“Good shooting,” said Doberman as A-Bomb reached altitude. “You leave anything for me?”
“Tried to,” said A-Bomb. “See now, you could shoot like this if you had one of the medals.”
“What medal?”
“Tinman’s cross.”
“You still pushing that?”
“Told him I would.”
“I can shoot better than you with my eyes closed.”
“Oh man— you mean we’re supposed to fly with them open?”
After dodging the triple-A, Doberman emptied his CUs on the two clumps of vehicles at the far end of the party. A-Bomb took his plane in an arc around the pluming smoke. Nothing was moving.
“Everything’s good and broken,” he told Doberman.
“I think that Rover or whatever it was stayed on the highway,” he told him.
“Nah.”
“Let’s find out.”
“Got ya,” said A-Bomb, reaching into his customized flight-suit to pull out a celebratory Twizzler. Nothing like red licorice to top off a good bomb run.
Doberman led him back along the road. They spotted a bus and some sort of small truck, but not the Land Rover. Then Cougar cut in.
“Break ninety degrees,” the AWACS controller told them. “Bogies coming off A-1. Break.”
A-Bomb listened to Doberman’s curse as the jets snapped onto the new coordinates south. They were nearly at bingo anyway. The two Iraqis were quickly ID’d as a pair of F-1 Mirages and just as promptly chased back to base by F-15s. By the time they disappeared from the tracking screens, Doberman had told the AWACS crew that they were heading back to Al Jouf for the night.
His mood reflective as he headed for home, A-Bomb treated himself to a second Twizzler, then clicked his CD changer to dish up Guns & Roses.
CHAPTER 19
The commandos waited until dusk to cross the road. They chose a spot near a short run of rock outcroppings, which would give them a staging area and some protection in case of traffic. The last fifteen minutes were the worst— Dixon’s eyes were weighted with the fatigue of slogging the rucksack and communications gear on his back, not to mention the long day and night before. Two or three times he felt his mind wander off into the null space of pre-sleep. If it hadn’t been so cold, he might have fallen completely asleep and not woken up for at least a week.
Two vehicles passed during that time: a Mercedes panel truck, probably though not necessarily civilian, and a small car which bore a Red Cross.
Dixon wondered about the Red Cross car, thinking that maybe it might be carrying a prisoner. At least one allied pilot had gone down over Iraq during the last two days.
For a fleeting moment he wondered if he should give the order to stop it, and then whether the troopers would have obeyed it.
It was their job to find Scud transports and launchers, nothing else. They had already let a score of other military vehicles go.
But rescuing a pilot was different. That was worth blowing their mission for, wasn’t it?
Shit yeah. He could explain it to them— he’d have to, since they still thought of him as an outsider.
But it was too late now. The vehicle was by them and gone. And besides, he was just an observer, not the boss.
In the dull blueness of the fading day, the countryside looked vaguely familiar, almost American, a desert scrubland just beyond farmland. Look carefully and the illusion evaporated. At any moment an Iraqi troop truck, or tanks, or helicopters could materialize and kill them. They had a ton of ammo, but eventually they would be outgunned— they were, as Jake Green had said three times during the last hour, in Saddam’s backyard.
It would be better, infinitely better, to die fighting than to be captured, Dixon decided. If captured, he would surely be tortured and killed anyway. Better to go quickly.
Besides, if they didn’t kill him, it would be worse. He’d be used for propaganda. That was his real fear. To be tortured to the point where he would agree to anything they said— that was the worst horror.
In survival school, they told pilots it was no disgrace to go along if you had to. Bend so you didn’t break. The people who counted back home would realize that you were being coerced. Your mission was survival, not playing hero.
But Dixon didn’t entirely accept that. The shame of being a prisoner, of being helpless— it would be more than he could stand.
He’d learned that lesson flying in combat the first time. Bitterly. He remembered how failure felt.
“Lieutenant? You coming?”
Dixon jumped as Leteri tapped him. He followed across the open ground to the roadway. After two strides he felt the weight of his two backpacks balance him; by the fourth he felt as if he could run forever, adrenaline surging. He gripped his MP-5 with both hands, trotting with it before him as if it set out a force field of protection.
“You’re looking like a Goddamn Delta trooper now, BJ,” mocked Winston as he approached the team leader’s position beyond the roadway.
Dixon was too tired to tell if he was mocking him. He slid down on his knee and waited as the rest of the patrol crossed and scouted ahead.
“Okay,” said Winston after his scouts reported back. “Here’s what I’m thinking. We got the old quarry a mile ahead. If those trucks stopped anywhere around here, it was there.”
“I’ll go with who’s ever scouting it,” said Dixon.
“Not so fast.”
“I got to be close to call a bomber in. I can use this, don’t worry,” said Dixon, holding out his gun.
“Relax. We’re staying together.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“It’s not you I’m worried about,” said Winston. “I don’t want to lose the radio.”
“Yeah, I thought you sounded a little sentimental.”
The comeback surprised Dixon as much as Winston. It was the sort of thing he would have expected A-Bomb or Doberman to say, something that would have come out of the mouth of a guy who’d seen hell a few hundred times and learned to laugh at it.
Winston laughed lightly, shaking his head. “Fuckin’ Hog pilots. You guys think you’re going to win the war all by yourselves, don’t you?”
“If we fucking have to,” said Dixon.
“Yeah, well, you’re not going to. We’re moving forward as a team. Stay close to Leteri, OK?” Winston gave him a chuck and moved out.
Fucking? Had he said fucking? Dixon pulled himself to his feet, moving ahead on sheer amazement alone.
CHAPTER 20
No question about it: Wong was definitely allergic to something in the desert. He sneezed into his handkerchief, at the same time muffling a curse that the half-dozen officers assembled around the table pretended not to hear.
It had to be an allergy. Sand maybe. Or the air.
Then again, it could be Major Wilson who insisted on punctuating his briefing on the Fort Apache mission with historical notes on the formation of Delta Force and commando operations in general. Wong wouldn’t have minded this so much if the major didn’t get every third fact wrong.
Captain Wong had actually served with Delta Force twice, once as an advisor on Russian weaponry and, briefly, as something called an “attached adjunctive administrative officer.” This was a cover for an assignment to handle a clandestine drop into the northern Vietnamese jungles, a CIA-inspired mission where he went along to assess the wreckage of what was supposed to be a Chinese super weapon — and which turned out, as Wong knew it would, to be merely the latest version of the F-7, a Chinese copy of the MiG-21. The base model was an antiquated deathtrap Wong wouldn’t allow even his worst enemy to fly. His inspection showed that the Chinese had succeeded in making it even more hazardous.