His main target was a topo-scatter communications tower not far from the radar dish his flight leader had hit. His eyes darted from the windscreen to the television, back and forth, waiting for the shadowy figure to appear. Finally, he saw something in the tube and pushed the trigger to lock and fire in practically the same motion. As the missile burst away, he worried that he hadn’t locked up on the right target — the screen had been a blur and he’d only picked the biggest shadow. Quickly, he put another Maverick on line, yelling at himself to study the screen more carefully, trying to narrow the world down to the small tube and its depiction of the target area. But too much was happening. He’d drifted off course and now overcorrected, and if the tower was still there it wouldn’t appear anywhere in the screen. Finally, he saw a squat shadow he recognized as a radar van, slid the cursor in for a lock, and fired.
Glancing up at his windscreen, he realized he had gone lower than planned — a hell of a lot lower.
The altimeter read two thousand feet.
Dixon yanked the stick back, jerked it for dear life, his whole body trembling with panic.
Doberman returned to twelve thousand feet, reorienting himself to continue the attack. While he’d practiced mid-altitude bombing a lot in the last few weeks, he still felt vaguely uneasy attacking at this altitude. Nor was he used to going after something so placid, though well protected, as a radar installation — officially an “early warning ground control intercept station” or GCI for short. The Hog’s “normal” mission was close-in troop support and tank busting, and if it had been all the same to Doberman, he would have spent the first day of the air war against Iraq cruising about fifty feet off the ground and blowing up recycled Russian armor near the Saudi border. But the GCI stations located deep within Iraq were an important part of the enemy air defenses; taking them out was critical to the success of the allied air plan. The fact that such an important job had been given to Hogs meant that someone in Riyadh finally realized how capable the slow but steady low-altitude attack planes really were.
That, or they were desperate.
On the bright side, the mission planners had given them pictures and everything, just like they were Stealth Fighters. As his friend A-Bomb had said yesterday: Draw a little snout on a trailer and it practically looks like a tank, so what’s the big deal?
Keying the mike to ask his wingman, Lieutenant Dixon, how his Maverick run had gone, Doberman spotted a command building through the broken layers of clouds below. It was the last of his primary targets, too fat and juicy to pass up. He glanced quickly at the Maverick targeting screen, found the building. Locked it tight, and kissed it goodbye. As the missile clunked off the wing rail, the pilot glanced back to the windscreen and spotted two trailers within a few hundred feet of each other, looking for all the world like the photo he’d memorized before the mission. With his Mavericks gone, he was down to the dumb stuff — six cluster bombs sat beneath his wings, clamoring to be dropped. Doberman tucked the Hog back toward the ground, rolling the big plane over his shoulder like a black belt karate instructor tossing an opponent to the mat.
As the attack jet headed downward, the Hog’s leading edges grabbed at the air as eagerly as the pilot himself. Unlike a swept-wing, pointy-nose fighter, the A-10A Thunderbolt II had been designed to go relatively slow, an important attribute when you were trying to plink tin cans a few feet off the deck. Even so, with all the stops out and the plane growling for blood as she plummeted toward the yellow Iraqi dirt, she felt incredibly fast. The g’s collected around Doberman’s face, tugging at his narrow cheeks and unshaven morning stubble.
This was the part of flying he loved- the burning rush that made you feel hotter than a bullet rifled out a flaming barrel. His scalp tingled beneath its razor cut, and his over-sized ears — the only parts of his compact body that might be called large — vibrated with adrenaline.
But this was more than a rush, more than fun and games. He wasn’t flying a training gig, and the gray rectangles below hadn’t been plopped there by overworked airmen anxious for a weekend pass. White cotton balls appeared all around him. They puffed and curled around him as he flew, inside-out tennis balls that frittered into thin air as he approached.
The innocent puffs were shells, exploding just out of reach.
Okay, Doberman thought, they’re shooting at me. Fair’s fair; I hit them first.
He continued onward, flexing his fingers in his gloves as he held the stick, telling himself not to overdo it. Even a blue-collar dirt mover like the Hog was designed to be flown, not muscled.
You stay loose, you stay in control.
The cluster bombs vibrated on their pylons, demanding to be fired. Each bomb was actually a dump truck for smaller bombs; once dropped it would dispense a deadly shower of hundreds of bomblets for maximum damage.
Doberman was all eyes. His eyelashes blinked the flak away, blinked aside the other trailers, found the one that had been waiting for him, the one that had been dug into the side of sand dune months before in preparation for this exact moment.
Two CBUs fell from his wings. Doberman rocked in his seat, dodging the Hog to the left. He saw the dark shadow of another trailer slide into the middle of his windscreen as he jinked; he eased back, angling to get it into his sweet spot. Finally it slid in like a curve ball finding the strike zone; he held it for the umpire and pickled two more of his bombs.
He was low now, below five thousand feet, lower than he’d been ordered to fly and nearly too low to drop any more cluster bombs effectively because of their preset fuses. His head buzzed with blood and the exploding 23 millimeter antiaircraft shells the Iraqis were firing at him. There was so much flak in the air Doberman could get out and walk across it.
That was probably a bad sign.
On the other hand, a lot of stuff was burning. That was really good.
Gunning his A-10 off east of the target area, Doberman turned his neck in ways it had never gone before, looking for Dixon. His wingman didn’t answer the radio calls, but that wasn’t necessarily surprising — just before the attack the kid was so nervous he had obviously forgotten to key the mike before talking.
Two other members of the 535th Tactical Fighter Squadron (Provisional), Devils One and Three, had been assigned to hit a second GCI complex about ten miles to the west. Doberman thought he saw a finger of smoke rising from where it should be. He and Dixon were due to head south soon and join up with the Hogs in ten minutes. From there they would head toward a forward air base in northern Saudi, rearm, and head back north for a second round of shoot-‘em-up.
Then they’d head home to bootleg beer, real long showers and a few good hands of poker. Doberman had lost over five hundred dollars the night before, the latest and by far the worst in a series of shellackings he’d taken since landing in Saudi Arabia. The pilot was determined to make at least half of that back tonight.
No way his luck could stay as bad as it was last night. He’d bitten off some of the worst hands of his life. And even when he’d had a good hand, inevitably someone else was fatter.
Doberman had held aces over eights in a full house on the last hand, hunkered down in front of a pot that held at least three hundred bucks. And damned if A-Bomb, of all people, hadn’t been holding four aces.
“Dead man’s hand,” said the other pilot, pointing to the cards on the table as he raked the chips in. “Doc Holiday drew that the day he was killed. Never bet on that. Can’t win.”
A-Bomb’s grin floated in front of Doberman’s face as he scanned the sky for Dixon. He saw a dark shadow rising through the clouds a good distance behind him. He lost it, saw it, lost it. “You got a little low, kid,” he told his wingman. “Get up over the flak.” Then he turned his attention back to the ground, looking for a place to put his last two bombs.