A dusty haze covered the ground, making it difficult to see what was left. Two big bubbles of black flak boiled well off his right wing as the Iraqi gunners did their best to shoot themselves out of ammunition. The Hogs wheeled above the site, moving into a circle approximately 180 degrees from each other.
The ZSU’s were starting to annoy him; they made it tough to target the rest of the site besides. A-Bomb realized he was better oriented than Mongoose to splash them, and told his lead he would take them out.
“I can get them both on one swing. Then we can shoot up what’s left downstairs.”
“Go for it.”
A-Bomb pushed the Hog into a dive, tightening his attack angle into a steep plunge, the A-10 screaming down at close to ninety degrees. He was going to pee on these bastards. No one shot at a Hog and got away with it.
Bastards started dishing serious flak in his direction. The Hog snorted. She knew she was being fired at, and it pissed her off. She held her wings and tail stiff, urging her pilot to drop the Rockeyes and giving him an iron-stiff platform to do it from.
A-Bomb pickled two of his four bombs on the first battery. Immediately he realized he hadn’t adjusted properly for the wind. But it was too late. Cursing, he pulled the stick back, determined to reset himself quickly for another attack. The Hog angrily slid her tail around, spanking the pilot for his miscue. But the CBUs were very forgiving weapons. A total of 187 spiked grenades, originally designed as armor piercing weapons, peppered out from each bomb. Though the majority fell well wide, enough fell close enough to silence the gun.
“There’s another gun or something under netting on the northeast corner,” said Mongoose as A-Bomb got ready to pounce on the remaining gun. “Shit— did you see that?”
A-Bomb twisted his neck like a pretzel, trying to see what Mongoose was talking about. By the time he figured it out, his commander had his nose just about on it. The Iraqis had done an excellent job of camouflaging the site defenses; there seemed to be another pair of ZSU-23s, or maybe larger-caliber guns, covered by the latest in desert wear.
“Hell of a lot of defenses for some old trucks,” said A-Bomb. “You think Saddam’s got one of his whores in that bunker or what?”
“Could be.”
“Probably screwing her right now.”
“I’m on that gun.”
He watched Mongoose dive into the attack just as the Iraqi gunner opened up. This was a big gun, probably a ZSU–57; the black wall of its shells appeared nearly twice as high as the others, though they were a bit behind Devil One’s flight path. Suddenly the nose of the Hog veered upwards and to the left; two thin cigars plummeted past the swinging stream of anti-aircraft fire toward the position. The canisters burst with a spectacular pop, an entire Iowa cornfield doing the Jiffy Pop thing as the double-barreled gun and its crew got perforated.
Mongoose wasn’t done— rather than breaking off the attack, he took his Hog just about sideways, lining up his last two CBUs on the last ZSU on the northwestern dune. A steam of red-hot metal engulfed the four-barreled cheese grater and the black cloud of flak it had been dishing suddenly disappeared.
“Double bang,” A-Bomb told his lead before pushing into his own attack against the trucks.
This time, the Hog just about did the wind calculation for him, nudging its tail up and screaming when it was time to fire. A row of transports turned into molten dust.
“How’s your fuel?” Mongoose asked as A-Bomb fell into an easy orbit above the smoking debris.
A-Bomb glanced at the dash. “Thirty minutes linger time, give or take a century,” he said.
“Few more vehicles down there. You feel like cranking up your cannon?”
“Does a private shit in the woods?”
But as he slid around to get ready to cover Mongoose, something caught his eye. He let the Hog drift a bit as his gaze found a hard — packed road. Five, six miles off, it headed toward a highway.
Something was happening there, something just beyond his vision.
A-Bomb felt a twinge in his nose, as if he’d just caught a whiff of late-season Brazilian beans being freshly roasted.
“Hey, Goose, hang tight a minute while I check something out,” he radioed, pushing the Hog to follow the road. The terrain below gradually became less of a desert and more a generic wasteland, though it didn’t look like anybody would be farming there soon.
The road led back north to the highway, where it plunged below it. A line of trucks was just now pulling off the paved road, kicking off a bunch of dust as they moved.
“Say, Goose, we got some sort of action going on south there, say three o’clock. You see that road?”
Mongoose broke his orbit and slid south, trailing A-Bomb. They were still a good way off as the last truck in the caravan dipped off the highway, disappearing in the underpass.
It was a trailer type of truck, with a long, roundish cylinder in the back.
The sort of cylinder you made a missile out of.
No wonder they hadn’t found the Scuds. The Iraqis had moved them.
CHAPTER 13
Mongoose yanked at the stick, angry that they’d wasted so much time and ammunition on the desert parking lot. Both planes had only their cannons left— excellent weapons, but it was going to be harder than hell to get a good shot at the bastards under the overpass.
Not really. Not at all. Hell, they’d done this sort of thing maybe a hundred times in training, working over highways throughout Europe. Not one underpass ever got away. All he had to do was take the Hog down to where it was designed to operate, and the missiles would be easy pickings.
Granted, they weren’t supposed to fly so low. But Scuds overrode everything.
Besides, he wasn’t flying a stinking Strike Eagle or a BUFF. He was in a Hog.
Mongoose mapped a quick game plan— a low-altitude scream and pop, quick away, then up for the border, head for a tanker, track directly south instead of KKMC. The tanker contingency was a nod to their dwindling fuel supply and any problems that might follow their close encounter of the Scud kind.
A-Bomb practically took his ear off with a war whoop when he told him they were going to nail the bastards at fifty feet.
“See, this is what I’m talking about,” said his wingman. “This is the way to fight with a Hog.”
Mongoose could feel the mask pinching his jaw as he worked to keep his voice flat. “We’ll swing back and use what’s left of the sun,” he told his wingmate. “It’s lined up almost perfectly. Let the fucking chips fall where they may.”
“Yeah, I’m on you. Show me the way.”
The flight leader marked the INS and gave the ABCCC the location. Then he swung northwest, working to get into position to make a straight-on shot up the road, sun at his tail. He began picking up momentum, energy and speed fanning each other as the plane revved herself toward a feeding frenzy.
“Ready?” he asked A-Bomb as he geared into the attack.
“I was born ready.”
Mongoose felt the plane roar as her nose sniffed out the underpass. The ground became a pebbly blur, the asphalt of the highway a thick black arrow pointing her toward hell. Mongoose sorted out the target area ahead in his windscreen, working his eyes deliberately, slowing the world down so he could nail the crap out of it. The underpass was very wide and deep, maybe even designed from scratch as a bunker area. There were three support vehicles in the front on his right, lighter trucks that as far as he was concerned were mere annoyances. Two Scud carriers were at the left end of the thick underpass. There was a big cloud of dust and sand beyond the roadway, a tractor or something moving. The terrain rose to the right; he saw more activity there, a truck moving around.