“Where the hell are you going, Wong?” shouted Golden.
“Be right with you, Sergeant. Please take the Satcom and proceed without me,” yelled Wong.
In the next moment a fresh set of salvos from the tanks rocked the hillside. Wong flew face-first into the hill. The last member of the fire team slid past to the left. Wong pushed himself to his feet.
The Iraqis were shouting below, their voices a cacophony of anguished cries and commands to attack.
Wong began to choke. He put his arm to his face, using his sleeve as a makeshift filter. The Iraqi captain lay heaped over to his right, perhaps ten yards away. As he ran toward it, the tanks launched another set of salvos. While their rate of fire was admirable, their marksmanship left a lot to be desired, though not by Wong. He stumbled sideways down the hill a few feet, lost his balance and fell onto the Iraqi’s body. The thick cloud of soot and dirt made it impossible to see what he was doing; he had to feel for the pockets with his hands. He found a folded map or document and something in one of the shirt flaps. That was going to have to suffice.
He threw himself backwards in the direction he’d come, rolling two or three yards downhill before managing to get his arm out and lever himself to his feet. He heard the sound of a tank shell whizzing by at close range and thought of the old saying about the shell you heard was never the one that got you. There must be some truth to that, he realized, given the innate lag time involved in the speed of sound and the human aural apparatus.
In the next second, he found himself flying through the air, launched by an explosion he hadn’t heard.
CHAPTER 38
Gravity slapped Doberman hard in the head, punishing him for trying to do too many things at once. He struggled, holding the hard maneuver and fighting the instinct that wanted him to ease off on the stick. He lost Wong’s transmission in a tangle of static; saw all sorts of ground fire and had a warning on the RWR. Fighting off the confusion, he steadied his hand on the stick and put his eyes back on the Maverick video monitor, pasting them there as he waited for the long gray shadow of the missile erector to appear. Some kind of ground battery, probably on a mobile platform, began firing flak at him; black pebbles and white streaks dotted the video screen as well as the canopy above him.
No target.
Doberman cursed. He pulled back on the stick, starting to bank to his right and try again. The long ladder materialized at the edge of his screen. It fuzzed, and for a moment he couldn’t be sure whether he had his target or an optical illusion. He stayed on course and switched the Maverick into what passed for close-up mode, doubling the magnification but narrowing his range of vision by about the same percentage.
The ladder morphed into a two-by-six with graffiti, then back into something approximating a construction crane half covered by a tarp. The crane portion was moving, swinging around slowly. Doberman steadied the small aiming cursor on the heart of the lumber and let the missile go. He kept his eyes on the screen for another two or three seconds, locked on his target, entranced by the gray fuzz. Then he shook himself out of it and yanked the Hog around, hitting the diversionary flares. He assumed the SA-9s had launched and jinked hard right then back left, leaving the small flares out to suck their IR sensors away.
At least he hoped they would. He counted off twenty seconds, shucking and jiving the whole way, cutting corners in the sky before starting to reorient himself for another attack. The altimeter ladder told him he’d fallen to 8,050 feet. The CBUs— long suitcases of miniature anti-armor and personnel bombs— had been preset to be delivered from roughly eight thousand feet; he’s have to get higher to get a good angle before letting them go. He swung out of his bank and put his nose upwards, now more than twelve miles from his target, well out of range of the missiles and flak in a swatch of open air. He could see large flashes near the hill on the left, in front of the village.
Wong’s team, taking heavy fire. He’d have to try and help them, the SA-9s be damned.
“Devil One to Bro leader,” he said, trying to raise the F-16s. Doberman angled to make his approach from the west, keeping as much distance between himself and the SAMs until the last moment. He saw a flash off his right wing, then something moving on the ground further along— maybe the Scuds.
Another set of muzzle flashes below the hill. If they kept that up, he’d have an easy time taking them out.
Couldn’t use the CBUs — no telling how close the tanks were to Wong.
Have to mash them with the cannon.
Lower attack. Have to hurry, too. The bastards were flailing.
He tried the F-16s one last time. When the radio didn’t snap back with pointy nose slang, Doberman called the AWACS, asking for information on the Vipers and giving his position. In the meantime, the Hog seemed to fly herself, homing in on the thick shadows at the base of the hill. He was near in range as his finger clicked off the talk button; his eyes separated the fresh muzzle flashes into real targets, thick and juicy. Doberman slammed the stick hard, pitching the Hog into the attack. A gray shroud filled his windshield, a cloud of dust or smoke or fog spewing from the hillside.
Come on, he thought to himself. Fire again you bastards. Show me where the hell you are.
“Bro flight is zero-three from target,” said the AWACS controller over the radio. Doberman lost the rest of the message as he struggled to find the tanks in the darkness. Something very bright flashed in the distance, back near the highway.
He was below four thousand feet and still didn’t have a target. He had mud and crap and dirt and shit, but no target.
SA-9s on their way. That was what the flash was.
Three thousand feet. Shit. What the hell happened?
Two thousand. Too late now. Sorry Wong.
He broke off, changing his plan as the Hog slid down into the mud, a thousand feet and still in a dive. He had a good view of the highway and saw a tower peeking out from the village— the minaret from the mosque, obviously— about eleven o’clock off his nose. A four-barreled Zsu-23 opened up near the edge of the village, its stream of bullets whipping for him. Doberman’s brain went critical, leaping into full-blown Hog driver mode; he dodged the stream of shells without thinking about them, hunkering in the A-10A’s titanium bathtub while his eyes hunted for something to hit. He had a long shadow in the center of the roadway a quarter of a mile off. He couldn’t tell what it was, but at this point it didn’t matter. Thirty-millimeter slugs from the Hog’s gun chewed into the thick brick, slicing it in two. There was no secondary explosion, however, and Doberman was by it before he could tell for sure what he’d hit. He banked hard, trying to cut a path low against the hill, away from the flak.
Dragged down by the four heavy cluster bombs on her wings, the Hog wallowed in the air, her energy robbed by the maneuvers and momentum.
He saw a flash from the corner of his eye. It was too big for tracers from the triple-A, but not big enough for the Scud.
The SA-9, closer than he thought, almost point blank.
He rammed the stick in the opposite direction and slammed his hand against the button to fire off more decoy flares. But he’d already shot his wad; there was nothing but cold air between his engines and the heat-seeker gunning for him.
The plane rocked to the right, down to five hundred feet, starting to slide sideways despite her pilot’s efforts to nose her around. Doberman felt something give way in his stomach, and he realized he’d pushed the line way too far tonight.