Five minutes out of KKMC, running parallel to the Saudi-Iraqi border, Mongoose spun his eyes around the cockpit on a routine instrument check. At first glance, everything seemed to be fine― temperature, fuel, everything was exactly where it was supposed to be. But when he returned his eyes to the large navigational display in the center of the front panel, he realized something was wrong― way wrong. The INS numbers marking his exact location hadn’t changed since he lifted off from KKMC.
That shouldn’t have been possible. It was like a car odometer not moving while the car was doing sixty on the highway.
Mongoose gave it the old car mechanic’s fix: he pounded it with his fist.
Didn’t move. He quickly double-checked the compass heading against the dial that sat at the top of his windshield. They agreed — until he tilted the Hog a few degrees north.
The INS was whacked beyond belief. Big problem.
The game plan called for Devil flight to fly parallel to the Saudi-Iraqi border until they were almost due south of their target. They would then angle hard north, flying nearly in a straight line to their target. The one serious jog was an angling maneuver around the edges of the radar belonging to a suspected mobile SAM site.
Making the turns without a reliable INS wasn’t particularly advisable. Especially since the rest of the group would be keying off him.
Mongoose blinked at the display a few times, hoping he’d made a mistake. When he finally admitted he hadn’t, he felt as if he’d taken a shot directly in the stomach.
There were exactly two options: abort the mission, or have someone else take his slot as pathfinder.
And the most logical person to do that was Dixon.
Back in his plane, Dixon concentrated on not screwing up.
It was easy, really. All he had to do was keep the dim glow of exhaust from Mongoose’s plane in his eyeballs. Every so often he marched his attention around the cockpit, making sure the Hog was running normally. Flying at night, especially on silent com, had a special loneliness to it. It was all glow and hum. The plane hulked around you; depending on your particular mood, it could feel tremendously huge or tremendously small and fragile.
Dixon didn’t want it to feel anything. He cleared his mind of all emotion and extraneous thought. He focused entirely on where he was.
All he had to do was follow Mongoose and he’d be fine.
Mongoose hesitated before hitting the speak button. It came down to trust.
He’d chosen the kid to go on the first day’s mission because he had seen something in him. A lot of people had.
And Knowlington believed in him. That meant something.
Did he believe in him? Or had he only said he deserved a second shot?
The major keyed the mike. “Dixon, you awake back there?”
“Devil One?” The startled voice sounded as if it had just been woken from a deep sleep.
“Look kid, I’ve got a situation here with my navigational system. What do you say we trade places?”
The static that followed his transmission seemed to last forever. Finally, the voice came back.
“No problem.”
There was no time to analyze if the words sounded confident or worried. Mongoose told the rest of the flight that they’d close up the trail a bit, but otherwise would proceed as planned.
With Dixon leading them to the target.
CHAPTER 43
As he made the turn to head over the border, Doberman took a careful break from flying, flexing each arm and then each leg methodically, hoping to ward off cramps. The Hog didn’t have an automatic pilot, so he couldn’t exactly do a yoga routine. Still, he liked to stretch to keep the kinks away.
According to his watch, they’d fallen three minutes behind schedule. Doberman frowned as he rechecked his instruments. The one interesting obstacle in their course lay ten minutes ahead, and he wanted to be ready.
With no time or fuel to get fancy, the line to and from the target had been drawn as straight as possible. Unfortunately, the straight line went almost directly over an SA-6 site. The mobile missile launchers were fairly impressive pieces of machinery, with radar the Hog’s primitive electronic counter-measures pod couldn’t hope to jam. Once a plane had been acquired by a ground battery’s Straight Flush radar, the missile was difficult to lose; it could mid-course correct and used its own semi-active system to score a kill. It loved high-G maneuvers, moved faster than greased lightning and had a much more potent warhead than the puny shoulder-launched weapon that had given Doberman so much grief yesterday. With a range of about ten miles and an effective altitude above twenty thousand feet, it could barbecue a Hog any day of the week.
They had planned three tight course corrections to skim around the outer edges of its radar coverage while maintaining as direct a course to the target as possible. Doberman visualized the Iraqi radar groping through the early morning sky with long, slender fingers. It reached desperately, a blind man in a cluttered room, trying to find the doorway.
Not the doorway, exactly. Just his plane.
Doberman laughed at his fears. It was a nervous laugh all the same. He longed to key his mike and ask A-Bomb what music he was listening to.
This was the worst part of a mission, knocking down the miles until things got hairy.
Finally, the INS and his math told him it was time to turn. But Mongoose, flying dead ahead, didn’t make the angle.
Had he lost Dixon? Or was the kid’s INS also screwed up, Doberman wondered.
Every second would take them closer to getting nailed.
The RWR would at least warn him of the launch. But it couldn’t save him.
He’d never see the missile coming for him in the dark. It would be worse than yesterday. He’d writhe violently, ducking and weaving, thinking at last he had escaped. Then he would hear a last-second hush, a vacuum of noise just before the wallop.
Bail out in the dark, deep in Indian country. Now that was where luck was involved.
But hell, nobody could be as unlucky as he had been yesterday. Getting banged around twice? What were the odds?
The small circles of blue exhaust dead ahead smeared into oblong cylinders and disappeared. Doberman took the cut, checked his watch, realized his heart was starting to race.
The next angle was the hairy one. Because of the configuration of the enemy radar, they would be turning and flying directly toward the missile site. In theory, there was a hole in the coverage there, allowing the Hogs to slingshot towards their target with their final cut.
In theory. Reality was never as neat as the carefully calculated clouds showing optimum radar detection envelopes.
Doberman held his breath. His INS said it was past time to cut back, but once more Mongoose was lagging.
Jesus, he thought, a tiny mistake here is going to take me right over the stinking god damn site. Let’s go.
Hell, maybe the missiles are destined to hit me. Maybe my card’s overdue.
The pilot saw the SAMs in his mind’s eye, wheeling around on their truck. Their noses swung upward, hit the stop, came back.
Something creaked in the cockpit. It was nothing — a strap on his seat, maybe, shifting with his weight. But Doberman jumped, nearly bringing the stick with him. If he hadn’t been belted in, he might have gone through the glass.
Mongoose was gone. Doberman yanked his stick hard, taking the turn, correcting to bring it back to the proper heading. His heart became a race car, surging in his chest.
Settle down, he told it, settle down.