also several triple-A batteries, and positionings of low-altitude heat seeking batteries. The information has been relayed to the F-111 commander. One group of the heat-seeking weapons will have to be targeted in the initial attack, and of course you must keep the others in mind during your operations near the village.”
A few squadron members drifted toward them from the other end of the room, obviously interested in what was going on. While Skull hated keeping his people in the dark, the mission was code-word secret.
“Let’s talk about this in my office,” he told them, ushering Wong and the others toward the hallway.
“Colonel, what newspaper reporter?” asked Preston, intercepting them outside.
“Hack.” Skull shook his head but decided not to bother explaining that he’d only said that to bail the idiot out. He continued down the hall.
“Uh, Colonel, could I have a word?” Preston asked.
Skull stopped. “Sure.”
“In private?”
“Is it a private thing?”
“Well. . .”
Skull gestured to the others. “You’ve met Glenon and O’Rourke, right? This is Captain Wong.”