Was this why he’d taken the mission, his last mission: To go out a failure? To let his guys die?
Skull slammed his stick, angry at himself — not for failing, but for the bullshit self-pity. Remorse didn’t mean jack to the poor bastards on the ground; it was useless, as useless and ultimately destructive as drinking.
He was closing the distance but it wasn’t going to be enough. The Sidewinders had trouble spotting the baffled heat signatures of the gunships, especially with the rockets acting as decoys.
Skull glanced at the Maverick screen. The targeting cursor sat just under the fat rotor at the top of the helicopter on the right.
Nail it?
With an air-to-ground missile?
In range. And shit, the damn helicopter was only five hundred feet off the ground. It wasn’t going anywhere.
No way.
Mavs couldn’t be confused by the flairs, or ECMs for that matter.
No fucking way.
By the time the debate played out in Skull’s mind, he had already fired the first Maverick at the chopper. The second clicked off the rail for the other Hind a half-breath later.
The solid-propellant rocket motors that powered the two missiles had been designed for reliability and ease of handling; while they weren’t exactly slow, they propelled the AGMs at less than half the speed of a typical air-to-air missile. Likewise, the guidance system in the Mavericks had been optimized for its intended targets — tanks, which were rarely moving faster than thirty miles an hour, and were hardly ever found off the ground.
On the other hand, the Maverick’s guidance system might be rated more accurate than that of many missile systems, and once locked could not easily be confused. In fact, there was no reason — at least in theory — why the missiles could not hit something hovering aboveground, so long as it stayed more or less stationary.
Which the helicopters did, until nearly the last second.
The pilot in the second Hind realized the thick splinter on the right side of his cockpit glass was not a crack, but a missile coming for him. He wheeled his helicopter hard to the left, kicking flares and spinning his heat signature away.
The maneuver would have worked perfectly had Skull launched a Sidewinder. Here, the Maverick merely pushed its nose down a little steeper, slightly increasing the speed at which its three-hundred-pound payload smashed through the armored windscreen of the weapons-system operator’s cabin. The missile continued through at an angle, obliterating the crewman and carrying off a good hunk of the pilot’s control panel as it smashed its way out of the aircraft.
It did not explode, and in fact the Hind continued to fly, though now without the benefit of control. The chopper flopped straight up at its top speed of nearly 2,500 feet per minute. Its tail whipped around as the main blades pulled the craft onto its back. It stuttered for a second, drifting like a leaf caught in a steady wind. Then slowly it began to sink toward the earth, its tail circling as it plummeted with a fiery crash.
In contrast, the warhead on the second Maverick not only hit precisely where the targeting cursor had sent it, but detonated as well, obliterating the upper cabin area and engines and initiating a fireball that flashed over the entire helicopter. The flames continued to burn as the helo fell nearly straight downward, its charred skeleton neatly depositing its ashes in a small heap.
By that time, Knowlington had pushed east to drop his bombs on the elements of the Iraqi convoy that had managed to get around the vehicle he’d destroyed. He also realized why the Tomcats were late — they had just nailed a MiG-21 that had been scrambled to assist the Iraqi counter-attack.
What he didn’t know, though, was where Dixon was.
CHAPTER 47
Dixon hit his flares and dove for the desert, zigging hard enough to pull six or seven g’s as he tried to evade the shoulder-launched missile. It clawed for his tail like an animal groping in the dark: he flew like a machine, working the stick and rudder with sharp precision. He didn’t feel fear — he didn’t feel anything. He just flew.
A white cigarette sailed fifty yards from his canopy; he glanced at it, then bucked his nose in its direction and kicked out more flares, calculating that the Iraqis might have launched a pair of the missiles and the second would be closer to his tail.
They hadn’t had time. The first missile continued on, its self-destruct mechanism apparently defective. Dixon caught another glimpse of it arcing toward the line of gray buildings near the river. The Iraqis would undoubtedly blame the deaths it caused on the Americans, pretending that the Allies were targeting civilians with their weapons.
To Dixon, the distinctions between civilians and combatants no longer made any sense. There was only the war, only the job to be done. He pushed his Hog into a wide bank, reorienting himself. He’d flown far north; a sizeable Iraqi town was laid out below his right wing. A few days before on the ground, he had seen a similar town almost as if it were an isolated outpost in Wisconsin, where he’d grown up. Now he saw it merely as something he flew over, a place where an antiaircraft gun began lobbing shells behind him. Sighted manually and too light to be a threat, the gun’s bullets pointed him back toward his target.
The static in his radio flared again. It was another warning, this time from Coyote, the AWACS plane monitoring the section.
“Devil Two, break! Break! Break!” shouted the controller in hoarse voice as his words were once more consumed in a cacophony of electronic rustling. Dixon heard “MiG-21” and began tucking south, assuming that was the most logical direction the controller would have given him. As he made his cut, his warning gear tripped over an Iraqi Jay Bird radar, trying to get its sticky fingers on him. The warning cleared, but Dixon punched chaff anyway, rolling back toward the battlefield.
His headphones had gone quiet again. Neither Skull nor Antman answered his hail.
He looked over at the com panel. Something was definitely wrong with his radio; the staticky chatter that ordinarily provided background listening as he flew had faded into dead silence. He clicked through different frequencies, retrieving nothing. He switched back, broadcasting to Coyote, though he couldn’t be sure he was sending. Calm and slow, his voice nonetheless sounded strange inside his head, as if the radio’s failure had affected his own sense of hearing.
“Devil Two is experiencing radio problems. If you’re hearing me, I can transmit but not receive. Repeat, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”
He clicked off the mike button, checking altitude and speed — 3,500 feet aboveground, level flight, 285 knots, nosing south by southwest. Splash was on his left; he had a straight line to the black smoke rising from the Iraqi column and the splashed helicopters. The ruined Hinds sat in heaps just before the highway. One of the transport helicopters, its rotors turning, was disgorging men near the wrecks. Beyond them, scattered near and on the road, were the Iraqi vehicles and troops that had been racing to Splash’s aid.
An A-10 dove toward the rear of the column. Bullets spewed from its mouth, red and gray and black lightning striking the earth. Steam hissed from the desert where it struck. A fireball followed, exploding about fifty feet off the ground as the Hog cleared and banked south. A few hundred yards away, an Iraqi helicopter — seemingly untouched, though it must have been targeted by a missile — rolled over in the air and folded into the ground, flames shooting out from the side.
Dixon repeated his can’t-hear-ya call on the squadron frequency, but again got no response. He checked his fuel situation, and saw that he was edging toward bingo, the magic point in his fuel tanks when it was time to head home.