To say nothing of pissed. He wondered where in hell the flak guns had come from, and felt his bladder backing up into his kidneys.
“Hey,” said A-Bomb.
“Hey back.”
“You hit?”
“Nah.” Doberman gave the instrument panel a quick once over just to be sure.
A-Bomb read him his position, but Doberman had already figured out where his wingman would be. He brought his plane back into a slow bank north, sliding around in an arc that kept the flak— stir firing intermittently— well off his right wing. He was still low at 3,500 feet, but since he had to get low to make the drop, decided to keep it there.
“You got screwed up?” asked A-Bomb.
“Fucking fuel tanks threw me off.”
“Still got them?”
“Shit, A-Bomb, what do you think?”
“Man, you’re testy. You know what it is, you didn’t have anything to eat. Blood sugar’s all whacked out. You got to take better care of yourself. When you eat’s as important as what you eat. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“What the fuck was shooting at me? I didn’t get a radar warning or anything.”
“I couldn’t see it with the Mavericks, but it looked like something dug in near the road. Shot real high. Got to be a bunch of ZSU-57s, don’t you think? Would have taken a lucky shot to nail you.”
“Lucky for who?”
“Good point. Want to go back and waste ‘em?”
“Hold on.”
Doberman checked the positions out on the map. Wong’s course had the helicopter coming in from the north, which meant the battery was well out of range. Besides, the helos would be almost at the refuel point by now. The Hogs were better off saving the guns for the return flight, if they even bothered.
The guns stroked up again. There had to be several of them, and A-Bomb was probably right about them being ZSU-57s or something similar— their tracers seemed to extend fairly high. The guns were usually mounted on vehicles like ZSU-23s; they might be attached to a convoy or positioned to defend something intel hadn’t yet picked up. In any event, they were firing blind and almost straight up. Most likely they had heard either the Hogs in the distance and gotten spooked.
Firing blind in the night was stupid, since it gave your position away and was unlikely to bring any results, but Doberman could understand the ground crews’ frustration. You could only sit and get pounded for so long before you lashed out.
“Looks like your friend Wong missed some pretty serious guns,” said Doberman as he plotted a new course to the drop point.
“Hey, I didn’t say Brainiac was perfect. Besides, those old suckers, shit, it would have taken a really lucky shot to get you. One in a hundred. You know what I’m talking about?”
“All right.” He gave A-Bomb the new course and got back into gear. He was back in control; even his bladder eased up a little.
“You could go Italian, you know.”
“What are you talking about, A-Bomb?”
“Pasta is very high in you carbohydrates,” said the wingman. “Instant energy. And versatile. You got your marinara, your Abruzzi, your Alfredo…”
“Just watch my back.”
“Six is as clean as spaghetti right out of the pot,” said A-Bomb.
CHAPTER 28
A-Bomb eased his Hog back, giving Doberman plenty of room to make his drop cleanly. While he had a huge amount of trust in the ground crew’s ability to improvise, even he was curious about whether this fudge would really work.
It had better. He had the choppers coming on now four miles away, so low they could be trucks.
His Maverick viewfinder was selected at what passed for wide-field magnification: six degrees. The ground battery was well off to the rear, and no longer firing; they’d either run out of bullets or hit themselves with their falling shells.
The Hogs “target” was a set of coordinates that translated into a hunk of sand about a half-mile beyond an impressive collection of bushes; the brush was probably considered an oasis, though A-Bomb was hardly an expert on that sort of thing. The only oasis he was familiar with featured topless dancers. The gray shadows of the bushes looked like an undulating test bar in his screen as he banked to follow Doberman on his approach.
One of the test bars morphed into a mountain.
Then mountain changed into bodies.
A couple of dozen bodies. All running west right into the drop zone.
“Hold off, hold off,” A-Bomb shouted into his radio, alerting Doberman. “Shit. Cisco freeze. Cisco Freeze,” he added, quickly switching to the frequency the helicopters were monitoring. The code meant for the helicopters to stop immediately.
A-Bomb thumbed the Maverick’s screen down to a narrow angle, which magnified the scene. He waited for the viewer to flash up an entire herd of Iraqi infantry.
That or some very strange bushes.
“Devil Two, this is One? What’s the problem?” asked Doberman.
“Don’t you see them?”
“See what?”
“Hang tight.” A-Bomb banked his plane, temporarily losing his angle. The Maverick screen showed nothing but empty desert.
A malfunction?
Hell no. The screen filled as he came back around, but now A-Bomb saw that the bodies streaming westward weren’t Iraqi troops or weirdly mobile fauna.
They were camels. At least two dozen of them.
He might have laughed, except it wasn’t funny. The animals were still moving toward the area where the tanks were supposed to be dropped.
Doberman cursed in his headset. Obviously he had seen them, too.
A-Bomb made out a man’s shadow, and what might be a tent. Some Bedouins were putting up for the night at the oasis. In fact, they were the oasis.
Jeez, you’d think they lived here or something. And wasn’t there a leash law? The damn camels were trampling all around the target area.
“All right, I’m going to set up a course toward Cisco,” said Doberman. “Let them improvise.”
“I got a better idea,” said A-Bomb, pushing the Hog down toward the dirt.
The big warplane hesitated a moment, then realized what her pilot was up to. She snorted, and answered A-Bomb’s whoop with one of her own. A salvo of flares, ordinarily used to defeat heat-seeking missiles, burst from her wingtips.
Startled, the camels turned their heads as one and stared at the meteor that had appeared from nowhere.
Then they ran like hell, their masters in hot pursuit.
CHAPTER 29
“Yee-fucking-haw!” shouted A-Bomb over the radio. He had the camels on the run.
Doberman slipped the Hog onto the proper coordinates for the tank drop. His thumbs danced back and forth — bing-bang-bam. He pickled and felt the plane jump beneath him, glad to be free of the unfamiliar tanks.
Doberman banked and pushed forward in his seat, anxious to see how he had done. But it was far too dark outside and at the moment there was nothing but a bleary blankness in the Maverick’s screen.
He keyed his mike and told the helicopters they could proceed in zero-one minutes; in the same instant he saw the outline of a small parachute in the corner of the TVM, then another and finally a third, all holding up the same fat canister of fuel.