Actually, they needed more than touch-ups; Apache Two in particular. Gashes and dents covered the sheet metal. A large crack and several bullet holes decorated the cockpit bubble. But the rotor and motor were intact and the wires she had field-stripped and twisted together at the start of this insanely long day were holding. She was good to go.
Or wait, since there was no sense leaving until the Pave Low was en route to meet them. They weren’t taking off for another hour and a half.
The wind kicked up. The sand felt like sleet in her face. With nothing left to do, Rosen went back to the bunker and took out her notebook again, thumbing past the page she’d filled earlier.
It did no good to brood on the past. Her grandma told her that a million times, raising her. So forget about Lieutenant Dixon. BJ. For now at least.
She turned her pen in her hand, thinking what she might write about. Some of the characters she worked with.
The pilots. What a bunch.
A-Bomb:
I guess every unit has its own one-of-a-kind pilot type. Well, A-Bomb— aka Captain O’Rourke— is one of a kind for the whole Air Force. He’s probably unique in the world.
I don’t know how he flies but he must be pretty good because he always gets the tough assignments. And Chief Clyston says he’s pretty good, which is praise right there.
But the thing about A-Bomb is— he’s like a walking junk food store. He’s always eating candy or Big Macs or something. And I mean always— you should see the crumbs on the floor of his airplane. He drinks coffee while he’s flying. I know because I’ve seen the coffee stains!
I don’t know how he manages it. I mean, the Hogs aren’t exactly 747s.
She stopped. She was going to add that the A-10As didn’t have automatic pilots, but that was the kind of information that could conceivably help the enemy. So she went on to other pilots.
Captain Glenon:
Everybody calls him “Doberman.” He probably got the name because of his bark— he has a pretty sharp temper and is very impatient. On the other hand, he’s been very nice and professional to me.
Maybe the best pilot in the bunch. Supposed to be the best at using the Mavericks and dropping bombs, but I’m not sure how you measure that exactly. They’re all pretty good here.
Nice guy. If I had had a brother, the kind of guy I’d want him to be.
Captain Hawkins:
Macho Spec Ops Army captain. Okay for an officer, because all he wants is for you to do your job. Likes to drink tea. Earl Gray tea.
Rosen put her pen down and reread her notes. They were bare descriptions, nothing that really would tell anybody who these men were. Brave. Good pilots. Decent men.
Wasn’t everybody?
No. No way. If you watched the movies or TV, sure— everybody was brave on television, everybody always did the right thing. War, life, weren’t really like that.
If she was going to write a book about her experiences, if she was even going to write a journal, that was what she had to get down.
Her fingers had cramped with the cold. She brought them to her mouth and blew on them as she thought about how difficult it was to communicate what really went on.
Would anyone really want to know?
Sure, they would. The problem was, a lot of what really happened was boring. You got up, you pulled an antenna off a Hog because it was nicked by shrapnel, put a new one in. That was your day.
Boring. Important as all hell, but boring.
Even if you were doing it in Iraq, a hundred miles from any sizable allied force, closer to Baghdad than Oz. Even if any second an enemy artillery shell or a Scud could wipe you out.
You didn’t think about that part. Not that you escaped it, exactly: You carried it around in your tool kit along with the wrenches and Mr. Persuasion, the extra-large ballpeen hammer at the bottom of the bag. It weighed the case down but you couldn’t get rid of it.
She started writing again.
I can’t get BJ out of my mind. He was such an innocent kid. Captain Glenon said he didn’t even curse when he was first assigned to Devil Squadron, and probably hadn’t had more than three beers in his life. A true fact. He was tall for a Hog driver, over six feet, with brushy blond hair and movie-star eyes. Real blue. He looked strong.
But innocent. Like a baby, almost. His lips were so soft.
Why do the good ones die first? Why is innocence the first victim?
PART THREE
HOG RULES
CHAPTER 32
Doberman checked the numbers on his INS, and glanced back at the map. He ought to be turning cartwheels over Al-Kajuk in twenty minutes.
Seventeen minutes and thirty seconds, to be exact.
He ran through his instrument checks and scanned the sky for boogies. His biggest enemy, though, was impatience.
There were certain tricks— straining the throttle with your eyes, leaning on your seat restraints to pull her along— but the bottom line was that Hogs could not go fast. They also really, truly, did not like to fly high. Doberman’s mount had groaned and grunted all the way to 18,500 feet, even though he promised to put the extra altitude to good use on the business-end of the trip. She was built like a tank and wanted to act that way; she seemed to whine with displeasure when Doberman didn’t turn in the direction of the thunderhead of flak at 12,000 feet two miles off her right wing.
Judging from the altitude and spread of the flak cloud, Doberman figured the exploding bullets came from two or three ZSU-57-2 self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, more than likely unguided by radar— though that didn’t make the monster shells any less deadly. The site wasn’t marked on the map. Doberman jotted the location down, just in case he still had some bombs left on the way home.
At precisely fifteen minutes from target, Doberman checked in with the AWACS controller tasked with coordinating support for the Apache mission. The crews rotated but he recognized the controller’s Carolina accent from earlier as the specialist acknowledged Devil One’s position.
The controller surprised him by saying that Wong hadn’t called in a strike— or even come back on the air in the past hour.
“No contact?” he asked.
“Negative, Devil One. We are out of contact with the Fire Team at this time.”
Out of contact?
“You’re aware they’re tracking Scuds,” he said, more a statement than a question.
“Copy that. We have two Vipers en route to that kill box,” said the controller. “We have a rotary asset en route, call sign Dark Snake. He is crossing north now. He may require assistance communicating with Apache Fire Team. We were told not to expect y’all,” added the controller. “But we’re happy to have ya.”
“Roger that.”
Doberman laid out the situation in his head. Dark Snake was the Spec Ops Pave Hawk, a specially modified Blackhawk designed for covert missions. Detailed to pick up Wong and the boys, the MH-60 would travel very close to the weeds, maybe only six feet off the ground, guided by special radar and other equipment. Because it was so low, it could have difficulty communicating with the ground team until it was almost on top of them. Doberman, much higher, could help out by establishing contact with the team and the helicopter individually. Then he’d relay messages back and forth like a telegraph operator in the Old West.