Technical Sergeant Rebecca Ann Rosen slid back in the hard seat of the McDonald Douglas AH-6G, letting her submachine gun fall between her legs. She had nailed the son of a bitch on the ridge who’d been firing at them; she saw the bastard fall backwards, saw the ripple of blood appear on his chest even as the helicopter had jerked away.
But she’d seen something else, something more gruesome and bitter. She’d seen Dixon’s body face-down in the rocks, dead.
She had no way of knowing that it was truly Dixon, except that she did. The man was wearing the brown Special Ops camo, unlike the Iraqis she’d seen. And besides, she knew it.
She picked up the submachine gun and folded it against her arms, resisting the temptation to smash out the front windshield of the helicopter in frustration, resisting the urge to scream.
“I think I can get us back to Fort Apache,” said the pilot next to her.
“I know you can,” she said softly, clutching the gun to her chest.
CHAPTER 81
“We got one chance,” A-Bomb told him. “And that’s Apache. We’re never ever making the border, let alone Al Jouf. We’ll be walking fifty miles, at least.”
Doberman didn’t argue. He’d already plotted the course himself.
“Got your six,” said A-Bomb when he told him he was changing their heading.
From a purely technical, specs-on-paper point of view, landing on the short strip at Fort Apache wasn’t an impossible proposition. The A-10As had been designed to operate from scratch bases close to the front lines. Apache was only slightly beyond what the plane’s designers had in mind when they started processing the blueprints, and within what a majority of them would have considered an acceptable margin of error, given the circumstances. The planes were essentially empty. The light load meant they had less momentum to slow down, and would less runway than normal. They had a good head wind, not the stiffest, but definitely another positive factor. And these two pilots were, without question, two of the finest Hog drivers in the world, able to wring things from the plane that challenged if not defied the laws of aeronautics.
But there was always a gap between theory and reality, a huge space inhabited by human beings and metal— a place where things went wrong as well as right, where the fact that you had been flying for tons more time than you were ever supposed to became more important than any theoretical wing-loading equation. It was a place where even the bullets that had missed the plane mattered, where the torque of the last screw in the final slot might be life or death.
And it was a place of luck, whether Doberman wanted to admit it or not, finally spotting the tiny squint of dirt in his windshield. It was smaller than the arms of the tiny silver cross on his sleeve.
“Damn short,” said A-Bomb.
“What’d you expect?”
“Hey, I got it, no problem,” replied A-Bomb. “I’m just saying it’s short, you know what I’m talking about?”
The Special Ops troops were standing by at the far end of the field, off the side in a small area that from here looked tinier than the main ring of a flea circus. They weren’t there to applaud. Because the landing strip was so short and narrow, the Hogs would have to land one at a time, the first plane hustling out of the way to let the second plane in.
Since their maneuvers at the battle scene had left Doberman with marginally more fuel than A-Bomb, he told him to land first.
“See you on the ground,” said A-Bomb, working into the first leg of the landing approach.
Doberman lifted his left hand and shook it, relieving some of the muscle stress.
At least that’s what he intended. It didn’t seem to do anything.
A-Bomb’s wheels hit at the very edge of the runway, the Hog nosing into a textbook-perfect, short-field landing. He ended with a good hundred feet to spare at the end.
Doberman practically whistled in admiration, trucking into position for his own landing.
If A-Bomb could do it, so could he.
Doberman was tired as hell, but the day was far from over. Taking off was going to be another test, assuming the Special Ops people found some jet fuel for them
Hogs could probably run on moonshine.
Doberman forced his mind back to the job at hand, slotting into a final approach as he set his flaps and prepared to duplicate A-Bomb’s perfect touchdown.
Except that the outer decelerons didn’t deploy.
He knew instantly he had a problem, tried quickly to reset, felt his heartbeat go from overwrought to ballistic. The plane fluttered and threatened to turn into a spinning football. He had hydraulics, had everything, but for some reason the decelerons stayed flat on the wing. His altitude bled off and speed dropped, though not nearly enough as he fought to control the approach.
No way was he landing without either smashing in a heap, or rolling off into the immense ditch at the not-so-far end of the cement. Doberman pulled off, his mind and hands whipping through the emergency-procedures checklist.
Nothing worked. The Hog’s decelerons— actually split ailerons located at the far end of each wing outside the two-segment flaps— were critical for short-field landings. The bottom part slide down to supplement the flaps while the upper portion popped up like air brakes. Besides increasing the wing area and helping the plane slow down, the decelerons helped control a certain innate tendency of the plane to roll.
Basically, they allowed the pilot to land on a dime without becoming a piece of lawn sculpture. Without them set right, Doberman needed a lot more runway than he had, and even then it might not be pretty.
Caul my ass, he thought, as he tried everything he could think of without result. I got the stinking goddamn crappiest luck of fucking Job in the whole damn Air Force.
Doberman worked into a new approach, pressured the stick, and pumped his rudder, trying to jink the damn things loose. But nada. He glanced at his fuel gauges. He was beyond dry.
Have to climb and bail. God, he’d break every bone in his body, not to mention the plane.
Shit!
So what would Tinman’s cross have done? Made the decelerons work? Put a tiger in his gas tank. It’d be as useless as his gun.
The gun.
As he began to pull up out of his approach, and idea occurred to him that was so wild, he knew not only that he had to try it, but that it would absolutely, positively work.
He put the nose back toward the runway and cleared his head, moving around the Hog cockpit as calmly as an insurance executive cleaning up his desk for the weekend. He was in a perfect position to land— damn decelerons still not deceleroning— speed still high, but otherwise right on the money. The plane nudged a bit, but he had her tight in his grip and she wasn’t going anywhere he didn’t want her to.
Doberman stared out the windshield. He could have been the insurance man, waiting at the twentieth floor of his high-rise, killing time at the window as he waited for the elevator to arrive. The edge of the runway came up big. His thumb danced over the elevator button.
Or rather, over the trigger of his gun.
Bing-bang-bam.
The Gatling’s heavy burst shook the Hog violently, and three things happened:
The Hog slowed down, as Doberman had hoped.
The Hog nearly dropped straight down onto the desert, which he hadn’t.
The Hog’s decelerons suddenly popped into action, helping him regain enough control to pull to a slightly cockeyed, burn-out-the-brakes, blow-the-tires, screech-to-a-smoky-halt stop a good fifty feet before the end of the strip.