by Jim DeFelice
Cocky little son of a bitch was one hell of a pilot.
Past tense. He spotted the Hog pitching left in front of a looming shadow— one of the SA-11s.
Poor son of a bitch.
Poor nasty son of a bitch.
Something exploded in the sky a mile ahead to the east, obliterating the darkness Doberman had just flown into. Hack gaped at the curling red circles that mushroomed into yellow and black spheres. The fireball crinkled at its edges, as if it were made of paper. Then it flashed white and disappeared, its only trace the shadow it had burned on his retina.
Jesus, he thought. I’ve never seen someone die before.
Poor nasty son of a bitch.
He started to turn his attention back to his targeting screen when Doberman’s voice came over the radio.
“Preston, you’re up. Go for the tank by the hill.”
What?
“Three, are you okay?” he said.
“What the fuck are you talking about, asshole? Take your shot. You’re almost on the god-damn highway.”
“I just saw your plane blowup.”
“You just saw the missile miss me and explode. Take your fucking shot. Then wheel if you can manage it and cover me. And watch it— there’s one more warhead in the air.”
Before Hack could respond, there was a second explosion in the sky, this one much higher and at least four miles further away.
“Take your fucking shot!” screamed Doberman.
Hack, partly angry, partly incredulous, and partly relieved, tore his attention back to the TVM. He pushed his right leg gently against the rudder pedal, nudging the plane ever so slightly through an eddy of turbulence. Somehow he overcorrected, elbow suddenly cramping as he moved the stick; he came back too hard and felt the beginning of a serious yaw, the plane pitching back and forth as it tried to follow the pilot’s over-anxious control inputs. He stopped moving the stick, told himself that it was going to have to be okay if he blew the attack— he’d be embarrassed but there’d be a next go-around, assuming the Tornadoes hadn’t missed any SAMs and none of the arcing yellow and green flares of anti-air perforated his wings.
Maybe he’d underestimated the Hog drivers, not just Doberman but every last one of them, willing to fly way the hell up here and hang their butts out where everybody in the world could hit them.
No longer confused by the jerks on her control stick, the Hog straightened herself out, pushing her tail up and sticking her chin down, smelling a ripe and ready piece of Iraqi meat on the ground ahead. Hack glanced at the HUD screen, noted the altimeter ladder falling through six thousand feet, then put his eyes back on the Maverick monitor. A big brick with a lollipop stuck on the top of it appeared in the left-hand corner; the brick reared back and flared into a glow so bright he thought the monitor would catch fire. The targeting cue jumped as Hack moved it toward the blur, sucking itself in.
But it didn’t lock, instead jittering away as Hack nudged his stick in the tank’s direction. Had he been flying an F-15, his touch would have been perfect; the plane would have bucked her nose ever so slightly in the proper direction. But Hack wasn’t flying an F-15, and as he felt a whisper of resistance from the controls, he pushed harder. Confused but obedient, the A-10A jerked her nose upwards to follow his command; Hack felt his stomach get weak again with the first hint of another yaw.
Do your best, he reminded himself, and this time he resisted the temptation to over correct. The plane’s momentum carried it into off the path he’d plotted, but he worked the cursor down as the tank reappeared in the upper quadrant of the screen. The cue slipped one way and then the other; Hack cursed and then realized with a shock he was down to two thousand feet.
As he went to jerk himself skywards, he saw the cursor plant itself square on the center of the lollipop.
CHAPTER 48
IRAQ
27 JANUARY 1991
2150
The black turned deep blue and a wedge of yellow appeared above, morphing into a triangle of pure, perfect whiteness, a gleam that grew and consumed everything else. Wong felt the edges of the triangle sear his face, bursting with the heat of a phosphorus grenade. It burned straight through his skull, his ears tingling with the sensation not of heat but cold; freezing cold. The triangle turned from white to black, the sides of his skull folded into it. His body followed in a rush, vacuumed inside out, skin to organs, molecule by molecule. He was at the end of a long, geometric tunnel cut from an infinite prism, glittering with a blue-blackness that seemed the inverse of light, as if it were capturing all colors to enhance its own nature. As he stood and stared, the crystal flared, then began to vibrate, pulsing with its blackness.
“Interesting,” Wong said aloud. “The metaphysical implications of this experience challenge a great deal of my essential beliefs regarding the nature of existence. But I have a considerable amount of work to do. Perhaps we can continue this at another time.”
And in that moment he was flung down on his back, his head bouncing off the hard rocks. He opened his eyes to an enormous headache and the flash of missiles and shells exploding all around him, bullets flying everywhere in the air.
He could see it all, but he heard nothing. The explosion had rendered him deaf.
In some ways that was a blessing, because he was in the middle of an enormous racket. Wong’s explosive charges had indeed thrown the tank’s aim off, but the T-72 crew was still firing. Wong turned to look back in the direction of Davis and Salt when his eye caught a wavering shadow above the highway; a red and yellow burst below it, followed by the quick flash of a gas tank exploding. A second flash, a second fireball, this one not quite as high. The long barrel of a howitzer or light tank gun somersaulted into the sky.
Obviously, the Hogs had arrived. And if, as was their wont, the A-10s were blowing up the biggest things they could find, the T-72 would be next.
Wong turned began running about ten seconds before the AGM-65 hit the top of the tank, crushing it with the wallop of a hammer hitting the side of a soda can. He slid into the crater created by the C-4, narrowly avoiding a spray of heavy machine-gun fire.
As he swung himself around on his haunches, Wong realized he had lost his MP-5 somewhere along the way. He had carried two pistols— a .44 magnum Desert Eagle and a SIG P226. Both were admirable weapons with slightly different applications, not to mention limited utility in the present situation. The Desert Eagle carried only seven rounds, though admittedly these were monster magnum slugs capable of stopping anything smaller than a rhinoceros. The heavy gun’s demanding kick made it more suitable to close encounters of the one-on-one kind, and Wong therefore chose the SIG, whose utter dependability and fifteen 9 mm rounds were enhanced by a nature that could only be described as “sweet,” even by someone like Wong who was not given to such imprecise and abstract descriptions. Pistol in hand, he got up and began running in the direction of the Delta team. Alternately ducking, diving, running, and spinning, it took Wong several minutes to spot Sergeant Davis hunkered behind his SAW. As the M249 Minimi spit a fresh mouthful of 7.62 mm toward the highway, Wong yelled to the sergeant, sliding in behind him as the light machine-gun clicked through the last of the rounds in its plastic feeder.
Davis shouted something in response, but Wong still couldn’t hear.
“I’m deaf,” he yelled, or thought he yelled— he couldn’t even hear himself.
Davis nodded vigorously, then reloaded the gun.
There were two knot of Iraqis firing at them. One was toward the north end of the highway, beyond the truck Salt had taken out with his grenade. They were firing willy-nilly, beyond the effective range of their weapons but not daring to move up.
The other knot was directly ahead, with better aim and more guns.
Wong realized that there must be more soldiers, but they were either dazed by the attack or prudently waiting until they had clear and obvious shots.
“Where’s Sergeant Salt?” he asked Davis.
Davis spoke and made
a kind of looping gesture with his hand; Wong took it to mean that Salt had decided to try flanking around the Iraqi’s position.
“The A-10s didn’t know to hit the Mercedes,” said Wong. “They would have gone for the station wagon. Is the Mercedes still intact?”
Davis didn’t know.
“We have to get Strawman,” Wong said. “Come.”
Wong jumped up, running to his right in a diagonal toward the curving highway, intending to flank the stalled convoy. A DShKM “Dushka” heavy machine-gun roared to their left, spitting its monster 12.7 mm shells into the night, fortunately behind them. A shadow loomed dead ahead. Wong extended his arm and pumped two slugs from the Sig in its direction, then threw himself down into a roll to duck any return fire. He rolled back to his stomach and got up into a crouch. The Dushka raked the night again, this time considerably closer to Wong and Davis, who had thrown himself to the ground a few feet away. The Russian-made heavy machine-gun was being fired from the lip of the road about forty yards away on the left; he had an unobstructed field of fire and sooner or later one of his sprays was going to nail them. Wong reached to his web belt for his M26 fragmentation grenade; his fingers had just touched it when he saw Davis rearing back and pitching one of his own.
Forty yards was a good toss under fire, but the sergeant had a right fielder’s arm. Fused to detonate on impact, the M26 sprayed its fragments through the air, killing the two men who had been operating the machine-gun. Meanwhile, someone with an AK-47 fired a burst at them from the edge of the road. Wong sighted across the top of his pistol but all he could see was darkness. He took a handful of dirt, tossing it to the left; as the soldier began firing in the direction of the noise Wong fired a single shot.
The Iraqi screamed, his anguish cascading over the battlefield. Wong crawled to his right a few yards, then picked himself up and began running toward the highway.
The Mercedes sat to his left off the road. There was a troop truck just beyond it. Wong still had the grenade in his hand and considered tossing it at the truck; he didn’t though, not knowing where Salt was.
A second vehicle sat about ten yards down the highway to his right. Its motor wheezed; Wong threw himself down as a shadow ran behind it.
Davis skidded in behind him, huffing; he’d lost his SAW along the way and like Wong was armed only with his pistol.
“Someone behind the truck,” said Wong. “Moving left to right.”
The Delta trooper said something, but Wong still couldn’t hear.
“Could be Salt,” he guessed, and Davis nodded his head.
An AKSU Russian submachine-gun declared that they wrong, a statement underlined by a half-dozen 5.45 mm bullets that ripped through Sergeant Davis’s arm and leg. And just in case there was any doubt, bullets from a much larger Dushka roiled the dirt nearby, the impact of its bullets so strong that Wong could feel the earth vibrating beneath him as he pressed into the soil.
CHAPTER 49
OVER IRAQ
27 JANUARY 1991
2200
“Got it! Shit! Shit!” yelped Preston over the radio, sounding like a nine-year-old who’d just nailed a tin duck at a church bazaar.
Doberman, flying in a wheeling pattern that had him roughly opposite his wingman’s path, glanced at the ground and saw the T-72 guarding the turnoff to Kajuk explode in a red-white geyser of frying steel. Preston was coming straight on for the hill behind it.
“Up, get up! Get the fuck up! You’re too damn low! The hill! The hill! Jesus get up!” yelled Doberman.
He cut his turn to try and keep Hack in view, but lost the dark-hulled airplane in the shadows near the hill. Doberman pitched his Hog downward, cursing the idiot and repeating his warning to pull away from the hill. Preston might be a jerk, but no one should pay the ultimate price for target fascination.
Pay attention to the plane, not the boom. Hog Rule Number Three.
And never run into hills.
Hack hadn’t acknowledged, but Doberman didn’t see a flash either. Now he was running right for a fresh stream of anti-air coming from a battery west of the village. Doberman cut south, tossing some flares and chaff in case any of the SAM sites were still working. He temporarily lost his sense of where he was, swinging at too wide an angle to get back on his original target area. His low altitude— he’d ducked to five hundred feet to avoid the SA-11— made sorting things somewhat harder. He also had to watch out for the hills.
Doberman pushed back westward, climbing slightly and scanning for his wingman, trying not to pay too much attention to the AAA bursting behind him. Wolf cut in with something to the effect that Skull and A-Bomb were on their way; Doberman didn’t have a chance to acknowledge, finally getting a bead on where he was and cutting back with the idea of launching another Maverick and then putting the cannon to work.
As he turned, his RWR bleeped a warning, then went off; in the next instant a gray streak of lightning flashed toward the earth three or four miles to the northeast. It was one of the RAF ALARM missiles nailing the last of the Iraqi SAM installations. The missile had needed only the slightest flick of the on-off switch to memorize its enemy’s location; before the Iraqis could juice up again the British warhead landed, sending hot shards of metal into the nearby SAM as well as the destroying the radar van. A narrow thread of yellow flame rippled on the ground, then erupted brilliant red as the poised SS-11s caught fire.
A pair of yellow and black flame puffs rode skywards, framed by the light of the explosion. Two more followed in quick succession. Doberman guessed they were a flock of heat-seeking SA-9s, launched in desperation. The short-range missiles were not a threat, since they had been launched at long range and lacked all-aspect targeting; they simply had too far to go to get a sniff of his engines.
The quartet of missiles rising now out of Al Kajuk, just ahead of his left wing and nearly parallel to him— those were a different story.
Doberman yanked and banked, goosing flares and trying to whip his turbofans away from the heat-seekers’ noses. One of the SAMs, moving at Mach 1.5, shot out behind him then veered upwards, utterly confused; it exploded in mid-air more than a mile from the Hog’s hull. Another sucked in one of his flares and detonated instantly, bouncing a shock wave but no shrapnel against Doberman’s tail.
But two others, launched in a fresh volley after he began his evasive maneuvers, stayed with him. Each sucked a different engine, lions working a tired zebra from both flanks. Doberman could feel them panting behind him; he goosed more flares and tucked right, tucked left, tucked right, very low now— so low in fact that he was at least ten feet below the summit of the hill that was growing in his front glass.
The missiles kept coming, gaining on him as he gave the stick a hard push left. An elongated football shot by his canopy, so close Glenon could see the thrust surging from its rear end. He nearly took the control column out of the floor trying to turn toward it as it passed, away from the other missile. The air in front of him shuddered as the missile detonated; the Hog skipped sideways with the turbulent shock, more a brick than an airplane, succumbing to several of Newton’s Laws at once.
The second missile exploded on his left, close enough to singe part of the tail fin. Doberman struggled to gain control of the plane, both hands on the stick, his head swimming. With his forward speed plummeting toward stall level, the right wing flipped out from under him; in the back of his mind he thought he’d flamed an engine. He worked to correct but the wing was insistent; he spun through an invert so close to the ground that the wing ip seemed to scrape dirt. But despite the spin and the ground he somehow managed to actually pull stable and begin to climb. He hadn’t lost the GE’s, or if he had it was only temporary, because they were cranking their turbofans now. Head scrambled, legs weak, he somehow managed climb over the highest hill, clearing the scrubby summit by perhaps six inches. The Hog lifted her nose with a snort as she flew into clear air; Doberman’s heart pounded so hard he could hear Tinman’s medal clanging on his chest.<
br />
Good luck or not, that sucker was now part of his flight gear. Doberman caught his breath, checked his instruments, and banked south to return to the battlefield. His fuel was a little low; it was possible he’d gotten nicked by shrapnel and had leaked a bit before the Hog’s self-sealing bladders choked shut. Even if that was the case, the situation wasn’t critical.
“Devil Three this Four. Glenon, where the hell are you?”
Preston sounded like a flight leader scolding a nugget for getting outside the formation.
“Where the hell are you?” Doberman responded.
“I’m two miles south of the highway,” said Hack.
“Which fucking highway? There’s two.”
Preston didn’t answer. Obviously he’d meant the east-west highway.
“I’m coming over Kajuk from the northeast,” Doberman told him. “Orbit where you are. I’ll come to you.”
“Four.”
The battlefield lay in a vector that perfectly split the intersection of Doberman’s left wing and fuselage at forty-five degrees. The village sat in the crook of a hill. A line of triple-A installations made a staggered “C” to the east of the village in the direction of Kuwait; only two were still firing, their spew of red and black streaming harmlessly into the air some miles away. Doberman turned his attention to the TVM; he quickly found the tank Preston had hit half-hidden by the shadow of the hill as he approached. Beyond it, several vehicles in the convoy were still burning. Nothing was moving, and there didn’t seem to be any armor left intact.
Doberman tried contacting the ground team but got no response; Wolf didn’t immediately answer his hails either.
“Preston, you talk to Wong and his boys while I was fooling with those SAMs?”
“Negative. Uh, friends call me Hack.”
“Three.” Doberman realized he was being an asshole, but Preston rubbed him the wrong way. “I’m banking west, trying to raise them. I have two more Mavs; I want to hold onto them until I know their situation. The convoy is definitely stopped.”