Hogs #4:Snake Eaters

by DeFelice, Jim

  He had the dark spot under the highway, the cursor was there. His thumb moved over the trigger.

  “Bing-bang-boom,” he said calmly, pushing the Maverick off from beneath his wing. The thick cylinder slipped downwards, its blunt nose locked on the target. For a moment it stood in the air, propelled only by forward momentum, still part of the airplane. Then the Thiokol solid-fuel rocket caught with a throaty roar; the missile flashed away, bobbing upwards briefly before setting her teeth to the job at hand.

  Doberman pulled off, heart-pumping. He saw another flash in the shadow of the hill— something big was firing down there.

  He had to make sure the erector was down. That was his priority.

  There were more trucks, something moving of the road.

  Too much.

  He took a hard breath, focusing his attention as he snapped the jet back into the attack path. He pushed his whole body down to the right, as if he wanted to ram the video screen with his head. He slipped the Maverick’s aim point down and saw smoke lingering from the first missile hit.

  Nailed the sucker. The culvert had been replaced by an immense crater.

  He began hunting for another target, preferably the SAM at the close end of the highway. He found it, lost it, then pulled off, realizing he was at the edge of his safety margin.

  He banked south, intending to turn to the east and come at the SA-9 from the other direction. He was just straightening out when he saw a long thick shadow several hundred yards south of the highway, in a cleared area to his left.

  The Scud erector had been moved.

  CHAPTER 37

  NEAR AL-KAJUK, IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1820

  Wong repeated his message into the communications handset as the Iraqi tanks began firing. Behind him, two of the Delta team members peppered the slope with automatic fire and grenades.

  “Devil One this is Apache Fire Team Snake Eaters,” Wong said. “Do you have your ears on?”

  “Ears on? What the hell, Wong, you think you’re talking into a god damn CB set?” responded Doberman. “Shit.”

  “I selected a vernacular sure to attract your attention,” he replied. “You did not answer my first two calls.”

  “What calls? I’ve tried hailing you three or four times over the past ten minutes.”

  A fresh salvo of grenades exploded down the hill. The Iraqi tanks had so far aimed very high, their shells sailing far over the hillside. Wong had no illusion, however, that that would continue indefinitely. Golden ran back and began tugging his sleeve— they had to move out.

  “There are three Scud carriers en route to the erector site,” Wong told Doberman quickly. “Do you copy?”

  “I don’t see the carriers but I have the erector. It’s moved from the culvert. Are you under attack?”

  “Immaterial,” said Wong. “The Scuds are your priority.”

  “No shit. I’m going to vector in help. I see three tanks. Are you on the hill?”

  “The SA-9s have a lethal envelope slightly beyond the published specifications that you may be aware of,” said Wong calmly. “Recent alterations to the infra-red seeker heads as well as some improvements in the rocket motor have increased their kill potential by a factor of one-point-five.”

  The hillside reverberated as the T-62s fired their 100 mm guns nearly simultaneously. Their charges slammed into the hillside below the American position. Golden lost his balance, grabbing Wong as he fell.

  “We have to go,” he said.

  “Wong, there’s a helo on its way,” Doberman shouted. “Call sign . . .”

  The rest of the transmission was swallowed by static.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to relocate,” he told Doberman as the ground shook again. The Iraqis had once more missed, but their margin was much closer. Dirt and debris showered around him; Wong lost his balance and the headset, rolling against the rocks.

  “Now!” shouted Golden, managing to get to his feet. He told his men to cover the retreat with smoke grenades and move out. “Smoke! Smoke! Come on, Wong!”

  Wong scooped up the satellite antenna and began dragging the Satcom rucksack down the hillside. He’d only taken two steps when he remembered that he hadn’t searched the Iraqi commander. He threw down the dish and turned back.

  “Where the hell are you going, Wong?” shouted Golden.

  “Be right with you, Sergeant. Please take the Satcom and proceed without me,” yelled Wong.

  In the next moment a fresh set of salvos from the tanks rocked the hillside. Wong flew face-first into the hill. The last member of the fire team slid past to the left. Wong pushed himself to his feet.

  The Iraqis were shouting below, their voices a cacophony of anguished cries and commands to attack.

  Wong began to choke. He put his arm to his face, using his sleeve as a makeshift filter. The Iraqi captain lay heaped over to his right, perhaps ten yards away. As he ran toward it, the tanks launched another set of salvos. While their rate of fire was admirable, their marksmanship left a lot to be desired, though not by Wong. He stumbled sideways down the hill a few feet, lost his balance and fell onto the Iraqi’s body. The thick cloud of soot and dirt made it impossible to see what he was doing; he had to feel for the pockets with his hands. He found a folded map or document and something in one of the shirt flaps. That was going to have to suffice.

  He threw himself backwards in the direction he’d come, rolling two or three yards downhill before managing to get his arm out and lever himself to his feet. He heard the sound of a tank shell whizzing by at close range and thought of the old saying about the shell you heard was never the one that got you. There must be some truth to that, he realized, given the innate lag time involved in the speed of sound and the human aural apparatus.

  In the next second, he found himself flying through the air, launched by an explosion he hadn’t heard.

  CHAPTER 38

  OVER IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1822

  Gravity slapped Doberman hard in the head, punishing him for trying to do too many things at once. He struggled, holding the hard maneuver and fighting the instinct that wanted him to ease off on the stick. He lost Wong’s transmission in a tangle of static; saw all sorts of ground fire and had a warning on the RWR. Fighting off the confusion, he steadied his hand on the stick and put his eyes back on the Maverick video monitor, pasting them there as he waited for the long gray shadow of the missile erector to appear. Some kind of ground battery, probably on a mobile platform, began firing flak at him; black pebbles and white streaks dotted the video screen as well as the canopy above him.

  No target.

  Doberman cursed. He pulled back on the stick, starting to bank to his right and try again. The long ladder materialized at the edge of his screen. It fuzzed, and for a moment he couldn’t be sure whether he had his target or an optical illusion. He stayed on course and switched the Maverick into what passed for close-up mode, doubling the magnification but narrowing his range of vision by about the same percentage.

  The ladder morphed into a two-by-six with graffiti, then back into something approximating a construction crane half covered by a tarp. The crane portion was moving, swinging around slowly. Doberman steadied the small aiming cursor on the heart of the lumber and let the missile go. He kept his eyes on the screen for another two or three seconds, locked on his target, entranced by the gray fuzz. Then he shook himself out of it and yanked the Hog around, hitting the diversionary flares. He assumed the SA-9s had launched and jinked hard right then back left, leaving the small flares out to suck their IR sensors away.

  At least he hoped they would. He counted off twenty seconds, shucking and jiving the whole way, cutting corners in the sky before starting to reorient himself for another attack. The altimeter ladder told him he’d fallen to 8,050 feet. The CBUs— long suitcases of miniature anti-armor and personnel bombs— had been preset to be delivered from roughly eight thousand feet; he’s have to g
et higher to get a good angle before letting them go. He swung out of his bank and put his nose upwards, now more than twelve miles from his target, well out of range of the missiles and flak in a swatch of open air. He could see large flashes near the hill on the left, in front of the village.

  Wong’s team, taking heavy fire. He’d have to try and help them, the SA-9s be damned.

  “Devil One to Bro leader,” he said, trying to raise the F-16s. Doberman angled to make his approach from the west, keeping as much distance between himself and the SAMs until the last moment. He saw a flash off his right wing, then something moving on the ground further along— maybe the Scuds.

  Another set of muzzle flashes below the hill. If they kept that up, he’d have an easy time taking them out.

  Couldn’t use the CBUs – no telling how close the tanks were to Wong.

  Have to mash them with the cannon.

  Lower attack. Have to hurry, too. The bastards were flailing.

  He tried the F-16s one last time. When the radio didn’t snap back with pointy nose slang, Doberman called the AWACS, asking for information on the Vipers and giving his position. In the meantime, the Hog seemed to fly herself, homing in on the thick shadows at the base of the hill. He was near in range as his finger clicked off the talk button; his eyes separated the fresh muzzle flashes into real targets, thick and juicy. Doberman slammed the stick hard, pitching the Hog into the attack. A gray shroud filled his windshield, a cloud of dust or smoke or fog spewing from the hillside.

  Come on, he thought to himself. Fire again you bastards. Show me where the hell you are.

  “Bro flight is zero-three from target,” said the AWACS controller over the radio. Doberman lost the rest of the message as he struggled to find the tanks in the darkness. Something very bright flashed in the distance, back near the highway.

  He was below four thousand feet and still didn’t have a target. He had mud and crap and dirt and shit, but no target.

  SA-9s on their way. That was what the flash was.

  Three thousand feet. Shit. What the hell happened?

  Two thousand. Too late now. Sorry Wong.

  He broke off, changing his plan as the Hog slid down into the mud, a thousand feet and still in a dive. He had a good view of the highway and saw a tower peeking out from the village— the minaret from the mosque, obviously— about eleven o’clock off his nose. A four-barreled Zsu-23 opened up near the edge of the village, its stream of bullets whipping for him. Doberman’s brain went critical, leaping into full-blown Hog driver mode; he dodged the stream of shells without thinking about them, hunkering in the A-10A’s titanium bathtub while his eyes hunted for something to hit. He had a long shadow in the center of the roadway a quarter of a mile off. He couldn’t tell what it was, but at this point it didn’t matter. Thirty-millimeter slugs from the Hog’s gun chewed into the thick brick, slicing it in two. There was no secondary explosion, however, and Doberman was by it before he could tell for sure what he’d hit. He banked hard, trying to cut a path low against the hill, away from the flak.

  Dragged down by the four heavy cluster bombs on her wings, the Hog wallowed in the air, her energy robbed by the maneuvers and momentum.

  He saw a flash from the corner of his eye. It was too big for tracers from the triple-A, but not big enough for the Scud.

  The SA-9, closer than he thought, almost point blank.

  He rammed the stick in the opposite direction and slammed his hand against the button to fire off more decoy flares. But he’d already shot his wad; there was nothing but cold air between his engines and the heat-seeker gunning for him.

  The plane rocked to the right, down to five hundred feet, starting to slide sideways despite her pilot’s efforts to nose her around. Doberman felt something give way in his stomach, and he realized he’d pushed the line way too far tonight.

  CHAPTER 39

  NEAR AL-KAJUK, IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1825

  Dirt and pain pushed Wong’s eyes closed as he fell into the ground. He seemed to fall right through the hill, through the rocks, into hell.

  Curious. He would have thought he’d merit assignment to the other destination.

  The ground rolled around him as he flailed. He heard the distinctive whine of a pair of A-10A turbofans above him and knew he hadn’t died.

  Yet.

  His left eye stayed closed; he saw only haze with his right.

  On his knees, he felt around him, waiting either to die or see. Dust flew in particles in front of his head. Stones. The ground.

  He found two small stubs, felt them gently, pushed his face down into them as his right eye gained focus.

  Two fingers.

  He pulled his own hands to his face to make sure they weren’t his. As he touched his left cheek a flame erupted there.

  His hands were intact. He’d been shot in the face, or near the face. That was why he couldn’t open his left eye.

  Burned, not shot. A piece of a red-hot shrapnel had glanced off his cheekbone. He was extremely lucky— the same shell had obliterated the Iraqi captain’s body; parts of the corpse were scattered around him. Wong’s uniform was soaked with the dead man’s blood.

  An awful roar rent the air. The A-10A fired its cannon at a target on the highway. There was answering fire, explosions everywhere. Missiles and flames leaped into the air.

  Perhaps this really was hell.

  Wong worried that he had dropped the dead man’s papers. He began hunting around on the ground in front of him, hands spread wide like a sunbather who’d lost his contact lens in the sand. Finally he remembered he’d stuffed them in his own pocket— he pounded his chest and found them there, or at least felt something he’d have to pretend were them for now. Still unable to see through his left eye, he heaved himself down the hill toward a large shadow. The figure waved its arms at him, beckoning.

  Charon or Sergeant Golden, at this moment it made no difference. He found his balance and began running with all the strength he had left.

  CHAPTER 40

  OVER IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1827

  Until he’d come to the Gulf, Doberman hadn’t believed in luck. In fact, he’d hated the idea. Trained as an engineer, he thought— he knew— that you could roll all that BS together— luck, ESP, UFOs, ghosts, angels, Santa Claus— and toss it into the trash heap. The world could be expressed mathematically, with cold numbers and complex equations. Things that appeared random actually occurred within predictable parameters, and no amount of superstition could change them.

  But he sure as hell believed in luck now, or at least he wanted to, ramming his body and hopefully the Hog to the southeast and as low as he could go, trying to get his nose pointed toward the SA-9s’ IR sniffers. The idea wasn’t as crazy as it seemed: the less of a heat signal he presented to the missiles, the harder it would be for them to find him. They were galloping toward him at maybe Mach 1.5; he had all of a second and a half to complete his maneuver.

  Doberman got his nose in the direction of the SAM launchers and turned the Hog over, goosing the CBUs from his wings as he did. The plane was far too low for the bombs to explode properly; he just wanted to get rid of the weight.

  Except, one of them did explode. And while the air rumbled around him and sweat poured from every pore of his body, the SA-9 sucked in the sudden heat and dove for it.

  Doberman felt something ping the rear fuselage, a sharp thud and shake, but his controls stayed solid and he was actually climbing. Tracers whizzed well overhead. The air buffeted worse than a hurricane. He saw light and thought he felt heat, and then found a large telephone pole moving on the road ahead of him. It took another second before he saw that the pole was laid out flat and realized it was a Scud carrier, moving on the highway.

  He had to pull back to get it into the aiming cue. The A-10A jerked her nose up and he fired, lead and uranium and blood flowing in a thick hose, splattering the ground and the air. He banked to his r
ight, struggling to reorient himself in the peppery haze as the ground crackled with tracers and muzzle flashes.

  The tanks were back on the other side of the hill. The SAM launchers were on his right; he was within range but he guessed— he hoped— that they’d already shot their wad. He hustled the Hog to the west, trying to keep an eye on the bouncing shadows of black and red. The T-62s were still firing at Wong.

  Doberman drew a long breath. You could build a ship with the flak in the air. Fortunately, the tracers were arcing high into the sky, the shells apparently set to explode far above. For all its fury, the triple-A was harmless.

  Unless, of course, the bullets actually flew through the plane.

  Doberman had a good mark on a tank. He pushed the Hog toward it, judging that he could cut left after firing and avoid the worst of the antiair. Three hundred feet above ground level, he came in on a T-62 turret as the tank’s machine-gun began to fire toward the top of the hill.

  “See you in hell, you son of a bitch,” said Doberman.

  In the two seconds his finger stayed on the trigger, more than a hundred rounds spit from the front of the plane. The foot-long shells glowed in the dimness as they sped toward their target, ripping the highway, the metal of the tank, and then the ground beyond. Half a dozen of the 30 mm warheads made their way through the hard metal of the tank, bouncing wildly in a ricochet of death through the cramped quarters of the thirty-six ton tank.

  By the time the last of the crew had died, Doberman had already trained the Hog’s GAU-8/A Avenger cannon on a second target and begun to fire. His angle was poor, however, and he didn’t have enough room to stay on the tank and not collide with the hill. He flicked off the gun and wagged his way clear for another run, cutting left and then flicking right to give the people firing at him less of a target.