He asked himself which way he should go? Left? Right? Forwards? Back? The possibilities froze him.
Maybe it was luck, going one way or the other.
Good luck? Or bad luck?
Damn it to hell, he told himself. Luck had nothing to do with it.
He decided left, but as he began to pull the plane in that direction, he saw that his maneuvering had put his nose nearly head-on with a trailer.
“Here’s some good luck for you, Saddam!” he screamed, bringing his cannon to bear. The trailer disintegrated in a haze of smoke that seemed to magically part as he flew into a patch of sky completely clear of flak. He brought the Hog around quickly and served up another Maverick to the dish he had hit the day before.
By the time Doberman called the shot on the infamous first dish, A-Bomb had seen the explosion. He was at eight thousand feet and hadn’t seen any flak yet. Suddenly, Tower Two and its Tonka Toy-like trailer appeared smack in the middle of the Maverick targeting tube.
Tower Two was supposed to be Doberman’s — and even for him it was a low-priority, secondary, hit-it-if-you-got-it, left-at-the-end-of-the-war, what-the-hell-we’re-going-home-anyway shot. But this was way too good to miss. A-Bomb pressed the trigger to kick out the Maverick.
The exact second the Maverick fell off his wing, the damned tower went boom.
“Damn it, Dog Man,” A-Bomb yelled, dipping his wing back to look over the remains of the CGI site. “You’re taking all my shots.”
“Stop screwing around then.”
There was a pile of rubble where the hidden dish had been. The one Doberman had gotten yesterday, further south, was now twice-fried meal. Running out of real estate — and feeling more than a little frustrated — A-Bomb pushed off his last Maverick at a trailer and began climbing back into the clouds to get into position for a cannon run. Doberman was already overhead, reorienting himself for a fresh attack.
“What do we have left down there?” he asked the element leader.
“There ought to be a couple of trailers back near that second dish,” said Doberman.
“Negative,” said A-Bomb. “They’re crispy critters. I just passed that way.”
“Uh, copy, uh, how about that microwave transmitter out near two?”
“You got it and I got it. That’s two gots.”
“The bunker then. How’s the flak?”
“They still have some peashooters, but nothing too serious that I saw.”
“Follow me in.”
A-Bomb had only a vague notion of where the target was, but how hard could it be to find a bunker? Besides, Doberman had a sixth sense about these things. A-Bomb followed him around, dipping his wing into the plunge.
The busted CD cartridge slid across the floor as he poked the A-10A back toward the target. Doberman screamed something along the lines of “got it,” only with a lot more curses. A-Bomb followed into a thunder-burst of flak, the plane bucking like an out-of-balance washing machine. Doberman was gone and the bunker had disappeared in a cloud of cement dust.
Shifting slightly to the south for a fresh target, A-Bomb found a huge gun battery almost smack dab in the middle of his HUD aiming cue. He started to pull the Hog onto it, but miscalculated somehow; it slipped out of the crosshair and then fell totally out of view. There wasn’t time to screw around — flak was flying all around him. A-Bomb pulled left, found a truck in his screen, and pushed the trigger. The two-second burst hit. As he continued through his banking turn he saw another gun emplacement, and fired, but missed badly. There was so much antiair now, he looked like he was dodging through a snowstorm.
The Hog was in exactly the kind of environment it had been designed for — hot and dirty. The pilot hulked down in his seat, cradled by the plane’s titanium plates, and wheeled toward a row of antiair guns on tank-type chassis. He was so low now that had he hopped out of the plane, he could have hit the ground and bounced over the cockpit.
“Turkey shoot!” A-Bomb shouted. The airplane’s Gatling exploded with so much energy he felt the Hog move backwards in the air. His first two shells missed low, but the rest drew a thick line through the guns, metal evaporating as the pilot worked his rudder to literally dance sideways through the sky, erasing the Russian-made weapons in one violent smear. Barrels, turrets, trucks erupted as he whipped by.
“You do not shoot at Hogs, no sir,” A-Bomb told them, pulling that A-10A into a bank to come back for anything he’d missed. As he turned, the Springsteen CD tumbled from behind his seat, cracking into pieces as it flew through the cockpit.
I really ought to make those bastards pay for that, he thought to himself. But there didn’t appear to be anything left to hit. Most of the ground fire had stopped, and the radar intercept complex was now a former radar intercept complex, with emphasis on the “former.”
Damn, A-Bomb thought. I was just getting going.
Out of the corner of his eye, as he turned, he saw a small building with a gun emplacement on its roof just to the south. The glimpse was so fleeting, he couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but he knew he hadn’t hit it before.
What the fuck, the pilot said to himself as he pushed the Hog’s nose back. I still have bullets.
This one’s for the Boss.
Doberman, back on top of the clouds, took stock of his airplane as he looked for his wingman. As far as he could tell, the plane was running Dash-1, exactly according to spec. He practically bumped his helmet on the canopy glass craning back to make sure his wings and fuselage were still there.
The attack had taken a bit longer than they’d planned, but they’d taken out everything they’d come for and more. The problem now was getting home — or rather, to the tanker that would give them enough fuel to make it home.
“Devil One, we’re done,” he told Mongoose. “Dishes are down, we’ve blown up every trailer we could find, and I think A-Bomb got a hot-dog wagon on the last run. Time to go home now. Copy”
He scanned the sky as he waited for an answer, still looking for the black shadow of A-Bomb’s Warthog. But his wingman was still somewhere below the ever-thickening clouds.
“Devil One, do you copy?” he asked Mongoose, wondering where the flight leader was.
“Affirmative. Saddle up. We’ll meet you at BakerCharles after the refuel.”
“Gotcha,” snapped Doberman. He put his eyes out of the plane again, craning his neck for a sign of A-Bomb. “Devil Three, this is Two. We are out of time. A-Bomb, what you doin’, boy?”
The thing was, the ZSU-23-4 was a very good gun. While its radar could be distracted, even by eye the cannon threw serious lead at you. The stripped-down version had done in quite a number of pilots, dating back to Vietnam. You had to five it to the gun’s Russian manufacturers — once they got something right, it stayed right.
A bit of A-Bomb’s bravado, though not his courage, began leaking away as the shells whipped past. He realized that the Iraqi gunner was shooting high, and that this particular set of buzzing bees were probably not going to strike him. But he guessed smaller-caliber weapons nearby would be firing any second now, and given the general hail of bullets, one of two had no choice but to hit his plane. Titanium hull or not, the Warthog was not invincible.
Still you couldn’t, on general principals, break off an attack this easily. An American taxpayer back home in Duluth had just written his congressman asking for some bang for the buck. It was A-Bomb’s job to deliver.
The building jumped into his gun sight. Square and squat, the cement structure was just the sort of thing that could be used as a command and control center.