Hogs #2: Hog Down (6 page)

OVER IRAQ

JANUARY 21 1991

1800

M
ongoose heard A-Bomb.
He had his bearing, but
still couldn’t see him. He continued climbing, spotting the highway they’d been
flying along earlier, still without his wingman in view. Finally he caught the
plane in the distance, much lower than he thought it would be.

He
keyed the mike and asked A-Bomb if he was all right.

“Yeah,
I told you I’m fine. Iraqis couldn’t hit a zeppelin.”

Damned
if A-Bomb didn’t sound like he was munching on something. And did he have his
music cranked?

“Can
you see me?” Mongoose asked.

“Yeah.
Gonna take me a minute.”

“We’ll
come east and follow that highway again. You see it?”

Their
little adventure in advanced jinking and jiving had taken them a good distance
from the road and the bunkers they’d been aiming to inspect, before the SAMs
interrupted. Mongoose kicked the throttle open and slipped the A-10A into a
straight tack north, calculating a new plan of attack as he went. The brown ribbon
that marked the highway gradually grew wider. He decided they would cross it,
then slide down out of the northwest.

A-Bomb
caught up to him as they reached the road. They angled northwestward, making
just over 380 knots.

Combat
did weird things to time. The actual encounter with the surface to air missiles
hadn’t lasted more than two or three minutes, yet it seemed to fill several
hours. Everything immediately before it felt like it had happened days ago.
Everything now felt like slow motion.

And
yet, sitting on the strip at King Khalid while waiting for clearance, that
seemed to have just happened. Mongoose glanced at his pocket where the letter
was, then reached his hand over and patted it, as if for luck.

He’d
left his wife and baby in the living room. He’d kissed her, kissed him, kissed
her again. He walked backwards to the door. A leather and fabric duffel bag sat
there, worn from a thousand hellos and good-byes. Through the screen door he
could see his ride waiting impatiently by the curb.

He
lingered, watching her feed their baby, Robby. The infant’s eyes were closed.
The deep frown of worry on his wife’s face gradually faded as she stared at her
child.

“Hey,
are those your bunkers at two o’clock?” asked A-Bomb. “Shit, look at that.
Goddamn Saddam’s got a used car lot down there. And I’m in the market for a
flamed-out APC.”

Mongoose’s
head nearly hit the canopy as he snapped back to the present. He tacked south a
second, aiming to come back and orbit the site from above. A-Bomb, following
off his right wing in a loose trail, actually had a closer position behind him
as they turned.

“You
see any Scuds in there?” the major asked.

“Negative.
I think the report was wrong.”

“Maybe.”

“Screw
the Scuds,” said A-Bomb. “I say we dust these mother fuckers. We’re gonna run
out of sun in less than a half-hour.”

“Yeah,
hang loose,” Mongoose told him. “Let me think this one through a second.”

They
had given the area a fairly thorough search without finding the Scud site.
Sunset was rapidly approaching. Tough hombre or no, the Hog was not a night
fighter. Mongoose relayed the information back to the ABCCC controller, telling
him that they had come up blank on the Scuds but found something almost as
juicy. Unless someone aboard the C-130 had serious objections or a better read
on the Scuds, they were going to expend their stores against the parking lot
and then go home.

The
controller was juggling about ten million things at once. By the time he
cleared Devil flight to make the attack, Mongoose had blueprinted the raid
three times. He noted what were probably two four-barrel anti-air guns at each
end; neither had activated its radar, either out of smart tactics or, more
likely, because the Hogs were well out of range and hadn’t been spotted.
Assuming they were ZSU-23s— the most common anti-aircraft guns the Iraqis had—
the weapons would have to be respected, but were not an insurmountable problem,
especially at medium altitude.

What
he’d seen as a bunker was actually a low-slung building. It could be the top of
an underground complex, though there was no way of really knowing from here. He
debated using the Mavericks against it on the chance that it would hold
ammunition and make a really spectacular boom. But the building wasn’t going
anywhere. With a good INS read, it could be attacked whenever the targeters
back at Black Hole wanted to hit it. The trucks and tanks— two or three seemed to
be dug into shallow trenches— were a different story.

Mongoose
would descend to ten thousand feet and use the Mavericks on the tanks. If the
flak guns got annoying, they could go after them with the cluster bombs;
otherwise the GBUs would be dropped on the trucks. They’d hold off using the
Hogs’ cannons— and dropping below eight thousand feet— unless absolutely
necessary, as per the general rules of engagement.

“I’m
going to roll and take the vehicles furthest from the building,” he told A-Bomb.
“I think they’re tanks. Come around and see what’s left.”

“Copy.”

“Watch
your altitude and don’t get too low. Keep your eye on that dune where the
ground turns into the real desert? You see it?”

“I’m
with you.”

“Got
to be a ZSU. You see that one and the other one?”

“Yeah.
I’ll let you know if they open up shop.”

Mongoose
came around in a half circle, lined up before he pushed over into a rolling dive,
swinging the nose of the plane toward his target. He could see the three tanks
clearly now, their guns pointing east rather than south.

The
sand heaped around them would provide some protection against a near miss. But
he wasn’t going to miss. He felt his way into a thirty-five degree glide, the
turret of the tank at the right end inching toward the center of his screen.
Mongoose moved eyes over the Maverick’s small targeting screen, probing for the
heart of the shadow in the middle of the screen, sucked there like the tip of a
compass seeking north. They wobbled, then stuck, glued themselves right in the
center of the turret.

Mongoose
held his stick dead steady and pickled. He felt the Maverick slip away and
blinked his eyes, pulling the next missile on-line. He had to work the crosshairs
hard, nearly losing his target. His altitude was burning off faster than he’d
planned; he was nearing eight thousand and was going to fall lower before he
could fire. His recovery would probably bring him within range of well-managed
AAA, but it couldn’t be helped; he was going to have that tank. Finally the
cursor slipped in. He had a lock and the missile was off, winging toward the
lollipop that marked the top of the northernmost vehicle.

He
moved his eyes up to the canopy, scanning the ground as he leveled off and
began orbiting to the south. He missed seeing the first missile hit. He caught
the second: a small, almost insignificant splotch of brown and black flared
into the shape of a mushroom and then quickly flattened. The top of tank jerked
up and down as if it were a warm can of soda being opened.

The
sky below his left wing began filling with black puffs of flak. In the same
instant he realized the desert undulations had hidden two gun positions almost
directly beneath his egress path.

OVER IRAQ

21 JANUARY 1991

1810

A
-Bomb called
the flak location about two
seconds after it began, warning his lead to take evasive action. In the same
moment he adjusted his course to eliminate the threat. He was at ten thousand
feet with a clear view of the muzzle flash— it was a four-barrel ZSU-23, firing
far too short to do any damage. Still, it had fired on a Hog, and its fate was
sealed. He switched the Maverick’s TVM to six times magnification; his target
was dead center. He locked and fired, looking up in time to see the two other
emplacements begin firing as well.

He
wasn’t in the best position to take out either one, so he put them on hold,
deciding to use his last AGM-65B on the remaining tank instead. It was already
lined up in the TVM, just about blinking “kill me.” Nudging the cursor onto the
big sucker, he locked and fired. The missile clunked off his wing with a sharp
note of enthusiasm— one thing you could say about Mavericks, they sure liked to
blow shit up.

A-Bomb
hit his armament panel to ready the cluster bombs as he recovered from the
shallow dive. His altimeter read seven thousand feet, still well above the flak,
though too low to drop the preset Rockeyes.

“Saddam’s
going to have a fire sale tomorrow,” he told Mongoose, whose tail appeared on
his left as he climbed to get into a better position. “I count three dead tanks
and one busted flak-feeder.”

A
dusty haze covered the ground, making it difficult to see what was left. Two
big bubbles of black flak boiled well off his right wing as the Iraqi gunners
did their best to shoot themselves out of ammunition. The Hogs wheeled above
the site, moving into a circle approximately 180 degrees from each other.

The
ZSU’s were starting to annoy him; they made it tough to target the rest of the
site besides. A-Bomb realized he was better oriented than Mongoose to splash
them, and told his lead he would take them out.

“I
can get them both on one swing. Then we can shoot up what’s left downstairs.”

“Go
for it.”

A-Bomb
pushed the Hog into a dive, tightening his attack angle into a steep plunge,
the A-10 screaming down at close to ninety degrees. He was going to pee on
these bastards. No one shot at a Hog and got away with it.

Bastards
started dishing serious flak in his direction. The Hog snorted. She knew she
was being fired at, and it pissed her off. She held her wings and tail stiff,
urging her pilot to drop the Rockeyes and giving him an iron-stiff platform to
do it from.

A-Bomb
pickled two of his four bombs on the first battery. Immediately he realized he
hadn’t adjusted properly for the wind. But it was too late. Cursing, he pulled
the stick back, determined to reset himself quickly for another attack. The Hog
angrily slid her tail around, spanking the pilot for his miscue. But the CBUs
were very forgiving weapons. A total of 187 spiked grenades, originally
designed as armor piercing weapons, peppered out from each bomb. Though the
majority fell well wide, enough fell close enough to silence the gun.

“There’s
another gun or something under netting on the northeast corner,” said Mongoose
as A-Bomb got ready to pounce on the remaining gun. “Shit— did you see that?”

A-Bomb
twisted his neck like a pretzel, trying to see what Mongoose was talking about.
By the time he figured it out, his commander had his nose just about on it. The
Iraqis had done an excellent job of camouflaging the site defenses; there
seemed to be another pair of ZSU-23s, or maybe larger-caliber guns, covered by
the latest in desert wear.

“Hell
of a lot of defenses for some old trucks,” said A-Bomb. “You think Saddam’s got
one of his whores in that bunker or what?”

“Could
be.”

“Probably
screwing her right now.”

“I’m
on that gun.”

He
watched Mongoose dive into the attack just as the Iraqi gunner opened up. This
was a big gun, probably a ZSU–57; the black wall of its shells appeared nearly
twice as high as the others, though they were a bit behind Devil One’s flight
path. Suddenly the nose of the Hog veered upwards and to the left; two thin
cigars plummeted past the swinging stream of anti-aircraft fire toward the
position. The canisters burst with a spectacular pop, an entire Iowa cornfield
doing the Jiffy Pop thing as the double-barreled gun and its crew got
perforated.

Mongoose
wasn’t done— rather than breaking off the attack, he took his Hog just about
sideways, lining up his last two CBUs on the last ZSU on the northwestern dune.
A steam of red-hot metal engulfed the four-barreled cheese grater and the black
cloud of flak it had been dishing suddenly disappeared.

“Double
bang,” A-Bomb told his lead before pushing into his own attack against the
trucks.

This
time, the Hog just about did the wind calculation for him, nudging its tail up
and screaming when it was time to fire. A row of transports turned into molten
dust.

“How’s
your fuel?” Mongoose asked as A-Bomb fell into an easy orbit above the smoking
debris.

A-Bomb
glanced at the dash. “Thirty minutes linger time, give or take a century,” he
said.

“Few
more vehicles down there. You feel like cranking up your cannon?”

“Does
a private shit in the woods?”

But
as he slid around to get ready to cover Mongoose, something caught his eye. He
let the Hog drift a bit as his gaze found a hard–packed road. Five, six miles
off, it headed toward a highway.

Something
was happening there, something just beyond his vision.

A-Bomb
felt a twinge in his nose, as if he’d just caught a whiff of late-season
Brazilian beans being freshly roasted.

“Hey,
Goose, hang tight a minute while I check something out,” he radioed, pushing the
Hog to follow the road. The terrain below gradually became less of a desert and
more a generic wasteland, though it didn’t look like anybody would be farming
there soon.

The
road led back north to the highway, where it plunged below it. A line of trucks
was just now pulling off the paved road, kicking off a bunch of dust as they
moved.

“Say,
Goose, we got some sort of action going on south there, say three o’clock. You
see that road?”

Mongoose
broke his orbit and slid south, trailing A-Bomb. They were still a good way off
as the last truck in the caravan dipped off the highway, disappearing in the
underpass.

It
was a trailer type of truck, with a long, roundish cylinder in the back.

The
sort of cylinder you made a missile out of.

No
wonder they hadn’t found the Scuds. The Iraqis had moved them.