“I would like to get back to my squadron.”
“I’ll be honest with you, BJ. I know there’s nothing here for you to do, I mean, besides waiting for somebody else to catch a cold. I know you’ve been bored. So I’m going to see what I can do about your request to ride with Special Ops as an observer. Not a bad idea, actually. We need more of our guys looking over their shoulders. Keep them from getting taken over by the god damn Green Berets. Pretty soon, these guys are going to be driving tanks instead of helicopters.”
Dixon sucked a quick, deep breath. He hadn’t exactly expected Greer to follow through on the offer, especially this fast.
Truth was, he’d be surplus material in the highly trained and capable crew that worked Special Ops.
On the other hand, this might be a kind of backhanded way of putting him back at King Fahd where he could just walk across the tarmac to Hog Heaven and get back in the starting rotation. It might be a way of getting around all the paperwork normally involved. Knowlington knew everyone in the air force; hell, he probably set this whole rigmarole up.
“I certainly wouldn’t pass up the chance to do anything, uh, anything important for the air force,” Dixon said.
“Good. If it was up to me, SAR would be entirely an air force mission. Special Ops is fine, don’t get me wrong, and I’m not against joint commands and all that bullshit, but— hey, this will work out. I’ll get on it right away,” said the major. “Listen, if anybody asks, you can handle a rifle, right?”
Dixon hesitated a moment. Since getting in trouble, he had made a solemn vow not to lie or even shade the truth.
“Absolutely, I can handle a rifle,” he said finally, deciding that handling wasn’t necessarily the same thing as aiming, firing and hitting anything he happened to point it at.
CHAPTER 4
Three-quarters of the world was blue— the light, delicate blue of a woman’s summer dress, inviting, scented with a fragrance that tickled and enticed.
The last quarter was hell, dirty yellow and brown, punctuated by black splotches and fingers of smoke and fire. Mongoose looked down through cockpit glass as the Hog chugged upwards, struggling to make the lofty twenty thousand feet prescribed as the “safe” altitude to cross the border. The A-10A was designed for smash-mouth, chin-in-the-mud flying. While other aircraft might consider twenty angels medium altitude, a heavily laden Hog worked up a serious sweat getting up there.
And to a Hog pilot, twenty thousand feet was just about in orbit. Hell, once the altimeter cranked over a hundred feet most guys called for oxygen and maybe a stewardess. But the brass had ordered the planes high to put them out of range of what was left of the Iraqi air defenses; though they’d been pounded pretty well on Day One of the air war, Saddam still had a formidable array of anti-aircraft guns and low-altitude missiles.
An Iraqi highway appeared in the distance as Mongoose oriented himself. It ran in a faint, gentle arc across the earth, like the scar left from a botched suicide attempt. Somewhere along it was an artillery encampment that Mongoose and A-Bomb had hit on their last run a few hours before, a five-clawed puppy paw of a site they had left mangled like a teenage girl’s wad of chewing gum. The pilot stared to the east, looking for the dark blotch of blackness that ought to mark it and the graves of the Iraqis who had worked the guns. There had been no resistance to speak of; the run had been quick, in and out, their bombs and missiles released from no lower than nine thousand feet, precisely as briefed. If anyone had fired at them, they hadn’t notice.
That was just fine as far as Mongoose was concerned. The medium altitude tactics felt awkward, but you couldn’t argue with the goal of getting everybody back in one piece. As the brass were fond of saying, there wasn’t anything worth dying for up here.
Which wasn’t to say that they wouldn’t get down and dirty if the situation called for it. Mongoose pushed his back against his seat, trying to undo a knot that had been tightening practically since leaving King Khalid. Part of him was convinced that the Hog had knotted his muscles itself because it didn’t like flying so high.
He double-checked his INS, mentally calculating that they were about ten minutes south of the quadrant in their assigned “kill box” or grid where they were to look for their target, another artillery park. Mongoose edged his eyes in that direction, his anticipation starting to build as he let the Hog nose ever so slightly into a very shallow dive. He aimed to arrive over their target at about fifteen thousand feet. The plane, happy to be on track for thicker air and sensing that she’d soon get a chance to do some snorting, gave him a happy growl, picking up speed.
Devil One and Two were each carrying a pair of Maverick B air-to-ground missiles and four Mk 20 Rockeye II cluster bombs. The Maverick B models were relatively primitive versions of the tank-busting weapon; a video camera in the nose displayed its target in a small television screen or TVM on the right side of the Hog’s control panel. Once a target was designated and locked, the pilot could launch the missile and move on; the Maverick’s own guidance system took over, flying its 125-pound shaped-charge warhead to the crosshairs. Newer models featured better seekers with infrared targeting and a heavier payload, but the B was still a deadly piece of meat, and only cost the air force about $22,000, a relative bargain— especially when compared to what it blew up.
The Mk 20 Rockeye II weapons were unguided but devastating; their bomblets spread out when dropped, a deadly hailstorm particularly suited for “softer” targets. The bombs were preset for this mission to be dropped from ten thousand feet; their need to be calibrated before taking off removed some of their flexibility, which was their only real drawback.
When the Hogs were about five minutes from their target, Mongoose did one more check of his paper map and coordinates. He was just rechecking their egress route back to base when their airborne controller, Red Dog, squawked out his call sign.
“Stand by for new tasking,” said the controller after running through the acknowledgment codes.
That meant: We got something juicy for you, so get your pen and paper handy.
Or in this case, your Perspex; Mongoose scrawled the heading and way markers directly onto the canopy glass with a grease pen. The nine-line brief began with an IP— an “initial point” to fly to that acted as the marker for most of the rest of the instructions.
The numbers on the glass were sending them about sixty miles further in Iraq, and well to the west, up in the direction of the Euphrates River and the better sections of the Iraqi air defense system. It was a hell of a long way to send the Warthogs, and Mongoose immediately guessed why.
He asked anyway. “What are we looking for, Red Eyes?”
“Scud launchers. F-111 crew saw them on the way out. Two, possibly more. Some auxiliaries.”
“Copy,” said Mongoose, immediately bringing his plane to the new heading.
The Iraqis had started launching the ground-to-ground missiles shortly after the start of the air war. Because of their range and ability to carry chemical and biological agents, Scuds had top priority as targets. So far, none had actually done much damage— but the allies’ luck couldn’t hold for very long.
The controller added that a Phantom Wild Weasel was being vectored into the area and would suppress any surface-to-air nasties. Like all the Weasels in the theater, the F-4 had a “beer” call sign: Rheingold One.