Hogs #1: Going Deep (8 page)

KING FAHD ROYAL AIRBASE

0930

“This is CNN.”

James Earl Jones' voice shook the walls of Cineplex. The
network's logo spun around and filled the immense
television screen had not only given
the Devils' squadron
room
its unofficial nickname but had made it a very popular
hangout.

Especially now. Off-duty pilots and most of the intelligence
officers who shared the Devils' Hog Heaven
trailer complex crowded the room, watching as the TV
flashed
a picture of the
night sky over Baghdad, shot from a
downtown hotel room. One second, the night was dark, blank, peaceful.
The next second, more triple-A than Skull had seen over Hanoi during the
Linebacker raids filled the heavens.

Knowlington listened in fascination as one of the
television correspondents described what it was like to
watch an air raid outside your
window. He'd never been on
that end of it.

On screen, the sky erupted with flash after flash,
reflections of explosions on the
ground. The F-117As were
hitting their
targets.

“Take that, you god damn son of a bitch!” said someone
in the room.

And with that, Cineplex erupted in a cheer.

***

Colonel Knowlington was still standing by the door,
eyes glued to the television, when
someone grabbed his
sleeve fifteen minutes
later.

He looked across at the balding head of Chief Master
Sergeant Alan Clyston. Clyston had started as an airman crewing Knowlington's
Thud three decades before; he was now the squadron's chief sergeant, in charge
of everything from paperclips to cluster bombs. Knowlington called him capo di
capo; the people who worked for him just said “Chief” — and
genuflected. Pudgy, with gray whiskers
and jowly cheeks, the
man
could still strip and reassemble an engine blindfolded
faster than anyone on the base. He was
a walking
encyclopedia
on everything the Air Force flew, but what Clyston was really an expert on was
people. Anybody who
crewed
for him would march barefoot to Baghdad if he asked.

And any officer who crossed him would wish he'd done
that instead.

“'Scuse me, sir,” said Clyston. He smiled— mostly,
Knowlington thought, at using the
word ‘sir,’ which he
always
did in public. “Can I catch you outside a minute?”

“You remember that guy on TV doing the commentary?” the
colonel asked him in the hallway. “He
flew F-4s.”

“Didn't catch him,” said Clyston.

“Shot me down in a training exercise once.” Knowlington
led him down his office. “Your
manuals on the Maverick are on the way,” he added. “A congressman is hand
delivering
them.”

“Really? Jeez, sir, good work.”

Knowlington laughed. He half-suspected that tracking
down the manuals had been something of a te
st: Clyston seemed able to locate and
appropriate anything he really wanted.

Like the TV and the trailers.

“I got good news and I got bad news,” said Clyston, once
inside Knowlington's spartan office.

“Bad news first.”

“They're connected. Major Johnson's group got their
target, all planes back to Al Jouf
intact.”

“That's the bad news?”

“One of them got chewed up pretty bad. I talked to
Major Johnson and then a buddy of
mine who was rustled out that way to make sure the planes are pa
tched together. Jimbo.
Remember him?”

“Round black guy, always nods to himself?”

“That's him. He'll get it back together as quick as anyone
I know.” Clyston tried to make himself comfortable on the small steel folding
chair, an exact mate to the colonel's. He had offered to find the colonel
better furniture several times, but Knowlington— who could
have a leather-clad suite airlifted
through his own
connections if he chose—
declined.

“They're scrounging for parts,” added the sergeant.
“One of the things they can't seem to
find is a radio.
Johnson's got fried.”

“That's the bad news?”

“I'm getting there. I was thinking I would put somebody
onto a Herc that's heading in that
direction. I could have
them on the ground in
two hours, tops.”

“So do it.”

“I had to use your name a little to get space on the
plane,” said the sergeant.

Knowlington shrugged. Usually he could figure out where
Clyston was going, but this time the
sergeant had him flummoxed. He only beat around the bush like this if it had
to do with personnel.

Damn.

The colonel realized what it was as the name formed on
Clyston's lips.

“Probably going to have to be Technical Sergeant
Rosen,” said Clyston.

“Oh, Jesus, Alan. For cryin' out loud. Not her.”

“Whatever it is, she can have the plane back here
tonight. If I were sure it was just dropping a radio in, I
could send half a dozen other guys.
But Jimbo didn't exactly have time to do an X-ray, you know what I mean?”

“Damn.”

“It's either her or me, if you want the plane back
tonight. Otherwise, there's no
guarantees.”

“Tell her I'll cut her fucking tongue out if there's
another incident like General Smith.”

“You know, she wasn't totally unjustified— “

Knowlington's eyebrows ended the conversation.

***

“You keep your F-ing mouth shut the whole flight, you
keep it shut at the base, you come
back here and you report
to me. You got it?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Rebecca Rosen told Clyston twenty
minutes later, as she stood waiting
for the C-130 crew to
finish loading their
gear.

“They'll throw you the F off the plane if you act up. And
at the base— you say nothing. F nothing. It's a special
ops base. They'll bury you in the
sand, we'll never find a
body.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Don't yeah-yeah me, Rosen.” Clyston shook his head, and
once again considered going out to Al Jouf himself.

“Look, Sergeant, I'm not a total asshole.” She stuck her
nose up in the air like she was a stinking English
princess. Five foot-two, a hundred
and ten pounds when wet,
and
she thought she was a stinking Amazon. “I just don't
suffer fools gladly.”

Clyston rolled his eyes. “Your problem is that you never
met another member of the Air Force who you don't
think is a fool.”

“I don't think you're a fool, Sergeant,” Rosen told
him.

“Get the F out of here, Rosen. I want to see that
airplane in my hangar by 1800. It has
a date with Saddam
tomorrow. You got it?”

“I'll have it here if I have to fly it myself.”

Clyston would bet money she would. Better than most
pilots.

***

Colonel Knowlington glanced at his watch. It was nearly
ten a.m.

Where the hell had the time gone? He hadn't done a damn
thing all morning.

Not true. But he hadn't done anything useful. He'd
become one of those red-tape idiots
he used to rail against.

Hell, that had happened long ago.

Knowlington slid his notes about the next day's ATO
into the drawer and locked it.
Standing, he centered his pad on the desktop, then went to the four-drawer file
cabinet and made sure it too was locked. The uncluttered order of the room
reassured him somehow, the blank walls a
comfortable contrast to the thoughts that jumbled and
raced
through his mind.

Down the hall, Cineplex was still filled to overflowing.
Most if not all of the people watching CNN knew
more about what had happened than all of the
broadcasters and studio analysts put together; still, there was an undeniable
fascination to the reports, especially the video
of Baghdad being bombed.

Walking toward the chaplain's tent, the colonel
wondered about the coverage. Would it
provoke sympathy for
Iraq? Did Saddam now look
like the victim?

Vietnam had been like that. You couldn't blame
everything on the media, sure, but
they had to shoulder a
shitload.

The worst stuff, maybe. People applauding— applauding!—
when a pilot was captured.

Knowlington had argued with his two sisters only once
about the war. He'd known it would be
useless before he even
opened
his mouth. Something— booze probably, but maybe his
love for them, too— made him try.

No way. They knew the truth— they had seen it on TV
and in the papers.

Colonel Knowlington found the chaplain's tent. There
were a few people standing around a coffee machine at the
back. He walked over silently, nodded
to an officer from one of the transport units he knew vaguely. Nice guy. Young.
Most of the other people
who came to these meetings were
enlisted.
There were no ranks here.

Today was a busy day, and there wasn't likely to be a
crowd. The colonel had barely filled
his cup when the
informal
leader of the group, known as “Stores,” cleared his
throat near the small wooden podium
at the front of the
tent.

“We ought to try and keep things quick today, since
there's a lot going on,” said the
man, who was a logistics sergeant. The others began sifting among the chairs,
everyone sitting near the front, but
not in the front row itself. No one was next to anyone else. “We'll just be ad
hoc for the next few days; catch as
catch can, etcetera.
Anyone
who has to leave, you know, ought to go when they
have to. Okay— anyone have anything to
say?”

Knowlington glanced around. When no one else spoke, he
rose slowly to his feet.

“My name is Michael and I'm an alcoholic. I've been
sober now thirteen days, going on fourteen. I thought it
would be easier here, but it turns
out its probably a bit
worse. Too much
Listerine.”

Everybody laughed.

TAKING OFF FROM AL JOUF FOB

1135

In theory, every
A-10A had been stamped from the same
sheet metal. The parts
were completely interchangeable; weapons, performance, characteristics
precisely the same.
The
bare-bones design and facilitated production lines were
supposed to churn out the Air Force
equivalent of a model T,
available
in any color, as long as it was muted green.
Unlike most other military jets, there weren't even
different versions or model numbers to
complicate matters. An OA-10A was just an A-10A on a target-spotting mission.
The only thing different was the mix of bullets in its gun.

In reality, each Hog had its own quirks and
characteristics. The one Doberman was
driving, for instance,
seemed
to pull slightly to its left, a bit like a motor boat
with a loose rudder. In fact, the
characteristic was so
noticeable
on takeoff that the pilot triple-checked his flap
setting and instruments. Eventually,
he decided the problem was with the engines, even though the gauges said the
two
GEs were operating
in precise unison.

His stomach said screw the gauges. One fan had just a
little more bite than the other, a little more aggressive
spinning around its axle. No amount of
fine-tuning the throttle evened it out, either. The solution was all in the
stick and rudder, all in Doberman's attitude as he flew. He tensed his muscles
a different way to fly Dixon's plane;
that's
what it came down to.

Another thing— the ACES-2 ejector seat felt different.
Totally impossible, but absolutely
true. Kid's fanny must've
bent it special.

Doberman noticed the rear end of A-Bomb's plane had
risen a bit high in his windshield; he
tilted his nose up a tad more to correct. They were flying a loose trail
formation north, climbing to twenty
thousand as they ran over the berm marking the border between Saudi Arabia and
its aggressive neighbor. A number of tanks were waiting to
get their turrets blown off about a
hundred miles away.

Luckiest dead man alive, huh? What the hell did Jimbo
mean by that?

A quarter inch one way or another.

Yeah, right. A quarter of an inch one way or another and
the damn shell would have missed completely.

Doberman snorted into his oxygen mask. He'd been
unlucky as hell ever since he got
here, and not just at
poker.

Another way to look at what had happened to his Hog was
the opposite of luck. Hell, nothing
hit Dixon's plane,
nothing,
and he'd flown through the same shit Doberman had.
Now that was luck.

Kid probably sucked what little luck he had right out
of him. Some guys were like that. Luck
magnets.

A couple of days ago Doberman had blown a tire landing.
That was unlucky as hell. Hogs never
blew tires. Never.

It wasn't luck that had kept the plane from becoming a
pile of junk that afternoon.

It was kick-ass piloting.

Hey, you want to call that luck? OK. Maybe to a
grizzled old sergeant who had been
there when Orville and
Wilbur
traded in their bicycles, it was luck.

To Doberman, it was skill.

And the hell with anyone who said he was conceited
about that.

Doberman peered out the side canopy, staring through
the thick, protective glass toward the
desolate undulations
of
yellow below. The sand and grit hardly seemed worth
fighting over; maybe staring at it all
day made you crazy.

Sure, but so did thinking about the oil beneath it.
Obviously Saddam's problem.

“Yo, Doberman, buddy, how's our six?”

Doberman snapped to attention at A-Bomb's call. He
craned his neck around, making sure
his back, or his “six” as in
six o'clock on the imaginary clock face of their location, was clean.
As he pushed his eyes toward the front windscreen, he realized that A-Bomb had
actually made the call to subtly remind him to keep his separation; he was
off Devil Three by less than a quarter
mile, and closing.

Subtle.

“Nothing behind us but a lot of dirt and open sky,
thank you very much, old buddy,” he
said.

“Don't mention it.”

“We're flying silent com,” barked Mongoose.

Fuck you, said Doberman, without, of course, keying
the microphone.

He hadn't been paying enough attention, and now as he
dropped back he realized he was also
muscling the stick. So
he
had to wake up and relax at the same time. Doberman blew
a long breath, letting the Hog ease
under him like a calm
horse
out on a Sunday walk. His tendency to over manage the
plane was a symptom of fatigue;
they'd been flying since nearly three this morning and his butt was dragging
lower than the wheels.

Mongoose had volunteered them for this stinking BAI hop,
another reason to be pissed off at him. The original
frag— the fragment or portion of the
air tasking order that pertained to them— had them just sitting on alert at Al
Jouf before going home.

Yeah, but could you blame him? Who wanted to hang out
while there were things to blow up?

***

They were about three minutes from the assigned kill
box when a familiar call sign crackled
over the radio.

“Cougar to Devil Leader. Devils, stand by for tasking.”

Tasking?

Doberman slipped up the volume on the radio, even
though the E-3 controller's voice had
been loud and clear.

“We need you to head east, pronto,” explained the
AWACS. “One of our Weasels spotted a
shipment of Scuds on
the highway.”