The helicopter skittered on oblivious to him, flanking a line of dark tan vehicles, dust billowing behind. BJ goosed his throttle. Barely twenty feet off the ground, he nudged over three hundred nautical miles an hour.
The Sidewinder’s growl deepened, its target getting tantalizing close— six miles, then five and a half, then five.
Something flared on his right, something on the ground firing at him. His helmet jangled with static, then a voice.
Knowlington, ordering him to stand down, to back off, get out of the way— a Tomcat was targeting the helicopters.
Static swallowed the voice, then silence replaced the static. The helo was dead on now, four miles away.
Dixon took a breath. He pushed the trigger and an AIM-9 whipped off the double launcher on his left wing tip. A string of smoke curled through the air as it nosed down toward the Hip, which jerked violently around, finally realizing it was in trouble.
Dixon watched as the missile sailed straight over the helicopter, flaring as it ignited in one of the vehicles beyond.
As he started to curse, he realized he was about to fly into the rising ground ahead. He pulled his stick back just enough to keep from scraping the sand, and at the same time reached to switch his selector to cannon. At inside two miles from his target he slammed his rudder hard, pushing the targeting cue dead onto the Hip’s tail. But the helicopter moved to his right, and Dixon was so low and had lost so much momentum, he found it difficult to stay with it. All he could do was take out another truck— he lit the Gat and erased a jeep, bullets pouncing on the soft metal of the vehicle’s body. He worked his rudder and slid his aim into the nose of a self-propelled gun, getting off a half-second burst before losing the angle and some of his altitude.
As he started to recover, the other helicopter appeared almost overhead; Dixon avoided the temptation to target it; the shot would have been nearly impossible and would have cost what little he had left of his momentum besides. He banked right, still picking up speed, and saw the helicopters off on his right— along with two dark hulls streaking to join them.
Not the F-14s, which must still be a good distance off. Not the other Hogs, which for a moment he’d lost track of
They were Hinds, serious gunfighters that carried anti-air missiles as well as ground attack weapons.
No match for a Hog, though. He’d proven that in the first days of the war.
Dixon put his nose toward the biggest shadow, still a good seven or eight miles off. The second Sidewinder, his last, growled from its wing-tip rail.
He waited ten long, long seconds, closing to inside five miles before firing. Then he lined up on the second gunship as it broke south, just out of range of his cannon.
A single word broke through the static in his helmet, as if it were fighting its way through the circuits and wires. Short and guttural, it had a sharp snap that could only come from Colonel Knowlington. Before the meaning of the actual word registered, Dixon knew it was a warning:
“Missile!”
CHAPTER 45
TENT CITY
29 JANUARY 1991
0618
Becky Rosen bolted upright from the cot. It felt like stones had been placed on her body, heavy weights that made it difficult to move. The gray light turned purple and the warm air froze.
“BJ! BJ!” she shouted.
The empty tent remained silent, Slowly she caught her breath, senses returning to normal.
It was only a dream, she told herself, curling her arms across her breasts.
A dream, a bad dream.
Rosen started to pull the covers back over her, then realized she was late for duty and bolted from the bed, still feeling heavy weights damping her movements.
He’s okay, she told herself, pushing on her boots. She tried thinking of everything she had to do, tried imagining what she might have for breakfast, tried remembering her uncle’s junkyard, but the light in the tent remained a dark tinge, not unlike the color of dried blood.
CHAPTER 46
OVER IRAQ
29 JANUARY 1991
0618
Skull fired the Maverick at the knot of men who had jumped from the truck to set up the shoulder-launched missiles. Something flared in the targeting screen just as the AGM launched; Knowlington punched the transmit button, barking another warning though he couldn’t be sure the Iraqis had actually fired a SAM. He caught a glimpse of Dixon’s Hog wheeling in the sky over the Iraqis eight miles ahead, then lost it. His attention was drawn back to the Maverick screen, where he had to target the lead vehicle in the convoy to stop it.
It was too late to do anything more for Dixon. The kid had left his butt wide open. Luck might save him, but it was too late for anything else.
Why the hell hadn’t he done what he was told?
Knowlington locked the AGM-65’s targeting cursor on the armored personnel carrier following the lead jeep, then fired. As the missile clunked off the rail, Antman said there were more helicopters coming almost due south from across the river, a bit over ten miles away.
Moving much faster than the others. Skull cut back, banking in a wide orbit south of the Iraqi convoy so he could sort out the situation. His wingman approached the convoy from the southwest; he reported that the colonel’s two missiles had hit their targets.
“Smoke and shit all over the place,” said the wingman.
“Column stopped?”
“Not all of it,” said Antman. “I have a good view of two tanks.”
“Get ‘em, then wheel back south. I’ll come up more or less in the same orbit. I’m on your back,” added Skull, pushing his Hog around to turn back north. He had two Mavericks and a pair of cluster-bombs left, along with his gun and the Sidewinders.
He watched a Maverick drop from Antman’s wing, fuming away. The Iraqis were still coming. The troop helicopters were still with them.
larger choppers were cutting a vector toward Splash, the helicopters now almost dead-on in Skull’s HUD.
The F-14’s were having trouble targeting the helicopters— they were apparently so low that even the vaunted long-range radars in the Tomcats couldn’t isolate them in the ground clutter.
The helicopters coming south were larger though much further away. He saw them as he began banking, spiders skipping over the ground, cutting a vector toward Splash.
Mi-24 Hinds. Deadly bastards that combined the firepower of Apaches with the troop carrying capability of Black Hawks.
So where the hell were the damn Tomcats?
And where was Dixon?
“Shit!” yelled Antman as something flared from the spider on the right. Steam erupted from the other helicopter, and red streaks filled the sky.
They were targeting the SAS team holding the highway with rockets and air-to-ground missiles.
There were a dozen men there, dug in maybe, but no match for the brawny helicopters.
Knowlington was just about ten miles from the helicopters. Out of range for the Sidewinders, even at their most optimistic.
Stinking helicopters ought to be out of range, too, but the bastards were really going at it, lighting their rockets now. The ground erupted with furious explosions.
Skull pushed his throttle, coaxing the Hog for more speed. His elbows sagged against his body, and his groin muscles cramped the Hind tracked toward their prey.
Was this why he’d taken the mission, his last mission: To go out a failure? To let his guys die?
Skull slammed his stick, angry at himself— not for failing, but for the bullshit self-pity. Remorse didn’t mean jack to the poor bastards on the ground; it was useless, as useless and ultimately destructive as drinking.
He was closing the distance but it wasn’t going to be enough. The Sidewinders had trouble spotting the baffled heat signatures of the gunships, especially with the rockets acting as decoys.
Skull glanced at the Maverick screen. The targeting cursor sat just under the fat rotor at the top of the helicopter on the right.
N
ail it?
With an air-to-ground missile?
In range. And shit, the damn helicopter was only five hundred feet off the ground. It wasn’t going anywhere.
No way.
Mavs couldn’t be confused by the flairs, or ECMs for that matter.
No fucking way.
By the time the debate played out in Skull’s mind, he had already fired the first Maverick at the chopper. The second clicked off the rail for the other Hind a half-breath later.
The solid-propellant rocket motors that powered the two missiles had been designed for reliability and ease of handling; while they weren’t exactly slow, they propelled the AGMs at less than half the speed of a typical air-to-air missile. Likewise, the guidance system in the Mavericks had been optimized for its intended targets— tanks, which were rarely moving faster than thirty miles an hour, and were hardly ever found off the ground.
On the other hand, the Maverick’s guidance system might be rated more accurate than that of many missile systems, and once locked could not easily be confused. In fact, there was no reason— at least in theory— why the missiles could not hit something hovering aboveground, so long as it stayed more or less stationary.
Which the helicopters did, until nearly the last second.
The pilot in the second Hind realized the thick splinter on the right side of his cockpit glass was not a crack, but a missile coming for him. He wheeled his helicopter hard to the left, kicking flares and spinning his heat signature away.
The maneuver would have worked perfectly had Skull launched a Sidewinder. Here, the Maverick merely pushed its nose down a little steeper, slightly increasing the speed at which its three-hundred-pound payload smashed through the armored windscreen of the weapons-system operator’s cabin. The missile continued through at an angle, obliterating the crewman and carrying off a good hunk of the pilot’s control panel as it smashed its way out of the aircraft.
It did not explode, and in fact the Hind continued to fly, though now without the benefit of control. The chopper flopped straight up at its top speed of nearly 2,500 feet per minute. Its tail whipped around as the main blades pulled the craft onto its back. It stuttered for a second, drifting like a leaf caught in a steady wind. Then slowly it began to sink toward the earth, its tail circling as it plummeted with a fiery crash.
In contrast, the warhead on the second Maverick not only hit precisely where the targeting cursor had sent it, but detonated as well, obliterating the upper cabin area and engines and initiating a fireball that flashed over the entire helicopter. The flames continued to burn as the helo fell nearly straight downward, its charred skeleton neatly depositing its ashes in a small heap.
By that time, Knowlington had pushed east to drop his bombs on the elements of the Iraqi convoy that had managed to get around the vehicle he’d destroyed. He also realized why the Tomcats were late— they had just nailed a MiG-21 that had been scrambled to assist the Iraqi counter-attack.
What he didn’t know, though, was where Dixon was.
CHAPTER 47
OVER IRAQ
29 JANUARY 1991
0618
Dixon hit his flares and dove for the desert, zigging hard enough to pull six or seven g’s as he tried to evade the shoulder-launched missile. It clawed for his tail like an animal groping in the dark: he flew like a machine, working the stick and rudder with sharp precision. He didn’t feel fear— he didn’t feel anything. He just flew.
A white cigarette sailed fifty yards from his canopy; he glanced at it, then bucked his nose in its direction and kicked out more flares, calculating that the Iraqis might have launched a pair of the missiles and the second would be closer to his tail.
They hadn’t had time. The first missile continued on, its self-destruct mechanism apparently defective. Dixon caught another glimpse of it arcing toward the line of gray buildings near the river. The Iraqis would undoubtedly blame the deaths it caused on the Americans, pretending that the Allies were targeting civilians with their weapons.
To Dixon, the distinctions between civilians and combatants no longer made any sense. There was only the war, only the job to be done. He pushed his Hog into a wide bank, reorienting himself. He’d flown far north; a sizeable Iraqi town was laid out below his right wing. A few days before on the ground, he had seen a similar town almost as if it were an isolated outpost in Wisconsin, where he’d grown up. Now he saw it merely as something he flew over, a place where an antiaircraft gun began lobbing shells behind him. Sighted manually and too light to be a threat, the gun’s bullets pointed him back toward his target.
The static in his radio flared again. It was another warning, this time from Coyote, the AWACS plane monitoring the section.
“Devil Two, break! Break! Break!” shouted the controller in hoarse voice as his words were once more consumed in a cacophony of electronic rustling. Dixon heard “MiG-21” and began tucking south, assuming that was the most logical direction the controller would have given him. As he made his cut, his warning gear tripped over an Iraqi Jay Bird radar, trying to get its sticky fingers on him. The warning cleared, but Dixon punched chaff anyway, rolling back toward the battlefield.
His headphones had gone quiet again. Neither Skull nor Antman answered his hail.
He looked over at the com panel. Something was definitely wrong with his radio; the staticky chatter that ordinarily provided background listening as he flew had faded into dead silence. He clicked through different frequencies, retrieving nothing. He switched back, broadcasting to Coyote, though he couldn’t be sure he was sending. Calm and slow, his voice nonetheless sounded strange inside his head, as if the radio’s failure had affected his own sense of hearing.
“Devil Two is experiencing radio problems. If you’re hearing me, I can transmit but not receive. Repeat, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”
He clicked off the mike button, checking altitude and speed— 3,500 feet aboveground, level flight, 285 knots, nosing south by southwest. Splash was on his left; he had a straight line to the black smoke rising from the Iraqi column and the splashed helicopters. The ruined Hinds sat in heaps just before the highway. One of the transport helicopters, its rotors turning, was disgorging men near the wrecks. Beyond them, scattered near and on the road, were the Iraqi vehicles and troops that had been racing to Splash’s aid.
An A-10 dove toward the rear of the column. Bullets spewed from its mouth, red and gray and black lightning striking the earth. Steam hissed from the desert where it struck. A fireball followed, exploding about fifty feet off the ground as the Hog cleared and banked south. A few hundred yards away, an Iraqi helicopter— seemingly untouched, though it must have been targeted by a missile— rolled over in the air and folded into the ground, flames shooting out from the side.
Dixon repeated his can’t-hear-ya call on the squadron frequency, but again got no response. He checked his fuel situation, and saw that he was edging toward bingo, the magic point in his fuel tanks when it was time to head home.
Long way to go without a radio.
CHAPTER 48
IRAQ
29 JANUARY 1991
0625
Hawkins ducked as one of the Apaches flashed dangerously close overhead, hustling toward the escalating firefight out on the highway east of the airfield. Distant explosions shook the ground. The Pave Hawk that had deposited him circled back over the road below the southern end of the enemy base, the door gunner occasionally firing at the last defenders still holding out there.
One of the buildings the SAS had attacked had now been secured. The other was surrounded, and an SAS interpreter was trying to get the last defenders to surrender. The clipped radio communications gave no clue about the missing commandos they’d come for. The heavy resistance didn’t mean much, one way or another.
Burns and his men had found the Iraqi fuel truck without resistance. Failing to get it started, they’d pulled and pushed it out of its bunker by hand, muscling it across the runway. It was fully loaded
and the going was excruciatingly slow.
Finally, Wong and Fernandez took the tractor they had used to pull the MiG and drove out to the fuel truck, wheeling behind it and pushing it toward the MiG. In the meantime, Eugene and Preston fussed around the plane, getting it ready and even trying to load a missile onto its wing.
They’re going to pull it off, Hawkins realized. Tight-assed Major Preston is actually going to fly the goddamn plane out of Iraq.
What in God’s name were the odds against that? Talk about stinkin’ luck.
Hot damn.
Something moved in the ditch beyond the runway apron beyond the MiG. The plane’s landing gear obscured it, made it invisible – but Hawkins was already running for it, his SAW tight against his side.
It took ten long strides to pull parallel with the nose of the MiG. Two more strides, three, and he had the top of the ditch in view.
Empty.
But he knew he hadn’t imagined it. He kept running. The truck, prodded unevenly by the tractor, heaved forward on his left. One of the British paratroopers coaxing it alongside was laughing. Burns was holding onto the door, talking with the driver, helping him steer.
Nothing in the ditch. Nothing.
But he hadn’t hallucinated.
He kept running, spotting another trench ten feet beyond the ditch, parallel to the runway.
Empty, except for three sacks of cement.
Men. A gun.
The SAW burst, then clicked clean. One of the bags of cement imploded. Burns fell off the truck.
The Iraqi at the far end of the trench stood with a long spear, jostling its pointed nose.
A javelin against a fuel truck?
Hawkins threw his empty gun away, still ten yards from the trench. One of the SAS men was grabbing for a weapon, but no one had started to fire.
Seven yards, five. Not a javelin, an RPG-7 or something similar. The Iraqi was screwing the propellant cylinder into the head, jamming it into the launcher muzzle, ramming it against the ground to steady his shot.
HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) Page 16