Of course, that was exactly the sort of thing that got him kicked out, that and the beer cans in his tux, but what the hell.
His plane stable again, the pilot keyed his mike, not for Mongoose or Rheingold but for the Iraqi who’d launched the missile:
“Missed, Saddam. Kind of a sissy explosion, if you ask me.”
Mongoose replied but A-Bomb didn’t have time to explain, spotting a fresh trio of missiles silhouetted against the ground, rising off his right wing just as he began pushing his nose back toward the few scattered clouds in the sky.
“More missiles,” he called. He squeezed his chaff button and began a new jinking routine.
All this maneuvering was starting to work up a good sweat, the kind of thing Gatorade was invented for.
Problem was he hadn’t packed any. A-Bomb pitched the Hog back for the ground. This time he was putting the plane down so low not even a gopher could follow it.
All three missiles were coming for his butt, not his commander’s. Which was what he got for making smart ass remarks over the radio.
One of the SA-2s inexplicably disappeared. The other two kept coming. A-Bomb leaned forward in his seat as the radar warning receiver started to get frantic. He was out of tinsel and didn’t have all that much sky left in front of him either.
SA-2s ought to get lost in the ground effects, their guidance system confused by the natural shadows and echoes thrown up by the earth.
Nope. They were coming for him big time.
The Hog didn’t like this. She had her head down and was running for all she was worth, screaming as she broke below two thousand feet.
She didn’t like to run away. She wanted to turn around and nail the missile in the teeth with a few rounds from her gun.
A-Bomb held on, skimming the ground at five hundred, four hundred, two hundred feet. By all rights he should have been clear by now — that or bagged— but he could feel he wasn’t. As he jinked, the shadow of one of the missiles poked into the far corner of his vision, dark and ugly. Stinking Saddam must have loaded this one up personally and fueled her with his piss, because the bitch was staying with him.
The missile was now in terminal-intercept phase— its onboard guidance system had locked on the Hog. It didn’t have to hit him; it just had to get close. There was no question of outrunning the missile in the much slower airplane, and A-Bomb didn’t seem to be lucky enough to outlast it.
No way the damn missile should still be on him. At two hundred feet?
Maybe it smelled his Twinkies.
He yanked the Hog back, pushing, shoving, straining, standing the sucker on her tail as its nose spat right in the missile’s face before he shoved back toward the dirt in almost the opposite direction.
It was like flashing a mirror in front of a charging bull and then diving down a manhole. The SA-2 twisted to follow the last echo of its radar, shuddering as its momentum carried it beyond the Hog.
It exploded with an angry tear, but by then A-Bomb had revved the engines higher than an Indy race car, flinging himself away from the last SA-2, which had been flying roughly parallel maybe a hundred yards behind the first. He was so low he could have landed. Its explosion rattled the American plane bad, pushing it down and yanking its tail sideways so violently that, at first, the pilot thought he’d been hit.
By the time he managed to steady the plane and dance his eyes through the gauges to confirm that the plane was still in one piece, A-Bomb was heading for a small observation post on a hill that stood over the desert like a crow’s nest. He had maybe three inches of clearance over the roof of the tent and had he lowered his landing gear he could have wrecked it.
A-Bomb would have left the post alone and started tacking north to hook up with his lead if it weren’t for the fact that the Iraqis manning the post decided to protest his low flight by firing every weapon they could find at him. Fortunately, they had nothing more formidable than AK-47s, and possibly the newer AK-74s, which had almost no recoil, a really good bark when you pulled the trigger, and a bullet that squished up good like a dum-dum.
Deadly against a person at a few hundred yards, but useless against a Hog.
Still, it was the thought that counted. Hunkering in his titanium bathtub, A-Bomb brought the plane around in a quick, tight bank. No one fired at a Hog without paying for it. He dialed up his cannon, steadied his hand, and let loose with a stream of high-explosive and depleted uranium that turned the position into a dervish of sand and burnt flesh.
Past the outpost, he gunned the throttle and nosed northwards, looking for Mongoose.
As he did, he reached inside his flight suit and hit the replay on his CD unit until he could hear the beginning of “Born in the USA.” Something about that song brought out the best in an airplane, no shit.
CHAPTER 9
Whoever was working the Iraqi SA-6 missile battery was either very good or very cautious, or both. Since the brief blip that alerted Bear to his presence, the intercept radar had been completely silent.
It didn’t matter though— the Weasel Police had his number. Parsons took a half second to make sure the SA-2s weren’t a threat and then closed for the kill.
The Phantom wasn’t completely immune to the SA-6. The missile had a range of approximately fifteen kilometers. Its control radar used two different bands and could acquire multiple targets. The SA-6 itself could out-maneuver a fighter and contained its own semi-active radar; once fired, it stood a better than average chance of hitting its target even with counter measures going full tilt.
“Turning,” called Parsons, pulling the Phantom in a sharp bank, directly toward the missile’s now-silent radar.
“Two is back up. Okay, here’s our six again. We’re going to nail the bastard. Okay. Hand off.”
Bear was busier than a one-armed paper hanger behind the iron wall separating the two men. The computer took the target information on the SA-6 and gave it to the HARM missile’s onboard guidance system. The big AGM-88 took the info, hiccupped, then thundered away. Immediately Bear dialed in one of the two SA-2 radar sites the plane had detected.
“Got the light,” he told Parsons.
“Fire!”
“Away.”
The thud of the rocket igniting beneath the gull-shaped wings felt reassuring. Parsons had already started a jink to keep his butt clean, planning on spinning back to pull the Phantom in the direction of the last SA-2 battery. He could see ground fire from anti-aircraft cannons, too far off to bother anyone. One of the A-10As was cutting paper dolls out of sky in the distance, evading a SAM.
“Keep your turn coming,” Bear told him. I have one more. He’s up. He’s dotted.” The pitter’s slang referred to the icons on his screen that said the enemy radar had been located and targeted by the Phantom’s gear.
“Handing off,” Bear said, giving the target information to the missile so it could attack while he concentrated on finding more threats.
“Optical launches on those twos,” warned the pilot.
“Ready light!”
“Fire.”
“Away. Shit— we got that six. Mama! Secondaries. There we go! Got the trailer on the two! Whole damn thing’s burning like all hell. Oh yeah, baby! Kick ass!”
The HARM’s warhead was designed to explode large, nasty shards of tungsten into the control facility of the missile’s radar. By doing that, the HARM wiped out the valuable electronics gear, rendering the battery useless. It was a more effective way of destroying a threat than blowing a hole in a radar dish, which could be easily repaired.