HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (26 page)

Preston reached over to the panel, angry that he’d
let himself get tripped up by something so simple. He shouldn’t even need
oxygen here. This was a Sunday drive. All he had to do was breathe slow and
easy.

His wrist gave way as he touched the nozzle end
and shrieked with pain. He pushed back in the seat, gathered himself, made sure
the MiG was flying all right, then did his instrument check. Finally, he
reached across to push the nozzle in with his right hand.

The left engine picked that moment to quit again.
But this time, the right engine joined it.

Hack slammed the tube adaptor home. Then he
grabbed the stick, pulling back in an attempt to stop the MiG from entering a
dive. Realizing he’d pulled too hard, he eased off. Two full, clean breaths of pure
oxygen later, the black haze that had been slowly strangling his brain melted
away.

Hack began working through the restart procedure,
fingers fumbling against the panel on the right side of the cockpit as he tried
to hold the control column with his left hand. But the buffeting against the
hydraulic controls was too much for his injured wrist, and the plane jerked
from his weakened fingers

He grabbed for the stick with his right hand. As
he did so, his gaze fell on the fuel gauges, and he realized that he had been
misreading the indicators from the start.

The engines hadn’t stalled. They’d run out of
fuel. The flow seemed to be restricted somehow, but at this point, he no longer
trusted the indicators or his ability to read the gauges.

And in any event, it was rapidly becoming
academic.

The plane yawed sharply to the left, fighting the
stick. He was losing altitude fast.

He calculated what he had to do: keep his hand on
the stick, get the plane stable, then play with the fuel selectors and try to
restart.

Glide you son of a bitch. Glide!

He got the wings even, got the nose almost level.
He gave a push against the stick, nudged his left elbow there, holding the
plane as he tried to restart the engines.

But it was too much to do with only one good arm.

Out! Out! I have to get out.

Out!

Fuck that. Not now.

Restart. There had to be fuel in the damn thing.
Switch the tanks. Get into the sumps.

You’re not flying a Hog.

Out! Out! Level the wings and get out!

Just out!

His body seemed to spin from inside his spine. His
stomach pushed out through the flightsuit, past the restraints. His left hand
screamed with pain and his legs were being pushed against the seat.

The handle, pull the handle.

He already had. The canopy failed to clear but
Hack shot through it anyway, propelled like a human cannon ball from the plane
as it turned upside down. He was shooting toward the ground faster than the
speed of sound, yanking around as the seat did its magic, the world a complete
blurry rush. He remembered his father, saw him now smiling at him when he was
nine, a Little League game.

“Hey dad, I hit a home run. I hit a home run.”

And then the strap from the Iraqi pilot’s suit,
which had been ever so slightly torn by the shrapnel from the grenade that
killed its owner, gave way.

OVER IRAQ

29 JANUARY 1991

0734

The crash happened
so quickly that Skull
didn’t realize what was going on until the MiG started to spin.

The way he saw it, the way he would tell it to the
investigators later, both engines quit at the same time. The plane edged down,
then one of the power plants caught again, hard, exploding as if the
afterburner suddenly slammed on, sending the plane into an uncontrollable yaw.

Until that moment, Hack had probably figured he
could control it. That was the kind of guy he was— he didn’t give up and was
cocky enough to figure he could work himself out of any jam.

But everyone has his limits. Hack must have gone
for the handles. The canopy didn’t come off, but the seat sure came out, flying
almost straight down. Skull started to bank, keeping one eye on the MiG which
was now pirouetting not fifty yards from him.

Knowlington saw, or thought he saw, the chute to
the seat open. Debris was in the air, or at least he thought he saw debris, or
just sensed there was something. Pulling up on his stick, he tried to stay
clear.

He circled back, dropping low and slow. By that
time, the parachute was skittering along the ground, crazy-curled by the wind.

Skull spotted the seat, and then saw Preston, who
ought to have released the chute, who ought to have been standing there,
probably kicking the desert because he had been so God damn close, so stinking
damn close, to hitting a grand slam, landing an Iraqi MiG back on a U.S. base
for all the world to see.

But he wasn’t. Preston was lying in the sand, his
body crumpled. It didn’t take more than a single pass to know he was dead.

Epilogue:

HANGING AROUND

KING FAHD

29 JANUARY 1991

0905

No way in
the world was it possible to
debrief a mission— to even
think
about a mission— without coffee. Hell,
it was against Air Force regulations and probably the U.S. Constitution to even
try that. The Geneva Convention probably even declared it punishable by hanging.
The UN undoubtedly had a commission on it.

So as soon as A-Bomb touched down at the Home
Drome— right after he parked and popped the hood and plopped down on the tarmac
next to Sergeant Rosen, who was taking personal care of his aircraft this
morning; right after he gave the rest of the crew a quick thumbs-up and pointed
to the holes in the airframe (unnecessary, actually, due to the rather obvious
gashes and dripping fluids); right after giving the appropriate shrug to an
airman’s incredulous “You actually managed to get home like that?” remark— A-Bomb
ambled over to the only place at King Fahd that could be relied upon for A-1
Debriefing Strength Joe: his quarters.

Regrettably, A-Bomb had not yet completed his
plans to rig his commercial Bunn coffeemaker to an IFF device, which would
allow the unit to begin grinding and brewing as his Hog approached the runway.
He therefore had to wait an excruciating ninety seconds as the machine ground a
choice selection of hand-picked African and Columbian beans before dripping
distilled mountain water into the pot.

The interlude gave him time to contemplate a philosophical
question: What should he have for breakfast, Freihofer’s or Entenmann’s?

Technically, neither of the famed Northeast
bakeries was listed among the official military suppliers providing food at the
mess. But A-Bomb had a direct line to outlet stores for both. With the help of
several well-connected supply sergeants— there were no other kind of supply
sergeants, after all— he had managed to schedule regular deliveries from both.
In fact, a C-5A with a fresh load of cheese strudel and sticky buns ought to be
due at any moment. Still undecided, he filled his thirty-ounce ceramic coffee
mug and left the tent.

A-Bomb had walked about two sips’ worth toward the
unloading area when one of the squadron pilots, Billy Bozzone, flagged him
down.

“Coffee’s in my tent,” he told Bozzone, a
lieutenant who had grown up on Staten Island but was otherwise a good sort.
“Going over to grab some Entenmann’s, I think. Or maybe
Freihofer's
. Kind of waiting for inspiration to strike.”

“Intel guys are looking for you,” said Bozzone.
“Delta major, too.”

“Yeah, I’m on my way,” said A-Bomb. “What’s the
rush?”

“You haven’t heard? Preston’s dead. MiG
malfunctioned and he fell out of the parachute harness.”

For the first time since he came to the Gulf, A-Bomb
could find nothing to say.

KING FAHD

29 JANUARY 1991

1012

Sergeant Becky Rosen’s
fingers betrayed
her, fumbling everything from screws to cables, even slipping off the controls
of an oscilloscope. She couldn’t staunch the adrenaline, couldn’t slow the
thump of her heart as she worked.

Was BJ all right? What had happened north? Where
the hell was he?

Every comment from someone in Oz threw her. Every
roar of a jet or whistle of landing gear took her attention away from what she
was doing. Finally, after nearly smashing a screwdriver through the radar unit
in A-Bomb’s plane, she put down her tools and walked away.

“Sarge, what’s up?” called one of the crew.

“Gotta take a leak,” she told him mildly.

“You selling tickets?”

“You won’t make enough money in three lifetimes,
Tommy,” she said. “Put that unit back together for me, will ya?”

“Gotcha, Sarge.”

Her legs began to shake as she walked toward the
small restroom stall in the back of one of Oz’s hangars. By the time she pushed
the door closed behind her, her knees were jelly. As she sat on the commode,
her hands began to shake and she realized she was crying.

I can’t do this, she told herself. There’s no way
I can do this.

Joining the military didn’t mean you had to give
up being human. Nor did it mean that you had to stow your emotions.

But.

But.

Rebecca Rosen felt as if she’d slipped into
someone else’s body. The limbs didn’t work quite the same way. The head seemed
at a permanent tilt. The borrowed eyes made the light seem more yellow.

No. This wasn’t her. She wouldn’t do it. She
couldn’t.

Feet scuffled along the floor a few yards away.
Sergeant Rosen ran her fingers through her short hair and kneaded the skin
behind her ears. She took a long breath, reached around and flushed the
commode.

Outside, she scowled when a staff sergeant said
something about A-Bomb’s plane needing an entire overhaul: new sumps, new fuel
system, new skin..

“No fuckin’ way,” she said. “Just go get Tinman.
He’ll tell you what to do if you can’t handle it.”

“Sump’s shot out,” said the sergeant.

“You want me to fuckin’ kiss it and make it
better?”

The sergeant scurried back under the plane.

“Getting on them kind of hard this morning, no?” said
Sergeant Clyston from behind her.

“There’s no fucking way we’re losing an airplane
because it has a dent,” Rosen told him. “It can be fixed. I checked it myself.”

Clyston nodded, but said nothing.

A half-hour later, Lieutenant Dixon and Gunny
landed. By then, details of the mission had spread through Oz. Rosen and the
others knew that the SAS men had been rescued and the MiG stolen. They also
knew that Dixon’s radio had been shot out— and that Major Preston had been
killed when the MiG malfunctioned and he had to bail.

Sergeant Rosen stayed back in the hangars when
Dixon landed. With any other pilot, on any other day, she would have among the
first to inspect the plane. Instead, she busied herself with a balky INS unit,
working at a bench at the furthest end of Devil Squadron Hangar 1.

Still, her hands trembled when she heard his voice
behind her.

Still, her heart seemed to stop when he touched
her shoulder gently.

She let herself step back into the borrowed body
for a brief moment, turning and hugging him. It was a warm hug, and even though
the world sat at a slant, even though the light seemed all wrong, there was a
certain comfort— maybe a great comfort.

“Gotta work,” she said, pushing away sharply,
regaining herself. “Gotta get this done ASAP. Sorry.”

Silent, Dixon stood watching her. How long he
stood there, she couldn’t say, but she knew when she turned that he would be
gone; and he was.

KING FAHD

29 JANUARY 1991

1200

“You did a
goddamn good job,” the general
told Knowlington after he picked up the phone in his office. “You hit a grand
slam.”

Knowlington pulled out his chair and sat down as
the general continued. The British were ecstatic, the Delta people were
ecstatic, even the CinC, the man himself, was ecstatic.

They all knew that he’d lost a pilot. They weren’t
being insensitive; they were putting it in perspective.

Actually, they were being insensitive, but that
was the way it was. Skull would have expected no less if he had bought it and
Preston managed to get the MiG back to the base intact.

He’d circled the wreck while the SAR people came
in. The pararescuers told him Preston had been ripped from the parachute by the
force of the ejection. The Iraqi gear had been damaged somehow; one of the
clasps had come loose, the strap ripped, or both. Even so, it was a freak
accident, a one in a million shot.

“Just unlucky,” said the pararescuer.

The plane had crashed in the desert about a mile
away. A team had already secured it for transport. There had been no fire.
Wong, who was en route to the scene, suspected that the plane’s fuel system had
malfunctioned and the tanks had run bone dry.

Maybe one of the gauges on the dash had
malfunctioned. Maybe Hack had miscalculated by using the afterburners. Maybe
they’d made a mistake on the ground when they loaded the fuel in. Any of those
things could have happened. Maybe all of them had.

Even so, it shouldn’t have been fatal. Worst case,
Hack should have been able to float down to earth, cursing the whole way.