Worth it if he could be sure he was getting missiles— especially if they had chemical warheads.
Hell, if he had to bail he could always hook up with Wong and his Delta Force buddies. Wouldn’t that be fun?
“What about the Scuds themselves?” he asked Wong. “Are they there too?”
“We’re working on it, Captain. Please be patient.”
“I have less than twelve minutes of fuel to play with,” Doberman said. “Don’t take all day.”
He banked the Hog back westwards, barely. The village and hill were between him and the SAMs, he was within their range; they could hit a hot target from five miles out.
Best thing to do, get low and go after the SA-9s first. Fifty feet head-on, no way they’d nail him.
Could be get both launchers in one run?
The Iraqis would have to be pretty stupid to line them up for him.
Duh.
“Devil One, we have a pickup truck entering the village. We are observing it now. It appears to be a command vehicle,” added Wong. “Please stand by.”
Doberman jostled his legs nervously, barely keeping himself from upsetting the rudders. He felt like he was waiting on the express line at a supermarket with a week’s thirst and a six pack in his hand, stuck behind a fat lady with a month’s supply of groceries.
The woman morphed into Rosen.
This was not the time to be distracted. Doberman pushed his head down and ran through the instrument readings, trying for a routine, trying to keep his edge and his focus. He began a steady climb as he slid his orbit further north toward the river. He turned and lined up to come into Al Kajuk with the Avenger cannon blazing. All he needed was a target. He’d smoke it, then use the hill for cover from the SAMs.
Tight, but doable.
“Come on Wong, what’s the story,” said Doberman. He now had five minutes of fuel left before he’d be at bingo and have to go home. “Is that pickup truck heading anywhere, or what.”
“We’ve found the storage facility,” said Wong finally. “We believe we have identified two missiles, but we do not have a positive confirmation.”
“That’s enough for me. I’m going in,” he said, bolting upright against his seat restraints. “Give me directions. I have that tower thing dead on.”
“The tower thing,” Wong said slowly, “is a minaret, and it is part of the target. We believe the missiles are being stored in a mosque.”
“Repeat?”
“Affirmative, a mosque. Please break off your attack until we have received authorization for the strike.”
“Son of a bitch,” said Doberman. Standing orders prevented an attack on a mosque without explicit approval.
“Repeat?”
Mosque or no mosque, if there were Scuds with chemical warheads down there, they needed to be taken out. He could see the building in the lower right quadrant of his screen.
In five seconds, he cross into the SA-9s’ range. They were going to get a strong whiff of his exhaust if he waited any longer to turn.
“Captain Glenon?”
“Yeah, I’m breaking off,” he told Wong. “Let’s think this through. I’m going to be bingo pretty damn quick. Shit.”
CHAPTER 20
By the time the two F-15s had recovered from their evasive maneuvers, the MiG had disappeared from the screen. Hack knew that his shot had missed; he blamed himself for waiting too long, probably giving the Iraqi time to hit his counter-measures and run away.
He and his wingmate swept north, their radars once again beating the weeds.
Hack’s screen popped up a fresh contact at a bare thousand feet, almost dead ahead.
Exactly where the MiG would be if it had hit its afterburners and dove into the ground effects, trying to duck his radar.
“I have a contact,” he told Johnny, giving him a bearing. “We’re close, we’re close.”
“You got a visual.”
“Negative. I’m locked.”
“I’m tickling— shit, shit, he’s friendly! He’s ours, he’s ours.”
Hack cursed too. The plane his radar had just locked up was an A-10A Warthog.
What the hell was it doing way up here? It sure as hell wasn’t on the air tasking order, at least not that he had seen.
The AWACS controller was yelping in his ear.
“Piranha One acknowledges,” Hack said coolly. “I understand that is a friendly. Tell him not to sweat it. We’re coming south.”
“Probably doesn’t even know you had him by the short hairs,” said Johnny as they turned to head south.
Hack didn’t answer. He suddenly felt angry as hell at the Warthog and its driver, as if the plane had made him miss the MiG.
Damn Warthogs had no business being in the war, let alone being so deep in Iraq. They were old, obsolete, slow, and worst of all, ugly.
Hack ought to know: he’d been a Hog driver for nearly three years before finally kissing enough ass to get promoted to the real Air Force.
Damn stinking Warthog and its dumb-as-shit drivers. Probably got lost.
He checked his position and flicked the radar into air-to-air scan, hunting for his tanker.
CHAPTER 21
Even a Hog driver had his limits.
After nearly twenty minutes of temptation and ho-hum flight back toward Al Jouf, A-Bomb was overcome by boredom as much as hunger. He reached down to the pocket flap for the Twinkie. The cellophane wrapper teased his fingertips— the pilot rarely wore flight gloves— but the package had somehow wedged itself in the bottom of his pocket and resisted his gentle tug. Under ordinary circumstances, A-Bomb would just yank, squeeze and swallow, but with your last piece of pastry you had to consider Karma. Squishing the delicate icing was very bad luck, especially while you were still over enemy territory. So he leaned down, trying to slip his fingers beneath the cardboard at the base of the pastry and tease it out.
As he did, his eyes caught something on the ground ahead, a small gray shape scuttling along like a crab in a shallow pool. A-Bomb left the Twinkie in his pocket and jerked upright in the seat. A Zil truck with a trailer was running across the desert ahead, maybe ten miles from the Saudi border. This wasn’t some Iraqi dad taking his kid to college, either— the trailer was a 122 mm D-30 towed howitzer, a large and effective medium range artillery piece designed to harass well-meaning trespassers and Coalition troops on the good-guy side of the border.
The Hog sniffed and snorted, her appetite inflamed by the tasty treat. She was in almost perfect position to gobble it up; a good solid push on the stick, perhaps a tad of rudder, and the target would slide into the cannon’s crosshairs at maybe five thousand feet. A-Bomb pushed in, so excited by his good fortune that he forgot he was flying with only one engine.
The A-10A promptly reminded him, bucking her tail behind him. It didn’t amount to more than a slight whimper of complaint, however— A-Bomb barely noticed as the altitude ladder on his HUD scrolled downwards, falling promptly through eight thousand to seven thousand feet. At six thousand, the truck passed into his targeting pipper, but A-Bomb held off, deciding that he would bank behind the truck and come lower, attacking it from the rear with a long, shallow approach, a tactical concession to the fact that he was running with only one engine.
Technically, of course, the concession he should have made was to ignore the target and fly directly back to base. But A-Bomb had never considered himself a technical type. He banked and came around, down now to nearly three thousand feet, a turkey shoot except that the Zil was not only moving faster than he thought but had cut to his right, leaving whatever trail it was following to dart and dodge in the hard-packed sand. A-Bomb corrected but then threw his momentum too far to the right, not only completely losing the shot but nearly putting himself into a spin.