HOGS #5: TARGET SADDAM (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (24 page)

Davis
skidded in behind him, huffing; he’d lost his SAW along the way and like Wong
was armed only with his pistol.

“Someone
behind the truck,” said Wong. “Moving left to right.”

The
Delta trooper said something, but Wong still couldn’t hear.

“Could
be Salt,” he guessed, and Davis nodded his head.

An
AKSU Russian submachine-gun declared that they wrong, a statement underlined by
a half-dozen 5.45 mm bullets that ripped through Sergeant Davis’s arm and leg.
And just in case there was any doubt, bullets from a much larger Dushka roiled
the dirt nearby, the impact of its bullets so strong that Wong could feel the
earth vibrating beneath him as he pressed into the soil.

OVER IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2200

“Got
it! Shit!
Shit!”
yelped Preston over the radio, sounding like a nine-year-old who’d just nailed
a tin duck at a church bazaar.

Doberman,
flying in a wheeling pattern that had him roughly opposite his wingman’s path,
glanced at the ground and saw the T-72 guarding the turnoff to Kajuk explode in
a red-white geyser of frying steel. Preston was coming straight on for the hill
behind it.

“Up,
get up! Get the fuck up! You’re too damn low! The hill! The hill! Jesus get
up!” yelled Doberman.

He
cut his turn to try and keep Hack in view, but lost the dark-hulled airplane in
the shadows near the hill. Doberman pitched his Hog downward, cursing the idiot
and repeating his warning to pull away from the hill. Preston might be a jerk,
but no one should pay the ultimate price for target fascination.

Pay
attention to the plane, not the boom. Hog Rule Number Three.

And
never run into hills.

Hack
hadn’t acknowledged, but Doberman didn’t see a flash either. Now he was running
right for a fresh stream of anti-air coming from a battery west of the village.
Doberman cut south, tossing some flares and chaff in case any of the SAM sites
were still working. He temporarily lost his sense of where he was, swinging at
too wide an angle to get back on his original target area. His low altitude— he’d
ducked to five hundred feet to avoid the SA-11— made sorting things somewhat
harder. He also had to watch out for the hills.

Doberman
pushed back westward, climbing slightly and scanning for his wingman, trying
not to pay too much attention to the AAA bursting behind him. Wolf cut in with
something to the effect that Skull and A-Bomb were on their way; Doberman
didn’t have a chance to acknowledge, finally getting a bead on where he was and
cutting back with the idea of launching another Maverick and then putting the
cannon to work.

As
he turned, his RWR bleeped a warning, then went off; in the next instant a gray
streak of lightning flashed toward the earth three or four miles to the
northeast. It was one of the RAF ALARM missiles nailing the last of the Iraqi
SAM installations. The missile had needed only the slightest flick of the
on-off switch to memorize its enemy’s location; before the Iraqis could juice
up again the British warhead landed, sending hot shards of metal into the nearby
SAM as well as the destroying the radar van. A narrow thread of yellow flame
rippled on the ground, then erupted brilliant red as the poised SS-11s caught
fire.

A
pair of yellow and black flame puffs rode skywards, framed by the light of the
explosion. Two more followed in quick succession. Doberman guessed they were a
flock of heat-seeking SA-9s, launched in desperation. The short-range missiles
were not a threat, since they had been launched at long range and lacked
all-aspect targeting; they simply had too far to go to get a sniff of his
engines.

The
quartet of missiles rising now out of Al Kajuk, just ahead of his left wing and
nearly parallel to him— those were a different story.

Doberman
yanked and banked, goosing flares and trying to whip his turbofans away from
the heat-seekers’ noses. One of the SAMs, moving at Mach 1.5, shot out behind
him then veered upwards, utterly confused; it exploded in mid-air more than a
mile from the Hog’s hull. Another sucked in one of his flares and detonated
instantly, bouncing a shock wave but no shrapnel against Doberman’s tail.

But
two others, launched in a fresh volley after he began his evasive maneuvers,
stayed with him. Each sucked a different engine, lions working a tired zebra
from both flanks. Doberman could feel them panting behind him; he goosed more
flares and tucked right, tucked left, tucked right, very low now— so low in
fact that he was at least ten feet below the summit of the hill that was
growing in his front glass.

The
missiles kept coming, gaining on him as he gave the stick a hard push left. An
elongated football shot by his canopy, so close Glenon could see the thrust
surging from its rear end. He nearly took the control column out of the floor
trying to turn toward it as it passed, away from the other missile. The air in
front of him shuddered as the missile detonated; the Hog skipped sideways with
the turbulent shock, more a brick than an airplane, succumbing to several of
Newton’s Laws at once.

The
second missile exploded on his left, close enough to singe part of the tail fin.
Doberman struggled to gain control of the plane, both hands on the stick, his
head swimming. With his forward speed plummeting toward stall level, the right
wing flipped out from under him; in the back of his mind he thought he’d flamed
an engine. He worked to correct but the wing was insistent; he spun through an
invert so close to the ground that the wing ip seemed to scrape dirt. But
despite the spin and the ground he somehow managed to actually pull stable and
begin to climb. He hadn’t lost the GE’s, or if he had it was only temporary,
because they were cranking their turbofans now. Head scrambled, legs weak, he
somehow managed climb over the highest hill, clearing the scrubby summit by
perhaps six inches. The Hog lifted her nose with a snort as she flew into clear
air; Doberman’s heart pounded so hard he could hear Tinman’s medal clanging on
his chest.

Good
luck or not, that sucker was now part of his flight gear. Doberman caught his
breath, checked his instruments, and banked south to return to the battlefield.
His fuel was a little low; it was possible he’d gotten nicked by shrapnel and
had leaked a bit before the Hog’s self-sealing bladders choked shut. Even if
that was the case, the situation wasn’t critical.

“Devil
Three this Four. Glenon, where the hell are you?”

Preston
sounded like a flight leader scolding a nugget for getting outside the
formation.

“Where
the hell are you?” Doberman responded.

“I’m
two miles south of the highway,” said Hack.

“Which
fucking highway? There’s two.”

Preston
didn’t answer. Obviously he’d meant the east-west highway.

“I’m
coming over Kajuk from the northeast,” Doberman told him. “Orbit where you are.
I’ll come to you.”

“Four.”

The
battlefield lay in a vector that perfectly split the intersection of Doberman’s
left wing and fuselage at forty-five degrees. The village sat in the crook of a
hill. A line of triple-A installations made a staggered “C” to the east of the
village in the direction of Kuwait; only two were still firing, their spew of
red and black streaming harmlessly into the air some miles away. Doberman
turned his attention to the TVM; he quickly found the tank Preston had hit
half-hidden by the shadow of the hill as he approached. Beyond it, several
vehicles in the convoy were still burning. Nothing was moving, and there didn’t
seem to be any armor left intact.

Doberman
tried contacting the ground team but got no response; Wolf didn’t immediately
answer his hails either.

“Preston,
you talk to Wong and his boys while I was fooling with those SAMs?”

“Negative.
Uh, friends call me Hack.”

“Three.”
Doberman realized he was being an asshole, but Preston rubbed him the wrong
way. “I’m banking west, trying to raise them. I have two more Mavs; I want to
hold onto them until I know their situation. The convoy is definitely stopped.”

When
two more hails failed to reach Wong and his men, Doberman went back to Wolf.
The ABCCC hadn’t heard from the ground team either. The Herk that was supposed
to make the pickup had suffered a casualty aboard— apparently a heart attack— but
was proceeding anyway.

There
was some good news. The Iraqis were desperately trying to radio about a dozen
units; the controller took that as a hopeful sign.

Doberman
didn’t. It meant there’d be no chance for the ground team to linger. The whole
operation had moved so quickly he doubted there had been time to find Dixon.

Son
of a bitch
. As
far as he was concerned, that was the whole reason for the mission.

Son
of a bitch
.

And
now they had other things to worry about— the AWACS monitoring the area spotted
two Iraqi fighters taking off from an air base about seventy miles away. At the
same time, two SA-2 SAM sites thought to have been eliminated suddenly came
back to life.

The
SAMs would only be a problem going home, and then only if the Tornadoes or
somebody else didn’t splash them. The Iraqi jets were another story.
Tentatively ID’d as MiG-29s, they could get within missile range in roughly
three minutes. Without a head start, the Hogs would never get away.

The
AWACS controller prudently directed Doberman and Preston to snap onto an escape
vector away from the Iraqi planes and out of the battle.

“Negative,”
answered Doberman. “We’re staying on station.”

The
controller’s response— undoubtedly not pretty— was conveniently overrun by
another transmission. Doberman tried the ground team again without getting an
answer. He turned his full attention to the Maverick screen as he swung back
south, as if he might somehow be able to see Wong through the tiny aperture.

“Devil
Three, this is Four,” said Preston. “Bandits are positively identified and
heading this way.”

“My
radio’s working fine,” Doberman told him. It took a superhuman effort not to
add something to the effect that Preston was welcome to run away if he was
scared.

“I
have your six,” said the major.

A-Bomb
would have said something funny, but at least Preston didn’t try and pull rank.
And, in fact, he had given the proper Hog response— screw the enemy, I’m
staying here until my job is done.

Which
didn’t make him all right, just slightly less of a jerk.

“Okay,
Hack,” Doberman said. “Your old buddies in the Eagles’ll take care of the
MiGs.”

“We’ll
nail them if they don’t.”

Okay—
that
was something A-Bomb could have said.

Doberman
eyed the village with the Mav’s infra-red eye; he caught a grayish blur at the
left edge of his screen that came into focus as a large vehicle, possibly an
APC though it didn’t have the wedge-shaped Dog associated with the Iraqi
vehicles. No matter— there was something else behind it, a truck big enough to
be a troop transport. And another. Doberman nudged his stick to try and get the
lead vehicle back into his targeting scope; he slid his whole body to urge the
plane around. He coaxed the pipper on target, locked and fired as he muttered
his ritual “Bing-bang-boing.”

“I
got trucks moving out of the village,” he told Preston. “I targeted a personnel
carrier, or what looked like a personnel carrier.”

The
Maverick smashed the vehicle as Doberman paused for a breath. As the explosion
flared, the ZSU-23s to the east began firing, this time nearly straight up.
Doberman banked west immediately; Preston said something but it was garbled.

A
thick spray of red tracers arced for his nose as he turned, frothing in his
path.

IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2210

Salt
pressed his
chin
against the dirt. The world had become a sharp buzz, the air above him on fire.
He wasn’t wounded, he was sure of that, but he was equally sure that if he
moved, if he twitched, he’d get fried. Things were burning, things were
exploding, but he couldn’t see anything except for a hazy gray mist, the shroud
they threw over you before dumping your body into the earth. He waited for it
to clear, but instead of lifting it drifted downwards, its electric tingle
moving closer and closer. Salt pressed himself further and further into the
earth, dirt filling his nose and throat and lungs as he breathed. The sky
flashed white with heat so intense he could feel every hair on his body singe.
Only then did the mist start to evaporate.

He
lifted his head, saw nothing in front of him. The wreckage of the Mercedes, a
twisted collection of burned metal, fabric, and plastic, sat to his left. The
door was open.

Salt
pushed forward like a sprinter lining up for a race. He took the M-16 and
awkwardly sprung forward, unbalanced, low to the ground, legs propelling him
forward in something like a stuttering dive rather than a trot or run. He
pushed himself sideways, stumbling for three or four yards before collapsing in
a roll. Something moved to his right. He got back to his feet and went in that
direction, six yards this time, falling down a shallow hill, sliding like a kid
belly-whopping without a sled down a snowy incline.