Doberman nearly fell over from the stench of the simmering concoction wafting across the desert. He shook his head.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said A-Bomb. “Should have gone with the soup course first, right?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.” Doberman shook his head. “You ready?”
“I was born ready.”
Doberman turned to inspect his airplane. Rosen followed. One think he had to give her— these planes couldn’t have been in better shape than if they’d just rolled out of the factory.
“Listen, Captain, don’t forget, you have to drop from thirty-five hundred feet so the chutes can fully deploy and the landing is soft. All right?”
Rosen was about the only crew member in the squadron— maybe the only person in the Air Force— who physically looked up at the five-foot-four Doberman. Maybe it was just the angle of her face that made her look less severe than she’d ever seemed before.
For just a second.
“I’ll give it a shot,” he told her.
Rosen smiled. “Kick butt, Captain.”
She chucked him on the shoulder harder than a linebacker.
Forty-five minutes worth of butt-grinding Hog driving later, Doberman checked his map against the INS and his watch. They were thirty seconds off, close enough for anyone but him. He edged his power forward infinitesimally, recalculating and adjusting until he had the thing nailed.
Wong had sketched the Hogs a route to the fuel drop points that was considerably more direct than the path the helicopters were taking. Even so, the timetable was tight and the course was not the easiest; they still had one known Iraqi position to overfly.
The Air Force had once planned to upgrade the A-10A with things like ground-avoidance radar and night-seeing equipment— reasonably necessary items, given the Hog’s primary mission to work with ground troops. But the A-10 was always treated like a forlorn stepchild at budget time; the pointy nose fast jets got all the fancy gear, and the Hogs had to make do with leftovers, hand-me-downs, and wishful thinking.
Still, even something as basic as an autopilot would have been nice, Doberman thought. For one thing, it would make it easier to pee, which he suddenly had to do.
No way he was braving the piddlepack until after the drop.
They went over the Iraqi position without drawing any fire; without, in fact, a hint that there was anything besides sand beneath their wings. Doberman adjusted his course as he planned the next way marker— he had it tight this time, and he edged the plane’s nose below five thousand feet, angled perfectly to hit 3,500 feet in exactly two minutes and twenty seconds at the drop point.
He checked the Maverick screen. As a primitive night-vision device, it was far from perfect, but at least he could make out the road Wong had marked on his map just south of the target.
Perfect. Doberman keyed his mike to make sure A-Bomb hadn’t fallen asleep.
In the next second, the sky in front of him erupted orange-green, the flak so thick it looked like a psychedelic waterfall.
CHAPTER 26
They dug a shallow grave at the edge of the minefield and buried Green, making sure to get a good read from the geo-positioner so they could retrieve the body when the mission was over.
The men looked to Dixon to say something, or at least he thought they did. He stepped up and asked them to bow their heads. Standing solemnly at the head of the medic’s grave, he remembered his mother’s funeral, and a passage flew into his head: a reading from Job about God’s justification for mankind’s trials:
That was as far as the reading had gone at the funeral. Dixon’s voice fell silent. But after a few seconds, Staff Sergeant Staffa Turk, demolitions expert and tail gunner, filled out the verse:
Winston’s back had been peppered with shrapnel and bits of Green. The bleeding was difficult to gauge; Dixon worried that some of the wounds had hit his spine and the nerves around it. They made the sergeant as comfortable as they could, hiding him in a crevice along the rock ledge that gave them a reasonably good view of the road, the minefield, and the next hill, though not the rest of the quarry. They could fight from here, if they had to.
Each trooper carried a syringe of morphine. They debated whether to give it to Winston or not. He was moaning and certainly in some pain, but if they used it they’d have nothing else to give him. And they couldn’t be sure how long it would be before they could be evacuated.
Once again, the men looked to Dixon to decide. It seemed to him that the best thing to do was call Fort Apache, the forward base that was supposed to be their support link, and see what could be arranged. Once they knew helos were on the way, they could give him the shot.
“If he starts screaming, then we absolutely have to knock him out,” said Leteri.
“Definitely,” agreed Dixon.
The radio had been hit by something when the mine exploded. Leteri set up the antenna, sure that he could get it to work somehow. The other members of the fire team began searching the quarry, trying to figure out why the mines were there. Dixon, meanwhile, looked after the wounded man, trying to make him as comfortable as possible.
There wasn’t much he could do, except wad a shirt as a pillow and cover him with a blanket. Dixon felt as helpless as his last days in ICU, watching his mother fade into the night. Weird thoughts had gone through his head then; one moment he’d see himself yanking out the tubes, another moment his eyes would flood with tears and he’d conjure wild promises and deals with God to keep her alive.
“Radio’s pretty screwed, Lieutenant,” said Leteri. “It’s the power, I think. The battery got whacked. I’ll keep trying.”
“Makes sense,” said Dixon.
“How’s Winston?”
Dixon shrugged. He wanted to be objective— he wasn’t a doctor and he had no idea what the extent of the wounds were. The sergeant’s pulse was strong. But there were at least three big wounds along his spine.
Turk appeared at the ridge before Dixon could find a way to diplomatically say he was afraid the sergeant might be paralyzed.
“Hey Lieutenant, you want to come look at this right away,” he said. “I think I found what those mines are all about.”
CHAPTER 27
Doberman whacked the Hog hard left as the fingers of fire seemed to reach for his windshield. He twisted the plane back, feeling her buck because of the unfamiliar tanks tied to her wings. He lost his balance, felt his left wing coming around and got down on his rudder pedals as well as his ailerons, muscling the plane stable with his nose pointed toward the ground. He started to recover, then realized the altimeter was winding down faster than he thought. His engineer’s brain spat out a series of equations with bad variables; he ignored them and pulled back on the stick, leveling off at two thousand feet, headed in the wrong direction and damn-shit confused.