by Jim DeFelice
Mongoose bit back an angry response, then looked at the list of fields. They were all pretty damn far from here; might just as well go on to King Fahd. He checked his map and the latitude-longitude on the INS again. But it wasn’t until he glanced at his own fuel stores that it all clicked.
“Devil Two, give me your fuel status.”
Doberman reported the weight of the fuel in his tanks with a hair less belligerence than before. Mongoose worked out the math. He checked his altitude, then cut his own power to take the Hog down to about one hundred and eighty-five nautical miles an hour. The plane didn’t like it; he dropped the nose and went down to five thousand, where her complaints weren’t quite as vociferous.
“Were you serious that you can cut power ten percent and still fly that thing?” he asked.
“Shit yeah.”
“Do it.”
“What’s going on?” asked A-Bomb.
“I may have to take it lower,” said Doberman.
“Go where you feel comfortable,” said Mongoose. He could tell Doberman had already figured out what he was thinking. “Just don’t put it into the sand.”
“We have to correct three degrees back north.”
“Affirmative. I’ll have the controller tell King Fahd we’re on the way. A-Bomb, go to the replacement tanker, top off and come find us. There’s a track ahead that I’ll jump on as soon as you’re back. Doberman, listen — let’s talk it up the rest of the way back.”
“You think I’m falling asleep?”
“Man, I’m tired,” said Mongoose. “You got to be exhausted.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’m a little beat. What do you want to talk about?”
“Who’s gonna win the Super Bowl?”
“Washington.”
“They’re not in it.”
“They will be by the time I land this thing.”
* * *
According to Doberman’s calculations, the stricken Hog had precisely enough gas to fall one hundred feet short of King Fahd. And no amount of math could change that.
What he hoped for was a strategic gust of wind at the last moment. Or maybe the incalculable effect of fumes and pilot willpower.
But even if he managed enough glide to make the strip, he needed several things to happen. First of all, he needed clearance. While the tower had relayed word that he would get it, things had a way of changing at the last minute.
Secondly, an A-lOA’s flaps were generally set at twenty degrees to land. Doing that on only one side would be like telling the plane to pretend it had been made by Black & Decker. He figured he would be going so damn slow he might be able to fake it. There was enough runway to roll for quite a ways — unless the strip was cluttered with too much traffic. Then he’d have to stand on very thin brakes and pray.
Assuming the right-side landing gear worked, of course. There was no way of knowing until final approach.
But aside from those minor considerations and the fact that for all he knew the wing could sheer off at any second, he was having a wonderful day.
* * *
The thing was, A-Bomb had a double standard. If it had been him flying the Hog, sure as shit, he’d have argued for King Fahd and told Mongoose not to sweat it.
But he wasn’t flying it — and that was no reflection on Doberman’s flying abilities because the dog man was a hell of a balls-out driver — but damn it, he should have punched out as soon as they were over the border. True, they would have lost the A-10 in the process. But better safe than sorry. You just didn’t fly a Hog with a hole in the wing.
Oh sure, you could. A-Bomb could. But he had a double standard.
“Doberman, you read that?” A-Bomb asked when the pilot didn’t immediately acknowledge the tower’s instruction that he was cleared to take it in any way he could.
“I got it,” snapped Doberman.
“You okay with this?”
“You’re sounding like my fucking mother today, A-Bomb. I don’t know which one of you assholes is worse, you or Mongoose. Why don’t you guys relax, huh?”
“Just making sure, prick-face. You ready to try your gear?”
“You gonna hold my dick for me while I pee, too?”
“I might.”
A-Bomb slipped his Hog lower, trying to get a good look beneath Doberman’s wings. The front wheel was down smooth, and so was the wheel beneath the damaged right wing.
But of all things, his left wheel was stuck.
“Uh, Doberman, you’re not going to believe this — ”
“I’m already trying to get it down manually. It must have been hit when the missile struck.”
“No, man, the left wheel. The right one looks fine.”
“You sure you know your left from your right?”
“What’s your indicator say?”
“Damn.”
* * *
Doberman hit the handle to lower the gear twice more. He couldn’t for the life of him figure what the hell the problem was. Like nearly all other aircraft flying, a hydraulic system automatically snapped the landing gear in place. But the Hog also had a safety system; because the wheels folded backwards, they could be manually released and locked into place with help from the slipstream or wind beneath the plane. And that should have happened by now.
One good thing — dropping the right wheel hadn’t snapped the wing in two. Not yet, anyway. But it hadn’t made it any easier to fly.
The runway was maybe a hundred feet away, and damned if the engine wasn’t starting to choke.
He reached for the handle and once again dropped it. Finally, he felt it move.
Or thought he did. Or hoped he did. There was no turning back now.
* * *
Mongoose felt a surge of relief as Doberman’s Hog rolled along the tarmac, smart and sharp as if she’d just been up for a quick qualifying spin. Right behind her came an HC-130 Spectre gunship, also low on fuel and just about trailing an engine.
The major gunned his engine. Looking for his place in the landing stack, he realized that he had to pee so bad he was going to have to duck under the wing once he touched down.
Assuming he could wait that long.
CHAPTER 24
AL JOUF FOB
1539
Technical Sergeant Rosen did a decent job with the Hog, good enough to get the radio and all of the instrumentation working. Between her and the scrub base’s own mechanics, the A-10 was patched and ready to go in what must have been world record time. In fact, for a few minutes it seemed like the base colonel was going to stick it into a four-ship element tasked to go north and bomb trucks.
Dixon felt a twinge of panic when he heard that. But he was also disappointed when the idea was dropped and he was told just to go home instead.
The fuel queue was backed up worse than the entrance ramp to the LA Freeway at rush hour. There was an HC-130 at the head of the line, and damned if the big four-engined monster didn’t look like she was going to drain the trucks dry.
Dixon tried to look disinterested as he sat in the cockpit, checking his way points and all of the marginalia critical for his return trip through King Khalid Military City and back on to King Fahd. He was nervous, and he wasn’t nervous. He could do this in his sleep; it was an easy ferry trip home through friendly skies.
As long as he didn’t come under fire. Then all bets were off.
No they weren’t, he told himself. He’d gotten spooked, sure, but that was because it was the first time and he didn’t know what to expect. The next time would be better. The next time he’d nail the son of a bitch.
He hated the fact that he had lied to Mongoose about dropping the bombs. But on the bottom line, it really didn’t matter. He’d dropped them. He’d gotten his plane back in one piece. That was what was important.
He wondered if he shouldn’t feel a little pissed off at being moved into Doberman’s plane. Yeah, he was the lowest ranking pilot, the least experienced by far, but damn! That was his plane.
And the
son of a bitch had kept him from redeeming himself.
You fall off a horse, you get right back on.
He could. He knew he could.
Whether the Herc was finally topped off or had just exceeded the limit on its credit card, the gas line began to move. Dixon eased up, wondering at the succession of jets that kept straggling onto the desert strip. The end of the runway and the access ramp were crowded with planes. If Jouf was this packed, he wondered what the home dome, King Fahd, would look like. Though much further behind the lines, it housed a full list of units, not to mention every A-10 in the theater. And its long, smooth runways would make it a convenient rest stop for battle weary planes based further south or on one of the two carriers in the nearby Gulf.
“Hey Yank! Yank!”
Dixon suddenly realized that a man in a green flight suit was doing jumping jacks in front of his right wing. His mouth seemed to be moving; in any event, it was fairly obvious that he wanted to talk to him. Dixon waved the fellow around to the left side of the plane and popped down the cockpit ladder. He soon found a British pilot leaning over the side into his seat. Damned if, through the myriad of fuel and oil smells, the stink of exhaust, sweat, gunpowder and metal, he didn’t catch a strong whiff of Scotch off the man.
The Brit gestured for Dixon to take off his helmet so he could hear better. Reluctantly, Dixon did so. It didn’t help him hear any better, and now he was sure it was Scotch.
“I want to thank you for helping rescue me,” said the visitor.
“When?”
“Just now. Up near Mudaysis.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“What?”
“Wasn’t me,” shouted Dixon. He tried to explain that the Hog had been grounded for the entire afternoon, and had only just been repaired. The Brit nodded at about half of what he said.
“Some of your mates, then,” said the other pilot. “They were definitely A-lOs.”
“There’s a bunch of us.”
“Bloody good crew. They risked their lives. All kinds of radar operating there.”
“Radar?”
The man nodded. “Got us coming in and out. My commander got a clear signal.”
“Commander?”
“Lost we think.” The pilot’s eyes edged downwards ever so slightly, then rose again, as if he had been watching a rowboat on a gently ebbing river. “Thank your friends.”
“I will.”
Dixon waited for the man to jump down and run off before obeying the ground crew’s wild gestures to come the hell forward and take fuel. Cinching up to get ready for takeoff, he wondered if he had heard what the man said correctly.
The GCI site they were supposed to take out that morning was just south of Mudaysis.
His fuckup had cost someone his life.
PART TWO
TENT CITY
CHAPTER 25
KING FAHD ROYAL AIRBASE
1830
When Michael Knowlington was young, the sky was a romantic place, full of possibilities and speed. Then it became a place for defying death; the rush-in-your-face seat-jolt he got nearly every time he went up was like an addict’s fix. For a brief time it was an extension of his mind and body, reaching out into the future and the past in the same motion. Then it became an ugly place, a place that told him how old he was, how useless.
Now it was just the sky, empty and gray. Colonel Knowlington stared at it, alone at the edge of the runway, the only place he had to himself on the massive base.
The truth was, Knowlington had expected to lose at least one pilot, and probably more. They’d all survived, and the preliminary reports on their missions were glowing. Now, the last Hog straggled in. It was Dixon in the A-10A patched together at Al Jouf. He felt himself overcome by emotion. He walked a few feet further along the runway, making damn sure no one else was around.
Tears dripped from his eyes. He bent his legs, lowering himself down in an Indian crouch as the flow became uncontrollable.
He couldn’t have picked out a specific reason. He didn’t know any of these men very well, with the exception of Mongoose, his operations officer. And yet he knew them all too well, as well as the Blazeman, Cat and Clunker.
Each a wingman. Each dead.
An F-4 Wild Weasel Phantom, diverted to the base because of mechanical problems, squealed in behind the Hog. The familiar whine of its engines as it touched down, the squeal of its wheels, the heavy suck of oxygen through the pilot’s mask snapped Skull’s head straight up.
He was back in the Philippines, months after his second ‘Nam tour had ended with his splash in the Tonkin Gulf. Still younger than most of the men he trained, he’d already gotten the hot-shot star tag and the medals to justify it.
Knowlington had been standing at the edge of a strip like this one day when he saw a Phantom smack down, just implode right there on landing. No one really knew why it happened; mechanical failure of some sort, since the landing itself had looked perfect.
He’d been due to take that plane up, but a hangover and a sympathetic duty officer saved him. Only his second hangover in the service to that point, a true accomplishment.
It had taken forever to unlearn the lesson he thought he learned that day.
Knowlington pushed himself past the memories, past regrets, back to the present. A chill whipped across the back of his neck. It startled him; the chill was familiar, though he hadn’t felt it now in a long, long time.
He had a job to do; it was time to stop wallowing and do it.
CHAPTER 26
KING FAHD ROYAL AIRBASE
1855
Captain Bristol Wong jumped from the chopper a good five feet before it hit the ground. He was higher than he thought. A lot. But he was so annoyed at being here he didn’t let it bother him. His legs sprung a bit, absorbing the shock, then steadied as he half-walked, half-ran from the commandeered army Huey. The exasperated pilot mouthed a silent curse — Wong had been a less than ideal passenger, even for an Air Force officer — and skipped away without touching down.
It took Wong several minutes to get himself pointed in the direction of the 535th tactical fighter squadron, and considerably more time for him to arrive at the ugly clump of trailers that served as its headquarters. Scowling at the hand-painted “Hog Heaven” sign nailed near the front door, he barged inside and strode down the hall, looking for Colonel Michael Knowlington, the unit commander. He was surprised to hear laughter coming from the squadron room, and even more surprised to find it dominated by several couches and a large-screen TV.
The fact that none of the officers inside could tell him where Knowlington was stoked his anger higher. He stomped into the hallway, nearly running over an airman who volunteered that he had seen the colonel near the runway some time before. The man was not otherwise helpful; it was only by sheer luck and some desperation that Wong managed to stumble across Knowlington inspecting several A-lOAs in the squadron’s maintenance area. The captain’s ill humor had long since passed from impatience to irritation. By now he knew he would never keep his evening dinner date in the foreign section of Riyadh; the deprivation riled him because he had been unable to contact his friend, which would undoubtedly make future dinner dates a difficult proposition.
Still, this was his first encounter with Knowlington, though he had of course heard of him; Wong coaxed as much energy as he could into seeming polite, giving him a false smile and a smart salute, then asked if they could speak in private.
“Shoot,” said Knowlington.
There were at least a dozen enlisted men, mechanical specialists and other grease monkeys from the look of them, within earshot. As far as Wong was concerned, anyone of them could have a cell phone and Saddam’s home number in his locker.
He shook his head, trying to retain the veneer of politeness. He did, after all, respect Knowlington’s rank. “I’m afraid you don’t understand, sir,” he told him. “We need a secure room.”
“A what?”
“I have code-word materi
al to discuss.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Sir?”
“Where are you from, Captain?”
“The Pentagon.”
“Don’t bullshit me, son. Are you with CENTCOM? Or what?”
“I’m afraid it’s ‘or what’ sir, until we are in a secure facility.”
“You think there’s a spy crouching behind that A-10 over there?”
“I try to follow procedure, sir. I work for Admiral McConnell,” added Wong. McConnell — the head of Joint Chief of Staff’s J-2 — was a heavy, and mentioning his name always tended to soothe the waters.
Except now.
“So?”
“You do know who the admiral is, sir?”
Knowlington’s expression left little doubt that he did — and could care less. “You know what, Wong? I have about three thousand better things to do than stand here and be unimpressed by you. Either make me interested real fast, or disappear.”
It’s because I’m Asian, Wong thought. The geezer scumbag flew in Vietnam, so he thinks I’m a gook.
He’d run into that before. Not a lot — most officers were extremely professional, especially when they saw his work product. But every so often there’d be an old-timer who wanted to tell him to go back to commie land.
“Sir, this has to do with one of your men,” he said, feigning a note of concern. “Could we discuss it in your office?”
Knowlington looked like he’d eaten a peach pit as he finally put his feet into motion.
* * *
The crisply pressed fatigues were what pissed Knowlington off.
He could deal with someone who went around with a stick up his ass — just nod and listen. Being uptight didn’t necessarily make you a jerk; plenty of excellent pilots and commanders were by-the-book pricks.
But a fucking captain who ironed his slacks and spit-polished his boots in a war zone belonged to a special class of idiot.
* * *
