CHAPTER 4
Captain Lars Warren took a deep breath — his fifth in perhaps the last twenty seconds — and fixed his glare on the runway in the distance. It was his second approach to King Fahd; he’d aborted his first landing attempt when he realized he was going too fast to land safely.
That was an excuse. He’d aborted it because he’d panicked. And it was happening again. Even worse than before.
His pinkie began to quiver. Lars glanced at his hands on the steering yoke of the big four-engine plane. His fingers’ light-brown flesh had turned violet from the pressure he was exerting. Lars pushed his right elbow further into his stomach, trying to keep the tremor from extending to the rest of his fingers. It was terrible flying posture — it was terrible posture, period — but he wasn’t thinking about that; all he was trying to do was land his Hercules C-130 in one piece.
The thing was, he’d landed Herks maybe a thousand times before. He’d landed this very plane at least twenty times, including twice on this long, sturdy, and accommodating strip. It wasn’t difficult — the high-winged transport was an extremely stable and generally forgiving aircraft. In many respects it was actually easier to fly than the 737 he had been flying three days ago when his Air National Guard Unit was ordered into the Gulf to spell other units.
Lars was a good pilot. In fact, he was better than good; he’d been up for an assignment as a training supervisor at the airline before the Gulf War complicated things. He had had flown 707s and Dash-8s and C-141s and a KC-10 and so many C-130s he could do it all in his sleep.
But he was having trouble landing. He was having trouble flying. And everyone on the flight deck knew it.
“Gear set,” said his copilot. His tone was gentle, but part of Warren bristled as if the man had cursed him for being a failure and a coward.
The rest of him trembled, just afraid.
Afraid of what?
Afraid of flying.
Hell no. No way. Flying was walking, with a checklist. Shit. He could fly in his sleep.
Afraid of being shot down?
He was flying a transport, for christsake. He was behind the lines — he always flew behind the lines. Way, way, way behind the lines. No one was going to shoot at him. He’d been here for two whole days and last night’s random Scud attack was the closest he’d come to anything remotely warlike.
But that had unnerved him. He’d been preparing to take off when the alert came in.
The warhead had landed on the other side of the country, but it had shaken him up. Still, when the all-clear came they went ahead with the mission, a routine supply hop. He’d done okay, though little things had bothered him. He’d forgotten to ask the copilot for the crosswind correction — not a big deal. He’d bounced a little on takeoff to come back — something he never, ever did, but no big deal.
Now though, this was a big deal. Lars felt his legs turn to water as the edge of the runway loomed ahead. Hot air rose in waves from the concrete. In just a few seconds it would be buffeting his wings.
If he let it.
Shit. All he had to do was skim in. Everything was perfect. Let the plane land.
Give it to his copilot.
No!
His copilot was talking to him. The tower was talking to him. A plane — a loaded Warthog — was on the runway, on the runway.
In the way.
What the hell?
Abort.
Abort!
“Captain?”
Lars snapped his head toward his copilot. As he did, he realized the A-10A wasn’t moving on the runway. It was well off to the side in the maintenance area, being prepared for a morning mission.
Nothing was in his way. His brain had done a mind flip, constructing bogies to spook him.
God, help me, he thought to himself. I’m losing it.
A pain shot through his chest, striking so hard he lost his breath mid-gulp.
Heart attack.
It’s just panic, he told himself.
“Captain?”
“Yeah, I’m landing,” Warren said, not caring how ludicrous it sounded. He pushed his elbows in and closed his eyes — actually closed his eyes — as the wheels skipped and screeched but finally rolled smooth against the tarmac. For a second his entire world turned black; for a second his addled mind completely lost its grip, furling and swirling in a darkness filled with bullets and missiles, Scuds and MiGs and SAMs. Then slowly, very, very slowly, the fog lifted. He was able to open his eyes; he realized he had already begun applying brakes. His copilot was busy on his side of the console; they had landed in one piece.
“No offense, Lars,” said the copilot as they found their way toward the hangar where they were assigned, “but, uh, you okay?”
Warren bit back the impulse to ask if the man — a young, white captain whom he didn’t know very well — was going to report him.
What would he report? That he came in too fast? That he seemed to hesitate at the last second?
That he closed his eyes?
That Lars Warren was petrified, twenty-three years after his first solo. That Lars Warren, who as a fourteen-year-old had single-handedly broken up an armed bank robbery by tackling a robber, had suddenly become a coward at forty-three. All because of a random Scud attack that had been thwarted by Patriot missiles miles and miles away.
Or because he’d always been a coward, deep down.
Lars said nothing, blowing air out through his clenched teeth and nodding instead.
CHAPTER 5
Doberman scanned the ripples in the sand, mechanically moving his eyes back and forth across the terrain as he pushed Devil One toward the trouble spot just over the Saudi border. Intelligence and the mission planners divided the desert into neat kill boxes, subdividing Iraq into a precise checkerboard that could be measured to the meter. But the nice clean lines got wavy as soon as you pushed your plane low enough to actually see anything. Distances blurred, coordinates began to jumble. For all the high-tech paraphernalia, war in the desert still came down to eyeballs and pilot sense. Glenon had a healthy helping of both — but he wasn’t Superman, and he felt himself starting to get pissed as he stared down at the area where the American troops should have been. The pilot had a notoriously short fuse, but even he knew he was in a particularly bad mood all of a sudden. Maybe it was because he hadn’t had that much sleep; maybe he was angry with himself for getting tongue tied with Rosen.
Or maybe it was what A-Bomb would call PBS — Pre-Blowup-Syndrome.
The ladder on the HUD altimeter display notched steadily downward as Doberman hunted for the slightest sign of the conflict the AWACS had sent them to contain. He kicked below three thousand feet without any sign of the unit that had called for air support — without, in fact, seeing anything but yellowish blurs of sand. Finally, a thick scar edged against the earth in the right quadrant of his windshield. Doberman nudged his stick, steadying the A-10 toward what he thought was the thick trench that marked the Saudi-Iraqi border for much of its length. But the manmade trench was actually a British army position two miles back from the border and not precisely parallel to it; when he realized his mistake he cursed over the open mike.
“My eyes are screwing me this morning,” he told A-Bomb.
“Sun’s wicked. I got dust bunnies, northwest, uh, off your nose at eleven o’clock, no, let’s call it five degrees on the compass. Could be our friends.”
A-Bomb was behind him by a mile and at least two thousand feet higher. But sure enough, when Doberman looked in the proper direction he found a small bubble of dust.