And came up empty.
“Now I’m starting to feel really mad,” he said, sweeping his eyes across his instruments and then the rest of his readouts. Speed brisk, compass doing its thing and altitude moving in the proper direction. The master caution on the warning panel — no light, good. Enunciators clean, good.
The controls were sharp; with only the Sidewinder missiles and ECM pod under her wings, the Hog felt clean and light, and gave no hint that she was flying with a patched hydraulic system.
“Devil One this is Two,” A-Bomb said over the squadron frequency, contacting Doberman as he set course in a loose trail roughly three miles behind his flight leader. Their initial direction was south, towards open desert where it was unlikely they’d be spotted as they climbed. “I’m up.”
“About time,” grunted Doberman.
“You get the helos on the air yet?”
“They’re on the back burner,” Doberman told him. That meant things were going according to plan — Fort Apache’s two helicopters had dropped off their men a few miles from the site a short time before. They had moved south a few miles to hide in case they were needed. “Ground should be positioned in fifteen.”
“My math has us there in ten,” said A-Bomb, who actually was just guessing. He hadn’t been very big on math since Sister Harvey’s class in fifth grade.
“Yeah, twelve,” said Doberman. “Conserve your fuel.”
“I go any slower I’m walking,” A-Bomb told him. “I’m surprised you can hear me over the stall warnings.”
“One,” snapped Doberman, an acknowledgment that basically meant, shut up and drive.
The two Hogs were to fly up and orbit south of the highway that led to the village, which was supposedly sparsely populated, with no known Iraqi army units. They’d be at eight thousand feet, ready to pounce once the Delta troopers gave them a good target. Captain Wong had gone along to help make sure things worked right; with Braniac on the job, A-Bomb figured they’d be working the Gats within five minutes of the fire team’s first transmission. That still left them a good twenty minutes worth of fuel reserves before they’d have to head back to Al Jouf.
Ten officially, but Doberman always padded those calculations.
Doberman had insisted on the ground that he would make all of the cannon attacks, not wanting to push A-Bomb’s plane and test the repairs. But A-Bomb knew once the fur started flying, he and his plane would do what was natural — leaky hydraulic system, missing wing, whatever. Doberman might bitch and growl, but in the end he’d understand.
His leader’s tail was a small black line in the upper left quadrant of his windshield. The loose trail formation was a de rigueur Hog lineup for a two-plane element. It was basically follow-the-leader with a slight offset; the trail plane off the right or left wing back anywhere from a half-mile to three, depending on the circumstances. The planes would generally fly at slightly different altitudes, making it a little more difficult for an approaching enemy to pick out both in one glance. Freelancing attack gigs like this sortie and the others typically flown by Hogs tended to be somewhat less precise than the carefully orchestrated plans employed by vast packages of advanced bombers and escorts, but they were well suited to the ground support mission. The Devil Squadron’s trail formation was almost infinitely flexible, the wingman protecting the lead plane’s six while allowing for a quick, two-fisted ground attack or a more leisurely figure-eight wheel and dive when it was time to boogie.
“How’s that repair holding up?” Doberman asked.
“Fine,” A-Bomb replied. “I’m dyin’ up here, though. Nothing to eat.”
“You didn’t check the seat for crumbs?”
“Now that you mention it, there’s probably a gum drop or two under the sofa. Probably full of cat’s hair, though.”
“This is war, Gun. You have to rough it.”
“It’s what I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb. Now that he thought about it, he probably had dropped something on the floor during the morning’s mission. He rocked the Hog left and right and pitched the nose up, trying to shake something loose.
Then the plane jerked hard to the left, much harder than it should have. A-Bomb felt the G’s snap into his body as he muscled the stick, got the Hog back.
He knew by the feel even before he checked his gauges that it wasn’t the hydraulics. He’d lost power in his right engine.
Gone. Dead. Dormant.
What the hell?
A-Bomb worked through the restart procedure, thought he had a cough.
Nada. He tried twice more and came up empty.
Serious caution lights; the damn cockpit looked like a Christmas tree.
Well, all right, a slight exaggeration. But this is what came of flying without even a good luck Three Musketeers bar.
A-Bomb cast his eyes toward his last resort — the lone Twinkie. Then he snapped the mike button in disgust.
“Devil One, this is Two. I’ve got a situation.”
CHAPTER 15
Three weeks ago to the day, Bristol Wong had been enjoying a leisurely game of chess in a small club frequented by Pentagon and CIA intelligence specialists in Alexandria, Virginia. With its thick leather chairs, horse paintings, and British decor, the club appealed to the Air Force captain’s innate sense of culture and decorum. The fact that a good game of chess and reasonably decent sherry could always be had there didn’t hurt. But on that very day, Wong had no sooner settled into a Sicilian defense— old hat to be sure, but he was playing a former CIA agent well known for his love of extreme symmetry— when his beeper vibrated. Wong knew immediately that he was going to hate the next four or five weeks of his life.
An hour after returning the call, Wong found himself aboard a Navy transport plane, en-route to Saudi Arabia, armed with a title several sentences long that had little to do with his actual mission. Officially, his job was to “consult and brief” Centcom on Iraqi air defenses. His actual task was to gather information about any and all advanced Soviet systems in the theater, which would be provided back-channel to the Pentagon G2’s chief of staff. The dual nature of his mission was nothing particularly out of the ordinary, at least not for Wong who was, after all, the world’s greatest expert on Soviet weapons — outside the Soviet Union, of course.
In due course he made his way to Hog Heaven and Devil Squadron at their Home Drome, also known as King Fahd Royal Air Base. He was chasing down a lead on the use of a shoulder-fired weapon that both the CIA and the Air Force claimed the Iraqis didn’t possess: the SA-16, a relatively sophisticated shoulder-fired weapon in some ways comparable to an American Stinger. While publicly expressing skepticism with the initial report, Wong in fact already had ample evidence that the missile was in Iraqi possession. He suspected that they were even using an improved version, only recently issued to Russian troops themselves. A member of Devil Squadron— Captain Glenon, in fact— had had the misfortune of encountering one during the first day of the war.
Unfortunately for Wong, the Devil Squadron commander, Colonel Michael Knowlington, had taken an inexplicable liking to Wong and managed to pull all manner of strings to have him assigned to his command. Naturally, Wong realized that he would be a prize jewel in any command structure, and had employed a vast array of tactics to get himself removed and returned to Washington, D.C., where he might play chess with some regularity, not to mention challenge. But his efforts had been misinterpreted. Colonel Knowlington now considered him an essential cog in the machine, and detailed him to help the advance elements of Devil Squadron supporting Fort Apache.