In every battle, there was a time to regroup. It wasn’t necessarily the time you wanted it to be, but if you didn’t recognize it, you usually didn’t get a chance to fight again.
“Back to the Fort,” said Hawkins. “Son of a bitch. Son of a fucking bitch.”
CHAPTER 51
OVER IRAQ
26 JANUARY 1991
0419
Doberman squeezed his stick tight enough to wring water from it as he got the cannon into the second truck. Hot uranium mixed with explosives as he erased the utility vehicle from the Iraqi order of battle. He tried pushing his rudder enough to get a shot on another vehicle but ran out of space and time, pulling off and flashing to the right so A-Bomb could come in on his own run.
He figured it was safer to smash them without using the flares; the shadows were thick enough, and while it wasn’t necessarily easy to sort what was what, the Iraqis were totally confused and probably defenseless. The few thin tracers raking the air arced in the wrong direction.
Unfortunately, he was into his fuel reserves.
Time to go home.
A-Bomb pulled up, his green and black camo a blur in the dawn light.
“How’s your fuel?” Doberman asked his wingman.
“Yeah, I’m bingo.”
Doberman got their position on the INS and called it in to the AWACS. Then he checked in with the commandos’ helicopter.
“We ought to refuel at Apache,” said A-Bomb after they had set sail southwards.
“You figure out how to land in a thousand feet and take off again, let me know.”
“They’ll have fifteen hundred feet with the mesh they’re talking about,” said A-Bomb. “That’s more than enough.”
“They got bullets and Twinkies?”
“Negative.”
“Then I guess we’re going back to Al Jouf.”
“Man, you’re a grouch in the morning. You ought to drink more coffee.”
“Hold your thermos out and I’ll grab a cup.”
“You got it.”
Doberman half-suspected A-Bomb might try it. He fought the twinge of fatigue tickling the corners of his eyes. Then, he tapped into the commandos’ frequency and hailed the helo pilot, who by now was almost at Fort Apache.
“I understand one of our guys was on your mission,” he told the pilot. “Like to say hi if I can. Lieutenant Dixon?”
“Dixon’s still on Sugar Mountain,” said Doberman. “Squad leader got hurt and he stayed with him.”
“What?”
Another voice, obviously angry, cut off the pilot’s answer with a single word: “Out.”
Even though he understood the need for the silent com, ordinarily Doberman would have taken offense to the tone. But all he could think about was the hole in his stomach, even as he reached to see if the throttle could cough up some extra horses.
__PART THREE___
I
OUT THERE SOMEWHERE
CHAPTER 52
SUGAR MOUNTAIN
26 JANUARY 1991
0420
One second Dixon was cursing himself for not making the rendezvous here, for not finding a way to get the radio working, for sending the commandos to their deaths. The next second, Dixon was throwing himself downwards. A shriek from far above vibrated at the back of his head. The jolt didn’t register consciously until after he hit the ground.
Dixon landed on the sergeant as the first of the F-111’s Paveways hit the hill beyond them. The ground shook and then seemed to slide away, the two-thousand-pound bombs acting like God’s foot, smashing and grinding the Iraqi hilltop beneath its heel. Debris percolated through the air, small bits of rock and sand propelled like the exploding steel case of a hand grenade. To Dixon it sounded as if the air were on fire.
Even though they were some distance from the target and had a hillside between them and the explosion, Dixon was covered with grit when the tremors stopped. His eyes burned when he tried to open them. He put his fingers into his mouth and tasted sandpaper. There was no moisture, nothing to help clear his eyes; he rubbed them but the burning felt even worse.
Blind, he fumbled for his canteen and managed to get some water on his hand. It was so cold it stung; he rubbed it onto his face, and then splashed the canteen over his eyes. Finally, the crap cleared out and he could see again.
He checked Winston. The sergeant was still breathing, alive.
Dixon sat back against the rocks. He heard the whine of helicopters and Hogs in the distance, or thought he did. He waited for either the helicopters or the A-10s, but the sky remained empty. After a while, he couldn’t even be sure he’d heard anything. The desert had a certain hum to it, a way of being quiet that was not quite silent. That was the only sound he heard.
He decided to scout the other hillside, see what the bombs had done. As he got up and stretched some of the cold from his muscles, Winston snuffled below him, alive but oblivious.
There had been days with his mother when he waited for hours, thinking she’d open her eyes— or, more likely, die. This was different, he told himself; Winston was going to make it.
Assuming Dixon figured out how to get help. He leaned back down, making sure the blankets were wrapped tightly. Then he took a few steps away, looking carefully to make sure the position was completely hidden before tracking across the ledge and down to the road.
The door to the bunker was still intact. That surprised him a little; he thought the force of the explosion would have blown it open. As he walked up the roadway, giving the mines a wide berth, he saw a huge hunk of rock had been taken out of the side of the hill. A pile of boulders lay on the ground. Dixon guessed that the damage had been caused by several laser-guided Paveways, probably two-thousand-pounders. He began climbing the debris pile, wondering what he would see.
He was nearly to the top when he realized that any containers holding chemicals or biological agents might have been ruptured by the blast. Which meant that the dust he was climbing through could be poisonous.
There was no sense stopping— he was probably contaminated by now anyway. If that was the case, he might just as well see what was going to kill him.
Even so, Dixon went up the rest of the way more slowly, using the M-16 as a balancing rod so he didn’t have to stoop down and actually touch the dirt with his bare hands. Two feet from the lip of the crater, the rocks began to slide; he nearly lost his balance sidestepping it and then fell face-first against the hill.
He pulled himself up through the sand and small stones to peer over the edge. He held the night viewer close to his eyes, expecting to see a smoky hole and, the way his luck had run, ruptured barrels of green and purple crud oozing with instant death.
But he saw nothing. The crater was filled with dirt, sand and stones.
Dixon nearly threw down the viewer in disbelief. He clambered over the side of the crater and slid down, expecting at any second to fall through into the Iraqi shelter.
He didn’t. The bombs had torn the hell out of the rocks. The pipe and its shaft were gone. But the crater surface was packed harder than a runway built to handle a wing of B-52Gs. The bunker lay below, bored into the rock at the base and protected by seventy-five yards or more of solid stone.
###
Dixon found a shorter way back to the sergeant, walking up the side of the crater and across a long, narrow ledge, through a crevice, and finally up a steep hill that brought him just behind the position. He was not particularly careful as he walked, letting his gun hang from his shoulder and kicking small rocks indiscriminately.
He could hear the sergeant’s labored breaths as he climbed the hill. They were eerily like his mother’s toward the end.
He checked him. Winston hadn’t moved. It occurred to Dixon that he should have left him with a gun, even though the trooper was probably now well beyond using it.
It would be more a respect kind of thing. Like the nurse who put the lipstick on his mom’s lips the very last night. He’d always remember that.
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Carefully, Dixon leaned down and took Winston’s Beretta out. He started to put it in the sergeant’s hand, but thought better of that— some sort of muscle contraction might make him pull the trigger. Instead he set it down within easy reach, as if the sergeant had just nodded off for the night. Then he packed the blankets back around him.
The question was: What should he do next? Wait to be rescued?
Only choice. Most likely that meant waiting until nightfall.
They could do it. Winston wasn’t going anywhere. The only thing Dixon had to worry about was boredom.
The Iraqis might come to check out their bunker. That was fine, as long as they stayed tight. There was no way to see it from the road in front of the door.
He took the binoculars as well as the NOD and climbed a few feet up the hill where he had watched the battle earlier. At full magnification, he could see a wrecked APC and maybe a truck; much of the battlefield was blocked off by the terrain. He found an easy way to the top of the rocks and used the binoculars, focusing first on the area to the east of the tiny plateau they’d watched the road from. He saw was an Iraqi APC, blown half apart. The back end looked like a paper shopping bag that had been twisted into a small knot; he stared at the jumbled shape next to it, wondering if it was a rock or melted metal, before realizing it was a body. A tank, its turret cocked to one side, sat a few yards away. Its gun barrel had snapped in two, and the jagged end now pointed like a stubby finger toward the rest of the battlefield.
A hundred yards away sat an American helicopter. It looked untouched – in fact, it looked like it was about to take off. But it remained perfectly still.
Then he saw a body nearby, dressed in the brown camo the commandos all wore.
One of his friends was dead. He cursed and moved his viewer around, examining the area near the aircraft, expecting to see other bodies, but finding none. He swept back around to the body, his eyes drawn to it by some inexplicable force; Dixon found himself staring at the fallen soldier, wondering who it was, thinking that the shape of the body looked like Leteri, though he couldn’t be sure. He stared, and wondered if he should go and bury the body. He stared, and wondered if the man had been in a lot of pain as he died.
He stared, and then the body moved, twisting and raising its his head. The man looked directly at him, and for a short second his face was clear in the viewer.
It was Leteri.
In the next instant, Dixon found himself running down the hill toward the highway, determined to rescue him.
CHAPTER 53
AL JOUF
26 JANUARY 1991
0500
The flaps on the A-10A snapped tight at twenty degrees as Doberman slowed to a figurative crawl above the tarmac at Al Jouf. The Hog nudged into her landing gently, rolling along the runway like a Mercedes out for a Sunday spin. Doberman trundled quickly toward the repitting area, determined to rearm and refuel in record time so he could return north. But even as the engines wound down he could see that wasn’t going to happen; a special ops officer was waiting to take him and A-Bomb directly to Colonel Klee for a personal debriefing.
Not to mention butt-chewing, since the Hog pilots had “forgotten” to clear their flight nor with him.
“You pull a stunt like that again, Glenon, and I don’t care what Knowlington thinks of you, your next post is Alaska. Yeah, you’re right,” continued the colonel as Doberman tried to object, “you saved their butts. Damn straight. You were in the right place at the right time, and that’s your job. You were fucking lucky big time. You pull that crap again and you’re in shit-ass trouble for the rest of your career. You won’t have a career except replacing toilet paper in johns across Antarctica. You got that?”
Doberman had expected some grief. Even so, it was a struggle to corral his anger. “Yeah,” he spat.
“Tell me what you saw on the ground.”
The colonel didn’t even nod as Doberman spoke. While Doberman’s account was in the best Hog tradition— brief and to the point, without taking credit for anything he wasn’t absolutely positive about— it should still have been obvious that they had saved the day. But Klee didn’t so much as hint ataboy. He told them that Hawkins, the captain in charge of Fort Apache, felt the helo left at the ambush site was worth retrieving. The colonel began peppering them with skeptical questions. Doberman felt his anger stoking up again. He half-expected to be asked why he hadn’t tossed down a tow-rope and hauled the damn thing back home.
“Keep yourselves available,” said the colonel.
“Excuse me, Colonel,” said Doberman. “We’d like to get back in the air right away. The planes’ll be rearmed and gassed by now.”
“See, our buddy’s still on the ground back there,” added A-Bomb. “We don’t want him having all the fun.”
“You’re to stay here until I tell you to fly. That’s an order.”
Only A-Bomb’s tug kept Doberman from exploding.
###
“We saved their fucking butts,” he complained to A-Bomb outside. “His whole fucking operation would be smoke right now if it wasn’t for us. Fuck him.”
“Your misinterpreting him. It’s a Special Ops thing,” said A-Bomb. “Like tough love. The way he looks at it, he was kissing our butts.”
“Yeah, well, he can fuck himself. If it wasn’t Dixon up there, I swear to God, I’d fucking punch somebody out right now. Let them throw me in jail or where ever the hell they want. Shit. I have a half a mind to tell them to screw off and just jump in the plane. I’ll bring the kid back if I have to land on the goddamn roadway and carry him on the wings. What the hell are you laughing at?”
“Man, your ears turn bright red when you get mad. You want to go find a card game?” A-Bomb asked.
“Screw yourself,” said Doberman, storming toward the planes.
###
Doberman was still fairly ballistic when he reached the pitting area, where the Hogs were being presided over by Rosen and the rest of the Devil Squadron crew dogs. Doberman waved at the crew members, then sat sullenly on a small folding chair near the “dragon” used to reload the Warthog’s cannon.
“Whose cat did you run over?” asked Rosen.
“Excuse me?”
“You in trouble, sir?”
Doberman shook his head.
“You want some coffee, Captain?” she asked.
Rosen had a roundish face and a few freckles, a nose that seemed to lean slightly, as if it had been broken long ago in a fight. Her impish grin revealed perfect teeth, and her eyes changed color in the light, sparking green from light brown.
“Yeah,” he said.
Rosen disappeared for a moment, returning with a thermos, two cups and a small campaign chair.
“Mind if I join you?” she asked, unfolding the chair.
“Go ahead. I’m sorry if I barked.”
“Oh, you didn’t bark at all,” she said, pouring him a coffee. She started to hand it to him and then stopped. “Oh.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Well, if you’re going to fly again— ”
“Of course I’m going to fly again. Don’t worry about it.” He reached and took the cup. “Hey, don’t worry about it. My bladder’s not that small.”
“Colonel was peed, huh?”
“Fucking asshole prick.”
Rosen nodded. “Colonel Knowlington’ll back you up.”
“Yeah. If I need it.”
“Damn straight. He’s very fair.”
She sounded like she meant to add, “for an officer,” but said nothing else. Doberman couldn’t help but look at her breasts. They were well hidden beneath her shirt, and yet they seemed inviting.
She seemed inviting. Not in a sexual way, in a good-comrade, fellow-squadron-mate, crew chief kind of way.
Damn.
“How’s Lieutenant Dixon?” Rosen asked.
Doberman shrugged. “He missed the pickup. He’s still on Sugar Mountain. That’s the quarry where the F-111 hit.”
“He missed it?”
“He decided to stay back with a wounded soldier.”
“Wow.”
“Just like Dixon, huh? We’ll get him. I’m going to fucking get him. They’re working up something now.”
Rosen looked worried.
“We can handle it,” Doberman told her.
“Excuse me, Captain,” she said, tossing her coffee onto the ground. “I have to go check on something.”
She had a strained expression on her face, as if someone had punched her in the gut. She got up from the seat and quickly began trotting in the direction of the crew tents, probably to a bathroom, Doberman thought. Damn food was screwing up everybody’s stomach.
CHAPTER 54
THE CORNFIELD
26 JANUARY 1991
0515
From Sugar Mountain, it had seemed as if the entire Iraqi force had been wiped out, but even before he got within a mile of the battlefield Dixon realized that wasn’t true. He heard an engine turn over several times, cough and die out; then he heard voices, a strange cacophony he assumed must be Arabic, or whatever the Iraqis spoke. He began tacking south, arranging the landscape in his head as he tried to remember not only what he had seen from the mountain but what he remembered from the day before. The sun was still just below the horizon, but there was more than enough light to see without using the NOD. He left the roadway and headed for the stream the team had followed the day before, stopping every so often to try and see where the Iraqis were. The helicopter— not yet visible— should lie about a mile northeast, beyond some of the empty ditches.
He had gone about a quarter of a mile along the stream when the truck engine kicked and caught in the distance, roaring steadily this time. Dixon dropped to one knee, scanning with the viewer in the direction of the noise. A broken tank lay near the western edge of the small plateau. He couldn’t see anything else.
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