Conrad dropped to his knees. He pulled his emergency radio out of his vest, but couldn’t hear anything over the roar. He checked his settings, tried again, then tossed it down and fumbled for his flare gun. He fired a charge — not skyward but at the vehicle. A hiss, a whoosh, the sound of glass smashing — but the truck kept coming.
He couldn’t find another flare, tossed the gun, and lost the radio, but he held onto the tap. He ran to his right, the only direction where there were no shadows. He smelled burning metal, and something like antifreeze,
Trucks. Right behind him.
For the first time since he’d come to the Gulf — for the first time ever in his twenty-six years — he realized there were limits to life, realities that had nothing to do with his abilities or strength or will. Heavy caliber bullets cut a swath ten feet away; the truck barreled on. Conrad willed himself to his feet again, pushing to the right, resigned to go out the way a soldier wanted to go out, fighting at least. He reached for his pistol, got it in his hand, and whirled around just in time to see the shadow of the Iraqi vehicle, an open-back Zil, crest a small hill less than ten yards away.
Then oblivion arrived.
But not for him. Red flames burst upwards as the heavy fist of the A-10A Thunderbolt II smashed down on the Iraqi vehicle. The night tore in two as Conrad flew backwards, propelled by some superhuman force that left him dazed and disoriented, but intact.
And with the video still in his hand.
He managed somehow to get back on his feet, realized he had both eyes open now, though they hurt like hell. He couldn’t hear. His body seemed to feel the swirl of the battle continuing. Wind, sand, cordite, blood flew into his face.
Something fluttered a few yards away. A heli.
No, it was a wolf, snapping for him.
More like an Apache war bird, her Gat swiveling beneath her chin, so close it could poke him in the chest.
Conrad threw himself onto the helicopter’s right skid. “Go!” he yelled. “Go! Go!”
And it did, skittering backwards a moment, twisting its body, then running a half-mile south to a calmer place where the others were waiting and where Conrad, back to himself, began laughing hysterically as two burly SAS men pried him off the rail and hustled him to safety.
CHAPTER 23
Part of him wanted to be philosophical — sometimes things went this way, all to hell.
But another part, a bigger part — a part that had driven Horace Gordon Preston to excel in school, in sports, in the Air Force — couldn’t accept defeat, not even a hint of one. Horace Gordon Preston couldn’t abide failure. And that part made him look for a way to salvage something, to find something to take home, something to notch, to banish the taste if not erase the memory.
That was the reason, the only reason, he thought of the Roland launcher when the AWACS controller told him that the Weasel had failed to knock it out.
Logic argued against attacking it. The SAM system completely overmatched the A-10 and its operators had already proven they knew how to use it.
But logic didn’t count for much, especially after Hawkins’s disgusted tone when he agreed that the mission had to be scrubbed.
A tone that implied it was Preston’s fault.
Delta dickwad.
“Two, I want you to follow me down to seventy-five feet,” Hack told A-Bomb.
“Roger that,” replied A-Bomb, without even asking what their course heading was.
Maybe O’Rourke had read his mind. In any event, Hack was grateful that his wingman didn’t question his judgment as he pushed his plane into the howling wind and tipped northeast, vectoring for the Roland’s approximate position. When he passed through five hundred feet, the wind increased exponentially and the Maverick-heavy Hog’s air speed dropped below two hundred knots. He pushed still lower, aiming to get under the Roland radar, falling through four hundred… three hundred… two hundred.
The wind whipped up in a fury so intense that the plane moved straight downward at one point, dropping another fifty feet in a second. And then miraculously, inexplicably, everything went silky smooth. Preston eased his grip on the stick as the altimeter nailed fifty feet, air speed climbing back toward three hundred miles an hour.
At night, in the dark, even over flat terrain, three hundred miles an hour feels incredibly fast when you are less than a hundred feet off the ground.,Shadows leap up at you, hands trying to pull you down to earth. The Hog lacked terrain-following radar; the only night-vision equipment at Hack’s disposal was the IR seeker on the Maverick, which offered a very limited view. His knowledge of what lay ahead was based on a relatively primitive map which experience had shown was not always one hundred percent precise. His sense of where exactly he was relied heavily on a navigation system proven to be less than one hundred percent reliable.
Logic would have, should have, sent him home. But logic no longer had a place in Horace Gordon Preston’s cockpit. He slammed the throttle to max as he neared the crunch zone, dividing his attention as evenly as possible between the RWR, the windscreen, and the Mav’s display, which ghosted several buildings, a road, more buildings, but no SAMs.
“Zeus on your right,” warned A-Bomb, and the next instant the sky filled with a stream of tracers, a hose of red fire spurting about two o’clock off his nose. “Mine.”
Something clicked in Hack’s brain and he nudge the Hog gently, pitching her on her axis to bring her path more slightly west as A-Bomb fired an AGM at the gun, whose errant fire was obviously optically aimed. Hack looked to the Maverick screen, saw a series of buildings and the edge of a river, then lost everything momentarily; the optical sensor jangling for some unknown reason.
When the screen flashed back, Preston saw a low-slung chassis shape in the upper right-hand corner. He slid the cursor over and clicked his trigger to fire.
He hadn’t locked on the Roland, however. A boneheaded, freshman-nugget, idiotic, deadly mistake. There was a flare and a launch — the missile operator firing the missile blind.
Not blind, exactly, just without ground guidance. The Roland was fully capable of finding its own target once launched, and if its kill probability wasn’t nearly as high in manual mode, it was deadly nonetheless. Hack cursed himself, hitting flares and chafe, kicking right quickly, trying to outrun the fire that suddenly ignited in his stomach. Gravity punched him in the chest and pushed at his neck, and a voice deep inside told him it served him right for being such a fuckup, for not having what it took — for choking when it was all on the line.
He zigged left, right, felt the missile piss through its first stage, go terminal — he felt it reach for him, then saw it, or saw something anyway, a large black shadow that miraculously sailed right over his head and kept going.
Then the ground exploded almost below him. Devil One bucked, then shot clear, her nose pointing due south.
“I’m on your six,” said A-Bomb. “Splash one slightly used missile launcher. I’m thinking the Brits owe us big time. You figure they stock Watneys, or are we going to have to settle for Bass?”
PART TWO
LOVERS
CHAPTER 24
Every conceivable chore done, paperwork in order, contingencies prepared for, Lieutenant Michael Knowlington stood up from his desk and took a laboriously lone, slow breath, filling his lungs from bottom to top with the recirculated Saudi air. He exhaled the breath twice as slowly as he had taken it in, pushing the air gently from his lungs, pushing until his stomach muscles flexed far toward his back.