At spec. Controls good. Steady climb.
He’d made it. And hell, he even had a good twenty minutes of fuel to spare.
He was one lucky SOB. A good pilot, maybe even great— but luckier than anyone had a right to be.
Doberman relaxed a little, shoulders sagging ever so slightly as he leaned backwards against the Hog’s ejector seat. His legs were cramping; he rocked his knees toward each other gently.
“Devil One, this is Bro leader,” said the leader of the F-16 two-ship. “Request you stand off while we attack.”
“If you can find something standing down there to hit,” Doberman told the late-arrivers, “be my guest.”
CHAPTER 41
Dixon was pinned there, behind the bodies, by a fury of machine-gun and heavy-weapons fire. The air boiled with explosions and metal and heat. Flames flew in every direction and he had to hunker into the ground, barely aware of anything more than a foot away. He couldn’t even get up to retrieve his AK-47, even though it lay on the side of the hill only a yard or two away. Every time he rose or crawled or leaned in its direction, the ground exploded with bullets.
He wasn’t sure how long he stayed there, or why the Iraqis firing at him didn’t just charge and get it over with. The machine-gun seemed to be shooting from a good way off, though in the dark he couldn’t really tell. Shells from a tank or artillery piece peppered the top hill, most landing well behind him; even so, they threw up fierce amounts of dirt and grit.
Dixon’s lips pressed into the ground, waiting for something to happen. Images crowded at the corners of his brain, ghosts trying to haunt him— his mother, the first man he had killed at close range, the Iraqi woman caught in the crossfire below, the baby. He sat in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean; the ghosts clawed the sides from the icy water, reaching for him, crying to be saved. But he knew that if he let one into the boat, if he even reached for one, it would be the end; Dixon himself would sink, swamped by their pain, dragged to his own death. He resisted; he closed his eyes against the tracers and the smoke and the shrapnel and the metal and the gunpowder and the death. He told himself that the Iraqis had killed the woman and her child, not him. He pushed his body close to the dead soldiers, protected by their freshly wasted bones. He slipped his sleeve over his mouth, trying to breathe the last air unpolluted by the hot winds of death that flowed over the battlefield.
One of the bodies before him began to move. It sprung up, laughing in his face, leering over him.
He fought it back down, forcing his eyes to see and his brain to know that the man was truly dead.
The body collapsed as the foot of the hill exploded with a tumultuous hiss. The red flare of flames shot up toward the sky.
Dixon’s body burned with the heat, though the fire was far away. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He got to his knees, looming over the dead men, making himself an easy target, not caring that he would soon be dead.
And then he heard a sound in the distance, a low, familiar whump— the exact sound a Blackhawk helicopter made as it flew. He heard it over everything, the explosions, the curses, the wails of wounded men. He heard it and knew it was coming toward him.
He didn’t know if the Iraqis were still firing or not. He didn’t know if he was pursued by ghosts or bullets or bombs or corpses or curses. He knew only that he was on his feet and he was running, pushing toward the growing but still distant whomp of the helicopter, a heavy, continuous thud that drummed him full of hope.
CHAPTER 42
By the time Wong reached the roadway, the four Delta troopers had set up the Satcom and were talking to the Blackhawk helicopter detailed to pick them up. The helo— technically an Air Force Special Operations MH-60G Pave Hawk, call sign Dark Snake— had located them with the aid of its FLIR imager and had a calculated ETA under forty-five seconds. The troopers could hear it but not see it; the southwest horizon was now a dark blur. Two F-16s were about to make a run on the Scuds.
“I suggest we request that the F-16s hold off their bombing run until we have egressed,” Wong told Golden. “And in any event, it would be prudent to don our chemical gear.”
Golden tapped the com specialist indicating that he ought to follow the captain’s suggestions. The rest of the men silently reached to their rucksacks, pulling out the moon gear.
Wong had lost his rucksack back on the hill, and thus had no NBC suit to put on. Instead, he pulled out the papers he’d taken from the Iraqi, examining them with the aid of a small penlight he borrowed from Golden.
One of the folded sheets contained two photos, both fairly battered. In one, an older Iraqi woman waved hesitantly. In the second, a younger version of the dead captain waved in front of a stairway to the Chicago El. The paper had some writing on it in Arabic; it was faded and difficult to read, but Wong guessed it was a personal letter or will of some type.
The other papers were two small sheets from a notebook. These had numbers as well as letters on them, instructions or map coordinates. There wasn’t time to study them before the ground started whipping with grit thrown up by the helicopter’s whirlies.
“Incoming!” shouted someone as the team began scrambling for the Pave Hawk.
A shell exploded at least fifty yards short of the highway. Tossed by either a mortar or the light armored vehicle that had harassed them back at the hill, it proved more inspiration than nemesis. The team bolted for the helicopter as one; Wong caught up and leaped through the wide open door of the helo, colliding with the gunner as the helicopter pitched away. In nearly the same instant the F-16s launched their attack, pickling their 2,000-ton Mk-84 iron bombs in an impressive send-off.
Wong rolled to his back and sat up, shaking his head as the helicopter’s pilot slid into Warp drive for home.
“What’s wrong, Captain?” Golden asked. For the first time since they had met, the sergeant seemed actually concerned and almost friendly.
Obviously an aberration, thought Wong.
“The aircraft tasked to strike the S1-B or so-called Scud missiles were obviously early model F-16 without precision instruments,” Wong informed him. “Perhaps not as inappropriate as A-10A Thunderbolt IIs, but a bad match nonetheless. We can see evidence of this in the fact that they resorted to dropping Mk-84 bombs, which naturally will result in a tonnage to devastation ratio frighteningly close to that experienced in World War II.”
“What are you saying?”
“A pair of missiles at the lower, less expensive end of the Paveway series, or perhaps even the AGM-65s used by our friends in the Thunderbolt IIs, would have been the weapon of choice. Unless, of course, one belongs to the accounting branch.”
“You think they missed?”
Wong chortled. “Hardly. We saw clear evidence presented by the numerous secondary explosions.”
“So what’s the big deal?”
Wong reached into his pocket for the Iraqi’s notes without answering. People either understood efficiency or they didn’t; there was no use explaining it.
Modified for covert and special operations, the MH-60G Pave Hawk began life at Sikorsky as a plain-Jane UH-60 Blackhawk, the muscular successor to the UH-1 Huey, arguably the most successful military utility helicopter of all time. Powered by a pair of General Electric T700-GE-401 turbo shaft engines that were rated for 180 knots cruising speed, stock Blackhawks had a range of nearly 375 miles. All Pave Hawks, however, were rigged for extra internal fuel; this particular bird also carried two large 117-gallon tanks off her side, increasing not only her range but her ability to linger in the war zone. A long airborne refueling probe stuck out from her nose, making the craft look something like a medieval knight and horse rushing to battle. Mounted on each door was a .50 inch machine-gun. Pintle mounts for 7.62 mm Miniguns were set on the sliding forward cabin windows, though at the moment the posts weren’t manned. The chopper’s equipment set included FLIR or forward-looking infrared, ground mapping and weather avoidance radar, advanced INS and global positioning, and com gear. While similar to the gear in the larger Pave Lows, the avionics set was not quite as advanced or powerful, though the difference would hardly be noticeable on most missions, including this Injun-country extraction. The men manning the craft were hand-picked veterans, trained for a range of missions from rescue to covert action. Painted in a brown chocolate chip scheme somewhat similar to the troopers’ camo fatigues, the Blackhawk bore three white bands around the fuselage behind the cabin, a recognition code for coalition forces.