He turned back toward the command bunker. There was just enough time for a cup of Earl Grey tea before the scheduled call to his colonel at Al Jouf.
CHAPTER 13
Doberman glanced through the clear Perspex bubble overhead, scanning the light blue sky. Somewhere above him, a pair of F-15C Eagles flew like guardian angels, swift police dogs ready to nail any Iraqi who dared take flight. Just to the southeast, the back-seater in a Phantom F-4 Wild Weasel scanned his radar warning screen, ready to point a homing missile into the dish of any air defense system foolish enough to turn itself on. To the north, a package of attack planes and electronic jammers streaked toward the outskirts of Baghdad, loaded down with bombs and defensive weapons. Far to the south, an Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS plane coordinated the entire air war, scanning for threats and potential threats, moving planes to meet them like a chess champion throttling an opponent.
And yet, Doberman felt alone in the cockpit, accompanied only by A-Bomb flying now a half-mile back. Both Hogs were at 17,110 feet. The ride up from Al Jouf had been free and easy, but it had been long, and they still had nine and a half minutes to go before they flew in range of the Special Ops unit they were tasked to assist.
If you were waiting for a stagecoach in the middle of Dodge City, nine and a half minutes wasn’t that long. If you were riding into Dodge with all kinds of bad guys eying you from the roadside, it was an eternity.
While not completely defenseless, the planes were hardly bullet or missile proof. The AlQ-119 radar-jamming pod on its right wing was a near-revolutionary dual mode jammer, when it was first introduced back in the Stone Ages. While it still provided protection against the older elements of Saddam’s multi-layer air defense, it was hardly an invincible shield. The A-10A’s more robust radar warning receiver or RWR could find and track more than a dozen threatening radars in several bands, telling the pilot that he was staring in his own radar show. But that was hardly a guarantee that he wouldn’t be shot down.
Among Saddam’s varied arsenal, Soviet-made SA-6’s and German Rolands were particularly effective weapons, posing more than a theoretical threat even to the fast movers. While the Devils had been briefed on the known positions of the SAM batteries throughout Iraq, both the SA-6— NATO code-named “Gainful”— and the Roland sat on mobile launchers that could pretty much be moved at will.
A pair of Sidewinders sat in a double-rail on Doberman’s left wing. Excellent heat-seeking weapons, they were meant for close-in air-to-air defense. They’d be handy if an enemy plane managed to get by the Eagles, but any MiG that could do that was a damned serious threat. It would have probably already launched longer-range weapons from far outside the Sidewinder’s scope.
But maybe nobody even knew they were here. The A-10As were too high to be heard from the ground. Most Iraqi radar operators who had survived the first day of the air war had realized the best way to stay alive was to leave their knobs in the off position. And besides, the desert and scrubland below the Hog’s wings was mostly empty, and hardly worth protecting.
Doberman checked his position on the INS, worked himself slowly through the routine checks of his instruments. He was like a Western marshal, buckling his gun belt before the big showdown, checking each bullet in his gun carefully, spinning the revolver more for luck than to make sure it was working properly.
Luck.
Doberman flushed his brain of trivia, concentrating on his mission. Once on station, they’d take it down closer to the ground and look for Scuds. The missile carriers were said to move along the targeted highway in mid- to late-afternoon, en route to their launching spots. The commandos and Dixon would spot them; the A-10s would blow them up.
There were only so many highways the Scud trucks could use. That was one curve of probability. Time was another. Even assuming the intel was good, their small time on target because of fuel considerations meant there was a bit of luck involved.
Luck again.
I am an engineer, Doberman told himself. Planes do not fly on luck, bridges are not built on luck, Scud carriers are not splashed on luck.
He checked his instruments and steadied his hand around the stick, precisely on course and on time.
CHAPTER 14
Dixon woke up with a kink in his neck the size of Iowa. Both hands were numb. He had to take the worst leak of his life. And as he got up, he felt something hard and heavy push him back down.
“Truck.”
Leteri’s hoarse voice brought Dixon back to reality. He rolled over, scooped his gun from the ground, and began following Leteri up the hill on his hands and knees to a dug out position just below the crest of the hill.
“What do we have?” he whispered as Leteri peered over the top of the ridge they were using as a lookout post. “Should I call in the planes?”
The sergeant shook his head, holding up his finger to tell Dixon to wait. Turk and Winston lay against the top of the ridge, watching the road through his binoculars. Dixon heard the distant sound of a truck approaching. The sound got louder, then began to fade.
“Just a pickup,” said Winston, slipping down. He gave Dixon his binoculars.
The Steiner 7x40’s brought the roadway into sharp relief, making it somehow seem more real. The yellow-gray haze of the distance melted into crisp shades of brown and blue. The moving finger with its trail of dust sharpened into a white pickup.
A Chevy, as a matter of fact. About ten years old.
Winston’s scowl deepened. “They may be checking the roadway, scouting it to see if it’s safe,” he said finally.
“This deep in Iraq?” asked Dixon.
The sergeant shrugged. “I would. Then again, it could be another civilian truck. We’ve seen three since you fell asleep.”
The sergeant resumed scanning in the direction the pickup had come from. Dixon followed Leteri back down the hill to a small, dug-out position at the foot of the slope.
“Latrine’s anywhere in that direction,” said Leteri, pointing a few yards beyond.
“You have ESP?”
“Yeah— ESPP, extra sensory pee perception.”
Dixon took care of business, then returned to check out the communications system, which Leteri had put together while he was sleeping. It consisted of two parts. One was the unit itself, contained in a rucksack; the handset and controls lay at the top. The other part was a small, folding radar dish that looked something like the folding circular clothesline Dixon’s mom used to use in her backyard. The sergeant had oriented the dish so that its signal could be picked up with a minimum of static by an orbiting satellite. With the push of a button, they could talk with Apache or the air support units or a command center in a Riyadh bunker, and from there, literally to the world. The short-burst, coded transmissions were nearly impossible for anything but the most sophisticated equipment to intercept.
“Here we go,” said Winston above. He chortled a bit, as if he had laid a bet that was now paying off. “Yeah, here we go.”
Dixon climbed back to the top of the ridge.
“It’s a truck, but I don’t think it’s a Scud carrier,” said Turk.
“There’s another truck right behind it,” said Winston.
Dixon could hear the engines now. Two tiny ants approached, winding their way across the distant highway.
“Just trucks, Sarge,” said Turk.
“Here, Lieutenant, you take a look,” said Winston, handing him the binoculars. “You got pilot’s eyes, right?”