But another part of him said no. Another part said stay home. You’ll never make it. You’ll screw up again.
It wasn’t that he was afraid of dying. He was afraid that he’d panic again. He felt his hands trembling as he gripped for the stair rail, climbing back toward the night air.
CHAPTER 35
Rosen found Tinman grumbling as he leaned head-first into the wing of the damaged Hog. In her opinion, his curses had a Celtic-Scandinavian lilt to them, though she was as clueless as anyone about his background.
“Sergeant Clyston asked me to help you out,” she called up.
Tinman grunted something in her general direction.
“What happened to the rest of your crew?”
“Go sleep. Tired.”
“What about you?”
“Work. Work,” he said, adding more unintelligible words.
Rosen surveyed the wing from the bottom. The hole had been squared off and the interior guts replaced — quick work, all things considered.
“Was the wing spar okay?” she asked.
“Checked out, yes,” he answered. “Bones okay. New lines. Check, check. Lots of work.”
I’ll bet, she thought to herself. Lots of work for a lot of people. And it wasn’t like this was the only A-10A that had been damaged — the plane Dixon had flown back was sitting not very far away, the last bullet hole being patched by an airman with a trusty drill set.
“Hey, Tinman, you got any electrical work that needs fixing?” she yelled up. “Otherwise, I’m going to bed.”
“New wink, that’s what we need,” grumbled the mechanic, pulling himself up. “But Chief doesn’t want to hear about it. Have to do this from scratch.”
“You put this aileron in by yourself?” she asked incredulously, looking at the large and obviously new wing section.
“No time to fool around,” he said, hopping down the scaffold. “Chief wants it flying tomorrow.”
“Chief is out of his mind.”
“You tell him.”
Not even Rosen would try that. “If there’s anybody who can fix it by then, it’s you,” she said.
“Thank you. I’m your friend, too,” he said, nodding. “How was Al Jouf?”
“Not bad. I was talking to one of our pilots there. Lieutenant Dixon. He’s actually kind of cute.”
Tinman shook his head, “Bad idea, sergeants and pilots.”
Rosen felt her face blush. “You need help or not?”
Something in the crusty old mechanics eye twinkled. “You help me find patch metal?”
“Patch metal?”
Rosen started to protest, but Tinman blinked mischievously. “Chief said we could have anything we need. Come, you can work acetylene with me.”
“Acetylene? Hold on a minute. Tinman? Where are you going?”
Rosen followed as the skinny old-timer walked briskly, not into the parts area, but back behind the hangar where a damaged C-130 had been stowed two days before, waiting for engine parts.
“Oh, Tinman,” she moaned. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
“Why not? Need new wink.”
“Wing. You mean wing.”
He shook his head up and down, pointing at the big general cargo plane.
“You mean the C-130?” she protested. “That one doesn’t need a new wing.”
“It will,” he said. “Come on. Help me get torch. Then, we need some paint.”
CHAPTER 36
Mongoose nearly fell over when he walked into Cineplex and found it filled not only with all of the squadron’s pilots but a good portion of the NCOs as well.
“There you are, Major,” said Knowlington, standing at the front. He rocked a bit on his legs, smiling bashfully — as if Mongoose had caught him talking about him behind his back. A rough diagram of the GCI site Doberman and Dixon had hit had been sketched on the large easel behind him. “I was just bringing everyone up to speed on Mudaysis.”
Mongoose was so flustered he wasn’t sure what to say. Until now, Knowlington had pretty much left him to run the squadron. He actually felt disoriented, slipping into a seat near the door as the colonel relayed a generalized version of his conversation with Black Hole.
“I’m not going to kid you guys,” concluded Knowlington, “this isn’t an easy mission. It’s long and grueling, as the pilots who undertook it this morning can tell you. Cloud cover is going to be very low, which will make things a hell of a lot more dangerous. We have to hit the site at 0600. The helicopters will be coming through this way, close enough to get into trouble if something goes wrong. There’ll be a Weasel in the area, but the odds are the dish itself will stay off; it’ll be our job to make sure it sleeps permanently. Now, participation will be voluntary… ”
“Hey, I’m leading the flight,” said Mongoose.
Knowlington looked at him, nodding as if he had been going to suggest that.
“A-Bomb and me are going, too,” said Doberman. The pilot was sitting in the back of the room, arms folded and frowning. “And BJ. We’re the volunteers. We missed it and we’re going back to nail the mother fucker.”
He was so emphatic that no one stated the obvious objection — the pilots would have no, or nearly no, sleep before the mission.
Not that Mongoose would have let that stop him. But he would have used it as an argument to keep Doberman and A-Bomb home.
And as for Dixon, no way did he want him on the mission.
“That’s great guys,” said Knowlington. “But slow down for a second. We only have two planes. I think Johnson and Glenon, if they’re up for it, get the first shot. Rank and time of service.”
“I’m up for it,” snapped Mongoose.
“Great.”
Before he could say anything else, Knowlington swept the group into a discussion of tactics, as if they were all sitting around a bar discussing possible baseball trades. It wasn’t that anyone was saying anything particularly stupid or wrong. There were only so many ways to go after the radar dish and trailers. What Mongoose objected to was the discussion itself. Planning a raid wasn’t a team sport.
And given the sudden change in Knowlington’s behavior, it was impossible not to think he might have hit the bottle.
But he sure acted sober.
“Assuming we get these two guns here,” said the colonel, pointing to the board, “we go for the dish next. The question I have is, what else is left up there that we have to make sure we get?”
“Damned if I know,” said Doberman. “If the Maverick didn’t hit the dish, who knows what else we missed. I don’t understand how the missile could have screwed up.”
“Maybe the guidance didn’t,” suggested Captain Blake, one of the pilots with extensive weapons training. “It might be that it flew right through, if the fuse screwed up. So you’d just have a hole.”
“Could have just blown up part,” said another pilot. “But left enough for it to work, or at least send out a signal.”
“Maybe we should put the cannon on it,” said A-Bomb, talking like he was going to fly on the mission. “No way you miss with that.”
“Way too dangerous,” said Jimmy Corda, the squadron’s intelligence officer. He had come back a few days ago from serving as a liaison with Black Hole and had helped plan the original mission. “You’ll we walking through a minefield.”
“There’s a hell of a lot of triple-A,” said Doberman. “You go low enough to make sure you hit it, the plane’11 get fried. And the cloud cover’s supposed to be worse tomorrow than it was today.”