Jim DeFelice
Fort Apache
PROLOGUE
Private Smith and Private Jones had spent the whole day arguing about the Super Bowl. So when their duty shifts wound down, Private Smith found a football and tossed it to Jones.
“Go long,” said Private Jones, dropping back to unleash one. “Here comes a bomb.”
Smith had played tight end in high school. He’d done pretty damn well, too; made all-county his junior and senior year. People used to say he ate defensive backs for breakfast, or at least lunch.
So when he put his head down and darted across the Saudi desert in a post pattern, he felt as if he were reliving a little of his old glory. He felt damn good, turning back with impeccable timing as Jones’ bomb arced overhead.
One second, the pigskin fluttered in the evening sky, headed for his outstretched arms.
The next second it had been swallowed whole by a dark angel of Hell.
The demon swallowed the ball and kept coming. Smith threw himself head-first into the sand. He thought he was a dead man. He said the only prayer he knew.
“Now I lay me down to sleep.”
His words were drowned by the roar. The ground shook so hard that he thought the devil best was chewing him whole.
Then he realized it had passed him by.
“Yo, what the hell are you doing?” asked Jones, nudging him in the back with his foot as the ground stopped shaking.
Smith turned over. “Didn’t you see that? Shit. I’ve never seen anything like it. That… thing… came right for me.”
“What? The Warthog? They always fly low around here.”
“Warthog?”
“Yeah. It’s an A-10. Mother-fucker of an airplane. Ugly as hell. Kills Iraqis just by lookin’ at ‘em.
Smith pulled himself up. “That was an airplane?”
“Meanest stinking bomber in the whole damn Gulf,” said Jones. “Say, how’d your pants get wet?”
PART ONE
INJUN COUNTRY
CHAPTER 1
This is what happened when you had a big mouth:
You ended up staring through the open door of a C-141B Starlifter, 35,000 feet over Iraq, sucking oxygen from a mask, waiting to kill yourself.
You also shivered your damn butt off. But at least that took your mind off what was going to happen when you jumped.
A little.
Air Force Lieutenant William B.J. Dixon would have given anything— anything— not to be standing in the dim red light of the unpressurized cargo hold, wind whipping everywhere, weighed down by what the Special Ops paratroopers around him swore was only thirty — five pounds of equipment but felt like at least five hundred.
But it was his fault. He had opened his big mouth.
Worse. He had committed the unpardonable sin.
He had volunteered.
Idiot.
Technically, Dixon hadn’t been lying when he told the Delta Force officer in charge of the operation that he had parachuted at night. He had— once, as part of a recreational sky diving program in college.
But that jump was a hell of a lot different than this. Much different. And while the Special Ops people had obviously thought he was a heavily experienced jumper, the truth was Dixon hadn’t even made the hundred jumps necessary for a Class A skydiving license.
In fact, he hadn’t made half that.
Or a quarter.
But five jumps did qualify in his mind as “a lot,” which were his exact words when asked how often he’d jumped.
It had been a seemingly innocent, offhand, and irrelevant question at the time, precisely the kind that demanded a vague and even baloney-squash answer.
You’d think.
Until tonight, the highest altitude he’d ever jumped from was twelve thousand feet. Or eight thousand. He couldn’t quite remember.
The commando in charge of the team, a Delta trooper named Sergeant Eli Winston, gave him a thumbs-up and nudged him toward the Starlifter’s door.
All these guys were serious nut cases, but Winston was the worse. The rest of the commandos had M-16s or MP-5s, serious but lightweight weapons. Created by Heckler & Koch, they could spit through their 30 round-clips in less than three seconds and were generally accurate to two hundred yards. Impressive, but not gaudy.
Winston, a wiry black man who stood maybe five-seven, was carrying an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon or “SAW,” a fierce machine-gun more than twice the size of the MP5. He had four plastic boxes of belted ammo strapped to his body within easy reach, augmenting the bulky clip of 5.56s in the SAW’s gut. Dixon was convinced the sergeant was planning on using all five clips before he hit the ground.
Thing was, to a man the Special Forces troops he was jumping with thought Dixon was as crazy as they were. Crazier. He flew a Hog, after all. He’d shot down a helicopter, after all. And he’d accepted the surrender of an entire platoon of Iraqi soldiers while riding along with a Special Ops group on a rescue mission just a few days before.
But of course what cinched it was the fact that he’d volunteered.
So no wonder they figured Dixon would have no problem jumping out of a cargo plane going, Mach 25, more than a hundred miles into Iraq in the dead of night.
Hog driver? Shit, those guys are born crazy. Ever see the plane they fly? How low they go? How many bombs they carry?
Got to be nuts.
Jumping out of an airplane in the middle of the night’s like going to a drive-in movie for those guys.
Dixon’s decision to volunteer had actually been part of his plan to get back to his squadron, the 535th Tactical Fighter Squadron, affectionately known to Saddam and anyone else who tried messing with them as Devil Squadron. Punished for an admittedly stupid screw up the first day of the air war, Dixon had been temporarily shunted into a do — nothing job in Riyadh. So naturally, he’d salivated when one of his newfound Special Ops buddies suggested he tell a certain colonel he was available to help train ground FACs.
Ground FACs— also known as forward air controllers— worked with attack pilots to pick out targets on the front lines. In some cases, the job was actually handled by pilots, but that wasn’t particularly necessary: mostly all you had to do was work a radio and have a good sense of direction and a rudimentary understanding of a plane’s capabilities. Telling a Hog driver what he needed to know would take all of three seconds: point to something big enough to blow up, then duck.
It was a time-honored profession, and Dixon figured he could make as worthy a contribution to it as the next guy. A few lectures, a bunch of donuts, and the job would be done.
And since the Special Ops units were headquartered at King Fahd— also his squadron’s home drome— the assignment seemed a perfect chance to worm back into his squadron commander’s good graces. His boss, Colonel Michael “Skull” Knowlington, would certainly have cooled off by now, and volunteering to help a brother service would surely count in Dixon’s favor.
It was all going to be piece of cake, especially since there was no real need for FACs until the ground war started— weeks, if not months from now. Dixon had figured that with a little luck, string-pulling and maybe some strategic whining, he’d be back dropping bombs with Devil Squadron inside a week.
Except something had gotten lost in the translation. Because there wasn’t anyone to train.
And the Special Ops troops weren’t waiting for the ground war to start. They needed somebody north right away.