Hogs #4:Snake Eaters (15 page)

O
VER IRAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

1815

Doberman
swung back
to the north, hunting through the blur of shadows for the highway and culvert. It was his second orbit south of the target area, but he still had trouble getting his bearings, let alone finding what he wanted to hit. Between his altitude— he was a nudge over 12,000 feet— and the twilight, most of what he saw looked like light chocolate and dark mud.

Ten more minutes and he’d only dark mud. The infra-red seeker in his Maverick cou
ld be used as a primitive night-vision device, but the small angle on the viewer made it at least helpful to narrow the general area down before trying to find the target. Doberman’s normally excellent eyes weren’t cooperating; between the shadows and his fatigue he wasn’t even sure he had the highway. What he thought was the highway jagged to the right, which didn’t seem right. He angled the Hog, nearing the northernmost edge of the circle he was drawing before he happened to glance to the left and saw a tiny brown brick at the left corner of his windscreen. He lost it as he began to turn, but he realized it must be the mobile SAM launcher.

Banking, Doberman quickly reoriented himself. And now the shadows had meaning
— there was the village, there was the hill. He had the highway, knew now where the SA-9s would be. He mapped out a long wide loop that would give him an easy approach toward the culvert.

Be nice to hear from Wong about now. He’d tried twice already without getting an answer.

“Devil One to Snake Eaters,” he said, pushing his mike button in. “Yo, Wong, what’s the story? Come on! You up or what?”

Doberman took his eyes off the windscreen to double-check the frequency and repeat the call.

Nada.

Dark Snake
, the Blackhawk that was supposed to be rendezvousing with the team, didn’t answer his hail either.

He came around at the southern end of his orbit, swinging into the approach. He was at nine thousand feet, roughly ten miles south of the culvert, lined up for a direct shot in. At
twelve thousand feet, the Mavericks were accurate to roughly ten miles; the closer he got, the better his odds of hitting the target. The SA-9s protecting the Iraqi launcher had a range of about five miles at that altitude; that left him with a perfectly safe firing envelope of just under a minute, plenty of time to take two shots under ordinary circumstances.

But that would mean attacking the SAMs with the cluster
bombs. Tricky in the dark.

Better to fire the Maverick, circle back, make sure he hit. Then he could dial up one of the SA-9s on the TV screen, blow it to smithereens. He’d then have the option of using the
cluster bombs on the last launcher, or letting the F-16s worry about it.

Be n
ice to hear from Wong about now.

Gravity tickled his side as he righted the Hog
and slotted into the attack run. Doberman saw a flash of light on the ground off his left wing; knew that meant the fire team was in trouble. But it was too late now— he pushed his head down into the Maverick monitor, easing the cursor toward the big shadow at the very corner of his screen. He waited for the shadow to move toward him— it was Zen, these final seconds, or maybe yin and yang, the target moving and the cursor moving, coming toward each other. It could be described by a mathematical formula: A x B = boom.

He had the dark spot under the highway, the cursor was there. His thumb moved over the trigger.

“Bing-bang-boom,” he said calmly, pushing the Maverick off from beneath his wing. The thick cylinder slipped downwards, its blunt nose locked on the target. For a moment it stood in the air, propelled only by forward momentum, still part of the airplane. Then the Thiokol solid-fuel rocket caught with a throaty roar; the missile flashed away, bobbing upwards briefly before setting her teeth to the job at hand.

Doberman pulled off, heart-pumping. He saw another flash in the shadow of the hill
— something big was firing down there.

He had to make sure the erector was down. Th
at was his priority.

Th
ere were more trucks, something moving of the road.

Too much.

He took a hard breath, focusing his attention as he snapped the jet back into the attack path. He pushed his whole body down to the right, as if he wanted to ram the video screen with his head. He slipped the Maverick’s aim point down and saw smoke lingering from the first missile hit.

Nailed the sucker. The culvert had been replaced by an immense crater.

He began hunting for another target, preferably the SAM at the close end of the highway. He found it, lost it, then pulled off, realizing he was at the edge of his safety margin.

He banked south, intending to turn to the east and come at the SA-9 from the other direction. He was just straightening out when he saw a long thick shadow several hundred yards south of the highway, in a cleared area to his left.

The Scud erector had been moved.

N
EAR AL-KAJUK, IRAQ

26 JANUARY
1991

1820

W
ong repeated his
message into the communications handset as the Iraqi tanks began firing. Behind him, two of the Delta team members peppered the slope with automatic fire and grenades.

“Devil One this is Apache Fire Team
Snake Eaters,” Wong said. “Do you have your ears on?”

“Ears on? What the hell, Wong, you think you’re talking into a god damn CB set?” responded Doberman. “Shit.”

“I selected a vernacular sure to attract your attention,” he replied. “You did not answer my first two calls.”

“What calls? I’ve tried hailing you three or four times over the past ten minutes.”

A fresh salvo of grenades exploded down the hill. The Iraqi tanks had so far aimed very high, their shells sailing far over the hillside. Wong had no illusion, however, that that would continue indefinitely. Golden ran back and began tugging his sleeve— they had to move out.

“There are three Scud carriers en route to the erector site,” Wong told Doberman quickly. “Do you copy?”

“I don’t see the carriers but I have the erector. It’s moved from the culvert. Are you under attack?”

“Immaterial,” said Wong. “The Scuds are your priority.”

“No shit. I’m going to vector in help. I see three tanks. Are you on the hill?”

“The SA-9s have a lethal envelope slightly beyond the published specifications that you may be aware of,” said Wong calmly. “Recent alterations to the infra-red seeker heads as well as some improvements in the rocket motor have increased their kill potential by a factor of
one-point-five.”

The hillside reverberated as the T-62s fired their 100 mm guns nearly simultaneously. Their charges slammed into the hillside below the American position. Golden lost his balance, grabbing Wong as he fell.

“We have to go,” he said.

“Wong, there’s a helo on its way,” Doberman shouted. “Call sign
. . .”

The rest of the transmission was swallowed by static.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to relocate,” he told Doberman as the ground shook again. The Iraqis had once more missed, but their margin was much closer. Dirt and debris showered around him; Wong lost his balance and the headset, rolling against the rocks.

“Now!” shouted Golden, managing to get to his feet. He told his men to cover the retreat with smoke grenades and move out. “Smoke! Smoke! Come on, Wong!”

Wong scooped up the satellite antenna and began dragging the Satcom rucksack down the hillside. He’d only taken two steps when he remembered that he hadn’t searched the Iraqi commander. He threw down the dish and turned back.

“Where the hell are you going, Wong?” shouted Golden.

“Be right with you, Sergeant. Please take the Satcom and proceed without me,” yelled Wong.

In the next moment a fresh set of salvos from the tanks rocked the hillside
. Wong flew face-first into the hill. The last member of the fire team slid past to the left. Wong pushed himself to his feet.

The Iraqis were shouting below, their voices a cacophony of anguished cries and commands to attack.

Wong began to choke. He put his arm to his face, using his sleeve as a makeshift filter. The Iraqi captain lay heaped over to his right, perhaps ten yards away. As he ran toward it, the tanks launched another set of salvos. While their rate of fire was admirable, their marksmanship left a lot to be desired, though not by Wong. He stumbled sideways down the hill a few feet, lost his balance and fell onto the Iraqi’s body. The thick cloud of soot and dirt made it impossible to see what he was doing; he had to feel for the pockets with his hands. He found a folded map or document and something in one of the shirt flaps. That was going to have to suffice.

H
e threw himself backwards in the direction he’d come, rolling two or three yards downhill before managing to get his arm out and lever himself to his feet. He heard the sound of a tank shell whizzing by at close range and thought of the old saying about the shell you heard was never the one that got you. There must be some truth to that, he realized, given the innate lag time involved in the speed of sound and the human aural apparatus.

In the next second, he found himself flying through the air, launched by an explosion he hadn’t heard.

O
VER IRAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

1822

G
ravity slapped Doberman
hard in the head, punishing him for trying to do too many things at once. He struggled, holding the hard maneuver and fighting the instinct that wanted him to ease off on the stick. He lost Wong’s transmission in a tangle of static; saw all sorts of ground fire and had a warning on the RWR. Fighting off the confusion, he steadied his hand on the stick and put his eyes back on the Maverick video monitor, pasting them there as he waited for the long gray shadow of the missile erector to appear. Some kind of ground battery, probably on a mobile platform, began firing flak at him; black pebbles and white streaks dotted the video screen as well as the canopy above him.

No target.

Doberman cursed. He pulled back on the stick, starting to bank to his right and try again. The long ladder materialized at the edge of his screen. It fuzzed, and for a moment he couldn’t be sure whether he had his target or an optical illusion. He stayed on course and switched the Maverick into what passed for close-up mode, doubling the magnification but narrowing his range of vision by about the same percentage.

The ladder morphed into a two
-by-six with graffiti, then back into something approximating a construction crane half covered by a tarp. The crane portion was moving, swinging around slowly. Doberman steadied the small aiming cursor on the heart of the lumber and let the missile go. He kept his eyes on the screen for another two or three seconds, locked on his target, entranced by the gray fuzz. Then he shook himself out of it and yanked the Hog around, hitting the diversionary flares. He assumed the SA-9s had launched and jinked hard right then back left, leaving the small flares out to suck their IR sensors away.

At least he hoped they would. He counted off twenty seconds, shucking and jiving the whole way, cutting corners in the sky before starting to reorient himself for another attack. The altimeter ladder told him he’d
fallen to 8,050 feet. The CBUs— long suitcases of miniature anti-armor and personnel bombs— had been preset to be delivered from roughly eight thousand feet; he’s have to get higher to get a good angle before letting them go. He swung out of his bank and put his nose upwards, now more than twelve miles from his target, well out of range of the missiles and flak in a swatch of open air. He could see large flashes near the hill on the left, in front of the village.

Wong’s team, taking heavy fire. He’d have to try and help them, the SA-9s be damned.

“Devil One to Bro leader,” he said, trying to raise the F-16s. Doberman angled to make his approach from the west, keeping as much distance between himself and the SAMs until the last moment. He saw a flash off his right wing, then something moving on the ground further along— maybe the Scuds.

Another set of muzzle flashes below the hill. If they kept that up, he’d have an easy time taking them out.

Couldn’t use the CBUs – no telling how close the tanks were to Wong.

Have to mash them with the cannon.

Lower attack. Have to hurry, too. The bastards were flailing.

He tried the F-16s one last time. When the radio didn’t snap back with pointy nose slang, Doberman called the AWACS, asking for information on the Vipers and giving his position. In the meantime, the Hog seemed to fly herself, homing in on the thick shadows at the base of the hill. He was near in range as his finger clicked off the talk button; his eyes separated the fresh muzzle flashes into real targets, thick and juicy. Doberman slammed the stick hard, pitching the Hog into the attack. A gray shroud filled his windshield, a cloud of dust or smoke or fog spewing from the hillside.

Come on
, he thought to himself
. Fire again you bastards. Show me where the hell you are.

“Bro flight is zero-three from target,” said the AWACS controller over the radio. Doberman lost the rest of the message as he struggled to find the tanks in the darkness. Something very bright flashed in the distance, back near the highway.

He was below four thousand feet and still didn’t have a target. He had mud and crap and dirt and shit, but no target.

SA-9s on their way. That was what the flash was.

Three thousand feet. Shit. What the hell happened?

Two thousand. Too late now. Sorry Wong.

He broke off, changing his plan as the Hog slid down into the mud, a thousand feet and still in a dive. He had a good view of the highway and saw a tower peeking out from the village— the minaret from the mosque, obviously— about eleven o’clock off his nose. A four-barreled Zsu-23 opened up near the edge of the village, its stream of bullets whipping for him. Doberman’s brain went critical, leaping into full-blown Hog driver mode; he dodged the stream of shells without thinking about them, hunkering in the A-10A’s titanium bathtub while his eyes hunted for something to hit. He had a long shadow in the center of the roadway a quarter of a mile off. He couldn’t tell what it was, but at this point it didn’t matter. Thirty-millimeter slugs from the Hog’s gun chewed into the thick brick, slicing it in two. There was no secondary explosion, however, and Doberman was by it before he could tell for sure what he’d hit. He banked hard, trying to cut a path low against the hill, away from the flak.

Dragged down by the four heavy
cluster bombs on her wings, the Hog wallowed in the air, her energy robbed by the maneuvers and momentum.

He saw a flash from the corner of his eye. It was too big for tracers from the triple-A, but not big enough for the Scud.

The SA-9, closer than he thought, almost point blank.

He rammed the stick in the opposite direction and slammed his hand against the button to fire off more decoy flares. But he’d already shot his wad; there was nothing but cold air between his engines and the heat-seeker gunning for him.

The plane rocked to the right, down to five hundred feet, starting to slide sideways despite her pilot’s efforts to nose her around. Doberman felt something give way in his stomach, and he realized he’d pushed the line way too far tonight.