Hogs #2: Hog Down (3 page)

APPROACHING
THE IRAQI BORDER

21
JANUARY 1991

1732

T
hree-quarters of
the world was blue— the
light, delicate blue of a woman’s summer dress, inviting, scented with a
fragrance that tickled and enticed.

The
last quarter was hell, dirty yellow and brown, punctuated by black splotches
and fingers of smoke and fire. Mongoose looked down through cockpit glass as
the Hog chugged upwards, struggling to make the lofty twenty thousand feet
prescribed as the “safe” altitude to cross the border. The A-10A was designed
for smash-mouth, chin-in-the-mud flying. While other aircraft might consider
twenty angels medium altitude, a heavily laden Hog worked up a serious sweat
getting up there.

And
to a Hog pilot, twenty thousand feet was just about in orbit. Hell, once the
altimeter cranked over a hundred feet most guys called for oxygen and maybe a
stewardess. But the brass had ordered the planes high to put them out of range
of what was left of the Iraqi air defenses; though they’d been pounded pretty
well on Day One of the air war, Saddam still had a formidable array of anti-aircraft
guns and low-altitude missiles.

An
Iraqi highway appeared in the distance as Mongoose oriented himself. It ran in
a faint, gentle arc across the earth, like the scar left from a botched suicide
attempt. Somewhere along it was an artillery encampment that Mongoose and A-Bomb
had hit on their last run a few hours before, a five-clawed puppy paw of a site
they had left mangled like a teenage girl’s wad of chewing gum. The pilot
stared to the east, looking for the dark blotch of blackness that ought to mark
it and the graves of the Iraqis who had worked the guns. There had been no
resistance to speak of; the run had been quick, in and out, their bombs and
missiles released from no lower than nine thousand feet, precisely as briefed.
If anyone had fired at them, they hadn’t notice.

That
was just fine as far as Mongoose was concerned. The medium altitude tactics
felt awkward, but you couldn’t argue with the goal of getting everybody back in
one piece. As the brass were fond of saying, there wasn’t anything worth dying
for up here.

Which
wasn’t to say that they wouldn’t get down and dirty if the situation called for
it. Mongoose pushed his back against his seat, trying to undo a knot that had
been tightening practically since leaving King Khalid. Part of him was
convinced that the Hog had knotted his muscles itself because it didn’t like
flying so high.

He
double-checked his INS, mentally calculating that they were about ten minutes
south of the quadrant in their assigned “kill box” or grid where they were to
look for their target, another artillery park. Mongoose edged his eyes in that
direction, his anticipation starting to build as he let the Hog nose ever so
slightly into a very shallow dive. He aimed to arrive over their target at
about fifteen thousand feet. The plane, happy to be on track for thicker air
and sensing that she’d soon get a chance to do some snorting, gave him a happy
growl, picking up speed.

Devil
One and Two were each carrying a pair of Maverick B air-to-ground missiles and
four Mk 20 Rockeye II cluster bombs. The Maverick B models were relatively
primitive versions of the tank-busting weapon; a video camera in the nose
displayed its target in a small television screen or TVM on the right side of
the Hog’s control panel. Once a target was designated and locked, the pilot
could launch the missile and move on; the Maverick’s own guidance system took
over, flying its 125-pound shaped-charge warhead to the crosshairs. Newer
models featured better seekers with infrared targeting and a heavier payload,
but the B was still a deadly piece of meat, and only cost the air force about
$22,000, a relative bargain— especially when compared to what it blew up.

The
Mk 20 Rockeye II weapons were unguided but devastating; their bomblets spread
out when dropped, a deadly hailstorm particularly suited for “softer” targets.
The bombs were preset for this mission to be dropped from ten thousand feet;
their need to be calibrated before taking off removed some of their flexibility,
which was their only real drawback.

When
the Hogs were about five minutes from their target, Mongoose did one more check
of his paper map and coordinates. He was just rechecking their egress route
back to base when their airborne controller, Red Dog, squawked out his call
sign.

“Stand
by for new tasking,” said the controller after running through the
acknowledgment codes.

That
meant: We got something juicy for you, so get your pen and paper handy.

Or
in this case, your Perspex; Mongoose scrawled the heading and way markers
directly onto the canopy glass with a grease pen. The nine-line brief began
with an IP— an “initial point” to fly to that acted as the marker for most of
the rest of the instructions.

The
numbers on the glass were sending them about sixty miles further in Iraq, and
well to the west, up in the direction of the Euphrates River and the better
sections of the Iraqi air defense system. It was a hell of a long way to send
the Warthogs, and Mongoose immediately guessed why.

He
asked anyway. “What are we looking for, Red Eyes?”

“Scud
launchers. F-111 crew saw them on the way out. Two, possibly more. Some
auxiliaries.”

“Copy,”
said Mongoose, immediately bringing his plane to the new heading.

The
Iraqis had started launching the ground-to-ground missiles shortly after the
start of the air war. Because of their range and ability to carry chemical and
biological agents, Scuds had top priority as targets. So far, none had actually
done much damage— but the allies’ luck couldn’t hold for very long.

The controller
added that a Phantom Wild Weasel was being vectored into the area and would
suppress any surface-to-air nasties. Like all the Weasels in the theater, the
F-4 had a “beer” call sign: Rheingold One.

“The
one Weasel to call when you’re slamming more than one,” sang A-Bomb in Devil Two.
“I hope this Scud launcher is the son of a bitch who woke me up last night.
Man, he pissed me off. I was in the middle of a wet dream.”

The
rest of his transmission was covered by another flight. In theory, the squadron
frequency should have been reserved just for them, but the large number of
allied sorties and the fog of war had a way of mangling theories.

Mongoose
wasn’t a particular fan of chitchat anyway, especially in this situation. If
his map and memory were right, the suspected launch site was pretty close to
several Iraqi SAM sites. The missiles had been hit at the beginning of the war,
but that didn’t necessarily mean a few weren’t still there. But that’s what the
Weasel was for.

He
took a quick glance at his instruments. Everything was at spec. His heart was
well into its pre-action rumble and his throat tightened a half-notch.
Something inside his brain flicked a switch and the irises in his eyes widened.
His situational awareness— a mental balloon of wariness around him— expanded as
he gripped the stick between his knees, nudging the Hog toward the first
reference marker.

His
eyes turned upwards as a pair of F-15 Eagles on combat air patrol screeched
across the sky well ahead and above the two A-10s. The pointy-nosed fast movers
had just gotten word that an Iraqi plane was scrambling from an air base nearly
a hundred and fifty miles to the north. The two jets looked like a pair of
famished wolves, anxious for a kill.

Mongoose
put his mind and eyes back where they belonged, scouting the ground ahead. The
Hog was barely making two hundred knots, moving slow because of the altitude
and its bomb load.

They
were just three minutes to the target coordinate when Rheingold One checked in.
He was swinging in from the northwest, obviously diverted from something else.
His scopes were clear.

An
old soldier now, the F-4 was equipped with radar-seeking HARM missiles that
homed in on anti-air defenses. The missiles were extremely potent, but worked
only when the radar sets were turned on— something the Iraqis had quickly
learned not to do until they definitely wanted to shoot something down. The
Weasel pilot sounded a little disappointed as he told Devil One things were
quiet and would probably stay that way.

“Okay.
Let’s keep it at fifteen thousand feet,” Mongoose told A-Bomb. “Take a circuit
and see what we can see.”

“Sounds
good to me.”

“You
see that smudge off my right wing?”

“Four-barrel
ZSU, gotta be.”

“Yeah,
I think. Nowhere near where our missiles are supposed to be.”

“I
got a good view. No missiles there. Looks like some sort of APC next to it,
nothing else.”

“Okay,
good. Let’s keep our distance.”

“’less
we get bored.”

Mongoose
held the Hog on its side so he could take a good gander at the ground, tilting
his wings carefully. He told himself to break everything down, take things in
pieces, and punch the buttons. This far north anything could happen. You had to
go at it very deliberately.

There
was no denying the adrenaline. In a certain way he almost considered this fun—
not amusement park fun, since people were or could shot at him— but fun in the
sense that it was what he was meant to do, what he was trained for and good at.

So
where the hell were these things? He put his eyes out back toward the
anti-aircraft gun he’d seen; well to the east now, its smudge had disappeared.
It sat alone at the edge of the wasteland, with seemingly no reason to be
agitated and too far from them to be of any immediate concern. He passed his
eyes around in the other direction, noting that the desert was less
stereotypical sand and dune desert here, more like a dirt parking lot that
hadn’t been used in a long time. Scrubby vegetation and even some trees poked
up everywhere in the packed-dirt wasteland before giving way to the more
resolute stretches of sand.

Intel
had passed around various pictures of Scud sites, and both Mongoose and A-Bomb
had seen— and smoked— a carrier the other day. A typical launch site would
arrange five or six missile erectors like fingers on a hand around a central
command area. The Russian-made launchers were large trucks that looked like
squashed soap pads with toilet paper tubes on them. But the Iraqis also made
their own launchers from the transport trailers. From the air at this altitude
they would look like long tanker trucks, dark pencils against the darker earth.

Mongoose
saw nothing manmade below except the faint ribbon of a road. No trucks, no
launchers, no Scuds. Definitely no base or flattened pull-off area. They were
standing on the coordinates the controller had given them.

He
continued the long, almost lazy figure-eight pattern around the area, gave a
good scan again and still found nothing.

“See
anything?” he asked his wing mate.

“Nah.
You know what the problem is? We’re too high,” A-Bomb said. It was pretty much
his answer to everything. “They could have all sorts of things camouflaged down
there. We’re going to have to take it down.”

Mongoose
reasoned that the plane that had spotted the launch site had probably been
flying a lot higher than they were. “We’ll hold off on that a second,” he told A-Bomb.
“You got that highway?”

“Oh,
yeah. No missin’ it. Probably goes right to Saddam’s house.”

“Let’s
follow it north and see if we can find anything worth taking a look at. Launch
site has to be near a road.”

“Gotcha.”

Thirty
seconds later, Mongoose caught the glare from something small and white moving
along the highway ahead. He quick-glanced at the weapons panel but kept his
stick hand solid. The white blur focused itself into a small pickup truck, too
insignificant to be a target.

The
road edged to the left ahead. There was a spot that seemed darker than the rest
of the nearby desert; two or three shadows were at the edge, tents or
something.

Good
place for a bunker.

And
more than that. Beyond the shadows were several rows of boxes that just had to
be trucks, maybe armored personnel carriers or even light tanks.

“A-Bomb,
there’s a wadi or something just northwest of the road where that truck is
passing. Follow that and you’ll see a bunker complex or some awfully funny
looking sand dunes looks like what, maybe a mile up it. Got it?”

Before
his wing mate could acknowledge, the Hog’s launch warning system began shouting
that Saddam’s forces had just fired a surface-to-air missile in their
direction.

KING FAHD, AIRBASE

21 JANUARY 1991

1742

F
or some guys
, the worst time was the
middle of the night. They’d lie awake in bed, sounds and shadows creeping
around the periphery of their consciousness. Innocent things, or maybe not so
innocent things, would poke at their memories, prod anxieties, fuel guilt.
They’d sweat and writhe; eventually they’d get up. From there it would get
worse.

Colonel
Thomas “Skull” Knowlington had never minded the night. Even at the worst of
times, he could sleep. And if he wasn’t sleeping, he was up because he had
plenty to do, and having plenty to do meant he could focus on the present. That
he could do; that was easy.

For
him, the worst time was the middle of the day, the dead time between missions,
when the paperwork was done, when he’d run out of things to check on, when he
had no more calls to make or people to see. The late afternoon, with all his
guys still out and everyone around him working or else off catching a quick
breather— that was the worst time. That was the time he could do nothing, and
doing nothing was the worst. Doing nothing led to old memories, and old
memories led to a powerful thirst.

Thomas
Knowlington— commander of 535
^th
Attack Squadron (Provisional), wing
commander, if only on paper, decorated hero of the Vietnam War, a survivor of
not just combat but the more dangerous intricacies of service politics— would
do anything
not
to satisfy that thirst. He had been sober now for
going on three and a half weeks. “Skull” Knowlington needed to put one more day
on that streak, just one more day.

There’d
be more, a long string beyond that, but for now, just one solid, drink-free day
was his goal.

For
much of his air force career he had hated paperwork, abhorring the bureaucratic
red tape and bullshit. Now he welcomed it— not because he appreciated that it
was impossible to run an organization as vast and complex as the air force
without it, but because it gave him something to focus on. But inevitably, it
was over. When the colonel finished proof-reading the last fitness report—
something that could have waited for weeks if not months— he found his small
desk completely empty. He got up, deciding to check things in the shop area, a
short walk from the complex of trailers used as the squadron offices and dubbed
“Hog Heaven” by the men. Besides Devil Squadron, seven A-10A units, over a
hundred planes, used King Fahd as their home drome; it was also home to an
assortment of helo and C-130 units, not to mention serving as a safe place to
set down for anyone in the area. O’Hare on the day before Thanksgiving wasn’t
half as busy.

Out
in the Devil’s repair areas, one of Knowlington’s crews was refurbishing a Hog
damaged during action earlier in the week. A new starboard rudder was being fitted
in place on the large double tail at the rear; the colonel stopped to watch as
the wing and its new control surface were quickly made whole. It was a
testament not only to the crew, but to the men who had designed the plane for
rapid repair in battle conditions.

“Colonel,
can we help you, sir?” snapped off Sergeant Rebecca Rosen. She had a piece of a
radar altimeter in her hand.

That
or the liver of some unsuspecting airman who’d come on to her.

Officer’s
liver would be larger.

“I’m
in good shape at the moment, Sergeant,” Knowlington told her. “How about
yourself?”

“Well,
there was one thing, Sir.”

The
colonel resisted the temptation to say, “How did I guess?” Instead he took a
step backwards, gesturing that she should continue. One of the tricks to
dealing with Rosen was to keep her from a completely private area where she would
feel at liberty to vent for hours.

She
squinted, obviously debating whether to ask to speak in his office. The
colonel, an old hand at hearing grievances real and imagined, stood hard-faced.
It wasn’t that he disliked dealing with true problems. Rosen, however, was a
walking folder of potential disciplinary BS. Just under five-two with a trim
and not unpleasant build, her most distinguishing feature was the six-by-six
chip on her shoulder. Knowlington’s chief sergeant rated her among the best
technicians in the air force, an expert on the Hog’s avionics and a tireless
worker. He also had her pegged as the top problem magnet in the squadron, a
judgment Knowlington couldn’t argue with.

“The
other afternoon,” she said. “Captain Meyer, sir, well he, uh— ”

“OK,
now tell me. Meyer is who?” Knowlington asked.

Rosen
stopped, her eyes receding into their sockets as she realized she had
miscalculated. The spec five had obviously expected Meyer to complain about
something she’d done; now that Rosen realized he hadn’t, she beat a slippery
retreat. The squirm on her face was almost worth the pain she’d cause him next
time. “Um, never mind, sir. I have to get this installed pretty much right
away.”

“Any
time, Sergeant,” said Knowlington cheerfully.

He
distributed a few other nods, making sure the crewmen knew he was there but
trying at the same time not to bother them. A good part of his job as commander
was to be a cheerleader, as much as possible applauding the men— and now women—
coming up with incentives to keep the team together and moving in the right
direction, but trusting his subordinates as much as possible to do their jobs.
Over the past few years he’d found it less and less necessary to be a scumbag;
either the air force was getting better, or he was.

A
Navy A-6 Intruder touched down on the runway with a loud screech. Knowlington
stepped forward to watch as the muscled gray swallow taxied. The first time
he’d seen one he’d been at Da Nang, diverted for an emergency landing after
flying a bit too close to a triple-A battery in his Thud. He was in good enough
shape to circle the field while the Navy pilot, low on fuel, made his own pit
stop. The plane had suffered an unexplained electronics failure, a common
failure of planes of the era, Intruders especially.

They
had beers later. The Navy guy, a lieutenant with two tours under his belt,
bemoaned the fact that he would take a hell of a ribbing when he got back to
the carrier; real pilots brought their planes back to their ship, no matter
what.

Later,
on their third or fourth beer, Knowlington saw the glance. It was the first
time he’d truly seen fear in a pilot’s eye. In retrospect, he realized that
he’d seen other signs before, but not recognized them, didn’t know what they
meant: the furtive glance at your hands, the slight hesitation before speaking,
the quick order of another drink, the urge to talk too much. It wasn’t fear so
much as being afraid of fear, as doubting yourself, and that was what killed
you.

He
heard later the guy had been shot down on his very next mission. MIA.

Knowlington
tried to move his mind off the past, think of something else as the Intruder
disappeared down the runway. Hell of a thing, trying to land on a carrier.
Skull had never had the pleasure, and he counted himself lucky. Landing on a
dime was one thing; landing on something that rolled beneath you was quite
another.

Just
another thing to make you doubt yourself, squinting for the ball in the dark
when you were just about out of gas and probably had to take a leak besides.

Intruders
were supposed to be pretty stable bombers, muscular workhorses that carried a
ton-load of bombs— 15,000 to 16,000 pounds– off a carrier without breaking a
sweat.

Thuds
were champion haulers themselves. The notched-wing fighter-bombers had been
designed to hump nukes at breakneck speed over enemy lines and get the pilot
back in one un-radiated piece. Skull had carried some dummy nukes very early in
his career, but what he used the F-105 for was dropping sticks on the North
Vietnamese. He’d been pretty damn good at it, too.

Carrying
a nuke. Now there was a pucker-ass job, if you stopped to think what you were
doing. Some of the real old-timers talked about jets where they knew they’d
never get away from the blast. Who was it– Schroeder, maybe?– laughed about the
F-84, hanging his butt over Cuba three days in a row.

No,
that was a different story. They had a tendency to blur together.

Damn,
he wanted a drink.

His
heart started pounding. He was back in the Thud, Ol’ Horse, plane one, stone
ages. Smell of raw kerosene and something that reminded him of a dentist’s
office thick in his nose. Muscling the stick after dropping his load. Tail-end
Charlie and he’d lost the rest of the flight. Just like the nugget he was.

Nothing
to panic about. Knowlington brought the plane around to his course, climbing
and then something happened, something made him crane his neck back. Maybe it
was training or luck or intuition or just random chance, but as the young pilot
pitched his eyes toward the rear quarter of his plane he saw the double dagger
of a MiG-17 coming up to get him.

They
were tough little bastards, in theory obsolete but in reality more than
competent dogfighters. They got you in a fur ball and you could easily get your
throat slit. The eggheads could pretend the F-105 had them outclassed but
experience said otherwise. Had Knowlington not realized the bastard was on him,
he would have been nailed in thirty seconds.

But
he saw him. And instead of opening the engine gates and running like hell– his
briefed routine, his orders, the prudent thing to do, what he absolutely would
have done in ninety-nine out of one hundred other chances– he tucked his wing,
pushing the stick as he began a ballet maneuver that suckered the MiG into
following into a dive-and-scissors roll. He saw it all in his head a split-second
before it happened: the second of danger as the enemy sighted him; the spin
around instead of breaking off; behind the enemy now; the 20mm M61A1 cannon
rotating slowly at first, then gaining momentum as he caught the MiG just
behind his right wing, and stayed with him as the plane jinked, and stayed with
him until he realized the commie bastard was out of it; seeing the wing
breaking off even as he fought his own stick to level off; and finally getting
the hell out of here, straight on course for home.

It
turned out another F-105 pilot had seen the whole thing, raved like hell, and
Knowlington had earned the first of his long series of “good” nicknames,
“Killer Kid,” and notched an improbable air-to-air victory in a plane not known
as much of a dogfighter. His victory was due as much to surprise and probably
inexperience on the MiG pilot’s part as his own skill, but that was the sort of
thing that got glossed over in the first rush of victory. In any event he had
plenty of chances later to show it wasn’t just luck that kept his wings in the
air.

So
long ago now, though the surprise in his chest when he realized he’d nailed
that son of a bitch still felt fresh.

More
than twenty years. Shit, twenty-five. He should be long-since retired.

Or
made a general, though everyone knew why that didn’t happen.

Skull
blinked his eyes and turned away from the runway, hoping to wipe his mind
clean. Replaying old glories was something you did when you were sitting down
for dinner at the old age home.

Or
when you were drinking. He headed back toward his office. Maybe he’d reread the
Devil’s frag— the portion of the air tasking order that pertained to them. The
next-day’s to-do list had ten of the squadron’s twelve planes committed to
battle. It was a tight schedule, with one left in the repair shop and only one
other as a spare. Even so, if the crew got the damaged plane back together in
time, the backups might be tasked for their own mission.

Knowlington
was dying to lead a mission himself. He’d been told not to, and there were good
reasons for him to follow orders— starting with the fact that they were orders—
but still. What good was a squadron commander who didn’t fly?

He
put his head down, pushing the question and its inevitable answer from his mind
as he walked back toward his office.

* * *

He
was a few steps from the door to Hog Heaven when he was caught by the bear-like
voice of Chief Master Sergeant Alan Clyston, his “capo di capo”. Clyston not
only headed the squadron’s enlisted contingent but oversaw the squadron’s
maintenance efforts personally, arranged for all manner of off-line items to
appear with paperwork signed (or lost), and knew more than the World Book
Encyclopedia on any subject anyone could quiz him on.

In
short, a typical chief.

“There
you are, Colonel,” said the Chief in his most respectful public voice.
Clyston’s grin, though, betrayed the fact that he had known Knowlington well
before he’d achieved that rank. He had, in fact, been a member of the crew that
took care of the Thunderchief Knowlington had just been thinking about.

The chief’s
memory of the plane would undoubtedly be a great deal different than the
colonel’s. The Thunderchiefs were notoriously difficult to maintain.

“What’s
up, Alan?”