HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (11 page)

Easy in theory, he thought now, listening to the
reverend. Difficult in reality, especially in war. Hack walked into the room,
sitting in the last of the twelve rows. The empty chairs made the space seem
cavernous. An electronic keyboard sat near the reverend’s lectern; one of its
stilt legs had been repaired with a thick tangle of duct tape.

“Who is the wise man? A man’s wisdom makes his face
shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed.” The minister nodded his
head, pausing for effect.

But you couldn’t tell who was wise and who wasn’t
by looking at his face, Hack thought. You couldn’t guess what people were worth
by looking at them. They changed. Look at Knowlington— take him out of
Washington, and the guy was actually wise, or damn close to it.

What about himself? Take him out of an F-15 and
put him in an A-10 and he was worthless.

Worthless? Just because he’d flubbed the wind correction
on his bombing run?

Or locked on an armored car instead of a missile
launcher?

Or hadn’t been aggressive enough? How much more
aggressive could he have been? Aggressive enough to get shot down? What if the
helicopters had been hit?

What was wisdom? What was folly?

The minister continued on, his thin voice as
earnest as any Hack had ever heard. The man’s eyes shone like faceted glass as
he spoke, clearly lost in the advice he was giving..

Preston had listened to many sermons like this in
his life, sometimes with rapt attention, more often with indifference as he
daydreamed about something else. The minister’s voice evoked something
different in him tonight— he thought about how naive the reverend must be, how
innocent of his surroundings.

He knew it wasn’t fair, and he knew he ought to
get up and find A-Bomb, let him know what was going on. But he stayed
listening, watching the reverend speak. He remained when the service ended and
the others filed out. He remained sitting as the minister closed his book and
walked to the electronic keyboard and turned it off; he watched as the man
walked toward him.

“Can I help you, son?”

“I’m as old as you, maybe older,” Preston told
him.

The minister laughed, nodding his head. “Age comes
with the collar, I’m afraid. I saw you listening to the sermon.”

“I have a line from Ecclesiastes on my flight board.
I carry it with me every flight. ‘Wisdom exceeds folly.’ ”

“It does.”

“But you can’t always tell what’s wise, and what’s
stupid.”

The reverend bit his lower lip, nodding his head
slowly. The lids of his eyes squeezed together slightly, as if he were
considering the quote for the first time. “I think that may be the point of the
passage,” he said finally.

“No,” said Hack. “I don’t think so. No one ever
said that,” he added, thinking of all the discussions he’d heard.

“Maybe they were wrong?”

“You think what we’re doing here is right? I mean,
we could be fooling ourselves and wouldn’t know it.”

Hack felt his throat contract as the words ran out
of his mouth. He hadn’t meant to say anything like that— he hadn’t been
consciously thinking of that, and even if he were, he’d never raise the
question with a stranger.

He stood, surprised at himself, a little
embarrassed even, waiting for the minister to reassure him, to say something
like: “Of course it’s right, justice must be done.”

It was the sort of thing that chaplains tended to
say. But this one looked at him and said nothing for a moment.

“I don’t know. Honestly, I’m not sure,” said the
reverent. “I struggle with it. To see someone die must be a horrible thing.”

“I’ve never actually seen anyone die,” said Hack.
“But I have killed a man. Or probably. I shot down a MiG.”

“Does it weigh on your conscience?”

“No. It doesn’t,” he said honestly. “I hadn’t
really thought of it. Not in that way. Not that I killed someone.”

How did he think of it? He thought of it as a
contest, a game almost.

No, as a job. Like the one he’d had in high
school, cutting grass. Something he had to do.

Surely the other pilot would have killed him if he
had the chance. Did that make it right, or wise?

Why had he held back on the Splash mission?

But he hadn’t held back at all. Screw the Army
briefer, screw Hawkins, screw anyone who suggested that. His guys saved two
men’s lives and that was worth something. No matter what you measured it
against.

“It is a struggle, deciding what is wise and what
is folly,” agreed the minister. “Would you like to get a drink?”

“A drink?” Hack laughed. “No.”

“Ministers drink.”

“I know that,” Preston told him. “But I have a,
uh, a kind of thing I have to do.” Splash was top secret and he couldn’t give
any details. “I’m on standby.”

“Oh,” said the chaplain, clearly disappointed.
“Coffee?”

“Nah,” said Hack. “Thanks anyway. Nice service.”

TENT CITY

28 JANUARY 1991

2145

BJ Dixon
stared at the canvas ceiling of
his tent, trying to remember what it felt like to fly. Wind rattled the fabric,
a whispery hush that made it seem as if he’d fallen into a void. He couldn’t
remember how to fly— he could barely remember how to walk. The yellow air of
the tent pressed against his chest like Iraqi dirt; the rumbles in the distance
were the groans of men dying, of the grenade exploding against the little boy’s
stomach.

“BJ?”

He turned his head toward the door.

“Lieutenant?”

Dixon sat up and swung his bare feet off the cot.
He had on dress uniform pants; they were the only pants clean enough to wear.
Cold, he’d layered all four of his clean T-shirts on. “It’s okay,” he said.

Becky Rosen slid slowly inside, holding the door
open only far enough to let her slender body through.

“I saw your light,” she said.

“Can’t sleep,” BJ told her.

“I. . .” She shrugged.

“What?”

“I was wondering how you were, after everything up
there.”

“Okay. Cold.”

“I heard you were going home.”

“No.” He folded his arms around his chest, a wave
of cold air hitting him. “They said I could. I don’t feel like it. I want to be
here.”

She nodded. “Get back on the horse? Fly again?”

“It seems like it’s been forever since I flew, you
know?”

“Those your dress pants?”

“Yeah.” He laughed— briefly, barely, but still, it
was a laugh. “Nothing else is clean.”

“I know the feeling.”

They’d kissed once, in the dark, by accident
really. Her lips had been warmer and deeper and softer than anything he’d ever
felt. But it had been so long ago now, before he’d known anything, before going
north, before the kid.

Rosen shifted her body, her head moving backward.
Dixon realized he didn’t want her to leave, but could think of nothing to get
her to stay.

“You were in Iraq?” he blurted out. Wong had told
him about the mission she’d volunteered for.

Yes.” She laughed, a tiny little laugh. “I
parachuted in with Captain Wong. He’s some sort of skydiving specialist. A
regular James Bond.”

“Saved my life,” said Dixon.

“Thank God.” She flexed her fingers, rubbing them
together. He’d never seen anyone so beautiful.

“Cold in here,” he said.

“Really? I feel warm.”

“Yeah.” He worked his tongue around his dry mouth,
trying to work up some moisture. “It was so cold in Iraq, I’m still frozen.”

“You’re a hero.” She blurted the words out.

“Nah.”

“That helicopter you shot down.”

“That was luck.”

“Well, you saved that sergeant’s life. I saw that
ridge and the quarry you were in. It must’ve been hell.”

“You saw that?”

“I was in one of the helicopters. The AH-6.
Captain Wong didn’t tell you?

“No.”

“Yeah, I was.”

“Yeah,” he repeated. His head became hollow again;
he remembered climbing along the rock face, the wind rushing around his body as
he waited for his chance to kill a man— three men, as it turned out, one with
his bare hands.

“They wouldn’t have, they wouldn’t have sent you
to Iraq if they, they didn’t think you were— brave,” said Rosen.

Her words jerked him back to the present.

 “I got tangled up with Delta on my own,” he said.
“Ground FAC. I volunteered. I ended up working with Doberman and A-Bomb.”

“Captain Glenon saved us, our helicopter.”

“Good guy.”

Rosen’s cheeks turned red. She said nothing.
Surprised, Dixon looked at her, waiting for her eyes to glance upwards from the
floor. He hadn’t thought she liked Doberman, not that way at least.

He’d thought, in fact, that she liked
him
.

She must. Otherwise, why was she here?

“Was it bad?” she asked.

He wanted to tell her about the boy. He saw the
boy and he saw the grenade as he began to speak. But instead of telling her
about the kid, instead of talking about Iraq and the howl in his head and how
much he’d forgotten and how bad his stomach hurt, his tongue found a different
story altogether.

“My mother died about a year ago, a little more
now,” said Dixon. His head seemed to pull back from the words, as if they were
physical things filling the air between them. “I sat by her side for a long
time, just waiting.”

The words stopped. Rosen nodded, then stared at
him.

Nothing else had ever seemed so beautiful.

 “I better go,” she said abruptly, turning for the
door.

He caught her arm. The biceps was harder than he
expected, a thick tree branch.

“Don’t,” he said.

The kiss was softer, way softer, than he expected,
and way longer than he could have hoped.

HOG HEAVEN

28 JANUARY 1991

2145

“The hangar roof
makes positive
identification difficult, admittedly,” Wong told Colonel Knowlington. “And the
enhancement technique that has been applied to the simple infrared rendering
has been known to distort images under similar circumstances. Nonetheless, the
pitot head at the nose confirms the identification. It is a Mig-29. No other
plan in the Iraqi inventory would cast such a shadow.”

Knowlington took the paper and held it less than
an inch in front of his eyes, trying to distinguish the black shadow from the
rest of the black shadows on the thermal-print paper. The image had started as
an infrared videotape of the Splash airfield taken by the Tornado shortly
before it had been shot down. British intelligence had analyzed and enhanced
the image with a computer program that could separate objects of different
primary heat characteristics – in other words, find objects hidden beneath
tarps or, in this case, thinly roofed buildings. According to Wong, the
aircraft had either been recently flown, or had been heated by the exposure of
a day’s worth of sun before being moved into the relatively small hangar
building at the Splash airfield. Since it definitely hadn’t been there
yesterday, it must have recently arrived.

Knowlington saw only a vague and dark arrow inside
a gray rectangle.

“You might prefer viewing this image,” said Wong,
removing another sheet from his folder. This was an even blurrier photocopy of
the same image, with a portion outlined in fine red pen.

Granted, the outline looked vaguely like the
outline of a MiG-29.

Or an F-15. Or a chipped piece of slate.

“It’s an aircraft, I assure you,” added Wong, as
if reading Knowlington’s mind. “And it was flown, or at least exposed to the
sun, within the past eight hours.”

“But why would they put it there?” the colonel
asked.

“I can think of several reasons. The simplest
would be to hide it, hoping that the base had been overlooked. It would be
easier to get it there than Iran.”

Several Iraqi fighters had scrambled to Iran over
the past several days, possibly for safekeeping, though it wasn’t entirely
clear why they had gone or what they intended on doing. The Iranians had
claimed the planes would be interred, but no one entirely trusted them.

“Maybe they’re staging to Iran,” suggested
Knowlington.

“Possible, though once in the air their modus
operandi has been to continue east.”

“Mechanical problems?”

“Possibly, though again, I can think of much
better places to land.”

“Maybe they’re going to plumb it for bombs and
send it south.”

Wong nodded grimly. “The so-called Death Wish
scenario cannot be ruled out. It would not be difficult to adapt the plane for
use as a bomber, especially if the mission were one-way. There are other
developments that indicated this plane may fly again, very soon.”

The captain pulled out another sheet of paper from
his folder. A satellite image taken around dusk, it was even darker than the
Tornado pictures.

“The truck here arrived after the overflight,
perhaps a few minutes before this was taken. It appears to be in motion, in
fact, though that is difficult to tell here,” said Wong.

“What truck?” asked Knowlington.

Wong pointed to a black curlicue near the runway,
which itself was barely discernible. “In this revetment. It is a tanker. And
while it could carry any number of liquid cargoes, my best guess would be
aviation fuel for the jet.”

“You see a fuel truck there?”

“The limitations of the available technology,”
said Wong, sighing with regret. “But yes, that is what that is.”

“Well, if that’s a fuel truck, the plane may be
gone already.”

“Possibly. But a night mission would be hazardous,
and perhaps beyond the capabilities of both the plane and the pilot.
Additionally, the airstrip is very short, even for a MiG-29. It’s unlit, and
the falloff at the very end of the runway, combined with the nearby hills,
makes the takeoff tricky.”