Jim DeFelice
Target Saddam
A-BOMB’S HOG RULES
1. Never leave base without your wingmate.
2. You can never be too ugly, too low, or too slow.
3. Pay attention to the plane, not the explosion.
4. If God wanted you to fly higher than five hundred feet, he’d have given you an F-15.
5. For every action by the enemy, there is an opposite and disproportionate reaction — be sure to administer it harshly.
6. The hotter the target, the better the bang.
7. If you can’t read the sign, you’re not close enough to smoke it.
8. Never fire your cannon when taking off unless absolutely necessary.
9. Under no circumstances should you attempt to eat anything with pits during a bombing run.
PART ONE
VOLUNTEERS & MANIACS
CHAPTER 1
Lieutenant Colonel Michael “Skull” Knowlington stepped out from his office in the ramshackle trailer building known as “Hog Heaven” — headquarters for the 535th Tactical Fighter Squadron at King Fahd Royal Air Base in eastern Saudi Arabia. The cold air of the desert night stung his eyes closed; the Devil Squadron commander had to stop and rub them open.
He began to walk again, ignoring the soft glow of the moon above, pretending he didn’t hear the uneasy murmur that came from the nearby hangar area where his A-10A Thunderbolt II “Warthog” fighter-bombers were resting after a long day of bombing Iraq. A few mechanics tended to battle damage; here an engine was being overhauled, there a wing was being patched. The workers might account for some of the noise, but not all of it — the A-10A had always seemed more animal than machine, and tonight a distinct murmur rose from the parked planes, as if they were rehashing their missions in a late-night bull session. In a few short hours, the planes would be back at it, loaded with missiles and bombs and bullets, jet fuel packed into their arms and bellies. They waited now in the shadows, metal bones shrugging off fatigue, green skins still sparking with the electricity of the day. If any warplane could be said to be more than a simple machine, it was the Hog, a two-engine stubby-winged dirt mover so ugly most pilots argued she had to have a soul. Aeronautics alone would never have gotten anything that ungainly off the ground.
Knowlington ignored the Hogs. He ignored the moon. He ignored the cold. He ignored the acknowledgment of the security detail. Like the planes and their pilots, he was due a few hours in the sack. More, actually. He’d been strapping planes around his narrow frame for just about thirty years now, and if it weren’t for the fact that he was a bona fide, decorated war hero with tons of friends in high places and could be a serious SOB besides, Michael Knowlington would be retired by now. He was due a long, long rest — the kind of rest where the most important thing you did all day was check the obits to make sure you were alive, then went back to bed.
Some people wanted him to take that rest. There were reasons beyond length of service, the same reasons that kept him a lieutenant colonel when most of his peers were either long gone or wore stars on their uniforms. But Skull had never been good at resting, much less reading obituaries. He wasn’t even very good at sleeping, especially not when there was a war on, especially not when he had an enemy on his ass and gravity was pinching his face and chest from all directions.
Which was how he felt now.
Which was good.
Something flashed in the sky behind him. The muscles in his neck snapped taut but didn’t flinch. He walked on, moving stiffly through the shadows, pushing toward a large parking garage at the other end of the base. He skirted the edge of Tent City, a mass of tents and temporary housing units where many of the base personnel — and all of Devil Squadron — lived. He walked quickly and with purpose but without fear. More importantly, he walked without desire.
For Michael Knowlington, fear and desire had often walked together. Not fear of the enemy, not desire for glory. It would be wrong to say that he wasn’t afraid of dying, or that he didn’t like the honor of recognition. But from the very first day in Thailand eons ago when he had wedged himself into the cockpit of a Thud and taken off for Vietnam, neither the enemy nor glory had haunted him.
The fear he felt was much more basic. He’d been afraid of letting others down. And he had let others down: as a wingman: that time when his mate nearly got shot down by a trailing MiG that Knowlington should have handled; as a leader, when his flight got nailed by a battery he should have scoped out before the mission; as a squadron commander, when one of his boys had gotten in over his head.
The last had happened three times, once in Vietnam, once in the States, and once last week.
Fear — and its guilt — fueled a deep, unquenchable desire. It was mundane, it was ordinary, but if was very real. For much of his Air Force career, Michael Knowlington desired, thirsted, for alcohol. It had tugged at his athletic frame and dulled his reflexes; it had rounded the sharp edges of his brain. Worst of all, the thirst had fueled the fear, which in turn increased the thirst.
But it was gone now. He’d been sober for only 22 days, and had come perilously close twelve hours before to falling back. But as he walked across the darkened base, ignoring the moon, ignoring the planes, nose stinging with sweat and jet fuel, he realized he didn’t want a drink.
And that was good, though nothing to bank on.
A Hummer carrying two Air Force MPs shot out of the darkness as he finally neared his destination. As the Humvee pulled up alongside him, a sergeant leaned out and spoke in a pseudo whisper, as if raising his voice would wake some sleeping giant nearby.
“Colonel, excuse me,” he said, “but there’s a Scud alert. Sir, I have to ask you to take shelter.”
Knowlington nodded but said nothing, continuing to walk. The MP started to repeat himself, but his words were drowned out by a loud shriek in the distance.
Skull kept walking. The ground rumbled. It was an explosion, but nothing that threatened him. He knew that from experience.
During his first tour in Vietnam, Knowlington had manned a machine-gun post with a frightened E-5 whose specialty was developing recon photos. Guerrillas had attacked a small base Skull was visiting on a liaison mission; he and the sergeant had worked through ten belts of ammo while ducking at least five grenade attacks. During his second tour in Vietnam, Skull had spent two nights at the Marine base in DaNang when it came under rocket attack — as sure a glimpse into the bowels of hell as ever offered a live human being. Distant explosions didn’t impress him; he kept his pace and ignored the comments from the Hummer, which vanished back into the darkness.
The two Delta troopers standing guard at the entrance to the parking garage wore the blank expressions of stone statues as he approached. Though both sergeants instantly recognized the Air Force officer, they challenged him as fiercely as if he were an Iraqi infiltrator. For the humble parking garage was the Saudi home of the Special Operations Command; its officers were running a variety of top secret operations north of the border. And while Lieutenant Colonel Michael Knowlington was one of the handful of men permitted access to the “Bat Cave” inside, even General Schwartzkopf himself would have had to withstand the ritual humiliation of passing the Delta boys’ sentry post.
Not that Schwartzkopf would have done so as quietly — nor as quickly — as Skull. But then, Skull tended to hold the D boys in higher esteem, and the feeling was mutual.