They couldn’t hear him over the whine of the engines. Finally, Eugene saw him and ran over.
“My mask! My mask!” Preston shouted, holding up the mask he had taken from the Iraqis. “Get the whole bag! The whole bag! I want my board, too!”
Might as well.
“My bag! Shit!” he screamed.
The engines were too loud. Eugene ran to the get the ladder.
Hawkins and Wong finally glanced up.
“My bag!” Hack shouted to them. “I need the mask. And the board.”
Wong pointed to the far end of the runway. At first, Hack didn’t understand what the hell he was trying to tell him. Finally, he turned around.
One of the Chinooks had crashed there and was on fire.
CHAPTER 50
Devil Leader, this is Splash Control. Buildings are secure and exfiltration is beginning. We have another difficulty. Please acknowledge.”
Skull had just turned his nose back toward Splash. A billow of black smoke rose between two Apaches. One of the Chinooks had crashed after being hit by gunfire.
Knowlington listened to the terse explanation, then assured Splash Control that he would stay nearby in case he was needed.
He had his own problems, though. The Iraqi relief column had been neutralized. Three of the helicopters were burning on the ground and the fourth had scrambled away to the west. But Dixon was still lost and not answering hails.
As Skull tried to reach the AWACS to request a fix on his squadron mate, a dark wing crossed behind the smoke wisping from the carcass of a self-propelled fun at the far end of the highway. He clicked onto the squadron frequency, hailing Dixon and asking why the hell he hadn’t responded.
He didn’t get an answer.
“Antman, you see him?” Knowlington asked his wingman.
“Uh, I got him at, uh, call it five miles, four and a half. He’s heading south of the highway, just passing that open truck I hit with the gun.”
“I don’t think he has a radio,” Knowlington said. “Let’s catch up.”
“Four.”
The two Hogs spread out in the sky. Devil Leader looping ahead and Four angling tighter, aiming to make sure Dixon noticed at least one of them as he flew. Dixon saw Antman first, wagging his wings slightly, then starting to climb toward his altitude. By the time Skull swept back around and drew alongside, Antman had pulled close enough to use hand signals.
“Says he’s all right except for the radio, if I’m reading his sign language right,” said Antman. “Got to work on his penmanship.”
By even the most optimistic calculation, Dixon would be well into his reserve fuel by now. He had to get straight home, and he needed someone to run with him.
Skull knew it had to be Antman; there was no way he would leave the kid here to take out the MiG y himself. But shepherding a stricken Hog home wasn’t going to be a picnic either.
Antman was a good, decent pilot with a strong sense of what he was about. But he was still a kid. Dixon was still a kid. They’d have to fly more than two hundred miles before putting down; they’d have to do so over hostile territory at slow speed and relatively low altitude.
Knowlington wanted to go with them — not because he didn’t think they could do it, but because he felt as if his presence would somehow protect them, somehow balance against the unpredictable contingencies and chaos of war.
They weren’t kids, not really. But he felt as if he ought to be there to protect them.
Hubris. As if he were the omnipotent, not an old goat with eyes and hands that were steadily slowing.
But that was the way he felt. The closest thing he would ever feel to a paternal instinct.
“Dixon’s going to be low on fuel,” Knowlington told his wingman. “You take him south. I’ll hang back and cover Splash.”
“Check, six, Colonel,” said Antman, wishing him luck with the time-honored slogan of goodwill — and caution.
“Yeah,” Knowlington said. “Check six.”
CHAPTER 51
Dixon answered Antman’s thumbs-up with one of his own, then settled onto the course heading he had flashed with his fingers a few moments earlier. The other Hog edged further off his wing, though it remained so close that BJ thought Antman might be able to hear him if he popped the canopy up and yelled.
That was the kind of thing A-Bomb would suggest. Hell, it was the kind of thing A-Bomb might do.
O’Rourke was a damned good flight leader, Dixon thought as he matched Antman’s slow, steady climb toward the border. He’d laid out the mission well, kept BJ aware of the situation, responded to his own problems in a way that guaranteed the mission would succeed. He acted like a goof-off sometimes, but that was just an act.
The man William James Dixon truly admired was the old-dog colonel who’d put Antman on his wing as his personal guide dog. Knowlington was a gray-hair, but there he was, circling back to cover the Splash team, moving as methodically as a freshly refurbished grandfather clock.
Not long ago, Dixon figured that guys like Knowlington hung around either out of vanity or in hopes of catching an adrenaline rush. Now he realized it was neither. After a while, after you went through enough shit, you didn’t feel any more adrenaline — maybe you didn’t feel anything. You did your job, and you kept doing it because that was your job. If your job was the be the gray-haired geezer who knew everything, you did it.
And his job?
His job was to get home, to see Becky, feel her next to him.
As he passed through seven thousand feet, Dixon spotted a small group of clouds dead ahead. The furls on the left side reminded him of a kid’s face; it became impossible not to think of the boy who’d saved his life.
Why had the kid done it? Dixon had saved him a short while before, but still — to jump on a grenade?
The cloud disappeared as Dixon approached. Perhaps it hadn’t even been there at all, for the sky before him was about as clear as he’d ever seen in his life. The Iraqi desert, bleak and cold, spread out below him. A thick pall hung over the horizon to his left — oil fires in Kuwait, most likely. Antiair artillery rose up about a mile away, futilely searching the sky for something to hit.
Why was he here? He could have gone home to America. Knowlington and the others had made that clear.
The only answer Dixon had was the unlimited sky and the furling clouds on the ground, the feel of his fingers curling around his stick, the cold scratch of fatigue at his eyes. There were no answers to any of his questions about the kid, about his mother, about himself. There was just gravity and the force of the engines, pushing him along.
That, and the memory of Becky’s body folded against his.
BJ checked his instruments, then corrected slightly to keep in Antman’s close shadow.
CHAPTER 52
Math had never been among A-Bomb’s favorite subjects. While unable to avoid numbers, he nonetheless made it a practice whenever possible to treat them with the sort of disdain he might show a month-old French fry.
His loathing of basic arithmetic could not, however, alter the fact that his fuel gauge was taking a steady and dramatic plunge toward negative integers. And it didn’t take a quadratic equation to calculate that there was no way in hell that he was going to make it back to Saudi Arabia, much less the Home Drome, on his rapidly dwindling supply.