There were two other flatbeds.
More tanks. No, these were self-propelled guns. Anti-air, or maybe tracked howitzers.
Anti-air. Four barrels. ZSU-23s.
Dixon glanced down at his watch. The helicopter was a half-hour away.
He pushed back against the rocks as the lead elements of the procession rounded the bend. They’d be at the cave in a minute to start setting up their defenses.
No way the helo was getting in with those guns. Dixon had to leave or he’d be trapped.
Winston rasped gently. He had a smile on his face. The morphine, maybe.
I’m not leaving him, Dixon decided. Even if it means taking on the whole damn Iraqi army.
Which it might.
Several trucks in the convoy didn’t have mufflers. The roar against the sheer rocks was deafening. The noise surrounded him, shaking every part of his body.
The trucks were all around him.
And beyond, still on the highway. Still moving.
Dixon scrambled to his feet. Clutching his rifle, he went out to the slope where he could get a view of the highway. He was exposed momentarily, but it was dark. Unless someone was looking directly at him, he’d be hard to spot.
He saw the large shadow of an armored personnel carrier speeding away. Then the tank carrier. And the rest.
Dixon couldn’t help feeling enormous relief, even though he knew the heavily armed convoy was heading in the direction of the Cornfield.
CHAPTER 41
Captain Hawkins found himself leaning forward in the helicopter, as if his weight might add more momentum to its speed.
The Little Bird was cranking, but it wasn’t going fast enough. Hawkins needed it there now, at the Cornfield, his men climbing aboard, the helo taking off.
With the exception of his Air Force FAC, he knew all of the members of the Ruth team. Green, who had been killed, had worked with him just a few days before. Green had filled the medic slot for Ruth, but had also worked point and como in recent missions.
Was. Past tense. They’d get his body back when this was over. Maybe there’d be enough time to get it back now.
Hawkins turned to the pilot. Fernandez tapped his watch but said nothing.
He was counseling him to be patient. They were ahead of schedule.
The AH-6Gs were skimming about six feet over the terrain. Hawkins, who unlike the pilot wasn’t wearing the night-vision goggles, braced himself against the side of the helo and stared into the darkness. The ground below was patchy scrubland, becoming more fertile the further they went. For him that meant there were more people in the area, more things that could go wrong.
The AWACS told them bombing attack would now probably coincide with their pickup. Fernandez assured him they’d be far enough away. It would be a good diversion really, in case anyone was nearby or watching.
You planned, you trained, you tried to cover every contingency, but you couldn’t. That was part of the excitement of it, part of what made it almost fun.
Except it wasn’t fun, because it was way the hell too serious. It was a job, a work, something with severe consequences While he didn’t consider the new mission itself that difficult — like dead friends.
The helicopter flicked briefly to the right. Hawkins’s arm was so tense it felt like it was going to snap in two against the metal panel.
In-out. No sweat.
They had the mesh units in place, but his runway was still way too short. Tomorrow night, a Herc was supposed to try dropping some motorcycles by parachute. Hawkins wondered if he could somehow arrange to get a bulldozer instead. Move the culvert into place and then fill around it. Cover it with mesh. The runway’d be two thousand, three thousand feet in no time.
Could they parachute a bulldozer?
Sure they could. Goddamn combat engineers could do just about anything. Hell, one would probably ride it down.
“Shit,” said the pilot.
Hawkins looked up and saw the bright red tracers arcing ahead. A pepper of green flared from the opposite direction.
“Looks like a problem,” said the pilot. “Big fucking problem. LZ is hot.”
Aside from a string of curses, it was the last coherent thing Hawkins heard him say.
CHAPTER 42
Heavy pushed himself upright in his seat, working his neck around to loosen his muscles. The Vark weapons officer had first gotten the kink from a fall on a 5.12 climb in the Idaho Sawtooths two days before the deployment orders came through. Nothing he had tried While he didn’t consider the new mission itself that difficult While he didn’t consider the new mission itself that difficult— aspirin, massages, home-brew— had cured it. Short of sticking his neck in front of his F-111F’s radar for half an hour, he was willing to do anything, even see a chiropractor, to get permanent relief.
He hadn’t found one in Saudi Arabia yet. And the medical doctor he had found gave him lousy advice, fortunately unofficiaclass="underline" take a few weeks off.
That he wouldn’t do.
Heavy’s job entailed putting his face into a small view screen for as long as it took to designate and vaporize whatever Black Hole wanted smashed. This magnified the kink into something abominable, since inevitably it tensed every muscle in his shoulder and back. While he knew it would feel better if he relaxed, that was tough to do when the F-111 was cranking at 650 knots at two hundred feet above the ground.
They’d been doing that now for nearly ten minutes, thanks to Heavy’s detection of some over-achieving Iraqi SAM operators in their path. But such was war.
Klecko gave him a quick tap. The two men had worked side by side in the F-111’s unique cockpit for more than a year. They had long ago given up using words during the business part of a mission; communication was more like ESP. Every gesture, every word, was densely packed code. The tap just now meant half a dozen things, including “Are you okay?” and “We’re just about there.”
Heavy gave Klekco a thumb’s up and got his head back into the game.
The quartet of Paveway III laser-guided bombs beneath the F-111’s variable-geometry swept wings were controlled with the use of a revolving laser designator carried in a pod glued to the F-111’s belly. Once they found their target, Klecko would buck the Vark upwards and they’d pickle, lofting the missiles toward the NBC facility. Rolling ninety degrees, the pilot would give his weapons officer— aka “you over there” in the Vark community— a nice long look at the target. Heavy would steady the laser designator where he wanted the bombs to hit. The Paveways would fly their two-thousand pound payload of explosives right to the spot.
The tactic was called a “ramp toss,” as if the plane were running up a ramp and throwing the bomb at its target. It wasn’t necessarily the easiest way to hit something but they had practiced it extensively and used it from the first night of the war.
And despite what it did to his neck, Heavy liked it.
Of course, he also liked 5.12 climbs.
The ground erupted with tracers to their north. Heavy realized immediately that they weren’t being shot at, but it took a second for him to wrestle his eyes and full attention back in the direction of their rock quarry, just now coming into view.
He scanned carefully but quickly for his aim point, the small pipe on the side of a hill above a shallow rock face. Something inside his brain clicked, and he forgot not merely about the tracers but about his shoulder, the seat, the physical parts of the viewer, the cockpit, the world. He was in full hunter mode, sifting and searching, running his eyes deliberately against the shades of gray, searching for the one particular shadow he wanted. He was on the rock face, eyes straining for the infinitesimally small nub that would friction him up two more feet, the handhold that would get him closer to his goal.