Dixon hadn’t seen the antiaircraft gun in the web of shadows and smoke. The first shells — fat twists of glowing metal hurling past his windscreen — seemed unreal, old nightmares remembered long after sleep.
If he’d seen it, he could have nailed the obsolete but still deadly self-propelled ZSU-57-2 gun with his AGMs, dropped the CBUs, or even lit his cannon and erased them with a quick burst of combat load. But Dixon wasn’t seeing very well — or rather, he was seeing in slow motion. It had been less than two weeks since he’d last flown, but those two weeks had been a lifetime. Shapes that would have crystallized immediately into threats remained vague and distorted for an agonizingly long time before he could decipher them.
In truth, the difference in reaction time might have only been a matter of a second or two, but in war, under fire, a second or two was the difference between life and death. He pushed his Hog right, ducking the path of the flak, increasing his speed as he dove.
The gun firing at him threw massive shells to twelve thousand feet in the air, but it was an ancient system, manually aimed. The bullets chewed the air behind the Hog, not quite fast enough to catch the plane’s tail.
Gravity smashed into Dixon’s face as he zagged away. Weighed down by her munitions, trying to respond to her pilot’s harsh inputs, the plane slammed downward. The flight suit tried desperately to compensate for the forces trying to squeeze blood from BJ’s body, but there was only so much it could do. Dixon felt his head begin to float above his body, icy blackness poking at the edges of his conscience.
This had happened to him before. On his very first combat mission, it had shaken him so badly he’d launched his weapons without targets, broken his attack, run away.
He didn’t do that now. If the days that had passed since he last flew had robbed him of his instantaneous reactions, they had also changed him irrevocably. He might flinch, but he would never again run away from anything ever again. He would bite his teeth together hard enough to taste blood flowing from the gums, hard enough to taste the smoking cordite of the grenade that had killed the boy, hard enough to hold off the yawning blackness of fear.
And then he would do his job, without fail.
As the g’s backed off, Dixon pushed the Hog into a wide banking turn, his hand reaching for the armament panel. Close on the target, below the prime altitude for dropping the cluster bombs, he selected his cannon. He straightened his wings, saw the thick line of flak turning toward him, and pushed the trigger. The seven-barreled Gatling spun in the Hog’s chin, spitting spent uranium into the open gondola of the Iraqi gun. Metal hissed into steam and another vehicle parked near the 57 erupted in a fireball as Dixon’s bullets caught it.
He let go of the trigger, quickly scanning the area for another target. There were dug-in positions on the hills opposite the airstrip; small weapons, probably, nothing that could hurt him but a problem for the assault teams.
No other defenses. And damn — there was the MiG, sitting on a ramp just waiting for Preston to come and snatch her.
“Kid! Kid!” screamed A-Bomb.
“I’m here. Nailed the gun,” said Dixon.
“Yeah, I see that,” said O’Rourke.
“Climbing,” he told him, double checking the ladder on his HUD as he cleared five thousand feet. “Going to take out some trenches on those hills with the CBUs, then clear Splash in.”
“What I’m talkin’ about.”
Dixon turned his attention back to the hill, where the enemy positions looked like a series of thumbprints on a misshapen cookie. BJ rolled on them, descending quickly into the sweet spot of his bomb swoop and pickling right on target. The Mk 20 Rockeye II Mod.2’s were veritable dump trucks. Their munitions fanned out in an elaborate and deadly pattern as the CBU unit ignited over its target. The bombs were capable of piercing light armor, and could do very nasty things to flesh.
Dixon recovered, sweeping his eyes around the battlefield one last time.
“Splash zone is clear,” he announced, glancing at his watch. They were two minutes ahead of schedule.
CHAPTER 41
The helicopter’s tail whipped so hard to the left that Hawkins fell sideways, losing his balance as the door gunner began blasting away at a defensive post at the southern end of the runway. One of the Apaches roared across their path, bullets whipping from its chain gun. Hawkins pushed upright and caught sight of the MiG, sitting in front of the hangar not ten yards away. The Pave Hawk veered back right, whipping around — one, maybe two Iraqis were running from the plane back toward the hangar, cement flying around them as the door gunner and the Minimi operator turned their attention on them.
The plane was out in the open, canopy up, a ladder nearby. The hangar door was open. Another Apache crossed between the plane and the building, unmolested.
The ragheads had been caught completely by surprise. Idiots!
You couldn’t pray for luck like this!
“Down! Down!” Hawkins yelled, anxious to get on the ground. “Get us on the runway! In front of the plane! In front of the plane!”
The Pave Hawk had already pitched toward the ground, fluttering and then coasting along as if on a gentle wave. It touched down not five yards from the nose of the enemy plane. Sergeant Crowley, the point man, leapt through the open door. Pig followed, with Wong right behind him.
“Go! Go! Go!” Hawkins yelled to the others, leaping forward himself. Only Fernandez, with Preston and Eugene, remained behind.
The helicopter jerked forward as Hawkins jumped out. He tripped against the edge of the doorway but somehow managed to keep his feet squared so that he hit the cement clean, even though he was falling off balance. He rolled, got up, whipped the nose of his heavy gun around to cover the MiG. Satisfied that it was empty, he ran toward the hangar. He caught sight of the British Chinook with its SAS team descending beyond the northeastern corner of the hangar area. The commandos were uncharacteristically late, though only by a few seconds — their big helo dropped nearly straight down, obviously not encountering any resistance.
We’re in, we’re in, Hawkins thought. Wong and that bozo Preston are going to pull it off.
Hot shit!
Hangar. Stop celebrating and secure the hangar.
Hawkins pushed forward, spotting Crowly at the large open door. The sergeant reached his hand back. Hawkins threw himself down, realizing the D boy was going to toss a flash-bang into the building, neutralizing any resistance with a grenade.
It wasn’t necessarily the optimum move — there were maybe a dozen flammable substances inside a typical hangar that the grenade could easily ignite. A fired could ruin the plane, not to mention snare Crowly. But in the fury of the moment, he wasn’t thinking about that.
The grenade went off. He pumped another. There was a puff of smoke, but no secondaries. The Iraqis who had run for the hangar were either dead or severely wounded.
Something flashed from the hedge of dirt on Hawkins’ right. He whirled around, saw Pig near the crest of the berm working his MP5.
“Secure the plane! Secure the plane!” Hawkins yelled before realizing that Wong was doing just that. He had already started to wheel the large, unpowered ladder platform toward the cockpit.
Hawkins turned back toward the helicopter to look for Fernandez when he a tan stick popped up into his periphery vision near the hangar. Hawkins jerked around, pressing his trigger at the same time. His SAW cut the Iraqi in half.
The captain dropped to one knee, covering the area more carefully now. When he was satisfied that there were no other soldiers there, at least that he could see, he jumped up and ran toward the trench where the Iraqi had hid, quickly making sure no one was hiding beyond the hangar.