Hogs #1: Going Deep (9 page)

AL JOUF FOB

1200

Dixon found himself
wearing a rut in the sand at the
edge of the runway, unable to tear his eyes away from the stricken planes
straggling into the base. Every beat-up
F-16, every flamed-out Tornado seemed to criticize him:
if
its jock could take it, why couldn't he?

Finally, he couldn't stand it anymore. Unwilling to go
near anyone whose questions would
inevitably lead to more
lies,
the young pilot collapsed butt first into the sand,
covering his face against the gritty
wind. His mind blanked;
his
brain fogging nearly as badly as it had up north.

He'd sat there for nearly fifteen minutes when he felt
a tug on his arm.

“Excuse me, you Lieutenant Dixon?”

Dixon looked up and found an Air Force special ops first
lieutenant with a greasy pad of legal-sized paper
staring up at him.

“Yeah?”

“Two things. The maintenance people say the parts they
don't have are en route; ought to be
here in an hour or
less.
Plane looked worse than it was, or they kicked butt;
Jimbo says take your pick. If it's
fixed tonight you can go
back
to Fahd. If not, we get you a bunk. Check the sheets before you turn in; the
pilots are ball busters.”

Dixon shrugged. The prognosis on the parts sounded
hopelessly optimistic, given the chaos
on the field in front of him, but he wasn't about to argue with anything that
even
pretended to be good news.

“Second thing, my colonel wants to know if you can help
out the intelligence guys. They're,
uh, kind of overworked.”

“Okay,” said Dixon. “What do I do?”

“Find a Major Bauer,” said the lieutenant, flipping
through the pad to see what his next errand was. He'd
already mentally crossed Dixon off the
list. “Uh, he'll give
you
the rundown. Your stuff stowed with your Hog, right?”

Dixon nodded. He rose, surprising the officer with his
height. “Where is Bauer?”

“Got me,” said the officer, trotting back toward the
tower area.

Dixon asked half a dozen people if they'd seen Bauer
without getting a positive response.
Finally he flagged down
a
marine captain with a clipboard who was trotting toward a
British plane. Jet engines were
roaring all around and
he
had to practically tackle the officer, shouting directly
into his ear.

“I'm looking for Major Bauer.”

“Why?”

“I'm supposed to help debrief pilots.”

“Here you go,” said the captain, handing over the
clipboard.

“You're Bauer?”

“No. But my plane's ready and I got to get back to my
unit. Bauer's up there. There's a
communications set up in
the Humvee. See it?”

He didn't, but the marine, obviously shanghaied into the
job earlier, disappeared before he could ask for more
directions.

The clipboard had a thick sheaf of unlined, completely
blank paper. There was a pen
beneath the clip,
which
turned out not to work
.

While he recognized the type of plane before him— it
was a two-place Tornado, one of the
most common British types in the Gulf— he wasn't precisely sure what kind of
mission it would typically be tasked.

Had a hell of a drawing on the nose, though. A woman
who was primarily boobs was getting a
missile right where it
counted.

“Like the tart?” the pilot yelled down from the
fuselage.

“Excuse me?” Dixon yelled back.

“The drawing. It's m'wife.” He laughed. “It's the
backseater's wife, actually.” He
laughed again.

Between the roar of incoming jets and the subdued whine
of the Tornado, not to mention the
pilot's accent, Dixon
caught maybe a third of
any given sentence.

“I'm supposed to debrief you,” he shouted.

“What?”

“What was your mission?” yelled Dixon.

“My mission? Talmud.”

“Tail what?”

“Talldaul Air Base.”

“Did you hit it?”

“Of course.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.”

“Like?”

“Like what?”

“How bad did you hit it?”

“Well I didn't have a bloody chance to land there and
find out, now did I?”

“Was it, uh, destroyed?”

“What, the runway?”

“Damage?”

“Like a tart’s face.”

“Tart?”

“Prostitute, son. How bloody old are you?”

“Can you spell it?”

“Tart?”

The lieutenant took out his own pen and scribbled
something he hoped approximated the
shout. Meanwhile, airmen
were
waving the Tornado pilot forward, urging him toward a
tank truck. Dixon got the man's unit,
his call sign, and the
fact
that he had nearly “gone empty” before the surrounding
confusion and revving Turbo-Unions
overwhelmed the
conversation.
Giving up, Dixon took a few steps back— and
nearly
got run over by a taxiing Hornet.

***

“Okay,
that would be
Tallil.
So did they hit the field?”

“Yup.”

“How
bad?”

“Like a prostitute's face, if that means anything.”

“Did he get both JP 233s on it?”

“I don't know.”

“JP 233s, the things they use to muck up the runway.” The
Brits like that word. Did he say, 'muck'? “The JP 233s?”

“I know what you're talking about. He said it was as
cratered as a prostitute's face.”

Bauer crossed his eyes, then sighed. Though he was
wearing an Air Force uniform, he had found or appropriated an army sergeant's
helmet. He was serious about it, too;
the chin strap was synched so tight he could barely move
his jaw. “All the prostitutes I know have smooth faces.”

“He claimed he hit it.”

“Don't worry about it. Listen, there's an F-16 on the
ground somewhere that was going north
with a package to
Taqaddum.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, but I don't need to know about that; he's
already been debriefed. On his way
back they were flying
right
over a factory at the edge of a lake. Ask him if it
was on fire or not.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I think the guy's name was Franco, or something
with a couple of vowels in it. It's in
the sheets somewhere
but
it'll take me an hour to find it. He's with that Guard
unit out of New York.”

Dixon wondered what the F-16 pilot— whom he figured
would have been in a very big hurry
and flying no lower than twenty thousand feet— could possibly have seen with
all the
cloud cover,
even if he happened to be looking in the exact
spot the intelligence officer mentioned. But what the hell?
It wasn't like he had anything better to do at the moment.

OVER WESTERN IRAQ

1205

Even when they
were on top of the coordinates the AWACS
had sent them to, they had trouble
raising the Phantom,
possibly
because there was so much damn radio traffic. It
seemed like every aircraft in the theater was
talking on the
same
frequency. Hell, Doberman thought without too much exaggeration, there were
probably a few guys using it to
call home.

Finally, a chopped transmission staggered through that
included their call sign.

“All right, everybody but Sharp Eyes shut the hell up,”
Doberman heard Mongoose bark. “We got
a situation here.”

The Phantom pilot told them a pair of flatbeds with
Scuds had parked about fifty yards
from a water tower in the
shadow
of what looked like an industrial park. It was ten miles
northeast of the way marker they were
sitting on. He had also spotted a number of military trucks, including two
troop
carriers on the
road headed in the same direction.

“I'm out of iron or I would have taken them myself,”
said the F-4 pilot. He sounded younger
than his plane,
though
that wasn't a particularly difficult accomplishment.
“I'm also about two pounds of fuel
from bingo.”

“We'll take it from here,” Mongoose told him. Doberman
spotted the Phantom's smoky tail at
about ten o'clock due north. It seemed to wag a bit as it turned the target
over
to the Hogs.

Doberman felt his heart starting to pump as they swung
down and began looking for the water
tower, an easy marker. A-Bomb was ahead of his left wing a few hundred feet,
Mongoose beyond that. The Hog snorted as its nose got closer to the dirt; the
pig loved scraping along in the sand.

Suddenly he spotted a cloud of dust kicking across the
sandpapery terrain to his right.

The two personnel carriers, most likely.

“Devil One, this is Two,” Doberman told Mongoose. “I
got the dust bunny to the north there.”

“Roger that,” said Mongoose. “A-Bomb and I will head
for the tower.”

Doberman angled his Hog toward the dust cloud, pouring
on the gas. The cloud soon separated into the two troop
trucks; they'd left the highway. If
they thought that was going to help them they were sadly mistaken.

The Hog's cannon began to bellow as he put the plane into
a shallow dive and fired, perforating the path of the
lead vehicle but missing the truck
itself. He gave the Hog a
bit
of rudder, pushing her nose to the left and getting off
a long, four-second burst.

Points for concept, but none for execution— he'd killed
a lot of sand blowing a double air ball and was now
beyond the rug rats. More a little
pissed at himself,
Doberman
yanked his nose up and dragged the A-10A back over
and under like a gymnast doing a
flip. The heavy drag of the
bombs beneath his wing— in his excitement and fatigue he
had actually forgotten he was carrying
a full load of iron—
screwed
up his sense of balance. The plane flailed wildly
toward the ground, angry at his
hot-dogging and inattention.
For a second Doberman thought he had lost it. As he wrestled
the plane back to level flight and
got her off the deck, he realized it wasn't quite as bad as he'd thought,
though he
deserved a
serious kick in the butt for getting stupid.

The trucks continued to the west as he attempted to put
a chokehold on his adrenaline and
take things a step at a
time.
Gearing around for a cannon run, he saw that they were
now separated from each other by a
good distance. Choosing the one on the left as his first target, A-Bomb picked
up his wing and drove the Hog toward the left rear quarter panel of the fleeing
Iraqi. He started firing his cannon perhaps a second too soon; the plane lost a
bit of momentum as the powerful Gatling fired, but this time Doberman had
the green canvas locked in the
crosshairs. The shells
rippled
in a tight line through the back of the truck. It
looked like a zipper coming undone,
the two halves peeling
apart
in a jagged twist of black and blue smoke, then fire,
then more smoke, then a mélange of
colors and death.

The guys in the other truck must have seen what had
happened to their friends, for by the time Doberman had the A-10 pointed in its
direction, the drab colored Toyota—
it wasn't at all, but somehow it was more fun to plink if he
thought of it as one of the rice
burners his brother-in-law sold— was wailing down a sandbank without anyone at
the wheel. Doberman lit the cannon and waxed the cab three
rounds into his burst.

***

The gray tower hulked over a trio of wedge-shaped
shadows ahead. Mongoose decided the
shadows must be
buildings,
and that the Scuds would be on the other side of
the tower. “Swing with me to the east. We're going
to turn
tight and come in
low for a look,” he told A-Bomb. “Expect
ground
fire.”

“What, you think these guys have slingshots?”
Mongoose was too busy concentrating
on the ground to
a
nswer.
He'd seen photos of Scuds, but never the real thing.
Now he wasn't totally sure he'd
recognize one.

Not that it would matter. Anything down there was going
bye-bye.

“There's a good-sized gun on the roof of that
building,” squawked A-Bomb.

Too late to do anything about it. Mongoose felt himself
hunkering down into the titanium
bathtub that protected the
cockpit
as he slammed the Hog forward, still trying to get a
look at the parking area behind the
water tower. Two long trucks sat nose to rear on a narrow driveway. They looked
like oil trucks, except that the front of their tanks had
coneheads.

There was more ground fire, but it was fairly light; even
twelve millimeter stuff wasn't going to do much damage
unless the Hog stayed in one place
for a long time. And he
wasn't about to do
that.

“They're right behind the water tank,” Mongoose told
A-Bomb. “They have some heavy machine
guns and maybe light
anti-air.”

“Yeah. I'm past
^‘
em.”

“Come around with me and let's take them out.” Mongoose
noted
several trucks and
smaller buildings nearby, and a
fair-sized revetment with maybe a half-dozen, khaki-covered vehicles a
quarter of a mile or so directly north of the
Scuds.

“You take the Scuds and I'll get the guys on the roof,”
said A-Bomb. “Shit, Goose, there's a
battery of something
in
that half-donut north of the parking lot. Bitch fuck, these guys got
peashooters all over the place.”

“You'd think they lived here or something,” said
Mongoose, pushing the Hog into
position to make a decent
bomb run.

***

Doberman's arms felt like lead as he pulled off the
remains of the second truck. He heard
Mongoose call out the
location
of the two Scud carriers and swung back in their
direction.

A quick scan of the instruments showed everything
running at spec. The slight pull to
the left was still
there,
but the engines pegged in perfect parallel on the
gauge. Plenty of gas, he told
himself; plenty of explosives
sitting under the wings to eliminate as many Scuds as they
could find.

He was still looking for the other Hogs when the terrain
ahead erupted with a thick black explosion. A-Bomb
was yelling 'hot shit' and Doberman
pulled his right wing up
and
pushed straight for the thunderclap of ex-Scud, aiming
to mop up what was left. He caught a
glimpse of a Hog
orbiting
back in his direction, off at two o'clock.

“Doberman, there's a flatbed with two guns at least to
the west of the tank. Take it out,”
said Mongoose.

“No, I got it,” said A-Bomb.

“Where the fuck are you?” Doberman asked.

“Right here,” said A-Bomb, pulling his A-10 through
the smoke cloud. He was well off to
Doberman's right but the
roiling
dust was so thick Doberman broke off, unable to get a target and not wanting to
screw up what was quickly becoming a turkey shoot. He gathered his wits for a
better
run once A-Bomb cleared.

“What else is down there?” he asked A-Bomb, his back
momentarily turned to the action.

A-Bomb's response was garbled. Someone else jumped on
the frequency and Doberman heard an
F-16 flight ask if the
Hogs needed help.

Meanwhile, Mongoose put himself in a shallow orbit and played
quarterback. He had A-Bomb hold off while he
directed Doberman in to drop his bombs on a truck park
north
of the now-demolished Scuds.

The haze made it tough to settle his target in the HUD. A
s he glared into the screen. Doberman
realized the
enthusiasm
he'd felt this morning— hell, the giddiness,
there wasn't another word— had slipped away. Even the energy
he'd just had smoking the trucks was gone. His arms
throbbed as he worked the stick, his
legs jittered. Time to
get
rid of the stinking bombs and head home. A thick shadow
finally loomed in the center of his
HUD. He went for the trigger, pickling his bombs and arcing back toward the
sky,
looking for his second wind.

“One of us ought to take out that water tank,” said
A-Bomb. “Discourage them from coming
back.”

“Yeah,” said Mongoose. “Who's closest?”

“I am,” said Doberman.

“You got bombs?”

“Negative. Cannon's ready though.”

“Okay. I don't see any more ground fire,” added Mongoose.
“You?”

“They ought to be out of ammo by now. Stinking machine
gun bullets won't do much anyway.”

“Yeah, don't get too cocky,” said Mongoose. “All it
takes is one.”

“I think anyone still alive down there's hiding in the
sand,” said A-Bomb. “They got a bad
case of Hog-itis.”

Doberman pushed his Hog around and double-checked his
cannon. “A good burst ought to nail it. Unless it's filled
with gasoline. Then one'll do.”

“If you wait a minute, I'll come in behind you.”

“I'm lined up now,” said Doberman, rushing a bit, as if
getting the tower was somehow a
competitive event.

“Doberman, take it out,” said Mongoose. “Then we go
home.”