Hogs #3 Fort Apache (5 page)

NEAR
FORT APACHE, IRAQ

25
January, 1991

0355

C
aptain
Kevin Hawkins
stopped and checked the
geo-positioner in his hand. They were allegedly less than a quarter-mile from
the abandoned stretch of concrete the Bat Cave planners had designated Fort
Apache, but he couldn’t see it. Like the other members of the team, Hawkins had
a set of AN/PVS-7 night vision goggles, known as NODs or night observation
devices, attached to his helmet. The high-tech devices gave a dim green glow to
the surrounding terrain, making it possible to see large objects several
hundred yards ahead. But the Iraqi desert was real desert here, with shifting
dunes and blowing sands. While they were working off satellite photos little
more than thirty-six hours old, Hawkins was worried that the concrete had been
swallowed whole.

He also worried that the flat surface nearly a
thousand feet long was simply a mirage. The intelligence folks had not been
able to come up with a plausible reason that the Iraqis would start an airport
here, nearly five miles from a highway, nor had they explained why they had
suddenly abandoned it.

Not that Hawkins really cared what the explanation
might be. He only cared that he found the damn concrete, secured it, and then
made it into an airfield. If he succeeded, a pair of Special Ops helos would
fly in tomorrow night with supplies, and stay for more than just dinner. He’d
also start getting serious parachute drops with enough equipment to turn this
little sidewalk in the middle of the desert into Saddam’s worst nightmare.

Assuming he could find it. Hawkins double-checked the
positioner again. The line display on the unit, dubbed by its makers “Magellan”
,
told him his
target lay straight ahead.

His eyes told him there was nothing there. What should
he believe?

The positioner relied on information supplied by a set
of dedicated satellites high overhead. The system had not been completed before
the start of the war, and there were grumbles about its accuracy. But it had
always worked perfectly for him.

So he trusted it, more or less.

“All right, we move north. Let’s go,” he told his team
of Delta Force troopers. His voice sounded confident, and he knew anyone
hearing it might think he had spotted the base.

Or not. These guys were pretty much on to his style by
now, which was straight-ahead, no-turning-back, no matter the insanity.

“Captain, building at two o’clock.”

Sergeant Nomo’s warning
—
which somehow managed to sound
like a whisper though it was nearly as loud as a shout
—
stopped the
team. Hawkins trotted up to his position on the northeast flank of the unit.

A jagged wall stood over a low dune two hundred yards
ahead. Nomo had found Apache’s lone structure, a twenty-by-twenty poured-cement
foundation the analysts said stood about three feet high.

Quickly, Hawkins had the team reorient into groups to
surround their target. The team’s lone infra-red viewer, more precious than
gold in the Gulf, revealed no warm bodies in the chilly night. But this deep in
Injun country, they were taking no chances. The men moved out slowly, the lead
troopers in each group armed with silenced MP-5s. While not absolutely silent,
the submachine gun was difficult to hear more than a few yards away.

Which was why the loud report of a gun a few minutes
later sent every member of the team diving into the dirt.

The shot came from the left flank, near the end of the
runway. There was no possibility it had come from the troopers, at least as far
as Hawkins was concerned. When no other shots fired, he began making his way in
that direction, one hand on his viewer as he scanned to see where the Iraqis
were positioned.

“What do we have, Vee?” Hawkins asked as he reached
the flank team leader without spotting anything.

Sergeant Olhum Vee pointed toward a ditch with the end
of his M-16A2. The rifle had a grenade launcher attached to the barrel. “Got to
be in the ditch,” he said. “Teller and Garcia are swinging around. We have them
covered.”

“How many?” Hawkins asked.

“Don’t know,” said Vee. “Nobody saw anything. There’s
no place to hide besides that ditch; can’t be more than four men, tops. Maybe
just one or two.”

“There’s a culvert on the other side,” Hawkins told
him, gesturing toward the other end of the runway. “But it’s empty. We’ll move
in slow

It took Teller and Garcia five long minutes to get
into position. By then, the rest of the team had the area well covered: nothing
else was moving.

Hawkins watched as Teller and Garcia bolted upright
behind the ditch where the shot had come from. They jumped into it without
firing.

Were they trying to take the Iraqi’s alive? Hawkins
and Lee leapt up, running to assist their men
—
who were leaning against the
edge of the ditch, laughing their butts off.

There were no Iraqis.

“What the hell?” said Vee.

“Relax,” said Garcia. “It’s a crow banger.” He held up
a handful of spent cartridges and pointed to a small device near his feet. “See
the wires? One of us must’ve got the last one, ‘cause it’s empty now.”

Hawkins bent down to examine the device as the rest of
the team gathered at the top of the ditch. Similar to ones used on some
American farms, the miniature cannon was intended to scare off animals.
Activated by trip wires in the desert, it fired blanks.

“Damn fucking lucky it wasn’t a mine,” said Hawkins,
which stopped the laughter. “Let’s make sure this place is secure. And watch
where the hell you step from now on. You may end up with more than camel poop
on your boot.”

IRAQ

25 JANUARY
1991

0455

D
ixon’s
legs felt
like they were going to
fall off. He dragged them forward, desperate to keep his momentum up. The
number five man in the team, Jake Green, kept looming behind him, and Dixon
felt him sneering every time he had to cut his pace to keep from running over
the Air Force lieutenant.

The thing was, Dixon thought he was in excellent
shape. He had run and won a 10K race just before coming over to Saudi Arabia,
and had managed to work out nearly every day since the deployment began. He
thought he shouldn’t have any trouble keeping up with them.

But the Special Forces soldiers practically galloped
through the desert, even with their overstuffed rucksacks. Each member of the
team, Dixon included, carried more ammo on him than a good-sized gun store.
Dixon’s brown desert camo suit was covered by a vest stuffed with smoke
grenades and clips for his MP-5; his pockets were so jammed with extra bullets
for his Beretta that he couldn’t sit properly. Each trooper had a gas mask in a
leg pocket; a full chem suit sat at the top of his ruck. The rest of the gear
varied, depending on the team member’s assigned role. The point man and the
tail gunner both carried silenced Berettas and MP-5s. The team’s pathfinder
worked with a geo-positioner from the number two slot in the line. All but
Dixon carried a pair of “night eyes”
—
AN/PVS-7 goggles, which could be attached to a helmet
and turned the terrain a fuzzy but viewable green.

Maybe there was something in the goggles that made
them move so damn fast, Dixon thought to himself, struggling into a trot to
keep his place. He was behind the jumpmaster turned communications specialist,
Sergeant First Class Joey Leteri, the number-four man in line. The trooper
packed an M-16 with a grenade launcher, and humped not only his own ruck but
the satellite com gear as well. But just like the others, he was moving quicker
than a race horse threatened with the glue factory.

Suddenly, Leteri stopped short. Dixon felt himself
being pushed into the ground by Green.

“Tents,” whispered the trooper, who was the team’s
medic. He pointed over Dixon’s shoulder toward the left; in the dim twilight
the only thing Dixon could see was the shadow of hills that were part of an old
quarry some miles away.

Sergeant Winston came back to them. “Aren’t supposed
to be any Bedouins this far north,” he told them. “But we think that’s all they
are. They got camels. We have to take a jog east near here anyway. Cornfield’s
about four miles on. That OK with you, lieutenant?”

It was the first time anyone had made even a glancing
reference to the fact that Dixon, though an observer, technically outranked
everyone here. There was no question from Winston’s tone that it had better be okay.

“You take us where we’re supposed to be,” said Dixon.
“That’s more than fine with me.”

“Yeah,” said Winston, pulling his SAW to his chest
before moving down the line to tell the tail-gunner what was going on.

Resentment began mixing under Dixon’s fatigue as the
team got back underway. He didn’t need to be in charge
—
didn’t want to
be, because frankly he had no damn idea what the hell to tell anybody to do.
But he wanted to be respected, or at least accepted.

At best, they thought he was nuts
—
and not
necessarily good nuts. Staffa Turk, the demo man who was bringing up the rear,
had practically sneered at Dixon earlier when he assured him he could handle an
MP-5.

Granted, it was an exaggeration, since he’d never
actually fired one before. But they didn’t know that.

The Delta warriors were all older than Dixon
—
much
—
and all were
NCOs, a tribe not especially known for tolerating junior lieutenants. He could
only guess what they thought of the Air Force. But heck
—
he’d already
shot down a stinking helicopter in combat, and survived some of the thickest
antiair fire of the war. Not to mention herded a platoon’s worth of Iraqis into
the back of a Pave Low.

Not that he could tell them that, or even hint that he
was angry. Saying anything would have exactly the opposite effect that he
wanted.

Actually, what he really wanted was sleep, and plenty
of it. He was so tired the marrow was draining out of his bones. Sooner or
later he was going to stumble face-first into the hardscrabble dirt in front of
him.

Which was the last thing he wanted to do. Dixon
concentrated on his steps, tightening his grip on the MP-5’s metal stock
tightly to keep himself awake.

###

About an hour after they had seen the Bedouin camp,
Winston had the team stop. He told them to eat while they rested; Dixon fished
out an MRE and wolfed its contents down in a breath.

“Got a candy bar if you want it, sir,” offered Leteri,
who was crouched nearby. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to him since
boarding the plane.

“I’d love it,” said Dixon. “Hey, uh, you can call me
BJ. Most people do.”

“I’m Joey.”

“That’s Joah-ee,” said Winston in an exaggerated
Italian accent.

Leteri tossed him a Snickers bar.

“I haven’t had one of these since I was in grammar
school,” said Dixon. He played it up, holding it to his nose like a connoisseur
sniffing at a glass of expensive wine.

“You’re going to want to take the paper off before you
eat it,” said Leteri.

“Why lose the calories?” Dixon said, unwrapping it.
“Maybe I’ll just snort it up my nose.”

He had just enough self-control to offer Winston half
the bar, but not enough to save it for later when Winston waved him off.

“You keepin’ up, OK?” asked the team leader.

“It’s a good hike. You?”

Winston laughed.

“Be honest with you, BJ,” said Leteri. “No braggin’ or
anything, but compared to some of our training gigs, this is like a guided tour
of Lincoln Center.”

“Where’s Lincoln Center?” Dixon asked.

“Shit, you serious?”

Dixon felt his face start to burn. “You mean the
Monument?”

“No, shit.” Leteri thought this was the funniest damn
thing he’d ever heard. “You never heard of Lincoln Center? You serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious.”

“Where’d you grow up, Lieutenant?” asked Winston.

“Wisconsin.”

“No shit,” said Leteri. “Lincoln Center’s a concert
hall in New York City. Every school kid in the state’s got to tour it before
they’re twelve. The law.” Leteri waited a second before adding. “That’s a joke,
sir.”

“He got it,” said Winston. “If it were funny, somebody
would have laughed.”

“So where in Wisconsin?” asked Leteri.

“Little town called Chesterville. About two hours away
from Milwaukee. More cows than people. Nobody’s ever heard of it.”

“No shit. I come from a little town called Chester
like an hour north of New York City. We got cows there, too.”

“You have cows in New York?”

“Hell yeah. It’s pretty far from the city. Just nobody
believes you when you tell them.”

“I thought you were from Brooklyn,” said Winston.

“Nah. I was
born
there. I mean, my grandma
still lives there and shit. But we moved out of the city when I was three.”
Leteri turned back to Dixon. “People look at me funny when I tell them I grew
up across the street from a farm. Hear New York and they figure, you know, it’s
all city.”

“All right, break time over,” said Winston, standing
up. “Here’s the deal. We got the streambed just over that rise. We follow that
into an open area near the road. Obviously they knew we’d have some farm boys
with us when they called it the Cornfield. Makes me feel right at home.” The
sergeant obviously loved sarcasm; he practically broke his jaw twisting his
face into a smile. “On my signal we shake out. Lieutenant, you want to stay
kinda near Leteri here until we know what we got. Leteri, you got my ass.”

“I always take the dirt road.”

“Yeah, fuck you too, bugger boy.”

“Better to be the bugger, than the buggee.”

The troop was soon moving again, stretching into a
long line as they proceeded carefully up the side of a large ditch. Shallow
water filled the bottom. Shards of ice had formed along the surface, in case
any of them needed reminding about how cold it was. Two dry irrigation ditches
ran off at right angles ahead; there were others as the main wadi or streambed
snaked around a flat plateau with a good view of the highway a half-mile
beyond.

That was the Cornfield. The rise not only gave them a
decent view of the road, but there was a good space between some of the ditches
that could be used by helicopters if they needed to be evacuated.

Not that they were planning on being evacuated any
time soon.

By the time they reached the top, Dixon’s limbs and
body had congealed into a numb mass. The soft campaign hat he was wearing felt
like a curtain around his brain, a permanent static emitter jamming outside
reception.

Sleep would revive him. Sleep would warm his frozen
bones, wet his parched lungs. Sleep would fill the hole in his stomach.

Sleep was a woman waiting for him just a few feet
ahead, wrapping her legs around him, her open palms and long fingers sliding
slowly across his chest. Electricity sparked as she touched him, soft and warm.
Her fingers slipped into the crevices behind his ears, around and across his
temples, down his cheeks to his neck, to the thick skin beneath his chin, up to
his mouth. She spread herself back on the bed and pulled him into her, open and
ready.

“We stop here,” said Winston.

Damned if the sergeant wasn’t part ghost, disappearing
and reappearing at will.

“Use the slope here for cover. Hey Lieutenant, you
still with us?”

Dixon grunted an answer as he collapsed butt first in
the dirt.

“Maybe you ought to get some sleep, sir,” said
Winston. “Catch a nap before show time. We’ll wake you up when we need you.”

Dixon nodded, then pushed himself prone.

“Uh, BJ?”

Dixon looked up to find Winston grinning in his face.
“You probably want to undo your ruck first.”

Nodding, he fumbled with the straps, barely getting it
off before slipping his head back to the ground.