Hogs #3 Fort Apache (10 page)

AL
JOUF FOA, SAUDI ARABIA

25
JANUARY 1991

1900

T
hey were
calling
it Oz West, but compared to
the Devils’ maintenance area at the Home Drome, the facilities at the forward
operating area were bare-bones at best. Even without the Clyston-supplied
amenities of elaborate test benches and gourmet coffee
—
Sergeant Rosen
wasn’t sure which she’d rather do without
—
she and her “boys” could completely strip down and
rebuild a Hog in under twenty-four hours. Twelve, even, if she broke into her
stock of the Tinman’s special coffee brew. Hell, with that coffee and the
Special Ops people as inspiration, they could probably do it in under six, and
wax the landing gear to boot.

The Hogs were designed for battlefield maintenance.
Rosen had to hand it to the engineers for keeping things very basic. But it was
also true that her skeleton crew of Jimmy, Elephant and most of all the Tinman
were the best crew-dog technical expert ground wizards in the Air Force. The
fact that the Capo had put her in charge of the operation made her determined
to bust twenty more guts than normal; she was good and damned if she wasn’t
going to be better.

So if the truth be told, when the two Devil ships came
back to base looking like they’d spent the day in an auto dealer showroom, she
was a little disappointed. It wasn’t that she was looking for something to do.
They were going to be here for a while and had a ton of organizing to do, not
to mention the fact that their talents could always be used helping the base
detachment with other planes. It was just that she felt like there ought to be
something more challenging.

And, since she’d heard that Lieutenant Dixon had been
assigned to this mission, she was more than a little disappointed he hadn’t
shown up.

Which was part of the reason she went to report the
detachment status to Captain Glenon personally. Glenon and Captain O’Rourke
were still debriefing in the makeshift intelligence area, a sandbagged tarp not
far from the runway.

“Captain, just wanted you to know, both Hogs are good
to go.”

“Jesus. We landed ten minutes ago,” said Glenon. He
seemed annoyed. Rosen was used to that, having dealt with the squadron’s DO,
Major “Mongoose” Johnson, a world class ball-buster.

Still, they’d just busted their butts getting the
planes ready. She’d worked with Glenon a few times and never had any trouble
with him before; for an officer, he’d seemed all right. But that was then, and
this was now. Stinking officers were all the same.

“I’m sorry if you expected them sooner, sir,” she
said, her lips pressed together tightly.

“No, that wasn’t what I meant. Relax, Sergeant.”

“Relax, sir?”

“Yeah, you don’t have to kill yourself,” said the
captain. “We won’t be flying until tomorrow morning.”

“Speak for yourself,” said A-Bomb. “I was thinking of
going camel hunting.”

Rosen recognized that that was supposed to be a joke.
She laughed politely, and looked back at Glenon. All right, so he was okay. For
an officer. Short guy, all muscle, quick temper, but okay. Kind of guy you
could trust.

“The planes will be ready the second you want them,
sir.”

“Okay. Get some sleep or food or whatever.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Rosen, but she didn’t move.

“Something up?” asked Glenon.

“Oh, um, nothing sir, just
—
I was
wondering about Lieutenant Dixon.”

“Dixon? What about him?”

“I hadn’t seen him, but I heard he was assigned to
this mission.”

“BJ’s uptown with the commandos,” said A-Bomb. “Crazy
fuck parachuted down with them last night. They went out at like 35,000 feet
—
you believe
that?”

Rosen nodded and stepped back to let the men pass. She
felt her side stitch up, as if she had been running for a half-hour. She
massaged it gently, but knew it wasn’t going away.

AL
JOUF FOA, SAUDI ARABIA

25
JANUARY 1991

1920

“Y
ou want
to
drum up a card game after dinner?”
A-Bomb asked Doberman as they walked from the briefing area.

“Nah,” said Doberman. He was feeling tired and a
little beat-up from the two long runs north. “I’m just going to bed.”

“Bed? Shit, are you kidding me? Bed? Instead of
cards?”

“Screw off.”

“Oh man, you’re making a big mistake,” insisted A-Bomb.
“I’m tellin’ ya, that cross of Tinman’s gonna be hot-shit at the poker table.”

“I’d be careful about playing cards with these Special
Ops types if I were you,” said Doberman. “You win too much they may bury you in
the desert.”

“Yo, look who’s here,” said A-Bomb, spotting Wong
walking toward them. “Hey Braniac, where’s the food at?”

“Food. Right,” said Wong.

“Seriously, there a place where we can get something
to eat?” Doberman asked.

“There are several, though I wouldn’t advise any of
them. Before you eat, Colonel Klee wants to see you.”

“What’s up?”

Doberman listened with disbelief to the scheme to drop
fuel for the helicopters.

“That’s impossible,” said Doberman.

“Merely difficult,” said Wong. “If it were easy they
wouldn’t be interested.”

“How’s that air strip coming?” asked A-Bomb. “You
think we can use it soon?”.

“Don’t be crazy,” Doberman told his wingman. “It’s
just about in Baghdad.”

“Baghdad is quite a distance away,” said Wong. “Given
the layout of the Iraqi defenses as well as their overly centralized command
structure, the base might as well be in Riyadh. This is a classic outgrowth of
the Soviet philosophy, the inherent flaws that were first pointed out by Herman
Dedorf in his 1951 report and subsequently demonstrated by a little-known
project entitled–”

“Spare me the dissertation,” said Doberman. “No matter
where it is, a thousand feet isn’t long enough to land anything. Let alone take
off.”

“Shit, Dog, that’s doable,” said A-Bomb. “What do you
say, Braniac?”

Wong seemed not to understand why he had suddenly been
nicknamed after a character in the Superman adventures. But it didn’t prevent
him from spewing forth.

“They wish to double the length and land C-130s there.
That will require considerable work and earth-moving equipment, a most
inefficacious contingency though they seem undeterred by such considerations,”
the captain told them. “If they can achieve that, then by all means your planes
could operate there was well, assuming reduced weights and combat schemes. In
fact, with the modest extensions to the present configuration that are already
planned, the Fort Apache strip would be theoretically accessible to an A-10A,
as you already undoubtedly are aware.”

To Doberman, Wong sounded like a kid on a quiz show
who wouldn’t shut up. And A-Bomb egged him on, bobbing his head up and down
like a toy on a dashboard.

“If you operated at forward combat weight of
approximately 32,771 pounds, you would need just 1,450 feet to take off,” continued
Wong. “Of course, there are several contingencies, including the wind and, in
Captain O’Rourke’s case, how much candy he happens to be chewing at the time.”

“And whether I got the stereo cranked,” said A-Bomb,
grinning.

“But the idea of placing American warplanes so far
behind the lines where they would be open to a concerted ground attack is
itself insane,” said Wong.

“Thank you,” said Doberman.

“It’s not that crazy,” A-Bomb told Doberman after they
finally managed to get Wong to point them in the colonel’s direction. “If we
could refuel there we wouldn’t have to go home every time the AWACS calls out a
snap vector. Shit, we’re flying so goddamn far north as it is, what difference
is landing going to make?”

“Strip’s only a thousand feet,” said Doberman.

“Yeah, but Wong said they’re extended.”

“Wong.”

“Guy’s a brain, Dog Man. He’s the world’s expert on
Russian weapons.”

“And what does that have to do with lengthening
airstrips?”

“Hey, you look at him, you say: there’s a guy who
knows concrete.”

“Only because he’s going to end up buried in some.”

Even though the idea of landing a Hog two hundred
miles deep in Iraq sounded crazy, Doberman realized that there was a certain
logic to the insanity. It would immensely increase their time on station
—
hell, they
would always be on station. And while the actual bomb runs were no picnic, the
most perilous part of their missions were actually the long legs to and fro.
Flying high made them immune to triple-A, but if the wrong SAM site picked the
wrong second to come on line, a dozen Weasels couldn’t take out the radar
quickly enough to protect them. Even the old SA-2s
—
flying
telephone poles which had been around since Vietnam
—
were potent
weapons against a slow, heavily laden Hog. And a Roland or SA-6
—
forget about it.

So Doberman didn’t immediately punch A-Bomb when he
mentioned using Apache to the colonel in the command bunker.

Actually, the reason he didn’t had more to do with the
fact that A-Bomb was across the room.

Even the Special Ops colonel could tell landing the
Hogs at Apache was crazy. His mouth and cheek worked up and down, as if he’d
gotten something caught in one of his back teeth.

“You know, son, I used to fly Hueys up Ho Chi Ming’s
butt,” he said finally. “You don’t have to impress me.”

“I’m not pushing a permanent Home Drome,” said A-Bomb.
“What I’m talking about is a fuel depot, and maybe get some gun dragons up
there, load up the cannon between shows. Dump in a few hundred iron bombs while
we’re at it. Nothing big. That’s what I’m talking about.”

The colonel gave Doberman a look that said, he’s
crazy, right.

Doberman shrugged. Klee turned back to A-Bomb.

“You boys just do this fuel drop tonight, all right?
We’re going to be goddamn lucky to have it work,” said the colonel.

“Excuse me, colonel, can I get a word in here?” said
Doberman.

“I wish you would, Captain.”

“I’m not saying we can’t do this, assuming those tanks
don’t explode when we drop them.”

“They tell me they won’t,” said Colonel Klee. “We’ve
made similar drops from MC-130s. Assuming your people rig them right.”

“If they can be rigged, our guys will do it,” said
Doberman.

“Then it’s in your court.”

Doberman clamped his teeth together, trying to choke
back his bile. He didn’t like being treated like a flunky. The colonel’s
dismissal of the problems involved in the mission was, in his mind, reckless.

But it was difficult for him to say that without
exploding.

“Damn straight it’s in our court,” he finally managed.
“Damn straight. We’re going to do a kick-ass job and you can count on it. But
realistically, Colonel, realistically we’re not equipped for night fighting.
Our navigation systems are not exactly state of the art. This drop has to have
a pretty wide margin of error. Unless we use flares, we’ll be bombing blind.”

“No flares,” said Klee. “We’ll live with whatever
margin of error you give us.”

“Skull and I used Maverick G’s when we rode up and
grabbed Goose,” said A-Bomb. “If we can round up a couple of those suckers,
we’ll be able to see the ground at least.”

“Get them,” said the colonel. “If you have to put
X-ray machines in those planes, do it. But nothing that gives the helicopters
away before they get there.”

Doberman blew another long breath, this one calm
enough to exist through his mouth without rattling his teeth. He told himself
he was just pissed about the colonel’s personality, which wasn’t an important
thing to be pissed about.

The gig was impossible, but what the hell. They’d done
harder shit. As long as it was him and A-Bomb taking it, they’d figure
something out. And if it weren’t for the fact that Dixon’s neck was on the
block up north, he wouldn’t give a flying turd’s crap what happened to this
jerk-ass of a colonel’s command. If he wanted to risk stranding two helicopters
so deep in Iraq that it took the entire Army and Air Force and maybe the
Marines to rescue them, what the hell.

“When are the helos taking off?” A-Bomb asked.

The colonel glanced at his watch. “They should be in
the air by now. They’re refueling at the border. According to Wong’s timetable,
they needed a good head start. You have a little over three hours to meet them.
You miss them, don’t bother coming back.”