A-Bomb caught up to him as they reached the road. They angled northwestward, making just over 380 knots.
Combat did weird things to time. The actual encounter with the surface to air missiles hadn’t lasted more than two or three minutes, yet it seemed to fill several hours. Everything immediately before it felt like it had happened days ago. Everything now felt like slow motion.
And yet, sitting on the strip at King Khalid while waiting for clearance, that seemed to have just happened. Mongoose glanced at his pocket where the letter was, then reached his hand over and patted it, as if for luck.
He’d left his wife and baby in the living room. He’d kissed her, kissed him, kissed her again. He walked backwards to the door. A leather and fabric duffel bag sat there, worn from a thousand hellos and good-byes. Through the screen door he could see his ride waiting impatiently by the curb.
He lingered, watching her feed their baby, Robby. The infant’s eyes were closed. The deep frown of worry on his wife’s face gradually faded as she stared at her child.
“Hey, are those your bunkers at two o’clock?” asked A-Bomb. “Shit, look at that. Goddamn Saddam’s got a used car lot down there. And I’m in the market for a flamed-out APC.”
Mongoose’s head nearly hit the canopy as he snapped back to the present. He tacked south a second, aiming to come back and orbit the site from above. A-Bomb, following off his right wing in a loose trail, actually had a closer position behind him as they turned.
“You see any Scuds in there?” the major asked.
“Negative. I think the report was wrong.”
“Maybe.”
“Screw the Scuds,” said A-Bomb. “I say we dust these mother fuckers. We’re gonna run out of sun in less than a half-hour.”
“Yeah, hang loose,” Mongoose told him. “Let me think this one through a second.”
They had given the area a fairly thorough search without finding the Scud site. Sunset was rapidly approaching. Tough hombre or no, the Hog was not a night fighter. Mongoose relayed the information back to the ABCCC controller, telling him that they had come up blank on the Scuds but found something almost as juicy. Unless someone aboard the C-130 had serious objections or a better read on the Scuds, they were going to expend their stores against the parking lot and then go home.
The controller was juggling about ten million things at once. By the time he cleared Devil flight to make the attack, Mongoose had blueprinted the raid three times. He noted what were probably two four-barrel anti-air guns at each end; neither had activated its radar, either out of smart tactics or, more likely, because the Hogs were well out of range and hadn’t been spotted. Assuming they were ZSU-23s— the most common anti-aircraft guns the Iraqis had— the weapons would have to be respected, but were not an insurmountable problem, especially at medium altitude.
What he’d seen as a bunker was actually a low-slung building. It could be the top of an underground complex, though there was no way of really knowing from here. He debated using the Mavericks against it on the chance that it would hold ammunition and make a really spectacular boom. But the building wasn’t going anywhere. With a good INS read, it could be attacked whenever the targeters back at Black Hole wanted to hit it. The trucks and tanks— two or three seemed to be dug into shallow trenches— were a different story.
Mongoose would descend to ten thousand feet and use the Mavericks on the tanks. If the flak guns got annoying, they could go after them with the cluster bombs; otherwise the GBUs would be dropped on the trucks. They’d hold off using the Hogs’ cannons— and dropping below eight thousand feet— unless absolutely necessary, as per the general rules of engagement.
“I’m going to roll and take the vehicles furthest from the building,” he told A-Bomb. “I think they’re tanks. Come around and see what’s left.”
“Copy.”
“Watch your altitude and don’t get too low. Keep your eye on that dune where the ground turns into the real desert? You see it?”
“I’m with you.”
“Got to be a ZSU. You see that one and the other one?”
“Yeah. I’ll let you know if they open up shop.”
Mongoose came around in a half circle, lined up before he pushed over into a rolling dive, swinging the nose of the plane toward his target. He could see the three tanks clearly now, their guns pointing east rather than south.
The sand heaped around them would provide some protection against a near miss. But he wasn’t going to miss. He felt his way into a thirty-five degree glide, the turret of the tank at the right end inching toward the center of his screen. Mongoose moved eyes over the Maverick’s small targeting screen, probing for the heart of the shadow in the middle of the screen, sucked there like the tip of a compass seeking north. They wobbled, then stuck, glued themselves right in the center of the turret.
Mongoose held his stick dead steady and pickled. He felt the Maverick slip away and blinked his eyes, pulling the next missile on-line. He had to work the crosshairs hard, nearly losing his target. His altitude was burning off faster than he’d planned; he was nearing eight thousand and was going to fall lower before he could fire. His recovery would probably bring him within range of well-managed AAA, but it couldn’t be helped; he was going to have that tank. Finally the cursor slipped in. He had a lock and the missile was off, winging toward the lollipop that marked the top of the northernmost vehicle.
He moved his eyes up to the canopy, scanning the ground as he leveled off and began orbiting to the south. He missed seeing the first missile hit. He caught the second: a small, almost insignificant splotch of brown and black flared into the shape of a mushroom and then quickly flattened. The top of tank jerked up and down as if it were a warm can of soda being opened.
The sky below his left wing began filling with black puffs of flak. In the same instant he realized the desert undulations had hidden two gun positions almost directly beneath his egress path.
CHAPTER 12
A-Bomb called the flak location about two seconds after it began, warning his lead to take evasive action. In the same moment he adjusted his course to eliminate the threat. He was at ten thousand feet with a clear view of the muzzle flash— it was a four-barrel ZSU-23, firing far too short to do any damage. Still, it had fired on a Hog, and its fate was sealed. He switched the Maverick’s TVM to six times magnification; his target was dead center. He locked and fired, looking up in time to see the two other emplacements begin firing as well.
He wasn’t in the best position to take out either one, so he put them on hold, deciding to use his last AGM-65B on the remaining tank instead. It was already lined up in the TVM, just about blinking “kill me.” Nudging the cursor onto the big sucker, he locked and fired. The missile clunked off his wing with a sharp note of enthusiasm— one thing you could say about Mavericks, they sure liked to blow shit up.
A-Bomb hit his armament panel to ready the cluster bombs as he recovered from the shallow dive. His altimeter read seven thousand feet, still well above the flak, though too low to drop the preset Rockeyes.
“Saddam’s going to have a fire sale tomorrow,” he told Mongoose, whose tail appeared on his left as he climbed to get into a better position. “I count three dead tanks and one busted flak-feeder.”