He could leave him. But that was like shooting him, wasn’t it?
He’d already made that decision.
“What I think we’re going to do here, Budge,” Dixon said, squatting so he was eye-level with the boy, “what I think we’re going to do is go into the village. We have to be very quiet. People there want to kill us. Do you understand?” He mimed the words, walking with his fingers, shielding his face with his hands, pretending to be fired at. The boy leaned forward and hugged him.
“That’s going to have to do for now,” said Dixon, starting toward the road.
CHAPTER 20
Hack furled his fingers around the A-10A stick, waiting impatiently for the other pilots to complete their checks. The F-15’s cockpit wasn’t exactly massive, but the Hog’s workspace seemed smaller than the trunk of a Honda Civic. The instrument panel was a solid wall of old-fashioned dials and buttons; the only display was the small tube below the windshield at the right-hand corner slaved to the Maverick missiles. It was a miracle the plane even had a heads-up display.
Hack bounced his feet up and down on the rudder pedals, trying to shake out his boredom. The Warthog’s GE turbofans were diminutive and almost silent — at least compared to the F-15, which had a guttural, throat-shaking roar even at rest.
He had to stop comparing the damn Warthogs to Eagles. He was a driver now, and a backseat one at that — Knowlington had stuck him with flying wing to Captain Glenon, the second plane in the second element.
Made sense, couldn’t argue. Actually, Knowlington seemed a hell of a lot more on the ball here than he had back in D.C. Had a peculiar way of running a squadron, but part of that might be because he had less than half the normal complement of personnel, except for the sections responsible for keeping the aircraft airworthy.
That Chief Master Sergeant Clyston was a real piece of work. Hack was going to sit on his butt good to get him to do things the way they were supposed to be done. Stinking sergeants thought they ran the frigging service. Straighten him out, no time.
Can his ass, once he took over the squadron.
Maybe.
Two things surprised Hack. One was the fact that Knowlington didn’t seem to be drinking — or at least was being considerably more discrete about it than he had been at the Pentagon.
The other was that Knowlington and his squadron were held in high enough esteem to have been tagged to work with Delta up north in what had to be a high priority, not to mention extremely difficult, mission.
Not that he’d thought Knowlington was a bad pilot. On the contrary, he’d heard the stories about what he’d done in Vietnam. It’s just that he’d thought the colonel was an over-the-hill geezer with one foot and half of his head out the door.
“Devil leader to Devil flight,” said Knowlington over the squadron frequency. “All right, let’s get this show on the road.”
One by one, the others acknowledged. By the time Major Preston pressed his transmit button, he’d already nudged his Warthog off her brakes and begun to trundle up toward the starting gate to keep pace with the others. He ran through his checks one more time, scanning the instruments, glancing at the INS, quizzing his compass. His stomach began flipping over, and for a brief moment the veteran Air Force pilot felt like a teenager taking dad’s car to the grocery store the first time. Then instinct took over; he pulled the double throttle bars to their stops, spooling out the engines and rocketing down the runway.
After a fashion; damn Warthog was slow, slow, slow. And while it might not be fair to compare it to an F-15, there was no way not to as the plane heaved itself up into the air, chugging along more like a pickup truck with wings than a modern airplane. Hack’s stomach tightened as he left the ground. He couldn’t get the feel right and started to jerk to the right, his left wing pitching up in answer to his awkward pull. But the A-10A was a forgiving sort; she caught a gust of wind and steadied her wings, rising behind her companions in a slow, steady march northwards.
A fresh wave of jitters hit Preston as he searched the dusky sky for his wingmate. It took three long glances to find Doberman on his left, exactly where he was supposed to be. He checked his INS; still overly nervous, he went through the sheet of way-markers on his kneeboard. He was precisely on course, flying the Hog as smoothly as if he’d racked up a hundred hours in the past month, but he could feel his heart pounding.
He’d been like this in the Eagle, too. A lot of time it took until the border for him to calm down. The first snap vector or the first heads-up from the AWACS or the first radar contact of an enemy — once something real happened, he was fine. But until then he was just jangled nerves, no matter what he was driving.
Shit. Thinking like a Hog driver already.
Hack flipped through the sheets on his kneepad, studying the frequencies, the way-points, the notes on fuel burn and the rest. Finally he lifted the last page and exposed the two items he’d pasted to his board on his very first solo years ago — a Gary Larson cartoon and something his father always said.
He laughed at the cartoon, just as he had on every flight he’d ever made. Then he repeated the saying:
Do your best.
Do your best. That’s all you ever needed.
Preston checked his throttle, shifted a bit on the ejector seat, nudged the Hog to slide a little further out, just off Doberman’s wing.
Like the others, Preston carried four Maverick AGM-65Gs, one each loaded in the LAU-117 launchers that flanked the main wheels. The G-model Mavericks were serious weapons, featuring three-hundred-pound warheads, more than twice the size of the “standard” B model and extremely adept at pounding armor. But the real value of the missiles was the infra-red imager in their golden noses; A-10A pilots in the Gulf had discovered that the IR gave the plane a primitive night-time capability.
Primitive indeed. It would be looking at the ground through a straw. But the others had already used the missiles to fly night missions; if they could do it, Hack could too.
Besides the missiles, A-Bomb and Doberman each had a pair of what looked like napalm containers slapped to the hard points on either side of their bellies. The pods held the STAR Fulton retrieval systems the ground team would use to escape.
The other two Hogs were carrying illumination flares in rocket launching canisters. Preston hadn’t actually used the launchers for anything but rockets — and as a matter of fact, he wasn’t even entirely sure he had done that. But the principle was fairly simple. The LUU-2 would spit out, opening its chute and igniting. The hot air would hold it up and it would descend, lighting the night like a set of klieg lights for five minutes or so. The “lou-twos” or logs would only be used if things got sticky and the Hogs needed to use their cannons.
Two other important weapons were attached to the planes. Every A-10 carried a pair of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles at the left edge of their wings for air defense. An ECM pod sat on the opposite hard point. The counter measures in the ALQ-119 were older than Hack; the device was next to useless against the SAMs the F-111s were going to hit. In fact, even the F-15 Hack had just been flying would have been pushed to the limit dealing with it.
Do your best, he reminded himself, trying to push the negative thoughts away. He rechecked his position and twisted his head, scanning the sky for the millionth time even though they were far behind the lines.