Jim DeFelice
Snake Eaters
PROLOGUE
The chaplain had only just arrived in the Gulf. He was very new to the Army, but was a sensitive man and conscientious, convinced that God had sent him here to do some good.
But how? His first service was scheduled for this very afternoon, and he couldn’t think of anything to say in his sermon, or at least nothing that would be inspiring. The men here were on the front line, the tripwire of the allied defense. At any second, Saddam’s minions could appear over the next sand dune and overwhelm them. He needed something powerful to encourage and comfort them. But he could think of nothing.
Finally, the minister decided to seek inspiration from the desert itself. He walked out from the sandbags and strolled into the open sand, shading his eyes from the sun overhead. He gazed across the undulating land, trying to imagine what this desert might have been like three or four thousand years before, when God had come among the Israelites and smote their enemies.
At that instant, the ground trembled and the chaplain felt himself being thrown down by the force of a heavenly wind. He writhed in the sand, certain that he was experiencing heavenly enlightenment.
Or worse.
Turning his eyes upward, he saw not an angel but a black-green monster, ugly and ferocious, breathing fire. It roared overhead, shaking the marrow of his bones.
It took the minister a moment to realize it was not an apparition, and then another moment to connect the monster to a briefing one of the soldiers had given him earlier. The sandbagged-position was directly in a flight line used by some of the Allied Coalition fighter bombers returning from missions north. The plane was an A-10A Warthog, heading for a nearby airbase to reload and refuel for another sortie.
The minister felt more than a little embarrassed as he pulled himself from the ground. But then he realized that it had, after all, been a message; if not entirely divine, certainly useful.
“The Apocalypse. Revelations. Of course,” he said, brushing the sand from his trousers as he ran back to write his sermon.
It was later said to be the best ever preached in Saudi Arabia.
PART ONE
IN THE MUD
CHAPTER 1
Fear made him stand up. Fear cocked his arm and straightened his legs. Fear snapped his finger on the Beretta’s trigger, once, twice. Fear was everything he was, everything he felt, everything he did.
The Iraqi soldier fell to the ground.
Lieutenant William “BJ” Dixon ran forward and grabbed the man’s fallen Kalashnikov rifle. There were shouts and footsteps in the rock quarry behind the soldier he’d just killed. He squatted, assault gun in his hand. He leaned forward to kneel and waited.
Finally, a pistol and then an arm appeared around the corner. The gun fired two, three times, without aiming. One of the bullets ricocheted off the sheer rock next to Dixon, but he did not flinch. He was beyond flinching. He waited for a clear shot.
The hand drew back. Dixon waited. Finally, a face, baffled, scared, poked out from behind the corner.
Dixon pressed the rifle against his side as he pushed the trigger.
In the instant between reflex and reaction, he realized it was his own fear he saw in the man’s face. By rights, Dixon shouldn’t be here in the middle of Iraq, closer to Baghdad than Riyadh. By rights, he should be lying dead on the next hillside where the Delta Force commando patrol he’d been working with as a ground controller had been ambushed and pinned down.
The moment passed. He fired a quick burst from the Russian-made automatic rifle; two of the three bullets struck the Iraqi, the first directly through the man’s heart. Dixon jumped up and ran forward, throwing himself to the ground as he reached the body. Falling past the corner of the sheer rock wall, he fired in the direction the man had come from.
Luck and surprise caught two more Iraqis cold, both barely three yards away. Bullets spewed from Dixon’s gun until it clicked empty.
He rolled upwards, pushing his knee under him and using it to spring along the rock wall toward the two bodies. There were no other Iraqis that he could see. He threw away his empty rifle and grabbed one that had fallen between the two men. As he took it, he looked into the face of one of the soldiers.
The man gasped for breath. Tears streamed down the sides of his face.
Dixon saw that the man wore a belt across his chest with extra clips for the Kalashnikov. He reached down, curled his fingers around the canvas straps, and yanked it free with an immense heave.
The man screamed. His chest and stomach blotted with a fresh spurge of blood. His yelp turned into a spew of vomit.
To shoot him now would be a great mercy.
Dixon hesitated.
Blood mixed with the vomit sputtering from the man’s mouth. He moved his lips, trying to say something.
Less than a week ago, Dixon was merely a pilot; a Hog driver. He’d never dealt with something like this; it simply hadn’t existed for him. He had never looked so closely at death.
That was irrelevant now. His past lay in the ruined smoke of a nearby storage bunker, a probable NBC or nuclear-bacterial-chemical facility the Delta team had targeted for Dixon’s A-10A unit, the 535th Tactical Fighter Squadron, the Devil’s Hogs. Everything Dixon had done until now, from shooting down a helicopter early in the air war to rescuing a Spec Ops sergeant a few hours ago, no longer mattered.
Fear was all. Fear and survival. He had to get the hell out of here before more Iraqis came. He had to run, right now, if he was going to live. There was no time for mercy.
The lieutenant closed his eyes and took a few steps away. Then he cursed and went to the man, forcing himself to look as he pressed the muzzle to the soft temple of the agonized Iraqi and took away his pain forever.
CHAPTER 2
Captain John “Doberman” Glenon heaved himself over the side of the A-10A cockpit, balancing precariously on the narrow steps of the attack plane’s crank-down ladder. Doberman considered himself, without doubt, the luckiest man in the Gulf. He had just managed an emergency landing on a scratch strip controlled by American Special Operations Forces nearly a hundred miles deep in the Iraqi desert. With less than a sneeze worth of fuel in the sump at the bottom of his tanks, he’d fought off a last-second mechanical problem and parked his Hog ten feet from the end of the dangerously short strip.
Until today, Doberman had never really believed in luck. Now he’d belly up to a Lotto machine, blow a year’s pay, and consider it an investment. He felt like he’d just nailed the prom queen.
The desert sun boiled off some of his exhilaration as the soles of his feet scraped along the grit of the sand-swept runway. He was alive against all odds— but he was also deep inside enemy territory, on the ground, with no jet fuel and no chance of getting some anytime soon. The concrete life raft he stood on was protected by less than a dozen Delta Force troopers and a handful of combat engineers who were working feverishly to throw up some sort of defense.
And less than a half-hour before, he’d seen the body of a fellow squadron member sprawled in a rock quarry he and his wingmate had targeted for destruction. Lieutenant William “BJ” Dixon had been a nugget with a knack for getting his butt into places where it didn’t belong, but that had only made Doberman liked him all the more.