Not there.
Patience.
Not there.
He was shocked to see the miniature outline of two men in his viewer.
A hallucination? His neck spiked stiff, pulling every muscle from his ears to his toes into spasm.
Relax.
His eyes climbed the rock, scaling it slowly, looking for the pipe, his pipe.
Patience. He would find it. It was just a matter of working the screen, feeling the rock.
Patience.
CHAPTER 43
Even as he cursed, the helo pilot began firing his 50-caliber machine guns into the Iraqi position. In the confusion and the dark, Hawkins couldn’t immediately tell what they were facing, but it was obvious there was serious firepower down there. He tried patching into the AWACS, hoping to get some support. But the chopper was too low to get the controller directly, and when the E-3 Sentry AWACS operator failed to acknowledge his second try, Hawkins tried his ground team instead.
They didn’t answer either. He could tell from their red tracers where they were, however; he told Fernandez and the pilot behind them to roll up the flank of the Iraqis, drawing their attention at least temporarily away.
The pilots were a step ahead of him, sweeping in with a coordinated rocket attack. Hawkin’s chopper stuttered with the force of the 70 mm rockets gushing from the tubes on both stubby wings; he felt himself buck forward and then wrench violently to the side. The Little Bird’s machine guns opened up again, a quick burst that perforated a black shadow 250 yards away. The shadow turned into the outline of an APC, which morphed into red flame.
Someone was hailing him on the radio but in the confusion Hawkins couldn’t hear precisely what they were saying. He pointed to the spot he wanted the chopper to fly to, and felt the aircraft comply immediately, as if it and not the pilot were responding to his command.
A new line of tracers erupted on his right, arcing away; these were thicker than the others, colored green— the enemy. Hawkins felt the AH-6G twist to get a better aim on this new threat, saw the line of bullets beginning to turn as they did.
“Get that son of a bitch!” he shouted, and in the next second something happened to the front of the helicopter; it seemed as if it were the outside of a giant tea kettle suddenly bursting with steam. Hawkins looked at the pilot, saw that he was bent over his control stick, and then felt the ground ram against the skis beneath his legs.
CHAPTER 44
The first flickers of the firefight looked like a fireworks display, errant sparkles shooting off at odd angles.
Then it turned into green and orange roman candles, rockets flashing, white streaks igniting everywhere.
Then a piece of hell opened up, volcanoes spitting fireballs into the air.
Dixon watched it all as if IT were a movie. This seemed different than real combat. Combat was flying a Hog and shacking a target, g’s hitting you in the face as you pulled up and whacked yourself the hell out of there. That was real. You felt that. Your head swam with blood and sweat. You struggled to keep your eyes cold and hard and focused. You tried to hit your buttons on time. It screamed in your face and it was real.
This was far away and surreal. He could feel the ground shake with the explosions, but it didn’t feel like war.
His friends, Leteri, Turk, the others, were in the middle of it. They were shooting, maybe dying. But it was so unreal it didn’t make sense.
Except for this: The gunfight probably meant the helicopters wouldn’t be coming for him.
He looked at his watch. The bomber would have taken off by now. He wasn’t sure what they would send. Most likely it would be an F-111 or a Nighthawk, something with fat, laser-guided weapons. Most likely, they’d aim for the pipe he’d spotted.
Winston coughed. The sergeant wasn’t smiling any more. His expression was bland and pasty. Dixon leaned over and checked for a pulse. He didn’t find it at first; frantically, he pushed his thumb around the bone at the inside of the sergeant’s wrist. Finally, he got a beat.
Not strong, but there.
Odds were, Winston was bleeding internally. Back was all shot up; probably he was already paralyzed. He was coughing. Dixon knew from his mother that wasn’t a good sign. Probably meant his lungs were filling up with fluid.
He’d die soon; certainly, if they couldn’t evac him.
Dixon cursed himself for not demanding an immediate evac the second they got out of the minefield. They should have been out of here hours ago.
Maybe not.
Shit, what did he want? They were closer to Baghdad than Saudi Arabia.
Winston knew that when he volunteered for the mission.
So did he.
Not really. He hadn’t thought it out. He hadn’t figured that shooting his mouth off about skydiving would lead him to find a hidden Iraqi bunker in a rock quarry, divide him from his team, and get them ambushed.
He hadn’t thought that staying with Winston would mean he’d be stranded. He might have known it was a possibility, but he hadn’t really played it out, actually picturing it happening.
He had to now. Because without the helicopters, he and Winston were a hell of a long way from anyplace good. Whatever happened next was going to depend a hell of a lot on what he thought out. And more importantly, on what he did.
CHAPTER 45
Hawkins coughed ferociously, trying to dislodge something from his throat. It was big and felt like a Brillo pad, scratching tender flesh. He coughed and coughed, arms drained of feeling, head spinning.
It flew out. Moisture flooded onto his face and chin. He looked down, saw he had spat up blood.
But he could breathe again. He pushed himself up, then remembered he was strapped in the helicopter.
But he wasn’t. He was free. The helicopter was a few feet away. He’d stumbled out somehow, just after it crash landed. He was sitting on the ground. Hawkins stood up, reaching to his belt for his pistol, then felt himself yanked back to the ground.
A quick burst of rifle fire ragged the air above him.
“Hang tight, Captain.”
The voice was familiar. Leteri or Ziza, one of the New Yorkers. He twisted to see who it was. Instead, he was distracted by the white light of a shell hitting in the distance.
“Assholes don’t know quite where we are.”
It was Mo Ziza. He quickly laid out the situation. The team had been surrounded by the Iraqis, who acted like they knew the commandos were there but couldn’t locate them in the dark. The Iraqis had mounted the hilltop overlooking the road, posting about a dozen soldiers there while the rest of the heavy stuff stayed between the plateau and the road. Rather than letting the helicopters walk into an ambush, the troopers had opened fire as soon as they heard the helos approaching; they’d managed to wipe out the bastards on the high ground even before the rest of the Iraqis began to return fire.
“We disabled one of the APCs before you got here but then they got lucky,” said Ziza. “Joe Leteri and Bobby Jackson are dead. Turk’s still holding them off up there.”