And never run into hills.
Hack hadn’t acknowledged, but Doberman didn’t see a flash either. Now he was running right for a fresh stream of anti-air coming from a battery west of the village. Doberman cut south, tossing some flares and chaff in case any of the SAM sites were still working. He temporarily lost his sense of where he was, swinging at too wide an angle to get back on his original target area. His low altitude — he’d ducked to five hundred feet to avoid the SA-11 — made sorting things somewhat harder. He also had to watch out for the hills.
Doberman pushed back westward, climbing slightly and scanning for his wingman, trying not to pay too much attention to the AAA bursting behind him. Wolf cut in with something to the effect that Skull and A-Bomb were on their way; Doberman didn’t have a chance to acknowledge, finally getting a bead on where he was and cutting back with the idea of launching another Maverick and then putting the cannon to work.
As he turned, his RWR bleeped a warning, then went off; in the next instant a gray streak of lightning flashed toward the earth three or four miles to the northeast. It was one of the RAF ALARM missiles nailing the last of the Iraqi SAM installations. The missile had needed only the slightest flick of the on-off switch to memorize its enemy’s location; before the Iraqis could juice up again the British warhead landed, sending hot shards of metal into the nearby SAM as well as the destroying the radar van. A narrow thread of yellow flame rippled on the ground, then erupted brilliant red as the poised SS-11s caught fire.
A pair of yellow and black flame puffs rode skywards, framed by the light of the explosion. Two more followed in quick succession. Doberman guessed they were a flock of heat-seeking SA-9s, launched in desperation. The short-range missiles were not a threat, since they had been launched at long range and lacked all-aspect targeting; they simply had too far to go to get a sniff of his engines.
The quartet of missiles rising now out of Al Kajuk, just ahead of his left wing and nearly parallel to him — those were a different story.
Doberman yanked and banked, goosing flares and trying to whip his turbofans away from the heat-seekers’ noses. One of the SAMs, moving at Mach 1.5, shot out behind him then veered upwards, utterly confused; it exploded in mid-air more than a mile from the Hog’s hull. Another sucked in one of his flares and detonated instantly, bouncing a shock wave but no shrapnel against Doberman’s tail.
But two others, launched in a fresh volley after he began his evasive maneuvers, stayed with him. Each sucked a different engine, lions working a tired zebra from both flanks. Doberman could feel them panting behind him; he goosed more flares and tucked right, tucked left, tucked right, very low now — so low in fact that he was at least ten feet below the summit of the hill that was growing in his front glass.
The missiles kept coming, gaining on him as he gave the stick a hard push left. An elongated football shot by his canopy, so close Glenon could see the thrust surging from its rear end. He nearly took the control column out of the floor trying to turn toward it as it passed, away from the other missile. The air in front of him shuddered as the missile detonated; the Hog skipped sideways with the turbulent shock, more a brick than an airplane, succumbing to several of Newton’s Laws at once.
The second missile exploded on his left, close enough to singe part of the tail fin. Doberman struggled to gain control of the plane, both hands on the stick, his head swimming. With his forward speed plummeting toward stall level, the right wing flipped out from under him; in the back of his mind he thought he’d flamed an engine. He worked to correct but the wing was insistent; he spun through an invert so close to the ground that the wing ip seemed to scrape dirt. But despite the spin and the ground he somehow managed to actually pull stable and begin to climb. He hadn’t lost the GE’s, or if he had it was only temporary, because they were cranking their turbofans now. Head scrambled, legs weak, he somehow managed climb over the highest hill, clearing the scrubby summit by perhaps six inches. The Hog lifted her nose with a snort as she flew into clear air; Doberman’s heart pounded so hard he could hear Tinman’s medal clanging on his chest.
Good luck or not, that sucker was now part of his flight gear. Doberman caught his breath, checked his instruments, and banked south to return to the battlefield. His fuel was a little low; it was possible he’d gotten nicked by shrapnel and had leaked a bit before the Hog’s self-sealing bladders choked shut. Even if that was the case, the situation wasn’t critical.
“Devil Three this Four. Glenon, where the hell are you?”
Preston sounded like a flight leader scolding a nugget for getting outside the formation.
“Where the hell are you?” Doberman responded.
“I’m two miles south of the highway,” said Hack.
“Which fucking highway? There’s two.”
Preston didn’t answer. Obviously he’d meant the east-west highway.
“I’m coming over Kajuk from the northeast,” Doberman told him. “Orbit where you are. I’ll come to you.”
“Four.”
The battlefield lay in a vector that perfectly split the intersection of Doberman’s left wing and fuselage at forty-five degrees. The village sat in the crook of a hill. A line of triple-A installations made a staggered “C” to the east of the village in the direction of Kuwait; only two were still firing, their spew of red and black streaming harmlessly into the air some miles away. Doberman turned his attention to the TVM; he quickly found the tank Preston had hit half-hidden by the shadow of the hill as he approached. Beyond it, several vehicles in the convoy were still burning. Nothing was moving, and there didn’t seem to be any armor left intact.
Doberman tried contacting the ground team but got no response; Wolf didn’t immediately answer his hails either.
“Preston, you talk to Wong and his boys while I was fooling with those SAMs?”
“Negative. Uh, friends call me Hack.”
“Three.” Doberman realized he was being an asshole, but Preston rubbed him the wrong way. “I’m banking west, trying to raise them. I have two more Mavs; I want to hold onto them until I know their situation. The convoy is definitely stopped.”
When two more hails failed to reach Wong and his men, Doberman went back to Wolf. The ABCCC hadn’t heard from the ground team either. The Herk that was supposed to make the pickup had suffered a casualty aboard — apparently a heart attack — but was proceeding anyway.
There was some good news. The Iraqis were desperately trying to radio about a dozen units; the controller took that as a hopeful sign.
Doberman didn’t. It meant there’d be no chance for the ground team to linger. The whole operation had moved so quickly he doubted there had been time to find Dixon.
Son of a bitch. As far as he was concerned, that was the whole reason for the mission.
Son of a bitch.
And now they had other things to worry about — the AWACS monitoring the area spotted two Iraqi fighters taking off from an air base about seventy miles away. At the same time, two SA-2 SAM sites thought to have been eliminated suddenly came back to life.
The SAMs would only be a problem going home, and then only if the Tornadoes or somebody else didn’t splash them. The Iraqi jets were another story. Tentatively ID’d as MiG-29s, they could get within missile range in roughly three minutes. Without a head start, the Hogs would never get away.
The AWACS controller prudently directed Doberman and Preston to snap onto an escape vector away from the Iraqi planes and out of the battle.
“Negative,” answered Doberman. “We’re staying on station.”
The controller’s response — undoubtedly not pretty — was conveniently overrun by another transmission. Doberman tried the ground team again without getting an answer. He turned his full attention to the Maverick screen as he swung back south, as if he might somehow be able to see Wong through the tiny aperture.