CHAPTER 39
Dirt and pain pushed Wong’s eyes closed as he fell into the ground. He seemed to fall right through the hill, through the rocks, into hell.
Curious. He would have thought he’d merit assignment to the other destination.
The ground rolled around him as he flailed. He heard the distinctive whine of a pair of A-10A turbofans above him and knew he hadn’t died.
Yet.
His left eye stayed closed; he saw only haze with his right.
On his knees, he felt around him, waiting either to die or see. Dust flew in particles in front of his head. Stones. The ground.
He found two small stubs, felt them gently, pushed his face down into them as his right eye gained focus.
Two fingers.
He pulled his own hands to his face to make sure they weren’t his. As he touched his left cheek a flame erupted there.
His hands were intact. He’d been shot in the face, or near the face. That was why he couldn’t open his left eye.
Burned, not shot. A piece of a red-hot shrapnel had glanced off his cheekbone. He was extremely lucky— the same shell had obliterated the Iraqi captain’s body; parts of the corpse were scattered around him. Wong’s uniform was soaked with the dead man’s blood.
An awful roar rent the air. The A-10A fired its cannon at a target on the highway. There was answering fire, explosions everywhere. Missiles and flames leaped into the air.
Perhaps this really was hell.
Wong worried that he had dropped the dead man’s papers. He began hunting around on the ground in front of him, hands spread wide like a sunbather who’d lost his contact lens in the sand. Finally he remembered he’d stuffed them in his own pocket— he pounded his chest and found them there, or at least felt something he’d have to pretend were them for now. Still unable to see through his left eye, he heaved himself down the hill toward a large shadow. The figure waved its arms at him, beckoning.
Charon or Sergeant Golden, at this moment it made no difference. He found his balance and began running with all the strength he had left.
CHAPTER 40
Until he’d come to the Gulf, Doberman hadn’t believed in luck. In fact, he’d hated the idea. Trained as an engineer, he thought— he knew— that you could roll all that BS together— luck, ESP, UFOs, ghosts, angels, Santa Claus— and toss it into the trash heap. The world could be expressed mathematically, with cold numbers and complex equations. Things that appeared random actually occurred within predictable parameters, and no amount of superstition could change them.
But he sure as hell believed in luck now, or at least he wanted to, ramming his body and hopefully the Hog to the southeast and as low as he could go, trying to get his nose pointed toward the SA-9s’ IR sniffers. The idea wasn’t as crazy as it seemed: the less of a heat signal he presented to the missiles, the harder it would be for them to find him. They were galloping toward him at maybe Mach 1.5; he had all of a second and a half to complete his maneuver.
Doberman got his nose in the direction of the SAM launchers and turned the Hog over, goosing the CBUs from his wings as he did. The plane was far too low for the bombs to explode properly; he just wanted to get rid of the weight.
Except, one of them did explode. And while the air rumbled around him and sweat poured from every pore of his body, the SA-9 sucked in the sudden heat and dove for it.
Doberman felt something ping the rear fuselage, a sharp thud and shake, but his controls stayed solid and he was actually climbing. Tracers whizzed well overhead. The air buffeted worse than a hurricane. He saw light and thought he felt heat, and then found a large telephone pole moving on the road ahead of him. It took another second before he saw that the pole was laid out flat and realized it was a Scud carrier, moving on the highway.
He had to pull back to get it into the aiming cue. The A-10A jerked her nose up and he fired, lead and uranium and blood flowing in a thick hose, splattering the ground and the air. He banked to his right, struggling to reorient himself in the peppery haze as the ground crackled with tracers and muzzle flashes.
The tanks were back on the other side of the hill. The SAM launchers were on his right; he was within range but he guessed— he hoped— that they’d already shot their wad. He hustled the Hog to the west, trying to keep an eye on the bouncing shadows of black and red. The T-62s were still firing at Wong.
Doberman drew a long breath. You could build a ship with the flak in the air. Fortunately, the tracers were arcing high into the sky, the shells apparently set to explode far above. For all its fury, the triple-A was harmless.
Unless, of course, the bullets actually flew through the plane.
Doberman had a good mark on a tank. He pushed the Hog toward it, judging that he could cut left after firing and avoid the worst of the antiair. Three hundred feet above ground level, he came in on a T-62 turret as the tank’s machine-gun began to fire toward the top of the hill.
“See you in hell, you son of a bitch,” said Doberman.
In the two seconds his finger stayed on the trigger, more than a hundred rounds spit from the front of the plane. The foot-long shells glowed in the dimness as they sped toward their target, ripping the highway, the metal of the tank, and then the ground beyond. Half a dozen of the 30 mm warheads made their way through the hard metal of the tank, bouncing wildly in a ricochet of death through the cramped quarters of the thirty-six ton tank.
By the time the last of the crew had died, Doberman had already trained the Hog’s GAU-8/A Avenger cannon on a second target and begun to fire. His angle was poor, however, and he didn’t have enough room to stay on the tank and not collide with the hill. He flicked off the gun and wagged his way clear for another run, cutting left and then flicking right to give the people firing at him less of a target.
And they were firing on him. He was at a hundred feet, barely higher than the hill. The Iraqis threw everything they had at him— anti-aircraft guns, rifles, pistols, maybe even a knife or two.
No rational man would have turned back for another run. But Captain Glenon wasn’t rational. He was a Hog driver. And having come this far he wasn’t about to go home.
The Gatling mechanism began pumping beneath his seat as Doberman whipped back toward the hill and immediately found the tank front and center in his HUD aiming cue. He mashed the rudder pedals back and forth, lacing the top of the tank. Two swishes and the tank disappeared, steamed into oblivion.
Dark black spitballs arced past his windshield, spewed by an optically-aimed ZSU-23 posted below the village. Doberman tucked his wing in and got the barrels sighted as they swung toward him. He rushed his shot, the enemy spitballs turning into footballs; he pushed hard on the stick, ramming his stream of bullets down into the target. His wings bounced up and down. He had a hard time putting the Hog where he wanted it to go, even though he didn’t think he’d been hit. He leaned on the trigger and finally squashed the gun, saw parts of the treads and one of the barrels flying upwards, but no more bullets. He pulled his right wing up, feeling his way back across the village, hugging the ground and looking for something big to shoot at.
Nothing. The anti-air fire seemed to have temporarily exhausted itself. One of the tanks was on fire. He pulled up into the darkness away from the Iraqi positions, quickly scanning his instruments. His heart pounded so fast it sounded like a downpour on a tin roof.