Why? So he could send more good kids to their deaths?
No. So he could keep his head clear, so he made the right decisions and kept the casualties down. So people who needed him could look at him and nod. So they could trust him, not have to worry about his decisions.
Fuck that naive bullshit.
Skull brought the glass to his mouth. There was a sweet sting on his lips.
No. Not for this. Not for this.
Slowly, carefully, he set the drink back on the bar and walked out quietly, leaving his money and the full glass, his first glass in twenty-two days, behind.
CHAPTER 7
Doberman closed his hand around the control stick and narrowed his focus, staring through the heads-up display at the empty blue sky before him. His threat indicator showed clearly that the enemy missile was gunning for him. His electronic countermeasures— supplied by an AN/ALQ-119 ECM pod carried on the Hog’s right wing— were busting their transistors in an attempt to confuse the missile’s Fong Song F radar and guidance system. Ordinarily, Doberman would jink and jive to increase the odds of escaping, but if he did that, he’d run out of gas about thirty seconds after the missiles passed.
He bent his head forward and back, breathing slowly and willing the jammer to do its thing.
Above him, a Wild Weasel swept in to kill the installation that had launched the missile. A backseat whizzo in an ancient Phantom leaned against the cockpit’s iron wall as his powerful radar got a lock on the enemy trailers; he punched the trigger and kicked off an AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation (HARM) missile toward the Iraqi installation.
One of the SA-2s fell away. But the other kept coming for him. He saw it, a dark toothpick growing in the bottom left corner of his canopy mirror. It was close now, smelling him. Doberman felt the muscles in his shoulder tighten, snapping so taut he felt his throat close. He could see the damn thing coming for him, getting bigger and bigger.
“All right,” he said to himself. “Better to run out of gas than get whacked by a telephone poll.”
He leaned hard on the stick and juiced the throttle, whacking out electronic chaff at the same time. The metallic tinsel unfolded in the air, a shadow to help confuse whatever was still guiding the missile; make it think the Hog was still straight and level.
Maybe that worked. Maybe the HARM missile took out the ground radar guidance system and managed to disrupt the SA-2 before it was terminal. Maybe one of the electronic warfare planes flying further south hit just the right chord of confusion at just the right moment. Or maybe Doberman’s incredible luck continued to hold.
Whatever.
The Hog slid down toward the earth, eating g’s as she stomped toward the yellow sand. The SA-2 climbed past it, passing through the tinsel, flying for nearly a thousand more feet before her nose started to wobble. The wobble turned into a shudder, and the warhead exploded.
Two hundred and eighty-seven pounds of high explosive makes a fair amount of boom, but Doberman was well out of range by the time the missile detonated. When he realized he’d escaped, he pulled the plane back, swooping back for his course while he checked his fuel and position on the INS. Then he checked the numbers against his chart.
If his math was right, he had less than thirty seconds to the border and another five to the tanker.
And sixty-two seconds of fuel beyond that.
Doberman started to laugh uncontrollably.
“I’m going to make it,” he said, as if it were a joke. He tapped his finger on his pad. “I’m going to make it. I can’t believe it.”
He laughed and he laughed, and the only thing that stopped him was a radio call from Bluebeard, the tanker, which was on an intercept dead ahead.
“Devil One, I see you but I’m going to need you to come up to twelve angels,” said the tanker pilot.
“Nah, we’ll meet halfway,” said Doberman.
If the tanker pilot thought he was out of his mind— which he had every right to— he didn’t say. Instead, he threw out his landing gear to help him slow down and put the big Boeing into a steep bank, diving and turning at the same time. No aerobatics pilot ever performed so tricky a maneuver, or one half so beautiful to the audience.
“I appreciate that,” said Doberman, kissing his throttle to inch up his speed and catch the tanker. He tried to relax his shoulders, relax everything but his eyes, which were hard bullets homing in on the director lights beneath the tanker that told him whether he was going to make the connection or not. He had an extreme angle but there wasn’t time for a second try. He pushed the Hog a bit too far to the left, came back heavy with his rudder, eyes narrowed to pinpoints.
The Hog’s nose nailed the nozzle with a satisfying thud. Fuel flowed nearly instantaneously.
Doberman glanced at his watch and then at his pad.
According to the cheat sheet, he’d run out of fuel thirty-two seconds ago.
CHAPTER 8
For a desert, the ground was damn hard. Stinkin’ Iraqis couldn’t even get sand right, for crying out loud.
A-Bomb cursed for the millionth time, pushing himself forward on his elbows and knees, eyes pinned on the Iraqi holed up in the rocks a few yards from the tanker truck. The man seemed to have an endless supply of bullets and didn’t mind spraying them around, though fortunately he was firing toward the hill, not A-Bomb. The Iraqi was so interested in Coors— or whatever else he thought he was shooting at— that he hadn’t bothered to even glance in A-Bomb’s direction.
The pilot was no more than a hundred yards from the Iraqi, but no matter what you did to a .45 it was still a .45; a hundred yards with a pistol on a target range was a guess-your-weight shot, and this was hardly a target range. A-Bomb waited for the Iraqi to begin firing again; as soon as he did, A-Bomb threw himself forward, collapsing as the final round stopped echoing against the low hills. That brought him nearly ten yards closer.
At this rate, Saddam would be on work-release from a federal pen before A-Bomb got close enough to nail the bastard.
The funny thing was, Coors hadn’t fired, at least not that A-Bomb had heard. That could mean that the Iraqi was just dinking shadows in the hills while the Delta trooper flanked him.
It could also mean he was lying on the slope bleeding to death.
A-Bomb waited for the Iraqi to fire again. The burst was shorter this time; the pilot managed only five yards before his belly flop.
This much up and down was going to wear his flightsuit out. Then he’d be forced into Spec Ops jammies. Okay up here maybe, but what would they say back in Devil Squadron’s readyroom? They’d haul him right over to the Depot and make him buy everybody in the squadron a round of drinks.
While he waited for the Iraqi to fire again, A-Bomb decided the liability to his ego, let alone wallet, didn’t permit any more fooling around. As soon as the soldier started shooting, he got up and began walking toward him, this time not bothering to stop or even crouch as the last round of Russian-made ammo echoed against the shallow hills.
He got maybe forty yards before he heard the muffled, not quite delicate sound of the sergeant’s modified MP-5. The Iraqi immediately rose from the rocks and returned fire.
Clear shot. Too far, but clear.
A-Bomb squeezed off a round, cursing as he did. He was fifty yards away.
The Iraqi jerked around, then fell back, struck in the side.