HOGS #5: TARGET SADDAM (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (21 page)

But
the speeding missiles were of small comfort to Doberman. The Iraqis had already
launched their SA-11s missiles, and there was nothing he could do but fly
toward them.

IRAQ

27 JANUARY , 1991

2118

Salt
felt the
grenade
pop from the blunt nose of the launcher like a paint ball phiffffing into the
air. He didn’t bother firing another, knowing the projectile would nail the
lead truck. He turned quickly, bending his head as he tried to sight the
Mercedes through the M-16’s starscope. He couldn’t find the target at first,
and by the time he dished a grenade in its direction the first one had
exploded, distracting him enough to screw up his aim. Davis yelled something
behind him. He’d left the Satcom and grabbed the SAW, opening fire in the
direction of the convoy.

The
earth turned into a barbecue pit, flames bursting all around them, rockets
streaking upward, the tank beginning to fire, the armored car— actually an
armored personnel carrier with a special cannon— thumping the ground. Men
poured from the troop trucks. At least two heavy machine-guns flailed.

Salt
popped another grenade, but in all the confusion it was impossible to tell
where it hit. He threw himself down over the sniper rifle, pulling his body
back over the long gun as the ground reverberated. It was all a matter of being
patient, as impossible as that seemed— you took your shot only when it was
there, and to get it there you had to move deliberately. He squirmed around
behind the sight, swinging the light fifty on its tripod. He moved the crosshairs
across the vehicles, past the truck and the muzzle flash of the APC. He got the
station wagon first, saw a driver but no one else, slipped his aim back toward
the Mercedes.

Empty.

Davis
screamed something. Salt ignored it, scanning the ground near the Mercedes. The
car began to move; he picked his shoulder up slightly and put a round into the
front tire. The round blew the tire and wheel apart, but the vehicle kept
moving. He pushed his shoulder down, zeroing his aim on the thick, bulletproof
glass at the driver’s window, waiting for the man to raise his head so he could
see where he was going. The Mercedes bumped forward, aiming to get behind one
of the trucks for cover. Just as Salt was about to swing toward the engine
compartment the man raised his head. Salt squeezed.

The
car’s thick glass was advertised as bulletproof. What the manufacturer meant
was that it was bulletproof against ordinary bullets and guns. The weapon Salt
fired was anything but ordinary, with its 12.7 mm armor-piercing bullet
hand-finished and loaded by the marksman himself. Still, the glass altered the
bullet’s shape and trajectory, knocking it off its mark.

Unfortunately
for the driver, that meant it entered not his neck but his skull. The blast
took off the top quarter of the Iraqi’s head.

The
gun’s heavy recoil momentarily cost Salt his aim; by the time he sighted again
the car had jerked to a stop in the middle of the road. Davis yelled again and
Salt felt something wet and hot hit the side of his face, the ground trembling
with the impact of a 125 mm T-72 shell less than twenty yards away.

OVER IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2118

Knowlington
watched the
PAVE
Low helicopter rear upwards from the mass of black shadows, jerking nearly
straight up with the motion of a champion weight lifter cleaning five hundred
pounds. Its dark shadow hovered a second, then slashed forward across the black
wilderness, heading for the fresh flare launched by the Frenchman. He looked to
be about two miles from them, perhaps less.

Knowlington
replotted the fuel reserves while A-Bomb asked the downed Frenchman something
about cafes. It was cutting it close, but there was just enough to run back to
Kajuk, fire the Mavericks and then tank.

As
long as they met the tanker at the northern extreme of its track. And they got
a tailwind.

Hell,
if they got a tailwind there’d be two gallons to spare. Maybe three.

Let’s
get on with it, he urged the helicopter silently.

Knowlington
pushed the Hog onto her wing, sliding through the orbit around the Frenchman.
Wolf gave an update on Kajuk in staccato: Doberman and Preston were attacking,
the RAF Tornadoes were launching their radar-killing missiles at a SAM site.

“Boss,
he’s hearing something,” said A-Bomb, breaking in. “And it ain’t
le
hélicoptère.”

Knowlington
started to ask for a direction when the air in front of him burst into flame.

“Leander
Seven, hold off, hold off!” he barked, whacking his stick hard to the right as
he pulled the Hog out of the worst of the anti-aircraft fire. The plane began
shaking like a pickup dragging four shot-out tires over a dried out stream bed.
Skull rolled into a chest-squeezing turn that took him nearly ninety degrees
from his original path, looping out under the stream of gunfire.

One
consolation— if he’d been hit, the maneuver would have torn the plane in two.

“Fuckin’
Zsu-Zsu in the shadow of that road, uh, half-mile, three-quarters north of the
Frog,” said A-Bomb. “Shit. Something else.”

“Yeah.
I’m on the son of a bitch,” said Knowlington, trying to get it into his targeting
screen. The four-barreled mobile anti-aircraft unit was one of three vehicles
hiding in a shallow area of shadows near a roadway. Before he could get the
flak dealer onstage, its red spit turned to narrow points as Skull closed in;
the gun was turning in his direction.

Knowing
he’d be unable to climb quickly enough to avoid the spray, Knowlington pushed
his nose down and twisted his wings, shaking off the g-forces as he sticked and
ruddered into a nearly ninety-degree turn, clear of flak about two hundred feet
from the ground and dead on target at one mile.

Michael
Knowlington had had less than twenty hours in an A-10A cockpit when he was
assigned to command Devil Squadron. At the time, it was only going to exist on
paper, a bureaucrat’s accounting for planes en route to the boneyard. But the
war— and Schwartzkopf— had intervened, plucking not just the allegedly obsolete
Hogs but their supposedly washed-up commander off the discard pile.

His
first few flights had been tentative. He’d had to unlearn a dozen habits better
suited to the high-powered aircraft he’d grown old with. In a way, Skull’s past
glories held him back; the differences between the Hog and the other planes
made him think too much about what he was doing, made flying a hair-twitch more
intellectual than it needed to be when shit was raining hot and heavy. But the
stream of unguided anti-aircraft fire that had caught him off-guard had changed
that. He didn’t think now, he flew. As he snapped clear of the flak he nailed
the Maverick’s targeting cue onto the Zeus and let go of the missile. The
AGM-65 slid through the air to the left as it was dropped, momentarily riding
out the Hog’s momentum. But as her engine ignited she cleared her head, setting
her chin on the ZSU-23 flak gun. She struck exactly 3.2 seconds later, ending
the hail of bullets.

“Trucks
moving on the road. I got people,” said A-Bomb.

“Yeah,”
said Knowlington, pushing the Hog to the east as his AGM crashed into the tin
armor below the flak dealer’s four-barreled turret. “You sure that Frenchie’s
real?”

“Authentication
checked out,” said A-Bomb. “And the guy knows his restaurants. I’m talking
serious snails. Targeting one of the trucks.”

“I
got your butt,” said Skull, pulling the Hog around south of his wingman’s.

“Just
don’t kiss it,” said A-Bomb. A Maverick dropped from his wing, its solid-fuel
motor igniting with a red sparkle.

Had
these guys been here all along? Even if the authentication procedure checked
out, there was no guarantee someone wasn’t holding a knife to the Frenchie’s
throat.

“Splash
one Zil,” said A-Bomb as the ground flared with his missile strike. “Bonus shot—
one slightly used pickup. Hope high explosives damage is a warranty repair.”

The
AWACS cut in, informing them that a pair of F-15s had been diverted to help.

“What
the hell are they going to do?” blustered A-Bomb. “They get nose bleeds under
twenty thousand feet.”

“A-Bomb,
I’m going to take it low and slow over our Frenchman. Tell him to get his butt
out in the open. I want to see him alone.”

“He’s
got people shooting at him, Boss.”

“Just
tell him.”

Knowlington
dropped the Hog down in a buzzard’s swoop into the shadows. He felt his way
through the grayness, slipping the Hog to sixty feet. He leaned Devil One
gently on her keel, improving his view out the side of the cockpit window. But
it was just too dark to see a man cowering on the ground. He pushed around,
fiddling with the IR head on the Maverick, hoping the glow of the Frenchman’s
body would show up somewhere. But the viewer was just too narrow or perhaps not
sensitive enough to see the pilot.

Served
him right. When he was at the Pentagon, Knowlington had helped kill a proposal
to outfit A-10s with night-fighting equipment.

“Says
you flew right over him.”

“Yeah,
I heard,” Skull told A-Bomb. The trucks O’Rourke had hit were still burning;
they would be big blotches on the IR if he could ever get the damn thing
oriented right.

Which
didn’t make sense, because hell, now he had them right in his face and the
screen was still blank. No matter how he pointed the FLIR head on the Mav, he
had nothing.

Seeker
head wasn’t working right.

Oh.

Skull
banked the Hog through another turn. Leander asked what the hell was going on.

“We’re
hosing these guys,” answered A-Bomb. “Be with you in two shakes.”

Knowlington
gave the shadows one more look with his Mark-One eyeballs. All he could see
were shadows dancing on shadows and an eerie reddish glow cast by the fires A-Bomb
had started when he hit the trucks.

Only
thing to do was fire off one of his LUU-2 illumination flares.

It
was a very dangerous move. The flare might help the Iraqis see the Frenchman.
It could also make the Hog an easy target as he ducked low to make sure the
pilot was for real and alone. But Skull couldn’t clear the helicopter into an
ambush.

“Leander
Seven, I’m going to drop a log,” Skull said over the rescue frequency. “Hold
back. A-Bomb, get between the Iraqis and the helo, just in case there’s more we
missed. I’ll take some turns, knock down anybody left by the trucks and look
for our guy.”

“Two,”
snapped A-Bomb. “Give me three seconds.”

Knowlington
needed more than that to get into position. He saw a few pinpricks of red on
the ground, but couldn’t tell if the Iraqis were firing at him or the downed
airman. He goosed off the flare, accelerated, then slammed back to take a look.
The stark effervescent light cast by the lou-two as it slowly descended on its
parachute swing turned the world into a scene from a Grade B sci-fi movie,
earth devastated after a nuclear accident.

Still
couldn’t see.

Screw
it.

Skull
tucked his wing, swooping toward the flare and charging in the direction of the
Frenchman. He plunged so low he got beneath the slowly descending LUU-2; the
light silhouetted the dark hull of the plane and made it an obvious target, but
Knowlington didn’t worry about that— he was too busy flying. He skimmed along
the ground and found three Iraqi soldiers blinking assault rifles toward him.

Skull
blinked back, teasing his GAU-30. The soldiers disappeared in the swirl of
erupting dirt, uranium and explosives. He nosed upwards, continuing his path
toward the trucks A-Bomb had hit. Shadows scattered— he fired at them,
realizing they were Iraqi soldiers. He fired high and there wasn’t time to
bring his aim down as he winged over the position, wheeling back around at the
edge of the bright circle of light.

As
he churned back around, he spotted a stick figure about fifty yards from the
spot where he’d obliterated the first group of Iraqis. He began crawling as
Skull approached, moving toward the south.

Had
to be the Frenchman.

“I’m
on that other truck,” announced A-Bomb.

It
took Skull a few seconds to spot the vehicle a quarter-mile ahead on his left,
a six-wheeler that looked more like a boat than a truck. A moment after
he saw it, A-Bomb’s missile turned its hull into molten steel and foam.

Skull
turned back toward the first group of trucks, looking for the soldiers he’d
seen. They were gone, obviously hiding from the Hog and its monster cannon.

“Leander
Seven, the heavy stuff is cleared away,” Skull told the SAR helicopter. “Few
ground troops by the burning vehicles. We’ll walk you in if you feel up to it.”

The
PAVE Low pilot replied with a string of curses indicating he was more than up
to it. The big Sikorsky popped up, racing forward into the bright arc of the still-burning
flare. As Skull banked behind her one of the crewmen lit up the mini-gun at the
door, spraying the area near the destroyed trucks. Meanwhile, the Eagles that
had been tasked to help out announced that they had arrived with a swoop down
to a thousand feet. Their massive engines shook the ground like lightning bolts
from the Norse god Thor.