He needed to find the damn things. Partly because he wanted to prove to A-Bomb and the rest of the squadron that he did really and truly have the right stuff. And partly because he wanted to prove it to himself.
Not that he should need to. But somehow the fuzzy picture in the small targeting screen and the rust in his Hog-flying chops negated everything else.
Hack checked his fuel and then his paper map as he legged further north. He pushed the air through his lungs slowly, telling himself to calm down.
Below the map and the mission notes, taped to the last page of the knee board, were three pieces of paper. He flipped the sheets up and looked at them now, talisman’s that never failed him.
One was a Gary Larson cartoon about scientists and bugs. He looked at it and laughed.
The second was a Biblical quotation from Ecclesiastes, reminding him that “wisdom exceedeth folly.”
And the last was the most important, a motto he’d heard from his father since he was seven or eight years old:
“Do your best.”
All he could do. He blew another wad of air into his face mask and put his eyes back out into the desert, trying to will some detail out of the shifting sands. The smudge had worked itself into a dark brown snake on the ground.
Not a tank. Something, but not a tank.
Hack sighed — might just as well let A-Bomb take a turn; he was used to looking at things on the ground, and maybe his eyes were even better. But as Preston slid his finger to click on the mike, the transmission from another flight ran over the frequency. Waiting for it to clear, he saw a gray lollipop just beyond the snake. Then another and another and another.
“Thank you, God, oh thank you,” he said. Looking over, he dialed the Maverick targeting cursor onto the first T-54.
“You say something, Major?” asked A-Bomb.
“Have three, no four tanks, dug in, beyond that smudge,” said Hack as he coaxed the pipper home. “Stand by.”
“Story of my life,” said A-Bomb. “Yeah, I got them. Your butt’s clear. Snake’s the track from a flak gun. Zeus on the right of the target area. Two of ‘em. Firing!”
As if they’d heard his wing mate’s warning, the four-barreled antiaircraft guns sent a stream of lead into the air. They were firing at extreme range and without the help of their radar, but even if they’d been in his face Hack wouldn’t have paid any attention — he wanted the damned tanks.
His first Maverick slid off her rail with a thunk, the rocket engine taking a second before bursting into action. By that time Hack had already steadied the crosshairs on a second tank. One hundred and twenty-five pounds of explosive dutifully took its cue as he depressed the trigger, launching from the Hog on what would be a fast, slightly arced, trip to its target.
Hack jerked his head back to the windscreen, belatedly realizing he was flying toward the anti-aircraft fire. Well-aimed or not, the 23mm slugs could still make nasty holes in anything they hit. He jerked the plane sharply to his right, narrowly avoiding the leading edge of the furious lead roiling the sky.
CHAPTER 2
As soon as Hack cleared to his right, A-Bomb dished off his two Mavericks, targeting the pair of four-barreled 23mm anti-aircraft guns that were sending a fury of shells at his flight leader.
“What I’m talking about,” A-Bomb told the missiles as they sped toward their destinations. “What I’m talking about is nobody fires on a Hog and gets away with it. Go shoot at an F-15 or something. Better yet, aim for a MiG.”
Never one to waste a motion, A-Bomb nudged his stick ever so slightly to the left, lining up to drop his cluster-bombs on the buried tanks. In the fraternity of Hog drivers, A-Bomb stood apart. He was a wingman’s wingman, always checking somebody’s six, always ready to smoke any son of a bitch with bad manners enough to attack his lead. But he did have his quirks — he never entered combat without a full store of candy in his flightsuit, and never dropped a bomb without an appropriate soundtrack.
“Sweet Child O’ Mine” qualified as appropriate, if you skipped the mushy parts.
As W. Axl Rose prayed for thunder, O’Rourke tipped into a gentle swoop toward the targets, planning to drop his Redeye cluster-bombs in two salvos. In the meantime, Hack’s first Maverick hit its target, the nose of the flying bomb sending a small gray-black geyser into the air.
“Decoy,” said A-Bomb. “Son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER 3
Hack rarely cursed, but he found it nearly impossible not to as he swung back toward the target area. A-Bomb might or might not be right about the tanks being decoys — hazy smoke now covered the target area, making it impossible to tell whether the tanks had been made of metal or papier-mâché. Flames shot up from one of the antiaircraft guns his wingmate had hit; black fingers erupted in crimson before closing back into a fist and disappearing. He turned on his wing, edging north, still trying to figure out what the hell he was seeing on the ground.
In an F-15, everything was laid out for you. AWACS caught the threat miles and miles away, fed you a vector. The APG-70 multimode, pulse-Doppler radar sifted through the air, caught the bandit eighty miles away, hiding in the weeds. You closed, selected your weapon. Push button, push button — two Sparrows up and at ‘em. The MiG was dead meat before it even knew you were there.
Push button, push button.
If the MiG got through the net, things could get dicey. But that was good in a way — you scanned the sky, saw a glint off a cockpit glass, came up with your solution, applied it. You might even tangle mano a mano, cannons blazing away.
But this — this was like trying to ride a bicycle on a highway in a sandstorm. You were looking at the ground, for christsakes, not the sky.
The desert blurred. Hack shifted in the ejection seat, leaning up to get a better view. His elbow slapped hard against the left panel, pinging his funny bone.
Stinking A-10.
Hack pulled through a bank of clouds and ducked lower, jerking the stick hard enough to feel the g’s slam him in the chest. He’d been out of sorts his first few times in the Eagle cockpit, out of whack again when he’d come over here for his first combat patrols, unsettled even the day he nailed his Iraqi. There were no natural pilots, or if there were, he didn’t know any and he certainly wasn’t one of them. There were guys who worked at it hard, set their marks and hit them. You learned to keep the bile in your stomach, slow your breathing, take your time — but not too much time.
Do your best.
“I’m thinking we of our cluster-bombs and maybe have a go with the guns on that cracker box.”
A-Bomb’s transmission took Hack by surprise. “Come again?”
“Cracker box, make that a box of Good ‘n Plenty, two o’clock on your bow, three, oh maybe four miles off. Looks like the candy’s spilling out of it. See?”
He did see — now. A-Bomb had incredible eyes.
“How come everything is food to you, A-Bomb?” he asked.
“Could be I’m hungry,” replied his wingmate.
A-Bomb’s “candy” looked suspiciously like howitzer shells. Their frag — slang for the “fragment” of the daily Air Tasking Order pertaining to them — allowed them to hit any secondary target in the kill box once the tanks were nailed. Still, Hack contacted the ABCCC controller circling to the south in a C-130 to alert him to the situation, in effect asking if they were needed elsewhere. Important cogs in the machinery of war, the ATO and the ABCCC (airborne command and control center) allowed the allies to coordinate hundreds of strikes every day, giving them both a game plan and a way to freelance around it. Dropping ordnance was one thing, putting explosives where they would do the most good was another. Coordination was especially important this close to Kuwait, where there were thousands of targets and almost as many aircraft.