Empty.
Davis screamed something. Salt ignored it, scanning the ground near the Mercedes. The car began to move; he picked his shoulder up slightly and put a round into the front tire. The round blew the tire and wheel apart, but the vehicle kept moving. He pushed his shoulder down, zeroing his aim on the thick, bulletproof glass at the driver’s window, waiting for the man to raise his head so he could see where he was going. The Mercedes bumped forward, aiming to get behind one of the trucks for cover. Just as Salt was about to swing toward the engine compartment the man raised his head. Salt squeezed.
The car’s thick glass was advertised as bulletproof. What the manufacturer meant was that it was bulletproof against ordinary bullets and guns. The weapon Salt fired was anything but ordinary, with its 12.7 mm armor-piercing bullet hand-finished and loaded by the marksman himself. Still, the glass altered the bullet’s shape and trajectory, knocking it off its mark.
Unfortunately for the driver, that meant it entered not his neck but his skull. The blast took off the top quarter of the Iraqi’s head.
The gun’s heavy recoil momentarily cost Salt his aim; by the time he sighted again the car had jerked to a stop in the middle of the road. Davis yelled again and Salt felt something wet and hot hit the side of his face, the ground trembling with the impact of a 125 mm T-72 shell less than twenty yards away.
CHAPTER 41
Knowlington watched the PAVE Low helicopter rear upwards from the mass of black shadows, jerking nearly straight up with the motion of a champion weight lifter cleaning five hundred pounds. Its dark shadow hovered a second, then slashed forward across the black wilderness, heading for the fresh flare launched by the Frenchman. He looked to be about two miles from them, perhaps less.
Knowlington replotted the fuel reserves while A-Bomb asked the downed Frenchman something about cafes. It was cutting it close, but there was just enough to run back to Kajuk, fire the Mavericks and then tank.
As long as they met the tanker at the northern extreme of its track. And they got a tailwind.
Hell, if they got a tailwind there’d be two gallons to spare. Maybe three.
Let’s get on with it, he urged the helicopter silently.
Knowlington pushed the Hog onto her wing, sliding through the orbit around the Frenchman. Wolf gave an update on Kajuk in staccato: Doberman and Preston were attacking, the RAF Tornadoes were launching their radar-killing missiles at a SAM site.
“Boss, he’s hearing something,” said A-Bomb, breaking in. “And it ain’t le hélicoptère.”
Knowlington started to ask for a direction when the air in front of him burst into flame.
“Leander Seven, hold off, hold off!” he barked, whacking his stick hard to the right as he pulled the Hog out of the worst of the anti-aircraft fire. The plane began shaking like a pickup dragging four shot-out tires over a dried out stream bed. Skull rolled into a chest-squeezing turn that took him nearly ninety degrees from his original path, looping out under the stream of gunfire.
One consolation — if he’d been hit, the maneuver would have torn the plane in two.
“Fuckin’ Zsu-Zsu in the shadow of that road, uh, half-mile, three-quarters north of the Frog,” said A-Bomb. “Shit. Something else.”
“Yeah. I’m on the son of a bitch,” said Knowlington, trying to get it into his targeting screen. The four-barreled mobile anti-aircraft unit was one of three vehicles hiding in a shallow area of shadows near a roadway. Before he could get the flak dealer onstage, its red spit turned to narrow points as Skull closed in; the gun was turning in his direction.
Knowing he’d be unable to climb quickly enough to avoid the spray, Knowlington pushed his nose down and twisted his wings, shaking off the g-forces as he sticked and ruddered into a nearly ninety-degree turn, clear of flak about two hundred feet from the ground and dead on target at one mile.
Michael Knowlington had had less than twenty hours in an A-10A cockpit when he was assigned to command Devil Squadron. At the time, it was only going to exist on paper, a bureaucrat’s accounting for planes en route to the boneyard. But the war — and Schwartzkopf — had intervened, plucking not just the allegedly obsolete Hogs but their supposedly washed-up commander off the discard pile.
His first few flights had been tentative. He’d had to unlearn a dozen habits better suited to the high-powered aircraft he’d grown old with. In a way, Skull’s past glories held him back; the differences between the Hog and the other planes made him think too much about what he was doing, made flying a hair-twitch more intellectual than it needed to be when shit was raining hot and heavy. But the stream of unguided anti-aircraft fire that had caught him off-guard had changed that. He didn’t think now, he flew. As he snapped clear of the flak he nailed the Maverick’s targeting cue onto the Zeus and let go of the missile. The AGM-65 slid through the air to the left as it was dropped, momentarily riding out the Hog’s momentum. But as her engine ignited she cleared her head, setting her chin on the ZSU-23 flak gun. She struck exactly 3.2 seconds later, ending the hail of bullets.
“Trucks moving on the road. I got people,” said A-Bomb.
“Yeah,” said Knowlington, pushing the Hog to the east as his AGM crashed into the tin armor below the flak dealer’s four-barreled turret. “You sure that Frenchie’s real?”
“Authentication checked out,” said A-Bomb. “And the guy knows his restaurants. I’m talking serious snails. Targeting one of the trucks.”
“I got your butt,” said Skull, pulling the Hog around south of his wingman’s.
“Just don’t kiss it,” said A-Bomb. A Maverick dropped from his wing, its solid-fuel motor igniting with a red sparkle.
Had these guys been here all along? Even if the authentication procedure checked out, there was no guarantee someone wasn’t holding a knife to the Frenchie’s throat.
“Splash one Zil,” said A-Bomb as the ground flared with his missile strike. “Bonus shot — one slightly used pickup. Hope high explosives damage is a warranty repair.”
The AWACS cut in, informing them that a pair of F-15s had been diverted to help.
“What the hell are they going to do?” blustered A-Bomb. “They get nose bleeds under twenty thousand feet.”
“A-Bomb, I’m going to take it low and slow over our Frenchman. Tell him to get his butt out in the open. I want to see him alone.”
“He’s got people shooting at him, Boss.”
“Just tell him.”
Knowlington dropped the Hog down in a buzzard’s swoop into the shadows. He felt his way through the grayness, slipping the Hog to sixty feet. He leaned Devil One gently on her keel, improving his view out the side of the cockpit window. But it was just too dark to see a man cowering on the ground. He pushed around, fiddling with the IR head on the Maverick, hoping the glow of the Frenchman’s body would show up somewhere. But the viewer was just too narrow or perhaps not sensitive enough to see the pilot.
Served him right. When he was at the Pentagon, Knowlington had helped kill a proposal to outfit A-10s with night-fighting equipment.
“Says you flew right over him.”
“Yeah, I heard,” Skull told A-Bomb. The trucks O’Rourke had hit were still burning; they would be big blotches on the IR if he could ever get the damn thing oriented right.