Hogs #3 Fort Apache (3 page)

OVER
IRAQ

24
JANUARY 1991

2203

T
he first
thing
Dixon felt was overwhelming
numbness.

The next thing he felt was a severe yank against his
chest.

The chute had opened.

Already? It should have taken at least twenty seconds
to fall down to 30,000 feet. He’d only just stepped out of the plane.

Dixon glanced upwards, aware that he was supposed to
check the canopy to make sure it was properly deployed, but damned if he could
remember what the hell it was supposed to look like.

It was too dark to see anyway. He had a flashlight
somewhere, but he wasn’t supposed to use it unless it was an emergency.

Or was that the flares?

Fuck it. If the chute was screwed up he’d be tear
–
assing
downward. And he didn’t seem to be.

Dixon actually felt himself relax a little. Now that
the chute was open, all he had to do was steer to his landing spot.

Which wasn’t necessarily impossible. Hell, all he
really had to do was land. Let the commandos worry about finding him.

They would, wouldn’t they?

Dixon reached up for the steering togs in place on the
rig above each of his hands. He was so surprised to find them that he pulled
down a hell of a lot harder than he intended.

His chute flared, exactly as the tug told it to.
Unfortunately, since the still-deploying chute hadn’t had enough time to
adequately slow his momentum, and since he was swaying besides, the canopy
began to wrap.

Which, in layman’s terms, meant things were starting
to get pretty screwed up. Dixon was in danger of becoming a QPO – a quickly
plummeting object.

Whether it was the shock of the spin, instinct, or his
long-forgotten skydiving lessons, Dixon managed to ease back and open the ram-air
chute enough to stabilize. But before he did every muscle in his upper body
went ballistic; his arms got more rigid than a corpse’s. There was no way was
ever going to steer the rig like that.

He tried relaxing by thinking relaxing thoughts. But
all he could think of was how pissed Colonel Knowlington was going to be if he
pancaked into the Iraqi countryside.

Somehow, the image of Knowlington’s furling lips
relaxed his muscles
—
or scared them into pliability. Dixon began to feel
almost comfortable in his parachute rig, finally confident that he was gliding
and not falling. He turned his head to read the night-glo altimeter strapped to
his left wrist.

Instead, his attention was grabbed by the dark shadow
of a large parachute just beyond his arm, close enough for him to touch.

Dixon held his breath and tried to keep his arms
relaxed, worried that anything he did to steer away would only take him closer.
He lifted his legs
,
remembering at the last second to keep them together,
so he wouldn’t change his momentum abruptly.

Gradually, the distance between him and the shadow
opened. The other parachute slipped three, four, then five yards away, barely
visible. It seemed to hang there, as if kept close by magnetic attraction.

Dixon was too damn close for safety in the dark.

On the other hand, it probably meant he wouldn’t be
lost when he landed.

Dixon was supposed to yank off his oxygen mask at twelve
thousand feet. He looked again at the altimeter, but couldn’t make out the
reading. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he could see the dial.

What he could see were green-yellow streaks off to his
right.

Pretty things. Delicate and thin, flares in the night.

Tracers.

Guns being fired at someone or something.

Maybe even him.

The colors told him who was firing. NATO guns almost
uniformly packed red tracers.

Russian-made weapons carried green.

Green means bad, red means good.

Oh shit.

###

Actually, it wasn’t that hard to steer the chute, once
his arms flexed and he got used to it. And Dixon finally figured he wasn’t
going to suffocate if he just went ahead and yanked off the oxygen mask, no
matter how high or low he was.

Granted, it was pitch black, he had no idea where the
ground might be, and he was colder than an icicle on a polar bear’s nose. But
the lieutenant even managed to put a few more yards between him and whoever was
piloting the nearby chute, while still staying close enough to make it out in
the dark.

All he had to do was land and this nightmare would be
over. He finally realized that his altimeter had somehow gotten twisted around
on his arm during the jump, and somehow wouldn’t stay put where he could see it
without gyrating contortions. But he knew he was getting close to the ground.
He figured he’d see something when the time came.

If nothing else, his rucksack
—
hanging off
his rig below his feet
—
would hit the desert a second or so before him. That
was probably all the cue he needed, or wanted.

Dixon knew how to land. That was easy. You relaxed and
you walked, as if you were coming off the last step of an escalator.

No, that was the way the pros did it. He was still a
newbie. Newbies relaxed and walked and
rolled.
The roll took all the
energy out of the jump. You went down easy so you didn’t break something.

Yeah, right. What about the rucksack tied to his butt?
What if it bounced and smacked him in the head?

Serve him right, that.

Dixon looked over and realized that he had lost the
other parachute. He saw a much longer shadow, a blanket almost, in its place.

The ground. Must be.

He pushed his left tog down, starting to turn into the
wind. Then he realized he’d set it too hard and backed off, but not before his
body and the parachute had pitched sharply to the right. Trying to straighten
himself out he flared the chute hard, once again hitting the brakes in midair.
His legs whipped forward unexpectedly, and he felt like a kid about to fall out
of a swing.

Dixon knew that nine-tenths of what he had to do was just
relax his arms and shoulders, but his muscles weren’t cooperating. The
parachute suddenly seemed to have a mind of its own. His neck felt as if it had
a steel boxcar spring wrapped around it.

Somehow he got his arms loose enough to regain some
control over the parachute. And then he saw that the sky in front of him wasn’t
moving any more.

The ruck hit behind him. His left leg hit the ground.
The next thing he knew he was twisting his face in the dirt.

Dixon’s first thought was that he had broken every
bone in his body from the neck down.

His next thought was
:
Hot damn! I made it.

He rolled his legs under him, then released the
parachute. He got to his knees and nearly fell over, as dizzy as an
out-of-control carousel.

He was still dizzy when a short man with a very large
gun materialized directly in front of him. The gun barrel poked into his
shoulder.

“Hey, Lieutenant, shit, why didn’t you land into the
wind?”

It was Sergeant Winston.

Dixon’s head finally stopped spinning. He stood
slowly. His ribs felt crushed but not quite broken. There was a stitch in his
lungs, and his left knee felt wobbly, but nothing had been damaged too badly.

“Were you trying to show off?” asked the sergeant.

“Show off?”

“Trying to beat everybody to the ground?”

“No.”

Winston obviously didn’t believe him, and made a sound
halfway between a snort and a laugh. “Well, you did. And you scored a perfect bull’s-eye.
Come on, let’s round up the rest of the team and get our butts in gear,” added
the sergeant, helping Dixon pull in his parachute. “I thought I saw something
moving on the highway just before we landed.” He shook his head. “Shit. I
figured you’d be off a mile at least. Fucking Hog pilots. You probably think
jumping out of a plane in the dark’s fun, huh?”

HOG
HEAVEN

24 JANUARY
1991

2230

“T
he kill boxes
are here,” Knowlington told
Doberman, A-Bomb and Wong, pointing to a map on an easel in Cineplex, Devil
Squadron’s multipurpose ready room, hangout space and briefing area. It was
called Cineplex because there was a large-screen TV with a satellite hookup on
one end, courtesy of Chief Master Sergeant Alan Clyston and his unending supply
line.

“You’re
pointing at the Euphrates,” said Doberman.

“I
know,” said Knowlington.

“Pretty
damn far for us to be flying in daylight,” Doberman told him. “Going to drain
time on target to nothing. Be there for what, ten minutes, then have to go
home?”

They’d
have more than ten minutes— the colonel had figured it at nearly thirty minutes
and maybe more, depending on their load configuration— but it was just like
Doberman to complain about that, rather than the problem of actually flying so
far behind enemy lines in an airplane built to stay close to the front. Even
from Al Jouf, a small, forward operating area on the other end of Saudi Arabia,
it would take about an hour at nearly top speed, through some of the best
anti-air defenses in the world, for the Hogs to reach the area where the
commando teams were operating. Granted, allied Weasels had whacked most of the
SAM batteries pretty hard. But all it took was one to nail you.

“Hey,
time on target’s no big deal as long as they got the targets picked out,” said A-Bomb.
“What we need is a good ground controller calling the shots. Somebody who’s
familiar with Hogs, you know what I’m talking about?”

“Well,
we’ll have one,” said the colonel. “In fact, he’s one of our guys.”

“One
of our guys? No shit,” said A-Bomb. “Who?”

“Dixon.
He parachuted in with one of the commando teams a few minutes ago.”

Both
men couldn’t have looked more surprised if he had told them the world was
actually flat.

“Dixon?”
said Doberman.

“The
lieutenant apparently volunteered,” said Knowlington.

“He’s
just a fucking kid,” said Doberman.

“No
shit,” said Knowlington.

“Hey,
BJ’ll do fine,” said A-Bomb. “He knows what it’s about.”

“He’s
a fucking kid,” Doberman told him.

“Whatever
he is, he’s on the ground in Iraq now,” said Knowlington. “And it’s too goddamn
late to get him back. Wong, you’ve been awful quiet. What’s your opinion?”

Knowlington
felt lucky to have snagged Wong for his team. Hijacking him just after he had come
to the Devil Squadron on a weapons assignment for CENTCOM. Wong was the
self-professed expert in Russian weapons. But for Knowlington, his real asset
was the drollest sense of humor he had heard since his days in Vietnam.
Sometimes it was so subtle, only the colonel could pick it up, and even he
couldn’t always tell whether Wong was goofing or being serious.

He was
serious now, definitely.

“The
entire operation is a waste of time,” said Wong. He gave a sigh so deep that it
sounded like it came from a draft horse. “The so–called Scud or Russian–made
SS-1 presents a minimal military threat, even if fitted with chemical warheads.
As we saw during the Afghanistan War— ”

“You
were there?” asked Doberman, about as sarcastic as a reporter questioning a
congressional junket.

“For a
time,” said Wong without missing a beat. “Even when massed with the most
accurate targeting radars and intelligence available, the SS-1 family was of
scant use against the rebel insurgency, with an ineffective damage ratio and a
destructive envelope that is frankly less intimidating than the average grenade
attack. The Iraqi targeting and launch capacity is even less organized. The
parabola of probable destruction has the slant of an inchworm at rest. Given
the infrastructure and resources necessary to support the infiltration,
targeting and disposal of these minor annoyances, it would make much more sense
to –”

“It’s
not our job to argue yea or nay,” said Knowlington. “We just have to hit what
they want us to hit.”

Wong’s
mouth and throat contorted, as if the rest of what he was going to say had been
written on a sheaf of paper and he swallowed it whole.

“Yeah,
all right, what the hell. I volunteer,” Doberman told Knowlington.

“I
wasn’t going to ask you to volunteer.”

“I
volunteer anyway.”

“Me,
too,” said A-Bomb. “There’s your two-ship. When do we leave?”

With
Mongoose due to be shipped back to the States, Doberman and A-Bomb were, at
least arguably, the best two pilots in the squadron; by asking them,
Knowlington had fulfilled his promise to the general.

Now he
proceeded to try and talk them out of it. Both had seen more than their share
of action in the past few days and were due serious rests. Doberman especially
looked a little ragged around the edges. And with Mongoose going home, the
squadron needed a new DO – one who was here at Home Drome, not out in the
desert.

“That’s
no argument to get me to stay,” said Doberman. “Listen Colonel, no offense
intended, but I want to fly, not sit behind a desk.”

“Major
Johnson didn’t sit behind a desk,” he told him. “Mongoose flew as much as
anybody.”

“Yeah,
but I can do without the bullshit, you know? Besides, it screws up your head.”

Knowlington
nodded. Doberman was more right than he knew. The downside of the job wasn’t
paperwork or bureaucracy or even so much the dealing with the personnel matters
that inevitably fell in the DO’s lap. It was the worrying. You felt responsible
for everyone, and it weighed on you, began to eat you away. It had only been as
a commander that Knowlington himself had come to feel real pressure; only as a
professional worrier that he had fallen into despair, and worse.

And,
truth was, he’d known these guys would volunteer.

“All
right,” Knowlington told them. “Go get some sleep.”

The
two pilots left, but Wong remained.

“Captain?”

“Begging
your pardon, sir, but I wonder if we could discuss the aspect of my transfer.”

“Which
aspect is that?” Knowlington asked. He was tired and not particularly in a mood
to enjoy Wong’s usual routines.

“The
aspects of its existence. I’m of no use here,” continued Wong. “My role is
reduced to fetching people and pointing out the mistakes in incompetent
estimates.”

Knowlington
started to dismiss him when a light went off in his head: Wong was angling to
get involved with Fort Apache.

He
should have realized it immediately. Poor guy probably felt insulted that he
hadn’t been asked to volunteer. For someone with Wong’s record and abilities,
it was a real put-down not to be included. But what the hell could he do at Al
Jouf? Help coordinate the bombing missions?

Probably.
But the commandos had their own intelligence guys. Not as good as Wong, but
damn good.

Still,
it might make sense to have Wong out there, scoping the air defenses for
Doberman and A-Bomb. Special Ops people weren’t going to be experts on SA-6s or
Rolands, and there were plenty of them where they were heading. Wong knew his
shit, even if he used phrases like “parabolas of probable destruction” and
compared missiles to inchworms.

Damn
ball-buster.

“I
need you around, Wong,” Knowlington told him. “Your insights are important.
Seriously.”

“With
all due respect, sir, a trained monkey could perform the services you require.”

Typical
Wong-style exaggeration— the whole reason Knowlington kept him around.

But
didn’t his guys deserve the best?

“All
right, Wong. Look, I have to go talk to Chief Clyston. Hook up with the team he
puts together and get out to Al Jouf ASAP. You have my blessing. Just remember,
you’re still my guy, not theirs.”

Wong
turned purple, or at least reasonably close.

“Al
Jouf?”

“That’s
where they’re running this from.”

“Colonel.
. .”

“Yeah,
I know,” Knowlington said, slapping him on the back as he started away. “You
owe me big time.”