The controller told them the building was a hospital and off-limits.
“No way that’s a fucking hospital,” said A-Bomb. “I’m looking at a dozen fucking artillery pieces, sandbagged in. Fuck.”
Hack waited for O’Rourke’s curses to subside, then gave the ABCCC controller another shot. But he wasn’t buying.
“Devil One, we’ll have a FAC check it out on the coordinates you supplied,” said the controller finally. “I have a target for you.”
Hack’s fingers fumbled his wax pencil and he had to dig into his speed-suit pocket for the backup. He retrieved it just as the controller began the brief, setting out an armored vehicle depot as the new target. He scrawled the coordinates on the Persipex canopy, then double-checked them against his paper map, orienting himself. The target was to the east, a stretch for their fuel.
Doable, though.
A-Bomb continued to grumbled about the ersatz hospital, even after they changed course.
“Hospital my ass.”
Hack tried coordinating the numbers against his map, but lost track of where he was for a moment, thrown a bit by the INS. You could get distracted easily in combat, no matter what you were flying. He had to keep his head clear.
The opposite seemed true for A-Bomb. “I’ve seen more convincing hospitals in comic books,” he railed.
“O’Rourke, shut the hell up and watch my six,” barked Preston.
“What I’m talking about.”
This time, there was no difficulty seeing the target. It had been bombed in the past hour or so; smoke curled from the remains of buildings or bunkers at the north and south ends of what looked like a large parking lot. Roughly two dozen vehicles were parked in almost perfect rows at a right angle to the buildings. Beyond them were mounds of dirt — probably more vehicles, dug into the sand. Whatever air defenses the Iraqis had mounted had been eradicated in the earlier strike.
A flight of F-16 Vipers cut overhead as Hack turned to line up his bombing run. At least five thousand feet separated him from the nearest plane, but it still felt like he was getting his hair cut. He hadn’t known about the flight, which was en route to another target; Hack fought against an impulse to bawl the controller out for not warning him that the aircraft were nearby.
Do your best, he reminded himself, as he nudged tentatively into the bombing run. The A-10A’s primitive bombsight slid slowly toward the row of vehicles as he dropped through nine thousand feet. They were small brown sticks, tiny twigs left in the dirt by a kid who’d gone home for supper.
Hack’s heart thumped loud in his throat, choking off his breath. He began to worry that he was going to be too low before the crosshairs found their target, then realized he’d begun his glide a bit too late. He was in danger of overshooting the vehicles. He pushed his stick, increasing his angle of attack. The cursor jumped onto a pair of fat sticks and he pickled.
Wings now clean except for the Sidewinders and ECM pod, the Hog fluttered slightly, urging her pilot to recover to the right as planned. But Hack’s attention stayed focused on the ground in front of him, the sticks steadily growing from twigs to thick branches. The bark roughened and indentations appeared. They were armored personnel carriers, all set out in a line. He could see hatches and machine guns, sloped ports. He stared at them as they grew, watching with fascination as they became more and more real, yet remained the playthings of a kid.
Finally he pulled his stick back, belatedly realizing he’d flown so close to the ground that the exploding blomblets might very well clip his wings. He reached for throttle, slamming the Hog into overdrive, ducking his body with the plane as he tried desperately to push her off to the south.
It was only as the Hog began to recover that Hack realized he hadn’t bothered to correct for the wind, which could easily send a stick of bombs tumbling off target.
As he twisted his head back to get a look, A-Bomb’s garbled voice jangled his ears. He started to ask his wingmate to repeat, then realized what the words meant.
Someone on the ground had fired a shoulder-launched SAM at Hack’s tailpipe.
CHAPTER 4
A-Bomb repeated his warning, then stepped hard on his rudder pedal, twisting his A-10A in the air. The ants that had emerged from the burned out bunker were fat and pretty in his screen — no way could he waste a shot like this, even if there were missiles in the air. He kissed his cluster bombs good-bye, then tossed a parcel of flares off for luck, tucking the Hog into a roll.
He swirled almost backward in the air, goosing more decoy flares off before finally pushing Devil Two level in the opposite direction he’d taken for the attack. If either of the SA-7s that had been launched had been aimed at him, his zigging maneuvers had tied their primitive heat seekers in knots.
Probably.
Something detonated in the air about a half-mile north of him. Immediately above the explosion, but a good mile beyond it, Devil One crossed to the west.
Assured that his wingmate hadn’t been hit, A-Bomb pulled his plane over his shoulder, flailing back at the armored depot to share his feelings at being fired on.
“I’m a touchy feely kind of guy,” he explained as Iraqis scattered below. “So let me just hug you close.”
The 30mm Avenger cannon began growling below his feet. About the size of the ’59 Caddy A-Bomb had on blocks back home, the Gatling’s seven barrels sped around furiously as high-explosive and uranium armor-piercing shells were fed in by a duet of hydraulic motors, only to be dispensed by the Gat with furious relish. The recoil from the gun literally held the Hog in the air as the pilot worked the stream of bullets through the top armor of three APCs.
As smoke and debris filled the air before him; A-Bomb pushed the Hog to the right, leaning against the stick to fight off a sudden tsunami of turbulence. He let off the trigger as he came to the end of the row, pushing away now at only fifteen hundred feet, close enough for some of the crazy ragheads on his left to actually take aim with their Kalashnikovs. The assault rifles’ 7.62mm bullets were useless against the titanium steel surrounding the Hog’s cockpit, and it would take more than a hundred of them to seriously threaten the honeycombed wings with their fire-retardant inserts protecting the fuel tanks. Still, it was the thought that counted.
“I admire the hell out of you,” said A-Bomb. Then he turned back to nail the SOBs. “Let me show you what a real gun can do.” As he zipped back for the attack, the Iraqis dove on the ground. “Do the words ‘thirty-millimeter cannon’ mean anything to you? How about u-rain-ee-um?”
CHAPTER 5
Tiny bubbles of sweat climbed up the sides of Hack’s neck, growing colder as they went, freezing the tips of his ears. His lungs filled with snow, ballooning, prying his ribs outward against the cells of his pressure suit. Hack jigged and jagged, throwing the plane back and forth as he tried desperately to avoid the SAMs.