“How the fuck did he know you were here?” shot back Doberman.
“How would I know? Probably the AWACS sent him to make sure we were who we were supposed to be.”
“This mission is secret.”
“Well they know we’re here, for christsakes,” answered Preston. “Besides —”
“Yeah. Tanker,” snapped Doberman, ending the exchange.
He began correcting to fall in behind the KC-135, which had turned south. The director lights in the belly were just visible.
Man, he missed A-Bomb.
CHAPTER 24
Major Ronald “Wick” Durk had always believed he could sense a mission’s karma right out of the gate. Not that he believed in any of the Eastern mysticism crap that went with the karma thing. But he could sense a winning streak when it was coming.
And one wasn’t, not tonight.
The F-111 pilot had nearly been diverted about five minutes after taking off from Taif in western Saudi to hit allegedly “live” Scuds found by a Delta team in western Saudi. He’d nearly had to scream at the AWACS trying to order him off his assignment. Not that it was the controller’s fault — for all he knew, Wick’s two-plane element was going after the low-priority bridge as originally posted in the ATO. Clearing up the misunderstanding without revealing the nature of his mission had not been easy.
And now his wingman had severe engine trouble, bad enough to knock him out of the game.
Hell of a time. They were less than five minutes away from their IP, the initial point or starting line for their bomb tossing.
He glanced at his weapons system operator next to him before contacting the ABCCC plane coordinating the mission. Mo had his head pressed to the cowling around the radar unit, seemingly oblivious to everything except the screen a few inches from his eyes. Two Paveway II two-thousand pound bombs were sitting on the wings waiting to be launched; a Pave Tack targeting set in the belly of the plane was even now hunting down their target. The pod head rotated as the turret flexed, the forward-looking infrared radar examining the terrain ahead.
“Wolf, this is Bad Boy leader,” said Wick, contacting the command plane. “I’ve just sent Two home. He’s limping but he thinks he’ll make it.”
“Wolf acknowledges. We heard that.” The controller was an Air Force Spec Ops captain sitting in the back of a specially equipped C-130 flying just over the Saudi-Iraq border. He was part communicator, part coach, part mother hen for the complicated mission. “We’d like you to continue into target as planned.”
That answered that question. Not that he expected anything different.
“Bad Boy acknowledges.”
He flipped the radio to its interphone circuit, allowing him to speak to Mo. “Sixty seconds.”
His bombardier grunted. Mo didn’t like to talk when he was working.
“We have the SA-11s. They’ll have to get someone else on the SA-9s.”
“Uhgg”
“You comfortable with a ramp toss?”
“Uhgg.”
“Green Bay ever going to win the Super Bowl?”
“Uhgg.”
“Your mother a whore?”
“Uhgg.”
Wick turned his full attention back to the plane, confident that they were going to get a good splash. Mo had everything under control.
CHAPTER 25
Flying at fifty feet above ground level, the hairs on your forearms and wrists became small pieces of ice, sticking into your skin. Your knees locked, the joints pinched by a mass of cold iron. The fabric of your flightsuit got heavier and heavier, weighted by a fog of sweat and adrenaline. And still you flew faster, your left hand resting on the throttle, as if its mere presence there might coax a few more ounces of thrust from the turbofans nailed to your spine. You held the plane’s stick firmly in your right hand, your consciousness centered in that the grip. Your eyes ran ahead, not so much seeing as absorbing the sky and ground, bleeding into its shapes and shadows. You were the plane and you were the pilot and you were the space where you were flying. And you knew that at any second if you lost just a fraction of your concentration, if you flicked your wrist the wrong way at the wrong moment, you’d pile into the earth.
Something twitched; Skull nudged left, lifting the Hog to stay with the contour of the land. Something else twitched and he took his turn right, precisely on his mark, thirty seconds from the landing zone. The village lay further northeast, to his right as he flew; the highway where Saddam would be hit sat further to the east.
And the SA-11s were dead ahead. There was a battery of the advanced Soviet-made missiles right where Wong said it would be. He could actually see the shadows without using the Maverick’s nine-inch targeting screen.
The Iraqi radars were inactive. As long as they stayed at fifty feet, however, the Hogs would be obscured in the ground clutter, even if it turned on. The angle of the radar waves and the reflections off the earth surface made it impossible for the targeting devices to see them.
Or rather, difficult; Wong had warned that there was a theoretical possibility that the Russian-made radars could be arranged in a way to guard against exactly this type of attack.
He pushed the seeker head around, scanning the scraggly ground beyond the SAM site. It wasn’t Iowa loam, but the land below was close enough to the Euphrates for farming, or so he’d been told. In any event, it wasn’t sandy desert; more like hard-packed dirt interrupted by rocks and occasional vegetation. The hill where Wong believed Dixon was holed up was on his right; Skull avoided the temptation to scan in that direction, concentrating on his job, which was to his left.
“Wolf to Devil Leader. One, we have a wrinkle.”
“One. Go ahead Wolf,” he snapped.
“Bad Boy Two is scratched. Bad Boy One has prime target. Can you mop up?”
The controller was asking them to strike the SA-9 site immediately south of the SA-11 the Aardvark targeted. The short-range heat-seeking SAMs could target the Herk when it made the pickup a few hours from now. Hitting them would necessitate quick action — Skull was less than three miles from the target, closing at roughly four hundred knots. Minimum range was around 3,000 feet, maybe twenty seconds from now.
Not a problem.
“One.” He nudged his stick slightly, pushing the targeting cursor at the same time to slide the Mav’s IR head over in the direction of the Iraqi missile launcher, which lay to the west of the SA-11 due west of Kajuk.
He started to tell A-Bomb about the change in plans, but O’Rourke cut him off.
“Two, yeah, I got ya, Chief. I’m looking at the LZ.”
Knowlington took one last read on the altimeter — sixty feet above ground — then turned his eyes to the blur of the Maverick screen, pushing the targeting cursor into the thick hull of the lightly armored vehicle where the missiles were mounted. The day’s sun had left the truck’s metal skin hot, making for a nice, fat blob in the monitor. He locked the target, then poked his nose up slightly, a bit over-anxious about letting go of the missile so close to the ground.
And then he launched.
If he told A-Bomb he had fired — and most likely he did, because he had intended to — he couldn’t remember later. Nor could he have detailed exactly how he dialed the cursor for the next AGM as a second SA-9 launcher — unbriefed — appeared in the screen roughly seventy yards to the north. But he had a good memory of pressing the trigger, and an even better memory of what happened next — the air in front of him turned into a wall of red streaks.