by Jim DeFelice
“About time you caught up, lieutenant,” he said.
There was no answer.
“You have to press the little doohickey to get the radio to work,” he said sarcastically. Doberman pressed his Hog earthwards, deciding mid-plunge to leave the gun in favor of a building slightly to the south. It hadn’t been tasked, but what the hell, a building was a building.
“Seriously, Dixon, let’s see if that cannon of yours works,” Doberman called as he lined up on the building. “Get yourself oriented and trail on this pass, okay? Then we’ll head for SierraMax.”
Still no acknowledgment. Doberman felt a twinge of anger at his wingmate; he liked the kid but he’d be damned if he wiped the young newbie’s ass for him.
Dixon bored in, unconsciously sinking lower and lower in the well-protected cockpit. He worked the building dead into his sights, then felt the stutter-stutter-stutter of the Hog as it spat bullets from its nose. The top of the structure blew apart, bits of stone, roof tar and machinery cascading upwards — followed by a spectacularly showy explosion.
One of his shells had ignited a gas line.
Dixon winged through a fireball, shouting like a cowboy busting a favored steer at a rodeo. Banking and climbing away for all he was worth, he congratulated himself for expending ammunition in an extremely expeditious manner. The Hog swaggered a bit — not so much out of pride but because it had taken a few bullets in the stabilizer — but in general he was in fine shape for the return run home.
Dixon pointed himself toward the rendezvous point. He craned his neck to see if Dixon had followed in on the cannon run.
It was then that he realized why the young lieutenant hadn’t acknowledged his instructions.
The plane behind him wasn’t an A-10A. It was a Mirage F-l. And it wasn’t a French jet that had strayed over the lines, either. The dull green and brown camo on her wing was punctuated by a bright red streak of Iraqi lightning. Had Doberman had the time or inclination, he would have had no trouble picking out the three stars sandwiched between the red and green fields in the Iraqi flag on her tail.
CHAPTER 2
OVER WESTERN IRAQ
0658
At roughly the same moment that Doberman discovered Dixon wasn’t on his tail, Dixon was staring into the blankness of the sky in front of him, slowly realizing that he was lost — completely and utterly lost. He was somewhere deep inside Iraq, without the vaguest notion of which direction he had to head in.
A compass sat directly in front of his face, and the center instrument panel across from his chest was dominated by an INS navigational system. While not without its problems, the unit could nonetheless be counted on to give at least a semi-accurate location. But at the moment it was about as useful to him as a map of Wisconsin.
Climbing after firing his Mavericks, Dixon had run into an aerial minefield. Antiair shells exploded in every direction, the Hog bucking and shaking like a car with three flat tires on a washboard highway. Miraculously, none of the shells did any damage, or at least not enough to affect the plane. Dixon climbed and climbed, his heart skipping as his lungs gulped in rapid staccato. Finally clear of the exploding black bursts, he kept going — to nearly twenty thousand feet, which took forever in a loaded Hog. It wasn’t what he had planned to do, and certainly not what he had rehearsed for days. Still, he got the plane’s nose angled down for a second run and prepared for a second run with the Mavericks; he was still in control.
Dixon had been a Division II quarterback in college, and he gave himself one of his old pep talks, as if he were clearing his head after a particularly vicious blitz. When Doberman failed to respond to his radio call he felt a twinge of anxiety, but pushed it away, hoping his flight leader was just too busy to respond.
He had flown wider than planned, and further north — and lost his leader, at least momentarily — but as he peered through the broken cloud layer he could feel his confidence returning. He pushed downward, searching both the air ahead for Doberman and the ground below for his brief targets. The clouds made both tasks difficult; he willed them away, sliding toward the Iraqi complex in a shallow dive. Suddenly the radar dish Doberman had targeted snapped into view.
Dixon was surprised to see it still intact.
Okay, he told himself, I have a target. He steepened the dive, confidence beginning to build.
Then clouds filled the windscreen. He turned quickly to the video monitor. A blur fell into the crosshairs and he pushed the trigger on his AGM, locking not on a dish but a building. He fired anyway, continuing downward into clear sky.
But now the site was jumbled around, different from the satellite pictures and maps he’d studied. Doberman’s dish was gone; the trailers were laid out in a different pattern. He shot his eyes back and forth, trying to orient himself. The muscles in his throat closed, desperately trying to keep his stomach acid from erupting in his mouth. Black bursts were exploding in front of him; there was fire and smoke on the ground. Finally, he saw a grouping of trailers he thought he recognized, locked on the middle one, and fired. The Maverick clunked away as the plane followed the motion of his arm, stiffly pulling to the left in a long descending bank as his eyes remained glued on the television display, now completely blank.
More than thirty seconds passed before he pulled his head upright. By then the Hog had flown well beyond the target area. There was nothing on the desert floor in front of him.
For a moment then, Lieutenant William Dixon- star athlete, star student, prized recruit, a young man headed toward a top F-15 assignment until his mother’s failing health complicated his career priorities- forgot how to fly. His arms and legs moved independently of his head. With his left hand he reached for the stick when he meant to adjust the throttle; with his right he tuned the radio when he meant to check the INS settings.
A voice in his head yelled that he wasn’t breathing right. He’d been hyperventilating probably since takeoff and the voice knew that a good part of his problem was physical. But Dixon couldn’t get the voice to do anything but yell impotently. The A-10, confused by its pilot’s commands, started heading toward the ground.
* * *
Doberman smashed the throttle and threw the Hog into a tight turn, trying to get inside the Mirage and set up an overshoot — putting the faster but less maneuverable plane ahead of him, a classic turn-the-tables ploy. The Mirage pilot anticipated the move, and traded some of his altitude for speed, breaking off in a diving straight line away. The move would have meant death for the Iraqi if Doberman had been able to complete his turn; even with the widening range and the lost energy, his Sidewinders probably could have caught the Mirage.
But Doberman didn’t have a prayer of turning in time, much less firing his heat-seekers; in fact, he didn’t dare complete his turn. The bogey had tossed off two heat seekers just as the Hog started away. One shot off wild, sucking the fire off one of the diversionary flares the Hog driver kicked out.
The other sniffed the air and caught a faint whiff of Hog turbofan dead ahead.
* * *
Dixon blinked his eyes, focusing not on the windscreen but the horizon indicator below it. He had to get it level. That was his first job, before all others.
The round sphere spun madly, whirling with no discernible axis. It fluttered and waved and shook without any pattern. It refused to be controlled, refused to assume any direction other than its own.
The pilot reached out and grabbed it, sparks flying from his hands. The sparks ignited his flight suit, burning his safety harness away, setting his arms and chest on fire.
He held on. His breath roared in his ears, rapid as the rod on a locomotive’s wheels. His entire body was on fire, but he held the sphere tight.
It stopped spinning. The cowl around his head lifted ever so slightly. He had both hands on the stick, and he had control of the bomb-laden Hog.
“The plane is level,” he heard himself say. Next step, climb to a safe altitude.
How do you climb? You put the
nose toward the stars, you pull your arm gently back, you feel your chest relax…
Slowly, his eyes rose with the nose of the plane. The pilot found himself staring into the muddled gray of the Iraqi dawn.
But where there should be clouds, he saw flowers — hundreds and hundreds of grayish-white lilies. Their mouths turned toward him, delicate satin tongues that brushed gently against the hard surface of the warplane’s fuselage. Dixon and his Hog were surrounded, folded in an endless blanket of beautiful flowers.
It was the most wondrous thing he’d ever seen. And then he realized that he had seen these flowers before.
At his mother’s funeral three months ago.
CHAPTER 3
OVER WESTERN IRAQ
0658
Several miles to the west, Devil One and Devil Three were mopping up their attack on a similar set of dishes and trailers. Flown by two of the most experienced pilots in the squadron, the Hogs had made a serious dent in the Iraqi air defense system. They might looked more like bathtubs with wings than attack planes, but together the two Hogs had done enough damage to impress even a snot-nose Strike Eagle commander.
With a lot less fuss than a sissy-ass state-of-the-art F-15E required, thought the pilot of Devil Three, Captain Thomas Peter “A-Bomb” O’Rourke. Like a lot of other committed A-10A drivers, A-Bomb had nothing but disdain for the pointy-nose, fast-jet community. Unlike most other Hog drivers, he expressed it at every opportunity.
Just now, his audience was an Iraqi radar trailer. In all likelihood, its crewmen didn’t hear a word he was saying, even though he was shouting at the top of his lungs.
They’d get the message soon enough. He held his Hog’s stick tight between his knees as he squeezed the trigger at the top of the handle. Dust erupted from the building, metal evaporating under the ferocious onslaught of cannon shells. The pilot stopped yelling and stared at the windscreen in front of him, pushing the trigger an extra second to complete the destruction. Then he pulled up, feeling the rubber of his mask and the tight fit of the helmet around his pudgy head. He could taste metal in his mouth and felt the steady rush of his breath down his throat into his lungs.
A-Bomb put the Hog on its wingtip, scanning ahead for the flight leader, Major James “Mongoose” Johnson. A greenish-black hulk was climbing maybe a quarter of a mile off to his left. A-Bomb checked his fuel, and did a quick scan of his instruments and warning indicators. Clean, he pitched the Hog more or less level.
“Devil One to Three. A-Bomb, you back there?”
“I got your butt in my sights,” A-Bomb replied.
“Let’s dance down to SierraMax and pick up Doberman and his pup,” said lead.
“Gotcha.”
Mongoose could be a hard-ass — a lot of the maintenance people hid when he came around the hangars — but he and A-Bomb went back a ways. A-Bomb had seen him pull strings to keep a fellow pilot from going to jail in Germany for a minor brawl; in his opinion that was as true a test of desirable character as any known to man.
The two jets climbed as they flew south. Without the weight and drag of the bombs, the ride to twenty thousand- practically outer space to a Hog pilot- wasn’t nearly as hard as it had been when they set out from their home base at King Fahd air base a million hours ago. But they took their time about it, careful to keep parading their eyes through the sky around them in case an intruder somehow managed to sneak nearby.
They were still climbing as they approached the checkpoint set for the rendezvous with their two mates. Devil One angled toward an easy orbit; Devil Three fell in behind. They were about sixty seconds early- an eternity for the notoriously punctual Doberman, who was leading the second element.
A-Bomb eased himself in his harness, loosening not only his restraints but his mask and helmet. Steadying the Hog with his left hand, he reached his right hand down to a custom-sewn pouch on the leg of his flight suit. There he removed a small titanium thermos- bulletproof, naturally- notched the cap to the open position with his thumb, and took a sip.
His radio crackled mid-swallow.
“A-Bomb, you want to look me over for damage while we’re waiting?” asked Mongoose.
“Be with you in a minute,” he grunted back.
* * *
Mongoose guessed what A-Bomb was up to. Few if any other Hog pilots would drink coffee on such a long mission- hell, on any mission. And at twenty thousand feet! If the sheer logistics didn’t get you, the piddle pack would. But that was one of the many wondrous things about A-Bomb- he never seemed to have to pee. And no obstacle, whether it was gravity, an enemy missile or a general out for his butt, ever stopped him from an objective.
Which made him the perfect wingman.
Mongoose shook his head, then rechecked their position for the third time. After they picked up Doberman and Dixon, they would fly back across the border to Al Jouf, a small spit of a strip in northwestern Saudi Arabia. There they would be refueled and rearmed. After that, they were supposed to cross back north and put some dents in Iraqi tanks- child’s play after this mission, though as far as he could tell things had gone pretty damn well so far.
Assuming Doberman and the kid showed up soon.
Thinking about anything too much made you worry about it, but sometimes it was impossible to clear your head. As flight leader and the squadron director of operations or DO, Major Johnson felt enormously responsible, not just for the mission but the men flying it. And that made him think. He thought about Doberman and Dixon, willing the two Hogs to appear. The cloud cover had gradually thickened; he worried that the second half of the mission would be grounded. He wondered about the other members of the 535th, who had been assigned to fly with other squadrons for the opening day festivities.
Mongoose took another gander at his fuel, then glanced back at his watch. Doberman was now a full three minutes late. He didn’t know him very well- the entire squadron had been patched together for deployment only a few weeks before- but it seemed uncharacteristic of the captain, who could be anal-retentive when it came to planning and poker. He was the kind of guy who not only stacked his chips according to color, but made sure they were all facing the same direction.
Which meant you always knew how much you’d won from him. The guy had the worst luck on the base.
* * *
A-Bomb replaced the thermos, then ran his hand into another pocket in his flight suit. “Born in the USA” blared from two small but powerful speakers carefully sewn behind mesh patches near his knees. He was thinking he might change the CD — he was in kind of a “Greetings From Asbury Park” mood — when Mongoose reminded him he was supposed to be checking for flak damage.
“You still with me or what?” barked the major, the radio barely audible over Springsteen.
A-Bomb closed in on Devil One and eyeballed the aluminum. The green camo looked completely unblemished.
“Jeez, Goose, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear you had that sucker washed and waxed.”
“One of these days you’re not going to get enough oxygen and your brain’s going to fry,” said Mongoose. “We’re pretty damn high to be screwing with your mask.”
“I got a straw goes right through.” By now A-Bomb had passed slowly under Devil One and was surveying the other side. “Cleaner than the day you drove it out of the showroom.”
“Let’s see how you made out,” said the flight leader, winging back to inspect A-Bomb’s A-10A.
“I thought I heard something hit my left wing,” said A-Bomb. “But it feels okay.”
“What the hell is that racket in the background?”
“RWR’s giving me trouble. Just checking the settings,” answered A-Bomb.
“I didn’t realize your threat indicator played guitar.”
“Shit, you wouldn’t believe the things Clyston’s techies can do with a pair of pliers,” said the pilot. “This sucker’s better tuned than a Spark Vark.”
“Uh-huh. Maybe we should just have you fly over the missile batteries and k
nock out the radar for us.”
“That wouldn’t be any fun. Ahmed has to have something to play with.”
A “Spark Vark” was an F-lll fighter-bomber outfitted with special gear to detect and jam enemy radars. The RWRS in the A-10A were based on technology that dated from Vietnam; while they could detect a variety of radars — usually they couldn’t jam them.
Or play guitar.
Jamming was left to a counter-measures pod carried on the right wing of the plane. The needle-shaped box was many years old and about two generations behind the times. The ECMs worked well against the radars it was designed to work well against, but the Iraqis had plenty of sophisticated defense systems beyond their reach. Devil Squadron hadn’t won whatever lottery was held for the few more advanced versions that had been shipped to the desert. Even those were considered a bit behind the curve.
But hell, a Hog with advanced ECMs? Kind of against the point, in A-Bomb’s opinion.
He held steady while the other Hog came in for an inspection. A-Bomb waved at Mongoose, then glanced at his watch again. Devils Two and Four were now more than five minutes late, an eternity in a war zone.
If it were up to him, he’d head north and find them. But it wasn’t his call.
* * *
Mongoose swung under the other plane, consciously trying to take his time and focus on the job in front of him. Doberman could take care of himself.
A-Bomb’s Hog was unblemished. They’d anticipated heavy anti-air, but the truth was, they’d encountered only sporadic fire, most of it unaimed. Still, all it took was one lucky shot to ruin your day.
Just as he was about to tell A-Bomb he was clean, Mongoose heard a hail over the radio from their E-3 Sentry AWACS controller. “Cougar” was flying back behind the border, helping coordinate the air war in this sector. The airborne situation room functioned like the coaching staff in a stadium skybox, calling in plays and alerting the pilots to blitzes and stunts.
