HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (9 page)

“Saved the best for last,” said Gunny. “You nailed
a tank. T-54, looks like.”

“Three,” said Doberman. He’d flailed back at the
target so fast he hadn’t even known what he was hitting.

“Thanks, Yanks!” shouted a voice over the
emergency rescue band. It was Sister Sadie’s pilot.

“Devil Three to Sadie. What the hell? I had you a
mile further north.”

“Quite,” responded the pilot. “Nav’s still there.
I had to retrieve a souvenir.”

God damn Brits were worse than Hog drivers.

“Stay put, would you?” Doberman told him. “We have
to smoke the rest of the Iraqis so the helicopters can come in..”

“It’s a starlit night and I feel all right,” sang
the voice, laughing as if it were karaoke night. “But I’ve got company.”

“What the fuck are you saying?”

“More lorries down here,” said the Brit, his voice
only marginally more serious.

“Yeah, whatever. Stay out of the cross fire, okay?”

Lorries? Did he mean trucks?

Goddamn Brits couldn’t even speak English.

OVER IRAQ

28 JANUARY 1991

1840

Hawkins tried to
control his anger as he
unfolded the paper map over the hump of controls between the two pilots at the
front of the Chinook. The SAS sergeant slapped his small flashlight twice
without getting the light to work.

“Figures,” muttered the sergeant.

Hawkins reached into his pocket and got his own.

“We’re here,” he said, pointing. “Sadie’s crew is
about here.”

“Further south, and they’re busy,” said the pilot,
pointing to the side glass. Flashes lit the horizon.

If they were going to hit the base, they had to get
moving. The Apaches were well into their fuel stores, and even with the planned
behind-the-lines refuel, they’d be pushing things. The Hogs, too, must be
nearing their limit.

On the other hand, he couldn’t take the risk of
flying the helicopters anywhere near serious antiair defenses.

Which, basically, was what Preston was concerned
about, even if the shithead hadn’t spelled it out.

He didn’t even know Preston, but he had worked
with two of the pilots in the support group, Doberman and A-Bomb. If those guys
thought there was a problem, there must really be a problem.

One way or another, they’d probably lost the
element of surprise.

Better to fail than never to try.

Unless failure meant twenty dead men.

“Our chaps,” said Sergeant Burns.

“They’re all our chaps,” said Hawkins. “We’re
going to have to scrub.”

“I agree,” said the pilot.

Burns didn’t say anything. Hawkins bent his head
slightly, studying the SAS sergeant’s face in the wash from the dimmed cockpit
lights.

“Best thing,” said the commando finally.

“Let’s go grab the Tornado crew,” Hawkins told the
pilot.

“Wait!” The co-pilot put out his hand, touching
Hawkins as he listened to a transmission over the headphones. “The A-10s say
there’s a second wave of vehicles approaching. They may light a flare. Looks
like quite a snit.”

“Get me the Apaches, and then Devil One,” said
Hawkins. “Plot that course but hold until it’s clear.”

OVER IRAQ

28 JANUARY 1991

1845

Doberman swung back
to the south, climbing
steadily. Devil Four completed the far end of a figure-eight about a half-mile
ahead, still flying at six thousand feet.

“Three pickups that I see,” Gunny told him over
the squadron frequency. “Moving toward the wreckage. I can nail them with the
Mavericks.”

“Hold off,” Doberman told him.

Using Mavericks on relatively soft targets like
pickups was a bit of an overkill. Had A-Bomb been his wingman, the response
would have been along the lines of, “Going for the best bang for the buck,” or
“Spoken like a real taxpayer.” But Gunny simply acknowledged.

“Devil Three, this is Devil One,” said Preston.
“What’s your status?”

“Circling over the crew,” said Doberman. “Three
Iraqi vehicles approaching, about a mile off, little more. There may be some
ground troops near our guys. Can’t tell.”

“Flare?”

“Figure it’ll help them more than us,” said
Doberman. “More than the Brits.”

“Concur. Can you take the pickups?”

“Shit, yeah.”

“They’re going to send the Apaches north to help
out. Chinooks will stand by to pick up the boys a mile back,” responded Hack.
“Lay it out for the Apaches.”

The way Hack said it, connecting the dots for him
like he was an imbecile, pissed Doberman off. Preston was just a little too
perfect and crisp, the kind of guy who never did any wrong and let you know it.
He thought the rest of the world couldn’t cross the street if he wasn’t there
to take its hand.

Doberman steamed while Hack read the com frequency
for Splash leader— which of course he already had— and then reminded him that he
was getting close to bingo— which of course he already knew.

“Repeat, Devil Three?” asked Hawkins, the Splash
commander, as he snapped onto their frequency.

“Need you to move exactly three point five north,
precisely north, from your position,” said Doberman, working it out in his
head. “When you’re ready I’ll have our boys give you a flare.”

The Apache commander got a little pushy when he
clicked on, saying they were less than three minutes from the battlefield and
asking which vehicles he could take.”

“None. They’re all ours,” snapped Doberman,
pushing the Hog’s wing over. “Finders keepers.”

IRAQ

28 JANUARY 1991

1845

Captain Conrad played
striker on the
squadron soccer team, and while he was perhaps not the most gifted forward in
the RAF, he had a certain quality of persistence and stamina that translated
into points late in the game.

As it was late in the game now, he put his stamina
to good use, running for all he was worth from the shadow of Sister Sadie as a
flare shot upwards in the distance.

One of the vehicles the A-10 had hit earlier flashed
with a fresh explosion as its gas tank caught fire. The noise caught him
off-guard, unsettling his balance and sending him face-first into the ground. Conrad
dropped the tape and had to hunt for it on his hands and knees, patting down
the desert but finding nothing but sand.

He heard a roar and then loud secondary explosions.
Grappling in the dust, he heard the distinct thump of approaching helicopters.
Then he felt a rush of air— the A-10 had returned to attack the vehicles, which
were closer to him than he’d thought.

The plane descended so low that its bullets passed
only a few yards away, streaming in front of his eyes like a surgeon’s laser
beam excising a tumor. The desert shrieked as the American lit his weapon in
three distinct, brief bursts. Blue, red, green and orange lightning lit
sideways across the sand, erupting in a pure white geyser so intense that dirt and
smoke and grit filled Conrad’s eyes. He threw his head down, rubbing his face
with his sleeve; he managed to clear one eye and groped again for the tape.
Finding it, he stood, running again toward the sound of the approaching
helicopter.

A small flare shot upward. His mate, no more than
a quarter mile away.

Something this and dark shot between them.

Conrad stopped quickly. There were shadows all
around; with the battle smoke, falling darkness, and swirling sand, he’d completely
lost his bearings.

 The A-10 danced above him, cannon roaring again.

He could hear a truck motor and the clicks of
automatic rifle fire approaching.  He thought he could see the moving shadow.
Red glints pricked closer.

He waited for the Hog to hit the truck. But there
were no geysers of burning metal, no secondary explosions.

Conrad dropped to his knees. He pulled his
emergency radio out of his vest, but couldn’t hear anything over the roar. He
checked his settings, tried again, then tossed it down and fumbled for his
flare gun. He fired a charge— not skyward but at the vehicle. A hiss, a whoosh,
the sound of glass smashing— but the truck kept coming.

He couldn’t find another flare, tossed the gun,
and lost the radio, but he held onto the tap. He ran to his right, the only
direction where there were no shadows. He smelled burning metal, and something
like antifreeze,.

Trucks. Right behind him.

For the first time since he’d come to the Gulf—
for the first time ever in his twenty-six years— he realized there were limits
to life, realities that had nothing to do with his abilities or strength or
will. Heavy caliber bullets cut a swath ten feet away; the truck barreled on.
Conrad willed himself to his feet again, pushing to the right, resigned to go
out the way a soldier wanted to go out, fighting at least. He reached for his
pistol, got it in his hand, and whirled around just in time to see the shadow
of the Iraqi vehicle, an open-back Zil, crest a small hill less than ten yards
away.

Then oblivion arrived.

But not for him. Red flames burst upwards as the
heavy fist of the A-10A Thunderbolt II smashed down on the Iraqi vehicle. The
night tore in two as Conrad flew backwards, propelled by some superhuman force
that left him dazed and disoriented, but intact.

And with the video still in his hand.

He managed somehow to get back on his feet,
realized he had both eyes open now, though they hurt like hell. He couldn’t
hear. His body seemed to feel the swirl of the battle continuing. Wind, sand,
cordite, blood flew into his face.

Something fluttered a few yards away. A heli.

No, it was a wolf, snapping for him.

More like an Apache war bird, her Gat swiveling
beneath her chin, so close it could poke him in the chest.

Conrad threw himself onto the helicopter’s right
skid. “Go!” he yelled. “Go! Go!”

And it did, skittering backwards a moment,
twisting its body, then running a half-mile south to a calmer place where the
others were waiting and where Conrad, back to himself, began laughing
hysterically as two burly SAS men pried him off the rail and hustled him to
safety.

OVER IRAQ

28 JANUARY 1991

1845

Part of him
wanted to be philosophical –
sometimes things went this way, all to hell.

But another part, a bigger part— a part that had
driven Horace Gordon Preston to excel in school, in sports, in the Air Force—
couldn’t accept defeat, not even a hint of one. Horace Gordon Preston couldn’t
abide failure. And that part made him look for a way to salvage something, to
find something to take home, something to notch, to banish the taste if not
erase the memory.

That was the reason, the only reason, he thought
of the Roland launcher when the AWACS controller told him that the Weasel had
failed to knock it out.

 Logic argued against attacking it. The SAM system
completely overmatched the A-10 and its operators had already proven they knew
how to use it.

But logic didn’t count for much, especially after Hawkins’s
disgusted tone when he agreed that the mission had to be scrubbed.

A tone that implied it was Preston’s fault.

Delta dickwad.

“Two, I want you to follow me down to seventy-five
feet,” Hack told A-Bomb.

“Roger that,” replied A-Bomb, without even asking
what their course heading was.

Maybe O’Rourke had read his mind. In any event,
Hack was grateful that his wingman didn’t question his judgment as he pushed
his plane into the howling wind and tipped northeast, vectoring for the
Roland’s approximate position. When he passed through five hundred feet, the
wind increased exponentially and the Maverick-heavy Hog’s air speed dropped
below two hundred knots. He pushed still lower, aiming to get under the Roland
radar, falling through four hundred. . . three hundred. . . two hundred.

The wind whipped up in a fury so intense that the
plane moved straight downward at one point, dropping another fifty feet in a
second. And then miraculously, inexplicably, everything went silky smooth.
Preston eased his grip on the stick as the altimeter nailed fifty feet, air
speed climbing back toward three hundred miles an hour.

At night, in the dark, even over flat terrain,
three hundred miles an hour feels incredibly fast when you are less than a
hundred feet off the ground. ,Shadows leap up at you, hands trying to pull you down
to earth. The Hog lacked terrain-following radar; the only night-vision
equipment at Hack’s disposal was the IR seeker on the Maverick, which offered a
very limited view. His knowledge of what lay ahead was based on a relatively
primitive map which experience had shown was not always one hundred percent
precise. His sense of where exactly he was relied heavily on a navigation
system proven to be less than one hundred percent reliable.

Logic would have, should have, sent him home. But
logic no longer had a place in Horace Gordon Preston’s cockpit. He slammed the
throttle to max as he neared the crunch zone, dividing his attention as evenly
as possible between the RWR, the windscreen, and the Mav’s display, which
ghosted several buildings, a road, more buildings, but no SAMs.

“Zeus on your right,” warned A-Bomb, and the next
instant the sky filled with a stream of tracers, a hose of red fire spurting
about two o’clock off his nose. “Mine.”

Something clicked in Hack’s brain and he nudge the
Hog gently, pitching her on her axis to bring her path more slightly west as A-Bomb
fired an AGM at the gun, whose errant fire was obviously optically aimed. Hack
looked to the Maverick screen, saw a series of buildings and the edge of a
river, then lost everything momentarily; the optical sensor jangling for some
unknown reason.