HOGS #5: TARGET SADDAM (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (19 page)

But
A-Bomb was a wingman’s wingman. And a Hog driver.

“Turning,”
said Knowlington, starting his sweep. He hit the radio and broadcast a call on
the Guard frequency used by stricken aircraft, asking Vulture Three to
acknowledge.

Static.

It
was a hell of a coincidence, he had to admit. Twenty years before, he’d lost
his own Vulture Three during what had been a routine mission to hit a supply
depot in North Vietnam. Skull had taken a four-ship of Phantoms north for the
strike. It was about midway through his second tour in Vietnam— he’d flown
Thuds on his first— and if the truth be told the mission had seemed almost
boringly routine. They’d encountered no flak and no SAMs en route. Skull had a
good look at the target through the cloud deck as he launched the attack, and a
strong memory of his backs eater telling him they were clean, meaning that the
Vietnamese had not managed to mount a defense. The sky had remained empty as Skull
recovered and the planes regrouped, flying southeastward to the coast as they
had planned.

It
happened that a coastal air defense battery was being hit by Navy A-4s at
the same time; Skull had seen a few black puffs of gunfire in the air, and four
or five separate fires on the ground as he banked over the water and waited for
his flight to catch him. It had seemed like glimpsing the corner of a movie
screen through an open door as he passed through a theater lobby, a quick vivid
glimpse that disappeared as he put his head back to the task at hand. His
wingmate had caught up; they tacked south, waiting for the other two planes in
the flight.

Vulture
Four had arrived shortly, having been separated from Three as he went after a
secondary target. Three never showed.

The
Vietnamese had launched several MiGs to respond to the Navy attack, and things
got tangled quickly. Fuel reserves low to begin with, Skull hadn’t been able to
mount a proper search. The Navy did fly several flights in, but no trace of
Vulture Three was ever found.

Knowlington
forced his eyes down from the Maverick screen to the fuel gauges, running a
quick check on his reserves. They had used considerably less fuel than planned,
but he’d have to think about going south for the tanker soon.

He
keyed back into the command and control aircraft plane running the Strawman
mission for an update. Everything was quiet.

So
had he imagined the distress call?

That
sort of thing had never happened to him before. Not even when he was drinking.

Maybe
it had and he’d just shut it out. Or didn’t even realize it.

“Devil
Leader, I got something hot down there,” said A-Bomb. “Uh, looking about two,
no one-and-a-half miles at say two o’clock off, uh, your nose.”

“One,”
said Knowlington, dipping his wing as A-Bomb continued with more detailed
coordinates. He pushed the Hog lower, easing the throttle back so slow that he
was practically walking.

If
this was a ruse, he was a sitting duck.

A
road cut across the desert; in the screen it looked like a twisted piece of
litter, the narrow cutting from a newspaper fresh off the press.

“Vulture
Three, this is Devil One. Vulture Three, please acknowledge,” Knowlington said
over the emergency band.

A
bright shadow appeared at the top corner of the Maverick screen. Knowlington
edged his stick to the right, the Hog stuttering a bit in the air— his
indicated airspeed had dropped precipitously. He caught it smoothly, the plane
gliding toward the growing glow in his monitor.

Long
cylinder. Maybe a fuselage.

Maybe
a heated decoy.

RWR
clear.

But
it would be if they were planning to use shoulder-launched heat seekers.

Flares
ready.

Knowlington
turned his eyes toward the windscreen, trying to sort through the darkness for
something— anything.

If
it’s an ambush, he thought, let’s get it over with.

“Vulcan
Tres,
Vulcan
Tres,”
crackled a voice over Guard.
“Vulcan Three to approaching allied aircraft.”

Vulcan,
not Vulture. Shit.

“Vulcan
Three, this is Devil leader,”
said Knowlington, flicking his talk button. “Relax friend. Give me a flare.”

Static
flooded into his headphones, and for a long moment Skull feared that maybe he
was
imagining the whole thing. But suddenly a sparkle of red pricked the sky two-and-a-half
miles southeast of his nose.

“There
she blows!” sang A-Bomb.

“Coyote,
this is Devil One,” said Knowlington. “I am in contact with
Vulcan
Three. Repeat,
Vulcan Tres.
French flier. I have a flare. . .” He looked
over and noted the position on the INS, reading it off as he walked his Hog
toward the downed airman. “Requesting verification procedures.”

“Copy,
Devil Flight. You are in contact with Vulcan Three. Stand by.”

“Hell
of an apology,” said A-Bomb.

“Devil
One, I can hear you! I can hear you!” said the downed pilot. He was shouting,
and added two or three sentences in indecipherable French.

“Relax
Vulcan,” Knowlington told him. “Can you give me your status?”

“Merci,
merci. Je ne comprends pas.”

“What?”
asked Knowlington.

“De
rien,”
answered A-Bomb.
“Nous sommes
‘Hog drivers’.”

“Ah,
cochon!
Le Hog.”

“Le
Hog,”
agreed
A-Bomb.

“Magnifique.”

“What
I’m
talkin’
about,” agreed O’Rourke.
“Comment allez-vous?”

“Je
suis perdu.”

“Nah,
you’re not lost. We got your butt,” said A-Bomb, adding words that seemed
roughly the equivalent in French.

“You
speak French, A-Bomb?” said Knowlington after his wingman and the downed pilot
exchanged several more sentences.

“Got
to,” said A-Bomb. “You never know when you’re going to find yourself in Paris,
hunting down a
cafe grande.”

“Devil
Leader, we have an SAR asset en route, call sign Leander Seven. Request you
contact him directly.”

“Devil
One copies. We have one downed pilot, tells us he’s in reasonable shape. No
enemy units at this time. My wingman speaks French and is talking to him. Feed
him the questions.”

“Coyote.”

“Man,
I love it when they’re humble,” said A-Bomb.

“Just
run through the authentication,” said Knowlington, dialing into the search and
rescue helicopter’s frequency.

OVER IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2030

Doberman
eased the
Hog
toward the director lights on the KC-135, sliding toward the refueling boom.
The tanker had edged over the border and they were running well ahead of
schedule. There was no need to rush, but he couldn’t help it— he wanted to tank
and get the hell back north.

Check
that. He wanted to see BJ back on the tarmac at Home Drome, walking around like
a newborn colt, a little embarrassed when A-Bomb slapped him on the back. A-Bomb
would say something like, “Fuckin’ A, Kid,” and Dixon would turn red. Kid was
so pure he didn’t even curse.

Fuckin’
A.

That
was what he wanted.

And
to do that, he had to get his ass back north.

Taking
out Saddam in his pretend Red Cross car wouldn’t be bad either. The job was
tasked to a pair of F-111 sharpshooters, Earth Pigs that wouldn’t even be
leaving their base for at least another hour.

Red
Crescent. Whatever.

He
wouldn’t mind taking that shot himself.

The
tanker twitched right. Doberman pushed on, nudging his rudder pedal gently to
stay with it. The boomer in the tail of the Boeing was watching, ready to aim
his long straw into the fueling port in the A-10’s nose.

The
lights on the big tanker told him he was there.

“Let’s
go, let’s go,” Doberman said to himself as the nozzle clunked in and the fuel
began to flow.

TENT CITY, KING FAHD

27 JANUARY 1991

2030

Air
Force Technical
Sergeant Rebecca Rosen was a cliché: the tough-girl tomboy playing hard-ass to
make it a man’s world. She was the junkyard dog scraping with all the other
dogs just to prove how tough she was.

She
was
tough. She’d been raised in the worst part of Philadelphia in, as it
happened, a junkyard. Or as her uncle called it, “The crème-dalla-crème of the
salvation industry.”

‘Dalla’
was supposed to be “de la,” but no one corrected her uncle, who though only
five-eight could tear a car door off its hinges without breaking a sweat. Few
people corrected his niece, either; there was almost never a need to. Rosen had
a real talent for fixing things, and the Air Force had given her not just the
training but the discipline she needed to put her skills and intellect to work.

Like
her uncle and the cousin she’d been raised with, Rosen had a reputation for
cracking people who got out of line— her personnel records put it more
delicately, if in greater detail. Barely five-two and about a hundred and ten
pounds, Rosen used every volatile ounce of her body to fight; she’d learned to
wrestle pinning junkyard mutts as a ten-year-old and had yet to find a tougher
opponent.

It
was also true that her clothes and skin smelled more like JP-4 than Calvin Klein’s
Obsession. And while she wasn’t ugly by any stretch, it had to be said that she
wasn’t particularly pretty, either. In fatigues and with her cropped hair
pulled back, she could look almost severe.

On
the other hand, there was more to Rosen than the cliché, more than the tough
kid who wrestled dogs and could fix just about any part, electronic or
mechanical, on anything that moved. There was, for instance, a young woman who
had discovered poetry during a bullshit college program she’d signed up for to
shake off some of the boredom of downtime in the mid-eighties.

Sitting
in a large auditorium with a hundred other students, most of them several years
younger, Becky Rosen had heard poetry for the first time. Maybe not literally,
but certainly figuratively. On the first day of class the professor stood in
front of the podium and wheezed through a poem by Walt Whitman declaring
America’s greatness, and then one by Emily Dickinson contemplating the nature
of death and duty. Rosen found herself fascinated, so fascinated that she ended
up taking enough courses to get a BA— and at the time of her assignment to the
Gulf was in fact only a few credits from a master’s.

Not
that she planned to use the degrees for anything. They were an excuse to read,
entertainment better than movies— activities almost as engrossing as
single-handedly overhauling an entire A-10A herself. From the day of that first
class, she had spent at least ten minutes every night reading.

But
tonight, sitting in her quarters in Tent City at the heart of the Home Drome,
Technical Sergeant Rebecca Rosen couldn’t find anything to read, or at least
nothing that sparked. Not Whitman, not Hemingway, not Jones, not the volume of
Joyce she’d promised herself she’d slug through. Not even Dickinson.

She
tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Lieutenant
Dixon, lying dead on the ground near a cave that housed Iraqi chemical weapons.

William
Dixon. BJ. KIA. RIP.

God,
this is morbid, she thought to herself finally. She sat up and pulled out her
small notebook from under the bed. She had been trying for the past few days to
start a journal, vaguely thinking she might write a book about the Gulf when
she got home— maybe get a million-dollar book contract and buy her own fixed
base operation when she got home.

Or
a junkyard. Hey, you went with what you knew.

She’d
barely filled two pages so far with a few notes on the people she served with.
She looked at her scrawl, barely readable even by her, then turned to a fresh
page, starting to describe Tent City.

A
well-ordered chaos of temporary quarters, theoretically intended for low-class
enlisted types but housing even hoity-toity officers due to a severe shortage
of facilities and poor political prowess on the part of muckety-mucks many echelons
above.

Or
not.

Her
pen fidgeted on the paper. She thought of Dixon, his baby face. They’d kissed
once, almost by accident. She felt the kiss now, felt him pressing against her
body, rubbing his hands against her breasts.