It also generally meant you got the men working the missile. The good ones were harder to replace than the gear they worked.
Parson caught a glimpse of the damage through the top of the canopy as he rolled the Phantom and began letting off chaff. One of the SA-2’s that had been fired before the site was hit was now headed in their direction.
“Telephone pole’s gunning for us,” the pilot told his pitter— his way of apologizing for the six-and-a-half g’s he pulled as he yanked the F-4 around to confuse the missile’s guidance system. The force of the maneuver squeezed his mouth and made his words sound strange, even to him. As he recovered, he juiced the throttle, accelerating to put a good chunk of real estate between the Phantom and the Iraqi missile. But the missile, fired without proper targeting to begin with, had already fallen away.
“Hogs are still with us,” reported the backseater.
“Devil Flight, this is Rheingold One. Sorry for the excitement,” Parsons told the A-10s.
“No problem,” snapped Devil One. “We like things hot.”
The colonel did a quick check of his systems, made sure he hadn’t caught something in the nether reaches of the plane. His fuel was still pretty good, but they’d fired all their radiation missiles; time to call it a day.
“How you doing in your cave back there, Bear?”
“’Bout ready to take a nap,” said the pitter.
“Miles to go before you sleep,” said the pilot.
“Hey, I’m the English teacher. When did you study Frost, anyway?”
“Haven’t you heard? Mandatory training for all airline pilots.”
“I’ll be impressed when you quote Whitman.”
“’Flood tide below me, I see you face to face’,” said Parsons, reciting the beginning to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
It was the only part of the poem, or Whitman for that matter, that he knew, but it was good enough to elicit a snort of surprised approval from Bear.
CHAPTER 10
The plane the A-10A reminded Knowlington of wasn’t the Thud, which, after all, was a straight-line in-and-out mover. It reminded him of the Spad, the propeller-driven A-1 Skyraider, a Navy plane adopted by the air force for close-in ground-support work. Drawn up at the tail end of World War II as a torpedo bomber, the Spad was a throwback to an era when sticking really meant sticking.
Knowlington had never actually been assigned to an A-1—he’d been a pointy-nose, fast-mover jock from Day one— but he wormed his way into the Spad’s cockpit a few times to satisfy his curiosity. He’d even once volunteered for a combat mission, though he was probably lucky he’d been turned down. He was flying Phantoms by then, and if a Viet Cong gunner hadn’t gotten him, the shock to his system would have.
Still, the A-1 was a hell of a plane, all stick and rudder, able to eat bullets with the best of them. She had her quirks. Skull always had a bit of trouble with the armament panel; it was right above his knee but he had a bad angle while flying. Still, the plane felt substantial around him, like a big old Mercedes. He had a fairly good flying position high up top, unlike the Phantoms and especially the early Thuds, where it felt like you were in a cave. And she did what she was told. Think left and you moved left. She could stand just about stock-still if you wanted, and pound the bejezuz out of what you were looking at.
The Hog was like that, only a bit faster.
Well, maybe not faster, come to think about it.
Skull thought right bank and the Hog went right bank. He pulled the stick back and she corrected, her forked tail snapping into place like a slot car coming out of a turn. He pulled a few more turns, each one a little sharper, making sure the control surfaces were still in place and working well.
Even though he’d flown the Hog back in the States as much as he could, Knowlington had been awkward as hell his first few flights over here, muscling the plane through her paces, hitting his marks mechanically. It wasn’t physical, it was mental — like he was thinking about flying, or maybe worrying about what some of his more senior pilots must be thinking: old man in a plane, old washed up hack shuffled into the wrong command.
No one said that, of course, but he could read it. More than one Centcom staffer just about told him he was washed up, though the generals were much more tactful— most of them, after all, had been his friends for a long time. Inside the squadron, there was plenty of resistance, even from Major Johnson, maybe especially from him. Johnson felt with some justification that he could lead the squadron, and probably resented being number two behind a guy who’d hardly even flown the plane. A-10 drivers were a special fraternity among combat pilots; their mission and plane was different than anyone else’s, and they tended to be different, too.
Good pilots, definitely, but with maybe the tiniest of chips on their shoulders about it.
A few realized that Knowlington had helped save the Hogs and possibly their jobs from the scrap yard, volunteering when he got word through the back channels that the CINC himself wanted more Hogs in Saudi Arabia for the ground war. They were grateful, but even they thought he was too far removed from “real” flying to lead them into battle.
Nobody mentioned his drinking. No one ever had.
The gray-haired colonel in him agreed that he ought to stand aside for the younger men when it came to flying missions; most of them were better Hog pilots than he’d ever be. But this afternoon he felt something ease into place as he snapped himself into the A-10A’s ejector seat, something familiar; as he pushed the nose up and started to climb toward ten thousand feet, Colonel Thomas “Skull” Knowlington lost track of the line that separated him from the plane. Some awkwardness lingered. He kept expecting more in the HUD, and maybe a better view out of the side of the canopy; his eyes tripped when they felt for the fuel gauge. But he knew this plane the way he knew the others; after so many years of estrangement, the sky had welcomed him back.
No reason I shouldn’t go north, he told himself. As long as I’m not a liability, it’s where I belong.
Except that the generals above him wouldn’t like it. As long as he didn’t screw up, they wouldn’t court martial him over it, of course, but they could force him to retire.
Then his string of non-drinking days would surely end.
Knowlington pushed the Hog through a series of twists and turns, gradually increasing the pressures against the control surfaces. He had written down a cheat sheet with all the maneuvers, just to make sure he didn’t miss any. But he didn’t even have to glance at it. His hands were slower, true, and his eyes— damn, his eyes weren’t the telescopes they’d once been. But his head was still there; that was sharper than ever.
Your head could also be a liability. Memories were like bullets in your wing. One slipped into his brain now as he pulled the Hog into a steep dive. He tried to work it away, ignore it. He even closed his eyes. But it came back, hard and fresh.
He was in a Phantom. They had just pulled out of a dive every bit as steep, bombing a bridge near the Laos border. Knowlington recovered and started the long run home. His wingman called out a SAM launch.
Soviet telephone poles coming for them. The SA-2 was relatively new then, very formidable. But he had encountered them a few times before; so had his wingman. He jinked the missile onto his beam, pulled a few g’s and let the engine roar. Nothing to it.
But his wingman couldn’t break free. Somehow, some way, Captain Harold “Crush” Orango had taken a SAM right in the tail. Skull’s backseater saw the hit. He saw, or thought he saw, two ejections and chutes. By the time Skull recovered from his evasive maneuvers and made sure his six was clean, they had lost track of the stricken Phantom’s crew. Skull cranked back, unable to find the parachutes in the low-lying clouds or draped in the jungle below. They found the wrecked Phantom soon enough — the sucker kicked up more smoke than a flaming oil tanker — but the pilot and weapons officer were nowhere to be found.