Zipping over Iraqi territory at more than a hundred miles an hour, their route had been carefully planned to follow an empty path in the desert; they had seen no sign of life except for two highways in the last half-hour. Now as he looked past the gunner Hawkins saw, or thought he saw, a row of houses only a few yards away. He pushed forward, trying to get a better view, not sure if the Iraqi village was an optical illusion or a detail he had somehow missed when the pilots went over the ingress route with him.
Illusion — just rocks.
But there were buildings there, a half-mile away, no more. People or animals or something were moving, something live.
The sky flashed red in the distance. One of the crew members began talking loudly, relaying radio information from the command plane.
The chopper seemed to pick herself up by the tail, her pace quickening. The door gunner leaped forward to man his weapon.
“Missiles in the air ahead! Flak!” warned the co-pilot. “The game’s afoot!”
A Sherlock Holmes fan, thought Hawkins, glancing at his watch. They were five minutes from Splashdown.
CHAPTER 39
A-Bomb nailed the cursor on the SA-9 just as the missile warning blared. The timing couldn’t be more perfect — his CD player had just dished up “Rock the Casbah.”
“Sing it, boys,” he told the band, joining in on the chorus as he goosed the first missile toward the small mobile launcher, which was just over eight nautical miles away. A second, unbriefed launcher sat maybe twenty yards to the right of the first; A-Bomb zeroed the targeting pipper on the hatch right in front of the four-barreled launching arm and cooked off Maverick number two.
He kicked chaff out, but didn’t bother zagging to avoid the SA-2 — the way he figured it, he was flying so damn slow a cut left or right wasn’t going to throw the enemy missile anyway. Besides, it would make it even harder to find the other SA-9 launcher, which didn’t seem to be in shadows of the hill where it was supposed to be. Perhaps sensing his difficulty, the Iraqis kindly lit their ZSU-23 flak guns, streaming bullets into the sky to advertise his secondary targets.
“I’ll get to you, I’ll get to you,” he told them, realizing from the position of the ZSU-23s that he had been looking for the SA-9 a little too far to the east. He slipped his cursor left, working the gear like his grandpa used to nudge the old Philco to improve reception. “Light touch, young’un, that’s what it takes,” Grandpa O’Rourke always used to advise, and just like that the baseball game would flood in with Phil Rizzuto shouting “There it goes!” — the Yankee Scooter two hundred miles away calling a Roy White home run into the upper deck in right field.
And just like that A-Bomb nudged the Maverick target cue precisely into the sloped grille of the SA-9 Gaskin launcher, itself a throwback to the days of stifled offense and a big strike zone. The Russian-made launcher lacked White’s deceptive speed and couldn’t play the difficult sun of Yankee Stadium’s left field, but it did possess something of the outfielder’s quiet grit — the launcher puffed up two missiles just as A-Bomb sent his fastball its way.
“Nice try, my friends,” A-Bomb told the Iraqis.
He was just coming into the missiles’ extreme range. Essentially hopped-up SA-7 heat-seekers on a mobile platform, the Gaskins were somewhat old-fashioned and relatively small, though of course any amount of explosive with wings attached was nothing to sneeze at.
A-Bomb kicked defensive flares and deepened his angle of attack, sliding right as he came for the AAA guns at the foot of the hill to the right of the airstrip. He found four of them, staggered in pairs, each pumping enough lead in the sky to keep a million batteries from ever running out of juice. A-Bomb thumbed his last Maverick at the first stream he could designate, then pushed his Hog right, leaning against his good engine to get an acceptable glide path for his CBUs.
Problem was, the bombs were preset for release around five thousand feet, and there was no way he was going to be that high when he got over the target. He couldn’t fudge it either — he was passing through seven thousand already and very far off the mark.
The air percolated with exploding shells, the gunners homing in on the slow-moving, chugging target. A-Bomb wasn’t quite in their range, though that didn’t stop them from giving it the ol’ Iraqi college try.
Nor did it prevent at least a few shells from bursting close enough to the Hogs skin to rattle the wings.
“Gonna melt your barrels you keep shooting like that,” he told them.
People were yelling at him over the radio. The Clash had moved on to “Red Angel Dragnet.” The Hog added a few jangles and rumbles of its own. The SA-2 was somewhere behind him, The SA-9s sped upward somewhere to the left. The 23mm slugs were coming for his nose. A-Bomb felt right at home.
Almost perfect.
“I could really go for a good cup of Joe right now,” he told the Iraqis, pushing his nose down sharply. “Got any?”
His Maverick erupted, erasing the first Zeus.
“I’ll take that as a no,” he said, dropping his bombs into the flak dealer to its right. The Hog jerked slightly as the bombs fell, helping as A-Bomb pushed right, angling for the second group of guns, which inexplicably stopped firing before he pickled.
“I told you not to start firing too soon,” A-Bomb told the Iraqis as he pulled back on the stick. “Damn. Didn’t the Ruskies teach you anything?”
“One, repeat?”
“Oops, did I transmit there?” A-Bomb asked Dixon over the squadron frequency.
“You’ve been doing play by play,” answered his wingman.
“Any good?”
“Don’t give up your day job. That the Clash on the soundtrack?”
“What I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb, who always appreciated when a youngster picked up on the classics. He checked his position — three thousand feet, give or take, a mile north of Splashdown, air speed 185 knots.
Must have a tailwind, he thought.
“What happened to that SA-2?”
“Got confused and blew up right after launch,” BJ told him. “Tornados nailed the site right after the radar came on. Gave them a good beacon.”
“Always glad to help out our allies, even if I’m just playing clay pigeon.” A-Bomb flicked the CD player back to the beginning of side one; something about “Know Your Rights” always got his juices moving.
“A-Bomb, did you hear me tell you about that SA-9 launch?”
“Musta missed it,” A-Bomb told him. A gun far to the north began firing, probably at him. The defenses to the north and west were serious and numerous; he banked southward, still climbing slowly. He could just make out Dixon beyond the thick gray smoke rising from his targets. “You got it, kid?”
“I’m taking a run at the field now,” Dixon told him.
“Go for it,” said A-Bomb. He checked his instruments, working through the numbers slower than usual — a difference of approximately one nanosecond.
Fuel a little lighter than he’d expected. More than enough to make it back to KKMC, though, especially on one engine.
A-Bomb spotted Dixon’s Hog diving toward the smoking airfield. A plume of black smoke erupted in its path; the dark fingers climbed high into the air, far higher than the ZSU 23 had been.
“Heavy artillery gunnin’ for ya kid,” A-Bomb shouted, as Dixon’s plane disappeared in the geyser of 57mm shells.
CHAPTER 40