More than the plan irked him. The colonel had banished BJ to a do-nothing desk job in Riyadh the week before as punishment for not giving a full and proper report of a mission on the first day of the air war. At the time, it seemed like the wisest thing to do— a harmless slap on the wrist. But it must not have seemed that way to Dixon. The kid must’ve figured he had to make up for it somehow, even if it meant volunteering to commit suicide.
If Dixon had gone down while flying, Knowlington’s insides might not have stung quite so bad. Flying was a difficult business, even under the best circumstances. In combat, it was always a matter of time and luck. When you climbed into the cockpit and snugged your hat, you knew you were making a deal with Fortune. You could work to put the odds in your favor, but the fact was that X amount of hours equaled Y amount of problems, and Z percentage of those problems were insoluble, no matter how great a flier you were. Sooner or later, you would have no choice but to go for the yellow handle next to the seat. That was the deal, and at some level, conscious or unconscious, you knew the deal and bought into it.
But dying on the ground, in a firefight he’d never been trained to deal with in a place he shouldn’t have been? What sense did that make? Whose deal was that?
Knowlington felt the bile eating all the way out from his gut to his skin. It seared the rims of his eyes and melted the sensation from his hands.
There was a cure, and he knew it welclass="underline" three fingers worth of Jack Daniels sour mash, straight up in clear glass tumbler. Three fingers worth, barely four ounces, just enough to burn the throat going down, just enough fire to sear the acid, snuff it out.
And then?
More and more and more, a never-ending fire.
The colonel focused his eyes, straining to see something in the blue rectangle of sky. He had work to do, a lot of work. He had to oversee the squadron’s “frag” or fragment of the Air Tasking Order, basically its to-do list for tomorrow’s action. He had to make sure he had the planes and the pilots and the ordinance to carry out his portion of the air war. He had to check on his two Hogs at Al Jouf, assigned to provide air support for the Delta Force at Fort Apache and beyond. He had to find a replacement DO or director of operations, who would serve as the squadron’s second in command. There were two or three personnel matters that Sergeant Clyston, his first sergeant, his top crew dog, his capo di capo, wanted to consult on.
He also had to notify Dixon’s next of kin.
He wanted to work. But more, he wanted, he needed a drink.
Twenty-two days, nearly to the minute. That was how long it had been.
An immense amount of time.
Skull snapped his eyes away from the blank blue rectangle, forced his hands to move into his desk drawer. He took out the computer sheets with the frag and a lined pad, along with notes and a sortie list.
He’d gone through the frag twice already. He had a plan and a backup plan and a contingency plan. He had the next day’s lineup figured out, knew how he was going to rotate the pilots for the next ten days, knew which planes would go where and which would back those up. He had every possible mission configuration covered for the foreseeable future.
Three fingers. Barely a trickle.
An informal AA meeting started at noon every day in one of the chaplain’s quarters in Tent City. If he walked quickly, he could make it.
The Depot, a theoretically off-limits black market club in a bomb shelter just outside the base, lay in the opposite direction, exactly 713 long strides away.
Skull put the paperwork away, took a long breath, and rose from his desk, not quite sure which direction he would take.
CHAPTER 4
Sometime in the early 1960s, in the steaming jungles of Vietnam, a young man pushed the controls on an ancient A-1 Skyraider and fell through a wall of small-arms fire to drop a stick of bombs on a cluster of Viet Cong rebels. The bombs fell with uncanny precision, killing enough of the enemy soldiers to allow a small patrol of Vietnamese regulars and their American advisor to escape the ambush that had trapped them.
In the grand scheme of a horrific war, it was an insignificant event. A few more people dead on either side, one way or the other, didn’t make much difference in Vietnam. But this bombing run was very different than most up to that point— it was at close range, damn accurate, and it did what it was supposed to do: kill bad guys. With all due respect to the brave men who’d flown missions in fast-moving pointy nose jets in the months before the Spad’s sortie, it was a nearly radical development.
And it was radical not because this particular pilot was very well trained or especially brave, though it goes without saying that he was both. What was radical was his plane; a geezer engineered during World War II and pulled through the air by technology the Wright Brothers would have been familiar with.
Intended as a torpedo bomber, the Skyraider could carry a lot of bombs to the fray and provided a very stable platform to drop them from. It was also completely outclassed by jets in every performance category, a slow-moving, low-flying aerial barge.
Which proved to be a serious asset. Flying lower and slower than a jet meant it was better at blowing little stuff up— little stuff like tanks and machine-gun nests and armored cars and mortar sites. It was exactly the sort of thing that mattered the most in that war; and, in fact, in any war.
There were more Spad missions after that first one, a lot more. And it didn’t take the brass long to realize that if the Air Force was going to be in the business of supporting grunts— not that they unanimously agreed it should, but never mind— it needed planes that were more like the A-1, less like the high-tech, go-fast, never-see-ya F-4s. The Spad’s success led, more or less directly, to the Attack Experimental program of 1967, a program that eventually resulted in the A-10A.
Among the many specifications for the AX was the ability to take off from “austere” forward air bases. Fort Apache was about as austere and forward as air bases got. The plank of concrete Doberman was about to walk was actually five hundred feet longer than the original AX specifications called for— but then, this Hog was quite a bit heavier as well.
Uglier, too. But ugly was good.
Snug inside the titanium hull of the ground pounder, Doberman leaned toward the side of the Hog and gave his ground crew, Rosen, a thumb’s up. Then he got ready to go to work. The plane had been positioned at the very edge of the runway, fanny over the sand, nose into the wind. Hawkins had anted up a few gallons and A-Bomb’s tanks had held more fuel than they’d hoped. Even so, with a good clean takeoff Doberman would only have under a half-hour to make the rendezvous with the tanker. The AWACS airborne command post coordinating the air war had been alerted, and he’d been promised priority at the tanker— but Doberman knew from experience that could be a difficult, if not impossible, promise to keep.
Trained as an engineer, the pilot tended to break things down by numbers. The numbers in this case said, no way. There was too little margin for error. But he’d been through so much in the past few days that he was almost comfortable ignoring them.
He took a breath, and told himself he was going for it. He needed a clean crank from the plane’s starter, so he could take off the second his wicks lit.
Another breath; then his fingers flew around the cockpit, push-buttoning himself into gear. The turbines sputtered a half moment, then caught. He was off the brake asking the Hog for full kick-butt-and-let’s-go power as the whine of the GE powerplants revved up and down his spine.