HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (17 page)

Hawkins pushed back against the wall of the
helicopter, tightening his grip on the restraining strap. He’d been standing
pretty much the whole way. He hated sitting for more than five minutes as a
general rule; going into combat he could never sit, could hardly even stand
still. He didn’t fidget over the operational details, much less worry about
what might go wrong or what could go wrong. He also didn’t check his gear a
million times – once after takeoff was good enough for him. But he couldn’t
sit, and he couldn’t stand still.

Most of the D boys were standing, too. The
exception was Fernandez, whom he’d told to mind Major Hawkins and the British
mechanic, who were crouched on the floor talking about the MiG. The Delta
sergeant perched on a jumpseat behind the two men, occasionally glaring at
their backs like an angry babysitter.

The British sergeant was an older man who looked
as if he’d been rousted from bed. Huddled on the floor beneath an over-sized
parka, he looked more like a mound than a man, his limbs hunched together, his
face whiter than porcelain. The man had no more volunteered for this mission
than Fernandez had asked to watch him; how much he might really be able to
accomplish was anyone’s guess, even though he seemed to know a lot about the
plane. He’d told Hawkins his name was Eugene, pronouncing it with great
emphasis on both syllables. If he had a last name, it had been drowned out by
the noise of the helicopter.

Preston, on the other hand, was practically tap-dancing.
He kept gesturing and nodding. Obviously a blowhard, the Air Force major had no
perspective on anything beyond his nose.

What the hell did
any
pilot know about war,
anyway? The fucks flew a million miles away from any real danger, pushed a
button, went home. That was their war— roll around with a local girl, trying to
forget the hardship involved in drinking beer instead of champagne.

Granted, some of the A-10 pilots were different.

Doberman had personally saved Hawkins’s butt by
nailing a MiG in air-to-air combat. He was a nasty son of a bitch with a temper
so fierce he would have been washed out of Special Operations training— hell,
out of the Army— in maybe five minutes. But he used it to his advantage in the
air.

BJ Dixon had humped a rucksack and saved one of
Hawkins’ best squad leaders, and to hear the old coot talk about the pilot now
you’d think he was in love. Dixon had lived off the land for a couple of days
and managed to get his butt snared in a STAR pickup— so you knew he wasn’t the
usual wimp shit pilot.

A-Bo0mb, what a piece of work. Stranded
temporarily at Fort Apache, he’d helped one of Hawkin’s sergeants capture a
tanker truck that turned out to be a chemical weapons ferry. Even more
impressive, the SOB won a desert “dune buggy” off a Spec Ops command in a poker
game and knew more about weapons than half the men in Delta Force.

And Colonel Knowlington had bona fides that
stretched back before Hawkins was born. So four exceptions to the general rule
of pilots being shitheads.

The only other Air Force officer that Hawkins knew
well was Bristol Wong, but he was in a whole different category— a Spec Ops guy
born and bred, assigned to the Air Force only by some weird fit of fate, or
maybe as penance for serious sins in an earlier lifetime. Just now he was
leaning over the door gunner, no doubt offering some arcane tip on how to
increase the weapon’s accuracy.

But Preston was a typical goober. No way was he getting
the plane out.

Hawkins suspected the MiG would be gone before
they got there. The Iraqis weren’t quite as dumb as they seemed.

But what the hell. They were in it now.

He turned his head and glanced toward the sliding
window, where one of the crewmen was fingering the 7.62mm mini-gun. A long tube
attached to the gun would catch spent shells, ferrying them outside where they
could be safely ejected. The gun was similar to the SAW Hawkins had outfitted
himself with, and nicely complimented the .50-cal door-mounted weapon.

Zipping over Iraqi territory at more than a
hundred miles an hour, their route had been carefully planned to follow an
empty path in the desert; they had seen no sign of life except for two highways
in the last half-hour. Now as he looked past the gunner Hawkins saw, or thought
he saw, a row of houses only a few yards away. He pushed forward, trying to get
a better view, not sure if the Iraqi village was an optical illusion or a
detail he had somehow missed when the pilots went over the ingress route with
him.

Illusion— just rocks.

But there were buildings there, a half-mile away,
no more. People or animals or something were moving, something live.

The sky flashed red in the distance. One of the
crew members began talking loudly, relaying radio information from the command
plane.

The chopper seemed to pick herself up by the tail,
her pace quickening. The door gunner leaped forward to man his weapon.

“Missiles in the air ahead! Flak!” warned the
co-pilot. “The game’s afoot!”

A Sherlock Holmes fan, thought Hawkins, glancing
at his watch. They were five minutes from Splashdown.

OVER IRAQ

29 JANUARY 1991

0550

A-Bomb nailed the
cursor on the SA-9 just
as the missile warning blared. The timing couldn’t be more perfect— his CD
player had just dished up “Rock the Casbah.”

“Sing it, boys,” he told the band, joining in on
the chorus as he goosed the first missile toward the small mobile launcher,
which was just over eight nautical miles away. A second, unbriefed launcher sat
maybe twenty yards to the right of the first; A-Bomb zeroed the targeting
pipper on the hatch right in front of the four-barreled launching arm and
cooked off Maverick number two.

He kicked chaff out, but didn’t bother zagging to
avoid the SA-2— the way he figured it, he was flying so damn slow a cut left or
right wasn’t going to throw the enemy missile anyway. Besides, it would make it
even harder to find the other SA-9 launcher, which didn’t seem to be in shadows
of the hill where it was supposed to be. Perhaps sensing his difficulty, the
Iraqis kindly lit their ZSU-23 flak guns, streaming bullets into the sky to
advertise his secondary targets.

“I’ll get to you, I’ll get to you,” he told them,
realizing from the position of the ZSU-23s that he had been looking for the
SA-9 a little too far to the east. He slipped his cursor left, working the gear
like his grandpa used to nudge the old Philco to improve reception. “Light
touch, young’un, that’s what it takes,” Grandpa O’Rourke always used to advise,
and just like that the baseball game would flood in with Phil Rizzuto shouting “There
it goes!”— the Yankee Scooter two hundred miles away calling a Roy White home
run into the upper deck in right field.

And just like that A-Bomb nudged the Maverick
target cue precisely into the sloped grille of the SA-9 Gaskin launcher, itself
a throwback to the days of stifled offense and a big strike zone. The Russian-made
launcher lacked White’s deceptive speed and couldn’t play the difficult sun of
Yankee Stadium’s left field, but it did possess something of the outfielder’s
quiet grit— the launcher puffed up two missiles just as A-Bomb sent his
fastball its way.

“Nice try, my friends,” A-Bomb told the Iraqis.

He was just coming into the missiles’ extreme
range. Essentially hopped-up SA-7 heat-seekers on a mobile platform, the
Gaskins were somewhat old-fashioned and relatively small, though of course any
amount of explosive with wings attached was nothing to sneeze at.

A-Bomb kicked defensive flares and deepened his
angle of attack, sliding right as he came for the AAA guns at the foot of the
hill to the right of the airstrip. He found four of them, staggered in pairs,
each pumping enough lead in the sky to keep a million batteries from ever
running out of juice. A-Bomb thumbed his last Maverick at the first stream he
could designate, then pushed his Hog right, leaning against his good engine to
get an acceptable glide path for his CBUs.

Problem was, the bombs were preset for release
around five thousand feet, and there was no way he was going to be that high
when he got over the target. He couldn’t fudge it either— he was passing
through seven thousand already and very far off the mark.

The air percolated with exploding shells, the
gunners homing in on the slow-moving, chugging target. A-Bomb wasn’t quite in
their range, though that didn’t stop them from giving it the ol’ Iraqi college
try.

Nor did it prevent at least a few shells from
bursting close enough to the Hogs skin to rattle the wings.

“Gonna melt your barrels you keep shooting like
that,” he told them.

People were yelling at him over the radio. The
Clash had moved on to “Red Angel Dragnet.” The Hog added a few jangles and
rumbles of its own. The SA-2 was somewhere behind him,. The SA-9s sped upward somewhere
to the left. The 23mm slugs were coming for his nose. A-Bomb felt right at
home.

Almost perfect.

“I could really go for a good cup of Joe right
now,” he told the Iraqis, pushing his nose down sharply. “Got any?”

His Maverick erupted, erasing the first Zeus.

“I’ll take that as a no,” he said, dropping his
bombs into the flak dealer to its right. The Hog jerked slightly as the bombs
fell, helping  as A-Bomb pushed right, angling for the second group of guns,
which inexplicably stopped firing before he pickled.

“I told you not to start firing too soon,” A-Bomb
told the Iraqis as he pulled back on the stick. “Damn. Didn’t the Ruskies teach
you anything?”

“One, repeat?”

“Oops, did I transmit there?” A-Bomb asked Dixon
over the squadron frequency.

“You’ve been doing play by play,” answered his
wingman.

“Any good?”

“Don’t give up your day job. That the Clash on the
soundtrack?”

“What I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb, who always
appreciated when a youngster picked up on the classics. He checked his
position— three thousand feet, give or take, a mile north of Splashdown, air
speed 185 knots.

Must have a tailwind, he thought.

“What happened to that SA-2?”

“Got confused and blew up right after launch,” BJ
told him. “Tornados nailed the site right after the radar came on. Gave them a
good beacon.”

“Always glad to help out our allies, even if I’m
just playing clay pigeon.” A-Bomb flicked the CD player back to the beginning
of side one; something about “Know Your Rights” always got his juices moving.

“A-Bomb, did you hear me tell you about that SA-9
launch?”

“Musta missed it,” A-Bomb told him. A gun far to
the north began firing, probably at him. The defenses to the north and west
were serious and numerous; he banked southward, still climbing slowly. He could
just make out Dixon beyond the thick gray smoke rising from his targets. “You
got it, kid?”

“I’m taking a run at the field now,” Dixon told
him.

“Go for it,” said A-Bomb. He checked his
instruments, working through the numbers slower than usual— a difference of
approximately one nanosecond.

Fuel a little lighter than he’d expected. More
than enough to make it back to KKMC, though, especially on one engine.

A-Bomb spotted Dixon’s Hog diving toward the
smoking airfield. A plume of black smoke erupted in its path; the dark fingers
climbed high into the air, far higher than the ZSU 23 had been.

“Heavy artillery gunnin’ for ya kid,” A-Bomb
shouted, as Dixon’s plane disappeared in the geyser of 57mm shells.

OVER IRAQ

29 JANUARY 1991

0554

Dixon hadn’t seen
the antiaircraft gun in
the web of shadows and smoke. The first shells— fat twists of glowing metal
hurling past his windscreen— seemed unreal, old nightmares remembered long
after sleep.

If he’d seen it, he could have nailed the obsolete
but still deadly self-propelled ZSU-57-2 gun with his AGMs, dropped the CBUs,
or even lit his cannon and erased them with a quick burst of combat load. But
Dixon wasn’t seeing very well— or rather, he was seeing in slow motion. It had
been less than two weeks since he’d last flown, but those two weeks had been a
lifetime. Shapes that would have crystallized immediately into threats remained
vague and distorted for an agonizingly long time before he could decipher them.

In truth, the difference in reaction time might
have only been a matter of a second or two, but in war, under fire, a second or
two was the difference between life and death. He pushed his Hog right, ducking
the path of the flak, increasing his speed as he dove.

The gun firing at him threw massive shells to twelve
thousand feet in the air, but it was an ancient system, manually aimed. The
bullets chewed the air behind the Hog, not quite fast enough to catch the
plane’s tail.

Gravity smashed into Dixon’s face as he zagged
away. Weighed down by her munitions, trying to respond to her pilot’s harsh
inputs, the plane slammed downward. The flight suit tried desperately to
compensate for the forces trying to squeeze blood from BJ’s body, but there was
only so much it could do. Dixon felt his head begin to float above his body,
icy blackness poking at the edges of his conscience.

This had happened to him before. On his very first
combat mission, it had shaken him so badly he’d launched his weapons without
targets, broken his attack, run away.

He didn’t do that now. If the days that had passed
since he last flew had robbed him of his instantaneous reactions, they had also
changed him irrevocably. He might flinch, but he would never again run away
from anything ever again. He would bite his teeth together hard enough to taste
blood flowing from the gums, hard enough to taste the smoking cordite of the
grenade that had killed the boy, hard enough to hold off the yawning blackness
of fear.