“We have to make sure we get hits,” said A-Bomb. “Hell, if we can’t trust the Mavericks, what can we trust?”
“There’s another dish!” blurted Dixon.
Everyone turned around to look at him. He’d been standing behind the couch, arms stiffly at his side.
“What do you mean, BJ?” asked Knowlington.
“I — when I started to make my second run with the Maverick, I saw a dish. It was strange, because I knew that Doberman had fired on it already. I didn’t think he could miss.”
“A second dish?” asked Corda. “It didn’t show on the photos.”
“Locate it for us,” suggested Knowlington.
Dixon walked slowly to the front of the room. Mongoose saw that his hands were shaking.
Kid was fried. He felt sorry for him. He’d had a hell of a lot of promise, but not the stomach.
“I don’t know,” said Dixon. He took the target photos the squadron had received, and the map, trying to correlate them and put the spot on the diagram. “Maybe this shadow. I–I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. If I could back up there and see — ”
“Let me see,” said Corda. He took the photos in his chubby fingers, examining them. “You know, if it is there,” he told Knowlington, “the satellite’s angle might have obscured it.”
“If there were two dishes instead of one,” said A-Bomb, “then it explains what the problem was. And it explains why the radar is still up when we know Doberman’s Maverick hit.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Doberman. “I didn’t see another one. But you know, the RWR got something that I couldn’t account for. Like a second dish being turned on for a quick second. I thought it was just a flakeout.”
“There are definitely two,” interrupted Wong. He walked to the front of the room with the intel photos. “The layout of the trailers gives it away.”
“In case you haven’t met him, this is Captain Wong, the newest member of the squadron,” Knowlington explained. “The captain came over working on a little intelligence project, and now he’s going to hang out with us a while.”
Wong’s head practically snapped off its neck in surprise.
“I just talked to the general and it’s all set,” Knowlington told him. He turned back to the group, ignoring Wong’s expression — which was somewhere between confused and ballistic. “Captain knows more about Russian weapon systems than the goddamn commies. Or ex-commies, excuse me. Come on, Captain, give us the spit.”
Wong stifled his objections and began explaining how Soviet intercept radars were configured; a few paragraphs into his lecture, one of the pilots cut him off. “So why didn’t Black Hole catch it?”
“It is camouflaged, as you noted. Some things even I cannot answer.”
“It’s not their job. They only get the sites and then dish them out in the frag,” explained Corda. “They don’t usually get so specific, like trailer A, not B. Besides, there’s a real disconnect between the planners and the intel people. Hell, I’m surprised we got this much data to begin with. Pictures, shit! Anybody here ever see photos in an A-10 strike folder?”
“Only of Goose’s wife,” said A-Bomb.
He was about the only one in the squadron who could make that crack and not get his butt kicked.
“You can target both dishes to make sure,” said Wong. “Let me make another suggestion,” he added, walking to the dry-erase board and its layout of the target area. Taking a black felt marker from his pocket, he pointed to two Xs in the lower left-hand corner, sites where 23 mm guns had been located earlier in the day. He added two more Xs, then moved his pen across the board and added several more.
“If I can see those photos again, please.” He waited while they were passed up, then once more began drawing on the board. “There are many more guns here than you have diagrammed. And they are not merely 23 mm weapons, though, of course those can be quite effective at low altitude, even if you jam the radars and they use optical aiming. Of greater importance for your strategy are these 57 mm S-6 canons. Very significant weapons. We can quibble about the guidance systems, but that is academic if you are hit, I assure you.”
He scratched his cheek. “The four at the south are all big ones. There are considerably more large-caliber weapons than the Iraqis usually employ. So they have you high and low. By high I mean for you; these guns are not particularly effective above, oh, we should say, thirty-five hundred meters. This is an interesting deployment, incidentally. The Russians use this pattern themselves every so often for a number of reasons… ”
He was about to list them, but changed gears at a glance from the colonel.
“The thing that is important is that they are effective at a much higher altitude and longer range than you have calculated,” he said. “If you are protecting your helicopters, you must consider that.”
“No shit,” muttered A-Bomb, just loud enough to provoke a nervous laugh from half the room.
Wong ignored it. “The configuration gives them very potent killing cones through eleven thousand feet. Even when optically aimed, they are bound to hit anything passing through these arcs.”
He drew a pair of thick cones that included the flight pattern Doberman took on his bombing run this morning.
“Those Xs at the bottom aren’t 23 millimeter?” asked Corda.
Wong shook his head. “This barrel configuration, do you notice it?”
“Looks like a cat’s whisker to me.”
“A very deadly meow. So you make your attack at six thousand feet, thinking you are safe, but you are not. Your plane had that problem today. They will be difficult to spot until they begin firing: you see how concealed they are. Most experts would miss it, thought of course not someone like me. Now, this camouflaging I have seen only in a few other places. I think that the idea came from a Major Andre… ”
“Yeah, okay,” said Doberman. “So what do you suggest?”
Wong smiled. “If you know where they are, you can attack them safely from a distance. For that, you must use their tactics to your advantage. If they acquire you here first,” said Wong, pointing at his X’s on the bottom, “and think you are attacking from this direction, all of the guns will be aimed in this arc. Let the radars think they have you. They all fire. Then you come quickly from the rear. You will have no less than ten seconds to make your attack.”
Somebody in the back whistled.
Wong shrugged. “Of course, sooner or later, they run out of ammunition. The Iraqi supply… ”
“Thanks Captain,” cut in Knowlington. “Okay, so we have four guns down here that have to go, plus the dishes. How do we get close enough to see them?”
“What if we tickle them at twelve thousand, look for the sparks, and then hit them?” suggested Corda.
“Then, we’d need more than two planes,” said Doberman. “The first two come in on the south, turn around, and the others nail the bastards.”
“You’re going to need four planes just to make sure you hit everything,” said Corda. “Can we take them off another mission?”
“This is more complicated than a stinking ballet,” said A-Bomb. “I say just pour on the gas and take out the mothers. Hogs weren’t made to bomb from twelve thousand feet. We got to get in the mud, man. That’s our job.”
“Our job is to take out those radars,” said Knowlington. “And to come back in one piece. Everyone. Wong’s idea makes a hell of a lot of sense. The problem is, we need four planes. Every Hog we have capable of flying is allotted.”
“We have two more,” said Clyston. “We’ve been holding back the two Hogs Captain Glenon tried to crash. We’ll have them ready by 0400.”
There were a few worried looks on the faces of Clyston’s sergeants, but none of them said a word.