by Jim DeFelice
In reality, each Hog had its own quirks and characteristics. The one Doberman was driving, for instance, seemed to pull slightly to its left, a bit like a motor boat with a loose rudder. In fact, the characteristic was so noticeable on takeoff that the pilot triple-checked his flap setting and instruments. Eventually, he decided the problem was with the engines, even though the gauges said the two GEs were operating in precise unison.
His stomach said screw the gauges. One fan had just a little more bite than the other, a little more aggressive spinning around its axle. No amount of fine-tuning the throttle evened it out, either. The solution was all in the stick and rudder, all in Doberman’s attitude as he flew. He tensed his muscles a different way to fly Dixon’s plane; that’s what it came down to.
Another thing — the ACES-2 ejector seat felt different. Totally impossible, but absolutely true. Kid’s fanny must’ve bent it special.
Doberman noticed the rear end of A-Bomb’s plane had risen a bit high in his windshield; he tilted his nose up a tad more to correct. They were flying a loose trail formation north, climbing to twenty thousand as they ran over the berm marking the border between Saudi Arabia and its aggressive neighbor. A number of tanks were waiting to get their turrets blown off about a hundred miles away.
Luckiest dead man alive, huh? What the hell did Jimbo mean by that?
A quarter inch one way or another.
Yeah, right. A quarter of an inch one way or another and the damn shell would have missed completely.
Doberman snorted into his oxygen mask. He’d been unlucky as hell ever since he got here, and not just at poker.
Another way to look at what had happened to his Hog was the opposite of luck. Hell, nothing hit Dixon’s plane, nothing, and he’d flown through the same shit Doberman had. Now that was luck.
Kid probably sucked what little luck he had right out of him. Some guys were like that. Luck magnets.
A couple of days ago Doberman had blown a tire landing. That was unlucky as hell. Hogs never blew tires. Never.
It wasn’t luck that had kept the plane from becoming a pile of junk that afternoon.
It was kick-ass piloting.
Hey, you want to call that luck? OK. Maybe to a grizzled old sergeant who had been there when Orville and Wilbur traded in their bicycles, it was luck.
To Doberman, it was skill.
And the hell with anyone who said he was conceited about that.
Doberman peered out the side canopy, staring through the thick, protective glass toward the desolate undulations of yellow below. The sand and grit hardly seemed worth fighting over; maybe staring at it all day made you crazy.
Sure, but so did thinking about the oil beneath it. Obviously Saddam’s problem.
“Yo, Doberman, buddy, how’s our six?”
Doberman snapped to attention at A-Bomb’s call. He craned his neck around, making sure his back, or his “six” as in six o’clock on the imaginary clock face of their location, was clean. As he pushed his eyes toward the front windscreen, he realized that A-Bomb had actually made the call to subtly remind him to keep his separation; he was off Devil Three by less than a quarter mile, and closing.
Subtle.
“Nothing behind us but a lot of dirt and open sky, thank you very much, old buddy,” he said.
“Don’t mention it.”
“We’re flying silent com,” barked Mongoose.
Fuck you, said Doberman, without, of course, keying the microphone.
He hadn’t been paying enough attention, and now as he dropped back he realized he was also muscling the stick. So he had to wake up and relax at the same time. Doberman blew a long breath, letting the Hog ease under him like a calm horse out on a Sunday walk. His tendency to over manage the plane was a symptom of fatigue; they’d been flying since nearly three this morning and his butt was dragging lower than the wheels.
Mongoose had volunteered them for this stinking BAI hop, another reason to be pissed off at him. The original frag — the fragment or portion of the air tasking order that pertained to them — had them just sitting on alert at Al Jouf before going home.
Yeah, but could you blame him? Who wanted to hang out while there were things to blow up?
* * *
They were about three minutes from the assigned kill box when a familiar call sign crackled over the radio.
“Cougar to Devil Leader. Devils, stand by for tasking.”
Tasking?
Doberman slipped up the volume on the radio, even though the E-3 controller’s voice had been loud and clear.
“We need you to head east, pronto,” explained the AWACS. “One of our Weasels spotted a shipment of Scuds on the highway.”
CHAPTER 16
AL JOUF FOB
1200
Dixon found himself wearing a rut in the sand at the edge of the runway, unable to tear his eyes away from the stricken planes straggling into the base. Every beat-up F-16, every flamed-out Tornado seemed to criticize him: if its jock could take it, why couldn’t he?
Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. Unwilling to go near anyone whose questions would inevitably lead to more lies, the young pilot collapsed butt first into the sand, covering his face against the gritty wind. His mind blanked; his brain fogging nearly as badly as it had up north.
He’d sat there for nearly fifteen minutes when he felt a tug on his arm.
“Excuse me, you Lieutenant Dixon?”
Dixon looked up and found an Air Force special ops first lieutenant with a greasy pad of legal-sized paper staring up at him.
“Yeah?”
“Two things. The maintenance people say the parts they don’t have are en route; ought to be here in an hour or less. Plane looked worse than it was, or they kicked butt; Jimbo says take your pick. If it’s fixed tonight you can go back to Fahd. If not, we get you a bunk. Check the sheets before you turn in; the pilots are ball busters.”
Dixon shrugged. The prognosis on the parts sounded hopelessly optimistic, given the chaos on the field in front of him, but he wasn’t about to argue with anything that even pretended to be good news.
“Second thing, my colonel wants to know if you can help out the intelligence guys. They’re, uh, kind of overworked.”
“Okay,” said Dixon. “What do I do?”
“Find a Major Bauer,” said the lieutenant, flipping through the pad to see what his next errand was. He’d already mentally crossed Dixon off the list. “Uh, he’ll give you the rundown. Your stuff stowed with your Hog, right?”
Dixon nodded. He rose, surprising the officer with his height. “Where is Bauer?”
“Got me,” said the officer, trotting back toward the tower area.
Dixon asked half a dozen people if they’d seen Bauer without getting a positive response. Finally he flagged down a marine captain with a clipboard who was trotting toward a British plane. Jet engines were roaring all around and he had to practically tackle the officer, shouting directly into his ear.
“I’m looking for Major Bauer.”
“Why?”
“I’m supposed to help debrief pilots.”
“Here you go,” said the captain, handing over the clipboard.
“You’re Bauer?”
“No. But my plane’s ready and I got to get back to my unit. Bauer’s up there. There’s a communications set up in the Humvee. See it?”
He didn’t, but the marine, obviously shanghaied into the job earlier, disappeared before he could ask for more directions.
The clipboard had a thick sheaf of unlined, completely blank paper. There was a pen beneath the clip, which turned out not to work.
While he recognized the type of plane before him — it was a two-place Tornado, one of the most common British types in the Gulf — he wasn’t precisely sure what kind of mission it would typically be tasked.
Had a hell of a drawing on the nose, though. A woman who was primarily boobs was getting a missile right where it counted.
“Like the tart
?” the pilot yelled down from the fuselage.
“Excuse me?” Dixon yelled back.
“The drawing. It’s m’wife.” He laughed. “It’s the backseater’s wife, actually.” He laughed again.
Between the roar of incoming jets and the subdued whine of the Tornado, not to mention the pilot’s accent, Dixon caught maybe a third of any given sentence.
“I’m supposed to debrief you,” he shouted.
“What?”
“What was your mission?” yelled Dixon.
“My mission? Talmud.”
“Tail what?”
“Talldaul Air Base.”
“Did you hit it?”
“Of course.”
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
“Like?”
“Like what?”
“How bad did you hit it?”
“Well I didn’t have a bloody chance to land there and find out, now did I?”
“Was it, uh, destroyed?”
“What, the runway?”
“Damage?”
“Like a tart’s face.”
“Tart?”
“Prostitute, son. How bloody old are you?”
“Can you spell it?”
“Tart?”
The lieutenant took out his own pen and scribbled something he hoped approximated the shout. Meanwhile, airmen were waving the Tornado pilot forward, urging him toward a tank truck. Dixon got the man’s unit, his call sign, and the fact that he had nearly “gone empty” before the surrounding confusion and revving Turbo-Unions overwhelmed the conversation. Giving up, Dixon took a few steps back — and nearly got run over by a taxiing Hornet.
* * *
“Okay, that would be Tallil. So did they hit the field?”
“Yup.”
“How bad?”
“Like a prostitute’s face, if that means anything.”
“Did he get both JP 233s on it?”
“I don’t know.”
“JP 233s, the things they use to muck up the runway.” The Brits like that word. Did he say, ‘muck’? “The JP 233s?”
“I know what you’re talking about. He said it was as cratered as a prostitute’s face.”
Bauer crossed his eyes, then sighed. Though he was wearing an Air Force uniform, he had found or appropriated an army sergeant’s helmet. He was serious about it, too; the chin strap was synched so tight he could barely move his jaw. “All the prostitutes I know have smooth faces.”
“He claimed he hit it.”
“Don’t worry about it. Listen, there’s an F-16 on the ground somewhere that was going north with a package to Taqaddum.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, but I don’t need to know about that; he’s already been debriefed. On his way back they were flying right over a factory at the edge of a lake. Ask him if it was on fire or not.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. I think the guy’s name was Franco, or something with a couple of vowels in it. It’s in the sheets somewhere but it’ll take me an hour to find it. He’s with that Guard unit out of New York.”
Dixon wondered what the F-16 pilot — whom he figured would have been in a very big hurry and flying no lower than twenty thousand feet — could possibly have seen with all the cloud cover, even if he happened to be looking in the exact spot the intelligence officer mentioned. But what the hell? It wasn’t like he had anything better to do at the moment.
CHAPTER 17
OVER WESTERN IRAQ
1205
Even when they were on top of the coordinates the AWACS had sent them to, they had trouble raising the Phantom, possibly because there was so much damn radio traffic. It seemed like every aircraft in the theater was talking on the same frequency. Hell, Doberman thought without too much exaggeration, there were probably a few guys using it to call home.
Finally, a chopped transmission staggered through that included their call sign.
“All right, everybody but Sharp Eyes shut the hell up,” Doberman heard Mongoose bark. “We got a situation here.”
The Phantom pilot told them a pair of flatbeds with Scuds had parked about fifty yards from a water tower in the shadow of what looked like an industrial park. It was ten miles northeast of the way marker they were sitting on. He had also spotted a number of military trucks, including two troop carriers on the road headed in the same direction.
“I’m out of iron or I would have taken them myself,” said the F-4 pilot. He sounded younger than his plane, though that wasn’t a particularly difficult accomplishment. “I’m also about two pounds of fuel from bingo.”
“We’ll take it from here,” Mongoose told him. Doberman spotted the Phantom’s smoky tail at about ten o’clock due north. It seemed to wag a bit as it turned the target over to the Hogs.
Doberman felt his heart starting to pump as they swung down and began looking for the water tower, an easy marker. A-Bomb was ahead of his left wing a few hundred feet, Mongoose beyond that. The Hog snorted as its nose got closer to the dirt; the pig loved scraping along in the sand.
Suddenly he spotted a cloud of dust kicking across the sandpapery terrain to his right.
The two personnel carriers, most likely.
“Devil One, this is Two,” Doberman told Mongoose. “I got the dust bunny to the north there.”
“Roger that,” said Mongoose. “A-Bomb and I will head for the tower.”
Doberman angled his Hog toward the dust cloud, pouring on the gas. The cloud soon separated into the two troop trucks; they’d left the highway. If they thought that was going to help them they were sadly mistaken.
The Hog’s cannon began to bellow as he put the plane into a shallow dive and fired, perforating the path of the lead vehicle but missing the truck itself. He gave the Hog a bit of rudder, pushing her nose to the left and getting off a long, four-second burst.
Points for concept, but none for execution — he’d killed a lot of sand blowing a double air ball and was now beyond the rug rats. More a little pissed at himself, Doberman yanked his nose up and dragged the A-10A back over and under like a gymnast doing a flip. The heavy drag of the bombs beneath his wing — in his excitement and fatigue he had actually forgotten he was carrying a full load of iron — screwed up his sense of balance. The plane flailed wildly toward the ground, angry at his hot-dogging and inattention. For a second Doberman thought he had lost it. As he wrestled the plane back to level flight and got her off the deck, he realized it wasn’t quite as bad as he’d thought, though he deserved a serious kick in the butt for getting stupid.
The trucks continued to the west as he attempted to put a chokehold on his adrenaline and take things a step at a time. Gearing around for a cannon run, he saw that they were now separated from each other by a good distance. Choosing the one on the left as his first target, A-Bomb picked up his wing and drove the Hog toward the left rear quarter panel of the fleeing Iraqi. He started firing his cannon perhaps a second too soon; the plane lost a bit of momentum as the powerful Gatling fired, but this time Doberman had the green canvas locked in the crosshairs. The shells rippled in a tight line through the back of the truck. It looked like a zipper coming undone, the two halves peeling apart in a jagged twist of black and blue smoke, then fire, then more smoke, then a mélange of colors and death.
The guys in the other truck must have seen what had happened to their friends, for by the time Doberman had the A-10 pointed in its direction, the drab colored Toyota — it wasn’t at all, but somehow it was more fun to plink if he thought of it as one of the rice burners his brother-in-law sold — was wailing down a sandbank without anyone at the wheel. Doberman lit the cannon and waxed the cab three rounds into his burst.
* * *
The gray tower hulked over a trio of wedge-shaped shadows ahead. Mongoose decided the shadows must be buildings, and that the Scuds would be on the other side of the tower. “Swing with me to the east. We’re going to turn tight and come in low for a look,” he told A-Bomb. “Expect ground
fire.”
“What, you think these guys have slingshots?” Mongoose was too busy concentrating on the ground to answer. He’d seen photos of Scuds, but never the real thing. Now he wasn’t totally sure he’d recognize one.
Not that it would matter. Anything down there was going bye-bye.
“There’s a good-sized gun on the roof of that building,” squawked A-Bomb.
Too late to do anything about it. Mongoose felt himself hunkering down into the titanium bathtub that protected the cockpit as he slammed the Hog forward, still trying to get a look at the parking area behind the water tower. Two long trucks sat nose to rear on a narrow driveway. They looked like oil trucks, except that the front of their tanks had coneheads.
There was more ground fire, but it was fairly light; even twelve millimeter stuff wasn’t going to do much damage unless the Hog stayed in one place for a long time. And he wasn’t about to do that.
“They’re right behind the water tank,” Mongoose told A-Bomb. “They have some heavy machine guns and maybe light anti-air.”
“Yeah. I’m past ‘em.”
“Come around with me and let’s take them out.” Mongoose noted several trucks and smaller buildings nearby, and a fair-sized revetment with maybe a half-dozen, khaki-covered vehicles a quarter of a mile or so directly north of the Scuds.
“You take the Scuds and I’ll get the guys on the roof,” said A-Bomb. “Shit, Goose, there’s a battery of something in that half-donut north of the parking lot. Bitch fuck, these guys got peashooters all over the place.”
“You’d think they lived here or something,” said Mongoose, pushing the Hog into position to make a decent bomb run.
* * *
Doberman’s arms felt like lead as he pulled off the remains of the second truck. He heard Mongoose call out the location of the two Scud carriers and swung back in their direction.
A quick scan of the instruments showed everything running at spec. The slight pull to the left was still there, but the engines pegged in perfect parallel on the gauge. Plenty of gas, he told himself; plenty of explosives sitting under the wings to eliminate as many Scuds as they could find.