Or an outhouse.
A-Bomb pushed the magic button. The GAU barrels rattled around, spitting 1.6-pound shells of spent uranium — augmented by the occasional round of high explosive — from the plane’s nose. The ground in front of his target opened: a trench seemed to consume the building and its gun. It was as if the Devil had decided to reach up and pull it down to Hell where it belonged.
Springsteen properly avenged, A-Bomb decided discretion was the better part of valor — or however the saying went — and kicked butt in the opposite direction.
“Lost airman, A-Bomb,” Doberman was saying on the radio. “Yo — acknowledge me, asshole. Where the fuck are you?”
“Who you calling lost?”
“What the hell are you firing at down there?”
“A cement outhouse.”
“Yo, we’re bingo.”
“Damn, and I just bought this card. How come I never win?”
Winging southeast of the site, out of range of the antiair weapons, A-Bomb pointed the Hog’s nose upwards. He found Doberman skimming the cloud ceiling, heading back in his direction.
“Are you out of your mind?” Doberman yapped, twisting his Hog due south for the tanker?
“You have to ask?”
“Didn’t you hear me calling you? Why the hell didn’t you acknowledge?”
“I just did.”
“We should be halfway to the refuel by now. Sometimes I think all that candy goes to your brain.”
“Man, you are a boring date.”
Starting to feel the fatigue of the mission and the long day before, A-Bomb dug into his vest for a Three Musketeers Bar. The A-10A accelerated as it hunted for its companion’s wing and the route back to the tanker.
CHAPTER 50
The clouds suddenly broke. Mongoose turned and looked through the canopy, out across the clear sky toward Dixon’s plane. The second Hog was still climbing to take its position on his wing, its black-green body none the worse for its dash at the ground cannons.
From what Doberman had just told him, there was nothing left to fire the Mavericks at. Mongoose decided to hold them back, either for targets of opportunity on the way home or for a future mission. It was time to go home.
The kid had done okay, no doubt about it. Mongoose told himself he’d overreacted yesterday: he owed the kid one. HE keyed the mike and gave Dixon an ataboy.
“Repeat, Devil One, you’re scratchy,” answered Dixon over the Fox Mike radio.
“Good work,” he repeated. “Now get up front and dial us a course for that tanker.”
Mongoose eased the Warthog toward the south, waiting for the younger pilot to overtake him. He couldn’t help but glance at the INS, which was still stuck back in Saudi Arabia somewhere.
How hard could it be, he wondered, to stick a state-of-the-art geo-positioner in the plane? More to the point, how much could it possibly cost? Bureaucrats and congressmen were screwing with defense appropriations and contract bids and all that crap while people’s butts were on the line.
But then, the Warthog had always been the Air Force’s forgotten stepchild. Low, slow, and ugly, the A-10A Thunderbolt II was supposed to be a limited plane with a limited mission, a throwback unsuited to modern warfare.
This group of Hogs — and the hundred or so that had flown during Desert Storm’s first hours — had proved that was all bullshit. The naysayers were wronger than wrong.
Check That. They were right about one thing. The A-10A Thunderbolt II was a kind of a throwback, a blue-collar tough guy with an old-fashioned work ethic who could get all hell pounded out of him and still come at you. Maybe the Thunderbolt moniker the brass had stuck it with — a nickname no one used — was right after all. The P-47 Thunderbolt was a kick-your-butt fighter in World War II, a hell of a ground-attack machine.
But maybe the B-17 was a better parallel. Now there was a plane that could get sawed in half and still make it back to the airfield. The comparison seemed sill until you considered that a Hog could carry twice the bomb load as the World War II bomber. The Flying Fortress was damned ugly too. But ugly pretty.
Like the Hog.
Mongoose checked over his instruments, looked carefully at the artificial horizon in front of him, and made sure his furel was okay. They had a very good margin for error to the tanker, at least ten more minutes than he’d planned.
Dixon gave his wings a gentle wag as he set his course. At least, Mongoose assumed he did that on purpose; because of the Hog’s trim controls, you never could be sure. The old joke was that if you took you hand off the stick when you were under fire, the plane would jink and jive for you.
“I got your wing,” Mongoose told him. “Let’s get some breakfast.”
Dixon exhaled loudly. His heartbeat was back to normal, his adrenaline already drained. His body felt as if it were covered with cement. A hundred different muscles ached, and his eyeballs were squeezed dry.
But he’d done it. He’d fought through the panic and made it.
He was who he’d hoped to be.
Except. Except that he’d lied to Major Johnson, to everybody, about what happened yesterday.
That was the part he hadn’t made up for.
Mongoose had just stretched a cramp out of his legs when the long-range radio crackled.
“Devil Flight, this is Cougar,” said the AWACS controller. “Devil One, acknowledge.”
“This is Devil One. Go ahead.”
“Devil One, we have a situation.”
The calm voice ignited a fire in Mongoose’s chest. Every part of him snapped back to attention. He leaned forward unconsciously as he told the E-3 Sentry crew to fill him in.
“We have two low-level contacts on an intercept to Buddy Boy,” said the controller. “We believe they are helicopters, probably transports, possibly Mi-8’s.”
“Copy. You want them driven off?” Mongoose asked, completing the controller’s sentence.
“Affirmative. Sandy bingo’d a few minutes ago. First Team CAP was diverted and the backup is five minutes off.”
“Give me a heading,” snapped the pilot.
CHAPTER 51
Like most of his peers, Captain Feroz Vali hated his country’s president and family, blaming them for the ruinous war with Iran and the difficult situation they now found themselves in with America. And like most of his peers, Captain Vali left his politics and preferences outside of the cockpit.
A good thing, since the cockpit was cramped as it was. Vali’s helicopter swarmed around him, a massive flying tank. Propelled by over-sized TV3-117A engines, the Mi-24D Hind could dart through the sky like an avenging angel. With four ground-attack rocket packs mounted on its plane-like wings and a four-barrel 12.7 mm machine-gun under its chin, the Hind was as deadly an attack helicopter as any in the world.
The problem was the helicopter was considered so valuable by the regime that Vali had been instructed to avoid combat. And to underline that instruction, he and the Hind following behind him had been posted here, far behind the lines in western Iraq.
Vali cursed his coward’s role. Yesterday, the Americans had begun their long-awaited air offensive. The official news reports said that it had been a glorious victory for Iraq, with hundreds of American planes downed. Even as he doubted the details, Vali wished for a part of glory. Heading out on his routine training mission, he toyed with the notion of taking the chopper south toward the Saudi border, well within its range. The only thing that stopped him was the realization that the desert there was most likely empty.