Hogs #3 Fort Apache (6 page)

KING
FAHD

25
JANUARY 1991

0455

H
is nose
tickled.

A-Bomb bolted upright in the bed, senses at full
alert. He took a sniff, then another; quickly, deliberately, he got up and put
on his boots. He slept in a flight suit for just this sort of emergency; he
grabbed his jacket and hustled out of his small tent, threading his way through
the Tent City to follow the faint but aromatic scent. Veering right, he headed
in the general direction of “Oz,” the Devil Squadron’s maintenance and hangar
area.

It was before dawn, but Fahd was in full gear. Many of
the more than one hundred planes quartered here had already left on their
missions north. A-Bomb sensed he was closing in as he ducked into a hangar and
past a gutted F-16
—
served the pointy-nose Viper right for wandering onto
a Hog base. He soon found himself standing in front of a coffeemaker that had
just finished spewing a full pot of black gold. The capo di capo and the
Tinman, the squadron’s resident Ancient Mechanic, stood nearby, already sipping
from cups.

“Jamaican,” said A-Bomb, nodding approvingly.

“Jamaican it is,” said Clyston. “Go ahead, have a
cup.”

A-Bomb realized there would be payback involved, but
he was too committed now to stop himself. He grabbed one of the sergeant’s
porcelain buckets and chugged.

“Except for Dunkin’ Donuts,” he said, three sigs later,
“this is the best joe I’ve had since the air war started.”

“Em privake stack,” said Tinman.

Like everyone else on base, A-Bomb couldn’t understand
a word the Tinman said. “Excuse me?”

“He says it’s his private stock,” said Clyston. “I
hear you and Captain Glenon are flying pretty far north today.”

“Yeah. Gonna play with some Special Ops guys.”

The capo nodded, then took a long sip of his coffee.
“Far to go in a Hog.”

“We can handle it.”

“How’s Captain Glenon doing these days?”

“Doberman?” A-Bomb was genuinely surprised by the
question. “He’s fine.”

“Luck holding out?” said the sergeant.

A-Bomb laughed. “Dog Man doesn’t believe in luck.”

“Do you?”

There was a serious note in Clyston’s voice, a hint
that he wasn’t just making conversation. A-Bomb realized the time for payback
had come.

But what the hell. This was real joe.

“Shit yeah, I’m superstitious as hell,” said A-Bomb.
“What’s the matter, Chief? You worried we’re going to break your planes?”

“You guys? Nah.” Clyston nodded at the Tinman, who
bent over an old toolbox below one of the workbenches. He opened it and removed
a small, silver cross.

“Es got, no hurt,” said the Tinman, holding the small
piece of metal in front of him as if it were a holy relic.

“What’s that?” asked A-Bomb.

“Kind of a good-luck charm the Tinman wants you to
have,” explained the capo as the Tinman carefully handed over the small medal
to A-Bomb. “St. Christopher’s Cross. Came from St. Peter’s. Blessed by the Pope
in 1502.”

“No shit. Were you there, Tinman?”

The Tinman said something unintelligible to A-Bomb.
Clyston only smiled. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was.”

A-Bomb turned the small pieces of metal over in his
hand. It was tarnished and worn smooth. It had definitely been around.

“What’s the deal?”

The Capo gave him a half-wink. “Karma thing. Morale.”

“Iff will kept Cap G wholk,” said Tinman.

Clyston was still grinning. Obviously, this was a
morale kind of thing for the Tinman’s benefit, part of some sort of elaborate
capo plot to keep the old-timer churning.

The things you had to do to be top sergeant.

 “He wants you to give it to Captain Glenon,” said the
capo. “Go ahead, have some more coffee.”

A-Bomb eyed the pot but stayed where he was. “That’s
going to be a problem,” he told them. “Doberman gets kind of touchy about
superstitious stuff. You know him, Chief. He won’t even take souvenirs, right?”

The Tinman’s face had begun to grow red, and he looked
obviously agitated. He started to say something, but Clyston put his hand up,
silencing him immediately.

“Thing is, Captain,” said the Capo, “I’d appreciate it
if you talked to him about.”

“I can’t make him do something he doesn’t want to do,”
said A-Bomb.

“If you say you’ll ask him, that would be enough,”
said Clyston, glancing at Tinman to make sure he was in agreement.

The old-timer nodded.

“I’ll see what I can do,” A-Bomb told them. Tin Man
nodded some more. Obviously satisfied, he drifted off to another part of the
shop, while A-Bomb helped himself to another cup of coffee.

“So where’s my cross?” he asked Clyston. “Don’t I need
karma, too?”

The capo made a face. “You don’t believe in that
superstitious crap, do you, Captain?”

“Nah,” said A-Bomb. “All I need is a good cup of joe.
Mind if I fill my thermos? This is the kind of stuff you want to be drinking
when you blow something up.”

###

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Doberman told A-Bomb
when he mentioned the cross an hour or so later. They were suiting up for their
mission.

“See the thing is, Tinman’s kind of superstitious is
what I think,” said A-Bomb. “And Clyston has to keep him happy because the
colonel’s sending him to Al Jouf. . .”

“Why does he have to be happy?”

“Dog, Tinman pretty much bends metal with his eyes,
you know what I’m talking about? The guy really knows his shit.”

“He’s a fucking loony bird.”

“Yeah, but he’s gonna keep us in the air. Maybe he’s a
shaman or something. Yeah, gotta be.”

“It’s all superstitious bullshit,” said Doberman. “I
don’t believe in that crap.”

“How about that penny you carry around?”

As the words left his mouth, A-Bomb realized he had
made a major mistake, but it was too late to take them back.

“That’s different.” Doberman’s face was so hot his
bristle-top hair seemed to flutter with the heat. “That’s fuckin’ different.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean nothin’.”

“You think I’m lucky? I got the fuckin’ luck of Job. I
busted my ass to learn to fly. I studied and practiced, that’s what I did.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Haunted crosses, shit.”

“Hey, I’m just trying to keep Clyston happy,” said A-Bomb.
“He gave me this thermos full of coffee. Want some?”

Doberman zipped his flight suit. “Next thing you know,
we’re going to have some stinking voodoo priest dancing on the wings. How the
hell do you get involved in this crap, anyway?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

KING
FAHD

25
JANUARY 1991

0755

D
oberman
rechecked the
flap settings, then ran
his eyes over the Hog’s instrument panel for one final make-sure-I’m-ready-to-go
pass. He wasn’t rushing anything, especially today. Laying his hand gently on
the throttle bar, he flexed his fingers and loosened his shoulder muscles,
willing himself into something approximating a relaxed state. He swung his eyes
back around the cockpit, inspecting the paraphernalia of his office: altimeter,
fuel gauges, radio controls. These were the desk accessories no Warthog
executive could live without.

At spec and ready to rock.

The plane whined gratefully as he fed her engines a
full dose of octane and began galloping down the runway. Doberman blew an easy
breath out of his lungs, pushing the battle-loaded Hog into the sky.

Designed in the 1970s, the A-10A was conceived as a
close-in ground-support plane, built to give a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.
Partly inspired by the success of the A-1 Skyraider in Vietnam, the plane was
an excuse to dump serious iron on an enemy. The two AGM-65Bs Mavericks and four
SUU-30s clusterbombs
tied to Doberman’s wings represented one of several
dozen ordinance variations typically carried by the Hogs. The Mavericks were
guided with the help of an optical (in this case) or infrared camera in the
missile’s nose; once locked on target by the pilot, the missile flew itself,
leaving him free to play with others. A small screen on the right side of the
dash was devoted to the Maverick’s display. While originally designed as an
antitank weapon, the missile was effective against a variety of targets, as it
had proven since the first day of the war.

“SUU” stood for Suspension Underwing Unit, a nod to
the fact that the sophisticated weapons were more like dump trucks than conventional
iron bombs. Popularly known as cluster bombs, they packed several hundred
explosive and fragmentation devices, releasing them at a pre-set altitude after
being dropped. The CBUs were an optimal weapon against “soft” targets, which
besides men included unarmored vehicles and tasty treats like radar vans and
dishes. The SUU could accommodate specialized loads, depending on the mission;
Doberman’s were CBU-58s
—
which hosted a total of 650 BLU-63
fragmentation/antipersonnel bomblets.

Besides the AGMs and cluster bombs, the Hog could
carry an assortment of conventional iron
—
unguided, straight-at-you blowup bombs. But in the
opinion of most Hog drivers, the plane’s fiercest weapon wasn’t its bombs. It
was the GAU-8/A Avenger cannon that sat in the plane’s chin. The Gatling gun
could deliver as many as four thousand rounds per minute; during a typical
three or four second burst more than a hundred peas of Uranium and high
explosive darted from the revolving barrels. The plane had been designed around
the huge gun; the weapon was so awesome it could literally make the Hog stand still
in the air as it was fired.

The one thing the Hog couldn’t do was go fast.
Doberman had the stops out and he was barely making 350 knots. And without an
autopilot, the plane demanded at least a modicum of attention at all times.

Still, as he climbed through the Saudi sky en route to
a pit stop north at King Khalid Military City, the pilot’s mind started to
wander. This part of the mission, staging out to Al Jouf before heading into
Iraq
,
was very plain-Jane, as close to boring as you could get in a war zone.
Inevitably, his thoughts shambled back to the card game and to Tinman’s idiotic
cross.

A lot of the crew members and even a few pilots were
heavily superstitious, he knew, but you had to draw the line somewhere.

Luck. Luck was some magic BB with his name on it
sailing out from Iraq a zillion miles away and managing to nail him. Luck was
something flaky happening with the engine in level flight, which in his
experience was almost as likely as the magic BB shot.

He thought that, he frowned, and in the next second
the right engine stopped winding its turbine. He saw the indicator zeroing out
of the corner of his eye as he tightened his grip on the stick, body jumping to
work the plane and compensate for the loss of power. Something unconscious took
over, something that felt rather than thought.

His mind whipped through his contingencies; it would
be best if he could make it back to the Home Drome but he had plenty of divert
fields closer if he couldn’t. His heart pounded and he could feel something in
his scalp tingling, as if his brain had gotten a quick shot of adrenaline.

He also felt himself suddenly out of kilter in the
cockpit.

But not because the Hog had slumped from losing the
engine. His body was compensating for something that hadn’t happened.

The engines were humming perfectly. There hadn’t been
a malfunction. In fact, everything was at operating manual specification.

Son of a bitch.

Doberman twisted backwards in the seat, craning his
neck to look out the cockpit glass. He couldn’t actually see the GE turbofans
mounted on either side of the fuselage in front of the Hog’s double-tail. But
he had to look anyway.

Just as he had to tap each one of the engine
instruments when he turned back.

Maybe they had flaked out for a second.

No. Everything was fine. It was all this thinking
about superstition and luck and that crap that was putting him over the edge.

“Devil Two this is One,” he said, calling A-Bomb. His
wingman was flying about a quarter mile back, off his wing in a trail. “How’s
our six?”

“Clean,” said A-Bomb. “You ducking flies?”

“Negative. Just staying awake.”

“Ought to drink more coffee.”

Air speed, attitude, rpms, fuel
—
everything at
spec. No way his engine had even burped.

It was just that he was tired. Damn royal straight
stinking flush had cost him a good night’s sleep.

“Something up?” A-Bomb asked.

If he didn’t know better, Doberman would swear this
was something A-Bomb and the capo had rigged up to teach him a lesson.

But which lesson would that be?

“Just wanted to make sure you were with me,” Doberman
told his wingmate. He glanced at his watch and did some quick math. “We have
ten minutes, twenty seconds to the Emerald City.”

“Yeah, I’m unwrapping my last pocket-pie now.”