HOGS #5: TARGET SADDAM (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (5 page)

Anybody
else would have been kidding.

Doberman
reached to the armament panel, readying the cannon. He could now see two
distinct smudges on the ground. One seemed to consist of a dozen ants
surrounding a small pickle they’d stolen from a picnic. The second, behind them
by about a mile, looked like two large and angry bees.

He
nudged toward the bees, setting up for a straight-in dive across their path.
They were tanks, moving at a fair clip.

“Rat
Patrol to Devil Flight, Rat Patrol at frequency ten-niner looking for Devil
Flight. Understand you are in our box. Please acknowledge.”

“Devil
Flight,” answered Doberman. “I have two enemy vehicles in sight. I’ll be on
them in about ten seconds. Keep running.”

“Negative,
negative. We’re stationary. We see you. We’re southeast of you, a mile directly
south of the truck and the men,” said the soldier. “They’re not the problem.
Repeat, they’re not the problem. Don’t hit them.”

Before
Doberman could ask what the hell was going on, the tanks stopped moving. A
large mushroom appeared near the truck and its attendant ants. They veered off
to the right, followed by another mushroom.

“T-72s
or maybe Chinese 69’s in that second group,” announced A-Bomb. “What’s the
deal, Dog Man?”

“I
don’t know. I see the tanks but I don’t have Rat Patrol. Let’s take a turn
while we sort this out. Cover my butt.”

“Butt’s
cleaner than the floor of the Route 17K diner in Monroe, New York,” said A-Bomb.

Doberman
took that for a compliment.

“Rat
Patrol,” added A-Bomb. “I like that. Nothing like taking your inspiration from
a sixties TV show.”

“Yeah,
right.”

“Better
than Ozzie and Harriet. Or My Mother the Car.”

As
Doberman swung the Hog around, he nudged the GAU to its high setting, the
preferred choice for breaking serious armor; roughly 65 slugs a second would
pour from the nose when he pressed the trigger. Though it allowed for a more
potent burst with less time on target, the higher rate also increased the amount
of gas expelled by the powerful cannon, not insignificant at low altitude
because it was possible to choke the engines. Besides, the high rate was
overkill for soft targets, where the normal 30 bullets were second were more
than enough to guarantee obliteration.

“Devil
One to Rat Patrol. I see tanks firing on a truck. Are these both Iraqis?
Explain to me what the hell’s going on,” he told the ground unit.

“They’re
both Iraqis, yes. The first group is trying to surrender to us,” the ground
unit’s com specialist explained. “Armor’s trying to stop them. We’re not sure
exactly what’s after them. They started out talking to us on the radio but
we’ve lost contact. They’re about to get nailed.”

“I
don’t have your position,” Doberman warned.

The
last thing he wanted to do was whack good guys. But the coordinates the soldier
started feeding him only made him more confused, and there wasn’t time to pull
out the paper map and sort the whole damn thing out. He had dropped through
1,500 feet and was lined up perfectly to cross the path of the lead tank— he
had to go for it now or bank around, let the tanks get off another four or five
shots.

Doberman
pushed his stick, putting the Hog into a shallow dive. He saw something on his
left, a U with dots in the sand, a mile and half away, closer to the tanks than
the truck.

Had
to be Rat Patrol.

Balls.

A
pair of mushrooms erupted on the ground about two hundred yards from the truck.
It veered to the right, then stopped moving.

“Okay,
Rat Patrol. Hang tight. I got ya,” said Doberman. “A-Bomb, the Ural is
surrendering to our guys, so leave him alone. I got the tank.”

A-Bomb’s
acknowledgment was lost in the fuzz of another transmission overriding the
squadron frequency. Doberman wouldn’t have heard it anyway— he was all cannon
now, the targeting bulls-eye centered on the front end of the Russian-made
T-72. While not to be taken lightly, the 40-ton tank was at a severe
disadvantage against the Hog; having stopped to get a better shot at the
fleeing deserters, it was an even easier target. Doberman nudged his stick
gently to the right, then squeezed the trigger. The first shells, fired at just
under 750 meters away, missed low, but that was merely a technicality— the
stream moved up, following Doberman’s stare and the plane’s momentum, uranium
and high explosive dancing through the steel plates as if they were paper. The
T-72’s gun retracted, then burst apart, choking on its own charge. The turret
opened like a rose bursting to meet the morning sun.

Doberman
jammed his pedals, swinging his tail hard to the left as he tried to yank the
Hog around and line up on the other tank. He’d come all the way down to five
hundred feet, still descending, but wanted the other T-72. He was so close he
could see the gunner at the top cursing as he splayed shells from the twin 7.62
mm machine-gun in his direction. Something plinked against the Hog’s armored
windscreen as Doberman pushed his trigger to fire. He flinched, then tightened
his grip on the stick, nailing down the trigger. The bullets spat off to the
right, drifting with his momentum. Doberman worked the rudder pedals, giving a
little body English with his shoulder as he tried to walk the cannon fire onto
the target. He got a few rounds near the front fender but then just had to give
up, the desert yawning up at him.

Doberman
pulled back, jerking four g’s as the Hog angled her wings upwards. He cleared
the ground by about fifty feet— too close for comfort, but not as close as he
thought he’d cut it.

He
was just starting to climb when A-Bomb shouted a warning in his ear.

“Missile
launch! Missile launch from the Ural! Those fuckers weren’t giving up, Dog
Man!”

IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

0650

He
woke up
thirsty,
his throat hard, his mouth hot.

Lieutenant
William “BJ” Dixon stared for a minute at the hazy blue sky, sore, cold, tired,
but more than anything else thirsty. He remembered the small canteen of water
on his belt and reached for it, his arm and shoulder joints cracking. The
bottle felt like ice, and he realized he, too, must be freezing, though all he
could feel was his thirst and the scorching heat in his mouth. Fingers
fumbling, he rolled himself onto his stomach and got on his knees, then finally
managed a drink. The water fell across his teeth to his tongue and into the
back of his mouth; he began to choke. His body wanted water and it wanted air
both— he choked and he gasped and he tried to drink, and the only thing he
could manage was to fall forward against the rock-strewn side of the ditch
where he’d spent the night, stomach heaving, body retching. He had nothing to
give, nothing to puke except mucus and viscera, the scrapings of his soul. He
curled in the dust, muscles spasming, chest and stomach wrenching against the
hard Iraqi soil. A metallic taste mixed with the vaguely bloody flavor of vomit
in his mouth.

When
it was over, Dixon lay against the rocks. He stayed there a long while. His
knee hurt and his shoulder had been whacked out of joint and maybe he’d broken
a rib and his head felt like it had been squeezed into sardine tin, but
considering the other possibilities, it wasn’t that bad. Two hundred miles
inside of enemy territory, without hope of getting out, it wasn’t that bad.

He
stayed there a while longer.

Not
bad at all.

“When
did I begin lying to myself?” he asked finally, speaking the words in a
whisper. He pushed himself upright and took a tiny sip of the water, then
another, then a third.

There
was a sound in the distance. Trucks.

Dixon
recapped the water and reached down to grab his desert chip campaign hat, a
“present” from the Delta unit he’d parachuted into Iraq with as a ground FAC
helping coordinate strikes on Scuds. BJ grabbed the AK-47 he’d taken yesterday
from a dead Iraqi and clambered up the side of the dry streambed, staring
across the scratchy terrain toward the highway.

Two
Iraqi troop trucks approached from the west. The trucks moved steadily though
not quickly. They were traveling in the direction of a missile launching site
that American fighter-bombers had attacked yesterday. The highway swerved
southwards, toward Dixon, to skirt a hill. There were no houses or other
buildings in sight; the area was apparently used as farmland, crisscrossed with
irrigation ditches, though BJ guessed it wasn’t particularly productive. The
local population seemed confined to a small village on the other side of the
hill; there had been Iraqi troops there yesterday, and he hadn’t gotten close
enough to see more than the minaret of a mosque.

As
the trucks followed the highway, turning in his direction, Dixon flopped
against the ditch, ducking from view. But as he lay against the rocks he asked
himself why. Hiding just delayed the inevitable.

He
wasn’t going to surrender, nor was he going to allow himself to be captured.
But it was senseless to think he might somehow make it back to allied lines. A
huge desert lay between him and Saudi Arabia.

So
there were two choices. Kill himself, or make the Iraqis kill him.

Better
to make the Iraqis do it. At least he might take a few of them with him.

BJ
stood, pulling the rifle up, cocking it under his arm. But by now the trucks
were past him. He swept his aim to follow, squeezed the trigger— a bullet
sailed from the rifle, skipping into the dirt less than fifty feet away.

The
trucks kept moving, oblivious. The highway was nearly a mile away; if the
drivers heard the crack of the gun over their engines they chose to ignore it.
Dust billowed in a thin swirl behind them, funneling over a shallow rise as
they disappeared. There was another highway as well as a turnoff for a village
somewhere beyond the rise, but it seemed as if the trucks had been swallowed by
the blue fringe at the edge of the universe.

As
Dixon stared at the disappearing film of dust, he realized he was yelling,
screaming at the Iraqis to come back and fight. He pointed the AK-47 upwards
and kicked off a short burst, then let the gun hang down. Slowly, he craned his
head left and right, twisting it nearly 360 degrees. He was alone.

His
stomach reminded him of his hunger with a low rumble, a gurgle that sounded
more like a gasp for help. With nothing to eat, he took another swig from the
canteen instead, then another. He had about half the bottle left, a few ounces—
it would be gone before noon.

So
that was his deadline.

Better
to take a few of them out when he went.

Slowly,
Dixon looked left and right, turning his whole body this time. Satisfied that
he was truly alone, he began to walk toward the left side of the hill, heading
in the direction of a ramshackle road that led to the village.

HOG HEAVEN

27 JANUARY 1991

0700

Major
Horace Gordon
Preston hopped out of the small C-12 Huron that had ferried him across from
Tabuk to his new squadron. After flying F-15s, anything was likely to seem
slow, but the bare-bones two-engined Beech— essentially a Model 200 with Air Force
insignia— had trudged across the Saudi peninsula, its three-pronged propellers
huffing and puffing the whole way. He was a terrible passenger to begin with,
but sitting in the C-12 was like rolling a heavy rock up Purgatory Hill.

An
apt transition to his new assignment, Preston thought as he stepped away from
the plane and got his bearings.

Yesterday,
Hack had nailed an Iraqi MiG and damaged another. His reward came swiftly: a
long-awaited promotion to squadron commander.

Except,
not quite. Because the hot-shot pointy-nose fast-mover zipper-suit jock had
been made only second in command— director of operations— not squadron
commander.

Worse,
far far far worse, he had
somehow
been placed with an A-10A squadron.

Preston
bit back his bile and asked an enlisted man near the parking area where the 535
^th
was located. The man pointed toward an A-10 maintenance area on the other side
of the base, and said the trailer unit that served as its headquarters was
located just beyond it.

“They
call it Hog Heaven,” said the airman enthusiastically, as if he were pointing
out Old Faithful.

Hack
grunted and began walking in that direction. He had his gear in a small
overnight bag— the rest was to follow him to the base.

His
new assignment offered two consolations. One was the fact that, on paper, the
squadron was actually listed as a wing. While at present this didn’t fool
anyone— Saddam especially— he had been told more A-10s were expected to be
added in the near future, in essence creating a new squadron. He’d be in line for
that command.