Ten or fifteen minutes later, Mongoose was jerked against the cab as the truck stopped short with a crash, rear-ending the one it had been following. The pain in his head, which had subsided almost to the point where he didn’t notice it, returned with a vengeance. His knee gave a fresh twinge of pain.
Both of his guards fell at his feet. They weren’t curious now— they grabbed him viciously and pulled him from the flatbed.
“I didn’t do it,” he said, holding out his hands. “Please. My leg.”
In the next moment he was tossed over the side. He couldn’t get his arms out in front of him quickly enough and the bottom of his jaw snapped upwards, barely missing his tongue, but hurting like all hell anyway. Arms grabbed him and hauled him to his feet; finally a shout from the captain made his captors ease up.
The truck ahead had blown a tire. He thought for a moment that they were going to put him to work changing it, but the soldiers did that themselves after pulling the two vehicles apart. The officer in charge passed by him, shaking his head.
He returned a few minutes later and asked if Mongoose wanted a cigarette.
“Don’t smoke,” said Mongoose.
“Bad for your health, right?” The man took a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and carefully removed a cigarette. “Very difficult to get these days,” he told Mongoose. “American-dog cigarettes. But we all need our luxuries.”
“How do you know English?”
“Everyone knows English.” As he lit the cigarette, the man’s face glowed red. It was not a gentle face, despite his manner. “I went to college at Midwestern. I am an engineer.”
“And you came back?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
No, he wouldn’t, thought Mongoose, and then he realized that of course he would— he would return to his home and family and soon as he could, just as he would when this deployment ended.
“A materials engineer. I could be in great demand in Europe. But there are always complications,” said the officer. “Yourself?”
“I’m just a pilot.”
“Where did you go to school?”
Mongoose hesitated, considering whether the information might somehow help his captor. Probably not, only in the vague way of helping to build rapport. But that probably cut both ways; it might make the man more trusting, and easier to lie to.
“RPI,” he told him. “I was an engineering major, too.”
“Really? Very good. Very good.” The officer nodded, then took a long drag from his cigarette. He seemed as if he was going to say more, but one of his men called him over to the truck.
They’d taken his watch with everything else, so Mongoose wasn’t sure what time it was. From the sky, he guessed that it might be an hour before dawn, somewhere in the long twilight before the sun rose.
If these guys were Moslems— and that seemed a damn good bet— they’d stop for morning prayers. Might be a good time to try running for it.
Why not try now, then? The ground sloped off from the road. The shadows thickened a short distance away.
The running lights of the nearby truck flashed on as the motor came to life.
He caught some low-slung shadows ahead in the strands of moonlit night fog. Buildings, maybe a city, or just a unit headquarters of some type.
His destination?
The truck at the front coughed a few times but refused to start. The motor ground out an incessant whine.
The sound reminded him of a moment two years before, during winter, of his wife having trouble and flooding the car.
He pushed the idea away. Here and now. Checklist mode.
The officer shouted to his men as the battery’s charge ground down. A group went to the back of the truck, as if they were going to push it, and then jump-start it.
That’ll never work, Mongoose thought to himself. But then the AAA probably didn’t offer roadside assistance out here.
As he watched them grunt and groan the vehicle forward, he heard a low, almost guttural hum in the distance.
A Hog.
Was he dreaming it? He looked toward the sky.
The truck engine sputtered and coughed, then somehow caught. He strained to hear over the sound. For undoubtedly the first time in his life he cursed the fact that the A-10A’s turbofans were relatively quiet.
The truck drowned out whatever he had heard. If he had heard anything.
Run for it?
One of his guards put his rifle into Mongoose’s side and prodded him toward their vehicle. He kept his eyes trained toward the sky for another second, desperate to see something.
The guard pushed him forward.
“Into the truck, let’s go,” the Iraqi captain told him. “Now, Major.”
“I have to take a leak,” said Mongoose, desperate to hear the noise again.
“You can relieve yourself when we arrive at our headquarters. It won’t be long.”
“But— ”
“I should not like to shoot you, but I will certainly do so if you do not get on the truck.” The captain had his hand on his pistol.
Mongoose held his hands out. “I’m sorry,” he said, turning and repeating the words to his guards. Then he pulled himself up onto the truck, hesitating for just a second as he got his legs under him, wincing because of his knee, and willing the Hog to return.
CHAPTER 42
Skull leaned into the Maverick’s screen, trying to sort out the shadow. It was small and faint, but wouldn’t that be what a body would look like? It was about a half mile east of a trio of abandoned, probably burnt-out buildings. That was exactly where a pilot hoping to vector a rescue helicopter in might end up— close enough to give the helicopters an easy landmark, but not too close to be found when the enemy searched the obvious hiding places.
Colonel Knowlington pitched the plane around and had it move through the bank quicker than he expected; he fought the impulse to snap back, letting himself ease onto the new course. He was right about the similarities with the old Spad. Not that you flew it the same, of course; it was more the way you thought about it, more the mindset. You saved those hard turns for when you were walking through shit.
“We got something?” A-Bomb asked.
“Not sure. Something warm, but I can’t tell yet. East of the buildings.”
“This is still a little south of where he’d be,” said A-Bomb. “But he could have walked down. Makes sense.”
Skull was too busy trying to wish the shadowy fuzz into focus to answer. The seeker head in the Maverick had been designed to home in on hot engines, and in fact all the experts said it could absolutely not be used as a night-vision device. As much as Knowlington would love to prove them wrong, he had to admit they had a point.
“Hey, we got something moving on the road ten, maybe twelve miles south,” said A-Bomb. “Uh, nine, ten o’clock.”
Skull immediately changed course. This time, there was no question what he was looking at — though it still felt a little like staring at an X-ray machine on monochrome acid.
“Yeah, okay,” he told A-Bomb. “Two trucks. Not very fast.” He glanced back at the artificial horizon, made sure he was level— without real points of reference and your eyes on the TV screen, it was very easy to get discombobulated. But his sense of balance was still at spec— his wings were perfectly paralleling the ground.
“They must be coming for him,” said A-Bomb.
The IR seeker glowed with the two vehicles moving slowly along the highway. The Hogs were approaching from seven o’clock at about eight thousand feet, moving at 320 knots. He flicked the viewer into narrow mode, increasing the magnification to six times but temporarily losing the trucks because the view was narrower. He held his course and they reappeared, fat and slow.