His bullets burst in the dusty rubble, dragonflies snapping their wings. He stopped firing, seeing the Iraqi on the floor just below the window, dead.
Letting go of the trigger on his rifle somehow made Dixon lose his balance; he stumbled backward, caught himself, then whirled around with the thought — the fear, really — that one of the men he’d shot in the front yard wasn’t really dead and might be holding a gun on him.
But the three bodies lay where they’d fallen, arms akimbo, heads jerked at bad angles in the ground. One man’s eyes caught him as he sank slowly to one knee. The corpse watched him force a slow breath into his lungs, glared at him as he stood and began checking each body carefully, making sure his enemies were truly dead. After he did so, he returned to each man, searching their bodies quickly for anything that might be useful. He found only a knife, but in the truck bed were four rifles similar to his; along with two full boxes of clips. It was only when he tried to load one of the clips into his gun that he realized the guns were actually different models — AK-74s, which used smaller caliber bullets. BJ left his and took two of theirs, stuffing banana clips into his pocket and belt. He fired off one of the guns, making sure it worked.
As he lowered the rifle, he heard a sound behind him. He spun quickly.
The Iraqi boy stood six or seven feet away, trembling.
“It’s okay,” Dixon told him. He shook his head. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
The boy’s white pants were torn and badly stained. His T-shirt was a faded yellow, entirely intact and fairly clean, though he’d obviously been wearing it a long time. He wore a pair of sneakers at least two sized too big; they seemed to be Nikes, though their markings were missing.
“You’re all right?” Dixon lowered the rifle. “You okay, kid?”
The boy opened his mouth but said nothing. He started to cry.
“It’s all right,” Dixon told him.
It surely wasn’t all right, but what else could he say? What could he do?
“Why did they want to kill you?” Dixon asked. “What were they doing?”
The Iraqi boy took a step toward him, then another. Fear leaped inside Dixon’s chest — what if the child was booby-trapped or had a weapon or saw the strange American who had appeared from nowhere not as his rescuer but as his enemy?
Before Dixon could do anything else, the boy threw himself into him, clamping his arms around his neck as he draped himself across BJ’s chest. Tears streamed from the kid’s body, soaking through Dixon’s shirt, mixing with his dried sweat and coursing down the side of his chest and stomach.
“It’s all right,” the lieutenant told the boy, patting his awkwardly with the gun still in his hand. “It’s all right. You’re okay.”
The boy began to wail, his voice starting as a low moan and quickly rising. Dixon started to push him away but the child held on tightly, his body shaking with his cries. There was nothing Dixon could do but pat his back, hoping somehow that would calm him.
Grief ran from the kid like water from a busted pipe. Dixon felt his own eyes swelling; he remembered his mother dying, tried steeling himself against it, walling himself off, but finally there was no stopping the tears. He let the rifle fall and took hold of the kid as he sobbed. The first few drops felt like ice, but those that followed were like warm oil, soothing the corners of his face, soothing the aches of his body.
BJ lost his sense of place. He lost his sense of himself. His hopelessness, his fear — most importantly, his determination to die here in a blaze of gunfire — slowly ebbed away. The frightened William James Dixon — the one who trembled before battle; who froze at one point in every combat sortie; the one that was paralyzed by confrontation, the part of him that wanted to give up, the self that had closed his eyes the night his mother died instead of taking one last look — left his body with a shudder and a sigh.
The man left behind wasn’t beyond fear, but he understood it in a different way now; he neither welcomed it nor ran from it, he simply accepted it as a fact.
His tears eventually stopped. Dixon lifted the boy and gently placed him on the ground. The kid, too, had stopped crying. He took a step back, looking at him with an expression of shock, as if he had finally realized that Dixon was an enemy soldier. He cringed and threw his arms around his thin chest, holding his tattered shirt.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Dixon told him.
The kid shook his head. It wasn’t until the boy pointed in the direction of the road that Dixon realized the kid was scared not of him but the sound of a vehicle approaching down the road from the direction of the village.
CHAPTER 17
Skull tried to keep his face military neutral as Major Preston continued his speech. Any other guy new to an important post in a combat squadron would keep his remarks — if any — briefer than hell. But this was vintage Preston, the full-of-himself officer Knowlington remembered from their stint together at the Pentagon a little more than a year ago. People who knew him then said the major could out-talk a congressman; Skull now had proof.
The worst thing was, he kept telling the assembled Hog drivers that, even though he was a pointy nose fighter jock pukehead, he was really one of them. Really.
Not in so many words, of course, but the drift was clear. And it went over like a Big Blue fuel bomb tumbling out the back of a Combat Talon I.
Being a pilot in the Air Force meant that you were one of a very select minority, the cream of chocolate milk. Being a fighter pilot — any fighter pilot — meant you were the cream of the cream.
And yet, there was a severe prejudice against Hog drivers because of the planes they flew. Unlike the sleek F-15 Eagles and F-16 Vipers, A-10As couldn’t come close to the sound barrier. They could pull maybe half the g’s a pointy nose could. Now granted, they were kick-ass at the job they were designed for — close-in ground support, tank busting especially. And the first few days of the ground war, which saw them flying far behind the lines and doing things their designers never dreamed of, proved not just the mettle of the planes but the skills and sheer balls of their pilots. Given all that, there was definitely a feeling out there that A-10s and their drivers were second-rate. Hog drivers definitely tended to react to it in various ways, none of which were particularly pretty.
They were reacting now, grinding their teeth as Preston told them once again they had nothing to be ashamed of.
“Uh, hey, no offense, Major,” said Lieutenant Jack Gladstone finally, “but we ain’t ashamed of nothing.”
“Damn straight,” murmured a couple of the other lieutenants. “We’re not second-rate at nothing.”
“I didn’t mean you were,” said Preston.
“Yeah, but you’re making it sound like we are,” said Gladstone.
“No. I didn’t mean that.” Fortunately for Preston, nearly all of the squadron’s front-line pilots were out on missions. Even so, the audience was pretty riled. Doberman, studiously trying to ignore the proceedings in the back, was frothing. Wong was his usual nonplused self — he wasn’t a pilot, so apparently he didn’t care.
And A-Bomb was stuffing his face with what looked like an apple pie, though God only knew where it came from.
Doberman’s lips started moving. A bad sign.
Skull cleared his throat, getting up from the folding chair near the side of the squadron room. “We’re all glad Major Preston is aboard,” he said. “Now we have some work to get done. Hack, I think one of those newspaper people is waiting outside to talk to you about that MiG you shot down yesterday.”