“Into the helicopter,” she said, trying to shake them off. “Come on, come on. There are a bunch of Iraqi airplanes headed this way. We got to get out of here.”
“Are you okay, Sergeant?” Hawkins asked.
“No,” she said, grabbing the flashlight from the ground. She pulled the roll of black electrical tape from her pocket as she threw herself back onto the helicopter. The wires were all color-coded but she had no play; she had to yank the tape off her harness to get some. She pulled at the tape and then twisted the pairs together as quickly as she could, hoping her tape would hold.
She leaned down and yelled for Fernandez to see if he had power.
He did.
She had to add more tape to the front of the wire strands to make sure they’d stay put, now that they were exposed. The wind from the rotors threw sand into her eyes, but Rosen was operating in another universe now, one beyond the throb in her head and the screaming fire of her battered face. She punched the remaining shards of the jammer assembly base with her fist, bending or clearing away everything she could. Then she found a plastic wire clip flopping loose and managed to secure it against an exposed pin near the wires. Not pretty, certainly not permanent, but good enough.
“Go! Go! Go!” she yelped, flinging herself back into the back cabin feet first. “Why the hell aren’t you going!”
“We are going,” shouted Fernandez, emphasizing his point by slamming the helo forward, full-throttle.
CHAPTER 48
Doberman acknowledged the AWACS snap vector with a grumble, putting the Hog into the directed turn at nearly a right angle.
Not that he resented the E-3 Sentry and its powerful airborne radar. What really irked him was the fact that he had to climb to fifteen thousand feet, per standing orders. Granted, the altitude kept him safe from the triple-A nasties, but it was a piss-poor place to be with a flock of MiGs coming for you. Besides, the Hog didn’t like flying this high, and neither did he.
Fifty feet above ground level, dark be damned. That was where he belonged.
Doberman got his Hog on the new course east, then dialed into the intercept, listening as the interceptors began to break down the approaching enemy flight. Unlike most Iraqi scrambles, this one seemed intent on actually doing something— the bandits, tentatively identified now as MiG-29s, weren’t running away.
Doberman tacked their courses on the blackboard of his mind. They were north and west of him, heading in the general direction of Fort Apache.
His RWR screamed something, and the AWACS controller yelped another warning. A ground-control radar for a high altitude SA-2 had turned itself on directly ahead on the AWACS directed course.
Doberman cursed and threw his plane into a fresh maneuver, beaming the radar by temporarily heading north. The radar went off as quickly as it had come on. He judged that he was already outside the range of the missiles, but there was no sense taking chances; he took the plane three miles north before pulling around to the southwest.
As he did, the AWACS announced it had discovered a MiG-21 Fishbed flying under cover of the larger MiG-29s. The plotted course had it headed straight for him, and now the controller rattled Doberman’s helmet with a warning that it was juicing its afterburners.
That was the last straw. He kicked the Hog over into a full dive, gunning down to where the air was thick and the ground effects heavy. If the Iraqi kept coming, good. Doberman had snapped his last vector tonight.
Let the bastard come and get him. They’d slug it out, mud fighter to mud fighter— if the Iraqi had the balls to take on a Hog.
CHAPTER 49
This time, Hack wasn’t going to miss. He twisted his Eagle northward for the intercept, ignoring the pinch and pull of gravity as he snapped onto the vector supplied by the AWACS. His radar screen laid out the bandits as if peering down from above. The hostile MiGs were at the very top, triangles with pointers coming off their noses to show their headings. The screen showed friendlies as circles with similar pointers, along with way markers for reference.
The radio exploded with a cacophony of calls and commands, a chaotic wail that had confused him during the earlier encounter. But this time Hack was prepared. He and his wingman keyed into a clear frequency they had surveyed earlier.
“Two bandits, ten o’clock, your zone,” said Johnny, his voice crisp.
“Out of range. Two more coming behind them,” Hack said.
“Something low.”
There were now six triangles very close together on the screen. Two veered to the left and temporarily disappeared, possibly obscured by the reflected ground clutter. The other four Iraqi planes altered course, vectoring toward the flight of F-111s.
Hack rechecked the IDs, making sure he had the unfriendlies.
No answer. The lead contact was thirty miles away.
“First two are mine,” he told Johnny. The radar and its weapons control computer had already locked them up. They were tagged on the HUD; he could launch and take them out at will. “You got the others?”
“Negative, negative. I’m having some trouble here.”
“Johnny?”
“Uh, okay, I have it. I— shit! I’m spiked.”
The lead MiG had just turned its radar on his wingmate. Time to pull the trigger.
“Fox One, Fox One! I’m on number two. Firing. Fox One!”
Hack yelled so loud his wingmate probably could have heard him without a radio. He didn’t bother jinking or trying to beam the enemy radars— if his wingmate couldn’t target the other interceptors, he was going to have to close and take them out with his Sidewinders.
The four enemy planes— still out of visual range, but closing quickly— began moving wildly on his radar screen. One of the missiles seemed to hit the lead plane, he thought— but now everything was moving so quickly, Hack couldn’t afford to divide his attention long enough to make sure he’d gotten the kill. Something beamed him dead ahead. He thumbed into auto-guns mode, then realized he’d dropped to sixteen thousand feet and was still pointing downward. He began to pull back on the stick when a dark shape shot in front of him, less than a mile away.
His stomach flared as he waited for the glare of a missile or cannon tracer. He pushed the Eagle over on her wing, desperate to duck away. He got a warning, then a second warning— sounds and buzzes and lights. Once more his head was swimming with sweat, gravity, and panic.
Gravity pushed against his chest. Hack realized the shadow had been one of the F-111s, not a MiG. He cursed himself, rolled level, tried to raise his wingmate on the radio. The small circle representing Piranha Two floated across the HUD, but Hack had lost track of where he was.
Fear twinged at the corner of his stomach.
Not this time, he told himself. Clear your head. Do your best.
Something exploded about three hundred yards in front of his right wing. Fire flew through the air.
The pipper had a triangle boxed at ten o’clock. He leaned on his trigger, getting off a quick shot but missing as the enemy wagged away. He saw the red circle growing oblong and started to follow, thumbing a Sidewinder on line. But he was too slow and had misjudged the enemy’s turn in the dark. For a second he was in deep shit— inside and ahead of the MiG, the worst place to be. But somehow, knowing exactly where he was cleared his head. Somehow, his stomach went hard and his eyes became focused. He gave the big Eagle more thrust than a Saturn V heading for the moon. The plane shot forward, twisting out of danger as he spit out chaff and flares.