by Jim DeFelice
Hide out tomorrow. As soon as it was dark, look for one of the Delta or British SAS teams that were Scud hunting. There ought to be at least one team a few miles further west. And beyond that there was a forward base, Fort Apache. They could go there, walk a few miles every night.
They’d get out of here somehow, Budge and him.
They began sidestepping toward the southern slope of the hill. Dixon slipped and Budge grabbed him, holding him up for half a second before tumbling over him. They rolled a few feet before coming to a stop.
It was so comical Dixon started to laugh, until he saw the flare of a cigarette ten yards away.
CHAPTER 37
IRAQ
27 JANUARY , 1991
2113
The station wagon was the third car in the procession, trailing two troop trucks. Immediately behind it was a German transport, followed by a pair of armored cars. A Mercedes sedan was next to last, sandwiched between two Zils with canvas backs. The caravan was about a two miles from the spot they’d picked to put down the explosives. The rest of the vehicles followed at intervals of ten to twenty yards. With their lights out, they traveled no more than forty miles an hour— but that was more than enough; there was no way to get the explosives down to the spot they’d picked out. Wong sent Davis to alert Wolf, then stopped Salt as he bent to set up his sniper rifle.
“We’ll have to stop them or slow them down so the bombers have a chance to target them,” Wong told him. “Wolf will have to scramble the A-10s, and they will be at least five minutes away.”
“I can get a shot.”
“One may not be sufficient, even with the light fifty,” said Wong. “Do you think you could hit the first vehicle with the grenade launcher when it draws parallel to us?”
“I’ll have to get closer to make sure I hit.”
“Do it then,” said Wong. He reached down and grabbed the explosives set. “Wait until the last moment, but make sure that you strike it. Take your next shot at the Mercedes— the station wagon appears empty and in any event will be struck by the A-10.”
“Where the hell are you going with those explosives?” Salt yelled as he started away.
“I will attempt to divert the tank and give you more time to use your sniper rifle,” Wong yelled. “Please, you have less than three minutes to get into position.”
PART THREE
LAZARUS
CHAPTER 38
IRAQ
27 JANUARY 1991
2113
Dixon pushed Budge down, and in the same motion swung the rifle on his right shoulder around to level it at the glowing cigarette ten yards away. The dot of red blurred into an oval meteor, flaring to the right. Dixon slid his trigger finger into the AK-74, his stomach pinching tight. His entire body jerked against his finger, pushing his life and hope into the quick burst it commanded, but there was no rumble at his side, no pull upwards from the front of the barrel, no bullets flying across the darkness into his enemy.
In his haste and fear he had put his finger against the guard, not the trigger.
The cigarette disappeared. The smoker miraculously had not noticed them.
Dixon waited for the air to come back into his lungs. When it finally did, he unfolded his finger as deliberately as he could and placed it where it belonged. The boy lay curled on the ground next to him, his neck on the other rifle.
Dixon reached over and gently removed the gun. He put his finger to his lips then held it up, wagging it to tell him he must be quiet and wait.
“I’ll be back,” he whispered, patting Budge reassuringly. The child bobbed his head, seeming to understand.
Moving silently, the second rifle slung over his left shoulder, Dixon clambered across the slope toward the spot where the cigarette had flared. He bent his head forward, eyes peering into the dimness to try and sort the shadows into shapes.
A dozen steps and he entered a patch of light thrown by the moon; he inched back, eyes adjusting well enough to see the edge of a wall eight feet away around the slope. In the dimness the enemy position looked as if it were made of books, immense dictionaries or encyclopedias stacked on their side. BJ hugged the ground, eyes pinned on a narrow globe at the middle of the row of books— the head of a soldier, who leaned against the sandbags, peering down the hillside through a pair of binoculars or a starscope.
A red dot flaring behind and to the left of the globe showed Dixon where the cigarette smoker was. The dot moved further back, behind the bend, out of his sight and aim.
Were there others? Dixon narrowed his mouth, stifling his breath into long, quiet pauses so he could hear. If there were other Iraqis, they were silent, not even fidgeting.
The man with the binoculars said something to his companion. He stretched back and the other man got up, took the glasses. They jerked into action.
Now was the time to fire. He could get them both with the same burst— get them both with the same bullet.
Trucks approached in the distance below, driving from the south in the general direction of the hill. The men began speaking excitedly, tapping each other. They leaned forward across the wall, trying to share the viewer.
Best to sneak away, Dixon realized. He and the kid could slip down the hill while their attention was drawn to the trucks.
He took a step back, kicking loose rocks.
One of the Iraqis jerked his head around. Dixon’s finger snapped, this time against the trigger.
CHAPTER 39
OVER IRAQ
27 JANUARY , 1991
2118
Doberman mashed his throttle, urging the turbofans to give him every ounce of thrust they could. The wind had shifted to kick the Hog in the face, holding her back at precisely the wrong moment. The pilot cursed and strained against his seat restraints, as if his weight might make a difference to the aircraft’s momentum.
If stinking Preston hadn’t screwed up his first attempt to hook into the flying tanker they’d be there by now.
Stinking rusty major who thought he was hot shit just because he’d flown pointy-nose teenagers.
“Keep up with me, Four,” Doberman snapped to his wingman.
“Four,” grunted Preston. He sounded as if he’d gotten out of the plane and was pushing it uphill.
Actually, Doberman’s indicated air speed was four hundred and sixty-five knots— close to an all-time Hog record for level flight with a combat load. But he was still a good two or three minutes away from getting into target range.
Once there, it could take considerably longer to find the convoy.
“I’ll call the targets,” Doberman said. “The station wagon’s our priority. Screw any SAMs or Zsu-Zsus— leave them for the Tornadoes. Wolf has them right behind us.”
“Four.”
Stinking Wong. Why the hell couldn’t he get the goddamn time right?
Doberman glanced at the Maverick targeting screen. He had the outline of a highway at the top right corner. It was the highway that led to Al Kajuk and intersected with the one Strawman was on. Swinging along it would make it easier to find his target.
But it would also take him through the lip of the remaining SA-11s’ radar coverage. Flying at medium altitude, he’d be an easy target.
Worth the risk.
“Follow my turn,” he barked to Preston, hanging a hard right, eyes glued on the Mav screen to guide him.
“Four. We’re moving off the briefed course, into –”
“Follow my turn.”
“Four.”
Wolf, the mission controller, called back, asking for an ETA.
“In target range in zero-two,” said Doberman, afraid that wouldn’t be good enough.
The highway cut a sharp line in the middle of the screen. He plotted the target zone in his head, decided he’d look for the T, then pivot; the station wagon would sit to his right, roughly in the center of the screen if he could hold this course.
More speed, more speed.
Ninety seconds.
“Wolf
acknowledges. We have live bait. Ground team attempting to tie them down.”
The controller said something else but Doberman lost it. Before he could ask him to repeat it his RWR went crazy. The SAMs had woken up, and they were angry.
Somewhere to the south, the electronic warfare operators aboard the two Tornadoes tasked to the mission licked their lips and lit the wicks on their spanking new BAe ALARMS; the high-tech radar killers burst from beneath their bellies, streaking upwards as their integrated circuits calculated the surest way of quashing the offending defenses.
But the speeding missiles were of small comfort to Doberman. The Iraqis had already launched their SA-11s missiles, and there was nothing he could do but fly toward them.
CHAPTER 40
IRAQ
27 JANUARY , 1991
2118
Salt felt the grenade pop from the blunt nose of the launcher like a paint ball phiffffing into the air. He didn’t bother firing another, knowing the projectile would nail the lead truck. He turned quickly, bending his head as he tried to sight the Mercedes through the M-16’s starscope. He couldn’t find the target at first, and by the time he dished a grenade in its direction the first one had exploded, distracting him enough to screw up his aim. Davis yelled something behind him. He’d left the Satcom and grabbed the SAW, opening fire in the direction of the convoy.
The earth turned into a barbecue pit, flames bursting all around them, rockets streaking upward, the tank beginning to fire, the armored car— actually an armored personnel carrier with a special cannon— thumping the ground. Men poured from the troop trucks. At least two heavy machine-guns flailed.
Salt popped another grenade, but in all the confusion it was impossible to tell where it hit. He threw himself down over the sniper rifle, pulling his body back over the long gun as the ground reverberated. It was all a matter of being patient, as impossible as that seemed— you took your shot only when it was there, and to get it there you had to move deliberately. He squirmed around behind the sight, swinging the light fifty on its tripod. He moved the crosshairs across the vehicles, past the truck and the muzzle flash of the APC. He got the station wagon first, saw a driver but no one else, slipped his aim back toward the Mercedes.
Empty.
Davis screamed something. Salt ignored it, scanning the ground near the Mercedes. The car began to move; he picked his shoulder up slightly and put a round into the front tire. The round blew the tire and wheel apart, but the vehicle kept moving. He pushed his shoulder down, zeroing his aim on the thick, bulletproof glass at the driver’s window, waiting for the man to raise his head so he could see where he was going. The Mercedes bumped forward, aiming to get behind one of the trucks for cover. Just as Salt was about to swing toward the engine compartment the man raised his head. Salt squeezed.
The car’s thick glass was advertised as bulletproof. What the manufacturer meant was that it was bulletproof against ordinary bullets and guns. The weapon Salt fired was anything but ordinary, with its 12.7 mm armor-piercing bullet hand-finished and loaded by the marksman himself. Still, the glass altered the bullet’s shape and trajectory, knocking it off its mark.
Unfortunately for the driver, that meant it entered not his neck but his skull. The blast took off the top quarter of the Iraqi’s head.
The gun’s heavy recoil momentarily cost Salt his aim; by the time he sighted again the car had jerked to a stop in the middle of the road. Davis yelled again and Salt felt something wet and hot hit the side of his face, the ground trembling with the impact of a 125 mm T-72 shell less than twenty yards away.
CHAPTER 41
OVER IRAQ
27 JANUARY 1991
2118
Knowlington watched the PAVE Low helicopter rear upwards from the mass of black shadows, jerking nearly straight up with the motion of a champion weight lifter cleaning five hundred pounds. Its dark shadow hovered a second, then slashed forward across the black wilderness, heading for the fresh flare launched by the Frenchman. He looked to be about two miles from them, perhaps less.
Knowlington replotted the fuel reserves while A-Bomb asked the downed Frenchman something about cafes. It was cutting it close, but there was just enough to run back to Kajuk, fire the Mavericks and then tank.
As long as they met the tanker at the northern extreme of its track. And they got a tailwind.
Hell, if they got a tailwind there’d be two gallons to spare. Maybe three.
Let’s get on with it, he urged the helicopter silently.
Knowlington pushed the Hog onto her wing, sliding through the orbit around the Frenchman. Wolf gave an update on Kajuk in staccato: Doberman and Preston were attacking, the RAF Tornadoes were launching their radar-killing missiles at a SAM site.
“Boss, he’s hearing something,” said A-Bomb, breaking in. “And it ain’t le hélicoptère.”
Knowlington started to ask for a direction when the air in front of him burst into flame.
“Leander Seven, hold off, hold off!” he barked, whacking his stick hard to the right as he pulled the Hog out of the worst of the anti-aircraft fire. The plane began shaking like a pickup dragging four shot-out tires over a dried out stream bed. Skull rolled into a chest-squeezing turn that took him nearly ninety degrees from his original path, looping out under the stream of gunfire.
One consolation— if he’d been hit, the maneuver would have torn the plane in two.
“Fuckin’ Zsu-Zsu in the shadow of that road, uh, half-mile, three-quarters north of the Frog,” said A-Bomb. “Shit. Something else.”
“Yeah. I’m on the son of a bitch,” said Knowlington, trying to get it into his targeting screen. The four-barreled mobile anti-aircraft unit was one of three vehicles hiding in a shallow area of shadows near a roadway. Before he could get the flak dealer onstage, its red spit turned to narrow points as Skull closed in; the gun was turning in his direction.
Knowing he’d be unable to climb quickly enough to avoid the spray, Knowlington pushed his nose down and twisted his wings, shaking off the g-forces as he sticked and ruddered into a nearly ninety-degree turn, clear of flak about two hundred feet from the ground and dead on target at one mile.
Michael Knowlington had had less than twenty hours in an A-10A cockpit when he was assigned to command Devil Squadron. At the time, it was only going to exist on paper, a bureaucrat’s accounting for planes en route to the boneyard. But the war— and Schwartzkopf— had intervened, plucking not just the allegedly obsolete Hogs but their supposedly washed-up commander off the discard pile.
His first few flights had been tentative. He’d had to unlearn a dozen habits better suited to the high-powered aircraft he’d grown old with. In a way, Skull’s past glories held him back; the differences between the Hog and the other planes made him think too much about what he was doing, made flying a hair-twitch more intellectual than it needed to be when shit was raining hot and heavy. But the stream of unguided anti-aircraft fire that had caught him off-guard had changed that. He didn’t think now, he flew. As he snapped clear of the flak he nailed the Maverick’s targeting cue onto the Zeus and let go of the missile. The AGM-65 slid through the air to the left as it was dropped, momentarily riding out the Hog’s momentum. But as her engine ignited she cleared her head, setting her chin on the ZSU-23 flak gun. She struck exactly 3.2 seconds later, ending the hail of bullets.
“Trucks moving on the road. I got people,” said A-Bomb.
“Yeah,” said Knowlington, pushing the Hog to the east as his AGM crashed into the tin armor below the flak dealer’s four-barreled turret. “You sure that Frenchie’s real?”
“Authentication checked out,” said A-Bomb. “And the guy knows his restaurants. I’m talking serious snails. Targeting one of the trucks.”
“I got your butt,” said Skull, pulling the Hog around south of his wingman’s.
“Just don’t kiss it,” said A-Bomb. A Maverick dropped from his wing, its solid-fuel motor igniting with a red sparkle.
Had thes
e guys been here all along? Even if the authentication procedure checked out, there was no guarantee someone wasn’t holding a knife to the Frenchie’s throat.
“Splash one Zil,” said A-Bomb as the ground flared with his missile strike. “Bonus shot— one slightly used pickup. Hope high explosives damage is a warranty repair.”
The AWACS cut in, informing them that a pair of F-15s had been diverted to help.
“What the hell are they going to do?” blustered A-Bomb. “They get nose bleeds under twenty thousand feet.”
“A-Bomb, I’m going to take it low and slow over our Frenchman. Tell him to get his butt out in the open. I want to see him alone.”
“He’s got people shooting at him, Boss.”
“Just tell him.”
Knowlington dropped the Hog down in a buzzard’s swoop into the shadows. He felt his way through the grayness, slipping the Hog to sixty feet. He leaned Devil One gently on her keel, improving his view out the side of the cockpit window. But it was just too dark to see a man cowering on the ground. He pushed around, fiddling with the IR head on the Maverick, hoping the glow of the Frenchman’s body would show up somewhere. But the viewer was just too narrow or perhaps not sensitive enough to see the pilot.
Served him right. When he was at the Pentagon, Knowlington had helped kill a proposal to outfit A-10s with night-fighting equipment.
“Says you flew right over him.”
“Yeah, I heard,” Skull told A-Bomb. The trucks O’Rourke had hit were still burning; they would be big blotches on the IR if he could ever get the damn thing oriented right.
Which didn’t make sense, because hell, now he had them right in his face and the screen was still blank. No matter how he pointed the FLIR head on the Mav, he had nothing.
Seeker head wasn’t working right.
Oh.
Skull banked the Hog through another turn. Leander asked what the hell was going on.