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  Going Deep

  ( Hogs - 1 )

  Jim Defelice

  Always tops in his training classes, Lieutenant BJ Dixon arrives at his new post with the A-10 Warthog unit in the Gulf War eager to prove he has “the right stuff.” But he can’t seem to impress his by-the-book unit commander, Major “Mongoose” Johnson, who knows that the real test of a Hog pilot is how he reacts for the first time under fire. BJ’s first battle mission will push him to the limits of both courage and cowardice in “Going Deep.”.

  Hogs #1: Going Deep is the first of six novels in the HOGS First Gulf War series. It follows a colorful group of brave pilots flying A-10 warthogs over the skies of Iraq during the First Gulf War in 1991. #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Jim DeFelice (American Sniper), writing under the pen name of James Ferro, based this dramatic, historical action series on the actual events. Filled with blistering action and gritty authenticity, this is a powerful and exciting tribute to the men and women who flew and serviced these no-nonsense, down in the dirt” flying machines.

  “DeFelice refreshes the genre.”

  Publishers Weekly.

  Jim DeFelice, writing as James Ferro

  GOING DEEP

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  October 2012

  I started writing the Hogs series early in my career, soon after the end of what we now call the First Gulf War. The A-10A was still something of an ugly duckling — or Warthog — at the time, though the men who’d seen her in action were quick with praise. The planes and their crews gave everything they had in that war, and then some; the colonel who “owned” the Hogs after the conflict used rather colorful language when explaining their condition to me following the fight.

  Things are different now. It seems as if the whole world knows about the Hogs. They’ve been overhauled and upgraded considerably since the war, so much so that they’ve been rechristened as A-1 °Cs. But they’re still amazing tough… and still darn ugly.

  Good ugly.

  Another thing that hasn’t changed — Hog drivers are still a rare breed, throwback stick and rudder types whose skills squeeze every ounce of capability from their amazing machines. Man and beast are lean and lethal warriors, perfectly matched.

  I was still learning — I still am learning — when I wrote those books. One of my regrets is that, in portraying the squadron, I had to cut down dramatically on the number of people and streamline the various tasks involved to keep the story manageable. There were probably ten or twenty people in the real squadron for every one person depicted in the books. I wish I could have depicted and thereby honored everyone who contributed to their success.

  About the pseudonym, James Ferro — it was a marketing device at the time, suggested by the publisher (I believe) so readers wouldn’t be confused by the historical fiction I was also writing. The last name is a tribute to my wife’s family, most especially my late father-in-law, a no-nonsense, meat and potatoes Marine, whom I’m sure wouldn’t have minded a few Hogs flying overhead when he was in Korea.

  — Jim DeFelice

  PROLOGUE

  NORTHWESTERN SAUDI ARABIA,

  NEAR THE IRAQI BORDER

  17 JANUARY 1991

  0555 (ALL DATES & TIMES LOCAL)

  The desert stretched without borders, without anything but heat and pink light. It lay as it had lain for thousands of years; silent, undisturbed, impenetrable…

  And then came the roar…

  It started as the somber rattle from the back of a dying man’s throat. The next second a hurricane pounded the air, whipping sand and stone in fury.

  Then something infinitely worse exploded in the sky, something metallic, something swirling, something from hell. Four black beasts filled the southeastern horizon like the lions of the Apocalypse. The reflection of morning light off the sand splayed like blood across their wings, vengeance glistening against their seething muscles. Their dark bodies profaned the pink flesh of the horizon, thirsting for the judgment of fire and damnation.

  Startled from the half-daze of a monotonous watch, the sentry grabbed his rifle and flung himself against the sand filled bags at the front of the trench. It took a moment for his brain to register the fact that the planes were coming from the south and not the north — they were friends, not foes. The thick canisters of death slung beneath their wings were not meant for him…

  “What the hell are those?” he asked his companion as the planes roared over their positions.

  The other soldier laughed. “You never saw A-10 Warthogs before?”

  “They’re on our side?”

  “You better pray to God they are.”

  PART ONE

  THE LUCKIEST DEAD MAN

  CHAPTER 1

  OVER WESTERN IRAQ

  17 JANUARY 1991

  0634

  “Get into the damn cursor now!” Doberman shouted at the fuzzy shadow in the corner of his infrared targeting screen. He pushed all of his 120 pounds into the A-lOA’s seat harness, as if his body’s momentum might somehow improve his aim — or help hold the target steady. But the huge dish of the Iraqi ground intercept radar station continued to slosh around in the screen, refusing to lock. Doberman blamed the wind and clouds, cursed his adrenaline, and kept his hands glued to the controls as he pushed below twelve thousand feet, his only aim in life to blow a good hunk of Iraqi early-warning hardware to Hell where it belonged.

  Outside the bubble cockpit, Devil Two’s straight, stubby wings cut through the thick air, balanced perfectly by several thousand pounds of ordinance. The Hog’s twin GE TF34 turbofans, mounted above the fuselage like Flash Gordon’s rocket pack, pushed the nose of the dark green warplane faster and faster toward the gristly sand of the desert.

  From a distance, the A-10A looked a bit like a winged pickup truck headed for disaster.

  Up close, it looked like a weathered two-by-four loaded for bear.

  Inside the cockpit, Captain Thomas “Doberman” Glenon narrowed his eyes until he saw only the television screen in the top right-hand corner of his instrument panel. Slaved to the infra-red seeking device in the nose of his air-to-ground Maverick G missile, the display provided the pilot with a heat picture of the ground below him. Finally, it glowed radar dish; he locked, drew a half-breath, and clicked the trigger. Devil Two kicked slightly as the missile whipped out from beneath her wing. The pilot caught a glimpse of the Maverick’s exhaust and stared at it, momentarily entranced by his first launch in combat. He snapped back to attention, thumbed another missile up, and pointed the A-lOA’s nose in the direction of what ought to be a long metal trailer jammed with radar equipment. He launched, then rolled up another one.

  No matter how much you trained for combat, no matter how refined the lines and arrows on the maps, real life blurred past you like a freight train flinging itself down a ravine. Doberman barely realized what he was doing, pushing buttons and talking to himself, searching his front windscreen for his second target. Forever and forever passed. Every curse known to man failed to get the stinking thing to show up. Altitude kept bleeding away. Doberman mashed his teeth together, his face gnarling into the unflattering pose that had helped earn him his nickname. He was ready to concede he’d lost his way when something clicked in his head; without conscious thought he pulled the trigger. In the next moment the Maverick went whoosh-bam-thank-you-ma’am, flinging its three hundred pounds of high explosive toward an Iraqi radar trailer.

  Less than a minute had passed since he had begun his bombing run, but it had seemed like a lifetime. The plane was already low enough to draw serious anti-aircraft fire. He kicked his head back and got ready to take some Gs.

  * * *

  Flying in Devil Four, Lieutenant William James “BJ” Dixon had lost Doberman as soon as the lead
plane began its bombing run. Dixon was late eyeballing his target area, late putting his eyes over to the Maverick screen. Everything came at him twenty times faster than it should. The fact that he’d practiced this attack several times over the past few days didn’t matter, and the abilities that had helped him rate among the best pilots at every stage of his training seemed to have deserted him. His head felt like it was a hand grenade with the pin removed. His arms and legs moved as if through heavy oil. The Hog growled at him, yelling at the pilot to get his shit together. No drill instructor had a meaner snarl.

  Dixon glanced down at his right hand, aware that he was squeezing the stick hard enough to bend metal. He couldn’t unclench. The plane jerked toward the ground, propelled by the tension in his arms and legs.

  His main target was a topo-scatter communications tower not far from the radar dish his flight leader had hit. His eyes darted from the windscreen to the television, back and forth, waiting for the shadowy figure to appear. Finally, he saw something in the tube and pushed the trigger to lock and fire in practically the same motion. As the missile burst away, he worried that he hadn’t locked up on the right target — the screen had been a blur and he’d only picked the biggest shadow. Quickly, he put another Maverick on line, yelling at himself to study the screen more carefully, trying to narrow the world down to the small tube and its depiction of the target area. But too much was happening. He’d drifted off course and now overcorrected, and if the tower was still there it wouldn’t appear anywhere in the screen. Finally, he saw a squat shadow he recognized as a radar van, slid the cursor in for a lock, and fired.

  Glancing up at his windscreen, he realized he had gone lower than planned — a hell of a lot lower.

  The altimeter read two thousand feet.

  Dixon yanked the stick back, jerked it for dear life, his whole body trembling with panic.

  * * *

  Doberman returned to twelve thousand feet, reorienting himself to continue the attack. While he’d practiced mid-altitude bombing a lot in the last few weeks, he still felt vaguely uneasy attacking at this altitude. Nor was he used to going after something so placid, though well protected, as a radar installation — officially an “early warning ground control intercept station” or GCI for short. The Hog’s “normal” mission was close-in troop support and tank busting, and if it had been all the same to Doberman, he would have spent the first day of the air war against Iraq cruising about fifty feet off the ground and blowing up recycled Russian armor near the Saudi border. But the GCI stations located deep within Iraq were an important part of the enemy air defenses; taking them out was critical to the success of the allied air plan. The fact that such an important job had been given to Hogs meant that someone in Riyadh finally realized how capable the slow but steady low-altitude attack planes really were.

  That, or they were desperate.

  On the bright side, the mission planners had given them pictures and everything, just like they were Stealth Fighters. As his friend A-Bomb had said yesterday: Draw a little snout on a trailer and it practically looks like a tank, so what’s the big deal?

  Keying the mike to ask his wingman, Lieutenant Dixon, how his Maverick run had gone, Doberman spotted a command building through the broken layers of clouds below. It was the last of his primary targets, too fat and juicy to pass up. He glanced quickly at the Maverick targeting screen, found the building. Locked it tight, and kissed it goodbye. As the missile clunked off the wing rail, the pilot glanced back to the windscreen and spotted two trailers within a few hundred feet of each other, looking for all the world like the photo he’d memorized before the mission. With his Mavericks gone, he was down to the dumb stuff — six cluster bombs sat beneath his wings, clamoring to be dropped. Doberman tucked the Hog back toward the ground, rolling the big plane over his shoulder like a black belt karate instructor tossing an opponent to the mat.

  As the attack jet headed downward, the Hog’s leading edges grabbed at the air as eagerly as the pilot himself. Unlike a swept-wing, pointy-nose fighter, the A-10A Thunderbolt II had been designed to go relatively slow, an important attribute when you were trying to plink tin cans a few feet off the deck. Even so, with all the stops out and the plane growling for blood as she plummeted toward the yellow Iraqi dirt, she felt incredibly fast. The g’s collected around Doberman’s face, tugging at his narrow cheeks and unshaven morning stubble.

  This was the part of flying he loved- the burning rush that made you feel hotter than a bullet rifled out a flaming barrel. His scalp tingled beneath its razor cut, and his over-sized ears — the only parts of his compact body that might be called large — vibrated with adrenaline.

  But this was more than a rush, more than fun and games. He wasn’t flying a training gig, and the gray rectangles below hadn’t been plopped there by overworked airmen anxious for a weekend pass. White cotton balls appeared all around him. They puffed and curled around him as he flew, inside-out tennis balls that frittered into thin air as he approached.

  The innocent puffs were shells, exploding just out of reach.

  Okay, Doberman thought, they’re shooting at me. Fair’s fair; I hit them first.

  He continued onward, flexing his fingers in his gloves as he held the stick, telling himself not to overdo it. Even a blue-collar dirt mover like the Hog was designed to be flown, not muscled.

  You stay loose, you stay in control.

  The cluster bombs vibrated on their pylons, demanding to be fired. Each bomb was actually a dump truck for smaller bombs; once dropped it would dispense a deadly shower of hundreds of bomblets for maximum damage.

  Doberman was all eyes. His eyelashes blinked the flak away, blinked aside the other trailers, found the one that had been waiting for him, the one that had been dug into the side of sand dune months before in preparation for this exact moment.

  Two CBUs fell from his wings. Doberman rocked in his seat, dodging the Hog to the left. He saw the dark shadow of another trailer slide into the middle of his windscreen as he jinked; he eased back, angling to get it into his sweet spot. Finally it slid in like a curve ball finding the strike zone; he held it for the umpire and pickled two more of his bombs.

  He was low now, below five thousand feet, lower than he’d been ordered to fly and nearly too low to drop any more cluster bombs effectively because of their preset fuses. His head buzzed with blood and the exploding 23 millimeter antiaircraft shells the Iraqis were firing at him. There was so much flak in the air Doberman could get out and walk across it.

  That was probably a bad sign.

  On the other hand, a lot of stuff was burning. That was really good.

  Gunning his A-10 off east of the target area, Doberman turned his neck in ways it had never gone before, looking for Dixon. His wingman didn’t answer the radio calls, but that wasn’t necessarily surprising — just before the attack the kid was so nervous he had obviously forgotten to key the mike before talking.

  Two other members of the 535th Tactical Fighter Squadron (Provisional), Devils One and Three, had been assigned to hit a second GCI complex about ten miles to the west. Doberman thought he saw a finger of smoke rising from where it should be. He and Dixon were due to head south soon and join up with the Hogs in ten minutes. From there they would head toward a forward air base in northern Saudi, rearm, and head back north for a second round of shoot-‘em-up.

  Then they’d head home to bootleg beer, real long showers and a few good hands of poker. Doberman had lost over five hundred dollars the night before, the latest and by far the worst in a series of shellackings he’d taken since landing in Saudi Arabia. The pilot was determined to make at least half of that back tonight.

  No way his luck could stay as bad as it was last night. He’d bitten off some of the worst hands of his life. And even when he’d had a good hand, inevitably someone else was fatter.

  Doberman had held aces over eights in a full house on the last hand, hunkered down in front of a pot that held at least three hundred bucks. And d
amned if A-Bomb, of all people, hadn’t been holding four aces.

  “Dead man’s hand,” said the other pilot, pointing to the cards on the table as he raked the chips in. “Doc Holiday drew that the day he was killed. Never bet on that. Can’t win.”

  A-Bomb’s grin floated in front of Doberman’s face as he scanned the sky for Dixon. He saw a dark shadow rising through the clouds a good distance behind him. He lost it, saw it, lost it. “You got a little low, kid,” he told his wingman. “Get up over the flak.” Then he turned his attention back to the ground, looking for a place to put his last two bombs.

  There was an Iraqi gun battery just off his right wing. The Hog seemed to growl at him when he spotted it through the clouds — as if she wanted a chance to kick a little dirt in the eyes of the people who’d been firing at her all morning.

  Didn’t Doberman owe her that chance?

  He banked sharply, hunkering down in the thick titanium bucket that protected the cockpit. As soon as he pickled the two cluster bombs, he knew he’d missed his target; the plane was running into a good hunk of wind and he hadn’t compensated for it. Angry at himself, he slammed the Hog around and worked into position for a run with his cannon. The plane screamed as she bled speed and energy, then whistled as the pilot edged her into a dive. The safe tactics of middle-altitude bombing were shelved — Doberman hunkered in for the kill, sliding down from five thousand feet.

  The four-barrel Iraqi peashooter desperately spun around to face him. As its slugs spit past him, Doberman gave the Hog’s cannon a full five-second burst, then jinked left as the flak shooter burst into a magnificent collection of red, orange and yellow flames.

  Climbing once again, Doberman caught the muzzle flash of a second gun as he tried tracking him through the sky. Something snapped inside his chest, and the methodical air force pilot was replaced by a seething werewolf screaming for vengeance. He tucked the Hog around for another attack. Just as he fell into the dive, he caught a shadow out of the corner of his eye.