Hogs #1: Going Deep (2 page)

A-Bomb's grin floated in front of Doberman's face as he
scanned the sky for Dixon. He saw a dark shadow rising
through the clouds a good distance
behind him. He lost it, saw it, lost it. “You got a little low, kid,” he told
his wingman. “Get
up
over the flak.” Then he turned his attention back to the
ground, looking for a place to put his
last two bombs.

There was an Iraqi gun battery just off his right wing.
The Hog seemed to growl at him when
he spotted it through the clouds — as if she wanted a chance to kick a little
dirt
in the eyes of the
people who'd been firing at her all
morning.

Didn't Doberman owe her that chance?

He banked sharply, hunkering down in the thick titanium
bucket that protected the cockpit. As
soon as he pickled the two cluster bombs, he knew he’d missed his target; the
plane
was running into a
good hunk of wind and he hadn't compensated for it. Angry at himself, he
slammed the Hog
around
and worked into position for a run with his cannon. The plane screamed as she bled
speed and energy, then whistled as the pilot edged her into a dive. The safe
tactics of middle-altitude bombing were shelved — Doberman hunkered in for the
kill, sliding down from five thousand feet.

The four-barrel Iraqi peashooter desperately spun around
to face him. As its slugs spit past him, Doberman gave the Hog's cannon a full
five-second burst, then jinked
left as the flak shooter burst into a magnificent collection
of red, orange and yellow flames.

Climbing once again, Doberman caught the muzzle flash
of a second gun as he tried tracking
him through the sky.
Something
snapped inside his chest, and the methodical air force pilot was replaced by a
seething werewolf screaming
for vengeance. He tucked the Hog around for another attack. Just as he
fell into the dive, he caught a shadow out of the
corner of his eye.

“About time you caught up, lieutenant,” he said.

There was no answer.

“You have to press the little doohickey to get the
radio to work,” he said sarcastically.
Doberman pressed his
Hog
earthwards, deciding mid-plunge to leave the gun in favor of a building
slightly to the south. It hadn't been
tasked, but what the hell, a building was a building.

“Seriously, Dixon, let's see if that cannon of yours
works,” Doberman called as he lined up
on the building. “Get
yourself
oriented and trail on this pass, okay? Then we'll
head for SierraMax.”

Still no acknowledgment. Doberman felt a twinge of
anger at his wingmate; he liked the
kid but he'd be damned if he wiped the young newbie's ass for him.

Dixon bored in, unconsciously sinking lower and lower in
the well-protected cockpit. He worked the building dead into his sights, then
felt the stutter-stutter-stutter of
the Hog as it spat bullets from its nose. The top of the
structure blew apart, bits of stone,
roof tar and machinery
cascading
upwards— followed by a spectacularly showy
explosion.

One of his shells had ignited a gas line.

Dixon winged through a fireball, shouting like a cowboy
busting a favored steer at a rodeo.
Banking and climbing away for all he was worth, he congratulated
himself for expending ammunition in an
extremely
expeditious manner. The Hog swaggered a bit— not so much out of pride but
because it had taken a few bullets
in
the stabilizer— but in general he was in fine shape for
the return run
home.

Dixon pointed himself toward the rendezvous point. He
craned his neck to see if Dixon had
followed in on the
cannon run.

It was then that he realized why the young lieutenant
hadn't acknowledged his instructions.

The plane behind him wasn't an A-10A. It was a Mirage
F-l. And it wasn't a French jet that had strayed over the
lines, either. The dull green and
brown camo on her wing was
punctuated
by a bright red streak of Iraqi lightning. Had Doberman had the time or
inclination, he would have had no trouble picking out the three stars
sandwiched between
the
red and green fields in the Iraqi flag on her tail.

OVER WESTERN IRAQ

0658

At roughly the
same moment that Doberman discovered
Dixon wasn't on his tail, Dixon was
staring
into the
blankness of the sky in front of him, slowly
realizing
that he was lost— c
ompletely and utterly
lost. He was somewhere deep inside Iraq, without the vaguest notion of which
direction he had to head
in.

A compass sat directly in front of his face, and the
center instrument panel across from his chest was dominated by an INS
navigational system. While not without its problems, the unit could nonetheless
be counted on to give at least a
semi-accurate location. But at the moment it was about as
useful to him as a map of Wisconsin.

Climbing after firing his Mavericks, Dixon had run into
an aerial minefield. Antiair shells
exploded in every
direction,
the Hog bucking and shaking like a car with three
flat tires on a washboard highway.
Miraculously, none of the
shells
did any damage, or at least not enough to affect the plane. Dixon climbed and
climbed, his heart skipping as his lungs gulped in rapid staccato. Finally
clear of the exploding black bursts, he kept going— to nearly twenty thousand
feet, which took forever in a loaded Hog. It wasn't what he had planned to do,
and certainly not what he had
rehearsed for days. Still, he got the plane's nose angled
down for a second run and prepared
for a second run with the Mavericks; he was still in control.

Dixon had been a Division II quarterback in college, and
he gave
himself one of
his old pep talks, as if he were clearing his head after a particularly vicious
blitz. When Doberman failed to respond to his radio call he felt a twinge of
anxiety, but pushed it away, hoping his flight leader was just too busy to
respond.

He had flown wider than planned, and further north– and
lost his leader, at least momentarily— but as he peered through the broken
cloud layer he could feel his confidence returning. He pushed
downward, searching both the air
ahead for Doberman and the ground below for his brief targets. The
clouds made both tasks difficult; he
willed them away, sliding toward the Iraqi complex in
a shallow dive. Suddenly
the radar dish Doberman had targeted
snapped into view.

Dixon was surprised to see it still intact.

Okay, he told himself, I have a target. He steepened the
dive, confidence beginning to build.

Then clouds filled the windscreen. He turned quickly to
the video monitor. A blur fell into the crosshairs
and he
pushed the trigger on his AGM, locking
not on a dish but a building. He fired anyway, continuin
g downward into clear sky.

But now the site was jumbled around, different from the
satellite pictures and maps he’d studied. Doberman’s dish was gone; the
trailers were laid out in a different pattern. He shot his eyes back and forth,
trying to orient himself. The muscles in his throat closed, desperately trying
to keep his stomach acid from erupting in his mouth. Black bursts were
exploding in front of him; there was fire and smoke on the ground. Finally, he
saw a grouping of trailers he thought he recognized, locked on the middle one,
and fired. The Maverick clunked away as the plane followed the motion of his
arm, stiffly pulling to the left in a long descending bank as his eyes remained
glued on the television display, now completely blank.

More than thirty seconds passed before he pulled his
head upright. By then the Hog had flown
well beyond the target area. There was nothing on the desert
floor in front of him.

For a moment then, Lieutenant William Dixon- star
athlete, star student, prized recruit, a young man headed toward a top F-15
assignment until his mother's failing health complicated his career priorities-
forgot how to
fly. His
arms and legs moved independently of his head. With
his left hand he reached for the
stick when he meant to adjust the throttle; with his right he tuned the radio
when
he meant to check the INS settings.

A voice in his head yelled that he wasn't breathing
right. He'd been hyperventilating
probably since takeoff and
the
voice knew that a good part of his problem was physical.
But Dixon couldn't get the voice to
do anything but yell
impotently.
The A-10, confused by its pilot's commands,
started heading toward the ground.

***

Doberman smashed the throttle and threw the Hog into a
tight turn, trying to get inside the Mirage and set up an overshoot– putting
the faster but less maneuverable plane ahead of him, a classic turn-the-tables
ploy. The Mirage pilot anticipated the move, and traded some of his altitude
for speed, breaking off in a diving straight line away. The move would have
meant death for the Iraqi if Doberman had
been able to complete his turn; even with the widening
range
and the lost
energy, his Sidewinders probably could have
caught
the Mirage.

But Doberman didn't have a prayer of turning in time,
much less firing his heat-seekers; in
fact, he didn't dare complete his turn
. The bogey had tossed off two heat seekers just as the
Hog started away. One shot off wild, sucking the
fire off one of the diversionary flares the Hog
driver
kicked out.

The other sniffed the air and caught a faint whiff of
Hog turbofan dead ahead.

***

Dixon blinked his eyes, focusing not on the windscreen
but the horizon indicator below it. He had to get it level.
That was his first job, before all others.

The round sphere spun madly, whirling with no
discernible axis. It fluttered and
waved and shook without
any
pattern. It refused to be controlled, refused to assume
any direction other than its own.

The pilot reached out and grabbed it, sparks flying from
his hands. The sparks ignited his flight suit, burning
his safety harness away, setting his
arms and chest on fire.

He held on. His breath roared in his ears, rapid as the
rod on a locomotive's wheels. His
entire body was on fire,
but he held the
sphere tight.

It stopped spinning
.
The cowl around his head
lifted
ever so slightly.
He had both hands on the stick, and he had
control
of the bomb-laden Hog.

“The plane is level,” he heard himself say. Next step,
climb to a safe altitude.

•How do you climb? You put the nose toward the stars,
you pull your arm gently back, you
feel your chest relax...

Slowly, his eyes rose with the nose of the plane. The
pilot found himself staring into the
muddled gray of the
Iraqi dawn.

But where there should be clouds, he saw flowers -
hundreds and hundreds of grayish-white
lilies. Their mouths
turned
toward him, delicate satin tongues that brushed
gently against the hard surface of the warplane's
fuselage.
Dixon and his
Hog were surrounded, folded in an endless
blanket
of beautiful flowers.

It was the most wondrous thing he'd ever seen. And then
he realized that he had seen these
flowers before.

At his mother's funeral three months ago.

OVER WESTERN IRAQ

0658

Several
miles to
the west, Devil One and Devil Three
were mopping up their attack on a similar set of dishes and
trailers. Flown by two of the most
experienced pilots in the
squadron,
the Hogs had made a serious dent in the Iraqi air defense system. They might looked
more like bathtubs with
wings
than attack planes, but together the two Hogs had done
enough damage to impress even a
snot-nose Strike Eagle
commander.

With a lot less fuss than a sissy-ass state-of-the-art
F-15E required, thought the pilot of Devil Three, Captain Thomas Peter “A-Bomb”
O'Rourke. Like a lot of other
committed A-10A drivers, A-Bomb had nothing but disdain for
the pointy-nose, fast-jet community.
Unlike most other Hog
drivers,
he expressed it at every opportunity.

Just now, his audience was an Iraqi radar trailer. In
all likelihood, its crewmen didn't hear a word he was
saying, even though he was shouting
at the top of his lungs.

They'd get the message soon enough. He held his Hog's
stick tight between his knees as he squeezed the trigger at
the top of the handle. Dust erupted
from the building, metal evaporating under the ferocious onslaught of cannon
shells.
The pilot
stopped yelling and stared at the windscreen in
front of him, pushing the trigger an extra second to
complete the destruction. Then he
pulled up, feeling the rubber of his mask and the tight fit of the helmet
around his pudgy head. He could taste metal in his mouth and felt the steady
rush of his breath down his throat into his
lungs.

A-Bomb put the Hog on its wingtip, scanning ahead for
the flight leader, Major James “Mongoose”
Johnson. A greenish-black hulk was climbing maybe a quarter of a mile off to
his left. A-Bomb checked his fuel, and did a quick scan of his instruments and
warning indicators.
Clean,
he pitched the Hog more or less level.

“Devil One to Three. A-Bomb, you back there?”

“I got your butt in my sights,” A-Bomb replied.

“Let's dance down to SierraMax and pick up Doberman and
his pup,” said lead.

“Gotcha.”

Mongoose could be a hard-ass— a lot of the maintenance
people hid when he came around the
hangars— but he and
A-Bomb
went back a ways. A-Bomb had seen him pull strings
to keep a fellow pilot from going to
jail in Germany for a minor brawl; in his opinion that was as true a test of
desirable character as any known to man.

The two jets climbed as they flew south. Without the
weight and drag of the bombs, the
ride to twenty thousand-
practically
outer space to a Hog pilot- wasn't nearly as hard as it had been when they set
out from their home base at King Fahd air base a million hours ago. But they took
their time about it, careful to keep parading their eyes through the sky around
them in case an intruder somehow
managed to
sneak nearby.

They were still climbing as they approached the
checkpoint set for the rendezvous with
their two mates.
Devil
One angled toward an easy orbit; Devil Three fell in
behind. They were about sixty seconds
early- an eternity
for
the notoriously punctual Doberman, who was leading the
second element.

A-Bomb eased himself in his harness, loosening not only
his restraints but his mask and helmet. Steadying the
Hog with his left hand, he reached his
right hand down to a
custom-sewn
pouch on the leg of his flight suit. There he
removed a small titanium thermos- bulletproof,
naturally-
notched the
cap to the open position with his thumb, and
took a sip.

His radio crackled mid-swallow.

“A-Bomb, you want to look me over for damage while
we're waiting?” asked Mongoose.

“Be with you in a minute,” he grunted back.

***

Mongoose guessed what A-Bomb was up to. Few if any
other Hog pilots would drink coffee on
such a long mission-
hell,
on any mission. And at twenty thousand feet! If the sheer logistics didn't get
you, the piddle pack would. But that was one of the many wondrous things about A-Bomb-
he
never seemed to have
to pee. And no obstacle, whether it was gravity, an enemy missile or a general
out for his butt,
ever stopped him from an
objective.

Which made him the perfect wingman.

Mongoose shook his head, then rechecked their position
for the third time. After they picked
up Doberman and Dixon,
they
would fly back across the border to Al Jouf, a small spit of a strip in
northwestern Saudi Arabia. There they would be refueled and rearmed. After
that, they were supposed to cross back north and put some dents in Iraqi
tanks- child's play after this
mission, though as far as he could tell things had gone pretty damn well so
far.

Assuming Doberman and the kid showed up soon.

Thinking about anything too much made you worry about
it, but sometimes it was impossible to clear your head. As
flight leader and the squadron
director of operations or DO,
Major Johnson felt enormously responsible, not just for the mission but
the men flying it. And that made him think. He thought about Doberman and
Dixon, willing the two Hogs to
appear. The cloud cover had gradually thickened; he
worried
that the
second half of the mission would be grounded. He wondered about the other
members of the 535th, who had been assigned to fly with other
squadrons for the opening day festivities.

Mongoose took another gander at his fuel, then glanced
back at his watch. Doberman was now a
full three minutes
late.
He didn't know him very well- the entire squadron had been patched together for
deployment only a few weeks before
- but it seemed uncharacteristic of the captain, who could
be anal-retentive when it came to
planning and poker. He was
the
kind of guy who not only stacked his chips according to
color, but made sure they were all
facing the same
direction.

Which meant you always knew how much you'd won from
him. The guy had the worst luck on the base.

***

A-Bomb replaced the thermos, then ran his hand into
another pocket in his flight suit. “Born in the USA” blared from two small but
powerful speakers carefully sewn behind
mesh patches near his knees. He was thinking he might
change
the CD— he was in
kind of a “Greetings From Asbury Park” mood— when Mongoose reminded him he was
supposed to be
checking for flak damage.

“You still with me or what?” barked the major, the
radio barely audible over Springsteen.

A-Bomb closed in on Devil One and eyeballed the
aluminum. The green camo looked
completely unblemished.

“Jeez, Goose, if I didn't know better, I'd swear you
had that sucker washed and waxed.”

“One of these days you're not going to get enough
oxygen and your brain's going to fry,”
said Mongoose. “We're
pretty
damn high to be screwing with your mask.”

“I got a straw goes right through.” By now A-Bomb had
passed slowly under Devil One and was
surveying the other
side.
“Cleaner than the day you drove it out of the
showroom.”

“Let's see how you made out,” said the flight leader,
winging back to inspect A-Bomb's A-10A.

“I thought I heard something hit my left wing,” said
A-Bomb. “But it feels okay.”

“What the hell is that racket in the background?”

“RWR's giving me trouble. Just checking the settings,”
answered A-Bomb.

“I didn't realize your threat indicator played guitar.”

“Shit, you wouldn't believe the things Clyston's
techies can do with a pair of pliers,”
said the pilot. “This
sucker's better tuned
than a Spark Vark.”

“Uh-huh. Maybe we should just have you fly over the
missile batteries and knock out the
radar for us.”

“That wouldn't be any fun. Ahmed has to have something
to play with.”

A “Spark Vark” was an F-lll fighter-bomber outfitted
with special gear to detect and jam
enemy radars. The RWRS in the A-10A were based on technology that dated from
Vietnam; while they could detect a variety of radars— usually they couldn't jam
them.

Or play guitar.

Jamming was left to a
counter-measures pod carried on the right wing of the
plane.
The needle-shaped
box was many years old and about two generations behind the times. The ECMs
worked well against the radars it was designed to work well against, but the
Iraqis
had plenty of
sophisticated defense systems beyond
their reach. Devil Squadron hadn't won whatever lottery
was held for the few more advanced versions that had been shipped to the
desert. Even those were considered a bit
behind the curve.

But hell, a Hog with advanced ECMs? Kind of against the
point, in A-Bomb's opinion.

He held steady while the other Hog came in for an
inspection. A-Bomb waved at Mongoose,
then glanced at his
watch
again. Devils Two and Four were now more than five
minutes late, an eternity in a war zone.

If it were up to him, he'd head north and find them.
But it wasn't his call.

***

Mongoose swung under the other plane, consciously
trying to take his time and focus on
the job in front of
him. Doberman could take
care of himself.

A-Bomb's Hog was unblemished. They'd anticipated heavy
anti-air, but the truth was, they'd
encountered only sporadic fire, most of it unaimed. Still, all it took was
one lucky shot to ruin your day.

Just as he was about to tell A-Bomb he was clean,
Mongoose heard a hail over the radio from their E-3 Sentry AWACS controller.
“Cougar” was flying back behind the
border, helping coordinate the air war in this sector. The airborne situation
room functioned like the coaching staff in a
stadium skybox, calling in plays and alerting the pilots
to
blitzes and stunts.

“Go ahead, Cougar,” said Mongoose, expecting to be asked
why they were playing ring-around-the-rosy in the
middle of the desert.

“We're tracking two Fulcrums headed toward SierraMax.
Are you in contact with Devil Two?”

“That's a negative.” Mongoose felt his voice start to
crack, despite his straining effort to
keep it level.

“He had an F-l in pursuit when we lost him on radar. We
haven't been able to reach him on any
frequency.”

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

“Roger. Vector me in.”

“That is a negative. Repeat. Negative. You are to
proceed according to your frag.
Confirm.”

There were very few times in his life that Mongoose
wished he flew a pointy nose,
fast-moving fighter, but this
was definitely one of them. He gunned the large turbofan engines that
sat behind the cockpit, turning the plane
northwards in what he hoped was Doberman's direction.

He knew A-Bomb would follow, so he didn't bother
keying the mike to tell him.

There was no sense answering the E-3. All he'd end up
doing was cluttering the airwaves with
four-letter words.