Hogs #3 Fort Apache (7 page)

FORT
APACHE

25
JANUARY 1991

1157

A dried-out but
very deep wadi formed a semi-circle around the abandoned runway. Hawkins,
kicking at the erosion at the southeastern end of the runway, theorized that
the Iraqis had found the tributary too rough to deal with, the seasonal rains
eating at the ground they needed to stay solid under the long expanse of
concrete and asphalt. Why they wouldn’t have realized that before laying out
several hundred feet of concrete, though, he had no idea.

It was nice of them to tear up the road leading out to
the highway, though. That made sneaking up on Fort Apache a little more
difficult.

Hawkins’ men had set out a good defensive perimeter
and studded it with a variety of weapons; still, a concentrated armor attack
could easily overrun them until they got their AH-6G gunships in. With luck, they
would get them in tonight.

Hawkins turned and began walking carefully down the
center of the cement. Except for minor crumbling around the expansion joints,
the concrete was smooth and seemingly solid. He could certainly land his helos.

He wanted a lot more. Like an MC-130, loaded for bear.
But to get the big four-engine gunship in and back up in the air again, they
needed two thousand feet.

Six of the twelve men who’d come in on a second
parachute drop once Fort Apache was secure were combat engineers. They’d landed
about ten minutes before dawn; a few seconds later he’d gotten them to work
plotting an extension that would add nearly six hundred feet to the northwest
end of the runway. Steel mesh was due to parachuted in as soon as the sun went
down. But that would get them only to the edge of the streambeds. Without a
bulldozer and cement culverts, the runway wasn’t getting any longer.

Still, all things considered, Hawkins had only
relatively minor problems at the moment. One of the men on the second team
—
an
inexperienced jumper who had no business being on the team, volunteer or not
—
had broken his
leg and arm during the drop, their only casualty so far. He was in decent
enough condition to stay on, but he was their lone helicopter mechanic.

Team Blue, operating north of the Euphrates since the
night before, hadn’t checked in on schedule, though that might just be due to
problems with the satellite communications system. But the team he’d been most
worried about, Team Ruth, was in position and ready to work several hours ahead
of schedule.

Sent to an area thought to be one of the main Scud
highways, Team Ruth would be vectoring in bombers by late afternoon
—
assuming they
found something to target. Hawkins had put some of his best men on the squad,
including Master Sergeant Eli Winston, who was leading the team. And Ruth
included the lone Air Force officer assigned to the entire Injun country
operation, a ground FAC who was supposed to sweet talk the iron onto the Scud
trailers. A pair of A-10As had been attached to Apache; for now, they were at
Team Ruth’s beck and call, though Hawkins could change that if he needed to.

The captain took a wistful glance down the runway. It
was good to know the Warthogs were on the job, but he couldn’t wait for his own
helicopters to get here.

He turned back toward the command bunker. There was
just enough time for a cup of Earl Grey tea before the scheduled call to his
colonel at Al Jouf.

OVER
IRAQ

25
JANUARY 1991

1540

D
oberman
glanced through
the clear Perspex
bubble overhead, scanning the light blue sky. Somewhere above him, a pair of
F-15C Eagles flew like guardian angels, swift police dogs ready to nail any
Iraqi who dared take flight. Just to the southeast, the back-seater in a
Phantom F-4 Wild Weasel scanned his radar warning screen, ready to point a
homing missile into the dish of any air defense system foolish enough to turn
itself on. To the north, a package of attack planes and electronic jammers
streaked toward the outskirts of Baghdad, loaded down with bombs and defensive
weapons. Far to the south, an Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS plane coordinated the
entire air war, scanning for threats and potential threats, moving planes to
meet them like a chess champion throttling an opponent.

And yet, Doberman felt alone in the cockpit,
accompanied only by A-Bomb flying now a half-mile back. Both Hogs were at 17,110
feet. The ride up from Al Jouf had been free and easy, but it had been long,
and they still had nine and a half minutes to go before they flew in range of
the Special Ops unit they were tasked to assist.

If you were waiting for a stagecoach in the middle of Dodge
City, nine and a half minutes wasn’t that long. If you were riding into Dodge
with all kinds of bad guys eying you from the roadside, it was an eternity.

While not completely defenseless, the planes were
hardly bullet or missile proof. The AlQ-119 radar-jamming pod on its right wing
was a near-revolutionary dual mode jammer, when it was first introduced back in
the Stone Ages. While it still provided protection against the older elements
of Saddam’s multi-layer air defense, it was hardly an invincible shield. The A-10A’s
more robust radar warning receiver or RWR could find and track more than a
dozen threatening radars in several bands, telling the pilot that he was
staring in his own radar show. But that was hardly a guarantee that he wouldn’t
be shot down.

Among Saddam’s varied arsenal, Soviet-made SA-6’s and
German Rolands were particularly effective weapons, posing more than a theoretical
threat even to the fast movers. While the Devils had been briefed on the known
positions of the SAM batteries throughout Iraq, both the SA-6
—
NATO
code-named “Gainful”
—
and the Roland sat on mobile launchers that could
pretty much be moved at will.

A pair of Sidewinders sat in a double-rail on
Doberman’s left wing. Excellent heat-seeking weapons, they were meant for
close-in air-to-air defense. They’d be handy if an enemy plane managed to get
by the Eagles, but any MiG that could do that was a damned serious threat. It
would have probably already launched longer-range weapons from far outside the
Sidewinder’s scope.

But maybe nobody even knew they were here. The A-10As
were too high to be heard from the ground. Most Iraqi radar operators who had
survived the first day of the air war had realized the best way to stay alive
was to leave their knobs in the off position. And besides, the desert and
scrubland below the Hog’s wings was mostly empty, and hardly worth protecting.

Doberman checked his position on the INS, worked
himself slowly through the routine checks of his instruments. He was like a
Western marshal, buckling his gun belt before the big showdown, checking each
bullet in his gun carefully, spinning the revolver more for luck than to make
sure it was working properly.

Luck.

Doberman flushed his brain of trivia, concentrating on
his mission. Once on station, they’d take it down closer to the ground and look
for Scuds. The missile carriers were said to move along the targeted highway in
mid- to late-afternoon, en route to their launching spots. The commandos and
Dixon would spot them; the A-10s would blow them up.

There were only so many highways the Scud trucks could
use. That was one curve of probability. Time was another. Even assuming the intel
was good, their small time on target because of fuel considerations meant there
was a bit of luck involved.

Luck again.

I am an engineer, Doberman told himself. Planes do not
fly on luck, bridges are not built on luck, Scud carriers are not splashed on
luck.

He checked his instruments and steadied his hand around
the stick, precisely on course and on time.

IRAQ

25
JANUARY 1991

1540

D
ixon
woke up
with a kink in his neck the
size of Iowa. Both hands were numb. He had to take the worst leak of his life.
And as he got up, he felt something hard and heavy push him back down.

“Truck.”

Leteri’s hoarse voice brought Dixon back to reality.
He rolled over, scooped his gun from the ground, and began following Leteri up
the hill on his hands and knees to a dug out position just below the crest of
the hill.

“What do we have?” he whispered as Leteri peered over
the top of the ridge they were using as a lookout post. “Should I call in the
planes?”

The sergeant shook his head, holding up his finger to
tell Dixon to wait. Turk and Winston lay against the top of the ridge, watching
the road through his binoculars. Dixon heard the distant sound of a truck
approaching. The sound got louder, then began to fade.

“Just a pickup,” said Winston, slipping down. He gave
Dixon his binoculars.

The Steiner 7x40’s brought the roadway into sharp
relief, making it somehow seem more real. The yellow-gray haze of the distance
melted into crisp shades of brown and blue. The moving finger with its trail of
dust sharpened into a white pickup.

A Chevy, as a matter of fact. About ten years old.

Winston’s scowl deepened. “They may be checking the
roadway, scouting it to see if it’s safe,” he said finally.

“This deep in Iraq?” asked Dixon.

The sergeant shrugged. “
I
would. Then again, it
could be another civilian truck. We’ve seen three since you fell asleep.”

The sergeant resumed scanning in the direction the
pickup had come from. Dixon followed Leteri back down the hill to a small,
dug-out position at the foot of the slope.

“Latrine’s anywhere in that direction,” said Leteri,
pointing a few yards beyond.

“You have ESP?”

“Yeah
—
ESPP, extra sensory pee perception.”

Dixon took care of business, then returned to check
out the communications system, which Leteri had put together while he was
sleeping. It consisted of two parts. One was the unit itself, contained in a
rucksack; the handset and controls lay at the top. The other part was a small,
folding radar dish that looked something like the folding circular clothesline
Dixon’s mom used to use in her backyard. The sergeant had oriented the dish so
that its signal could be picked up with a minimum of static by an orbiting
satellite. With the push of a button, they could talk with Apache or the air
support units or a command center in a Riyadh bunker, and from there, literally
to the world. The short-burst, coded transmissions were nearly impossible for
anything but the most sophisticated equipment to intercept.

“Here we go,” said Winston above. He chortled a bit,
as if he had laid a bet that was now paying off. “Yeah, here we go.”

Dixon climbed back to the top of the ridge.

“It’s a truck, but I don’t think it’s a Scud carrier,”
said Turk.

“There’s another truck right behind it,” said Winston.

Dixon could hear the engines now. Two tiny ants approached,
winding their way across the distant highway.

“Just trucks, Sarge,” said Turk.

“Here, Lieutenant, you take a look,” said Winston,
handing him the binoculars. “You got pilot’s eyes, right?”

Dixon’s pilot’s eyes took a second to adjust to the
glass: the silver and green blurs turned into a pair of tractor-trailers. He
caught a Mercedes emblem on the front of the leading vehicle as it took the
long curve toward them.

“Sorry,” he said. “They’re not missiles.”

Winston frowned and took the binoculars back. The
trucks might be carrying military supplies or they might not. In any event,
there was no sense telling the Hogs to hit them.

“Bus or something coming the other way,” said Turk.
His dark mahogany cheeks began glowing cherry red. “Hey now, here we are. That,
my friends, is a Ural 375 flatbed, built by Ivan just for our obnoxious friend.
That’s a crane, I do believe, and here we go, here we, here we go. You tell me
lieutenant, what’s under those tarps? Huh?”

Dixon took Turk’s binoculars and quickly focused on
the road. The lead truck was a common Warsaw-pact export, as ubiquitous as a
U.S. M35 6x6. On its back was a long crane, the type that could be used to
erect a derrick or even a modular house in the States. But the two tractors
following behind it indicated the crane might have a much more sinister purpose:
the Zil-157 long haulers were known Scud ferries, with large tarps curled
around suspicious shapes at the back of each truck.

“Aren’t they going in the wrong direction?” asked
Dixon. “They’re heading East.”

“Don’t worry about what the intel people told us,”
said Winston. “Just get your guys on the horn. Now. Uh, sir.”

Dixon was already scrambling down the hill to do just
that.