He hadn’t necessarily screwed up the MiG shot. On the contrary— he’d followed procedure to the iota, hesitating only because of the friendlies in the vicinity. He’d locked and launched within the Sparrow’s optimum target range, then jinked his plane and launched countermeasures. Everything had been precisely by the book.
But it nagged at him. He should have had nailed the damn thing. Anything less was failure.
He acknowledged as his wingmate checked in with two more radar contacts. They ID’d the planes as F-111s en route to Baghdad.
“All quiet on the Western Front,” added Johnny.
“Affirmative,” he told his wingmate, expecting that the formal tone would discourage him from chitchat.
It did. The two Eagles continued their silent patrol of the skies, trekking along their racetrack at a leisurely four hundred and fifty nautical miles an hour. Fuel flowed steadily through their thirsty engines. The video screens and dashboard lights filled the cockpit with a soft glow that faded from red to green to yellow. Hack worked methodically, fighting off fatigue, struggling to keep his focus as they completed their next-to-last circuit and headed north for one last run.
Somewhere far below, triple-A flared toward the heavens in a steady, thick stream of tracers. The gunfire was so furious that the line looked unbroken— a fairly sobering thought, given that typically only one in four of the rounds fired would be a sparkler.
“Coming to our turn in zero-one minutes,” Hack told his wingmate. They were in tactical separation, two miles abreast, with the wingman stacked above him about a thousand feet. The formation allowed each man to check the other’s “six” or rear, and provided clearly defined hunting spheres for their missiles. Offsetting each other’s altitude made it more difficult for an on-coming fighter pilot to spot both planes with one sweep of his eyes.
But the abreast formation did make turns a bit more difficult, especially in the dark; they had to be closely coordinated or the formation would be broken. The planes moved like parts in an old-fashioned clock. Hack called the turn and they went at it textbook style, Two pulling three gs as it started left, One easing around with a tight turn and roll-out that picked up his wingmate precisely abeam, two miles apart, still stacked but heading south.
Twenty-five thousand feet, four hundred and sixty nautical miles an hour. F-111s passing ahead of them, twenty miles.
Hack got another contact below eight thousand feet about fifty miles to the east heading west. He tickled the identifier.
A-10A. The Warthogs were all over the place today.
“What do you figure that A-10 is doing this far north?” Hack asked his wingmate.
“Got me,” said Johnny. “Maybe he’s lost.”
Hack debated asking the AWACS if it really was an A-10. Before he could decide, his radar kicked out three more low-level contacts, all moving relatively slow further southwest, most likely helos. He began to query them when the AWACS broke in with an alert.
“Two boogies coming off the deck,” screeched the controller. “No three, four— damn, they’re sending the whole air force after you.”
CHAPTER 47
Rosen, peering over Fernandez’s shoulder, had just spotted Fort Apache in the distance when the AWACS called out the MiG warning. She sat back in the seat, stretching the headset cord to the max as the pilot leaned over and punched the controls for the radio.
“We’ll monitor the interceptors,” Fernandez explained. “We don’t want them to see us at Apache but we have to make the pickup no matter what. We don’t have enough fuel to screw around. If we stay low they may miss us.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. They had to get their guys out.
“There’s our other Little Bird— you see it? He’s just leaving the strip.”
Fernandez needed both hands to control the helicopter, so he merely leaned his head forward. Rosen made out a low shadow ahead, darting across the left quarter of the windscreen. It was Apache Air One, the other Little Bird. There would now be only two men left at the Fort— Captain Hawkins and a gunner.
One of the fighter pilots squawked something about different targets and called a bearing number. It sounded to Rosen as if the Eagles were having difficulty locating the enemy planes, but she had never heard live air combat before. The voices had a clipped excitement to them, a high-pitch that came through the static.
Fort Apache with its fatally short runway lay a few hundred yards ahead in the dust. Fernandez slowed the helicopter as he crossed over the concrete, looking to land near the ruins that had served as the base’s command post.
Rosen thought of Lieutenant Dixon as she whipped off the com set and threw it into the front of the helo. His broken body lay somewhere to the north, unburied for all she knew, abandoned. She felt a cold blast of air from the open door, pulled her arms around her and walled off the part of her mind where his memory lived, sealing it away permanently as a dangerous keepsake.
Parallel to the ruins, Fernandez tilted the back end of the craft up to spin around. Suddenly the control panel went dark and the AH-6 slammed against the ground.
“Shit!” said Fernandez, slamming his hand on the top of the panel as if the electrical short were there.
“It’s the harness, it’s the harness,” yelled Rosen, jumping out of the craft. She pulled herself up to examine the panel before realizing she had left her flashlight on the ground back at Sand Box when she’d slipped. She had to lean back and get Fernandez’s light.
But her jury-rigged harness had held. What the hell?
It was difficult to see beyond the wires. She began to slide her hands along the harness but found them blocked by a jagged piece of metal. The metal moved when she moved her hand— it was part of the infrared jammer, which had come loose from the back of the motor assembly cover.
Not good.
Rosen slid her fingers around, gingerly touching the unit. The rotors were still revolving over her head; it was hard to shine the light and hold on at the same time. She used her fingers to feel for the problem. They slid across wires and a narrow tube and metal. Finally, her pinkie slipped into an empty hole. Her forefinger found another and then a third.
“Turn everything off!” she yelped. “Off! Off!”
“It’s off! It’s dead! It’s dead!” Fernandez yelled back.
Rosen draped herself across the topside of the helo, craned between the rotor blades. Exactly one bolt, no thicker than a Bic pen, held the entire AN/ALQ-144A and its ceramic radiator in place. One of its flanges had severed several wires as the helicopter tipped to land.
That was lucky. Had it flown off into the rotors, they would have gone straight down as fast as gravity could take them.
Rosen slipped down to the side of the helicopter and held the wire harness assembly aside. She pushed the jammer housing away about six inches before the bolt caught tight and refused to budge.
“Fuck you, Saddam!” she screamed, throwing her weight and fury headlong at the assembly, pushing it toward the side. The bolt hung on stubbornly, then sprang loose, sending her rolling head first across the cement. Parts of the ALQ-144 spewed around her as she fell.
Oblivious to what was happening, Hawkins and the other Delta trooper had been trotting nonchalantly toward the helicopter from a sandbagged position north of the landing strip, seemingly reluctant to leave. They saw Rosen fall and ran to her, yanking her up so fast that the blood that wasn’t pouring from her scraped-up face rushed to her feet.