“Hey, Dog Man!” Doberman’s wingmate, Captain Thomas “A-Bomb” O’Rourke, ambled over. A-Bomb’s burly body hung half out of his flightsuit. “Where you figure they got the coffee going?”
“What makes you think they got coffee?” said Doberman.
“Green Berets always have coffee,” said A-Bomb. “It’s one of the requirements. Like being an NCO. Spec Ops run special courses on making it under fire.”
Doberman shielded his eyes against the sand and sun as he stared at A-Bomb’s round face. It was hard to tell sometimes whether his wingmate was kidding or not.
Odds were he wasn’t. There were only two things A-Bomb considered sacred: driving Hogs and coffee. He was undoubtedly the only attack pilot in the Air Force who carried a thermos of joe into battle.
“You will find coffee in the second dugout beyond the cement foundation,” said a voice behind them. “Though I would note that the use of the word ‘coffee’ stretches the definition beyond reasonable tolerance.”
Doberman spun around. Only one person in the Gulf spoke like that— Captain Bristol Wong, a Pentagon intelligence analyst who’d had the misfortune of wandering into Devil Squadron’s readyroom shortly after the air war began. He had been promptly shanghaied as the unit’s resident expert on Russian-made air defenses. Despite his prissy nature, Wong was actually a man of considerable talents; he had performed a tandem high-altitude jump earlier in the day to deliver a mechanic to the covert base.
The mechanic happened to be another member of Devil Squadron, Technical Sergeant Rebecca “Becky” Rosen.
Female Technical Sergeant, whose presence here violated any number of regulations, military necessity or not. It was as boneheaded a move as any Doberman had ever heard of.
“Hey Braniac, how was the parachutin’?” asked A-Bomb, slapping Wong on the back so hard the sharp creases momentarily disappeared from the captain’s Spec Ops chocolate-chip camo fatigues. But only momentarily.
Wong carefully removed A-Bomb’s hand from his back.
“The parachuting, Captain, was an elementary operation that could have been accomplished by any member of the Special Forces command. Obviously, I was assigned because Colonel Klee decided he didn’t want me at his base.”
“Gee, you think?” asked A-Bomb.
“As for your being angry with me, Captain Glenon, as I can tell by your red cheeks,” Wong nodded in Doberman’s direction, “I would suggest that the emotion is misdirected. Colonel Klee gave a direct order. I merely carried it out.”
“Klee’s an ass,” spit Doberman.
“Undoubtedly. Nonetheless, given the contingencies involved, his order appeared lawful,” added Wong. “And thus I saw it as my duty to carry it out. A fortuitous event, in any case.”
“How do you figure that?”
“There is now a mechanic here to see after your planes, as well as the helicopters,” said Wong.
Rosen was hardly an expert on helicopters, which were Army aircraft, not Air Force. But before Doberman could say anything more, they were interrupted by a sun-burned middle linebacker who turned out to be the captain in charge of the base.
“I’m Hawkins,” said the man, shoving his fat hand into Doberman’s. “Welcome to Fort Apache.”
Hawkins wore a generic camo uniform without markings of unit or rank, but the snap in his voice left no doubt that he was in charge. He’d also been wounded. There was a thick wrap around his mid-section and another on one of his legs. His rolled up sleeves revealed a series of scrapes and gashes covered with caked-up anti-bacterial ointment. But there was no hint from his manner, let alone his quick movements, that any of these injuries had affected him.
Doberman, who at five-four was short even for a pilot, shook his hand and walked with him to his command post, a makeshift bunker in the concrete ruins.
Fort Apache had been established barely twenty-four hours earlier by Hawkins and his team. It served as a staging and command center for American and British special ops troops looking for Scuds further north in Iraq. The concrete landing strip had been started as an airbase some years before by the Iraqis, and then mysteriously abandoned. Located about five miles from the nearest highway, the concrete strip was surrounded by scrubland and desert. Two AH-6 Little Birds, armed scout helicopters specially adapted to “black” missions, had been assigned to Hawkins team. They were hidden beneath desert-colored tarps just off the concrete.
The original plan had called for Hawkins’ team to capture the strip and lengthen it to at least two thousand feet. That would make it long enough for emergency landings and takeoffs by stricken allied craft heavier than the Hogs. It would also accommodate a four-engined MC-130, the Spec Ops chariot of choice. A specially modified model equipped with an airborne cannon as well as supplies and troops was cooling its heels at Al Jouf, more than a hundred miles away, waiting to make the run north.
It looked like it was going to be waiting a long while. Hawkins had discovered two immense wadis that ran along the ends of the concrete. The dry creek beds could not be filled without massive amounts of debris and cement: even then, the engineers feared the ground would give way under heavy use. Working with prefab steel mesh, the engineers had managed to lengthen the strip to about fifteen hundred feet. But that was it. They had no chance of getting the strip long enough for the intended operations.
“Herky pilot says he could get in if we need him,” Hawkins told Doberman and A-Bomb after they had shed their survival gear. “But there’s no way he can land his C-130 with any sort of load. We’re hoping to get a Pave-Low up with fuel for the helicopters tonight. At the moment I have barely enough in case we have to bug out.”
“What about us?” asked Doberman.
Hawkins frowned.
“Shit,” said Doberman.
“We may be able to run some more fuel up on another Pave-Low tomorrow night,” said Hawkins. “Or maybe they can figure out some sort of drop.”
“Shit, dump some of this coffee in the bladders, Hog’ll purr like a kitten,” said A-Bomb, draining his cup.
“The proximity of Iraqi installations make Pave-Low flights a precarious proposition,” said Wong, belatedly joining the discussion. “The MH-53 family has a significantly larger detection profile. They are likely to be seen as well as heard, if not actually scanned by radar. Their flights would comprise the usefulness of the base, especially if more than one craft was required.”
“And a Herky Bird wouldn’t?” said Doberman.
“A C-130 could, in theory, descend from altitude in a non-apparent trajectory,” said Wong.
“Which means what?” Intel specialists tended to rub Doberman the wrong way, but Wong was in a class of his own.
“I think he means they could make it look like it was going somewhere else,” said Hawkins. He said it like he not only understood but liked Wong— a truly scary thought.
“Correct. But in any event, I would not like to wager on a C-130 landing here, let alone it taking off,” said Wong. “As your landings demonstrated, even the A-10A Thunderbolt II has difficulty, despite its innate short-field capabilities.”
“Nah,” said A-Bomb. “We were just trying to make it look tough.”
Wong twisted his nose, as if his tongue were a windup toy. “At forward-strip weight, the A-10A needs 396 meters to land and 442 meters to take off. Now, depending on the ordnance configuration and fuel load, wind, ambient temperature…”
“Thanks Wong, I know the math,” snapped Doberman. “I just landed, remember?”
“Face it, Dog Man, we’re just ground soldiers now,” said A-Bomb joyfully. “Mud fighters. Snake eaters.”