Doberman smashed the throttle and threw the Hog into a tight turn, trying to get inside the Mirage and set up an overshoot — putting the faster but less maneuverable plane ahead of him, a classic turn-the-tables ploy. The Mirage pilot anticipated the move, and traded some of his altitude for speed, breaking off in a diving straight line away. The move would have meant death for the Iraqi if Doberman had been able to complete his turn; even with the widening range and the lost energy, his Sidewinders probably could have caught the Mirage.
But Doberman didn’t have a prayer of turning in time, much less firing his heat-seekers; in fact, he didn’t dare complete his turn. The bogey had tossed off two heat seekers just as the Hog started away. One shot off wild, sucking the fire off one of the diversionary flares the Hog driver kicked out.
The other sniffed the air and caught a faint whiff of Hog turbofan dead ahead.
Dixon blinked his eyes, focusing not on the windscreen but the horizon indicator below it. He had to get it level. That was his first job, before all others.
The round sphere spun madly, whirling with no discernible axis. It fluttered and waved and shook without any pattern. It refused to be controlled, refused to assume any direction other than its own.
The pilot reached out and grabbed it, sparks flying from his hands. The sparks ignited his flight suit, burning his safety harness away, setting his arms and chest on fire.
He held on. His breath roared in his ears, rapid as the rod on a locomotive’s wheels. His entire body was on fire, but he held the sphere tight.
It stopped spinning. The cowl around his head lifted ever so slightly. He had both hands on the stick, and he had control of the bomb-laden Hog.
“The plane is level,” he heard himself say. Next step, climb to a safe altitude.
How do you climb? You put the nose toward the stars, you pull your arm gently back, you feel your chest relax…
Slowly, his eyes rose with the nose of the plane. The pilot found himself staring into the muddled gray of the Iraqi dawn.
But where there should be clouds, he saw flowers — hundreds and hundreds of grayish-white lilies. Their mouths turned toward him, delicate satin tongues that brushed gently against the hard surface of the warplane’s fuselage. Dixon and his Hog were surrounded, folded in an endless blanket of beautiful flowers.
It was the most wondrous thing he’d ever seen. And then he realized that he had seen these flowers before.
At his mother’s funeral three months ago.
CHAPTER 3
Several miles to the west, Devil One and Devil Three were mopping up their attack on a similar set of dishes and trailers. Flown by two of the most experienced pilots in the squadron, the Hogs had made a serious dent in the Iraqi air defense system. They might looked more like bathtubs with wings than attack planes, but together the two Hogs had done enough damage to impress even a snot-nose Strike Eagle commander.
With a lot less fuss than a sissy-ass state-of-the-art F-15E required, thought the pilot of Devil Three, Captain Thomas Peter “A-Bomb” O’Rourke. Like a lot of other committed A-10A drivers, A-Bomb had nothing but disdain for the pointy-nose, fast-jet community. Unlike most other Hog drivers, he expressed it at every opportunity.
Just now, his audience was an Iraqi radar trailer. In all likelihood, its crewmen didn’t hear a word he was saying, even though he was shouting at the top of his lungs.
They’d get the message soon enough. He held his Hog’s stick tight between his knees as he squeezed the trigger at the top of the handle. Dust erupted from the building, metal evaporating under the ferocious onslaught of cannon shells. The pilot stopped yelling and stared at the windscreen in front of him, pushing the trigger an extra second to complete the destruction. Then he pulled up, feeling the rubber of his mask and the tight fit of the helmet around his pudgy head. He could taste metal in his mouth and felt the steady rush of his breath down his throat into his lungs.
A-Bomb put the Hog on its wingtip, scanning ahead for the flight leader, Major James “Mongoose” Johnson. A greenish-black hulk was climbing maybe a quarter of a mile off to his left. A-Bomb checked his fuel, and did a quick scan of his instruments and warning indicators. Clean, he pitched the Hog more or less level.
“Devil One to Three. A-Bomb, you back there?”
“I got your butt in my sights,” A-Bomb replied.
“Let’s dance down to SierraMax and pick up Doberman and his pup,” said lead.
“Gotcha.”
Mongoose could be a hard-ass — a lot of the maintenance people hid when he came around the hangars — but he and A-Bomb went back a ways. A-Bomb had seen him pull strings to keep a fellow pilot from going to jail in Germany for a minor brawl; in his opinion that was as true a test of desirable character as any known to man.
The two jets climbed as they flew south. Without the weight and drag of the bombs, the ride to twenty thousand- practically outer space to a Hog pilot- wasn’t nearly as hard as it had been when they set out from their home base at King Fahd air base a million hours ago. But they took their time about it, careful to keep parading their eyes through the sky around them in case an intruder somehow managed to sneak nearby.
They were still climbing as they approached the checkpoint set for the rendezvous with their two mates. Devil One angled toward an easy orbit; Devil Three fell in behind. They were about sixty seconds early- an eternity for the notoriously punctual Doberman, who was leading the second element.
A-Bomb eased himself in his harness, loosening not only his restraints but his mask and helmet. Steadying the Hog with his left hand, he reached his right hand down to a custom-sewn pouch on the leg of his flight suit. There he removed a small titanium thermos- bulletproof, naturally- notched the cap to the open position with his thumb, and took a sip.
His radio crackled mid-swallow.
“A-Bomb, you want to look me over for damage while we’re waiting?” asked Mongoose.
“Be with you in a minute,” he grunted back.
Mongoose guessed what A-Bomb was up to. Few if any other Hog pilots would drink coffee on such a long mission- hell, on any mission. And at twenty thousand feet! If the sheer logistics didn’t get you, the piddle pack would. But that was one of the many wondrous things about A-Bomb- he never seemed to have to pee. And no obstacle, whether it was gravity, an enemy missile or a general out for his butt, ever stopped him from an objective.
Which made him the perfect wingman.
Mongoose shook his head, then rechecked their position for the third time. After they picked up Doberman and Dixon, they would fly back across the border to Al Jouf, a small spit of a strip in northwestern Saudi Arabia. There they would be refueled and rearmed. After that, they were supposed to cross back north and put some dents in Iraqi tanks- child’s play after this mission, though as far as he could tell things had gone pretty damn well so far.
Assuming Doberman and the kid showed up soon.
Thinking about anything too much made you worry about it, but sometimes it was impossible to clear your head. As flight leader and the squadron director of operations or DO, Major Johnson felt enormously responsible, not just for the mission but the men flying it. And that made him think. He thought about Doberman and Dixon, willing the two Hogs to appear. The cloud cover had gradually thickened; he worried that the second half of the mission would be grounded. He wondered about the other members of the 535th, who had been assigned to fly with other squadrons for the opening day festivities.