Dixon’s pilot’s eyes took a second to adjust to the glass: the silver and green blurs turned into a pair of tractor-trailers. He caught a Mercedes emblem on the front of the leading vehicle as it took the long curve toward them.
“Sorry,” he said. “They’re not missiles.”
Winston frowned and took the binoculars back. The trucks might be carrying military supplies or they might not. In any event, there was no sense telling the Hogs to hit them.
“Bus or something coming the other way,” said Turk. His dark mahogany cheeks began glowing cherry red. “Hey now, here we are. That, my friends, is a Ural 375 flatbed, built by Ivan just for our obnoxious friend. That’s a crane, I do believe, and here we go, here we, here we go. You tell me lieutenant, what’s under those tarps? Huh?”
Dixon took Turk’s binoculars and quickly focused on the road. The lead truck was a common Warsaw-pact export, as ubiquitous as a U.S. M35 6x6. On its back was a long crane, the type that could be used to erect a derrick or even a modular house in the States. But the two tractors following behind it indicated the crane might have a much more sinister purpose: the Zil-157 long haulers were known Scud ferries, with large tarps curled around suspicious shapes at the back of each truck.
“Aren’t they going in the wrong direction?” asked Dixon. “They’re heading East.”
“Don’t worry about what the intel people told us,” said Winston. “Just get your guys on the horn. Now. Uh, sir.”
Dixon was already scrambling down the hill to do just that.
CHAPTER 15
“Devil Flight this is Ground Hog. Are you up?”
He’d been expecting to hear Dixon eventually, but even so Doberman actually turned and looked out the cockpit canopy, as if BJ were gunning a Hog next to him.
“We’re here,” Doberman told him.
“Captain Glenon. Doberman? Is that you? Geez, how the heck are you?”
“I’m fine,” said Doberman. There was no need for an elaborate authentication procedure— only Dixon would say “heck. The kid was way behind in the mandatory cursing unit of Hog training.
“Yo, War Hero,” said A-Bomb. “How the fuck are you? Blow up any helicopters today?”
“Listen, Devil Flight,” snapped Dixon, suddenly all business, “we have three targets for you. Proceeding east on the highway, uh, two, three miles now from Point Super Zed-Three. You copy?”
Doberman glanced down at the grid map on his knee, which overlaid the Special Forces checkpoints against the Iraqi terrain. Zed-Three was a point along the highway. They were, by his quick calculations, exactly 8.75 miles southwest of it.
“I have the position,” said Doberman. He swung the Hog back toward the north, calculating an intercept with the vehicles, which he figured would be moving along at 50 miles an hour, or thereabouts.
Doberman spotted the highway about a minute later. As he began to close, he saw a vehicle. But the truck was moving in the wrong direction. His eyes strained past the bulletproof persiplex glass of the canopy, working the grains of sand into lines and ants.
Nothing except for the truck going the wrong way. Zed-three was ahead to the northeast, about two o’clock. He pushed on, the plane level at 8,550 feet. It was somewhat high for IDing moving targets, but their instructions were to fly no lower than 8,000 feet, unless absolutely necessary, which would keep them safe from all but the most persistent antiair guns. Doberman had a clear view and figured once he spotted a likely candidate for Dixon’s trucks they could move lower.
But at the moment, he couldn’t see anything. He double-checked the map to make sure he had the right highway, not that there were many choices. Then he asked A-Bomb what he was seeing.
“Not even camel turds.”
“Let’s take it this way another forty-five seconds, then crank back,” Doberman told him.
“Forty-five seconds? Why not forty-four? Or forty-three.”
He was just about to tell A-Bomb to fuck off when the AWACS controller shouted a warning over the radio.
“Devil Flight, snap ninety south!”
Doberman jerked to comply, putting the Hog almost literally onto a right-angle. As he juiced the throttle, the AWACS operator filled in the reason for the emergency evasive maneuver: a pair of MiGs had just taken off from an airbase to their north.
With pedals to the metal, the Russian-made interceptors could reach the Hogs in under two minutes. And splash them soon thereafter.
A flight of Eagle interceptors scrambled to fry the MiGs. Doberman’s instinct was to punch the Hog into the ground fuzz at twenty feet, then say screw the MiGs and get back to Scud hunting. But this far inside enemy territory, that wasn’t a particularly wise thing to do. Instead, he and A-Bomb had to settle for a wide turn a good thirty miles south of the action.
By then the MiGs had disappeared from the AWACS radar— probably by landing back at the base they had started from, though the controller wasn’t immediately sure. Doberman angled the Hog back toward the highway, but he knew that by now the trucks would be long gone. Worse, the Hogs were down to ten minutes of loiter time, thanks to all the maneuvering.
“What’s going on up there?” Dixon asked over the ground radio just after Doberman and A-Bomb had crossed over the road without, of course, spotting the Scuds.
Tersely, Doberman explained that they had been shunted off the trail by the AWACS. And that they were almost bingo fuel.
“Did you pass the location on to the AWACS?” BJ asked.
“Fuck no,” said Doberman. “We fucking couldn’t find them.”
“Aw shit.”
“Yeah, copy,” said Doberman. “Shit-damn fucking hell in a whore house.”
“Bad news, Dog Man. I’m bingo,” said A-Bomb. “Bingo” meant he had used up the fuel allocated for loitering. He now had only enough left to get home, with a modest amount left over for emergencies.
“Yeah,” muttered Doberman. The two planes had to stay together and in any event, he was pretty low himself. He blew a deep sigh from his mouth, cursed some more, then finally reoriented the Hog for the long, dreary trip home. He was so pissed he didn’t bother answering when A-Bomb joked that Special Ops obviously agreed with Dixon, since the lieutenant had finally used a four-letter word on the radio.
CHAPTER 16
“Son of a shit. We could have blown the goddamn things up ourselves,” said Winston. He looked at Dixon as if Dixon had been the one flying the planes. “How the hell could they have lost it?”
“I don’t know that they ever saw it.”
“Well fuck. They’re in goddamn airplanes, right? How the hell hard can it be?”
The truth was, it wasn’t easy picking out moving targets from the altitudes the brass had the Hogs flying. The planes weren’t carrying super-enhanced videos, or extra-perceptive radars, or anything beyond Mark-One standard-issue eyeballs. The MiGs had been the real problem. Since the Hogs were sitting ducks against any interceptor, their only defense was to run away, and even that hardly guaranteed safety.
But it was tough to explain all that to someone on the ground— especially when the ground was in central Iraq.
“What the fuck is the sense of our being here if they’re not going to squirt the damn things when we point them out?” Winston insisted.
“They’ll get them,” said Dixon. “Give them a chance.”