Hogs #4:Snake Eaters (7 page)

F
ORT APACHE

26
JANUARY 1991

1540

A-
Bomb adjusted
the harness on his seat restraint, rocked back and forth and played with the rudder pedals as he sat off to the side of the runway, waiting for Doberman to clear so he could trundle into takeoff position. His Hog had been fueled, he had close to a full combat load in the Gatling-style cannon beneath his chair, and the plane had just been given a personal going over by the best A-10A maintenance tech this side of the capo di capo.

Still, he couldn’t help feeling a little discombobulated.

Not anxious, exactly, not worried or nervous. Those words weren’t in his vocabulary, at least not as they pertained to flying. Just
off.

Part of it was the fact that,
in order to conserve fuel, the Warthog was going to be pushed to the far end of the runway. Not that he personally cared, but the plane was apt to feel embarrassed, especially with all these Special Ops guys watching. In the pilot’s opinion, the eleven seconds or so of flight time that would be gained weren’t worth the indignity, but Doberman was in such an obviously bad mood today that A-Bomb had just nodded when he suggested that.

No, what was bothering him went beyond the Hog’s sense of self-esteem.
A-Bomb had a full load of coffee, such as it was, in the thermos. The Boss was cued up on the custom-rigged CD system that had been integrated into his personal flightsuit and helmet. But his cupboard was practically bare: no Twizzlers, no Three Musketeers, not even an emergency M&M.

In fact, his entire store was represented by a single Twinkie. He eyed its bulge in his shin
y pocket longingly, aching to swallow it but not wanting to be without hope of sustenance at a critical moment in battle.

War was hell, but this was total bullshit. It was the kind of thing that really made him mad. Not to mention hungry.

A-Bomb was aware that most combat pilots, perhaps even all combat pilots, never ate on the job. There was all the flight gear to deal with – the mask, the helmet, the pressure suit. There was gravity and there were vague altitude effects, which played havoc with your taste buds. And admittedly, the wrong crumb in the navigational gear could send you to Beijing instead of Baghdad, though that was the sort of mistake you had to make the most of.

But
A-Bomb wasn’t another combat pilot; he was a Hog driver, and Hog drivers were genetically equipped to do the impossible. He had stuffed a Tootsie Roll in his mouth on his very first flight in an A-10A, savoring the chewy caramel flavor through his first roll. Few things in the world could compare to the shock of four or five gs hitting you square in the esophagus as you bit down on a Drake’s cherry pie. It made the blood race; it made you feel like you were an American, connected to the great unbroken chain of 7-Elevens strung across the Heartland. It was what he was fighting for, after all.

A-Bomb
shook his head and watched as Doberman lit his Hog’s twin turbofans at the far end of the Apache base and start down the runway. Unlike many other planes, the Hogs were equipped with on-board starters that allowed them to operate at scratch bases like these; they were just one of the many features that made the A-10 the ultimate do-it-yourself airplane. Doberman’s mount picked up speed, jerking herself in the sky two hundred feet before the wadi.

Rosen ran in front of
A-Bomb’s Hog and gave him a thumbs up. The pilot released the brakes, sighing to himself as the soldiers began pushing the plane forward. He could tell the Hog didn’t like this – she grunted and creaked, dragging her tail across the concrete like a dog yelled at for peeing on the rug.

“Get over it,” he barked at the plane. She stopped her whining, rolling freely and poking her tail surfaces around as
A-Bomb helped steer her around with a touch of the pedals.

Rosen’s fixes to the hydraulic system couldn’t be properly tested until he was in the air. Under other circumstances, the checkflight would have been conducted very carefully, according to a rigidly prescribed to-do list. Here though,
A-Bomb was basically going to make sure everything worked and go from there.

Which suited him just fine. He’d never been much of a test pilot.

Actually, under other circumstances, he’d have been under strict orders to return to a “real” base for “real” repairs, but heck, who’d listen to orders like those when there was good stuff just waiting to be blown up?

Besides, the controls were responding just fine. The Hog had two sets of hydraulic systems as well as manual controls; even if Rosen’s fix fell apart
A-Bomb figured he’d have an easy time flying the plane. When he lit the GE TF34-GE-100 turbofans on the back hull, the Hog roared her approval. She bucked her nose up and down and began striding down the short run of concrete, willing herself off the ground. A-Bomb had the wheels coming up as she thundered over the dark crease at the runway’s end. She gave a wag of her tail to the men working to bury the tanker, as if she were saying goodbye to the blood donor who’d helped her carry on. A-Bomb brought her to course, cranked “Born to Run” – kind of mandatory, when you thought about it – and reached for his customary post-takeoff Twizzler.

And came up empty.

“Now I’m starting to feel really mad,” he said, sweeping his eyes across his instruments and then the rest of his readouts. Speed brisk, compass doing its thing and altitude moving in the proper direction. The master caution on the warning panel – no light, good. Enunciators clean, good.

The controls were sharp; with only the Sidewinder missiles and ECM pod under her wings, the Hog felt clean and light, and gave no hint that she was flying with a patched hydraulic system.

“Devil One this is Two,” A-Bomb said over the squadron frequency, contacting Doberman as he set course in a loose trail roughly three miles behind his flight leader. Their initial direction was south, towards open desert where it was unlikely they’d be spotted as they climbed. “I’m up.”

“About time,” grunted Doberman.

“You get the helos on the air yet?”

“They’re on the back burner,” Doberman told him. That meant things were going according to plan – Fort Apache’s two helicopters had dropped off their men a few miles from the site a short time before. They had moved south a few miles to hide in case they were needed. “Ground should be positioned in fifteen.”

“My math has us there in ten,” said A-Bomb, who actually was just guessing. He hadn’t been very big on math since Sister Harvey’s class in fifth grade.

“Yeah, twelve,” said Doberman. “Conserve your fuel.”

“I go any slower I’m walking,” A-Bomb told him. “I’m surprised you can hear me over the stall warnings.”

“One,” snapped Doberman, an acknowledgment that basically meant, shut up and drive.

The two Hogs were to fly up and orbit south of the highway that led to the village, which was supposedly sparsely populated, with no known Iraqi army units. They’d be at eight thousand feet, ready to pounce once the Delta troopers gave them a good target. Captain Wong had gone along to help make sure things worked right; with Braniac on the job, A-Bomb figured they’d be working the Gats within five minutes of the fire team’s first transmission. That still left them a good twenty minutes worth of fuel reserves before they’d have to head back to Al Jouf.

Ten officially, but Doberman always padded those calculations.

Doberman had insisted on the ground that he would make all of the cannon attacks, not wanting to push A-Bomb’s plane and test the repairs. But A-Bomb knew once the fur started flying, he and his plane would do what was natural – leaky hydraulic system, missing wing, whatever. Doberman might bitch and growl, but in the end he’d understand.

His leader’s tail was a small black line in the upper left quadrant of his windshield. The loose trail formation was a
de rigueur
Hog lineup for a two-plane element. It was basically follow-the-leader with a slight offset; the trail plane off the right or left wing back anywhere from a half-mile to three, depending on the circumstances. The planes would generally fly at slightly different altitudes, making it a little more difficult for an approaching enemy to pick out both in one glance. Freelancing attack gigs like this sortie and the others typically flown by Hogs tended to be somewhat less precise than the carefully orchestrated plans employed by vast packages of advanced bombers and escorts, but they were well suited to the ground support mission. The Devil Squadron’s trail formation was almost infinitely flexible, the wingman protecting the lead plane’s six while allowing for a quick, two-fisted ground attack or a more leisurely figure-eight wheel and dive when it was time to boogie.

“How’s that repair holding up?” Doberman asked.

“Fine,” A-Bomb replied. “I’m dyin’ up here, though. Nothing to eat.”

“You didn’t check the seat for crumbs?”

“Now that you mention it, there’s probably a gum drop or two under the sofa. Probably full of cat’s hair, though.”

“This is war, Gun. You have to rough it.”

“It’s what I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb. Now that he thought about it, he probably had dropped something on the floor during the morning’s mission. He rocked the Hog left and right and pitched the nose up, trying to shake something loose.

Then the plane jerked hard to the left, much harder than it should have.
A-Bomb felt the G’s snap into his body as he muscled the stick, got the Hog back.

He knew by the feel even before he checked his gauges that it wasn’t the hydraulics. He’d lost power in his right engine.

Gone. Dead. Dormant.

What the hell?

A-Bomb worked through the restart procedure, thought he had a cough.

Nada. He tried twice more and came up empty.

Serious caution lights; the damn cockpit looked like a Christmas tree.

Well, all right, a slight exaggeration. But this is what came of flying without even a good luck Three Musketeers bar.

A-Bomb cast his eyes toward his last resort – the lone Twinkie. Then he snapped the mike button in disgust.

“Devil One, this is Two. I’ve got a situation.”

I
RAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

1540

T
hree weeks ago
to the day, Bristol Wong had been enjoying a leisurely game of chess in a small club frequented by Pentagon and CIA intelligence specialists in Alexandria, Virginia. With its thick leather chairs, horse paintings, and British decor, the club appealed to the Air Force captain’s innate sense of culture and decorum. The fact that a good game of chess and reasonably decent sherry could always be had there didn’t hurt. But on that very day, Wong had no sooner settled into a Sicilian defense— old hat to be sure, but he was playing a former CIA agent well known for his love of extreme symmetry— when his beeper vibrated. Wong knew immediately that he was going to hate the next four or five weeks of his life.

An hour after returning the call
, Wong found himself aboard a Navy transport plane, en-route to Saudi Arabia, armed with a title several sentences long that had little to do with his actual mission. Officially, his job was to “consult and brief” Centcom on Iraqi air defenses. His actual task was to gather information about any and all advanced Soviet systems in the theater, which would be provided back-channel to the Pentagon G2’s chief of staff. The dual nature of his mission was nothing particularly out of the ordinary, at least not for Wong who was, after all, the world’s greatest expert on Soviet weapons – outside the Soviet Union, of course.

In due course he made his way to Hog Heaven and Devil Squadron at their Home Drome, also known as King Fahd Royal Air Base. He was chasing down a lead on the use of a shoulder-fired weapon that both the CIA and the Air Force claimed the Iraqis didn’t possess
: the SA-16, a relatively sophisticated shoulder-fired weapon in some ways comparable to an American Stinger. While publicly expressing skepticism with the initial report, Wong in fact already had ample evidence that the missile was in Iraqi possession. He suspected that they were even using an improved version, only recently issued to Russian troops themselves. A member of Devil Squadron— Captain Glenon, in fact— had had the misfortune of encountering one during the first day of the war.

Unfortunately for Wong, the Devil Squadron commander
, Colonel Michael Knowlington, had taken an inexplicable liking to Wong and managed to pull all manner of strings to have him assigned to his command. Naturally, Wong realized that he would be a prize jewel in any command structure, and had employed a vast array of tactics to get himself removed and returned to Washington, D.C., where he might play chess with some regularity, not to mention challenge. But his efforts had been misinterpreted. Colonel Knowlington now considered him an essential cog in the machine, and detailed him to help the advance elements of Devil Squadron supporting Fort Apache.

That
was how he found himself here, close to two hundred miles inside Iraq, sucking dirt as the interminable wind whipped up through the hills surrounding the small pimple of a settlement called Al Kajuk. He and the Delta troopers accompanying him had at least a mile of climbing to do before getting a clear view of the village, such as it was.

Wong had worked with Delta and other Special Ops troops before. Aside from a predilection for running when walking would have been sufficient, he found them competent, professional, and taciturn, characteristics he thoroughly appreciated.

The sergeant in front of him held up a hand, signaling a stop. Wong passed the signal along to the team’s com specialist behind him, who in turn passed it on to the tail gunner. There were only four troopers on this ad hoc team: Sergeant Mays at point, Sergeant Franks at the rear, Sergeant Holgrum with the satellite communications gear, and Sergeant Golden, the team leader. Golden was in charge; Wong was in theory just along as an adviser and knew better than to interfere.

“
Let’s rest here a minute,” said Golden, coming back. “We have a house or something over that hump and down the slope, maybe half a mile, a little more. That way, there’s a road and the village. Over there’s the highway, on our right. Looks like when we get to the peak, we’ll be exposed, the sun in our faces. We should be able to position the Satcom up there somewhere, but let’s scout the area first. Kind of weird we got vegetation on that side of the hill and pretty much nothing here,” he added. “Must be water underground or something.

Wong nodded.
He suspected that the vegetation on the long, sloping hillside to their left had more to do with the wind pattern, which would amplify the modest moisture effect produced by the nearby river. But he knew from experience that meteorological matters hardly ever interested anyone, except while waiting for a train.

“Captain Wong and I will go on ahead,” the sergeant told the others. “That okay with you, Captain?”

“It would suit me.” Wong dropped his pack on the ground, pulling his M-164 and its 203 grenade launcher up under his arm. It was not his preferred weapon, but it would serve.

“Captain Hawkins said you were with him when he jumped into Korea,” said Golden. The sergeant was short for a Green Beret, about five-seven, and f
airly skinny. Wong, at six-two, towered over him, even on the incline.

“Yes. An interesting mission.”

“You killed two gooks?”

Wong smiled at the racial slur, but didn’t answer. Golden was white, but obviously of mixed ancestry; no one ethnic group could have produced a face quite so ugly. Wong  himself was fifth generation Chinese-American born in Hong Kong to a Scottish mother
— not quite classic “gook,” but undoubtedly close enough for the sergeant.

“We may be doing some killing here,” said Golden. “I know you Pentagon boys don’t like to get your hands dirty.”

“I would not be surprised to find mine are dirtier than yours,” Wong said, starting up the hill ahead of him.