Jim DeFelice
Hog Down
PROLOGUE
Finally, they’d gotten a day with nearly full sun, the sort of day you’d expect in the desert. The weather had been horrible the past few days, more like Idaho than Saudi Arabia.
Private Smith rubbed his mouth, trying to chase away the late-afternoon dog breath. A few more hours and the sun would set: he’d go off duty and get some real zzzs — assuming Saddam didn’t lob any Scuds their way tonight.
The slime.
Leaning forward against the sandbags, Private Smith stared out across the vast wasteland in the direction of the enemy, his eyes straining to separate the dust from the earth. A huge earth berm sat a few hundred yards away. It was both the border of the country and the line between boredom and insanity.
Private Jones poked him in the back good-naturedly.
“How’s it going?” asked Jones.
“Not too bad,” said Smith. “You get any action going on the Super Bowl yet?”
The answer to his question was drowned out by a sudden roar. Two dark monsters swept up over the nearby berm, almost on top of them. The jets were so close to the earth, their wheels would have touched if their landing gear was out.
“Motherfucker!” screamed Smith, throwing himself on the ground.
The ground rattled with the sudden roar of the planes. Their noses bristled with the business ends of GAU-8/A Avenger seven-barrel rotary cannons, whose 30mm shells could chew through a concrete wall in a heartbeat. Thick wings jutted defiantly straight out from the fuselages, throwbacks to an earlier, rougher era. The planes’ huge engines hung off their backs like a devil’s forked taiclass="underline" the rear rudders looked like legs trailing a flying witch.
The two fighter-bombers pounded over the sand like a pair of Satan’s minions sent to return some escaped soul to eternal torture. Smith cowered, sure that his next address would be chiseled in granite.
“Relax,” Jones told Smith as soon as the planes passed. He laughed, reaching down and hauling his companion to his feet. “They’re only the Warthogs.”
“Shit. I didn’t even hear the bastards.”
“Good thing they’re on our side, huh?”
“Damn fug-ugly planes,” said Smith, staring after them. “Uglier than the back end of a Humvee.”
“Uglier than your girlfriend.”
“That ain’t no thing.”
“Kick-ass ugly plane,” agreed Jones. “Gonna go tank up, then go back and rip some Iraqi hide.”
“I’m for that,” said Smith.
PART ONE
EASY PICKINGS
CHAPTER 1
He’d meant to read the letter from his wife earlier. In fact, he’d been meaning to read it since last night, but one thing or another got in the way. Now, sitting in the cockpit of his A-10A Warthog fighter-bomber waiting for clearance to takeoff, Major James “Mongoose” Johnson eyed the edge of the greenish-blue envelope, wondering if there was enough time to slit it open and read it.
Probably, there was. Having just been refueled and reloaded, Mongoose and his wingman were standing at the edge of the runway, ready to launch their third foray that day behind the enemy lines. But an F-16 with battle damage had been given priority to land; they were waiting for the plane to make its appearance.
Thing was, if the F-16 took too much longer, this sortie would have to be scrapped. There wasn’t a heck of a lot of daylight left and besides, the two Devil flight Hogs had been working since before sunup nearly twelve hours ago.
He could’ve, should’ve, read the letter earlier. He’d had plenty of time between the first and second missions, sitting in the refueling pit. And actually, there had been nearly a half-hour after his preflight before dawn that he’d spent rechecking details that had been checked three times already.
The truth was, Major Johnson got fixated on routines as well as details; he usually read his wife’s letters at night before writing to her, and missing that chance had thrown him off. It didn’t feel right to read it at any other time, in any other place but his quiet bunk in tent city.
This was the flip side of the personality that made Tommy “Mongoose” Johnson one of the best Director of Operations in the entire A-10A community, if not the US Air Force. The positive side led him to meticulously diagram not just a planned mission route but all the alternatives. The positive side led him to take over a lot of the squadron commander’s tasks, pushed him to find problems in planes that had been cleared by someone else, made him carefully evaluate not just a pilot’s physical abilities but his mental state before drawing up a game plan.
The negative side made him a pain in the ass. He knew that; he was trying to be less by-the-book, bend more on the bullshit, bring out the best in people by giving them slack.
The negative side also meant that when his routine was disrupted, he tended to let things drop off the side.
Like the letter. He could read it now; undoubtedly it would give him a boost, as Kathy’s letters always did. But somehow it didn’t feel right.
Reading the letter would be like removing his helmet before goosing the throttle to take off, or undoing the straps that bound him to the ACES II ejector seat while in the middle of an invert. As tempting as it was to think about home, to savor the memory of his wife and their new baby, it was important for him to keep to his usual cockpit routine. Granted, the sortie— the third and last of a very long day— was nothing special, easy pickings. Devil One and Two were tasked to smash the hell out of an artillery emplacement a quick drive over the border. Ride in, ride out, no big deal.
Still, it needed his full attention. The letter could wait.
A wobbling blur appeared at the edge of the afternoon sky, fumbling over the runway haze with a sizable gash in her right wing. It was the injured F-16. Johnson watched as the plane seemed to fight off a sudden burst of wind— it might actually have been a problem with the damaged control surfaces— then righted itself and skimmed into a good landing pattern.
The sleek and versatile F-16 Viper or Falcon was generally reckoned as one of the best all-around planes in the allied inventory, a hell of a dogfighter that drew second straw only to a balls-out F-15 Eagle or— and this was a heavy point of contention between the services— an F/A-18 Hornet, the versatile two-engined attack plane favored by the Navy. In contrast, Mongoose’s A-10A Warthog was more a mud wrestler than a modern fighter. She was built to fly low and slow, and she looked it. Her long wings stood straight out from her pudgy fuselage, exactly the way they would have on a 1930’s monoplane. The large fan-jets behind the cockpit looked as if they’d been stolen from an early 1960’s airliner. Officially called a Thunderbolt II, the plane had been nicknamed the Warthog because she was twice as ugly as one.
But she was also three times as ornery. Those simple wings could hold a heavier weapons load than the average World War II bomber. The fan-jets couldn’t get the Hog up to the sound barrier, but they allowed the plane to twist and turn cartwheels in the sky. Part of the A-10A’s muscular frame was made of titanium; all of her important control systems were redundant and well protected. The Hog could take more lead than a target at a turkey shoot and keep on flying— a fact, not a brag; Mongoose had seen it himself. She was also incredibly easy to service, and meant to be used right in the heart of trouble. Gassing and arming her were easy enough that army troops could do it. In fact, rumor had it that more than one Hog driver had gotten fed up with the wait over at Al Jouf FOA the first day of the war and hopped out to refurbish his craft himself.