The seeker head in the Maverick found the wrecked overpass still hot from its pounding late yesterday; it was a fuzzy collection of wrecked debris in the small television monitor on the right side of the dash. Knowlington kept it on what passed for wide magnification, easing the Hog toward it with the fascination of a diver approaching an ancient wreck.
“How are we looking?” asked A-Bomb over the squadron’s common frequency as they pushed over the wreckage.
“I have the dummy missiles or what’s left of them,” said Skull. “Bunch of roadway. Maybe the two carriers, I think. A couple of trucks. There’s the Roland launcher. Broke it in half. Good shooting.”
“Wish I’d gotten it sooner.”
“You hear anything on Guard?” Skull asked.
“Nah. You?”
“No. Keep listening.”
“You, too.”
“I’m turning,” said Knowlington, moving to follow the path they believed Mongoose had taken when he was hit. He felt the prick of adrenaline in his stomach as the Maverick screen traced the ground into blankness.
CHAPTER 39
Over Iraq
22 January 1991
0420
A-Bomb wanted a flare. A little Mark 79 pencil flare, shooting up to six hundred feet, sparkling for four or five seconds before dying out. A big Mark 13 would be even better. Those suckers lasted forever and you could see them from Washington, D.C.
Hell, he’d even settle for a strobe.
But the darkness gave him nothing back. The pilot gripped his stick tighter, following the colonel around the shoot-down area about three-quarters of a mile for another circuit. Scanning the ground with the TVM was slow work, a bit like panning for gold.
A shitload of guys had already been over this but they weren’t Hog drivers. Not that they lacked motivation or expertise or anything like that; they just weren’t part of the Hog brotherhood. Brothers felt stuff other relatives didn’t, simple as that. If he hadn’t been able to find him before, that was just because Mongoose was busy, maybe evading the enemy or something.
So give me a stinking flare, Goose boy.
“Let’s get low enough for him to hear us,” said the colonel, tilting the Hog’s nose downward as he spoke.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” said A-Bomb. He glanced at the radio controls, gave it more volume. The emergency band stayed silent; no chirp, no voice, no nothing.
Hot damn, Goose. Get your butt out of that pup tent and flag us down. My Big Mac’s getting cold, bro.
He ran his eyes around the ground. He’d have preferred having one of the Mavericks himself. Knowlington told him switching them around would have cost them too much time, and even laughed when A-Bomb told him he could set it up himself.
Which he could have, no sweat.
A-Bomb willed his eyes into full-blown owl mode as he stared from the cockpit. Maybe from now on he’d carry some carrots with him, get that extra night-light boost.
Hell, if only he had found an Apache pilot and made that trade. It was top priority when he got back.
Better yet, go mail order and buy himself a pair of starlight goggles. There’d be complications with the instrument glow but hell, Clyston or one of his guys could figure that out.
Maybe they could take whatever the gizmo was that worked the damn thing and expand it to fit the glass of the canopy. So you could have an entire panel of night vision.
That was what he was talking about.
Give me a flare, Mongoose. One lousy, stinking flare. That’s all I’m sayin’.
CHAPTER 40
Northern Saudi Arabia
22 January 1991
0425
By the time the Huey landed, Dixon had realized he wasn’t being clandestinely ferried back to the Home Drome, machinations or not. They had flown northwest, and at top speed; by his calculations Iraq was about half a stone’s throw away. He decided that clearance for the Special Ops Scud mission must have come through. His reward— or maybe punishment— was to be granted observer status on the first mission.
Not that he was objecting, but . . .
The Huey hulked in close to the dark hulk of a fat MH-53J. Originally drawn up as a heavy-lifter, the long-distance helicopter was bigger than a diesel locomotive and a couple of times more powerful. Something like fifty-five troops could crowd into the back, along with the three-man crew. Her real asset, however, were the powerful, long-range electronics and sensors that provided the “Pave Low” designation.
He wasn’t sure it was the right helicopter or even if he really, truly, should be here. But since he didn’t see any other helicopters nearby, Dixon jumped out and ran for it. He kept his head down though there was plenty of clearance.
“Hey, you Dixon?” said the sergeant at the door.
“Yeah?”
“Well come on, Lieutenant. We’ve been waiting for you.”
The sergeant grabbed hold of his arm and yanked him not only into the Pave Low, but practically through to the other side. At the last second, he managed to change his momentum and found himself stumbling toward the front of the big warbird. Just as he was about to steady himself on a bar near the cockpit, the big bird lifted off. Dixon bounced to his left then flew back to the right as the helo’s massive rotors beat the air. He slipped and rolled onto something hard.
It turned out to be the floor.
“What the hell you doin’ down there, BJ?” asked the pilot— his old root beer-drinking buddy, Major Greer.
“I heard the floors on these things were clean enough to eat off,” grunted Dixon, trying to get to his feet despite a fresh jink.
Dixon, who had been aboard a Super Jolly Green Giant before, knew that the choppers could fly relatively smoothly, even when they were moving fast. Apparently Greer hadn’t read that part of the sales brochure.
“About time you got up here,” said Greer. “I been waiting half the night for you.”
“Scud attack hung me up.”
“See? I told you. If we were going for them, you wouldn’t have to put up with that bullshit anymore.”
“We’re not going after the Scuds?”
“Hell no. At least, not tonight. We’re going to go fetch us a Hog driver. Nobody told you?”
“Mongoose?”
“That Major Johnson?”
“Yup.”
“That’s who we’re getting.”
“You found him?”
“I didn’t say we found him. I said we were going to go get him. I’ve been waiting for word that he was found. Lucky for you it didn’t come or we would have been gone.”
Dixon wondered to himself if the other half of that equation meant Mongoose had been unlucky.
“We’d like to make the pickup in the dark,” added the helicopter pilot. “Less people to shoot at us. Sun won’t come up until almost 0530. But we’ll have some fog after that, most likely, so we have some leeway.”
“Has he been spotted yet?”
“No. But we want to get closer so we can make a quick pick-up. Saddam won’t mind if we hang out over the fence, you think?”
“Nah.”
“Word is your colonel knows where he is. Went to mark the way for us.”
“Colonel Knowlington? No shit.”
“If we get lucky, we may smoke a stinking Scud launcher on the way back,” said the major. “Then we’ll all be heroes. Sergeant, fix him up, would you? And keep him calm. Dixon here blasted an Iraqi Hind the other day and word is he’s bucking for the Medal of Honor. I don’t want him falling out of my aircraft until we’re back home.”
CHAPTER 41
On the ground in Iraq
22 January 1991
0430
The trucks were old military model flatbeds— Soviet he thought, or maybe French— , though as far as Mongoose was concerned their most notable feature was the particularly uncomfortable ribbed metal bed in the back. He sat against the wall of the cab, opposite his two guards, who were crouched a short distance away. Five or six other soldiers
clung to various parts of the open back. They didn’t have to grip too hard; the truck was moving at a snail’s pace, following in the dark behind the vehicle equipped with the searchlight. Neither truck seemed to have a muffler, and both were running rougher than the old Camaro Mongoose had owned in high school. Maybe the four hours they’d spent sitting idle as the Iraqis searched got his nonexistent copilot had fouled their plugs.
When they had captured him, Mongoose assumed the men were part of the Iraqi Republican Guard, crack troops equipped with the best weapons and generally regarded as the best disciplined soldiers in the army. Now he wasn’t so sure. He’d seen pictures of the Guards where they were wearing berets; there were no berets in sight, and in fact most of these men had fairly plain uniforms. Most seemed barely teenagers, not the hardened veterans who had fought the Iranians to a stand-still.
His guards had rolled the cuffs of their khaki pants away from the heels of their boots. Even in the dim light, he could tell the ends were frayed. One of the men made an effort to frown every time he caught Mongoose looking at him. The other just stared.
The soldier who had tried to hit him was in the other vehicle. The men on this truck were more curious than angry, and if it weren’t for the roar of the poorly tuned truck motor he might have tried striking up a conversation. Mongoose figured their curiosity was more or less in his favor; it might make them less inclined, or at least less quick, to shoot him.
There had been no interrogation yet. The officer hadn’t seemed much interested in doing anything but making sure he was alone, and then taking him back to wherever they were going in one piece.
But the questioning would surely come. And it wouldn’t necessarily be pleasant.
Mongoose knew a great deal about the Hogs, their tactics and the general situation, but he hardly possessed any great military secrets. Even so, he wanted to give up as little as possible. He certainly wouldn’t volunteer information. But he had to be realistic; it would be impossible to say absolutely nothing if the Iraqis began torturing him. It was a question of how long he could hold out, and what information he could hold back.
Part of him wanted to jump up and dive over the side of the truck right now, make a desperate, foolhardy attempt to escape. But his job wasn’t to do something stupid; it was to survive.
Kath needed him to survive. So did Robby.
Every night before turning in, Mongoose sat in his tent and wrote a just-in-case letter, a last word to his wife in case he didn’t make it back. Knowlington would probably have it by now.
Knowlington. His opinion of the commander had changed somewhat since the fighting started. He actually had done a decent job pulling the unit together; only two months ago it had been organized only on paper, a discordant melange of planes destined for the junk heap with barely enough men to get them there. As Knowlington’s second-in-command, Johnson had done a lot of the work in Saudi Arabia himself, especially with the pilots, but he had to admit, ol’ Skull had a good way about him. He knew just about everybody in the air force. Between him and Sergeant Clyston— a man whose rating seemed to stretch into triple digits— the unit was the best supplied on the base, maybe in the entire air force. Plus, Knowlington just about glowed reassurance, spreading calm and patience wherever he went. Despite all his personal problems, the guy had seen this shit before; he put it in perspective. He thought before he spoke, and actually listened to what people told him.
Maybe too much, since he had been known to ask an airman what he thought and actually consider the advice. The colonel wasn’t by-the-book enough for Mongoose’s taste, not by a mile. And then there was the drinking, which wasn’t much of a secret, though he seemed to have knocked it off since coming to the war zone.
But Knowlington’s biggest knock was the fact that he was a low-timer in the Hog; some of the mechanics probably had flown more. He was an outsider, a fast-mover pilot and commander who ended up heading the A-10 squadron— technically, it was a wing, though only at squadron force— completely by accident. If it hadn’t been for a last minute request by Schwarzkopf himself, Knowlington would have overseen these planes’ flight to the boneyard, not Iraq. Whoever had cut the original orders had basically intended him to be a junkyard foreman, not a combat commander.
But he was a combat commander, and not a bad one. Maybe a real good one. He’d gone through hell in Vietnam, with medals and scars to prove it. He was a real pilot, probably a hero once.
Shit, some day they might say that about him.
Assuming he made it back.
Checklist. Stay in the here and now.
Mongoose imagined himself with a sign around his neck that said he was a war criminal. For some reason, he also saw himself naked — and began to laugh.
The guards looked at him as if he was laughing at them. But he couldn’t stop himself. It seemed like the most hilarious thing in the world, him naked.
* * *
Ten or fifteen minutes later, Mongoose was jerked against the cab as the truck stopped short with a crash, rear-ending the one it had been following. The pain in his head, which had subsided almost to the point where he didn’t notice it, returned with a vengeance. His knee gave a fresh twinge of pain.
Both of his guards fell at his feet. They weren’t curious now— they grabbed him viciously and pulled him from the flatbed.
“I didn’t do it,” he said, holding out his hands. “Please. My leg.”
In the next moment he was tossed over the side. He couldn’t get his arms out in front of him quickly enough and the bottom of his jaw snapped upwards, barely missing his tongue, but hurting like all hell anyway. Arms grabbed him and hauled him to his feet; finally a shout from the captain made his captors ease up.
The truck ahead had blown a tire. He thought for a moment that they were going to put him to work changing it, but the soldiers did that themselves after pulling the two vehicles apart. The officer in charge passed by him, shaking his head.
He returned a few minutes later and asked if Mongoose wanted a cigarette.
“Don’t smoke,” said Mongoose.
“Bad for your health, right?” The man took a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and carefully removed a cigarette. “Very difficult to get these days,” he told Mongoose. “American-dog cigarettes. But we all need our luxuries.”
“How do you know English?”
“Everyone knows English.” As he lit the cigarette, the man’s face glowed red. It was not a gentle face, despite his manner. “I went to college at Midwestern. I am an engineer.”
“And you came back?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
No, he wouldn’t, thought Mongoose, and then he realized that of course he would— he would return to his home and family and soon as he could, just as he would when this deployment ended.
“A materials engineer. I could be in great demand in Europe. But there are always complications,” said the officer. “Yourself?”
“I’m just a pilot.”
“Where did you go to school?”
Mongoose hesitated, considering whether the information might somehow help his captor. Probably not, only in the vague way of helping to build rapport. But that probably cut both ways; it might make the man more trusting, and easier to lie to.
“RPI,” he told him. “I was an engineering major, too.”
“Really? Very good. Very good.” The officer nodded, then took a long drag from his cigarette. He seemed as if he was going to say more, but one of his men called him over to the truck.
They’d taken his watch with everything else, so Mongoose wasn’t sure what time it was. From the sky, he guessed that it might be an hour before dawn, somewhere in the long twilight before the sun rose.
If these guys were Moslems— and that seemed a damn good bet— they’d stop for morning prayers. Might be a good time to try running for it.
Why not try now, then? The ground sloped off from the road. The shadows thickened a short distance away.
The running l
ights of the nearby truck flashed on as the motor came to life.
He caught some low-slung shadows ahead in the strands of moonlit night fog. Buildings, maybe a city, or just a unit headquarters of some type.
His destination?
The truck at the front coughed a few times but refused to start. The motor ground out an incessant whine.
The sound reminded him of a moment two years before, during winter, of his wife having trouble and flooding the car.
He pushed the idea away. Here and now. Checklist mode.
The officer shouted to his men as the battery’s charge ground down. A group went to the back of the truck, as if they were going to push it, and then jump-start it.
That’ll never work, Mongoose thought to himself. But then the AAA probably didn’t offer roadside assistance out here.
As he watched them grunt and groan the vehicle forward, he heard a low, almost guttural hum in the distance.
A Hog.
Was he dreaming it? He looked toward the sky.
The truck engine sputtered and coughed, then somehow caught. He strained to hear over the sound. For undoubtedly the first time in his life he cursed the fact that the A-10A’s turbofans were relatively quiet.
The truck drowned out whatever he had heard. If he had heard anything.
Run for it?
One of his guards put his rifle into Mongoose’s side and prodded him toward their vehicle. He kept his eyes trained toward the sky for another second, desperate to see something.
The guard pushed him forward.
“Into the truck, let’s go,” the Iraqi captain told him. “Now, Major.”
“I have to take a leak,” said Mongoose, desperate to hear the noise again.
“You can relieve yourself when we arrive at our headquarters. It won’t be long.”
“But— ”
“I should not like to shoot you, but I will certainly do so if you do not get on the truck.” The captain had his hand on his pistol.
Hogs #2: Hog Down Page 15
