HOGS #5: TARGET SADDAM (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) Page 14

  “Devil One, this Coyote,” snapped a new voice obviously belonging to controller’s supervisor. “Please advise your current status.”

  Skull blew a long breath into his mask, then calmly noted his location and course.

  Which wasn’t the answer Coyote wanted.

  “There is no Vulture Three,” said the officer flatly. “We have no data indicating a downed plane at this time. Colonel, we’re concerned here that you’re being sucked into a trap.”

  “I appreciate your concern. Maintaining search pattern.” Skull could almost hear the exasperation in the static that filled the radio band.

  “See, now that’s why you get the big bucks,” said A-Bomb over the short-range radio. “I woulda told him to jerk off.”

  O’Rourke would have been perfectly within his rights to suggest they break off their search. Most if not all of the wingmen Skull had flown with, from ‘Nam to Panama to Red Flag, would have at least asked if he was positive he’d heard the distress call.

  But A-Bomb was a wingman’s wingman. And a Hog driver.

  “Turning,” said Knowlington, starting his sweep. He hit the radio and broadcast a call on the Guard frequency used by stricken aircraft, asking Vulture Three to acknowledge.

  Static.

  It was a hell of a coincidence, he had to admit. Twenty years before, he’d lost his own Vulture Three during what had been a routine mission to hit a supply depot in North Vietnam. Skull had taken a four-ship of Phantoms north for the strike. It was about midway through his second tour in Vietnam— he’d flown Thuds on his first— and if the truth be told the mission had seemed almost boringly routine. They’d encountered no flak and no SAMs en route. Skull had a good look at the target through the cloud deck as he launched the attack, and a strong memory of his backs eater telling him they were clean, meaning that the Vietnamese had not managed to mount a defense. The sky had remained empty as Skull recovered and the planes regrouped, flying southeastward to the coast as they had planned.

  It happened that a coastal air defense battery was being hit by Navy A-4s at the same time; Skull had seen a few black puffs of gunfire in the air, and four or five separate fires on the ground as he banked over the water and waited for his flight to catch him. It had seemed like glimpsing the corner of a movie screen through an open door as he passed through a theater lobby, a quick vivid glimpse that disappeared as he put his head back to the task at hand. His wingmate had caught up; they tacked south, waiting for the other two planes in the flight.

  Vulture Four had arrived shortly, having been separated from Three as he went after a secondary target. Three never showed.

  The Vietnamese had launched several MiGs to respond to the Navy attack, and things got tangled quickly. Fuel reserves low to begin with, Skull hadn’t been able to mount a proper search. The Navy did fly several flights in, but no trace of Vulture Three was ever found.

  Knowlington forced his eyes down from the Maverick screen to the fuel gauges, running a quick check on his reserves. They had used considerably less fuel than planned, but he’d have to think about going south for the tanker soon.

  He keyed back into the command and control aircraft plane running the Strawman mission for an update. Everything was quiet.

  So had he imagined the distress call?

  That sort of thing had never happened to him before. Not even when he was drinking.

  Maybe it had and he’d just shut it out. Or didn’t even realize it.

  “Devil Leader, I got something hot down there,” said A-Bomb. “Uh, looking about two, no one-and-a-half miles at say two o’clock off, uh, your nose.”

  “One,” said Knowlington, dipping his wing as A-Bomb continued with more detailed coordinates. He pushed the Hog lower, easing the throttle back so slow that he was practically walking.

  If this was a ruse, he was a sitting duck.

  A road cut across the desert; in the screen it looked like a twisted piece of litter, the narrow cutting from a newspaper fresh off the press.

  “Vulture Three, this is Devil One. Vulture Three, please acknowledge,” Knowlington said over the emergency band.

  A bright shadow appeared at the top corner of the Maverick screen. Knowlington edged his stick to the right, the Hog stuttering a bit in the air— his indicated airspeed had dropped precipitously. He caught it smoothly, the plane gliding toward the growing glow in his monitor.

  Long cylinder. Maybe a fuselage.

  Maybe a heated decoy.

  RWR clear.

  But it would be if they were planning to use shoulder-launched heat seekers.

  Flares ready.

  Knowlington turned his eyes toward the windscreen, trying to sort through the darkness for something— anything.

  If it’s an ambush, he thought, let’s get it over with.

  “Vulcan Tres, Vulcan Tres,” crackled a voice over Guard. “Vulcan Three to approaching allied aircraft.”

  Vulcan, not Vulture. Shit.

  “Vulcan Three, this is Devil leader,” said Knowlington, flicking his talk button. “Relax friend. Give me a flare.”

  Static flooded into his headphones, and for a long moment Skull feared that maybe he was imagining the whole thing. But suddenly a sparkle of red pricked the sky two-and-a-half miles southeast of his nose.

  “There she blows!” sang A-Bomb.

  “Coyote, this is Devil One,” said Knowlington. “I am in contact with Vulcan Three. Repeat, Vulcan Tres. French flier. I have a flare. . .” He looked over and noted the position on the INS, reading it off as he walked his Hog toward the downed airman. “Requesting verification procedures.”

  “Copy, Devil Flight. You are in contact with Vulcan Three. Stand by.”

  “Hell of an apology,” said A-Bomb.

  “Devil One, I can hear you! I can hear you!” said the downed pilot. He was shouting, and added two or three sentences in indecipherable French.

  “Relax Vulcan,” Knowlington told him. “Can you give me your status?”

  “Merci, merci. Je ne comprends pas.”

  “What?” asked Knowlington.

  “De rien,” answered A-Bomb. “Nous sommes ‘Hog drivers’.”

  “Ah, cochon! Le Hog.”

  “Le Hog,” agreed A-Bomb.

  “Magnifique.”

  “What I’m talkin’ about,” agreed O’Rourke. “Comment allez-vous?”

  “Je suis perdu.”

  “Nah, you’re not lost. We got your butt,” said A-Bomb, adding words that seemed roughly the equivalent in French.

  “You speak French, A-Bomb?” said Knowlington after his wingman and the downed pilot exchanged several more sentences.

  “Got to,” said A-Bomb. “You never know when you’re going to find yourself in Paris, hunting down a cafe grande.”

  “Devil Leader, we have an SAR asset en route, call sign Leander Seven. Request you contact him directly.”

  “Devil One copies. We have one downed pilot, tells us he’s in reasonable shape. No enemy units at this time. My wingman speaks French and is talking to him. Feed him the questions.”

  “Coyote.”

  “Man, I love it when they’re humble,” said A-Bomb.

  “Just run through the authentication,” said Knowlington, dialing into the search and rescue helicopter’s frequency.

  CHAPTER 34

  OVER IRAQ

  27 JANUARY 1991

  2030

  Doberman eased the Hog toward the director lights on the KC-135, sliding toward the refueling boom. The tanker had edged over the border and they were running well ahead of schedule. There was no need to rush, but he couldn’t help it— he wanted to tank and get the hell back north.

  Check that. He wanted to see BJ back on the tarmac at Home Drome, walking around like a newborn colt, a little embarrassed when A-Bomb slapped him on the back. A-Bomb would say something like, “Fuckin’ A, Kid,” and Dixon would turn red. Kid was so pure he didn’t even curse.

  Fuckin’ A.

  That was
what he wanted.

  And to do that, he had to get his ass back north.

  Taking out Saddam in his pretend Red Cross car wouldn’t be bad either. The job was tasked to a pair of F-111 sharpshooters, Earth Pigs that wouldn’t even be leaving their base for at least another hour.

  Red Crescent. Whatever.

  He wouldn’t mind taking that shot himself.

  The tanker twitched right. Doberman pushed on, nudging his rudder pedal gently to stay with it. The boomer in the tail of the Boeing was watching, ready to aim his long straw into the fueling port in the A-10’s nose.

  The lights on the big tanker told him he was there.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Doberman said to himself as the nozzle clunked in and the fuel began to flow.

  CHAPTER 35

  TENT CITY, KING FAHD

  27 JANUARY 1991

  2030

  Air Force Technical Sergeant Rebecca Rosen was a cliché: the tough-girl tomboy playing hard-ass to make it a man’s world. She was the junkyard dog scraping with all the other dogs just to prove how tough she was.

  She was tough. She’d been raised in the worst part of Philadelphia in, as it happened, a junkyard. Or as her uncle called it, “The crème-dalla-crème of the salvation industry.”

  ‘Dalla’ was supposed to be “de la,” but no one corrected her uncle, who though only five-eight could tear a car door off its hinges without breaking a sweat. Few people corrected his niece, either; there was almost never a need to. Rosen had a real talent for fixing things, and the Air Force had given her not just the training but the discipline she needed to put her skills and intellect to work.

  Like her uncle and the cousin she’d been raised with, Rosen had a reputation for cracking people who got out of line— her personnel records put it more delicately, if in greater detail. Barely five-two and about a hundred and ten pounds, Rosen used every volatile ounce of her body to fight; she’d learned to wrestle pinning junkyard mutts as a ten-year-old and had yet to find a tougher opponent.

  It was also true that her clothes and skin smelled more like JP-4 than Calvin Klein’s Obsession. And while she wasn’t ugly by any stretch, it had to be said that she wasn’t particularly pretty, either. In fatigues and with her cropped hair pulled back, she could look almost severe.

  On the other hand, there was more to Rosen than the cliché, more than the tough kid who wrestled dogs and could fix just about any part, electronic or mechanical, on anything that moved. There was, for instance, a young woman who had discovered poetry during a bullshit college program she’d signed up for to shake off some of the boredom of downtime in the mid-eighties.

  Sitting in a large auditorium with a hundred other students, most of them several years younger, Becky Rosen had heard poetry for the first time. Maybe not literally, but certainly figuratively. On the first day of class the professor stood in front of the podium and wheezed through a poem by Walt Whitman declaring America’s greatness, and then one by Emily Dickinson contemplating the nature of death and duty. Rosen found herself fascinated, so fascinated that she ended up taking enough courses to get a BA— and at the time of her assignment to the Gulf was in fact only a few credits from a master’s.

  Not that she planned to use the degrees for anything. They were an excuse to read, entertainment better than movies— activities almost as engrossing as single-handedly overhauling an entire A-10A herself. From the day of that first class, she had spent at least ten minutes every night reading.

  But tonight, sitting in her quarters in Tent City at the heart of the Home Drome, Technical Sergeant Rebecca Rosen couldn’t find anything to read, or at least nothing that sparked. Not Whitman, not Hemingway, not Jones, not the volume of Joyce she’d promised herself she’d slug through. Not even Dickinson.

  She tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Lieutenant Dixon, lying dead on the ground near a cave that housed Iraqi chemical weapons.

  William Dixon. BJ. KIA. RIP.

  God, this is morbid, she thought to herself finally. She sat up and pulled out her small notebook from under the bed. She had been trying for the past few days to start a journal, vaguely thinking she might write a book about the Gulf when she got home— maybe get a million-dollar book contract and buy her own fixed base operation when she got home.

  Or a junkyard. Hey, you went with what you knew.

  She’d barely filled two pages so far with a few notes on the people she served with. She looked at her scrawl, barely readable even by her, then turned to a fresh page, starting to describe Tent City.

  A well-ordered chaos of temporary quarters, theoretically intended for low-class enlisted types but housing even hoity-toity officers due to a severe shortage of facilities and poor political prowess on the part of muckety-mucks many echelons above.

  Or not.

  Her pen fidgeted on the paper. She thought of Dixon, his baby face. They’d kissed once, almost by accident. She felt the kiss now, felt him pressing against her body, rubbing his hands against her breasts.

  Which he had not done.

  A damn, damn shame.

  She tried writing again, thinking of a routine day, but segueing into a dream she’d had before bugging out of Fort Apache, the clandestine Delta command post in Iraq.

  She was in her uncle’s junkyard, back by the buses where her cousin Crank used to smoke dope. A turkey vulture swept down.

  Red-headed turkey vulture. Never saw that in Philly, no way.

  But that was the dream.

  She thought about it, and then her pen began moving, the words arranging themselves on the blank paper:

  Vulture Death

  spread his wings

  and laughed

  boasting to me with his dark eye

  I stood my ground

  His head fired the sky

  but I stood

  His wings pummeled the air

  but I stood

  His claws ripped my neck

  but I stood until at last

  he tired and flew off.

  But that was just a dream

  Becky put down the pen and reread what she’d wrote.

  Death and more death.

  Her fingers tore the page out. She crumpled it up and shoved it in her pocket, then pulled on her boots to go see what needed doing in Oz.

  CHAPTER 36

  IRAQ

  27 JANUARY 1991

  2030

  Dixon and Budge stopped for a rest amid a small collection of bushes just below the summit of the hill. Even in the dark, the scrubby vegetation wouldn’t provide much cover, but it was better than nothing. They didn’t seem to have been followed, and as far as BJ could tell the hill was unoccupied. It was lower than the hill opposite to the northwest, with occasional rock outcroppings and jagged terrain, difficult for the anti-air vehicles to climb. Or at least Dixon assumed.

  The boy had recovered from his panic, or maybe he was just too tired to do much of anything— he sat on the ground next to his rescuer, knees pulled up in front of his chest.

  “Hey Budge, what do you think?” Dixon whispered. “You think there Scuds on the other side of that hill there?”

  He pointed with his thumb. The boy tilted his head, but said nothing.

  “I’m not sure what the bombers hit,” Dixon continued. “I’m not exactly sure what kind of planes they were. I fly a Hog,” he added. “An A-10. I’m really a pilot. I came north to help target Scuds. A-10’s a great plane. They’re made to fly real low and support ground troops.” He began miming it with his hands, zooming in low and working the cannon with a stutter. He pretended to be in the cockpit, then threw his hands out like he was the plane, crouching and dancing. Budge smiled.

  “We call it a Hog— short for Warthog. Kind of a joke, too, because it looks ugly and it moves slower than a farm truck. I could have flown Eagles— I was selected to. But I had to, uh, see, I had some personal stuff going on.” Dixon knew he was just babbling on, but the kid nodded, as if he
understood and wanted him to continue. It felt good to talk; he’d been alone so long. “My mom died, she was dying. And my father’s been laid up with strokes since I was about your age. You lost your parents, too, huh?”

  BJ hadn’t thought about that before, but now he realized it must be true— perhaps the kid had seen them die.

  “Parents dead?” he asked.

  Budge nodded solemnly, then said something in Arabic. Dixon listened, trying to pick up the meaning in the tone of the words. They were flat though, and the way the kid moved his hands he could be miming a parade.

  Until he jumped up and began mimicking what BJ had done, flying a Hog.

  “Yeah, kid, we’ll fly. We’ll fly out of here. If we can find our way. I know there’s got to be another Delta team around here. I just know it.”

  Budge kept flying. Dixon extended his arms and for a moment the two of them flew together, bumping wings and laughing as if they were out on a playground a million miles from the war.

  “Okay,” Dixon said finally. “All right. We have to get serious, Budge.”

  The kid stopped and looked up at him. BJ slung the rifles over his shoulders and held the boy gently by the neck as they walked.

  “What we’re doing here is kind of like a game,” Dixon said. “Kind of like hide and seek. Except the guys looking for us have guns, and they’re not going to count to ten before shooting. But we’re smarter than them, right? You and me. We’ll kick their butts if they try to do anything.”

  Dixon let go, considering their next move. The plain to the west and southwest of the hill seemed open; they could sneak back to the Cornfield, several miles away along the highway west. They could get water there, and it would be easy to hide during the daylight.

  He remembered passing a building or two. They might be able to get food— better to try there than in the village, where there were other people and troops around.

  But first, he wanted to look to the south, see what was there.