Hogs #3 Fort Apache (12 page)

OVER
IRAQ

25
JANUARY 1991

2155

D
oberman
whacked the
Hog hard left as the
fingers of fire seemed to reach for his windshield. He twisted the plane back,
feeling her buck because of the unfamiliar tanks tied to her wings. He lost his
balance, felt his left wing coming around and got down on his rudder pedals as
well as his ailerons, muscling the plane stable with his nose pointed toward
the ground. He started to recover, then realized the altimeter was winding down
faster than he thought. His engineer’s brain spat out a series of equations
with bad variables; he ignored them and pulled back on the stick, leveling off
at two thousand feet, headed in the wrong direction and damn-shit confused.

To say nothing of pissed. He wondered where in hell
the flak guns had come from, and felt his bladder backing up into his kidneys.

“Hey,” said A-Bomb.

“Hey back.”

“You hit?”

“Nah.” Doberman gave the instrument panel a quick once
over just to be sure.

A-Bomb read him his position, but Doberman had already
figured out where his wingman would be. He brought his plane back into a slow
bank north, sliding around in an arc that kept the flak
—
stir firing
intermittently
—
well off his right wing. He was still low at 3,500
feet, but since he had to get low to make the drop, decided to keep it there.

“You got screwed up?” asked A-Bomb.

“Fucking fuel tanks threw me off.”

“Still got them?”

“Shit, A-Bomb, what do you think?”

“Man, you’re testy. You know what it is, you didn’t
have anything to eat. Blood sugar’s all whacked out. You got to take better
care of yourself. When you eat’s as important as what you eat. That’s what I’m
talking about.”

“What the fuck was shooting at me? I didn’t get a
radar warning or anything.”

“I couldn’t see it with the Mavericks, but it looked
like something dug in near the road. Shot real high. Got to be a bunch of
ZSU-57s, don’t you think? Would have taken a lucky shot to nail you.”

“Lucky for who?”

“Good point. Want to go back and waste ‘em?”

“Hold on.”

Doberman checked the positions out on the map. Wong’s
course had the helicopter coming in from the north, which meant the battery was
well out of range. Besides, the helos would be almost at the refuel point by
now. The Hogs were better off saving the guns for the return flight, if they
even bothered.

The guns stroked up again. There had to be several of
them, and A-Bomb was probably right about them being ZSU-57s or something
similar
—
their tracers seemed to extend fairly high. The guns were usually
mounted on vehicles like ZSU-23s; they might be attached to a convoy or
positioned to defend something intel hadn’t yet picked up. In any event, they
were firing blind and almost straight up. Most likely they had heard either the
Hogs in the distance and gotten spooked.

Firing blind in the night was stupid, since it gave
your position away and was unlikely to bring any results, but Doberman could
understand the ground crews’ frustration. You could only sit and get pounded
for so long before you lashed out.

“Looks like your friend Wong missed some pretty
serious guns,” said Doberman as he plotted a new course to the drop point.

“Hey, I didn’t say Brainiac was perfect. Besides,
those old suckers, shit, it would have taken a really lucky shot to get you.
One in a hundred. You know what I’m talking about?”

“All right.” He gave A-Bomb the new course and got
back into gear. He was back in control; even his bladder eased up a little.

“You could go Italian, you know.”

“What are you talking about, A-Bomb?”

“Pasta is very high in you carbohydrates,” said the
wingman. “Instant energy. And versatile. You got your marinara, your Abruzzi,
your Alfredo. . .”

“Just watch my back.”

“Six is as clean as spaghetti right out of the pot,”
said A-Bomb.

OVER
IRAQ

25
JANUARY 1991

2200

A
-Bomb
eased his
Hog back, giving Doberman
plenty of room to make his drop cleanly. While he had a huge amount of trust in
the ground crew’s ability to improvise, even he was curious about whether this
fudge would really work.

It had better. He had the choppers coming on now four
miles away, so low they could be trucks.

His Maverick viewfinder was selected at what passed
for wide-field magnification: six degrees. The ground battery was well off to
the rear, and no longer firing; they’d either run out of bullets or hit
themselves with their falling shells.

The Hogs “target” was a set of coordinates that
translated into a hunk of sand about a half-mile beyond an impressive
collection of bushes; the brush was probably considered an oasis, though A-Bomb
was hardly an expert on that sort of thing. The only oasis he was familiar with
featured topless dancers. The gray shadows of the bushes looked like an
undulating test bar in his screen as he banked to follow Doberman on his
approach.

One of the test bars morphed into a mountain.

Then mountain changed into bodies.

A couple of dozen bodies. All running west right into
the drop zone.

“Hold off, hold off,” A-Bomb shouted into his radio,
alerting Doberman. “Shit. Cisco freeze. Cisco Freeze,” he added, quickly
switching to the frequency the helicopters were monitoring. The code meant for
the helicopters to stop immediately.

A-Bomb thumbed the Maverick’s screen down to a narrow
angle, which magnified the scene. He waited for the viewer to flash up an
entire herd of Iraqi infantry.

That or some very strange bushes.

“Devil Two, this is One? What’s the problem?” asked
Doberman.

“Don’t you see them?”

“See what?”

“Hang tight.” A-Bomb banked his plane, temporarily
losing his angle. The Maverick screen showed nothing but empty desert.

A malfunction?

Hell no. The screen filled as he came back around, but
now A-Bomb saw that the bodies streaming westward weren’t Iraqi troops or weirdly
mobile fauna.

They were camels. At least two dozen of them.

He might have laughed, except it wasn’t funny. The
animals were still moving toward the area where the tanks were supposed to be
dropped.

Doberman cursed in his headset. Obviously he had seen
them, too.

A-Bomb made out a man’s shadow, and what might be a
tent. Some Bedouins were putting up for the night at the oasis. In fact, they
were the oasis.

Jeez, you’d think they lived here or something. And
wasn’t there a leash law? The damn camels were trampling all around the target
area.

“All right, I’m going to set up a course toward
Cisco,” said Doberman. “Let them improvise.”

“I got a better idea,” said A-Bomb, pushing the Hog
down toward the dirt.

The big warplane hesitated a moment, then realized
what her pilot was up to. She snorted, and answered A-Bomb’s whoop with one of
her own. A salvo of flares, ordinarily used to defeat heat-seeking missiles,
burst from her wingtips.

Startled, the camels turned their heads as one and
stared at the meteor that had appeared from nowhere.

Then they ran like hell, their masters in hot pursuit
.

OVER
IRAQ

25
JANUARY 1991

2210

“Yee-fucking-haw!” shouted A-Bomb over the radio. He
had the camels on the run.

Doberman slipped the Hog onto the proper coordinates
for the tank drop. His thumbs danced back and forth
—
bing-bang-bam.
He pickled and felt the plane jump beneath him, glad to be free of the
unfamiliar tanks.

Doberman banked and pushed forward in his seat, anxious
to see how he had done. But it was far too dark outside and at the moment there
was nothing but a bleary blankness in the Maverick’s screen.

He keyed his mike and told the helicopters they could
proceed in zero-one minutes; in the same instant he saw the outline of a small
parachute in the corner of the TVM, then another and finally a third, all
holding up the same fat canister of fuel.

Finished spooking the camels, A-Bomb pulled off and
swung in for his own drop.

Doberman began to climb in a spiral intended to keep
him away from both the helicopters and his wingman; in the dark good flight
discipline was particularly important and he hit his marks precisely, climbing quickly,
for a Hog, to ten thousand feet. Their straight-forward plan called for the two
Hogs to remain in the area for thirty minutes, which hopefully would be long
enough for the two helos to refuel and get underway.

Once the helicopters cleared, they could waste the
triple-A battery and go home, where bed was waiting. Doberman’s body ached for
rest, even if it was on a cramped cot stolen from the Special Ops Forces
troops.

There had been no fireballs. That was a good sign.

If you believed in luck, this was exactly the sort of
gig that depended on it. Rigging a bizarre plan, flying to a point on the map
with a notoriously inefficient INS system, then hooking up with helos that had
already been flying for hours on a course so convoluted they were coming south
—
only to have
the whole thing almost screw up because of a group of wayward camels.

Luck?

Bullshit. How about giving credit to tons of skill,
with great technical people coming up with a creative solution to an impossible
problem? How about great navigational skill on his part, making mid-course
corrections and dealing with an unexpected glitch in the shape of an anti-air
gun? And give a little credit to impromptu finesse from A-Bomb, scaring the
crap out of the camels to herd them away from the drop zone.

Luck was bullshit.

Doberman felt his leg starting to numb from
inactivity. He danced it up and down, twisted his muscles and shook his knees
around, trying to ward off the pins and needles.

Rosen and Tinman had done a hell of a job, conjuring
up this drop-tank thing. Of course, Tinman had probably done this sort of thing
before, like maybe for the Wright Brothers.

Silver crosses. Jeee-zus.

Rosen, though, she was pretty damn smart for a girl.

Check that. For a woman.

She was a woman. There was something sincere in her
eyes, something warm, as if she really cared if they made it on their mission.

The refuel took longer than planned, and Doberman
decided to wait until the helicopters were in the air before moving on. He
played with the variables, but couldn’t quite squeeze enough time and fuel to
allow the A-10s to splash the batteries after the choppers left. Reluctantly,
he spun the Hogs onto their go-home course.

“Six is clean as a scared camel’s rear,” said A-Bomb.

“Very funny. You watch I don’t put you up for a medal
for that.”

“Hey, I got the only medal I need, courtesy of Tinman.
You notice that gun opened up on you, not me.”

“How’s your fuel?” snapped Doberman.

“Not a problem,” said A-Bomb. His words were almost
lost in what seemed to be an uncontrolled chortle.

“You laughing at me, A-Bomb?”

“Hell no,” said A-Bomb. “I’m just thinking of those
helicopter crews when they landed. There must have been a ton of camel shit
everywhere. Got to be more toxic than anything Saddam could load into a Scud.”

OVER
IRAQ

25
JANUARY 1991

2210

The more Dixon walked, the less tired he felt. Whether
it was because he was so far beyond fatigue that he’d become numb, or whether something
biological had kicked in, Dixon couldn’t say. All he knew was that he was more
awake and alert than he’d ever been in his life. The night was a little lighter
than last night had been; whether because of that or some shift in his senses,
he could see Turk and the way down to the road almost as if it were high noon.

The sergeant led him back to the road, then across and
parallel to it. After about a tenth of a mile, he pointed out a rock that marked
the edge of the minefield on the far side. Just beyond it was a dirt road that
curved between two crags in the hills.

“The entrance off the road is down further,” the
sergeant explained. “But this is shorter.”

Dixon followed silently. They quickly came to a pass
and walked about twenty yards into the quarry. A rock face loomed ahead; they’d
seen the top from the position where they’d taken the sergeant, but hadn’t been
able to see its base because of the angle.

And the base was definitely worth seeing. There was a
large metal door, the kind that might be used on a factory or warehouse.

“Old mine?” Dixon asked.

“Check it out,” said Turk, handing the lieutenant his
NOD. “Brand new combo lock. Got to be hiding something, don’t you think?”

It wasn’t just a combo lock
—
it had a
high-tech digital face and a massive panel.

“Probably booby-trapped,” said Turk. “Got a slot for a
key, so you can’t just fudge the combination either.”

Dixon’s mind conjured up different possibilities: the
Mother of All Scud Bases, Saddam’s own secret palace, or a vast underground
base for the Revolutionary Guards. He saw the same end for each
—
a raid by
Devil Squadron to send the bastards to hell.

Another vision mixed with the others: the memory of his
mother’s funeral. It had been a bright, sunny day, perfect in every way but the
most important.

She’d chosen the Job reading herself. For years his
mother had cared for his dad, who suffered just like the biblical figure.
Cancer had long ago left him an invalid; by the time he was twelve Dixon had
reconciled himself to his father’s death.

Yet his father hadn’t died and in fact was still
living at the nursing home Dixon had put him in when his mother suffered her
first stroke.

His mother never talked of death, not the countless times
it seemed likely that his father would pass away, and certainly never of her
own. And yet he found the passages all noted in her top drawer, written perhaps
years before, too long for any premonition, surely.

“What do you think?” Turk asked.

Dixon handed the viewer back.

“Underground bunker, or some sort of storage
facility,” said Dixon. “Way out here, my bet would be a chemical or biological
warehouse. Maybe even nuclear. NBC.”

He started to take a step forward but Turk caught him.

“Could be mined,” said the trooper. “The way I’m
thinking about it, that minefield we stumbled into is set up for defense, so
they don’t need too many men to guard the place, see? Things get tricky, you
send a team in. You can locate your posts there and there, not worry about your
flanks. And this way, too.”

Dixon nodded. He took the viewer back and began
scanning the rocks, looking for a ventilation pipe. As he did so, he remembered
that the trucks had been heading in this direction.

A coincidence?

You couldn’t drive them through the door; it was too
small. The shadows thrown by the rocks might hide them temporarily, though.

Hard to tell. He scanned first for another entrance,
then for a ventilation system. Finally he spotted a thin pipe a good forty
yards back on the hillside, around in the opposite direction from the hill
where they had placed the sergeant. He oriented himself, realizing that the
bunker’s hill was connected by a long ridge to theirs.

“Intelligence people don’t know about this,” said
Turk. “Otherwise they’d have told us. Hill wasn’t even named on our maps.
Nothing special to them.”

“Yeah,” agreed Dixon. “But it’s real special now.”