HOGS #5: TARGET SADDAM (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (16 page)

“What
trucks?” asked Davis.

“You’ll
hear them presently,” said Wong, starting off.

OVER IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2003

Lars
felt the
Herk
hop upwards as the rear door snapped shut. He hit the transmit button, radioing
Wolf that their passengers had disembarked, then held on as the pilot began a
sharp bank west, at the same time pushing the nose to get back close to the
terrain. Besides the heavy flak vest, he was wearing a full helmet and night
vision gear; their weight seemed to triple the effect of the g’s the plane
pulled as it whipped through its finely choreographed paces. They had popped up
to five hundred feet to make the drop, lower than they had planned when a blip
of the radar detector forced a last-second deviation in the game plan. But the
strike aircraft had done their job well, for the MC-130E’s sophisticated
equipment gave no indication that they were being tracked.

No
radars were active as they descended, flying toward the earth’s nap. They had
more to fear from bullets than missiles— antiaircraft fire cascaded into the
sky to the north and east as the Herk banked to turn southwards. Lars’s hands
began to shake as the pilot continued to descend.

“Turbulence,”
remarked the pilot.

Lars
grunted. He tightened his grip on Herky Bird’s control yoke, trying to will his
hands steady. Anyone with a rifle on the ground could hit them, even with his
eyes closed.

Lars
pushed his helmet to the side, trying to scratch an itch without removing it or
the night goggles, which magnified the outside starlight enough so he could
see. He felt his head growing woozy, and took a breath. The hum of the plane
and the dampened, surreal glow of the cockpit’s instrument panel pummeled his
senses, trying to convince him he was in a dream, not reality.

 “We
made the drop too low,” said DiRiggio.

No
one answered. They hadn’t been off by that much, thought Lars, and besides, the
commandos could handle it. He read their present altitude— falling through 300
feet above ground level. The terrain-following radar showed a clear,
unobstructed flight path— nothing to run into.

He
looked toward the FLIR screen on the left near the pilot, then jerked his head
to the left to glance through the pilot’s side window. An immense fireball shot
into the sky from the direction of the SAM battery that had been hit to darken
the alley for their drop. The yellow-white flames turned inside out, blackness
erupting from the inside as the fire burned through its fuel.

“Wow,”
he heard himself say.

“Got
to be the missiles frying,” said DiRiggio. “How’s that temp?” he asked the
flight engineer, who was perched like a wise man in a seat directly behind the
two pilots. The seat was elevated, ostensibly to give him a better view, though
a few wags thought for sure the men who had designed the flight deck had been
former sergeants intent on telling pilots who
really
ran the Air Force.

“Green,”
replied Kelly, the engineer. They’d seen some spikes in the temp on two earlier
in the flight, and three’s oil pressure had flickered just before the airdrop.
“Gauge was flaky a second, I think. We’re fine.”

Lars
managed a long, slow breath, lowering his eyes to the horizon indicator. His
heart began to slow. He checked the altimeter clock again, still gathering
himself, then pulled himself back up in his seat, helping the pilot with a
crosswind correction as they hung tight on their course.

They
were safe now, out of the radars’ detection area. A few more minutes of flying
time at low altitude and they’d be free to climb— they were entering a dark
zone in the Iraqi radar coverage.

The
worst was over, for now at least. Granted, they had nearly three hours to kill
before the extraction— and that was going to be sheer hell— but for now things
were fairly easy. All they had to do now was orbit in the dead zone and wait.

“Not
like flying a slick, huh?” DiRiggio said to Lars, using Herk slang for a
“normal” C-130. Compared to the heavily modified Combat Talons and other
special operations craft, the transport models had smooth or slick skins.

“It’s
the flak vest I can’t get used to,” he said, coaxing what he hoped was a
jocular note into his voice.

“Probably
a good idea, though.”

“Uh-huh.”

Because
the mission was classified, the crew had been told just the bare outlines, the
absolute minimum they needed to do their jobs. Lars and DiRiggio knew that the
Delta team was targeting a caravan of vehicles for F-111s. Lars figured that the
target was a high-ranking Iraqi— possibly Saddam himself, given the location
where they’d made the drop. Lars guessed that DiRiggio thought that too, and he
wouldn’t have been surprised if the rest of Herky Bird’s crew had figured it
out. But their code called for ignorance, and to a man they practiced it,
concentrating on their job and pretending to know nothing beyond what was in
front of them.

DiRiggio
hit his mark and began angling into a slight turn eastward. They double-checked
their indicators. They were still clean; the terrain before them empty desert.
Lars listened for the transmission from Wolf that would tell them the landing
team was down and in the right spot. Their MC-130E carried the latest
high-tech communications gear, but radio transmissions could still be
problematic, hampered by everything from low altitude to atmospheric vagaries
to interference from jamming craft. In theory none of those things were
supposed to matter, but somehow communications remained as much an art as a
science. Lars remembered an old Philco monster radio his great-grandpa had had
in his Bristol, Connecticut row house. It managed to pull in Yankee games from
New York City, crystal clear, even day games— once you hit the knob right. Took
a certain flick, though.

“Jerry?
Three? God. God!”

Lars
snapped his head toward DiRiggio, unsure whether he was worried about engine
three or something else. The major’s face seemed to glow white in the dim
cockpit, as if he were made of white marble instead of flesh. His eyes were round,
large circles that stared at Lars, stared at him for a long moment, as if
DiRiggio had woken from a dream and wondered how he’d gotten there. Then they
rolled back in his head, the pilot’s body flailing against the restraints, his
arms snapping taut. The plane jerked to the right so hard the control yoke
pulled out of Lars’ hand.

“Somebody
help me.”

Lars
wasn’t sure whether the words came from DiRiggio or himself. He grabbed at the
controls desperately, struggling to right the Hercules as its right wing
pitched toward the ground barely fifty feet away.

OVER IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2003

Skull
brought the
Hog
level at just under a hundred feet, not sure exactly where he was and
half-suspecting that he was going to slam into a hill any second. He stepped
through the last of the blurring tracers and found himself in the open air,
though dangerously low. The plane quickly responded as he pulled back on the
stick, plucking its nose upwards toward the sky. If he’d been hit— and surely
the odds had favored it— the Hog had shrugged it off. The plane responded
crisply to his control inputs.

Not
wanting to believe his luck, he hesitated before checking the row of warning
lights on the dash.

Clean
and green.

What
had the rattle been? Shock waves from the exploding shells? Or was he flying
with holes in his sides?

Knowlington
craned his neck around, checking the exterior of the plane through the Perspex.
It was too dark to see, of course, but he had to look, just as he had to
recheck his indicators once more, working through them slowly.

If
anything, he had a bit more fuel than the preflight calculations had predicted.

He’d
always been good. But he hadn’t been this lucky since the old days— the really
old days, back in the Thud.

“Devil
Two to Devil One. I’m having trouble locating you, Boss,” said A-Bomb.

“One,”
said Skull, keying his mike to let A-Bomb use the radio signal as a primitive
direction-finding beacon. In the meantime, he got out his small flashlight and
pulled the paper map off his flight board, shaking it out with his left hand as
he got his bearings with the help of the plane’s nav gear. He’d flown slightly
to the northwest of where they had planned, but was more or less in the right
place.

He
saw A-Bomb before the pilot saw him— bearing straight at him from the east,
less than a mile away.

“A-Bomb,
you’re on me,” he said, tucking his wing in an evasive and hopefully
attention-getting roll. “Time for glasses,” he added as he recovered.

“What
I need is one of those NOD doohickeys,” complained A-Bomb. “Night vision. What
I’m talking about.”

“I’m
surprised you haven’t traded for one yet,” said Knowlington. While he was still
a bit put off by some of A-Bomb’s personal habits— not to mention the music he
played— Skull had come to respect O’Rourke and his skills. A-Bomb goofed around
a lot, except when the shit started to fly; then he was the sort of
no-nonsense, can-do pilot Knowlington wanted watching his six.

“I
almost had one off these Green Beret dudes at Al Jouf,” replied A-Bomb. “Went
for a FAV instead.”

“A
FAV being what, exactly?”

“Fast
Attack Out-of-my-way Vee-hicle,” said A-Bomb. “The ‘O’ is silent. Your basic
dune buggy.”

“You
strap it to your wing?”

“Geez,
Colonel, why didn’t I think of that?”

“That’s
why I get the big bucks,” said Knowlington. He leaned the Hog into a wide bank,
now precisely on the course they had laid out before the mission. They were
approximately twelve miles from Kajuk, south of a highway that ran west to east
over mostly empty scrubland. They were far enough away not to attract
attention, but close enough to ride in to the rescue if things went sour. He
dialed in Wolf and asked for an update.

The
F-111 had done its job well, taking out one of the SAMs. There was still some
doubt as to whether the missiles had been SA-11s or not; their radars had never
been activated. A pair of Tornadoes had been tasked to sit on the remaining
sites in case they flickered to life. While the sites would present a danger to
the F-111 tasked with actually nailing Saddam, Wong had felt that taking out
all of the SAMs would have caused the dictator to go elsewhere.

Which
he might just do anyway, Skull realized. But you took your shots where you
found them.

Skull
advised Wolf that he and his wingman would orbit for another forty-five
minutes, then go and tank as the other two A-10As came north.

“Wong
ought to be finding Dixon right about now,” said A-Bomb after the exchange with
the command ship was finished.

Skull
shrugged to himself, not sure what to say. He hoped O’Rourke was right, but
knew better than to be so wildly optimistic.

He
should have pulled strings and insisted on the original plan. He cursed himself
for not being more forceful.

Honestly,
though— what more could he have done?

If
anyone could find Dixon, it was Wong. But damn it— they should have launched a
full-blown SAR mission. The hell with Saddam— any American was worth twenty, a
hundred dictators.

Not
true, not even close. And he’d done the best he could as far as getting the
mission authorized. This was a lousy compromise, but if Wong brought something
harder home than a long-shot hunch, they’d be back.

Skull
checked his instruments as he continued southward, easing off on the throttle
to conserve fuel. The Maverick IR head painted the terrain empty and lonely in
his screen, a green-hued plain of desolation.

“Turning,”
he said, cueing A-Bomb as he began a fresh bank.

There
was no way to do this part of the mission comfortably. You flew and you waited,
you flew and you waited. It was worse than the interminable ferry flight he’d made
from the States to the Gulf, surrounded by darkness, waiting for something to
happen, partly wishing it would and partly hoping it wouldn’t. Skull tried not
to let his mind wander, concentrating on his airplane as he came back north,
nudging the Maverick viewer around in what he knew was a fruitless attempt at
widening the area he could see.

At
least there was no temptation to drink.

Maybe
he was over that now. Maybe getting back into the adrenaline rush of combat was
the shock therapy he’d needed.

The
idea of bourbon in his mouth seemed mildly nauseating.

“Turning,”
he told A-Bomb again, reaching the northern end of their racetrack pattern. The
Hog seemed to anticipate him, pushing her wings down and gliding through the
smooth bank as if she were showing off for the crowd at a Sunday afternoon air
show. The plane looked ugly— hell, it didn’t look like even belonged in the
sky. But sitting in her cockpit putting her through her paces, it was hard to
imagine a prettier aircraft. She went where her pilot wanted; she could walk
through a standing wall of triple-A; she could carry a heavier bomb load than
most World War II bombers. Every plane should be so ugly.