“You think we ought to move him?” asked Turk.
The sergeant’s moans had faded into one continuous semi-screech. Dixon knelt next to him and gently placed his two fingers along the sergeant’s neck.
“Weak pulse, but with us,” Dixon said.
For a moment, the words jangled in his mind, reviving a memory of the last time he’d felt for someone’s pulse. It was his mother’s, nearly a year ago, and the result had been very different— he’d been feeling for himself, the last time, to make sure what the machines were saying, what the doctor and nurses were saying, was true, that she was dead.
“We shouldn’t move him, probably.” Dixon stood up quickly. “But we have to have better cover than this. Those rocks up there. Leteri, can you check them out? Mo, Staffa, scout the road and then cover us. Bobby and I will move the sergeant as gently as we can, once Leteri gives us the all clear.”
The men jumped into action. It was only later, after they set the sergeant down, that Dixon realized he had given orders and they’d followed them without question.
CHAPTER 25
AL JOUF FOA, SAUDI ARABIA
25 JANUARY 1991
2050
They looked like Warthogs with tits.
Two five hundred gallon tanks, with elaborate air-drop chutes custom-welded around them, had been slapped to the number five and seven hard-points beneath the A-10As’ wings. The basic drop tanks had been borrowed from RAF Tornadoes— an accomplishment in itself, since as far as Doberman knew there were none at the base. Tinman had worked out the modifications himself, with help from Wong and Rosen. They were equipped with parachutes that worked off altimeter settings; apparently these included a pair of more-or-less-standard Special Ops chutes and three smaller drag “foils” from British bombs ordinarily used to crater runways.
Rosen had explained the mechanics of the chute-and-baffle system to Doberman, but the setup seemed as much of a marvel as the MRE A-Bomb was wolfing down. The bottom line was that she said it would all work.
Probably.
Wong seemed to agree. Which in itself made Doberman nervous.
“You really ought to try one of these MREs,” said A-Bomb. “This sole in vermouth with a touch of lemon— it’s what I’m talking about.”
“Sole in vermouth?” asked Rosen.
“Sorry, finished. I got lobster bisque with crabmeat and a squeeze of saffron left. You want it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You got to buddy up with the Special Ops guys if you want decent grub,” said A-Bomb, opening the plastic packet and pouring it into a drab green cup. “They got connections.”
Doberman nearly fell over from the stench of the simmering concoction wafting across the desert. He shook his head.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said A-Bomb. “Should have gone with the soup course first, right?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.” Doberman shook his head. “You ready?”
“I was born ready.”
Doberman turned to inspect his airplane. Rosen followed. One think he had to give her— these planes couldn’t have been in better shape than if they’d just rolled out of the factory.
“Listen, Captain, don’t forget, you have to drop from thirty-five hundred feet so the chutes can fully deploy and the landing is soft. All right?”
Rosen was about the only crew member in the squadron— maybe the only person in the Air Force— who physically looked up at the five-foot-four Doberman. Maybe it was just the angle of her face that made her look less severe than she’d ever seemed before.
For just a second.
“I’ll give it a shot,” he told her.
Rosen smiled. “Kick butt, Captain.”
She chucked him on the shoulder harder than a linebacker.
###
Forty-five minutes worth of butt-grinding Hog driving later, Doberman checked his map against the INS and his watch. They were thirty seconds off, close enough for anyone but him. He edged his power forward infinitesimally, recalculating and adjusting until he had the thing nailed.
Wong had sketched the Hogs a route to the fuel drop points that was considerably more direct than the path the helicopters were taking. Even so, the timetable was tight and the course was not the easiest; they still had one known Iraqi position to overfly.
The Air Force had once planned to upgrade the A-10A with things like ground-avoidance radar and night-seeing equipment— reasonably necessary items, given the Hog’s primary mission to work with ground troops. But the A-10 was always treated like a forlorn stepchild at budget time; the pointy nose fast jets got all the fancy gear, and the Hogs had to make do with leftovers, hand-me-downs, and wishful thinking.
Still, even something as basic as an autopilot would have been nice, Doberman thought. For one thing, it would make it easier to pee, which he suddenly had to do.
No way he was braving the piddlepack until after the drop.
They went over the Iraqi position without drawing any fire; without, in fact, a hint that there was anything besides sand beneath their wings. Doberman adjusted his course as he planned the next way marker— he had it tight this time, and he edged the plane’s nose below five thousand feet, angled perfectly to hit 3,500 feet in exactly two minutes and twenty seconds at the drop point.
He checked the Maverick screen. As a primitive night-vision device, it was far from perfect, but at least he could make out the road Wong had marked on his map just south of the target.
Perfect. Doberman keyed his mike to make sure A-Bomb hadn’t fallen asleep.
In the next second, the sky in front of him erupted orange-green, the flak so thick it looked like a psychedelic waterfall.
CHAPTER 26
ON THE GROUND IN IRAQ
25 JANUARY 1991
2050
They dug a shallow grave at the edge of the minefield and buried Green, making sure to get a good read from the geo-positioner so they could retrieve the body when the mission was over.
The men looked to Dixon to say something, or at least he thought they did. He stepped up and asked them to bow their heads. Standing solemnly at the head of the medic’s grave, he remembered his mother’s funeral, and a passage flew into his head: a reading from Job about God’s justification for mankind’s trials:
Gird up now thy loins like a man: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.
Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?
Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
That was as far as the reading had gone at the funeral. Dixon’s voice fell silent. But after a few seconds, Staff Sergeant Staffa Turk, demolitions expert and tail gunner, filled out the verse:
Cast aboard the rage of thy wrath, and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on everyone that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together, and bind their faces in secret. Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.
###
Winston’s back had been peppered with shrapnel and bits of Green. The bleeding was difficult to gauge; Dixon worried that some of the wounds had hit his spine and the nerves around it. They made the sergeant as comfortable as they could, hiding him in a crevice along the rock ledge that gave them a reasonably good view of the road, the minefield, and the next hill, though not the rest of the quarry. They could fight from here, if they had to.
Each trooper carried a syringe of morphine. They debated whether to give it to Winston or not. He was moaning and certainly in some pain, but if they used it they’d have nothing else to give him. And they couldn’t be sure how long it would be before they could be evacuated.
Once again, the men looked to Dixon to decide. It seemed to him that the best thing to do wa
s call Fort Apache, the forward base that was supposed to be their support link, and see what could be arranged. Once they knew helos were on the way, they could give him the shot.
“If he starts screaming, then we absolutely have to knock him out,” said Leteri.
“Definitely,” agreed Dixon.
The radio had been hit by something when the mine exploded. Leteri set up the antenna, sure that he could get it to work somehow. The other members of the fire team began searching the quarry, trying to figure out why the mines were there. Dixon, meanwhile, looked after the wounded man, trying to make him as comfortable as possible.
There wasn’t much he could do, except wad a shirt as a pillow and cover him with a blanket. Dixon felt as helpless as his last days in ICU, watching his mother fade into the night. Weird thoughts had gone through his head then; one moment he’d see himself yanking out the tubes, another moment his eyes would flood with tears and he’d conjure wild promises and deals with God to keep her alive.
“Radio’s pretty screwed, Lieutenant,” said Leteri. “It’s the power, I think. The battery got whacked. I’ll keep trying.”
“Makes sense,” said Dixon.
“How’s Winston?”
Dixon shrugged. He wanted to be objective— he wasn’t a doctor and he had no idea what the extent of the wounds were. The sergeant’s pulse was strong. But there were at least three big wounds along his spine.
Turk appeared at the ridge before Dixon could find a way to diplomatically say he was afraid the sergeant might be paralyzed.
“Hey Lieutenant, you want to come look at this right away,” he said. “I think I found what those mines are all about.”
CHAPTER 27
OVER IRAQ
25 JANUARY 1991
2155
Doberman whacked the Hog hard left as the fingers of fire seemed to reach for his windshield. He twisted the plane back, feeling her buck because of the unfamiliar tanks tied to her wings. He lost his balance, felt his left wing coming around and got down on his rudder pedals as well as his ailerons, muscling the plane stable with his nose pointed toward the ground. He started to recover, then realized the altimeter was winding down faster than he thought. His engineer’s brain spat out a series of equations with bad variables; he ignored them and pulled back on the stick, leveling off at two thousand feet, headed in the wrong direction and damn-shit confused.
To say nothing of pissed. He wondered where in hell the flak guns had come from, and felt his bladder backing up into his kidneys.
“Hey,” said A-Bomb.
“Hey back.”
“You hit?”
“Nah.” Doberman gave the instrument panel a quick once over just to be sure.
A-Bomb read him his position, but Doberman had already figured out where his wingman would be. He brought his plane back into a slow bank north, sliding around in an arc that kept the flak— stir firing intermittently— well off his right wing. He was still low at 3,500 feet, but since he had to get low to make the drop, decided to keep it there.
“You got screwed up?” asked A-Bomb.
“Fucking fuel tanks threw me off.”
“Still got them?”
“Shit, A-Bomb, what do you think?”
“Man, you’re testy. You know what it is, you didn’t have anything to eat. Blood sugar’s all whacked out. You got to take better care of yourself. When you eat’s as important as what you eat. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“What the fuck was shooting at me? I didn’t get a radar warning or anything.”
“I couldn’t see it with the Mavericks, but it looked like something dug in near the road. Shot real high. Got to be a bunch of ZSU-57s, don’t you think? Would have taken a lucky shot to nail you.”
“Lucky for who?”
“Good point. Want to go back and waste ‘em?”
“Hold on.”
Doberman checked the positions out on the map. Wong’s course had the helicopter coming in from the north, which meant the battery was well out of range. Besides, the helos would be almost at the refuel point by now. The Hogs were better off saving the guns for the return flight, if they even bothered.
The guns stroked up again. There had to be several of them, and A-Bomb was probably right about them being ZSU-57s or something similar— their tracers seemed to extend fairly high. The guns were usually mounted on vehicles like ZSU-23s; they might be attached to a convoy or positioned to defend something intel hadn’t yet picked up. In any event, they were firing blind and almost straight up. Most likely they had heard either the Hogs in the distance and gotten spooked.
Firing blind in the night was stupid, since it gave your position away and was unlikely to bring any results, but Doberman could understand the ground crews’ frustration. You could only sit and get pounded for so long before you lashed out.
“Looks like your friend Wong missed some pretty serious guns,” said Doberman as he plotted a new course to the drop point.
“Hey, I didn’t say Brainiac was perfect. Besides, those old suckers, shit, it would have taken a really lucky shot to get you. One in a hundred. You know what I’m talking about?”
“All right.” He gave A-Bomb the new course and got back into gear. He was back in control; even his bladder eased up a little.
“You could go Italian, you know.”
“What are you talking about, A-Bomb?”
“Pasta is very high in you carbohydrates,” said the wingman. “Instant energy. And versatile. You got your marinara, your Abruzzi, your Alfredo. . .”
“Just watch my back.”
“Six is as clean as spaghetti right out of the pot,” said A-Bomb.
CHAPTER 28
OVER IRAQ
25 JANUARY 1991
2200
A-Bomb eased his Hog back, giving Doberman plenty of room to make his drop cleanly. While he had a huge amount of trust in the ground crew’s ability to improvise, even he was curious about whether this fudge would really work.
It had better. He had the choppers coming on now four miles away, so low they could be trucks.
His Maverick viewfinder was selected at what passed for wide-field magnification: six degrees. The ground battery was well off to the rear, and no longer firing; they’d either run out of bullets or hit themselves with their falling shells.
The Hogs “target” was a set of coordinates that translated into a hunk of sand about a half-mile beyond an impressive collection of bushes; the brush was probably considered an oasis, though A-Bomb was hardly an expert on that sort of thing. The only oasis he was familiar with featured topless dancers. The gray shadows of the bushes looked like an undulating test bar in his screen as he banked to follow Doberman on his approach.
One of the test bars morphed into a mountain.
Then mountain changed into bodies.
A couple of dozen bodies. All running west right into the drop zone.
“Hold off, hold off,” A-Bomb shouted into his radio, alerting Doberman. “Shit. Cisco freeze. Cisco Freeze,” he added, quickly switching to the frequency the helicopters were monitoring. The code meant for the helicopters to stop immediately.
A-Bomb thumbed the Maverick’s screen down to a narrow angle, which magnified the scene. He waited for the viewer to flash up an entire herd of Iraqi infantry.
That or some very strange bushes.
“Devil Two, this is One? What’s the problem?” asked Doberman.
“Don’t you see them?”
“See what?”
“Hang tight.” A-Bomb banked his plane, temporarily losing his angle. The Maverick screen showed nothing but empty desert.
A malfunction?
Hell no. The screen filled as he came back around, but now A-Bomb saw that the bodies streaming westward weren’t Iraqi troops or weirdly mobile fauna.
They were camels. At least two dozen of them.
He might have laughed, except it wasn’t funny. The animals were still moving toward the area where the tanks we
re supposed to be dropped.
Doberman cursed in his headset. Obviously he had seen them, too.
A-Bomb made out a man’s shadow, and what might be a tent. Some Bedouins were putting up for the night at the oasis. In fact, they were the oasis.
Jeez, you’d think they lived here or something. And wasn’t there a leash law? The damn camels were trampling all around the target area.
“All right, I’m going to set up a course toward Cisco,” said Doberman. “Let them improvise.”
“I got a better idea,” said A-Bomb, pushing the Hog down toward the dirt.
The big warplane hesitated a moment, then realized what her pilot was up to. She snorted, and answered A-Bomb’s whoop with one of her own. A salvo of flares, ordinarily used to defeat heat-seeking missiles, burst from her wingtips.
Startled, the camels turned their heads as one and stared at the meteor that had appeared from nowhere.
Then they ran like hell, their masters in hot pursuit.
CHAPTER 29
OVER IRAQ
25 JANUARY 1991
2210
“Yee-fucking-haw!” shouted A-Bomb over the radio. He had the camels on the run.
Doberman slipped the Hog onto the proper coordinates for the tank drop. His thumbs danced back and forth — bing-bang-bam. He pickled and felt the plane jump beneath him, glad to be free of the unfamiliar tanks.
Doberman banked and pushed forward in his seat, anxious to see how he had done. But it was far too dark outside and at the moment there was nothing but a bleary blankness in the Maverick’s screen.
He keyed his mike and told the helicopters they could proceed in zero-one minutes; in the same instant he saw the outline of a small parachute in the corner of the TVM, then another and finally a third, all holding up the same fat canister of fuel.
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