The tale was probably apocryphal, though Mongoose had no doubt that his wingman, Captain Tommy “A-Bomb” O’Rourke, had contemplated something along those lines already.
A-Bomb— the pilot of Devil Two— was exactly that kind of guy, the prototypical wingman and a born Hog driver. But he was unlike any other pilot in the entire service. His legend extended well beyond the small confines of the 535th Attack Squadron (Provisional). A-Bomb could fly with one hand on the stick and the other wrapped around his coffee thermos, in manual reversion with no help muscling the controls from the hydraulics. He’d be listening to a Bruce Springsteen CD that played on the stereo in his specially modified flight getup, plunking Iraqis while microwaving a hot dog.
Actually, he didn’t have a microwave in his cockpit.
Yet.
The F-16 hit the runway a bit fast, wheels squealing and a wing popping up before settling down. Mongoose glanced again at his wife’s letter, staring at the return address with its carefully printed block letters. The thin blue lines of her text were folded against themselves, backwards and showing through the thin paper.
She would have used her favorite Cross pen to write the letter. It was her good luck pen.
Maybe it wasn’t anal-retentiveness about his schedule and duties that had made him put off reading this letter. Maybe it was something else, something unconscious. Bad karma or something.
Maybe he sensed bad news.
He’d devoured the others. Read them and read them and read them, until the words were burned into his brain.
But this one…
Not bad news, not a premonition, just— something weird. Like maybe it would be bad luck.
Jesus, he told himself. You’re getting like Doberman. Next thing you’ll be doing is snugging your helmet exactly twelve times before getting into the cockpit.
“Devil One?”
With a start, Mongoose realized the tower had cleared him to take off and was waiting for him to get his butt in gear.
He gave the letter a frown, then pushed it securely into his pocket.
“Sorry, honey,” he told it, as if it were really his wife. “I’ll get to it later. I promise.”
CHAPTER 2
Most combat pilots, especially ones facing a sortie sure to stretch several hours, stayed away from coffee hours before climbing up into their winged chariot. Most pilots would sooner bring an armed hand grenade into a cockpit than a loaded half-gallon thermos. Especially Warthog drivers— the plane lacked an autopilot, and wrestling with the piddlepack in flight was probably more hazardous than running past a dozen SA-6 installations, the fiercest Russian-made anti-air missiles in Iraq.
Of course, most pilots weren’t Captain Thomas “A-Bomb” O’Rourke, the commander of Devil Two.
As A-Bomb stowed his thermos back in its specially designed compartment in his flight suit, he considered the possibility of rigging some sort of pressurized device that would operate with a tube and spigot. This way he could sip coffee even pulling high g’s. Nothing like a little caffeine to counteract the effects of all that blood rushing into, or away from, your head.
Of course, he could just go ahead and use a cup, but the ground crew tended to complain about splashes on the instruments.
A-Bomb still had about a few ounces of coffee in his plastic “preflight” cup, not as much as he wanted but enough to keep his hum level up for the trip north. He sipped it delicately, like a connoisseur checking out fine wine. Truth was, this Java Roast was really Chase & Sanborn from the windy side of the vineyard, but what the hell. Sacrifices had to be made in wartime.
King Khalid Military City was a forward operating area, in theory a scratch base near the front where A-10As could reload and get back into the fray as quickly as possible. But Khalid didn’t look like a typical scratch base. Sure, there were army guys running all over the place, which gave it the homey look. There was also the requisite Saudi dust, and the change in temperature could provide a very handsome fog in the early morning, exactly the sort of thing you wanted to accent sheer chaos.
But there was also an immense dome and office building complex nearby— a pit helmet and band box— which made the place look more civilized than Charles DeGaulle Airport, in A-Bomb’s humble opinion.
Now DeGaulle would be kick-ass FOA. Those Frenchmen knew how to throw the fear of God into a pilot, the one thing they did right, as far as A-Bomb was concerned. Plus as an extra bonus you could fly under the Eiffel Tower on the way in for a landing.
The pilot gave his instruments a final check as his Hog rumbled across the tarmac. The pointy nose F-16 had finally gotten his butt down on the airstrip in one piece. He’d obviously been shot up pretty bad, and A-Bomb didn’t begrudge the Viper’s pilot for taking so long to land. He was, after all, working under a hardship— he wasn’t driving a Hog.
A-Bomb’s eyes pegged the indicators on the dials over his right knee as he made sure the twin engines were running at spec. Together, they put out over eighteen thousand pounds of thrust, enough in theory to lift fifty thousand pounds of Hog off a strip faster than he could finish a Twinkie. The plane couldn’t actually go all that fast— her posted top speed was 439 miles an hour in level flight at sea level, a mark A-Bomb had never actually made, partly because he rarely found himself at level flight at sea level. But the Hog wasn’t about speed; she was about pounding the crap out of bad guys, and that he had done, and done well. Going slow was a point of honor.
When the dials confirmed his gut feel that the power plants were pumping at shop manual spec, A-Bomb swept his eyes across the panel on the right, making sure the fuel tanks hadn’t sprung a leak. Then he glanced down at the switches for the INS navigational system, marching his glance around the rest of the cockpit in a sweep that took in the radio and weapons switches and worked over to the large, globe-like horizon indicator at the top center of the dashboard before returning to the canopy. With all instruments present and accounted for, A-Bomb shifted his one-hundred and sixty-something pounds in his seat, hunkering in the cockpit like a medieval knight getting into joust position on his horse. To his everlasting disappointment, the ACES II ejector seat could not be customized as his flight gear had been; otherwise, A-Bomb might have fit it with a gun rack and maybe a massage unit.
But then, being a Hog pilot was all about roughing it.
He reached his left hand to give his steed more throttle. The TF34 GE power plants whinnied hungrily, winding their turbofans into a snorting frenzy. The plane jumped forward, her nose sniffing the air for the smell of battle as A-Bomb nudged toward the firing line. She gave the pilot a snort and a gentle shake as she flexed her muscles and strained for the sky.
He still had the coffee cup cradled in his lap. He liked to hold out as long as possible for the last sip. There was nothing like the feeling of a perfectly-timed takeoff— one where gravity forced the final gulp of joe down your throat.
CHAPTER 3
Lieutenant William Dixon shuffled through the listing of Republican Guard units the army wanted bombed, in theory reviewing their priorities as targets. In reality he was doing nothing more than providing a fifth check on someone else’s math. One of Devil Squadron’s most promising young pilots, Dixon was currently assigned as a “floating liaisonary aide” to the FIDO, or fighter duty officer at Black Hole. It might sound semi-impressive outside of Riyadh, but it was actually a make-work job created especially for him, a velvet-barred temporary exile cum dog house.