“The one Weasel to call when you’re slamming more than one,” sang A-Bomb in Devil Two. “I hope this Scud launcher is the son of a bitch who woke me up last night. Man, he pissed me off. I was in the middle of a wet dream.”
The rest of his transmission was covered by another flight. In theory, the squadron frequency should have been reserved just for them, but the large number of allied sorties and the fog of war had a way of mangling theories.
Mongoose wasn’t a particular fan of chitchat anyway, especially in this situation. If his map and memory were right, the suspected launch site was pretty close to several Iraqi SAM sites. The missiles had been hit at the beginning of the war, but that didn’t necessarily mean a few weren’t still there. But that’s what the Weasel was for.
He took a quick glance at his instruments. Everything was at spec. His heart was well into its pre-action rumble and his throat tightened a half-notch. Something inside his brain flicked a switch and the irises in his eyes widened. His situational awareness— a mental balloon of wariness around him— expanded as he gripped the stick between his knees, nudging the Hog toward the first reference marker.
His eyes turned upwards as a pair of F-15 Eagles on combat air patrol screeched across the sky well ahead and above the two A-10s. The pointy-nosed fast movers had just gotten word that an Iraqi plane was scrambling from an air base nearly a hundred and fifty miles to the north. The two jets looked like a pair of famished wolves, anxious for a kill.
Mongoose put his mind and eyes back where they belonged, scouting the ground ahead. The Hog was barely making two hundred knots, moving slow because of the altitude and its bomb load.
They were just three minutes to the target coordinate when Rheingold One checked in. He was swinging in from the northwest, obviously diverted from something else. His scopes were clear.
An old soldier now, the F-4 was equipped with radar-seeking HARM missiles that homed in on anti-air defenses. The missiles were extremely potent, but worked only when the radar sets were turned on— something the Iraqis had quickly learned not to do until they definitely wanted to shoot something down. The Weasel pilot sounded a little disappointed as he told Devil One things were quiet and would probably stay that way.
“Okay. Let’s keep it at fifteen thousand feet,” Mongoose told A-Bomb. “Take a circuit and see what we can see.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“You see that smudge off my right wing?”
“Four-barrel ZSU, gotta be.”
“Yeah, I think. Nowhere near where our missiles are supposed to be.”
“I got a good view. No missiles there. Looks like some sort of APC next to it, nothing else.”
“Okay, good. Let’s keep our distance.”
“’less we get bored.”
Mongoose held the Hog on its side so he could take a good gander at the ground, tilting his wings carefully. He told himself to break everything down, take things in pieces, and punch the buttons. This far north anything could happen. You had to go at it very deliberately.
There was no denying the adrenaline. In a certain way he almost considered this fun— not amusement park fun, since people were or could shot at him— but fun in the sense that it was what he was meant to do, what he was trained for and good at.
So where the hell were these things? He put his eyes out back toward the anti-aircraft gun he’d seen; well to the east now, its smudge had disappeared. It sat alone at the edge of the wasteland, with seemingly no reason to be agitated and too far from them to be of any immediate concern. He passed his eyes around in the other direction, noting that the desert was less stereotypical sand and dune desert here, more like a dirt parking lot that hadn’t been used in a long time. Scrubby vegetation and even some trees poked up everywhere in the packed-dirt wasteland before giving way to the more resolute stretches of sand.
Intel had passed around various pictures of Scud sites, and both Mongoose and A-Bomb had seen— and smoked— a carrier the other day. A typical launch site would arrange five or six missile erectors like fingers on a hand around a central command area. The Russian-made launchers were large trucks that looked like squashed soap pads with toilet paper tubes on them. But the Iraqis also made their own launchers from the transport trailers. From the air at this altitude they would look like long tanker trucks, dark pencils against the darker earth.
Mongoose saw nothing manmade below except the faint ribbon of a road. No trucks, no launchers, no Scuds. Definitely no base or flattened pull-off area. They were standing on the coordinates the controller had given them.
He continued the long, almost lazy figure-eight pattern around the area, gave a good scan again and still found nothing.
“See anything?” he asked his wing mate.
“Nah. You know what the problem is? We’re too high,” A-Bomb said. It was pretty much his answer to everything. “They could have all sorts of things camouflaged down there. We’re going to have to take it down.”
Mongoose reasoned that the plane that had spotted the launch site had probably been flying a lot higher than they were. “We’ll hold off on that a second,” he told A-Bomb. “You got that highway?”
“Oh, yeah. No missin’ it. Probably goes right to Saddam’s house.”
“Let’s follow it north and see if we can find anything worth taking a look at. Launch site has to be near a road.”
“Gotcha.”
Thirty seconds later, Mongoose caught the glare from something small and white moving along the highway ahead. He quick-glanced at the weapons panel but kept his stick hand solid. The white blur focused itself into a small pickup truck, too insignificant to be a target.
The road edged to the left ahead. There was a spot that seemed darker than the rest of the nearby desert; two or three shadows were at the edge, tents or something.
Good place for a bunker.
And more than that. Beyond the shadows were several rows of boxes that just had to be trucks, maybe armored personnel carriers or even light tanks.
“A-Bomb, there’s a wadi or something just northwest of the road where that truck is passing. Follow that and you’ll see a bunker complex or some awfully funny looking sand dunes looks like what, maybe a mile up it. Got it?”
Before his wing mate could acknowledge, the Hog’s launch warning system began shouting that Saddam’s forces had just fired a surface-to-air missile in their direction.
CHAPTER 5
For some guys, the worst time was the middle of the night. They’d lie awake in bed, sounds and shadows creeping around the periphery of their consciousness. Innocent things, or maybe not so innocent things, would poke at their memories, prod anxieties, fuel guilt. They’d sweat and writhe; eventually they’d get up. From there it would get worse.
Colonel Thomas “Skull” Knowlington had never minded the night. Even at the worst of times, he could sleep. And if he wasn’t sleeping, he was up because he had plenty to do, and having plenty to do meant he could focus on the present. That he could do; that was easy.
For him, the worst time was the middle of the day, the dead time between missions, when the paperwork was done, when he’d run out of things to check on, when he had no more calls to make or people to see. The late afternoon, with all his guys still out and everyone around him working or else off catching a quick breather— that was the worst time. That was the time he could do nothing, and doing nothing was the worst. Doing nothing led to old memories, and old memories led to a powerful thirst.
Thomas Knowlington— commander of 535th Attack Squadron (Provisional), wing commander, if only on paper, decorated hero of the Vietnam War, a survivor of not just combat but the more dangerous intricacies of service politics— would do anything not to satisfy that thirst. He had been sober now for going on three and a half weeks. “Skull” Knowlington needed to put one more day on that streak, just one more day.