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“Where are you going?”

“I got to find junior.”

“Say Goose, you looked at your fuel gauge lately? It’s that big dial on the right side of cockpit, right near the handle you have to pull if the tanks run dry.”

Damn A-Bomb. Always a wise ass.

“Yeah, just take Doberman home,” he snapped. He glanced at the map folded out on his lap, calculating that he had just enough in his tanks for a pass back over the GCI site before running home.

Assuming he found a tail wind.

“Goose?”

“Go. That’s an order.”

“Aye, aye, Captain Bligh.”

CHAPTER 6

Over western Iraq
0717

It took forever for Dixon to realize the lilies were just the clouds playing tricks on his eyes. He passed through them, climbing high above the earth where he could clear his head.

There was something wrong with his oxygen supply. At least that’s what he blamed the hallucinations on. He was incapable of panic; it had to be something physical, something tangible, something that could be fixed by turning a dial or adjusting a switch. He moved his hands deliberately around the cockpit, putting everything in order.

Slowly, the lieutenant regained control of himself and his plane. He began by breathing deeply. At first his lungs rebelled, aching with the effort. Then he felt his shoulders starting to sag, the muscle spasms finally giving way. He rocked his head to the left and then the right, his spinal cord cracking as the tension was released. Dixon was a long way from relaxed, but at least he could fly the plane.

He still had six iron bombs attached to the hard points beneath his wings. They were slowing him down, robbing not just air speed but precious fuel.

One by one, he let them go. The Hog seemed to buck slightly with each release, as if she were protesting that they had not been used on the enemy.

For all he knew, they might be dropping on one of Saddam’s palaces. Dixon had yet to work out his location.

He glanced at his watch, saw it was about time for him and Doberman to be hooking up with the others at the point they had called SierraMax.

Where in God’s name was that? Where was he?

He worked at the map and realized that he was now about twenty-five miles west and maybe fifteen miles south of the GCI site.

Not horribly off course, all things considered. But he was alone. Had the others tried to contact him? He hadn’t heard their calls? Had they been shot down?

It didn’t make sense to go to the checkpoint. His best bet was to head straight to Al Jouf.

He’d screwed up the mission, big time. But his job now was getting to the air base in one piece.

Strange things happened in combat all the time, confusing things, bizarre things. There were excuses, not necessarily bad ones, either  — the fog of war and all that.

He’d gotten turned around, lost track of his leader, lost track of himself. But it had been his first time in combat.

The fog of war.

No, it was something more than that. You didn’t know who you were until you stared down the barrel of a gun. Life was one big question mark until then.

If that were true, William James Dixon didn’t like what the answer had turned out to be.

CHAPTER 7

OVER WESTERN IRAQ
0728

The smoke curled in a thin line from the desert, as if fueled by the final embers of a spent cigar. It was about five miles south and three due east of the GCI site — exactly where a damaged Hog might crash after the attack.

Grimly, Mongoose altered course and continued lowering his altitude. He made double sure his radio was tuned to Guard — the band a downed flier would use to call for help.

The twisted wreckage in the distance could be a Hog. Then again, it could be a pickup truck, smoked by somebody returning home with some bombs or bullets to spare. He was by it too fast and too high to tell.

The radio stayed silent. A good or bad sign, depending on how he cared to interpret it.

Mongoose whirled his head around, making damn sure he was alone in this corner of the sky, then cranked the Hog back for another pass. This time he slowed the big plane down to a crawl; any slower and he’d be going backwards.

The major berated himself for picking Dixon for the mission. He liked the kid, but hell, he’d been in the cockpit barely long enough to qualify for a learner’s permit.

True, Dixon had fighter jock written all over him. Easy-going bravado, spit-in-your eye aggressiveness, and just the right touches of insubordination and selfless dedication to remind any older pilot of his early years — accurately or not. Lean and at six-four on the tall side for a pilot, he had an upper body toned by the squadron weight machines and a daily run. Dixon was a recruiting poster come to life.

Or maybe death. Mongoose pushed himself high in the seat as he walked the plane across the desert, his eyes sorting through the wreckage for anything that would mark it as a Hog — a flat, stubby stabilizer or a thick round engine among the most obvious.

But no. He saw a wheel and a body and then another body.

Some sort of truck, definitely.

He couldn’t help feeling relieved, even though he was looking at corpses.

Enemy corpses, but he shuddered a little.

Mongoose cast a wary eye at his fuel gauge — not great, but he still had a little to play with. He angled the jet toward the GCI site, marked out in the distance by a thick plume of black smoke. From here it was difficult to tell if the smoke was coming from one source or many.

Mongoose continued to monitor the rescue band as he headed north. Part of him hoped to hear the telltale chirp of an emergency survival beacon activated by ejection; part of him was relieved that he didn’t. He expected the gunners at the GCI site to start firing any minute. Sure enough, gray fingers began raking the sky ahead. The rattle wasn’t particularly threatening yet, falling far short of the Hog, but it distracted him all to hell. He had to stay low to see the ground clearly, which would mean running through the top of the triple-A in about ten seconds.

“Devil One, this is Cougar,” snapped the AWACS. “Are you reading me?”

“Go ahead, Cougar.”

“We’re showing a flight headed south we think is your boy. You copy?”

“Who does he say he is?” Mongoose asked.

“Not responding at the moment. We’re a bit busy here,” added the controller — a not too subtle hint.

“Yeah, right, I copy. Heading back,” said Mongoose. He pulled a U-turn and gave the ground batteries a good view of his twin rudders as he slid onto coordinates that would get him back to Al Jouf with three minutes of fuel to spare.

Assuming he coasted half-way.

CHAPTER 8

KING FAHD ROYAL AIRBASE
Saudi Arabia
0800

His domain had come down to this: a single pad of lined white paper in the exact middle of a plain steel desk, a thin, dented silver Cross pen he’d once thought of as lucky, and a telephone.

Colonel Michael Knowlington continued outlining the large triangle he’d drawn around the phone number on the top of the page, his eyes lost somewhere between the thick line and the memory of many other triangles, drawn on many other sheets, under many other circumstances.

Nostalgia was not useful. But it was difficult to push it completely away. Much earlier this morning, when the first group of “his” Hogs took off on their long mission to bomb radar sites in Iraq, Knowlington felt as if he were standing at an airline terminal, killing time before a flight. And then, just as he turned to walk back through the hangar area, he somehow remembered watching an RC-135 take off in Alaska a million years ago.