HOGS #5: TARGET SADDAM (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (23 page)

“Can
you complete your mission?” asked the controller.

Lars
felt his lungs cough for air.

“We
will complete our mission,” he said between gulps.

He
had talked over the engineer again. This time, however, their words chorused
together, exactly the same.

OVER IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2150

Major
Preston watched
the black-green hull of Devil Three plunge downwards, blurring into the raging
hell fires. The dark night sky seemed to fold over itself as the Russian-made
triple-A hunted through the sky for the intruders. One of the SAM operators had
managed to launch two missiles; both were in the air somewhere ahead. Preston
felt naked. His A-10’s ALQ-119 electronic counter measures pod was older than
the airplane and incapable of confusing an SA-8, let alone the SA-11s.

But
Doberman flew right into the teeth of the defenses, despite Hack’s warnings.
All he could do was follow as his leader pitched downward almost directly over
the target area, single-mindedly hunting for Strawman. He had a hell of an
attitude but he had balls, no question about it.

Doberman
snapped out something over the radio. Preston’s brain worked in slow motion,
processing the words.

He’d
launched the Mavericks.

Now
it was Hack’s turn. Someone blurted something over the radio; he only half
heard it, trying to find a target in his screen.

The
Tornado commander had just assured the Hogs that they had launched their ALARMS
at the other SAMs, the ones that hadn’t turned on their radar. Unlike American
HARMs, the homing missiles could loiter above until the SAMs came back on-line.

Somehow,
the idea of four or six missiles flying around overhead didn’t comfort him.
Hack slid his eyes over to the small screen at the upper right quadrant of his
dash. He had the highway in the middle of the screen, no vehicles. The screen
blurred, the IR head temporarily overwhelmed by the flash of Doberman’s
Maverick striking the station wagon.

There’s
a way to compensate for that, Hack thought. What the hell is it?

Close
your eyes?

A
second flash. Doberman had taken out the APC as well.

Cocky
little son of a bitch was one hell of a pilot.

Past
tense. He spotted the Hog pitching left in front of a looming shadow— one of
the SA-11s.

Poor
son of a bitch.

Poor
nasty son of a bitch.

Something
exploded in the sky a mile ahead to the east, obliterating the darkness
Doberman had just flown into. Hack gaped at the curling red circles that
mushroomed into yellow and black spheres. The fireball crinkled at its edges,
as if it were made of paper. Then it flashed white and disappeared, its only
trace the shadow it had burned on his retina.

Jesus,
he thought. I’ve never seen someone die before.

Poor
nasty son of a bitch.

He
started to turn his attention back to his targeting screen when Doberman’s
voice came over the radio.

“Preston,
you’re up. Go for the tank by the hill.”

What?

“Three,
are you okay?” he said.

“What
the fuck are you talking about, asshole? Take your shot. You’re almost on the
god-damn highway.”

“I
just saw your plane blowup.”

“You
just saw the missile miss me and explode. Take your fucking shot. Then wheel if
you can manage it and cover me. And watch it— there’s one more warhead in the
air.”

Before
Hack could respond, there was a second explosion in the sky, this one much
higher and at least four miles further away.

“Take
your fucking shot!” screamed Doberman.

Hack,
partly angry, partly incredulous, and partly relieved, tore his attention back
to the TVM. He pushed his right leg gently against the rudder pedal, nudging
the plane ever so slightly through an eddy of turbulence. Somehow he
overcorrected, elbow suddenly cramping as he moved the stick; he came back too
hard and felt the beginning of a serious yaw, the plane pitching back and forth
as it tried to follow the pilot’s over-anxious control inputs. He stopped
moving the stick, told himself that it was going to have to be okay if he blew
the attack— he’d be embarrassed but there’d be a next go-around, assuming the
Tornadoes hadn’t missed any SAMs and none of the arcing yellow and green flares
of anti-air perforated his wings.

Maybe
he’d underestimated the Hog drivers, not just Doberman but every last one of
them, willing to fly way the hell up here and hang their butts out where
everybody in the world could hit them.

No
longer confused by the jerks on her control stick, the Hog straightened herself
out, pushing her tail up and sticking her chin down, smelling a ripe and ready
piece of Iraqi meat on the ground ahead. Hack glanced at the HUD screen, noted
the altimeter ladder falling through six thousand feet, then put his eyes back
on the Maverick monitor. A big brick with a lollipop stuck on the top of it
appeared in the left-hand corner; the brick reared back and flared into a glow
so bright he thought the monitor would catch fire. The targeting cue jumped as
Hack moved it toward the blur, sucking itself in.

But
it didn’t lock, instead jittering away as Hack nudged his stick in the tank’s
direction. Had he been flying an F-15, his touch would have been perfect; the
plane would have bucked her nose ever so slightly in the proper direction. But
Hack wasn’t flying an F-15, and as he felt a whisper of resistance from the
controls, he pushed harder. Confused but obedient, the A-10A jerked her nose
upwards to follow his command; Hack felt his stomach get weak again with the
first hint of another yaw.

Do
your best,
he
reminded himself, and this time he resisted the temptation to over correct. The
plane’s momentum carried it into off the path he’d plotted, but he worked the
cursor down as the tank reappeared in the upper quadrant of the screen. The cue
slipped one way and then the other; Hack cursed and then realized with a shock
he was down to two thousand feet.

As
he went to jerk himself skywards, he saw the cursor plant itself square on the
center of the lollipop.

IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2150

The
black turned
deep blue and a wedge of yellow appeared above, morphing into a triangle of
pure, perfect whiteness, a gleam that grew and consumed everything else. Wong
felt the edges of the triangle sear his face, bursting with the heat of a
phosphorus grenade. It burned straight through his skull, his ears tingling
with the sensation not of heat but cold; freezing cold. The triangle turned
from white to black, the sides of his skull folded into it. His body followed
in a rush, vacuumed inside out, skin to organs, molecule by molecule. He was at
the end of a long, geometric tunnel cut from an infinite prism, glittering with
a blue-blackness that seemed the inverse of light, as if it were capturing all
colors to enhance its own nature. As he stood and stared, the crystal flared,
then began to vibrate, pulsing with its blackness.

“Interesting,”
Wong said aloud. “The metaphysical implications of this experience challenge a
great deal of my essential beliefs regarding the nature of existence. But I
have a considerable amount of work to do. Perhaps we can continue this at
another time.”

And
in that moment he was flung down on his back, his head bouncing off the hard
rocks. He opened his eyes to an enormous headache and the flash of missiles and
shells exploding all around him, bullets flying everywhere in the air.

He
could see it all, but he heard nothing. The explosion had rendered him deaf.

In
some ways that was a blessing, because he was in the middle of an enormous
racket. Wong’s explosive charges had indeed thrown the tank’s aim off, but the
T-72 crew was still firing. Wong turned to look back in the direction of Davis
and Salt when his eye caught a wavering shadow above the highway; a red and
yellow burst below it, followed by the quick flash of a gas tank exploding. A
second flash, a second fireball, this one not quite as high. The long barrel of
a howitzer or light tank gun somersaulted into the sky.

Obviously,
the Hogs had arrived. And if, as was their wont, the A-10s were blowing up the
biggest things they could find, the T-72 would be next.

Wong
turned began running about ten seconds before the AGM-65 hit the top of the
tank, crushing it with the wallop of a hammer hitting the side of a soda can.
He slid into the crater created by the C-4, narrowly avoiding a spray of heavy
machine-gun fire.

As
he swung himself around on his haunches, Wong realized he had lost his MP-5
somewhere along the way. He had carried two pistols— a .44 magnum Desert Eagle
and a SIG P226. Both were admirable weapons with slightly different
applications, not to mention limited utility in the present situation. The
Desert Eagle carried only seven rounds, though admittedly these were monster
magnum slugs capable of stopping anything smaller than a rhinoceros. The heavy
gun’s demanding kick made it more suitable to close encounters of the
one-on-one kind, and Wong therefore chose the SIG, whose utter dependability and
fifteen 9 mm rounds were enhanced by a nature that could only be described as
“sweet,” even by someone like Wong who was not given to such imprecise and
abstract descriptions. Pistol in hand, he got up and began running in the
direction of the Delta team. Alternately ducking, diving, running, and
spinning, it took Wong several minutes to spot Sergeant Davis hunkered behind
his SAW. As the M249 Minimi spit a fresh mouthful of 7.62 mm toward the
highway, Wong yelled to the sergeant, sliding in behind him as the light
machine-gun clicked through the last of the rounds in its plastic feeder.

Davis
shouted something in response, but Wong still couldn’t hear.

“I’m
deaf,” he yelled, or thought he yelled— he couldn’t even hear himself.

Davis
nodded vigorously, then reloaded the gun.

There
were two knot of Iraqis firing at them. One was toward the north end of the
highway, beyond the truck Salt had taken out with his grenade. They were firing
willy-nilly, beyond the effective range of their weapons but not daring to move
up.

The
other knot was directly ahead, with better aim and more guns.

Wong
realized that there must be more soldiers, but they were either dazed by the
attack or prudently waiting until they had clear and obvious shots.

“Where’s
Sergeant Salt?” he asked Davis.

Davis
spoke and made a kind of looping gesture with his hand; Wong took it to mean
that Salt had decided to try flanking around the Iraqi’s position.

“The
A-10s didn’t know to hit the Mercedes,” said Wong. “They would have gone for
the station wagon. Is the Mercedes still intact?”

Davis
didn’t know.

“We
have to get Strawman,” Wong said. “Come.”

Wong
jumped up, running to his right in a diagonal toward the curving highway,
intending to flank the stalled convoy. A DShKM “Dushka” heavy machine-gun roared
to their left, spitting its monster 12.7 mm shells into the night, fortunately
behind them. A shadow loomed dead ahead. Wong extended his arm and pumped two
slugs from the Sig in its direction, then threw himself down into a roll to
duck any return fire. He rolled back to his stomach and got up into a crouch.
The Dushka raked the night again, this time considerably closer to Wong and
Davis, who had thrown himself to the ground a few feet away. The Russian-made
heavy machine-gun was being fired from the lip of the road about forty yards
away on the left; he had an unobstructed field of fire and sooner or later one
of his sprays was going to nail them. Wong reached to his web belt for his M26
fragmentation grenade; his fingers had just touched it when he saw Davis
rearing back and pitching one of his own.

Forty
yards was a good toss under fire, but the sergeant had a right fielder’s arm.
Fused to detonate on impact, the M26 sprayed its fragments through the air,
killing the two men who had been operating the machine-gun. Meanwhile, someone
with an AK-47 fired a burst at them from the edge of the road. Wong sighted
across the top of his pistol but all he could see was darkness. He took a
handful of dirt, tossing it to the left; as the soldier began firing in the
direction of the noise Wong fired a single shot.

The
Iraqi screamed, his anguish cascading over the battlefield. Wong crawled to his
right a few yards, then picked himself up and began running toward the highway.

The
Mercedes sat to his left off the road. There was a troop truck just beyond it.
Wong still had the grenade in his hand and considered tossing it at the truck;
he didn’t though, not knowing where Salt was.

A
second vehicle sat about ten yards down the highway to his right. Its motor
wheezed; Wong threw himself down as a shadow ran behind it.