Wilson looked over his right leading edge extension and saw two small smoke clouds wafting up from a nondescript neighborhood. He was well above small arms fire, but was concerned about hand-held SAM launches, even though no firings had been reported in this area for some time. With seconds to release, he concentrated on the release cue and accelerated. Bowser seemed like a guy who wouldn’t mind a JDAM a bit early. The airplane jumped as another 500 pounds of ordnance, guided by satellite signals all the way to the target, fell earthward to the precise point Bowser wanted it to hit.
Wilson went to military power and rolled up on his left wing to egress north and watch the impact. The FLIR showed a car approach the targeted building; in anticipation he looked over his left shoulder to watch the weapon impact. He saw a massive explosion in the middle of the city, the shock wave raising a concentric cloud of dust above the structures around the building covered in smoke. Secondary explosions shot out of the burning building, and projectiles rammed into the houses across the street. One missile-like projectile flew crazily over the houses and landed in a dirt field north of the highway. The driver of the car he saw before impact reversed down the street in a panic. Wilson was surprised it was still running. A raging column of flame and black smoke towered over the targeted building.
Wilson was transfixed by the scene until the radio crackled. “Nails, we gettin’ mortared! Gotta move, out!”
Wilson overheard a soldier in the background shout, “Andy, let’s go!”
“Roger, Bowser, we’re standing by.”
With his wingman in trail, Wilson orbited northwest of the city, the pall of black smoke showing no signs of abating. To the southwest he also saw a tight group of small puffs caused by mortars. Bowser must be in that area.
Wilson called to Smoke. “Let’s make some noise south to north. Follow me after I come off.”
“Roger!”
To keep the insurgents’ heads down, Wilson commanded Smoke to take trail as he led them from the south over the narrow part of the city in another show of force. With airspeed increasing, he descended in a left-hand turn to begin his run. Approaching the city, he popped out chaff and flares and initiated jinking in three dimensions. From the secondary explosions he saw, Wilson figured they had just hit an even larger weapons cache than the one they had destroyed in the sedan. The throttles were at full power, showing 550 knots indicated, as Wilson flew over the city and pulled up to the left to watch Smoke begin his run.
Wilson made a call to Bowser. No answer.
After Smoke’s run, Wilson overflew the town again, higher and slower. He and Smoke were in a perfect wagon-wheel orbit, which would allow one of them to pounce on a pop-up contact while the other maintained a position to provide support.
“Nail four-one, y’all up?” It was Bowser.
“Go ahead, Bowser!”
“We got a vee-hicle, a white SUV, movin’ outta town on Highway 82. Movin’ west now. Bad guys in there.”
Smoke called a tally. “Nail four-two has a white SUV passing the northwest corner of the city on the highway.” Without warning, a bright flare separated from the SUV and climbed into the sky leaving a gray corkscrew trail of smoke.
“SAM at your left seven! Break left! Flares!” Smoke cried.
Wilson saw the launch and turned hard into it. He sensed, though, he was not the target because the missile veered low and behind him well before the rocket motor burned out. He expended some flares and kept an eye on the SUV, which continued to barrel west away from town.
Smoke called to Bowser. “Bowser, Nail four-two, that guy just launched a MANPAD at Nail four-one. Request clearance to engage with twenty mike-mike.”
“You’re cleared, Nail four-two. Take that mo-fo out!”
“Nail four-two’s in hot.”
Wilson watched Smoke roll in on the white truck. Although it sped away from the town, it was now completely in the open and stood out in contrast to the black asphalt road that stretched across the desert. Smoke extended a little to the south to get a better run in, and when he turned back, the SUV was still moving west at high speed. It was going to be a 90-degree crossing shot for Smoke, and Wilson took up a position in trail. Wilson selected GUN, and armed up.
Smoke bore in on the SUV and kept his eyes padlocked on it from two miles away. Wilson saw a car on the highway heading east and called it to Smoke.
“I’ve got it… Nail four-two’s in hot on the SUV,” replied Smoke.
“Nail flight, Bowser. I’ve lost y’all. Engage at pilot discretion.”
“Roger, Bowser, engaging.”
Wilson watched Smoke in his strafing run. Once the eastbound vehicle passed the SUV, a faint white trail of vapor emerged from Smoke’s aircraft. Wilson saw the tracers as they flew toward the insurgent truck.
Dust kicked up along the highway 50 yards in front of the SUV, and one ricochet spun into the far field with a wild trajectory. Smoke had calculated too much lead and missed.
The bullet impacts stitched across the highway, however, and startled the driver. In what must have been a panicked state, the driver slammed on the brakes and turned south onto a side road. Wilson saw right away that the insurgents were trapped.
The dirt road ran between two partially flooded fields in flat farmland — about three miles west of Balad Ruz. Despite the fact he was driving an SUV, the driver couldn’t change course to turn left or right through the muddy fields. The only chance the insurgents had was for the driver to drive straight ahead and limit Wilson’s firing window by closing the range and making him aim steep.
Wilson watched the SUV come right at him, trailing a cloud of dust. Although the target was moving, all he had to do was aim short and walk the rounds up to the vehicle, or let it drive into the bullets. He felt as if he were rolling in on a strafe target run-in line, with Smoke, on a local training mission back home over the Dare County target range in eastern North Carolina. He keyed the mike.
“Lead’s in hot,” he said with a calm voice. Oh, yeah! he thought and rolled left.
His g-suit squeezed him and the horizon tilted as he overbanked and looked out of the top of his canopy at the SUV. He pulled his nose to a point on the road ahead of the vehicle. For Wilson, the situation was ideaclass="underline" Against the landscape, the vehicle appeared to be a white dot moving toward him. The brown cloud of dust it kicked up behind was proof of the driver’s desperate attempt to avoid another strafing attack. Wilson stabilized in a shallow dive; pulled some power; placed his gunsight aim point, or “pipper,” in front of the SUV; and watched the range ring unwind on the reticle.
As the truck and the fighter drew closer, Wilson wondered if the insurgents could see him. A faint muzzle flash from the passenger side of the vehicle answered that question. Wilson squeezed the red trigger on the stick with his right index finger and held it for three… long… seconds.
A cloud of white gun gas formed above the nose of the aircraft as 20-millimeter rounds flew out of the six-barrel cannon. The deep BURRRRRRRRP sounded similar to the noise of a large chain saw. Wilson noted the tracers explode away from his aircraft at supersonic speeds, but he kept his concentration on the green pipper, the “death dot,” in front of the white truck. His hand clenched the stick hard as he pushed forward a hair to keep a tight bullet grouping; he released some pressure to “walk” the rounds up and then back down the road. The first rounds of the bullet stream kicked up the dirt in front of the truck. They were followed by bright impact flashes that ripped open the vehicle and churned the dirt around it into a brown cloud. Approaching 500 feet, Wilson yanked the stick up and rolled left, looking down to check his work.