HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (16 page)

A-Bomb’s A-10 grumbled as they took a bank to
avoid the outer reaches of the SA-2’s radar. He patted the throttle, trying to
soothe her.

“I’ll take you down soon,” he said. “I promise.
Think of it this way— the higher we are, the faster we dive.”

Unimpressed, the A-10 continued to stutter. It was
subtle perhaps, but it was definitely coughing when it had no reason to cough.

A-Bomb glanced at the instruments— the temp was
rising on engine two. His oil pressure was good, but there was something wrong
with the power plant, whose rpms were fluctuating. He throttled back gently, lightly
trimming the rest of the plane to compensate.

The temp edged higher. Then the oil pressure began
whipping up and down, with the turbine’s rpms doing the same.

A wingman with a full complement of bombs and
Twinkies could have ignored the readings as either a product of misplaced
sensitivity on the gauge’s part, or his own overworked imagination. But a pilot
leading an important element of the attack had to assess them coolly and coldly
and conclude that, against all odds, against all human experience, one of the
A-10’s engines was actually threatening to quit.

The engine sputtered.

“Shape up,” he told his plane, smacking the fuel
panel switches as if the problem were due to indigestion.

The Hog responded by surging nearly sideways, the
engine suddenly back in the green, all indicators at spec. Then A-Bomb heard a
soft pop behind him and felt a shudder. By the time the warning light told him the
engine had put in for early retirement, he was muscling the stick to keep the heavily
laden plane from spinning toward the ground.

OVER IRAQ

29 JANUARY 1991

0530

Skull moved his
eyes carefully, using them
as an astronomer might use a telescope to examine an uncharted part of the sky.
Nudging them across the reddish-blue band of the horizon, he studied the thin
wisps of clouds for black specks and odd shifts, looking for enemy fighters
that might somehow have managed to avoid the comprehensive Allied radar net.

That was virtually impossible for a primitive air
force like the Iraqi’s. But Knowlington had learned to fly against a supposedly
primitive air force. The Vietnamese MiGs had been outdated, outmoded, and son
of a bitchin’ good. They came at you from a cloud or caught your tail or
suckered you into a turn where their wingman popped up behind you. They hid in
the sun, or the blind spot of your inattention. They waited until you were out
of missiles or low on fuel. They took advantage of your arrogance and
sloppiness, your failure to hit the marks just so. It was more the men than the
machines— but that had always been the case, back to the very beginning over
the trenches in France and Belgium. Skill and machine and luck.

Never forget luck, the under-rated factor in every
equation.

Skull’s eyes reached the right wing of his Hog, then
slipped upward, repeating the ritual search. He blew a long breath into his
mask, nudged his stick just barely left, staying on course. A hundred other
missions played at the edge of his brain, memories of mistakes and triumphs
that pricked his adrenaline. A list of contingent to-do’s played constantly at
the back of his mind: if this, then that; if that, then this. Skull had only
the vaguest awareness of the list, knew only that if it was needed his brain
would flash it like an urgent bulletin to his arms and legs and eyes. His
actions would be automatic.

To fly you had to “think and not think” at the
same time. To fly well you had to forget you were flying.

An old instructor had told him that. Skull could
still remember nodding solemnly at the time, not knowing what the hell the
geezer was talking about. He’d had to shoot down two Vietnamese MiGs before he
started to actually understand— before, really, the tension of combat became
familiar enough to relax him. Before the jagged rhythm of an over-pumped heart
became a thing to live for.

Knowlington would be giving that up, quitting now.
It was his duty to resign.

Who wanted to go out that way, sneaking off in the
middle of the night? Better to burn out in a last fireball.

That was why he’d gone along with the plan to
steal the MiG. One last burst of glory. He wasn’t coming back from this
mission. Auger in.

Years from now, people would talk about him in
awed tones
: Michael Knowlington— Skull— the guy who bought it carrying out
the impossible dream.

Arrogance. Vanity.

He tightened his eyes and continued scanning the
sky.

OVER IRAQ

29 JANUARY 1991

0535

A-Bomb wrenched the
stick to the right,
crunching the rudder pedals at the same time, more for leverage than actual
effect. The plane’s wings finally steadied and he started working his nose back
up, regaining control. He’d lost nearly three thousand feet in little more than
the time it took to chew through a half-stick of red licorice.

That was nothing. He’d dropped the other half of
the candy, losing it somewhere on the floor of the plane. That was the kind of
thing that hurt your ego, as well as attracted ants.

Cycling through the restart procedure on the
starboard engine, he considered that what he really needed right now was a good
cup of Joe, something beyond the Dunky in his thermos. Dunkin’ Donuts made a
mean batch of caffeine, but in a situation like this there was no beating the
takeout at Joltin’ Joe’s Diner in Schenectady, N.Y. A-Bomb had thought several
times of arranging a pipeline for just such emergencies, but hadn’t been able
to come up with a way of keeping the coffee hot in transport to the Gulf. A
cold Jolt didn’t do it.

At the moment, he’d take any jolt, cold or hot.
The power plant just wasn’t willing to restart, and nothing he did— including a
very unsubtle string of curses and a harsh rap on the instrument panel— worked.

“Hey, Two! Yo kid! I got a situation up here,” he
told Dixon. “One of my thinks it belongs in a Ford.”

“One?”

“Left engine died.”

A-Bomb checked his position against the paper map
on his kneeboard as Dixon acknowledged. He’d drifted west, edging dangerously
close to the SA-2 site, which wasn’t due to be taken out for a good ten minutes.
So close, in fact, that a direct course to his target area would take him
inside the missile’s envelope.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” he told his wingman.
“We change the game plan slightly— I’ll go after the SA-9s, then nail the guns
with the cluster-bombs.”

“Uh, lost some of that One,” said Dixon. “You’re
looking to hit all the targets on one engine?”

“What I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb. “Can’t fly
with all this weight under my wings. Might as well get rid of it where it’ll do
the most good.”

“Uh, Captain—” Static swallowed the rest of
Dixon’s voice. His meaning, however, was clear. A-Bomb was out of his mind to
not cut his stores loose and head home.

Maybe if he’d been flying another kind of plane,
that might have been true. But in a Hog, A-Bomb’s decision made perfect,
logical, conservative sense. At least to him.

“Got to shoot my wad,” explained O’Rourke. This
way, I get rid of it quick and leave you a full load to back up the assault
team with. Let me get what we know is there, you handle the contingencies. I’ll
turn around, you hang out, catch up over the border or back at base, whatever.”

“You’re flying back alone?”

“I think I take a left and keep going until I hit
the stop sign, right?” A-Bomb lifted his finger off the mike, remembering he was
flight leader and had to make a pass at sounding like one.

What would Doberman do in this situation?

Curse and snarl something nasty.

Couldn’t curse the kid, though. It was tough to be
nasty to BJ.

“Unless you’re thinking of pushing, it’s not going
to make much difference if you’re on my butt or not going home,” said A-Bomb.
“Besides, I don’t want you to miss the show.”

Under duress, A-Bomb might have admitted that he
knew vaguely of some sort of standing order— or suggestion or maybe a whimsical
thought somewhere— about dealing with engine failures that might, under certain
very specific circumstances, be interpreted as advising against proceeding to a
target on one engine. He’d also admit, again under heavy duress, that although the
plane could fly quite adequately with one engine once properly coaxed and
flattered, she wasn’t particularly happy to do so while carrying a full load— a
fact she emphasized now by giving him a stall warning.

He traded a little altitude for speed.

“You with me, Two?”

“Your call, Gun.”

“What I’m talking about. One other thing,” he
added. “I want you to leave me and track back to our original course. I have to
cut a closer line to Splashdown.”

“Uh. . .” The rest of his transmission was covered
with static.

“You got to work on that stutter, kid,” said A-Bomb.
“Ruins a really beautiful singing voice.”

“Captain, anything like a straight line is going
to take you right through the target area for the SA-2. It’s still live.”

“Our British buddies are going to take it out any
second,” said A-Bomb.

There was a pause. O’Rourke knew what Dixon was
going to say— it was, after all, exactly what he would say.

“I got your butt,” said Dixon.

“Kid. . .”

“You really ought to think about upgrading your
choice of toilet paper,” said his wingman. “And maybe doing something about
that hair.”

“What I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb, nosing onto
the course.

OVER IRAQ

29 JANUARY 1991

0545

BJ kept his
eyes nailed on A-Bomb’s good
engine, trying to ignore the churning juices that had spit up from his stomach
to his lungs and throat. He’d always thought O’Rourke was a little crazy, but
this was insane. In approximately ten seconds they were going to cross into the
scanning area of one of the most potent missiles in the Iraqi arsenal, a missile
that had been downing Western aircraft for something like thirty years.

If the SAM operators decided to target the a-10s—
and even if no radar anywhere in Iraq had detect them, the planes were
certainly low and slow enough to have been eyeballed by now in the early light—
the chugging Hog was dead meat.

Insisting that he take all the known targets was
equally insane. The Maverick launches were one thing— the AGM-65s could be
targeted and fired from a good distance away. But the cluster-bombs had to be
released essentially over the target, which meant that likely as not O’Rourke
would be plunging into a hail of flak to kick them off. With one engine – hell,
with two – yanking and banking to duck even optically guided 23mm shells was
not an easy way to make a living. Half the push as you recovered meant the
gunners had twice the chance to nail you.

BJ shifted against his seat restraints, hunkering
over his stick, pushing himself into the red zone.

The Iraqi missile was probably dead. It hadn’t come
up last night. Wouldn’t now.

Dixon checked his weapons panel, made sure he was
ready to go with the Mavs, glanced at the targeting screen. It took patience to
work the blurs into a hittable target, and he wasn’t feeling particularly
patient.

His mind flashed on Becky, the warm feel of her
body next to his in bed, her softness. He wanted her warmth. He hadn’t realized
how good it could feel before, or perhaps he hadn’t needed it before. It didn’t
erase everything. It didn’t banish the memory of the kid or everything else,
but it was something he wanted. He didn’t feel cold anymore.

BJ’s eyes itched. He moved them up from the
screen, looked outside the plane, checked the HUD, went back to the IR image in
the video.

The target area dribbled into the top corner of
the screen. Dixon found the dim shadow of an SA-9 launcher, or at least thought
he did— definitely yes. He slipped the cursor toward it in case A-Bomb missed.
He took a breath and checked his altitude, nudging through thirteen thousand feet.
His left hand tightened on the throttle and he looked toward A-Bomb’s plane,
watching for the burst that would show he’d fired; waiting for the yell in his
ears over the short-range radio announcing the game was on.

He waited, but what he heard was not A-Bomb’s
triumphant screech but the warning blare of the RWR, and a scream from the
AWACS controller, their impromptu duet announcing that the Iraqi SA-2 battery
had launched a pair of missiles in their direction.

CHAPTER 39

OVER IRAQ

29 JANUARY 1991

0545

Captain Hawkins leaned
back, trying to see
their target area through the Pave Hawk’s windscreen. It would have taken
better eyes than he possessed— Splash was still nearly ten miles away. The two
helo pilots worked silently in the cockpit, fingers jumping across the cockpit
panels in an elaborate ballet. Every so often one would point to something;
inevitably the gesture would be answered by a thumbs-up.

The aircraft the two men were flying was based on
the Sikorsky S-70/H-60 Blackhawk, the military’s standard utility helicopter.
The successor to the ubiquitous UH-1 Huey, the base model could carry an
eleven-man squad and three or four crew members roughly six hundred miles
before refueling. While combat use generally shortened the range, the type was considerably
faster and longer legged than the versatile Huey. The MH-60G Pave Hawk— an Air
Force ship often used on Spec Op missions, as well for combat SAR or rescue
operations— differed from the standard H-60 in several key aspects. Among the
most important for this mission were advanced ground-following radar, an
infra-red radar, satellite communications and position finder, and
range-extending fuel tanks.