Hogs #3 Fort Apache (19 page)

AL
JOUF

26
JANUARY 1991

0500

T
he flaps
on
the A-10A snapped tight at twenty
degrees as Doberman slowed to a figurative crawl above the tarmac at Al Jouf.
The Hog nudged into her landing gently, rolling along the runway like a
Mercedes out for a Sunday spin. Doberman trundled quickly toward the repitting
area, determined to rearm and refuel in record time so he could return north.
But even as the engines wound down he could see that wasn’t going to happen; a
special ops officer was waiting to take him and A-Bomb directly to Colonel Klee
for a personal debriefing.

Not to mention butt-chewing, since the Hog pilots had
“forgotten” to clear their flight nor with him.

“You pull a stunt like that again, Glenon, and I don’t
care what Knowlington thinks of you, your next post is Alaska. Yeah, you’re
right,” continued the colonel as Doberman tried to object, “you saved their
butts. Damn straight. You were in the right place at the right time, and that’s
your job. You were fucking lucky big time. You pull that crap again and you’re
in shit-ass trouble for the rest of your career. You won’t have a career except
replacing toilet paper in johns across Antarctica. You got that?”

Doberman had expected some grief. Even so, it was a
struggle to corral his anger. “Yeah,” he spat.

“Tell me what you saw on the ground.”

The colonel didn’t even nod as Doberman spoke. While Doberman’s
account was in the best Hog tradition
—
brief and to the point, without taking credit for
anything he wasn’t absolutely positive about
—
it should still have been obvious that they had saved the day. But Klee didn’t
so much as hint
ataboy. He told them that
Hawkins, the captain in charge of Fort Apache, felt the helo left at the ambush
site was worth retrieving. The colonel began peppering them with skeptical
questions. Doberman felt his anger stoking up again. He half-expected to be
asked why he hadn’t tossed down a tow-rope and hauled the damn thing back home.

“Keep yourselves available,” said the colonel.

“Excuse me, Colonel,” said Doberman. “We’d like to get
back in the air right away. The planes’ll be rearmed and gassed by now.”

“See, our buddy’s still on the ground back there,”
added A-Bomb. “We don’t want him having all the fun.”

“You’re to stay here until I tell you to fly. That’s
an order.”

Only A-Bomb’s tug kept Doberman from exploding.

###

“We saved their fucking butts,” he complained to A-Bomb
outside. “His whole fucking operation would be smoke right now if it wasn’t for
us. Fuck him.”

“Your misinterpreting him. It’s a Special Ops thing,”
said A-Bomb. “Like tough love. The way he looks at it, he was kissing our
butts.”

“Yeah, well, he can fuck himself. If it wasn’t Dixon
up there, I swear to God, I’d fucking punch somebody out right now. Let them
throw me in jail or where ever the hell they want. Shit. I have a half a mind
to tell them to screw off and just jump in the plane. I’ll bring the kid back
if I have to land on the goddamn roadway and carry him on the wings. What the
hell are you laughing at?”

“Man, your ears turn bright red when you get mad. You
want to go find a card game?” A-Bomb asked.

“Screw yourself,” said Doberman, storming toward the
planes.

###

Doberman was still fairly ballistic when he reached
the pitting area, where the Hogs were being presided over by Rosen and the rest
of the Devil Squadron crew dogs. Doberman waved at the crew members, then sat
sullenly on a small folding chair near the “dragon” used to reload the
Warthog’s cannon.

“Whose cat did you run over?” asked Rosen.

“Excuse me?”

“You in trouble, sir?”

Doberman shook his head.

“You want some coffee, Captain?” she asked.

Rosen had a roundish face and a few freckles, a nose
that seemed to lean slightly, as if it had been broken long ago in a fight. Her
impish grin revealed perfect teeth, and her eyes changed color in the light,
sparking green from light brown.

“Yeah,” he said.

Rosen disappeared for a moment, returning with a
thermos, two cups and a small campaign chair.

“Mind if I join you?” she asked, unfolding the chair.

“Go ahead. I’m sorry if I barked.”

“Oh, you didn’t bark at all,” she said, pouring him a
coffee. She started to hand it to him and then stopped. “Oh.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Well, if you’re going to fly again
—
”

“Of course I’m going to fly again. Don’t worry about
it.” He reached and took the cup. “Hey, don’t worry about it. My bladder’s not
that small.”

“Colonel was peed, huh?”

“Fucking asshole prick.”

Rosen nodded. “Colonel Knowlington’ll back you up.”

“Yeah. If I need it.”

“Damn straight. He’s very fair.”

She sounded like she meant to add, “for an officer,”
but said nothing else. Doberman couldn’t help but look at her breasts. They
were well hidden beneath her shirt, and yet they seemed inviting.

She seemed inviting. Not in a sexual way, in a
good-comrade, fellow-squadron-mate, crew chief kind of way.

Damn.

“How’s Lieutenant Dixon?” Rosen asked.

Doberman shrugged. “He missed the pickup. He’s still
on Sugar Mountain. That’s the quarry where the F-111 hit.”

“He missed it?”

“He decided to stay back with a wounded soldier.”

“Wow.”

“Just like Dixon, huh? We’ll get him. I’m going to
fucking get him. They’re working up something now.”

Rosen looked worried.

“We can handle it,” Doberman told her.

“Excuse me, Captain,” she said, tossing her coffee
onto the ground. “I have to go check on something.”

She had a strained expression on her face, as if someone
had punched her in the gut. She got up from the seat and quickly began trotting
in the direction of the crew tents, probably to a bathroom, Doberman thought.
Damn food was screwing up everybody’s stomach.

THE
CORNFIELD

26
JANUARY 1991

0515

F
rom Sugar
Mountain,
it had seemed as if the
entire Iraqi force had been wiped out, but even before he got within a mile of
the battlefield Dixon realized that wasn’t true. He heard an engine turn over
several times, cough and die out; then he heard voices, a strange cacophony he
assumed must be Arabic, or whatever the Iraqis spoke. He began tacking south,
arranging the landscape in his head as he tried to remember not only what he
had seen from the mountain but what he remembered from the day before. The sun was
still just below the horizon, but there was more than enough light to see
without using the NOD. He left the roadway and headed for the stream the team
had followed the day before, stopping every so often to try and see where the
Iraqis were. The helicopter
—
not yet visible
—
should lie about a mile northeast, beyond
some of the empty ditches.

He had gone about a quarter of a mile along the stream
when the truck engine kicked and caught in the distance, roaring steadily this
time. Dixon dropped to one knee, scanning with the viewer in the direction of
the noise. A broken tank lay near the western edge of the small plateau. He couldn’t
see anything else.

Dixon moved a few hundred yards further east.
Stopping, he saw figures moving beyond the shell of another wrecked vehicle. A
few yards further and he had several more wrecks in view. Finally, he saw what
must be the truck, back near the road. He was three-quarters of a mile from it,
about ten degrees to the west of due south. Dixon turned carefully and scanned
the area where he thought the helicopter should be; he finally found it further
to his left than he thought, but much closer, only a few hundred yards away.
The rotor and the very top of the motor housing were the only parts visible
because of the topography.

He scanned around in a complete circle. Nothing else
was moving. Stooping, he retreated further south before turning back in the
direction of the helicopter and Leteri.

He began considering contingencies. If the Iraqis put
up a flare, what would he do?

Throw himself face first on the ground, push up his M-16
and kill them all.

Yeah, right. He would keep his head. Firing first
would give his position away. More than likely they wouldn’t even know he was
there. Even if they did, the flare wouldn’t necessarily give him away.

He would hit the ground and wait for them to make the
first move. And the second. Firing his weapon would be a last resort.

Dixon walked and trotted toward the helicopter, going
slightly uphill, for what seemed like an eternity
—
though by his watch it was
barely ten minutes. He crossed a dry irrigation ditch, climbed back up and
finally had the helicopter in good view. But now he couldn’t see the Iraqis or
the truck, though he heard its motor still coughing away.

The Little Bird looked unharmed, sitting as if it were
waiting for its pilot to hop in. Even if it were in perfect working condition,
it wouldn’t make any difference to him – the only thing he knew about flying a
helicopter was that it was a lot different than flying a plane.

Maybe he ought to blow it up, to keep the Iraqis from
getting it.

Right.

So where the hell was Leteri? Dixon scanned down from
the helo’s cockpit, in front and around the aircraft and then behind it,
without seeing him. He took a few steps to his right and looked again. He was
now less than twenty yards away, and could see fairly well without the NOD. He
used the binoculars but still couldn’t pick out Leteri.

Shit. Had he even been there at all?

Dixon took another step, still scanning, hoping the whole
thing hadn’t been a hallucination. As he took a third step, he heard the truck
motor cut off. He ducked instinctually, catching a shadow he hadn’t noticed
before on his left and to the north across another ditch. He brought the NOD to
his eyes slowly and saw there were four Iraqis there, two pointing their
weapons in his general direction.

They hadn’t seen him, but if he stayed here they
would. Dixon began moving slowly, as quietly as possible, hoping to get on the
other side of the helicopter, which he figured was what they were interested
in. He took three steps and tripped, skidding face-first down the ditch, which
he hadn’t realized was so close. He bounced against the stones and dust of the
dry creek bed, lost his gun, and found it again as he threw himself against the
bottom.

The amazing thing was, the Iraqis didn’t start
shooting.

The NOD and the binoculars had fallen somewhere along
the way. Dixon left them, crawling and then walking sideways along the ditch,
which came halfway to his chest. The enemy soldiers hadn’t reacted in any way
that he could tell. When the tail end of the AH-6G hulked about twenty yards
away, Dixon stopped and rested on his haunches, trying to get his eyes to see
more and his heart to stop pounding so he could hear if the soldiers were
following him.

The Iraqi truck started up again, revving in the
distance, smoother now. It roared, then backed off, then started revving
wildly; as if it were stuck in the sand. He hoped that the men he had seen had
gone back to help get it free.

But where the hell was Leteri? Assuming he hadn’t been
hallucinating, the trooper must have heard the Iraqis playing with their truck
earlier and taken cover. He couldn’t have gone all that far; it was just a
question of finding him.

The truck screeched and ran steady. It sounded as if
it were coming toward him.

Dixon gripped the M-16 tightly and continued along the
dried streambed. It got progressively deeper and wider, angling away from the
helicopter and battlefield. Debris had been piled in several spots; finally he
moved around one and saw a shadow ahead. It moved and realized it was a man.

“I figured you had to be around here somewhere, Joey,”
he said.

The man answered with an incomprehensible shout in a
language that definitely wasn’t English.

THE
CORNFIELD

26
JANUARY 1991

0530

There was a
moment when he saw him clearly; saw the confusion, the question and the plea,
the hope, dreams, small comforts and desperate wishes welling in the man’s
eyes. The next second Dixon had pulled the M-16’s trigger, holding it there
long enough for the three rounds to smoke through the Iraqi soldier’s stomach
and chest.

The 5.56 mm slugs streaked through his vital organs so
quickly that it took a moment for the blood to actually flood into the holes they
had made. The man stumbled back, dropping his Kalishnikov, aware he was going
to die, aware of it long enough to begin to shake his head.

Dixon caught his breath somewhere down around his
stomach. His legs began to buckle, and only the sound of Iraqis shouting behind
him kept him from collapsing. He threw himself on the side of the ditch,
waiting for something to shoot at. At the top edge of the dry creek a shadow
appeared; a leg that looked like a thick cornstalk. He pushed the trigger of
his M-16. The man went down, but Dixon realized he had actually missed, and now
he had to move, and quickly
—
the creek side began boiling with lead.

He threw himself back and ran to his right, nearly
tripping over the Iraqi he had killed. As his foot kicked the man’s rifle, he
heard a fresh burst of machine-gun fire behind him. Dixon fell against the
ground. He crawled a few feet; realizing the shooting had stopped, he hauled
himself up the embankment, rolling onto the nearly flat ground behind it.

As he tried to figure out where his enemies were, they
did him a favor, firing off a flare from behind the truck. He froze as it ignited;
willing his body to become part of the dirt he was splayed against.

The flare began dropping above and behind the closest
Iraqis. It seemed designed to help Dixon instead of them, though of course the Iraqis
couldn’t have known where he was, nor that they were facing only one man and
not an entire platoon. Eight or nine shadows moved forward across the open
ground toward the creek bed where he’d killed the first soldier. They moved at
glacier speed, obviously unsure of their enemy.

 He edged backwards, but dared not move too quickly or
much further. When they were at the lip of the dry creek, the Iraqis split into
two groups. One held their ground; the others moved off to his left, probably
intending to roll up the flank of the creek bed. He guessed they thought he was
hiding in one of the piles of debris.

The men on the other side of the creek bed were all
fairly close together. He could nail them and then the ones in the creek itself
with the M-16s grenade launcher.

Assuming he could figure out how to fire the damn
thing.

He knew how to do it. It was easy, like a shotgun.

Dixon pumped and loaded, pushed his right knee down
into the dirt to brace himself and then squeezed his finger against the
launcher’s thin metal trigger. As he did, the gun rammed into his shoulder; he
threw as much of his weight against it as he could, awkwardly dancing the
weapon in a half-pirouette that would have been comical under other
circumstances. The whishing sound of the grenade zipping through the air was
followed by a deep, authoritative bang; he had missed wildly, firing at least a
hundred yards beyond and well to the east of his enemies.

The Iraqis responded with equally misplaced shots,
firing not in his direction but towards the explosion. He cocked again,
pointing the barrel eastward into the creek this time.

As he was about to pull the trigger, something moved
to his right. He swung around to nail it, stopping his finger only at the last
second.

“Lieutenant, shit. What the hell are you doing here?”
said Leteri, hunkering toward him.

“I almost put a grenade right through you.”

“Nah, I saw your first shot. You would have missed by
a mile,” he said. “You don’t mind if I take a whack at that, do you?”

Dixon quickly traded for Leteri’s gun, an H&K
MP-5. A fresh flare arced into the air from this distance, igniting overhead
just as Leteri launched the grenade into the soldiers on the other side of the
ditch. The corporal pumped a fresh one into the chamber and let it fly into the
far end of the creek itself.

Dixon leaped to his feet. The Iraqi truck was about a
hundred yards away, heading in their direction with troops behind it and its
lights on. He had a clear shot at its front end; he nailed the trigger on the
submachine-gun straight back, running half the clip through the front of the
truck. He pushed the barrel upwards, working his aim with his body as if he
were firing the cannon in the Hog, smashing the radiator and the hood and then
the glass. He stopped firing, saw something move to the left of the truck and
emptied the rest of the clip at it.

He ducked down as he ejected, reaching to his pocket
to reload, forgetting that he had only M-16 cartridges in his pockets now.

“They’re out of ammo,” said Leteri.

“What?”

“They just wasted their clips.”

“They were firing?”

“The whole time,” said the sergeant, passing him a
pair of MP-5’s long clips. “Now would be a good time for a strategic retreat.”

“Okay,” said Dixon. He jumped up.

“Afraid I can’t go very fast,” said Leteri, grabbing
him. He pointed to his side, caked with a black substance that looked like tar.
There was a second blotch on his leg. “My head hurts, too.”

“Lean on my shoulder,” Dixon told him. “Wait
—
maybe we ought
to blow up the helicopter first. You got more grenades in that thing?”

“Let’s not fuck around.”

Dixon hesitated for another second. He thought he
heard something move on the other side of the creek. That cinched it – he
squatted down, his back to Leteri. “Get on. Let’s go.”

Leteri started to protest, but before he finished,
Dixon has him on his back.

“Just hang on,” he said, rising. “And try not to bleed
on my uniform. I had it dry-cleaned yesterday.”

“In that case I’ll puke on you, too,” said Leteri, as
Dixon waddled away from the battlefield.