He’d also prayed that he wouldn’t screw up.
Hack snapped the mike button and requested clearance from ground control. Acknowledged and approved, he slipped the Eagle’s dual throttles out of idle and eased out from his parking spot.
Hack hated this part of the flight. His stomach stirred with anticipation, juices building. Inevitably he poked the stick around like a novice, shaking the plane’s control surfaces like a new lieutenant queuing for his first flight.
“Tower, Piranha One, in sequence,” he began, asking the controller for his departure ticket.
“Piranha, the wind three-two-zero at 12 knots, cleared for take-off.”
“Piranha,” he acknowledged, leading the rest of his flight toward the long gray splash of runway where they would take off. His stomach jerked back and forth furiously, bile climbing up his windpipe as he glanced through the large bubble canopy at his wingman Captain “Johnny” Stern.
Stern gave him a thumbs up. Hack returned it, then got serious about his throttle, poking his Pratt & Whitneys to full military power while checking his instruments. RPM, turbine inlet temp, oil pressure and fuel flow were at spec. He checked them off in his head, working quickly through the numbers for engine two. His stomach boiled— the temp gauge for the inlet read 322 degrees Celsius, about 900 Fahrenheit, and he might have believed that was measuring his own temperature.
Do your best.
When the brakes were released, the Eagle didn’t roll down the runway— it bolted, pushing itself against his back as it jumped from zero to 120 knots in nothing flat. Hack brought the stick back steadily. The F-15 could literally fly straight up off the runway, but there was no need to show off. The Eagle ascended into the desert air, past the fine mist of sand, beyond the heated air radiating in waves off the concrete. The fire in his stomach subsided. He settled into the routine, cleaning up the airplane by cranking in the wheels and adjusting his flaps. The Eagle was already moving through the air at over 220 nautical miles an hour.
As the unsafe gear lights blinked off, Hack checked through his instruments quickly, making sure he was in the green. Then he swept his head around the cockpit glass nearly three hundred degrees, from one end of the ejector seat cushion to the other, back to front to back again, before beginning a bank to set course to the flight’s rendezvous point.
Once airborne, the four Eagles split into two sections. Hack and his wingmate went north. The second group stayed south, queing up to tank. They would trade places in roughly forty-five minutes, one group in reserve while the other zipped over southwestern Iraq at roughly twenty-five thousand feet.
Hack and his wingman were just falling into their first sweep when the AWACS broke the loud hush in his ears with the words he’d prayed to hear.
“Boogies coming off the runway at H-2.”
Oh yeah, thought Hack. Oh yeah!
CHAPTER 14
A-Bomb adjusted the harness on his seat restraint, rocked back and forth and played with the rudder pedals as he sat off to the side of the runway, waiting for Doberman to clear so he could trundle into takeoff position. His Hog had been fueled, he had close to a full combat load in the Gatling-style cannon beneath his chair, and the plane had just been given a personal going over by the best A-10A maintenance tech this side of the capo di capo.
Still, he couldn’t help feeling a little discombobulated.
Not anxious, exactly, not worried or nervous. Those words weren’t in his vocabulary, at least not as they pertained to flying. Just off.
Part of it was the fact that, in order to conserve fuel, the Warthog was going to be pushed to the far end of the runway. Not that he personally cared, but the plane was apt to feel embarrassed, especially with all these Special Ops guys watching. In the pilot’s opinion, the eleven seconds or so of flight time that would be gained weren’t worth the indignity, but Doberman was in such an obviously bad mood today that A-Bomb had just nodded when he suggested that.
No, what was bothering him went beyond the Hog’s sense of self-esteem. A-Bomb had a full load of coffee, such as it was, in the thermos. The Boss was cued up on the custom-rigged CD system that had been integrated into his personal flightsuit and helmet. But his cupboard was practically bare: no Twizzlers, no Three Musketeers, not even an emergency M&M.
In fact, his entire store was represented by a single Twinkie. He eyed its bulge in his shiny pocket longingly, aching to swallow it but not wanting to be without hope of sustenance at a critical moment in battle.
War was hell, but this was total bullshit. It was the kind of thing that really made him mad. Not to mention hungry.
A-Bomb was aware that most combat pilots, perhaps even all combat pilots, never ate on the job. There was all the flight gear to deal with — the mask, the helmet, the pressure suit. There was gravity and there were vague altitude effects, which played havoc with your taste buds. And admittedly, the wrong crumb in the navigational gear could send you to Beijing instead of Baghdad, though that was the sort of mistake you had to make the most of.
But A-Bomb wasn’t another combat pilot; he was a Hog driver, and Hog drivers were genetically equipped to do the impossible. He had stuffed a Tootsie Roll in his mouth on his very first flight in an A-10A, savoring the chewy caramel flavor through his first roll. Few things in the world could compare to the shock of four or five gs hitting you square in the esophagus as you bit down on a Drake’s cherry pie. It made the blood race; it made you feel like you were an American, connected to the great unbroken chain of 7-Elevens strung across the Heartland. It was what he was fighting for, after all.
A-Bomb shook his head and watched as Doberman lit his Hog’s twin turbofans at the far end of the Apache base and start down the runway. Unlike many other planes, the Hogs were equipped with on-board starters that allowed them to operate at scratch bases like these; they were just one of the many features that made the A-10 the ultimate do-it-yourself airplane. Doberman’s mount picked up speed, jerking herself in the sky two hundred feet before the wadi.
Rosen ran in front of A-Bomb’s Hog and gave him a thumbs up. The pilot released the brakes, sighing to himself as the soldiers began pushing the plane forward. He could tell the Hog didn’t like this — she grunted and creaked, dragging her tail across the concrete like a dog yelled at for peeing on the rug.
“Get over it,” he barked at the plane. She stopped her whining, rolling freely and poking her tail surfaces around as A-Bomb helped steer her around with a touch of the pedals.
Rosen’s fixes to the hydraulic system couldn’t be properly tested until he was in the air. Under other circumstances, the checkflight would have been conducted very carefully, according to a rigidly prescribed to-do list. Here though, A-Bomb was basically going to make sure everything worked and go from there.
Which suited him just fine. He’d never been much of a test pilot.
Actually, under other circumstances, he’d have been under strict orders to return to a “real” base for “real” repairs, but heck, who’d listen to orders like those when there was good stuff just waiting to be blown up?
Besides, the controls were responding just fine. The Hog had two sets of hydraulic systems as well as manual controls; even if Rosen’s fix fell apart A-Bomb figured he’d have an easy time flying the plane. When he lit the GE TF34-GE-100 turbofans on the back hull, the Hog roared her approval. She bucked her nose up and down and began striding down the short run of concrete, willing herself off the ground. A-Bomb had the wheels coming up as she thundered over the dark crease at the runway’s end. She gave a wag of her tail to the men working to bury the tanker, as if she were saying goodbye to the blood donor who’d helped her carry on. A-Bomb brought her to course, cranked “Born to Run” — kind of mandatory, when you thought about it — and reached for his customary post-takeoff Twizzler.