HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (2 page)

OVER SOUTHEASTERN IRAQ

28 JANUARY 1991

1110

As soon as Hack
cleared to his right, A-Bomb
dished off his two Mavericks, targeting the pair of four-barreled 23mm
anti-aircraft guns that were sending a fury of shells at his flight leader.

“What I’m talking about,” A-Bomb told the missiles
as they sped toward their destinations. “What I’m talking about is nobody fires
on a Hog and gets away with it. Go shoot at an F-15 or something. Better yet,
aim for a MiG.”

Never one to waste a motion, A-Bomb nudged his
stick ever so slightly to the left, lining up to drop his cluster-bombs on the
buried tanks. In the fraternity of Hog drivers, A-Bomb stood apart. He was a
wingman’s wingman, always checking somebody’s six, always ready to smoke any
son of a bitch with bad manners enough to attack his lead. But he did have his
quirks— he never entered combat without a full store of candy in his
flightsuit, and never dropped a bomb without an appropriate soundtrack.

“Sweet Child O’ Mine” qualified as appropriate, if
you skipped the mushy parts.

As W. Axl Rose prayed for thunder, O’Rourke tipped
into a gentle swoop toward the targets, planning to drop his Redeye cluster-bombs
in two salvos. In the meantime, Hack’s first Maverick hit its target, the nose
of the flying bomb sending a small gray-black geyser into the air.

“Decoy,” said A-Bomb. “Son of a bitch.”

OVER SOUTHEASTERN IRAQ

28 JANUARY 1991

1115

Hack rarely cursed,
but he found it nearly
impossible not to as he swung back toward the target area. A-Bomb might or
might not be right about the tanks being decoys— hazy smoke now covered the
target area, making it impossible to tell whether the tanks had been made of
metal or papier-mâché. Flames shot up from one of the antiaircraft guns his
wingmate had hit; black fingers erupted in crimson before closing back into a
fist and disappearing. He turned on his wing, edging north, still trying to
figure out what the hell he was seeing on the ground.

In an F-15, everything was laid out for you. AWACS
caught the threat miles and miles away, fed you a vector. The APG-70 multimode,
pulse-Doppler radar sifted through the air, caught the bandit eighty miles
away, hiding in the weeds. You closed, selected your weapon. Push button, push
button— two Sparrows up and at ‘em. The MiG was dead meat before it even knew
you were there.

Push button, push button.

If the MiG got through the net, things could get
dicey. But that was good in a way— you scanned the sky, saw a glint off a
cockpit glass, came up with your solution, applied it. You might even tangle
mano a mano, cannons blazing away.

But this— this was like trying to ride a bicycle
on a highway in a sandstorm. You were looking at the ground, for christsakes,
not the sky.

The desert blurred. Hack shifted in the ejection
seat, leaning up to get a better view. His elbow slapped hard against the left
panel, pinging his funny bone.

Stinking A-10.

Hack pulled through a bank of clouds and ducked
lower, jerking the stick hard enough to feel the g’s slam him in the chest.
He’d been out of sorts his first few times in the Eagle cockpit, out of whack
again when he’d come over here for his first combat patrols, unsettled even the
day he nailed his Iraqi. There were no natural pilots, or if there were, he
didn’t know any and he certainly wasn’t one of them. There were guys who worked
at it hard, set their marks and hit them. You learned to keep the bile in your
stomach, slow your breathing, take your time— but not too much time.

Do your best.

“I’m thinking we of our cluster-bombs and maybe
have a go with the guns on that cracker box.”

A-Bomb’s transmission took Hack by surprise. “Come
again?”

“Cracker box, make that a box of Good ‘n Plenty,
two o’clock on your bow, three, oh maybe four miles off. Looks like the candy’s
spilling out of it. See?”

He did see – now. A-Bomb had incredible eyes.

“How come everything is food to you, A-Bomb?” he
asked.

“Could be I’m hungry,” replied his wingmate.

A-Bomb’s “candy” looked suspiciously like howitzer
shells. Their frag— slang for the “fragment” of the daily Air Tasking Order
pertaining to them— allowed them to hit any secondary target in the kill box
once the tanks were nailed. Still, Hack contacted the ABCCC controller circling
to the south in a C-130 to alert him to the situation, in effect asking if they
were needed elsewhere. Important cogs in the machinery of war, the ATO and the
ABCCC (airborne command and control center) allowed the allies to coordinate
hundreds of strikes every day, giving them both a game plan and a way to
freelance around it. Dropping ordnance was one thing, putting explosives where
they would do the most good was another. Coordination was especially important
this close to Kuwait, where there were thousands of targets and almost as many
aircraft.

The controller told them the building was a
hospital and off-limits.

“No way that’s a fucking hospital,” said A-Bomb.
“I’m looking at a dozen fucking artillery pieces, sandbagged in. Fuck.”

Hack waited for O’Rourke’s curses to subside, then
gave the ABCCC controller another shot. But he wasn’t buying.

“Devil One, we’ll have a FAC check it out on the
coordinates you supplied,” said the controller finally. “I have a target for
you.”

Hack’s fingers fumbled his wax pencil and he had
to dig into his speed-suit pocket for the backup. He retrieved it just as the
controller began the brief, setting out an armored vehicle depot as the new
target. He scrawled the coordinates on the Persipex canopy, then double-checked
them against his paper map, orienting himself. The target was to the east, a
stretch for their fuel.

Doable, though.

A-Bomb continued to grumbled about the ersatz
hospital, even after they changed course.

“Hospital my ass.”

Hack tried coordinating the numbers against his
map, but lost track of where he was for a moment, thrown a bit by the INS. You
could get distracted easily in combat, no matter what you were flying. He had
to keep his head clear.

The opposite seemed true for A-Bomb. “I’ve seen
more convincing hospitals in comic books,” he railed.

“O’Rourke, shut the hell up and watch my six,”
barked Preston.

“What I’m talking about.”

This time, there was no difficulty seeing the
target. It had been bombed in the past hour or so; smoke curled from the
remains of buildings or bunkers at the north and south ends of what looked like
a large parking lot. Roughly two dozen vehicles were parked in almost perfect
rows at a right angle to the buildings. Beyond them were mounds of dirt—
probably more vehicles, dug into the sand. Whatever air defenses the Iraqis had
mounted had been eradicated in the earlier strike.

A flight of F-16 Vipers cut overhead as Hack turned
to line up his bombing run. At least five thousand feet separated him from the
nearest plane, but it still felt like he was getting his hair cut. He hadn’t
known about the flight, which was en route to another target; Hack fought
against an impulse to bawl the controller out for not warning him that the
aircraft were nearby.

Do your best,
he reminded himself, as he
nudged tentatively into the bombing run. The A-10A’s primitive bombsight slid
slowly toward the row of vehicles as he dropped through nine thousand feet.
They were small brown sticks, tiny twigs left in the dirt by a kid who’d gone
home for supper.

Hack’s heart thumped loud in his throat, choking
off his breath. He began to worry that he was going to be too low before the
crosshairs found their target, then realized he’d begun his glide a bit too
late. He was in danger of overshooting the vehicles. He pushed his stick,
increasing his angle of attack. The cursor jumped onto a pair of fat sticks and
he pickled.

Wings now clean except for the Sidewinders and ECM
pod, the Hog fluttered slightly, urging her pilot to recover to the right as
planned. But Hack’s attention stayed focused on the ground in front of him, the
sticks steadily growing from twigs to thick branches. The bark roughened and indentations
appeared. They were armored personnel carriers, all set out in a line. He could
see hatches and machine guns, sloped ports. He stared at them as they grew,
watching with fascination as they became more and more real, yet remained the
playthings of a kid.

Finally he pulled his stick back, belatedly
realizing he’d flown so close to the ground that the exploding blomblets might
very well clip his wings. He reached for throttle, slamming the Hog into
overdrive, ducking his body with the plane as he tried desperately to push her
off to the south.

It was only as the Hog began to recover that Hack
realized he hadn’t bothered to correct for the wind, which could easily send a
stick of bombs tumbling off target.

As he twisted his head back to get a look, A-Bomb’s
garbled voice jangled his ears. He started to ask his wingmate to repeat, then
realized what the words meant.

Someone on the ground had fired a
shoulder-launched SAM at Hack’s tailpipe.

OVER SOUTHEASTERN IRAQ

28 JANUARY 1991

1130

A-Bomb repeated his
warning, then stepped
hard on his rudder pedal, twisting his A-10A in the air. The ants that had
emerged from the burned out bunker were fat and pretty in his screen— no way
could he waste a shot like this, even if there were missiles in the air. He
kissed his cluster bombs good-bye, then tossed a parcel of flares off for luck,
tucking the Hog into a roll.

He swirled almost backward in the air, goosing
more decoy flares off before finally pushing Devil Two level in the opposite
direction he’d taken for the attack. If either of the SA-7s that had been
launched had been aimed at him, his zigging maneuvers had tied their primitive
heat seekers in knots.

Probably.

Something detonated in the air about a half-mile
north of him. Immediately above the explosion, but a good mile beyond it, Devil
One crossed to the west.

Assured that his wingmate hadn’t been hit, A-Bomb
pulled his plane over his shoulder, flailing back at the armored depot to share
his feelings at being fired on.

“I’m a touchy feely kind of guy,” he explained as
Iraqis scattered below. “So let me just hug you close.”

The 30mm Avenger cannon began growling below his
feet. About the size of the ’59 Caddy A-Bomb had on blocks back home, the Gatling’s
seven barrels sped around furiously as high-explosive and uranium
armor-piercing shells were fed in by a duet of hydraulic motors, only to be
dispensed by the Gat with furious relish. The recoil from the gun literally held
the Hog in the air as the pilot worked the stream of bullets through the top
armor of three APCs.

As smoke and debris filled the air before him; A-Bomb
pushed the Hog to the right, leaning against the stick to fight off a sudden
tsunami of turbulence. He let off the trigger as he came to the end of the row,
pushing away now at only fifteen hundred feet, close enough for some of the
crazy ragheads on his left to actually take aim with their Kalashnikovs. The
assault rifles’ 7.62mm bullets were useless against the titanium steel
surrounding the Hog’s cockpit, and it would take more than a hundred of them to
seriously threaten the honeycombed wings with their fire-retardant inserts
protecting the fuel tanks. Still, it was the thought that counted.

“I admire the hell out of you,” said A-Bomb. Then
he turned back to nail the SOBs. “Let me show you what a real gun can do.” As
he zipped back for the attack, the Iraqis dove on the ground. “Do the words ‘thirty-millimeter
cannon’ mean anything to you? How about u-rain-ee-um?”

OVER SOUTHEASTERN IRAQ

28 JANUARY 1991

1135

Tiny bubbles of
sweat climbed up the sides
of Hack’s neck, growing colder as they went, freezing the tips of his ears. His
lungs filled with snow, ballooning, prying his ribs outward against the cells
of his pressure suit. Hack jigged and jagged, throwing the plane back and forth
as he tried desperately to avoid the SAMs.

The sharp maneuvers sent gravity crushing against
his body. Even as his g suit worked furiously to ward off the pressure, Hack’s
world narrowed to a pinprick of brown and blue, surrounded by a circle of
black. He heard nothing. He felt nothing. He knew his fingers were curled hard
around the stick, but only because he saw them there.

The plane was going where he didn’t want it to.

He pulled back on the stick, struggling to clear
his head and keep himself airborne. The black circle began to retreat. The
wings lifted suddenly, air pushing the plane upward. Something rumbled against
the rudders.

I’m hit.

Damn, I’m going in.

His lungs had a thousand sharp points, digging
into the soft tissue around them.

Do your best.

The plane’s shudder ceased. He caught his arm,
easing back, leveling off.

He was free. The missile that had been chasing him
had given up, exploding a few yards behind as it reached the end of its range.

Or maybe he’d just imagined it all in his panic. Maybe
the g’s rushing against his body had temporarily knocked him senseless; made
him hallucinate. In any event, he was free, alive and unscathed, or at least
not seriously wounded.

As deliberately as he could manage, Hack took
stock of himself and his position. He was about three miles south of the target
area, now clearly marked by black smoke. Open desert lay below and directly
south. He was at five thousand feet, climbing very slightly, moving at just
over 350 knots— a fair clip for a Hog.