Hogs #2: Hog Down (5 page)

OVER IRAQ

21 JANUARY 1991

1757

W
hoever was working
the Iraqi SA-6 missile
battery was either very good or very cautious, or both. Since the brief blip
that alerted Bear to his presence, the intercept radar had been completely
silent.

It
didn’t matter though— the Weasel Police had his number. Parsons took a half second
to make sure the SA-2s weren’t a threat and then closed for the kill.

The
Phantom wasn’t completely immune to the SA-6. The missile had a range of
approximately fifteen kilometers. Its control radar used two different bands
and could acquire multiple targets. The SA-6 itself could out-maneuver a fighter
and contained its own semi-active radar; once fired, it stood a better than
average chance of hitting its target even with counter measures going full
tilt.

“Turning,”
called Parsons, pulling the Phantom in a sharp bank, directly toward the
missile’s now-silent radar.

“Two
is back up. Okay, here’s our six again. We’re going to nail the bastard. Okay.
Hand off.”

Bear
was busier than a one-armed paper hanger behind the iron wall separating the
two men. The computer took the target information on the SA-6 and gave it to
the HARM missile’s onboard guidance system. The big AGM-88 took the info, hiccupped,
then thundered away. Immediately Bear dialed in one of the two SA-2 radar sites
the plane had detected.

“Got
the light,” he told Parsons.

“Fire!”

“Away.”

The
thud of the rocket igniting beneath the gull-shaped wings felt reassuring.
Parsons had already started a jink to keep his butt clean, planning on spinning
back to pull the Phantom in the direction of the last SA-2 battery. He could
see ground fire from anti-aircraft cannons, too far off to bother anyone. One
of the A-10As was cutting paper dolls out of sky in the distance, evading a
SAM.

“Keep
your turn coming,” Bear told him. I have one more. He’s up. He’s dotted.” The
pitter’s slang referred to the icons on his screen that said the enemy radar
had been located and targeted by the Phantom’s gear.

“Handing
off,” Bear said, giving the target information to the missile so it could
attack while he concentrated on finding more threats.

“Optical
launches on those twos,” warned the pilot.

“Ready
light!”

“Fire.”

“Away.
Shit— we got that six. Mama! Secondaries. There we go! Got the trailer on the two!
Whole damn thing’s burning like all hell. Oh yeah, baby! Kick ass!”

The
HARM’s warhead was designed to explode large, nasty shards of tungsten into the
control facility of the missile’s radar. By doing that, the HARM wiped out the
valuable electronics gear, rendering the battery useless. It was a more
effective way of destroying a threat than blowing a hole in a radar dish, which
could be easily repaired.

It
also generally meant you got the men working the missile. The good ones were
harder to replace than the gear they worked.

Parson
caught a glimpse of the damage through the top of the canopy as he rolled the
Phantom and began letting off chaff. One of the SA-2’s that had been fired
before the site was hit was now headed in their direction.

“Telephone
pole’s gunning for us,” the pilot told his pitter— his way of apologizing for
the six-and-a-half g’s he pulled as he yanked the F-4 around to confuse the
missile’s guidance system. The force of the maneuver squeezed his mouth and
made his words sound strange, even to him. As he recovered, he juiced the
throttle, accelerating to put a good chunk of real estate between the Phantom
and the Iraqi missile. But the missile, fired without proper targeting to begin
with, had already fallen away.

“Hogs
are still with us,” reported the backseater.

“Devil
Flight, this is Rheingold One. Sorry for the excitement,” Parsons told the
A-10s.

“No
problem,” snapped Devil One. “We like things hot.”

The
colonel did a quick check of his systems, made sure he hadn’t caught something
in the nether reaches of the plane. His fuel was still pretty good, but they’d
fired all their radiation missiles; time to call it a day.

“How
you doing in your cave back there, Bear?”

“’Bout
ready to take a nap,” said the pitter.

“Miles
to go before you sleep,” said the pilot.

“Hey,
I’m the English teacher. When did you study Frost, anyway?”

“Haven’t
you heard? Mandatory training for all airline pilots.”

“I’ll
be impressed when you quote Whitman.”

“’Flood
tide below me, I see you face to face’,” said Parsons, reciting the beginning
to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

It
was the only part of the poem, or Whitman for that matter, that he knew, but it
was good enough to elicit a snort of surprised approval from Bear.

KING FAHD

JANUARY 21 1991

1800

T
he plane the
A-10A reminded Knowlington
of wasn’t the Thud, which, after all, was a straight-line in-and-out mover. It
reminded him of the Spad, the propeller-driven A-1 Skyraider, a Navy plane
adopted by the air force for close-in ground-support work. Drawn up at the tail
end of World War II as a torpedo bomber, the Spad was a throwback to an era
when sticking really meant sticking.

Knowlington
had never actually been assigned to an A-1—he’d been a pointy-nose, fast-mover
jock from Day one— but he wormed his way into the Spad’s cockpit a few times to
satisfy his curiosity. He’d even once volunteered for a combat mission, though
he was probably lucky he’d been turned down. He was flying Phantoms by then,
and if a Viet Cong gunner hadn’t gotten him, the shock to his system would
have.

Still,
the A-1 was a hell of a plane, all stick and rudder, able to eat bullets with
the best of them. She had her quirks. Skull always had a bit of trouble with
the armament panel; it was right above his knee but he had a bad angle while
flying. Still, the plane felt substantial around him, like a big old Mercedes. He
had a fairly good flying position high up top, unlike the Phantoms and
especially the early Thuds, where it felt like you were in a cave. And she did
what she was told. Think left and you moved left. She could stand just about
stock-still if you wanted, and pound the bejezuz out of what you were looking
at.

The
Hog was like that, only a bit faster.

Well,
maybe not faster, come to think about it.

Skull
thought right bank and the Hog went right bank. He pulled the stick back and
she corrected, her forked tail snapping into place like a slot car coming out
of a turn. He pulled a few more turns, each one a little sharper, making sure
the control surfaces were still in place and working well.

Even
though he’d flown the Hog back in the States as much as he could, Knowlington
had been awkward as hell his first few flights over here, muscling the plane
through her paces, hitting his marks mechanically. It wasn’t physical, it was
mental — like he was thinking about flying, or maybe worrying about what some
of his more senior pilots must be thinking: old man in a plane, old washed up
hack shuffled into the wrong command.

No
one said that, of course, but he could read it. More than one Centcom staffer
just about told him he was washed up, though the generals were much more
tactful— most of them, after all, had been his friends for a long time. Inside
the squadron, there was plenty of resistance, even from Major Johnson, maybe
especially from him. Johnson felt with some justification that he could lead
the squadron, and probably resented being number two behind a guy who’d hardly
even flown the plane. A-10 drivers were a special fraternity among combat
pilots; their mission and plane was different than anyone else’s, and they
tended to be different, too.

Good
pilots, definitely, but with maybe the tiniest of chips on their shoulders
about it.

A
few realized that Knowlington had helped save the Hogs and possibly their jobs
from the scrap yard, volunteering when he got word through the back channels
that the CINC himself wanted more Hogs in Saudi Arabia for the ground war. They
were grateful, but even they thought he was too far removed from “real” flying
to lead them into battle.

Nobody
mentioned his drinking. No one ever had.

The
gray-haired colonel in him agreed that he ought to stand aside for the younger
men when it came to flying missions; most of them were better Hog pilots than
he’d ever be. But this afternoon he felt something ease into place as he
snapped himself into the A-10A’s ejector seat, something familiar; as he pushed
the nose up and started to climb toward ten thousand feet, Colonel Thomas
“Skull” Knowlington lost track of the line that separated him from the plane.
Some awkwardness lingered. He kept expecting more in the HUD, and maybe a
better view out of the side of the canopy; his eyes tripped when they felt for
the fuel gauge. But he knew this plane the way he knew the others; after so
many years of estrangement, the sky had welcomed him back.

No
reason I shouldn’t go north, he told himself. As long as I’m not a liability,
it’s where I belong.

Except
that the generals above him wouldn’t like it. As long as he didn’t screw up,
they wouldn’t court martial him over it, of course, but they could force him to
retire.

Then
his string of non-drinking days would surely end.

Knowlington
pushed the Hog through a series of twists and turns, gradually increasing the
pressures against the control surfaces. He had written down a cheat sheet with
all the maneuvers, just to make sure he didn’t miss any. But he didn’t even
have to glance at it. His hands were slower, true, and his eyes— damn, his eyes
weren’t the telescopes they’d once been. But his head was still there; that was
sharper than ever.

Your
head could also be a liability. Memories were like bullets in your wing. One
slipped into his brain now as he pulled the Hog into a steep dive. He tried to
work it away, ignore it. He even closed his eyes. But it came back, hard and
fresh.

He
was in a Phantom. They had just pulled out of a dive every bit as steep,
bombing a bridge near the Laos border. Knowlington recovered and started the
long run home. His wingman called out a SAM launch.

Soviet
telephone poles coming for them. The SA-2 was relatively new then, very
formidable. But he had encountered them a few times before; so had his wingman.
He jinked the missile onto his beam, pulled a few g’s and let the engine roar.
Nothing to it.

But
his wingman couldn’t break free. Somehow, some way, Captain Harold “Crush”
Orango had taken a SAM right in the tail. Skull’s backseater saw the hit. He
saw, or thought he saw, two ejections and chutes. By the time Skull recovered
from his evasive maneuvers and made sure his six was clean, they had lost track
of the stricken Phantom’s crew. Skull cranked back, unable to find the
parachutes in the low-lying clouds or draped in the jungle below. They found the
wrecked Phantom soon enough – the sucker kicked up more smoke than a flaming
oil tanker – but the pilot and weapons officer were nowhere to be found.

Skull
keyed his mike and called in the crash. At the same time, he greased his
Phantom down to treetop level, looking for his buddy in the thick canopy of
trees. He’d flown with Crush on something like twenty missions; he wasn’t about
to lose him.

Hell
damn, he’d have to start paying for his own drinks.

There
was no ground beacon, no signal from the pilot’s emergency radio. They were
over Laos a few miles, not the best area to be. For all Skull cared he could
have been pulling circuits over the Kremlin. He crisscrossed twice, low and
slow, he and his pitter taking turns peering out the side, looking in vain for
a pucker of nylon or a flash from a signal mirror.

He
spotted a village–sized clearing at the edge of the canopy just to the east,
probably straddling the border with North Vietnam, though he wasn’t about to
get out a map and check. Holding the F-4 about as slow as it would go, he eased
toward it. The clearing was a perfect place for a chopper to land. With luck
Crush would be hiding nearby.

Red
and brown rocks rose from the jungle to his left as he approached. There was a
long rift in the ground, a mountain ridge heaved up by some ancient geological
pressures that had dented the South Asian peninsula. He passed the clearing.

“See
anything?” his backseater asked.

They
called him Little Bear. Not exactly original, but he claimed to be part
Cherokee.

Might’ve
been bull.

“Negative.
I’m trying another sweep.”

“Copy.”

Skull
brought the Phantom back around, her engines whining. Fuel burn was light.
Flaps felt a bit sluggish for some reason. He was at five hundred feet,
slipping toward three hundred as he made the pass, lower than the top of the
nearby ridge.

Nothing.
And nothing again on the third run. He brought the plane up. This much flying
over any one spot in Southeast Asia was extremely dangerous, especially at low
altitude.

But
where was Crush? On the other side of the ridge? He took the Phantom around,
still craning his head toward the ground for a sign of something.

“I’m
going to run along that escarpment a way,” he told Little Bear.

“Shit—
a mirror. Right wing. See it?”

His
backseater leaned forward past his equipment to poke him in the back and make
sure he had his attention. Skull looked over his shoulder out the F-4’s canopy,
but couldn’t see the light, couldn’t see anything but the infinite variations
of green below.

“Where?”
he asked.

“Back
there. It was something.”

“Yeah,
hang on. I’ll go back.”

He
could barely contain himself or the Phantom as he pulled around for a better
look. He put his wings almost on the trees, holding the jet barely above stall
speed, begging the mirror to catch a fresh glint of the strong, overhead sun.

He
got a nose full of heavy machine-gun fire as a reward. What seemed like a
hundred thousand 23mm anti–aircraft guns opened up on him from the ridge.

There
was a disconnect for a second, a short between his brain and his body. Knowlington’s
hand threw the throttle to after-burner, or maybe beyond; the rest of him
reacted to push the plane into a line over the ridge and out of fire. None of
this registered in his brain. All the pilot saw was black lead headed straight
at him from all directions, red muzzles burning into his eyes.

Breaking
off was the prudent thing to do, the thing any commander would have insisted he
do, the thing that was right. He did it as soon as his limbs began taking
instructions from his brain again.

It
felt very, very wrong.

They
were back at twenty thousand feet, still climbing and halfway to Burma before
his backseater’s voice pulled him back to the plane.

“Throttle
stuck,” Skull answered lamely. He began pulling the Phantom back, but he was
spooked. They were now low on fuel, so low that he couldn’t have made another
pass even he wanted to. He radioed a warning about the anti-air and headed back
to home base in Thailand.

After
that, the real drinking started.

No
one ever found Crush or his pitter. They weren’t among the prisoners released
at the end of the war, nor did their names show up among the dead, either in
the North or interred in Laos. Their names were on the Wall in Washington, D.C.;
Skull had traced his finger over them himself.

Officially,
the Air Force decided that the two men had gone down with the plane;
unofficially, Knowlington knew that was a bunch of bull, since the Vietnamese
would have recovered the bodies. The reds had definitely found the plane; they
had released propaganda photos of it as part of a campaign to prove that
America had no respect for Laos’s borders.

As
if the scumbags did themselves.

Despite
the fact that he’d driven through a cloud of flak, Skull’s Phantom didn’t have
a nick on it when he landed. A lot of guys interpreted that as one more sign of
his incredible luck. Even Little Bear was amazed.

Knowlington
saw it as confirmation that he had chickened out and was a coward at heart.

All
the recognition, all the medals that had come before that flight— and certainly
those that came later— couldn’t counterbalance those dark five minutes on that
sortie.

He
never talked about it with Little Bear. In fact, he started avoiding his
backseater, worried that he might want to talk about the mission, about his
chickening out. The weapons officer would have known the throttle sticking was
a bunch of bull. He would have felt the second of indecision. He would have
known they should have toughed it out despite the gunfire— prudence be damned.

* * *

“Devil
Twelve, Devil Twelve, this is Fahd control. Colonel, how are you reading me?”

“Twelve.
Go ahead, Control.”

“Sir,
we need to move you around a bit.”

Snapped
back to the present, Knowlington did a quick check of his instruments before
responding. The plane was flying at spec and had passed all her tests; no need
to keep it up any longer than necessary. Tightening his grip on the stick, the
colonel pushed a long breath of air out of his lungs into his face mask,
reminding himself to stay in the present, to work on just today. He told the controller
that what he’d really like to do was land.

“Ah,
Miller time, is it?”

“Something
like that,” he told the kid.

Spinning
back to take his slot in the landing pattern, Skull admired the way the Hog
picked her tail up and put her nose right where he wanted, He tried hard not to
think of anything else.