Hogs #3 Fort Apache (26 page)

The
Cornfield

26
January, 1991

1045

T
hey were
in
the air, without radar but with
the radio, at least enough of it to monitor the chaos at Sugar Mountain. Rosen
hooked her arm around the restraints, her attention divided between the radio
and the readings on the displays in front of her.

The situation over at Sugar Mountain was chaotic as
hell, but she recognized Captain A-Bomb O’Rourke’s voice screaming through the
chaos:

“I just shacked the APC with my last Maverick. That
was kick-ass, Dog Man! You double-banged the fucker.”

The helicopter pilot turned to her, as if asking for
an explanation.

“I think that’s good,” she told him.

The pilot of the other helicopter made a transmission
to the Hogs, reporting some battle damage and wounded.

“Is Captain Dixon okay?” Rosen blurted over the com
set.

For a second there was no answer. She knew she had
keyed her mike because Slim Jim gave her a dirty look. That wasn’t enough to
prevent her from asking again, though this time she dressed up the
communication with a slightly more professional tone, adding “over” at the end
of the transmission.

“Air Two this is Air One. Lieutenant Dixon is not on
board.”

“Shit. Repeat?”

“Dixon is not on board.”

Rosen grabbed the sleeve of her helicopter pilot. “Go
over to Sugar Mountain.”

“What?”

“One of our men is still on the ground down there.”

The pilot said nothing, but gave her two answers
nevertheless. One answer was with his eyes, which summarized the helicopter’s
precarious mechanical state, their low fuel reserves and lack of ammunition in
a look that clearly asked,
Do you think I’m out of my friggin’ mind?

The other was with his hands, which yanked the helo’s
control column nearly out of its bolts and put the AH-6G on-line to the foaming
clouds of smoke that marked the Iraqi stronghold.

SUGAR
MOUNTAIN

26
JANUARY 1991

1052

“A
pache
Two, this
is Devil One. I copied that
transmission. We will cover you to Sugar Mountain. Over.” Doberman let go of
the mike key and ran his eyes quickly over the Hog’s indicators, with the
notable exception of the panel detailing his dwindling fuel supply.

“Got your six,” said A-Bomb.

He was as short of fuel as Doberman was, but it was
senseless ordering him home. The two Hogs cut tight angles in the air as they
whacked back for Sugar Mountain.

“I’m thinking that must have been Dixon who nailed the
missile launcher on the crater,” said A-Bomb. “That’s just the sort of thing a
Hog driver’s gonna do, you know what I’m talking about?”

“We’ll buzz the crater and have the helo follow us
in.” said Doberman, straining to see the quarry through the dust and smoke
ahead. “Check for machine guns, if you can find the damn things. I can’t see
shit.”

He took the Hog into a shallow but quick dive, moving
down through four thousand feet as he accelerated. The smoke, rocks and
wreckage divided into distinct clumps, several of which began to fire furiously
at him from the periphery of the quarry. Doberman didn’t have a particularly
good shot on any of them and decided to truck on past, concentrating on looking
for Dixon. He figured A-Bomb would be more than happy to clean up for him.

Picking out something as small as a man from an
airplane under any circumstances was extremely difficult. Picking out someone
in the rocks while people are shooting at you was nearly impossible.

Doberman nonetheless pushed the Hog in, practically
crawling as he scanned out the right side of his cockpit. Pulling off to the
west, he took a slow, low orbit and watched as A-Bomb rode in on one of the
gunners, letting the A-10A’s cannon eat up the dirt.

The cannon’s kick was so fierce, it slowed the plane
down, nearly holding the Hog still as the bullets stuttered right and left.
A-Bomb worked the rudders like pedals on a piano, playing the Death March for
the unlucky slobs who had dared aim at him. And then he was beyond them,
spinning off as Doberman put his Hog onto another of the heavy machine guns,
pelting it with the Gatling’s big shells. Doberman winged through the haze and
got a good view of the landslide that had crushed the storage bunker closed for
good.

He couldn’t see Dixon. Nor could A-Bomb when to took a
second run through. The machine-gun fire had stopped, at least. Doberman
cleared the helicopter pilot in for a closer look.

As they watched the helo approach, their AWACS controller
asked, semi-politely, if they had left the allied air forces and established
one of their own.

He had some pointed questions about fuel consumption
as well.

“Somebody’s feeding him information,” squawked A-Bomb
over the short range radio.

Doberman told the AWACS they had the situation under
control, then asked for the nearest tanker track, knowing before the
coordinates came back that it was going to be tight.

One of the machine-guns started firing again as the
helicopter pushed in. Doberman cursed, nearly pulling the wing off the plane as
he spun the Hog to take the bastard out. The helo pilot yelled something he
couldn’t understand.

There was a dead man at the lip of the crater.

Helo was taking fire.

Doberman leveled off briefly and flailed back in time
to see the helicopter work its way toward the back of the mountain. His Hog was
sucking dirt now, down under five hundred feet, slipping to three hundred. Doberman
spotted something brown moving in the crevice formed by the rocks between them
just southeast of the hill he’d just hit.

“Two bodies,” said the helo pilot, except it wasn’t
the helo pilot, it was Rosen.

Something flashed in the corner of his eye.

“Watch the hilltop!” he shouted as he passed. He
started to bank back and transmitted the warning again, unsure if he had even
keyed the mike to send it.

There was a gunner flailing at the helicopter. A-Bomb
saw him and was diving at the hill. The helicopter yanked away, bullets
erupting from its side.

A-Bomb yelled.

The helicopter pilot yelled.

Rosen screamed.

And in the middle of it all the AWACS controller, his
voice calm and ice cold, dished out a snap vector: Two MiGs were taking off
from a nearby Iraqi airstrip.

“We’re hit but we’re okay,” announced the helicopter
pilot.

“Was that Dixon?” Doberman asked.

“Those bodies aren’t moving,” said A-Bomb. “Dog, we
got two pick-ups on the road in warp drive heading for Sugar Mountain. Got guns
in the back, looks like.”

“OK, everybody get the hell out of here,” said
Doberman. “Take the AWACS vector, A-Bomb.”

“What about you?”

Doberman hesitated for a second. The kid was down
there somewhere; dead probably, but he couldn’t leave him.

Dixon wasn’t dead. No way. No.

Doberman’s Hog was almost out of fuel, two MiGs were
heading this way, and more Iraqis were playing Rat Patrol. Dixon or no Dixon,
he had to go.

There wasn’t anything he could do for the kid now. No
amount of skill
— or
luck or superstition
—
would help him. Neither would
pounding the Hog into the dirt.

“Yeah, I’m on it,” he told A-Bomb, slamming the Hog
onto the get-away course.

OVER
IRAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

1058

T
echnical
Sergeant Rebecca
Ann Rosen slid back
in the hard seat of the McDonald Douglas AH-6G, letting her submachine gun fall
between her legs. She had nailed the son of a bitch on the ridge who’d been
firing at them; she saw the bastard fall backwards, saw the ripple of blood
appear on his chest even as the helicopter had jerked away.

But she’d seen something else, something more gruesome
and bitter. She’d seen Dixon’s body face-down in the rocks, dead.

She had no way of knowing that it was truly Dixon,
except that she did. The man was wearing the brown Special Ops camo, unlike the
Iraqis she’d seen. And besides, she knew it.

She picked up the submachine gun and folded it against
her arms, resisting the temptation to smash out the front windshield of the
helicopter in frustration, resisting the urge to scream.

“I think I can get us back to Fort Apache,” said the
pilot next to her.

“I know you can,” she said softly, clutching the gun
to her chest.

OVER
IRAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

1112

“W
e got
one
chance,” A-Bomb told him. “And
that’s Apache. We’re never ever making the border, let alone Al Jouf. We’ll be
walking fifty miles, at least.”

Doberman didn’t argue. He’d already plotted the course
himself.

“Got your six,” said A-Bomb when he told him he was
changing their heading.

###

From a purely technical, specs-on-paper point of view,
landing on the short strip at Fort Apache wasn’t an impossible proposition. The
A-10As had been designed to operate from scratch bases close to the front lines.
Apache was only slightly beyond what the plane’s designers had in mind when
they started processing the blueprints, and within what a majority of them
would have considered an acceptable margin of error, given the circumstances.
The planes were essentially empty. The light load meant they had less momentum
to slow down, and would less runway than normal. They had a good head wind, not
the stiffest, but definitely another positive factor. And these two pilots were,
without question, two of the finest Hog drivers in the world, able to wring
things from the plane that challenged if not defied the laws of aeronautics.

But there was always a gap between theory and reality,
a huge space inhabited by human beings and metal
—
a place where things went wrong
as well as right, where the fact that you had been flying for tons more time
than you were ever supposed to became more important than any theoretical
wing-loading equation. It was a place where even the bullets that had missed the
plane mattered, where the torque of the last screw in the final slot might be
life or death.

And it was a place of luck, whether Doberman wanted to
admit it or not, finally spotting the tiny squint of dirt in his windshield. It
was smaller than the arms of the tiny silver cross on his sleeve.

“Damn short,” said A-Bomb.

“What’d you expect?”

“Hey, I got it, no problem,” replied A-Bomb. “I’m just
saying it’s short, you know what I’m talking about?”

The Special Ops troops were standing by at the far end
of the field, off the side in a small area that from here looked tinier than
the main ring of a flea circus. They weren’t there to applaud. Because the
landing strip was so short and narrow, the Hogs would have to land one at a
time, the first plane hustling out of the way to let the second plane in.

Since their maneuvers at the battle scene had left
Doberman with marginally more fuel than A-Bomb, he told him to land first.

“See you on the ground,” said A-Bomb, working into the
first leg of the landing approach.

Doberman lifted his left hand and shook it, relieving
some of the muscle stress.

At least that’s what he intended. It didn’t seem to do
anything.

A-Bomb’s wheels hit at the very edge of the runway,
the Hog nosing into a textbook-perfect, short-field landing. He ended with a
good hundred feet to spare at the end.

Doberman practically whistled in admiration, trucking
into position for his own landing.

If A-Bomb could do it, so could he.

Doberman was tired as hell, but the day was far from
over. Taking off was going to be another test, assuming the Special Ops people found
some jet fuel for them

Hogs could probably run on moonshine.

Doberman forced his mind back to the job at hand,
slotting into a final approach as he set his flaps and prepared to duplicate A-Bomb’s
perfect touchdown.

Except that the outer decelerons didn’t deploy.

He knew instantly he had a problem, tried quickly to
reset, felt his heartbeat go from overwrought to ballistic. The plane fluttered
and threatened to turn into a spinning football. He had hydraulics, had
everything, but for some reason the decelerons stayed flat on the wing. His altitude
bled off and speed dropped, though not nearly enough as he fought to control
the approach.

No way was he landing without either smashing in a heap,
or rolling off into the immense ditch at the not-so-far end of the cement. Doberman
pulled off, his mind and hands whipping through the emergency-procedures
checklist.

Nothing worked. The Hog’s decelerons
—
actually split
ailerons located at the far end of each wing outside the two-segment flaps
— were critical for short-field landings. The bottom
part slide down to supplement the flaps while the upper portion popped up like
air brakes. Besides increasing the wing area and helping the plane slow down, the
decelerons helped control a certain innate tendency of the plane to roll.

Basically, they allowed the pilot to land on a dime
without becoming a piece of lawn sculpture.
Without
them set right, Doberman needed a lot more runway than he had, and even then it
might not be pretty.

Caul my ass, he thought, as he tried everything he
could think of without result. I got the stinking goddamn crappiest luck of
fucking Job in the whole damn Air Force.

Doberman worked into a new approach, pressured the
stick, and pumped his rudder, trying to jink the damn things loose. But nada.
He glanced at his fuel gauges. He was beyond dry.

Have to climb and bail. God, he’d break every bone in
his body, not to mention the plane.

Shit!

So what would Tinman’s cross have done? Made the
decelerons work? Put a tiger in his gas tank. It’d be as useless as his gun.

The gun.

As he began to pull up out of his approach, and idea occurred
to him that was so wild, he knew not only that he had to try it, but that it
would absolutely, positively work.

He put the nose back toward the runway and cleared his
head, moving around the Hog cockpit as calmly as an insurance executive
cleaning up his desk for the weekend. He was in a perfect position to land
—
damn
decelerons still not deceleroning
—
speed still high, but otherwise right on the money.
The plane nudged a bit, but he had her tight in his grip and she wasn’t going
anywhere he didn’t want her to.

Doberman stared out the windshield. He could have been
the insurance man, waiting at the twentieth floor of his high-rise, killing
time at the window as he waited for the elevator to arrive. The edge of the
runway came up big. His thumb danced over the elevator button.

Or rather, over the trigger of his gun.

Bing-bang-bam.

The Gatling’s heavy burst shook the Hog violently, and
three things happened:

The Hog slowed down, as Doberman had hoped.

The Hog nearly dropped straight down onto the desert,
which he hadn’t.

The Hog’s decelerons suddenly popped into action,
helping him regain enough control to pull to a slightly cockeyed,
burn-out-the-brakes, blow-the-tires, screech-to-a-smoky-halt stop a good fifty
feet before the end of the strip.

As he popped the cockpit and threw off his helmet,
Doberman looked up at the sky.

“I am one damn lucky son of a bitch!” he shouted.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” shouted A-Bomb, clambering
up onto the wing. “You’re also a goddamn show-off with that gun.” He slapped
the nose of the Hog in admiration. “Wish I’d thought of that.”