There were two other flatbeds.
More tanks. No, these were self-propelled guns. Anti-air, or maybe tracked howitzers.
Anti-air. Four barrels. ZSU-23s.
Dixon glanced down at his watch. The helicopter was a half-hour away.
He pushed back against the rocks as the lead elements of the procession rounded the bend. They’d be at the cave in a minute to start setting up their defenses.
No way the helo was getting in with those guns. Dixon had to leave or he’d be trapped.
Winston rasped gently. He had a smile on his face. The morphine, maybe.
I’m not leaving him, Dixon decided. Even if it means taking on the whole damn Iraqi army.
Which it might.
Several trucks in the convoy didn’t have mufflers. The roar against the sheer rocks was deafening. The noise surrounded him, shaking every part of his body.
The trucks were all around him.
And beyond, still on the highway. Still moving.
Dixon scrambled to his feet. Clutching his rifle, he went out to the slope where he could get a view of the highway. He was exposed momentarily, but it was dark. Unless someone was looking directly at him, he’d be hard to spot.
He saw the large shadow of an armored personnel carrier speeding away. Then the tank carrier. And the rest.
Dixon couldn’t help feeling enormous relief, even though he knew the heavily armed convoy was heading in the direction of the Cornfield.
CHAPTER 41
Near the Cornfield
26 January 1991
0345
Captain Hawkins found himself leaning forward in the helicopter, as if his weight might add more momentum to its speed.
The Little Bird was cranking, but it wasn’t going fast enough. Hawkins needed it there now, at the Cornfield, his men climbing aboard, the helo taking off.
With the exception of his Air Force FAC, he knew all of the members of the Ruth team. Green, who had been killed, had worked with him just a few days before. Green had filled the medic slot for Ruth, but had also worked point and como in recent missions.
Was. Past tense. They’d get his body back when this was over. Maybe there’d be enough time to get it back now.
Hawkins turned to the pilot. Fernandez tapped his watch but said nothing.
He was counseling him to be patient. They were ahead of schedule.
The AH-6Gs were skimming about six feet over the terrain. Hawkins, who unlike the pilot wasn’t wearing the night-vision goggles, braced himself against the side of the helo and stared into the darkness. The ground below was patchy scrubland, becoming more fertile the further they went. For him that meant there were more people in the area, more things that could go wrong.
The AWACS told them bombing attack would now probably coincide with their pickup. Fernandez assured him they’d be far enough away. It would be a good diversion really, in case anyone was nearby or watching.
You planned, you trained, you tried to cover every contingency, but you couldn’t. That was part of the excitement of it, part of what made it almost fun.
Except it wasn’t fun, because it was way the hell too serious. It was a job, a work, something with severe consequences While he didn’t consider the new mission itself that difficult – like dead friends.
The helicopter flicked briefly to the right. Hawkins’s arm was so tense it felt like it was going to snap in two against the metal panel.
In-out. No sweat.
They had the mesh units in place, but his runway was still way too short. Tomorrow night, a Herc was supposed to try dropping some motorcycles by parachute. Hawkins wondered if he could somehow arrange to get a bulldozer instead. Move the culvert into place and then fill around it. Cover it with mesh. The runway’d be two thousand, three thousand feet in no time.
Could they parachute a bulldozer?
Sure they could. Goddamn combat engineers could do just about anything. Hell, one would probably ride it down.
“Shit,” said the pilot.
Hawkins looked up and saw the bright red tracers arcing ahead. A pepper of green flared from the opposite direction.
“Looks like a problem,” said the pilot. “Big fucking problem. LZ is hot.”
Aside from a string of curses, it was the last coherent thing Hawkins heard him say.
CHAPTER 42
Over Iraq
26 January, 1991
0355
Heavy pushed himself upright in his seat, working his neck around to loosen his muscles. The Vark weapons officer had first gotten the kink from a fall on a 5.12 climb in the Idaho Sawtooths two days before the deployment orders came through. Nothing he had tried While he didn’t consider the new mission itself that difficult While he didn’t consider the new mission itself that difficult— aspirin, massages, home-brew— had cured it. Short of sticking his neck in front of his F-111F’s radar for half an hour, he was willing to do anything, even see a chiropractor, to get permanent relief.
He hadn’t found one in Saudi Arabia yet. And the medical doctor he had found gave him lousy advice, fortunately unofficial: take a few weeks off.
That he wouldn’t do.
Heavy’s job entailed putting his face into a small view screen for as long as it took to designate and vaporize whatever Black Hole wanted smashed. This magnified the kink into something abominable, since inevitably it tensed every muscle in his shoulder and back. While he knew it would feel better if he relaxed, that was tough to do when the F-111 was cranking at 650 knots at two hundred feet above the ground.
They’d been doing that now for nearly ten minutes, thanks to Heavy’s detection of some over-achieving Iraqi SAM operators in their path. But such was war.
Klecko gave him a quick tap. The two men had worked side by side in the F-111’s unique cockpit for more than a year. They had long ago given up using words during the business part of a mission; communication was more like ESP. Every gesture, every word, was densely packed code. The tap just now meant half a dozen things, including “Are you okay?” and “We’re just about there.”
Heavy gave Klekco a thumb’s up and got his head back into the game.
The quartet of Paveway III laser-guided bombs beneath the F-111’s variable-geometry swept wings were controlled with the use of a revolving laser designator carried in a pod glued to the F-111’s belly. Once they found their target, Klecko would buck the Vark upwards and they’d pickle, lofting the missiles toward the NBC facility. Rolling ninety degrees, the pilot would give his weapons officer— aka “you over there” in the Vark community— a nice long look at the target. Heavy would steady the laser designator where he wanted the bombs to hit. The Paveways would fly their two-thousand pound payload of explosives right to the spot.
The tactic was called a “ramp toss,” as if the plane were running up a ramp and throwing the bomb at its target. It wasn’t necessarily the easiest way to hit something but they had practiced it extensively and used it from the first night of the war.
And despite what it did to his neck, Heavy liked it.
Of course, he also liked 5.12 climbs.
The ground erupted with tracers to their north. Heavy realized immediately that they weren’t being shot at, but it took a second for him to wrestle his eyes and full attention back in the direction of their rock quarry, just now coming into view.
He scanned carefully but quickly for his aim point, the small pipe on the side of a hill above a shallow rock face. Something inside his brain clicked, and he forgot not merely about the tracers but about his shoulder, the seat, the physical parts of the viewer, the cockpit, the world. He was in full hunter mode, sifting and searching, running his eyes deliberately against the shades of gray, searching for the one particular shadow he wanted. He was on the rock face, eyes straining for the infinitesimally small nub that would friction him up two more feet, the handhold that would get him closer to his goal.
Not there.
Patience.
Not there.
A hallucination? His neck spiked stiff, pulling every muscle from his ears to his toes into spasm.
Relax.
His eyes climbed the rock, scaling it slowly, looking for the pipe, his pipe.
Patience. He would find it. It was just a matter of working the screen, feeling the rock.
Patience.
CHAPTER 43
In Iraq
26 January, 1991
0355
Even as he cursed, the helo pilot began firing his 50-caliber machine guns into the Iraqi position. In the confusion and the dark, Hawkins couldn’t immediately tell what they were facing, but it was obvious there was serious firepower down there. He tried patching into the AWACS, hoping to get some support. But the chopper was too low to get the controller directly, and when the E-3 Sentry AWACS operator failed to acknowledge his second try, Hawkins tried his ground team instead.
They didn’t answer either. He could tell from their red tracers where they were, however; he told Fernandez and the pilot behind them to roll up the flank of the Iraqis, drawing their attention at least temporarily away.
The pilots were a step ahead of him, sweeping in with a coordinated rocket attack. Hawkin’s chopper stuttered with the force of the 70 mm rockets gushing from the tubes on both stubby wings; he felt himself buck forward and then wrench violently to the side. The Little Bird’s machine guns opened up again, a quick burst that perforated a black shadow 250 yards away. The shadow turned into the outline of an APC, which morphed into red flame.
Someone was hailing him on the radio but in the confusion Hawkins couldn’t hear precisely what they were saying. He pointed to the spot he wanted the chopper to fly to, and felt the aircraft comply immediately, as if it and not the pilot were responding to his command.
A new line of tracers erupted on his right, arcing away; these were thicker than the others, colored green— the enemy. Hawkins felt the AH-6G twist to get a better aim on this new threat, saw the line of bullets beginning to turn as they did.
“Get that son of a bitch!” he shouted, and in the next second something happened to the front of the helicopter; it seemed as if it were the outside of a giant tea kettle suddenly bursting with steam. Hawkins looked at the pilot, saw that he was bent over his control stick, and then felt the ground ram against the skis beneath his legs.
CHAPTER 44
IN IRAQ
26 JANUARY 1991
0355
The first flickers of the firefight looked like a fireworks display, errant sparkles shooting off at odd angles.
Then it turned into green and orange roman candles, rockets flashing, white streaks igniting everywhere.
Then a piece of hell opened up, volcanoes spitting fireballs into the air.
Dixon watched it all as if IT were a movie. This seemed different than real combat. Combat was flying a Hog and shacking a target, g’s hitting you in the face as you pulled up and whacked yourself the hell out of there. That was real. You felt that. Your head swam with blood and sweat. You struggled to keep your eyes cold and hard and focused. You tried to hit your buttons on time. It screamed in your face and it was real.
This was far away and surreal. He could feel the ground shake with the explosions, but it didn’t feel like war.
His friends, Leteri, Turk, the others, were in the middle of it. They were shooting, maybe dying. But it was so unreal it didn’t make sense.
Except for this: The gunfight probably meant the helicopters wouldn’t be coming for him.
He looked at his watch. The bomber would have taken off by now. He wasn’t sure what they would send. Most likely it would be an F-111 or a Nighthawk, something with fat, laser-guided weapons. Most likely, they’d aim for the pipe he’d spotted.
Winston coughed. The sergeant wasn’t smiling any more. His expression was bland and pasty. Dixon leaned over and checked for a pulse. He didn’t find it at first; frantically, he pushed his thumb around the bone at the inside of the sergeant’s wrist. Finally, he got a beat.
Not strong, but there.
Odds were, Winston was bleeding internally. Back was all shot up; probably he was already paralyzed. He was coughing. Dixon knew from his mother that wasn’t a good sign. Probably meant his lungs were filling up with fluid.
He’d die soon; certainly, if they couldn’t evac him.
Dixon cursed himself for not demanding an immediate evac the second they got out of the minefield. They should have been out of here hours ago.
Maybe not.
Shit, what did he want? They were closer to Baghdad than Saudi Arabia.
Winston knew that when he volunteered for the mission.
So did he.
Not really. He hadn’t thought it out. He hadn’t figured that shooting his mouth off about skydiving would lead him to find a hidden Iraqi bunker in a rock quarry, divide him from his team, and get them ambushed.
He hadn’t thought that staying with Winston would mean he’d be stranded. He might have known it was a possibility, but he hadn’t really played it out, actually picturing it happening.
He had to now. Because without the helicopters, he and Winston were a hell of a long way from anyplace good. Whatever happened next was going to depend a hell of a lot on what he thought out. And more importantly, on what he did.
CHAPTER 45
In Iraq
26 January, 1991
0405
Hawkins coughed ferociously, trying to dislodge something from his throat. It was big and felt like a Brillo pad, scratching tender flesh. He coughed and coughed, arms drained of feeling, head spinning.
It flew out. Moisture flooded onto his face and chin. He looked down, saw he had spat up blood.
But he could breathe again. He pushed himself up, then remembered he was strapped in the helicopter.
But he wasn’t. He was free. The helicopter was a few feet away. He’d stumbled out somehow, just after it crash landed. He was sitting on the ground. Hawkins stood up, reaching to his belt for his pistol, then felt himself yanked back to the ground.
A quick burst of rifle fire ragged the air above him.
“Hang tight, Captain.”
The voice was familiar. Leteri or Ziza, one of the New Yorkers. He twisted to see who it was. Instead, he was distracted by the white light of a shell hitting in the distance.
“Assholes don’t know quite where we are.”
It was Mo Ziza. He quickly laid out the situation. The team had been surrounded by the Iraqis, who acted like they knew the commandos were there but couldn’t locate them in the dark. The Iraqis had mounted the hilltop overlooking the road, posting about a dozen soldiers there while the rest of the heavy stuff stayed between the plateau and the road. Rather than letting the helicopters walk into an ambush, the troopers had opened fire as soon as they heard the helos approaching; they’d managed to wipe out the bastards on the high ground even before the rest of the Iraqis began to return fire.
“We disabled one of the APCs before you got here but then they got lucky,” said Ziza. “Joe Leteri and Bobby Jackson are dead. Turk’s still holding them off up there.”
“Where’s Winston?”
“Sergeant Winston couldn’t travel. Lieutenant Dixon stayed back with him at Sugar Mountain.”
“What?” Hawkins struggled to clear his head. “Shit. Why the fuck didn’t you radio that in?”
“We tried. Radio got hit when we walked into those mines.”
“Dixon?”
“He didn’t want to leave the sergeant.”
“No shit. Why the fuck did you let him stay?”
“He told us it was an order.”
“Oh fuck that, he’s a goddamn pilot. Shit fucking hell.”
“He’s got balls for a pilot.”
“The helicopter. Fernandez.” Hawkins jumped up and ran back to the chopper. Ziza followed, reaching him just as Hawkins got to the door.
Fernandez was slum
ped forward in his harness, chest, neck and head laced with bullets.
A line of holes arced up across the top of the AH-6G’s front glass. Otherwise the chopper seemed in good shape, though he was far from a mechanic. Or a pilot. He didn’t even know how to turn the panel on.
A fresh round of gunfire sounded from the Iraqis position beyond the hilltop plateau. His second helo passed overhead, unleashing machine-gun fire in that direction.
“How the hell did they get Fernandez and miss me?” Hawkins said as he ducked.
“They didn’t. The side of your head’s bleeding.”
Hawkins touched his temple. It was wet. He pushed his finger gently along the skin, felt something small and sharp; a piece of metal or glass. But it must not be serious or he’d be dead; unconscious at least.
“All right, let’s go get Turk and get the fuck out of here while we still can,” he told Ziza. “Show me the way.”
Ziza stooped slightly as he trotted. Hawkins huffed to keep up. He had a good feel for the situation now, had it laid out in his head.
His other helo was behind them somewhere. They would retreat and get picked up. Swing around and get Dixon and Winston. Go back to Fort Apache. Get their one spare pilot, maybe a mechanic. Bring back the downed helo.
Mechanic had broken his leg; wasn’t going anywhere.
Fuck that. He’d cart him there in a stretcher if they had to.
Ziza slid in behind the hulked ruins of an Iraqi truck as the enemy began firing mortar rounds. They were way off the mark and their first corrections were in the wrong direction. Hawkins ducked nonetheless, trotting toward Ziza and Staffa Turk. Turk was hunkered over guns on one end of a wrecked Iraqi vehicle. Four or five dead Iraqi soldiers lay on the ground, most still clutching their weapons.
Hogs #3 Fort Apache Page 14
