Hogs #4:Snake Eaters (18 page)

F
ORT APACHE

2
6 JANUARY 1991

1854

R
osen, peering over
Fernandez’s shoulder, had just spotted Fort Apache in the distance when the AWACS called out the MiG warning. She sat back in the seat, stretching the headset cord to the max as the pilot leaned over and punched the controls for the radio.

“We’ll monitor the interceptors,” Fernandez explained. “We don’t want them to see us at Apache but we have to make the pickup no matter what. We don’t have enough fuel to screw around. If we stay low they may miss us.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. They had to get their guys out.

“There’s our other Little Bird—
you see it? He’s just leaving the strip.”

Fernandez needed both hands to control the helicopter, so he merely leaned his head forward. Rosen made out a low shadow ahead, darting across the left quarter of the windscreen. It was Apache Air One, the other Little Bird. There would now be
only two men left at the Fort— Captain Hawkins and a gunner.

One of the fighter pilots squawked something about different targets and called a bearing number. It sounded to Rosen as if the Eagles were having difficulty locating the enemy planes, but she had never heard live air combat before. The voices had a clipped excitement to them, a high-pitch that came through the static.

Fort Apache with its fatally short runway lay a few hundred yards ahead in the dust. Fernandez slowed the helicopter as he crossed over the concrete, looking to land near the ruins that had served as the base’s command post.

Rosen thought of Lieutenant Dixon as she whipped off the com set and threw it into the front of the helo. His broken body lay somewhere to the north, unburied for all she knew, abandoned. She felt a cold blast of air from the open door, pulled her arms around her and walled off the part of her mind where his memory lived, sealing it away permanently as a dangerous keepsake.

Parallel to the ruins, Fernandez tilted the back end of the craft up to spin around. Suddenly the control panel went dark and the AH-6 slammed against the ground.

“Shit!” said Fernandez, slamming his hand on the top of the panel as if the electrical short were there.

“It’s the harness, it’s the harness,” yelled Rosen, jumping out of the craft. She pulled herself up to examine the panel before realizing she had left her flashlight on the ground back at Sand Box when she’d slipped. She had to lean back and get Fernandez’s light.

But her jury-rigged harness had held. What the hell?

It was difficult to see beyond the wires. She began to slide her hands along the harness but found them blocked by a jagged piece of metal. The metal moved when she moved her hand— it was part of the infrared jammer, which had come loose from the back of the motor assembly cover.

Not good.

Rosen slid her fingers around, gingerly touching the unit. The rotors were still revolving over her head; it was hard to shine the light and hold on at the same time. She used her fingers to feel for the problem. They slid across wires and a narrow tube and metal. Finally, her pinkie slipped into an empty hole. Her forefinger found another and then a third.

“Turn everything off!” she yelped. “Off! Off!”

“It’s off! It’s dead! It’s dead!” Fernandez yelled back.

Rosen draped herself across the topside of the helo, craned between the rotor blades. Exactly one bolt, no thicker than a Bic pen, held the entire AN/ALQ-144A and its ceramic radiator in place. One of its flanges had severed several wires as the helicopter tipped to land.

That was lucky. Had it flown off into the rotors, they would have gone straight down as fast as gravity could take them.

Rosen slipped down to the side of the helicopter and held the wire harness assembly aside. She pushed the jammer housing away about six inches before the bolt caught tight and refused to budge.

“Fuck you, Saddam!” she screamed, throwing her weight and fury headlong at the assembly, pushing it toward the side. The bolt hung on stubbornly, then sprang loose, sending her rolling head first across the cement. Parts of the ALQ-144 spewed around her as she fell.

Oblivious to what was happening, Hawkins and the other Delta trooper had been trotting nonchalantly toward the helicopter from a sandbagged position north of the landing strip, seemingly reluctant to leave. They saw Rosen fall and ran to her, yanking her up so fast that the blood that wasn’t pouring from her scraped-up face rushed to her feet.

“Into the helicopter,” she said, trying to shake them off. “Come on, come on. There are a bunch of Iraqi airplanes headed this way. We got to get out of here.”

“Are you okay, Sergeant?” Hawkins asked.

“No,” she said, grabbing the flashlight from the ground. She pulled the roll of black electrical tape from her pocket as she threw herself back onto the helicopter. The wires were all color-coded but she had no play; she had to yank the tape off her harness to get some. She pulled at the tape and then twisted the pairs together as quickly as she could, hoping her tape would hold.

She leaned down and yelled for Fernandez to see if he had power.

He did.

She ha
d to add more tape to the front of the wire strands to make sure they’d stay put, now that they were exposed. The wind from the rotors threw sand into her eyes, but Rosen was operating in another universe now, one beyond the throb in her head and the screaming fire of her battered face. She punched the remaining shards of the jammer assembly base with her fist, bending or clearing away everything she could. Then she found a plastic wire clip flopping loose and managed to secure it against an exposed pin near the wires. Not pretty, certainly not permanent, but good enough.

“Go! Go! Go!” she yelped, flinging herself back into the back cabin feet first. “Why the hell aren’t you going!”

“We
are
going,” shouted Fernandez, emphasizing his point by slamming the helo forward, full-throttle.

O
VER IRAQ

2
6 JANUARY 1991

1900

D
oberman acknowledged the
AWACS snap vector with a grumble, putting the Hog into the directed turn at nearly a right angle.

Not that he resented the E-3 Sentry and its powerful airborne radar. What really irked him was the fact that he had to climb to fifteen thousand feet, per standing orders. Granted, the altitude kept him safe from
the triple-A nasties, but it was a piss-poor place to be with a flock of MiGs coming for you. Besides, the Hog didn’t
like
flying this high, and neither did he.

Fifty feet above ground level, dark be damned. That was where he belonged.

Doberman got his Hog on the new course east, then dialed into the intercept, listening as the interceptors began to break down the approaching enemy flight. Unlike most Iraqi scrambles, this one seemed intent on actually doing something— the bandits, tentatively identified now as MiG-29s, weren’t running away.

Doberman tacked their courses on the blackboard of his mind. They were north and west of him, heading in the general direction of Fort Apache.

His RWR screamed something, and the AWACS controller yelped another warning. A ground-control radar for a high altitude SA-2 had turned itself on directly ahead on the AWACS directed course.

Doberman cursed and threw his plane into a fresh maneuver, beaming the radar by temporarily heading north. The radar went off as quickly as it had come on. He judged that he was already outside the range of the missiles
, but there was no sense taking chances; he took the plane three miles north before pulling around to the southwest.

As he did, the AWACS an
nounced it had discovered a MiG-21 Fishbed flying under cover of the larger MiG-29s. The plotted course had it headed straight for him, and now the controller rattled Doberman’s helmet with a warning that it was juicing its afterburners.

That was the last straw. He kicked the Hog over into a full dive, gunning down to where the air was thick and the ground effects heavy. If the Iraqi kept coming, good. Doberman had snapped his last vector tonight.

Let the bastard come and get him. They’d slug it out, mud fighter to mud fighter— if the Iraqi had the balls to take on a Hog.

O
VER IRAQ

2
6 JANUARY 1991

1900

T
his time, Hack
wasn’t going to miss. He twisted his Eagle northward for the intercept, ignoring the pinch and pull of gravity as he snapped onto the vector supplied by the AWACS. His radar screen laid out the bandits as if peering down from above. The hostile MiGs were at the very top, triangles with pointers coming off their noses to show their headings. The screen showed friendlies as circles with similar pointers, along with way markers for reference.

The radio exploded with a cacophony of calls and commands, a chaotic wail that had confused him during the earlier encounter. B
ut this time Hack was prepared. He and his wingman keyed into a clear frequency they had surveyed earlier.

“Two bandits, ten o’clock, your zone,” said Johnny, his voice crisp.

“Out of range. Two more coming behind them,” Hack said.

“Something low.”

There were now six triangles very close together on the screen. Two veered to the left and temporarily disappeared, possibly obscured by the reflected ground clutter. The other four Iraqi planes altered course, vectoring toward the flight of F-111s.

Hack rechecked the IDs, making sure he had the unfriendlies.

No answer. The lead contact was thirty miles away.

“First two are mine,” he told Johnny. The radar and its weapons control computer had already locked them up. They were tagged on the HUD; he could launch and take them out at will. “You got the others?”

“Negative, negative. I’m having some trouble here.”

“Johnny?”

“Uh, okay, I have it. I— shit! I’m spiked.”

The lead MiG had just turned its radar on his wingmate. Time to pull the trigger.

“Fox One, Fox One! I’m on number two. Firing. Fox One!”

Hack yelled so loud his wingmate probably could have heard him without a radio. He didn’t bother jinking or t
rying to beam the enemy radars— if his wingmate couldn’t target the other interceptors, he was going to have to close and take them out with his Sidewinders.

The four enemy planes—
still out of visual range, but closing quickly— began moving wildly on his radar screen. One of the missiles seemed to hit the lead plane, he thought— but now everything was moving so quickly, Hack couldn’t afford to divide his attention long enough to make sure he’d gotten the kill. Something beamed him dead ahead. He thumbed into auto-guns mode, then realized he’d dropped to sixteen thousand feet and was still pointing downward. He began to pull back on the stick when a dark shape shot in front of him, less than a mile away.

His stomach flared as he waited for the glare of a missile or cannon tracer. He pushed the Eagle over on her wing, desperate to duck away. He got a warning,
then a second warning— sounds and buzzes and lights. Once more his head was swimming with sweat, gravity, and panic.

Gravity push
ed against his chest. Hack realized the shadow had been one of the F-111s, not a MiG. He cursed himself, rolled level, tried to raise his wingmate on the radio. The small circle representing Piranha Two floated across the HUD, but Hack had lost track of where he was.

Fear twinged at the corner of his stomach.

Not this time
, he told himself.
Clear your head. Do your best
.

Something exploded about three hundred yards in front of his right wing. Fire flew through the air.

The pipper had a triangle boxed at ten o’clock. He leaned on his trigger, getting off a quick shot but missing as the enemy wagged away. He saw the red circle growing oblong and started to follow, thumbing a Sidewinder on line. But he was too slow and had misjudged the enemy’s turn in the dark. For a second he was in deep shit— inside and ahead of the MiG, the worst place to be. But somehow, knowing exactly where he was cleared his head. Somehow, his stomach went hard and his eyes became focused. He gave the big Eagle more thrust than a Saturn V heading for the moon. The plane shot forward, twisting out of danger as he spit out chaff and flares.

And then it was over.

The cockpit went silent. The night became black. Hack heard his breath loud in his ears, saw that he was level at fifteen thousand feet.

Carefully, almost slowly, he got his bearings and did his instrument checks, pointing the nose of the Eagle southward.

“Piranha One, this is Two,” said Johnny. “I’m lost airman.”

“Yeah, okay, okay, okay.” The words slurred out of
Hack’s mouth; he couldn’t stop them or change them into anything coherent. But that was all right— his head was clear, and he calmly found his wingmate only two miles to the northeast, though considerably higher than him. Johnny began turning. Hack continued his climb, heart steady and almost slow.

“I think I nailed one of those MiGs,” he told his wingman.

“I think you nailed two.”

“Yeah?” Hack started to ask whether he’d seen the explosions when he got a new contact on his radar. They were running south at four thousand feet, about two miles west of where the MiG had snuck in and almost unzipped him.

“We have a fresh contact, Piranha Two,” he said, changing course to catch it.