HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (20 page)

Nothing.

They’d have to swing with the highway at a bend
three miles away. Get the lead vehicles there with Mavericks, while the F-14’s
splashed the helicopters.

On beam for that.

 “I’m at two o’clock,” Dixon snapped as Skull
alerted his flight. “I have the Hip.”

“Negative. Let the Navy boys take the helicopters.
Stand off and let them in,” Skull told him. “We’ll get the column as it clears
that bend northeast of the airport.”

Devil Two swooped ahead, well out of formation.

“Dixon? What the hell are you doing,” Skull said,
flipping the transmit button off quickly and listening for an answer.

“Dixon, you’re supposed to be east where I told
you to orbit. Acknowledge. Dixon! Dixon!”

OVER IRAQ

29 JANUARY 1991

0614

The seeker head
in the Hog’s Sidewinder misled
growled at him, anxious to launch. It had locked on the helicopter’s hot
turbine engines from nearly eight miles away— much too far to fire and
guarantee a hit.

BJ had done this all before. He pushed on toward
the Iraqi helicopter, keeping the large angled exhaust square in the middle of
his windshield, a juicy target for his missile.

The helicopter skittered on oblivious to him, flanking
a line of dark tan vehicles, dust billowing behind. BJ goosed his throttle. Barely
twenty feet off the ground, he nudged over three hundred nautical miles an hour.

The Sidewinder’s growl deepened, its target
getting tantalizing close— six miles, then five and a half, then five.

Something flared on his right, something on the
ground firing at him. His helmet jangled with static, then a voice.

Knowlington, ordering him to stand down, to back
off, get out of the way— a Tomcat was targeting the helicopters.

Static swallowed the voice, then silence replaced
the static. The helo was dead on now, four miles away.

Dixon took a breath. He pushed the trigger and an
AIM-9 whipped off the double launcher on his left wing tip. A string of smoke
curled through the air as it nosed down toward the Hip, which jerked violently
around, finally realizing it was in trouble.

Dixon watched as the missile sailed straight over
the helicopter, flaring as it ignited in one of the vehicles beyond.

As he started to curse, he realized he was about
to fly into the rising ground ahead. He pulled his stick back just enough to
keep from scraping the sand, and at the same time reached to switch his
selector to cannon. At inside two miles from his target he slammed his rudder hard,
pushing the targeting cue dead onto the Hip’s tail. But the helicopter moved to
his right, and Dixon was so low and had lost so much momentum, he found it
difficult to stay with it. All he could do was take out another truck— he lit
the Gat and erased a jeep, bullets pouncing on the soft metal of the vehicle’s
body. He worked his rudder and slid his aim into the nose of a self-propelled
gun, getting off a half-second burst before losing the angle and some of his
altitude.

As he started to recover, the other helicopter
appeared almost overhead; Dixon avoided the temptation to target it; the shot
would have been nearly impossible and would have cost what little he had left
of his momentum besides. He banked right, still picking up speed, and saw the
helicopters off on his right— along with two dark hulls streaking to join them.

Not the F-14s, which must still be a good distance
off. Not the other Hogs, which for a moment he’d lost track of

They were Hinds, serious gunfighters that carried
anti-air missiles as well as ground attack weapons.

No match for a Hog, though. He’d proven that in
the first days of the war.

Dixon put his nose toward the biggest shadow,
still a good seven or eight miles off. The second Sidewinder, his last, growled
from its wing-tip rail.

He waited ten long, long seconds, closing to
inside five miles before firing. Then he lined up on the second gunship as it
broke south, just out of range of his cannon.

A single word broke through the static in his
helmet, as if it were fighting its way through the circuits and wires. Short
and guttural, it had a sharp snap that could only come from Colonel
Knowlington. Before the meaning of the actual word registered, Dixon knew it
was a warning:

“Missile!”

TENT CITY

29 JANUARY 1991

0618

Becky Rosen bolted
upright from the cot. It
felt like stones had been placed on her body, heavy weights that made it
difficult to move. The gray light turned purple and the warm air froze.

“BJ! BJ!” she shouted.

The empty tent remained silent, Slowly she caught
her breath, senses returning to normal.

It was only a dream, she told herself, curling her
arms across her breasts.

A dream, a bad dream.

Rosen started to pull the covers back over her,
then realized she was late for duty and bolted from the bed, still feeling
heavy weights damping her movements.

He’s okay
, she told herself, pushing on her
boots. She tried thinking of everything she had to do, tried imagining what she
might have for breakfast, tried remembering her uncle’s junkyard, but the light
in the tent remained a dark tinge, not unlike the color of dried blood.

OVER IRAQ

29 JANUARY 1991

0618

Skull fired the
Maverick at the knot of men
who had jumped from the truck to set up the shoulder-launched missiles.
Something flared in the targeting screen just as the AGM launched; Knowlington
punched the transmit button, barking another warning though he couldn’t be sure
the Iraqis had actually fired a SAM. He caught a glimpse of Dixon’s Hog
wheeling in the sky over the Iraqis eight miles ahead, then lost it. His
attention was drawn back to the Maverick screen, where he had to target the
lead vehicle in the convoy to stop it.

It was too late to do anything more for Dixon. The
kid had left his butt wide open. Luck might save him, but it was too late for
anything else.

Why the hell hadn’t he done what he was told?

Knowlington locked the AGM-65’s targeting cursor
on the armored personnel carrier following the lead jeep, then fired. As the
missile clunked off the rail, Antman said there were more helicopters coming
almost due south from across the river, a bit over ten miles away.

Moving much faster than the others. Skull cut back,
banking in a wide orbit south of the Iraqi convoy so he could sort out the
situation. His wingman approached the convoy from the southwest; he reported
that the colonel’s two missiles had hit their targets.

“Smoke and shit all over the place,” said the
wingman.

“Column stopped?”

“Not all of it,” said Antman. “I have a good view
of two tanks.”

“Get ‘em, then wheel back south. I’ll come up more
or less in the same orbit. I’m on your back,” added Skull, pushing his Hog
around to turn back north. He had two Mavericks and a pair of cluster-bombs
left, along with his gun and the Sidewinders.

He watched a Maverick drop from Antman’s wing,
fuming away. The Iraqis were still coming. The troop helicopters were still
with them.

 larger choppers were cutting a vector toward
Splash, the helicopters now almost dead-on in Skull’s HUD.

The F-14’s were having trouble targeting the helicopters—
they were apparently so low that even the vaunted long-range radars in the
Tomcats couldn’t isolate them in the ground clutter.

The helicopters coming south were larger though
much further away. He saw them as he began banking, spiders skipping over the
ground, cutting a vector toward Splash.

Mi-24 Hinds. Deadly bastards that combined the
firepower of Apaches with the troop carrying capability of Black Hawks.

So where the hell were the damn Tomcats?

And where was Dixon?

“Shit!” yelled Antman as something flared from the
spider on the right. Steam erupted from the other helicopter, and red streaks
filled the sky.

They were targeting the SAS team holding the
highway with rockets and air-to-ground missiles.

There were a dozen men there, dug in maybe, but no
match for the brawny helicopters.

Knowlington was just about ten miles from the helicopters.
Out of range for the Sidewinders, even at their most optimistic.

Stinking helicopters ought to be out of range,
too, but the bastards were really going at it, lighting their rockets now. The
ground erupted with furious explosions.

Skull pushed his throttle, coaxing the Hog for
more speed. His elbows sagged against his body, and his groin muscles cramped the
Hind tracked toward their prey.

Was this why he’d taken the mission, his last
mission: To go out a failure? To let his guys die?

Skull slammed his stick, angry at himself— not for
failing, but for the bullshit self-pity. Remorse didn’t mean jack to the poor
bastards on the ground; it was useless, as useless and ultimately destructive
as drinking.

He was closing the distance but it wasn’t going to
be enough. The Sidewinders had trouble spotting the baffled heat signatures of
the gunships, especially with the rockets acting as decoys.

Skull glanced at the Maverick screen. The
targeting cursor sat just under the fat rotor at the top of the helicopter on
the right.

Nail it?

With an air-to-ground missile?

In range. And shit, the damn helicopter was only
five hundred feet off the ground. It wasn’t going anywhere.

No way.

Mavs couldn’t be confused by the flairs, or ECMs
for that matter.

No fucking way.

By the time the debate played out in Skull’s mind,
he had already fired the first Maverick at the chopper. The second clicked off
the rail for the other Hind a half-breath later.

The solid-propellant rocket motors that powered
the two missiles had been designed for reliability and ease of handling; while
they weren’t exactly slow, they propelled the AGMs at less than half the speed
of a typical air-to-air missile. Likewise, the guidance system in the Mavericks
had been optimized for its intended targets— tanks, which were rarely moving
faster than thirty miles an hour, and were hardly ever found off the ground.

On the other hand, the Maverick’s guidance system
might be rated more accurate than that of many missile systems, and once locked
could not easily be confused. In fact, there was no reason— at least in theory—
why the missiles could not hit something hovering aboveground, so long as it
stayed more or less stationary.

Which the helicopters did, until nearly the last
second.

The pilot in the second Hind realized the thick
splinter on the right side of his cockpit glass was not a crack, but a missile
coming for him. He wheeled his helicopter hard to the left, kicking flares and
spinning his heat signature away.

The maneuver would have worked perfectly had Skull
launched a Sidewinder. Here, the Maverick merely pushed its nose down a little
steeper, slightly increasing the speed at which its three-hundred-pound payload
smashed through the armored windscreen of the weapons-system operator’s cabin.
The missile continued through at an angle, obliterating the crewman and carrying
off a good hunk of the pilot’s control panel as it smashed its way out of the
aircraft.

It did not explode, and in fact the Hind continued
to fly, though now without the benefit of control. The chopper flopped straight
up at its top speed of nearly 2,500 feet per minute. Its tail whipped around as
the main blades pulled the craft onto its back. It stuttered for a second,
drifting like a leaf caught in a steady wind. Then slowly it began to sink
toward the earth, its tail circling as it plummeted with a fiery crash.

In contrast, the warhead on the second Maverick
not only hit precisely where the targeting cursor had sent it, but detonated as
well, obliterating the upper cabin area and engines and initiating a fireball
that flashed over the entire helicopter. The flames continued to burn as the
helo fell nearly straight downward, its charred skeleton neatly depositing its
ashes in a small heap.

By that time, Knowlington had pushed east to drop
his bombs on the elements of the Iraqi convoy that had managed to get around
the vehicle he’d destroyed. He also realized why the Tomcats were late— they
had just nailed a MiG-21 that had been scrambled to assist the Iraqi
counter-attack.

What he didn’t know, though, was where Dixon was.

OVER IRAQ

29 JANUARY 1991

0618

Dixon hit his
flares and dove for the
desert, zigging hard enough to pull six or seven g’s as he tried to evade the
shoulder-launched missile. It clawed for his tail like an animal groping in the
dark: he flew like a machine, working the stick and rudder with sharp
precision. He didn’t feel fear— he didn’t feel anything. He just flew.

A white cigarette sailed fifty yards from his
canopy; he glanced at it, then bucked his nose in its direction and kicked out more
flares, calculating that the Iraqis might have launched a pair of the missiles
and the second would be closer to his tail.

They hadn’t had time. The first missile continued
on, its self-destruct mechanism apparently defective. Dixon caught another
glimpse of it arcing toward the line of gray buildings near the river. The
Iraqis would undoubtedly blame the deaths it caused on the Americans,
pretending that the Allies were targeting civilians with their weapons.