He thought that, he frowned, and in the next second the right engine stopped winding its turbine. He saw the indicator zeroing out of the corner of his eye as he tightened his grip on the stick, body jumping to work the plane and compensate for the loss of power. Something unconscious took over, something that felt rather than thought.
His mind whipped through his contingencies; it would be best if he could make it back to the Home Drome but he had plenty of divert fields closer if he couldn’t. His heart pounded and he could feel something in his scalp tingling, as if his brain had gotten a quick shot of adrenaline.
He also felt himself suddenly out of kilter in the cockpit.
But not because the Hog had slumped from losing the engine. His body was compensating for something that hadn’t happened.
The engines were humming perfectly. There hadn’t been a malfunction. In fact, everything was at operating manual specification.
Son of a bitch.
Doberman twisted backwards in the seat, craning his neck to look out the cockpit glass. He couldn’t actually see the GE turbofans mounted on either side of the fuselage in front of the Hog’s double-tail. But he had to look anyway.
Just as he had to tap each one of the engine instruments when he turned back.
Maybe they had flaked out for a second.
No. Everything was fine. It was all this thinking about superstition and luck and that crap that was putting him over the edge.
“Devil Two this is One,” he said, calling A-Bomb. His wingman was flying about a quarter mile back, off his wing in a trail. “How’s our six?”
“Clean,” said A-Bomb. “You ducking flies?”
“Negative. Just staying awake.”
“Ought to drink more coffee.”
Air speed, attitude, rpms, fuel— everything at spec. No way his engine had even burped.
It was just that he was tired. Damn royal straight stinking flush had cost him a good night’s sleep.
“Something up?” A-Bomb asked.
If he didn’t know better, Doberman would swear this was something A-Bomb and the capo had rigged up to teach him a lesson.
But which lesson would that be?
“Just wanted to make sure you were with me,” Doberman told his wingmate. He glanced at his watch and did some quick math. “We have ten minutes, twenty seconds to the Emerald City.”
“Yeah, I’m unwrapping my last pocket-pie now.”
CHAPTER 12
FORT APACHE
25 JANUARY 1991
1157
A dried-out but very deep wadi formed a semi-circle around the abandoned runway. Hawkins, kicking at the erosion at the southeastern end of the runway, theorized that the Iraqis had found the tributary too rough to deal with, the seasonal rains eating at the ground they needed to stay solid under the long expanse of concrete and asphalt. Why they wouldn’t have realized that before laying out several hundred feet of concrete, though, he had no idea.
It was nice of them to tear up the road leading out to the highway, though. That made sneaking up on Fort Apache a little more difficult.
Hawkins’ men had set out a good defensive perimeter and studded it with a variety of weapons; still, a concentrated armor attack could easily overrun them until they got their AH-6G gunships in. With luck, they would get them in tonight.
Hawkins turned and began walking carefully down the center of the cement. Except for minor crumbling around the expansion joints, the concrete was smooth and seemingly solid. He could certainly land his helos.
He wanted a lot more. Like an MC-130, loaded for bear. But to get the big four-engine gunship in and back up in the air again, they needed two thousand feet.
Six of the twelve men who’d come in on a second parachute drop once Fort Apache was secure were combat engineers. They’d landed about ten minutes before dawn; a few seconds later he’d gotten them to work plotting an extension that would add nearly six hundred feet to the northwest end of the runway. Steel mesh was due to parachuted in as soon as the sun went down. But that would get them only to the edge of the streambeds. Without a bulldozer and cement culverts, the runway wasn’t getting any longer.
Still, all things considered, Hawkins had only relatively minor problems at the moment. One of the men on the second team— an inexperienced jumper who had no business being on the team, volunteer or not— had broken his leg and arm during the drop, their only casualty so far. He was in decent enough condition to stay on, but he was their lone helicopter mechanic.
Team Blue, operating north of the Euphrates since the night before, hadn’t checked in on schedule, though that might just be due to problems with the satellite communications system. But the team he’d been most worried about, Team Ruth, was in position and ready to work several hours ahead of schedule.
Sent to an area thought to be one of the main Scud highways, Team Ruth would be vectoring in bombers by late afternoon— assuming they found something to target. Hawkins had put some of his best men on the squad, including Master Sergeant Eli Winston, who was leading the team. And Ruth included the lone Air Force officer assigned to the entire Injun country operation, a ground FAC who was supposed to sweet talk the iron onto the Scud trailers. A pair of A-10As had been attached to Apache; for now, they were at Team Ruth’s beck and call, though Hawkins could change that if he needed to.
The captain took a wistful glance down the runway. It was good to know the Warthogs were on the job, but he couldn’t wait for his own helicopters to get here.
He turned back toward the command bunker. There was just enough time for a cup of Earl Grey tea before the scheduled call to his colonel at Al Jouf.
CHAPTER 13
OVER IRAQ
25 JANUARY 1991
1540
Doberman glanced through the clear Perspex bubble overhead, scanning the light blue sky. Somewhere above him, a pair of F-15C Eagles flew like guardian angels, swift police dogs ready to nail any Iraqi who dared take flight. Just to the southeast, the back-seater in a Phantom F-4 Wild Weasel scanned his radar warning screen, ready to point a homing missile into the dish of any air defense system foolish enough to turn itself on. To the north, a package of attack planes and electronic jammers streaked toward the outskirts of Baghdad, loaded down with bombs and defensive weapons. Far to the south, an Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS plane coordinated the entire air war, scanning for threats and potential threats, moving planes to meet them like a chess champion throttling an opponent.
And yet, Doberman felt alone in the cockpit, accompanied only by A-Bomb flying now a half-mile back. Both Hogs were at 17,110 feet. The ride up from Al Jouf had been free and easy, but it had been long, and they still had nine and a half minutes to go before they flew in range of the Special Ops unit they were tasked to assist.
If you were waiting for a stagecoach in the middle of Dodge City, nine and a half minutes wasn’t that long. If you were riding into Dodge with all kinds of bad guys eying you from the roadside, it was an eternity.
While not completely defenseless, the planes were hardly bullet or missile proof. The AlQ-119 radar-jamming pod on its right wing was a near-revolutionary dual mode jammer, when it was first introduced back in the Stone Ages. While it still provided protection against the older elements of Saddam’s multi-layer air defense, it was hardly an invincible shield. The A-10A’s more robust radar warning receiver or RWR could find and track more than a dozen threatening radars in several bands, telling the pilot that he was staring in his own radar show. But that was hardly a guarantee that he wouldn’t be shot down.
Among Saddam’s varied arsenal, Soviet-made SA-6’s and German Rolands were particularly effective weapons, posing more than a theoretical threat even to the fast movers. While the Devils had been briefed on the known positions of the SAM batteries throughout Iraq, both the SA-6— NATO code-named “Gainful”— and the Roland sat on mobile launchers that could pretty much be moved at will.
A pair of Sidewinders sat in a double-rail on Doberm
an’s left wing. Excellent heat-seeking weapons, they were meant for close-in air-to-air defense. They’d be handy if an enemy plane managed to get by the Eagles, but any MiG that could do that was a damned serious threat. It would have probably already launched longer-range weapons from far outside the Sidewinder’s scope.
But maybe nobody even knew they were here. The A-10As were too high to be heard from the ground. Most Iraqi radar operators who had survived the first day of the air war had realized the best way to stay alive was to leave their knobs in the off position. And besides, the desert and scrubland below the Hog’s wings was mostly empty, and hardly worth protecting.
Doberman checked his position on the INS, worked himself slowly through the routine checks of his instruments. He was like a Western marshal, buckling his gun belt before the big showdown, checking each bullet in his gun carefully, spinning the revolver more for luck than to make sure it was working properly.
Luck.
Doberman flushed his brain of trivia, concentrating on his mission. Once on station, they’d take it down closer to the ground and look for Scuds. The missile carriers were said to move along the targeted highway in mid- to late-afternoon, en route to their launching spots. The commandos and Dixon would spot them; the A-10s would blow them up.
There were only so many highways the Scud trucks could use. That was one curve of probability. Time was another. Even assuming the intel was good, their small time on target because of fuel considerations meant there was a bit of luck involved.
Luck again.
I am an engineer, Doberman told himself. Planes do not fly on luck, bridges are not built on luck, Scud carriers are not splashed on luck.
He checked his instruments and steadied his hand around the stick, precisely on course and on time.
CHAPTER 14
IRAQ
25 JANUARY 1991
1540
Dixon woke up with a kink in his neck the size of Iowa. Both hands were numb. He had to take the worst leak of his life. And as he got up, he felt something hard and heavy push him back down.
“Truck.”
Leteri’s hoarse voice brought Dixon back to reality. He rolled over, scooped his gun from the ground, and began following Leteri up the hill on his hands and knees to a dug out position just below the crest of the hill.
“What do we have?” he whispered as Leteri peered over the top of the ridge they were using as a lookout post. “Should I call in the planes?”
The sergeant shook his head, holding up his finger to tell Dixon to wait. Turk and Winston lay against the top of the ridge, watching the road through his binoculars. Dixon heard the distant sound of a truck approaching. The sound got louder, then began to fade.
“Just a pickup,” said Winston, slipping down. He gave Dixon his binoculars.
The Steiner 7x40’s brought the roadway into sharp relief, making it somehow seem more real. The yellow-gray haze of the distance melted into crisp shades of brown and blue. The moving finger with its trail of dust sharpened into a white pickup.
A Chevy, as a matter of fact. About ten years old.
Winston’s scowl deepened. “They may be checking the roadway, scouting it to see if it’s safe,” he said finally.
“This deep in Iraq?” asked Dixon.
The sergeant shrugged. “I would. Then again, it could be another civilian truck. We’ve seen three since you fell asleep.”
The sergeant resumed scanning in the direction the pickup had come from. Dixon followed Leteri back down the hill to a small, dug-out position at the foot of the slope.
“Latrine’s anywhere in that direction,” said Leteri, pointing a few yards beyond.
“You have ESP?”
“Yeah— ESPP, extra sensory pee perception.”
Dixon took care of business, then returned to check out the communications system, which Leteri had put together while he was sleeping. It consisted of two parts. One was the unit itself, contained in a rucksack; the handset and controls lay at the top. The other part was a small, folding radar dish that looked something like the folding circular clothesline Dixon’s mom used to use in her backyard. The sergeant had oriented the dish so that its signal could be picked up with a minimum of static by an orbiting satellite. With the push of a button, they could talk with Apache or the air support units or a command center in a Riyadh bunker, and from there, literally to the world. The short-burst, coded transmissions were nearly impossible for anything but the most sophisticated equipment to intercept.
“Here we go,” said Winston above. He chortled a bit, as if he had laid a bet that was now paying off. “Yeah, here we go.”
Dixon climbed back to the top of the ridge.
“It’s a truck, but I don’t think it’s a Scud carrier,” said Turk.
“There’s another truck right behind it,” said Winston.
Dixon could hear the engines now. Two tiny ants approached, winding their way across the distant highway.
“Just trucks, Sarge,” said Turk.
“Here, Lieutenant, you take a look,” said Winston, handing him the binoculars. “You got pilot’s eyes, right?”
Dixon’s pilot’s eyes took a second to adjust to the glass: the silver and green blurs turned into a pair of tractor-trailers. He caught a Mercedes emblem on the front of the leading vehicle as it took the long curve toward them.
“Sorry,” he said. “They’re not missiles.”
Winston frowned and took the binoculars back. The trucks might be carrying military supplies or they might not. In any event, there was no sense telling the Hogs to hit them.
“Bus or something coming the other way,” said Turk. His dark mahogany cheeks began glowing cherry red. “Hey now, here we are. That, my friends, is a Ural 375 flatbed, built by Ivan just for our obnoxious friend. That’s a crane, I do believe, and here we go, here we, here we go. You tell me lieutenant, what’s under those tarps? Huh?”
Dixon took Turk’s binoculars and quickly focused on the road. The lead truck was a common Warsaw-pact export, as ubiquitous as a U.S. M35 6x6. On its back was a long crane, the type that could be used to erect a derrick or even a modular house in the States. But the two tractors following behind it indicated the crane might have a much more sinister purpose: the Zil-157 long haulers were known Scud ferries, with large tarps curled around suspicious shapes at the back of each truck.
“Aren’t they going in the wrong direction?” asked Dixon. “They’re heading East.”
“Don’t worry about what the intel people told us,” said Winston. “Just get your guys on the horn. Now. Uh, sir.”
Dixon was already scrambling down the hill to do just that.
CHAPTER 15
OVER IRAQ
25 JANUARY 1991
1552
“Devil Flight this is Ground Hog. Are you up?”
He’d been expecting to hear Dixon eventually, but even so Doberman actually turned and looked out the cockpit canopy, as if BJ were gunning a Hog next to him.
“We’re here,” Doberman told him.
“Captain Glenon. Doberman? Is that you? Geez, how the heck are you?”
“I’m fine,” said Doberman. There was no need for an elaborate authentication procedure— only Dixon would say “heck. The kid was way behind in the mandatory cursing unit of Hog training.
“Yo, War Hero,” said A-Bomb. “How the fuck are you? Blow up any helicopters today?”
“Listen, Devil Flight,” snapped Dixon, suddenly all business, “we have three targets for you. Proceeding east on the highway, uh, two, three miles now from Point Super Zed-Three. You copy?”
Doberman glanced down at the grid map on his knee, which overlaid the Special Forces checkpoints against the Iraqi terrain. Zed-Three was a point along the highway. They were, by his quick calculations, exactly 8.75 miles southwest of it.
“I have the position,” said Doberman. He swung the Hog back toward the north, calculating an intercept with the vehicles, which he figured would be moving along a
t 50 miles an hour, or thereabouts.
Doberman spotted the highway about a minute later. As he began to close, he saw a vehicle. But the truck was moving in the wrong direction. His eyes strained past the bulletproof persiplex glass of the canopy, working the grains of sand into lines and ants.
Nothing except for the truck going the wrong way. Zed-three was ahead to the northeast, about two o’clock. He pushed on, the plane level at 8,550 feet. It was somewhat high for IDing moving targets, but their instructions were to fly no lower than 8,000 feet, unless absolutely necessary, which would keep them safe from all but the most persistent antiair guns. Doberman had a clear view and figured once he spotted a likely candidate for Dixon’s trucks they could move lower.
But at the moment, he couldn’t see anything. He double-checked the map to make sure he had the right highway, not that there were many choices. Then he asked A-Bomb what he was seeing.
“Not even camel turds.”
“Let’s take it this way another forty-five seconds, then crank back,” Doberman told him.
“Forty-five seconds? Why not forty-four? Or forty-three.”
He was just about to tell A-Bomb to fuck off when the AWACS controller shouted a warning over the radio.
“Devil Flight, snap ninety south!”
Doberman jerked to comply, putting the Hog almost literally onto a right-angle. As he juiced the throttle, the AWACS operator filled in the reason for the emergency evasive maneuver: a pair of MiGs had just taken off from an airbase to their north.
With pedals to the metal, the Russian-made interceptors could reach the Hogs in under two minutes. And splash them soon thereafter.
A flight of Eagle interceptors scrambled to fry the MiGs. Doberman’s instinct was to punch the Hog into the ground fuzz at twenty feet, then say screw the MiGs and get back to Scud hunting. But this far inside enemy territory, that wasn’t a particularly wise thing to do. Instead, he and A-Bomb had to settle for a wide turn a good thirty miles south of the action.
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