“No, I got you,” said A-Bomb.
“We’re going over that spot near the buildings with a fine tooth comb.”
“Listen, I didn’t mean that I thought you wouldn’t warn me if someone was shooting at me. I just had a hunch, like I felt something coming off the ground for me.”
Knowlington didn’t bother answering.
CHAPTER 46
Mongoose landed arm first and felt a bone in his forearm snap.
His head blanked. His whole body moved away from him. Dirt pushed into his nose and mouth. He bit the inside of his lip, felt the dizziness come, and rolled.
The pilot remembered the flares tucked inside his flight suit. He got to his knees and reached for the bandoleer. Halfway there the pain overwhelmed him and his right arm fell limp; he fell forward onto his head, scraping against the dirt. Bent into the earth, resting on his shoulder, he reached for the flares with his good hand, tearing at his suit to retrieve them.
There was shouting and moaning and crying behind him. The A-10s had pulled off, probably to line up for another pass. They’d see the flare if he fired.
The gas tank on one of the trucks exploded. He felt the heat on his back, felt himself pitched to the side. He rolled, loosing the bandoleer with the flares before he stopped against something large and soft.
It was one of the Iraqi soldiers. Reaching to push himself away Mongoose felt the man’s uniform. It was wet; he’d been so scared he’d peed himself.
Shuffling himself to his knees Mongoose, realized the man was dead. It wasn’t piss, it was blood. His left hand was smeared with it.
He turned away, looking for the bandoleer. The flare the Hogs had launched was still descending but its light was becoming fitful. One or two men moved on the far side of the road. He heard crying. His own arm hurt so bad he couldn’t be entirely sure the moans weren’t his own.
He saw the flares and pushed his body down for them as if he were a snake, not a man, curling in the cold fog and fine dirt. He made an effort to keep his right hand close to his body and immobile, but firing the flares was more important. He grappled with the holder and the small gun, had to use his bad arm, and might have screamed with the pain, but his head was swimming now with adrenaline. He managed somehow to push the jackhammering throb to one side. He rolled back on his haunches into a seated position, cradling the launcher on the ground, and fired.
Nothing happened.
He started to move his head forward to take a look when the rocket hissed upward, streaking toward the sky like a July 4th firework. Shocked, he jerked backward, dropped the launcher, and fell onto his back as the rocket climbed quickly to nearly six hundred feet, where its small warhead ignited with a red burst.
Did they see it? The LUU-2 was still burning, and now there were other flares just north of them, decoys probably; whoever was flying the Hogs was worried about ground missiles.
They hadn’t seen him. He would have to fire another. Mongoose scooped up the bandoleer and forced it into his right hand. His fingers had numbed but he managed to hold it steady enough to remove another of the small, cylindrical metal cartridges. There were like mini-thermoses, filled not with water but life-giving fire.
“No,” said a voice behind him.
Mongoose turned and saw the Iraqi captain, his pistol aimed at his face. The man’s uniform was singed and tattered; fog and smoke swirled around him. But his mouth and eyes looked calm and determined despite the chaos.
“If you try to fire another flare, Major, I will kill you. Put the launcher down.”
The jets had moved off. Their engine noise was gone; they’d missed him.
“Put the launcher down. Now, Major. I will not tell you again.”
Slowly, carefully, Mongoose complied.
CHAPTER 47
Colonel Knowlington pushed the stick hard, felt the world drop away. His brain split into two halves. One contained the fuzzy TVM image, and the other the blur of dark earth in front of the Warthog’s nose. He wanted to be low so Mongoose would be sure to hear them. He wanted to make this fast, just in case someone other than his pilot was down there.
He also wanted not to plow into the earth.
But he worked the roll and dive well, pushing the plane over, then around, and finally into a majestic swoop as pretty as poetry, pulling out and starting to recover just as the altimeter touched two hundred feet. He rocked across the path he’d mapped above as perfectly as if he were drawing it on paper.
The TVM was blank. The dirt here was cold and dead, without so much as an old log on the surface. He pushed around, checked his altitude, checked the screen, looked outside. Nothing.
The Warthog loved it down here. She felt like a horse finally released from the paddock.
Most likely, A-Bomb hadn’t meant the flares as a vote of no-confidence.
Knowlington nudged the Hog into another turn. He made four more low-level circuits, scanning the entire area as carefully as a miner working an old stream.
The TVM stayed blank. He couldn’t get the shadow back, not even a hint of one.
“See anything?” he asked his wingman.
“Negative. I was hoping for a strobe, but nada.”
“I’m going to do it again.”
“Gotcha.”
He got his airspeed down even further for the second low-level pass, dropping down toward a hundred knots, slower than a car on a highway. Plane didn’t seem to mind; she seemed capable of just about stopping in midair.
He knew Mongoose wasn’t here but he made a complete circuit anyway. Where the hell could he be?
Most likely, the Iraqis had gotten him already. That explained why there were no radio transmissions.
There could be another explanation. The pilot’s body could be lying back there in the wreckage, mangled beyond recognition. They could be wasting their time, and risking their own necks for nothing.
He was going to catch holy shit when Glosson found out about this little adventure. It’d be worth it if he came back with Mongoose.
What the hell. At his age, the only thing he was really good for was getting yelled at.
No. He could still fly. Damn Hog proved that. For all the bad things he’d once said about her, she didn’t hold even the barest of grudges. She might be smirking a little bit, just around the edges, but otherwise she did what he asked, real smooth and professional.
Knowlington began pulling up as he returned to his starting point. This time A-Bomb asked him if he’d seen anything.
“Negative,” Skull told him. “Maybe that shadow wasn’t anything, or maybe he heard all the commotion and started heading north. Let me come up a bit and then let’s follow the highway.”
“Gotcha.”
“Say A-Bomb, I have a question for you. Is that music I hear behind your transmissions?”
“The Boss. Bruce Springsteen.”
Knowlington snorted into his mike. “You planning on blasting the Iraqis with it?”
“I told Clyston it would be a good idea,” said A-Bomb. There was no question he was serious. “A couple of speakers mounted below the wings and I could scare the piss out of them while I was taking a bomb run. Like a Stuka’s siren. That’s what I’m talking about.”
Hog drivers.
But hell, Knowlington thought, I’m one of them.
“Don’t let it break your concentration,” he told his wingman, fixing his eyes back on the TVM as he swung onto the new course.