Hogs #3 Fort Apache (8 page)

OVER
IRAQ

25
JANUARY 1991

1552

“D
evil
Flight this
is Ground Hog. Are you
up?”

He’d been expecting to hear Dixon eventually, but even
so Doberman actually turned and looked out the cockpit canopy, as if BJ were
gunning a Hog next to him.

“We’re here,” Doberman told him.

“Captain Glenon. Doberman? Is that you? Geez, how the
heck are you?”

“I’m fine,” said Doberman. There was no need for an
elaborate authentication procedure
—
only Dixon would say “heck. The kid was way behind in
the mandatory cursing unit of Hog training.

“Yo, War Hero,” said A-Bomb. “How the fuck are you?
Blow up any helicopters today?”

 “Listen, Devil Flight,” snapped Dixon, suddenly all
business, “we have three targets for you. Proceeding east on the highway, uh,
two, three miles now from Point Super Zed-Three. You copy?”

Doberman glanced down at the grid map on his knee,
which overlaid the Special Forces checkpoints against the Iraqi terrain. Zed-Three
was a point along the highway. They were, by his quick calculations, exactly
8.75 miles southwest of it.

“I have the position,” said Doberman. He swung the Hog
back toward the north, calculating an intercept with the vehicles, which he
figured would be moving along at 50 miles an hour, or thereabouts.

Doberman spotted the highway about a minute later. As
he began to close, he saw a vehicle. But the truck was moving in the wrong
direction. His eyes strained past the bulletproof persiplex glass of the
canopy, working the grains of sand into lines and ants.

Nothing except for the truck going the wrong way. Zed-three
was ahead to the northeast, about two o’clock. He pushed on, the plane level at
8,550 feet. It was somewhat high for IDing moving targets, but their
instructions were to fly no lower than 8,000 feet, unless absolutely necessary,
which would keep them safe from all but the most persistent antiair guns. Doberman
had a clear view and figured once he spotted a likely candidate for Dixon’s
trucks they could move lower.

But at the moment, he couldn’t see anything. He double-checked
the map to make sure he had the right highway, not that there were many choices.
Then he asked A-Bomb what he was seeing.

“Not even camel turds.”

“Let’s take it this way another forty-five seconds,
then crank back,” Doberman told him.

“Forty-five seconds? Why not forty-four? Or
forty-three.”

He was just about to tell A-Bomb to fuck off when the
AWACS controller shouted a warning over the radio.

“Devil Flight, snap ninety south!”

Doberman jerked to comply, putting the Hog almost
literally onto a right-angle. As he juiced the throttle, the AWACS operator
filled in the reason for the emergency evasive maneuver: a pair of MiGs had
just taken off from an airbase to their north.

With pedals to the metal, the Russian-made
interceptors could reach the Hogs in under two minutes. And splash them soon
thereafter.

A flight of Eagle interceptors scrambled to fry the
MiGs. Doberman’s instinct was to punch the Hog into the ground fuzz at twenty
feet, then say screw the MiGs and get back to Scud hunting. But this far inside
enemy territory, that wasn’t a particularly wise thing to do. Instead, he and A-Bomb
had to settle for a wide turn a good thirty miles south of the action.

By then the MiGs had disappeared from the AWACS radar
—
probably by
landing back at the base they had started from, though the controller wasn’t
immediately sure. Doberman angled the Hog back toward the highway, but he knew
that by now the trucks would be long gone. Worse, the Hogs were down to ten
minutes of loiter time, thanks to all the maneuvering.

“What’s going on up there?” Dixon asked over the
ground radio just after Doberman and A-Bomb had crossed over the road without,
of course, spotting the Scuds.

Tersely, Doberman explained that they had been shunted
off the trail by the AWACS. And that they were almost bingo fuel.

“Did you pass the location on to the AWACS?” BJ asked.

“Fuck no,” said Doberman. “We fucking couldn’t find
them.”

“Aw shit.”

“Yeah, copy,” said Doberman. “Shit-damn fucking hell
in a whore house.”

“Bad news, Dog Man. I’m bingo,” said A-Bomb. “Bingo”
meant he had used up the fuel allocated for loitering. He now had only enough
left to get home, with a modest amount left over for emergencies.

“Yeah,” muttered Doberman. The two planes had to stay
together and in any event, he was pretty low himself. He blew a deep sigh from
his mouth, cursed some more, then finally reoriented the Hog for the long,
dreary trip home. He was so pissed he didn’t bother answering when A-Bomb joked
that Special Ops obviously agreed with Dixon, since the lieutenant had finally
used a four-letter word on the radio.

THE
CORNFIELD, IRAQ

25 JANUARY
1991

1621

“S
on of a
shit
. We could have blown the goddamn
things up ourselves,” said Winston. He looked at Dixon as if Dixon had been the
one flying the planes. “How the hell could they have lost it?”

“I don’t know that they ever saw it.”

“Well fuck. They’re in goddamn airplanes, right? How
the hell hard can it be?”

The truth was, it wasn’t easy picking out moving
targets from the altitudes the brass had the Hogs flying. The planes weren’t
carrying super-enhanced videos, or extra-perceptive radars, or anything beyond
Mark-One standard-issue eyeballs. The MiGs had been the real problem. Since the
Hogs were sitting ducks against any interceptor, their only defense was to run
away, and even that hardly guaranteed safety.

But it was tough to explain all that to someone on the
ground
—
especially when the ground was in central Iraq.

“What the fuck is the sense of our being here if
they’re not going to squirt the damn things when we point them out?” Winston
insisted.

“They’ll get them,” said Dixon. “Give them a chance.”

Winston grunted, and turned his binoculars back toward
the highway. Dixon slid back down the hill to the radio, though there was
little reason to at the moment. It would take the Hogs close to two hours to
refuel and return. By then they would be limited by the available light.

Dixon had just decided to brave an MRE when Leteri
came sliding down the hill, nearly landing on his back.

“Patrol,” hissed the corporal. “They’re on the side of
the road and they’re moving slow. Stay down.”

Dixon spun back around, pressing himself into the dirt
and pulling his gun under his arm. If they came under fire, his job was to stay
with the radio; they might need air support, which he could get through the
AWACS controller. But holding the MP-5 made him feel safer.

Leteri continued to the very base of the hill,
crawling into a shallow trench the commandos had dug and camouflaged so it
could be used as an observation post. The far end of it gave him a good view of
their flank as well as the road. Dixon watched him work along it slowly. Moving
that slowly must be an exercise in great will power, he thought; the temptation
to rush would be almost overwhelming, but doing so might expose you to the
enemy. Patience was such a difficult thing in war
—
in life, for that matter. It
was the one trait he didn’t have.

Leteri reached his post, stayed flat against the side
of the trench a minute, then leaned back and gave a thumbs up. The others had
relaxed as well. Curious, Dixon scrambled up the hill, flopping between Winston
and Turk.

“They’re staying put, at least for now. They’re on the
other side of the highway,” said Winston, handing the binoculars over. “Got
their backs to us.”

Dixon peered through the glasses. Four men in tan
fatigues were walking a staggered line beyond a troop truck.

“What are they doing?” Dixon asked. “Looks like they
lost something.”

“They may have seen the planes,” said Turk. “The
idiots probably think they mined the road. They did the same thing about a mile
north.”

Winston took the smallest of sips from his canteen,
rolling the water around and around the inside of his mouth before swallowing.
“Crazy fucks.”

“They use their own men to trip mines?” Dixon asked.

“Saddam doesn’t give a shit,” said Winston. He screwed
his canteen closed. “We’re going to have to move off this hill.”

“Why?” asked Dixon.

“It’s the tallest feature on the landscape, the most
obvious place to check the road from. If they really are looking for mines,
even if they’re fucking picking up litter, they’re paranoid enough to figure
out that someone on the ground brought the planes here. Besides, maybe the
trucks turned off down the road a bit. They may be setting up to bomb Tel Aviv
right now.”

“Trucks were headed east,” said Turk. “Are we going to
follow them to Baghdad?”

“Shit, why not?” said Winston. “Let the Lieutenant get
a chance to practice his Arabic.”

“I don’t know Arabic.”

“Fuck no,” said Winston in mock horror. “And here I
thought you went to college.”

Turk laughed.

Dixon couldn’t think of a comeback. He waited a bit,
and when Turk changed the subject, he slid back down the hill. When the time
came to move out, he told Leteri he’d take a turn humping the com gear, then
did his best to ignore the trooper’s surprise as he shouldered the ruck and got
into line.

APPROACHING
THE IRAQI BORDER

25
JANUARY 1991

1752

T
wo hours
and
one record-time tanking later,
Doberman found himself clicking his mike button and getting nothing but a
steady stream of static. They’d been trying to find Dixon for the past five
minutes without any luck. He was about to try hailing the Delta unit again when
A-Bomb beat him to it.

“Devil Flight to Ground Hog. Yo, Dixon, where the fuck
are you?”

“Real military,” Doberman told A-Bomb over the
short-range fox mike radio, tuned to the squadron’s private frequency.

“Yeah, well you try.”

“Just keep their frequency open. I’m going to have
Cougar double check for us, in case we’re out of range or something.”

Cougar was the call sign for the AWACS. The controller
told them
—
as he had only a few minutes before
—
that the ground unit had not come back on the air
after signing off to change position. This wasn’t unusual, implied the
operator, who all but directed the Hogs drivers to just “chill.”

“Man, I’ll tell you something. I’m getting a little
fed up with Cougar,” said A-Bomb. “Kinda like havin’ my fourth-grade teacher
lookin’ over my shoulder. Hangout. Break. Run away. We need somebody back there
who’s a Hog driver, you know what I’m talking about? Like, here’s a couple of
tanks to splash while you’re waiting.”

Doberman let A-Bomb rant on as he examined the map
unfolded in his lap. The two Hogs were at 16,675 feet, flying a wide, perfect
circle around the coordinates where the ground team had spotted the trucks. As
they swung through the northern arc, the Euphrates edged into their
windscreens, a thick brown line in the distance.

Doberman had read somewhere that civilization started
along the Euphrates. The Sumerians had built an impressive empire well before
the Egyptians, taming the wiles of the river with massive irrigation projects.
They had enjoyed tremendous wealth, building cities of gold.

Hard to imagine that now. This was supposed to be part
of the country’s fertile area, but the terrain looked blotchy at best. Doberman
had flown over Iowa cornfields – now those looked like something, orderly lines
of green extending out as far as you could see.

Part of the problem was, they were too stinking high,
as per their orders to maintain a safe altitude. Safe for whom? Might just as
well be on the moon as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t get a very clear
view of the highway, let alone make out what exactly might be moving on it.
Scud launcher or a milk truck looked the same from here
—
smaller than an
ant’s behind.

“Getting kind of dark,” A-Bomb hinted.

“Copy,” said Doberman. “Let’s take a run over the
highway down where we can see something bigger than a fucking battleship.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” snapped A-Bomb.

Doberman pushed his wing over and threw the Hog into a
tear-ass dive, plunging downwards so fast even the A-10 seemed to have been
caught by surprise. He moved his stick until the gray line of the road fell
into his windshield. He was below five thousand feet before he started to
recover, pulling the Hog back level in a smooth, precise arc, his wings
leveling. The GE power plants hummed behind almost gently, their steady rhythm
a subconscious soundtrack as he flew.

Some pilots flew by making the plane an extension of
their bodies. They moved their arms and legs and the plane moved; they felt the
wind curling in a slipstream around their bodies and their eyes were part of
the radar nosing ahead. At some point the line between man and plane blurred;
they flew as much by instinct, by stomach or gut, as they did by carefully
accumulated knowledge and deliberate action.

Doberman considered himself more a director, or maybe
a sitter
—
he sat on top of the plane, pushing its levers the way an experienced
heavy equipment operator might move a bulldozer through a construction site.
The plane went where he wanted it to, not the other way around.

No luck involved in that. You knew the data, worked
with it. Wind had a certain effect, depending on the altitude and angle of your
attack; you calculated it, you compensated for it, you pushed the button to
drop your load. Anything else was bullshit.

“Six is clean,” called A-Bomb.

Doberman eased his stick right, following the road’s
curve northward. Now he could see damn well. A bus appeared ahead, a
Matchbox-sized vehicle with a light-brown color. A half-mile in front of it was
something that looked more military; grayish-brown waves of camo flopped over
the back of a medium-sized truck. Might be a troop carrier.

Drawing closer, he saw that the tarp was pulled up
over some ribbing, and the exposed bed was empty. But his disappointment
quickly melted as he saw two flatbeds further along, carrying tanks. They were
behind two long tractor-trailers and a tarp-covered flatbed. A pair of armored
personnel carriers cruised in front of them. Further ahead, something similar
to a Land Rover led the procession.

Hot damn! Something worth hitting.

Doberman banked to the right, pulling into a quick
orbit while he consulted his map. The two A-10s were a few miles east of the
point where they had lost the Scud carriers earlier. It seemed to him possible,
if not entirely probable, that these vehicles might be going wherever the Scuds
had gone. He checked his fuel: he and A-Bomb had about a half-hour more of
linger time.

“Let’s follow these guys for a ways and see if they
take us anywhere,” he told A-Bomb. “Peg your altitude at seven thousand feet
where they can’t hear us. We’ll give Dixon ten minutes to come back on the air.
They’re still sleeping, we take these guys.”

“I’m counting the seconds,” replied his wingman.

Doberman walked his eyes slowly across his instruments
as he rode his Hog back around to the road. He had good fuel and a clean threat
indicator.

Doberman put the road just above his left wing-root.
He lowered his neck slightly, drew a long breath, gathering himself exactly as
if this was an exercise over Germany. The tail end of the Iraqi convoy nosed
into his screen, a small blur the size of a cockroach’s foot. Gradually, it
started to grow. He thought he recognized the roadway and figured the trucks
were now beyond the point where they had started looking for the Scuds. The
road curved and straightened for nearly two miles in an arrow toward the river.
Then it came almost due east, heading in the direction of Iran.

No way the damn Scud carriers could have outrun them.
They had to have turned off somewhere. On the other hand, the briefings had the
Scuds going the other way, so who knew what the story was. He wondered if Dixon
had dished him the wrong location or marker.

The convoy was now the size of fat cockroaches.
Doberman hesitated a moment, scouting ahead, rechecking his compass heading and
then the altimeter, making sure his gas was still good. He couldn’t see a
turnoff and certainly no Scuds.

“Stay with me,” he told A-Bomb, marking his INS for a
reference point before tacking north with a tight turn. This time he kept his
eyes trained on the ground, trying to sort the shadows and shades into
something, anything that would tell him where the Scuds had gone. He saw a rock
quarry and beyond that a group of buildings which seemed to be abandoned, but
nothing thick enough to be a missile. From the air, the Scud carriers looked
like longish milk trucks; the dedicated launchers looked like soap dishes with
turds on top. He saw neither. The long shadows were starting to play tricks;
even if they didn’t go bingo soon they were going to have to head home.

“Our friends must have seen us,” said A-Bomb.

Doberman pulled the Hog around and saw the vehicles
kicking up a storm of dust to their south. They’d left the highway.

“How’s your fuel?” he asked his wingmate.

“Twenty-something to bingo, give or take,” replied A-Bomb.
“You still want to wait?”

“Fuck it. Let’s shag ‘em,” Doberman told him. “I have
the tanks.”

“Just leave something for me,” said A-Bomb.

The procession had stopped about three hundred yards
off the roadway. The two tank carriers
—
long, narrow crickets on broken leaves
—
sat on the
western flank. Doberman eyeballed them, then pushed his face almost into the
Maverick’s targeting screen where the cursor was already flat on a turret.

The long shaft of a 125 mm smoothbore pointed down
from the back of the tank, the stick of a lollipop stuck to the cockroach’s
back. Doberman flicked his thumb back and forth over the stick
—
it was a habit
he’d picked up just a few days before, a tick that was now part of his routine
before pushing the trigger. Bing-bang-bam, he told himself, and pickled. As one
AGM-65 dropped from his wing he quickly dished up a second, hurrying the cursor
into the meat of the second tank as the screen flashed with Saddam’s latest
hamburger special.

Bing-bang-bam. The second Maverick clunked from its
firing rail, the Tikol motor catching with a whomp that sent the missile in a
direct line toward the image burned into its brain. As it neared the T-72, the
Maverick suddenly pulled up, arcing so that it could nail the target at the
exact weak point of its armored hull, the turret top.

By then, Doberman was no longer paying attention to
the tanks or the truck near them. For A-Bomb had shouted a warning about
something much more interesting: one of the armored personnel carriers had
stopped and set up a position on a slope near the highway.

Except that it wasn’t an armored personnel carrier; it
was a four-barreled ZSU-23 antiaircraft gun, an old but effective flak dealer
that had already started to fire at him.