HOGS #5: TARGET SADDAM (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (28 page)

“We’ll
go there when we get out of this, kid,” Dixon told the boy, and the kid nodded
vigorously, as if he’d read his mind about Disney World and going to America.
“Come on— let’s get the hell out of here.”

Dixon
hooked his arm around the boy’s back and side, clutching him as he began
running toward the light machine-gun that had cut down the two Iraqis a
few moments before. Having wished the Hog there, he now wished his countrymen
to materialize before him; he ran forward, convinced it would happen, convinced
the first miracle wouldn’t have happened without this one being preordained,
too.

“We’re
American! We’re American!” he shouted as he ran. “American! American!”

“Ammorican,
Ammorican!” yelled the boy. “Budge! Budge!”

Dixon,
half-running, half-dragging, started to laugh again. He was a kid himself,
running through a bizarre fun house, trotting through an endless dream, his
head spinning wildly. Days of hunger and almost no sleep, of thirst, stress— of
every bizarre thing that war was— spun like a tornado in his chest, holding him
up, propelling him.

“I’m
an American!” he yelled, and he heard something pop on his left, and he heard a
voice, vaguely familiar, yelling from a few yards away on his left, “Get down!
Get down! I see you! Get down!” And the thing popping on his left flared into
the dragon mouth of a machine-gun mounted on the rear of a truck, its breath
flaming the ground in front of him and the air overhead, its tongue leering
from between teeth dripping with blood. The dragon roared and lurched, snapping
at him, trying to bite the tornado he had become. And all Dixon could do was
run and laugh, run and laugh, shouting again and again, “We’re American! Don’t
shoot! We’re American, me and the kid. Don’t shoot.”

IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2250

“Get
down! Get down!
I
see you! Get down!” screamed Wong as the canvas at the back of the Iraqi truck
flew off. He’d seen Dixon running forward from the road just after the A-10
struck the BMP, but had been unable to warn him away from the Iraqi truck a few
yards away.

As
he had feared, the Iraqis had mounted a heavy machine-gun on the back of the
vehicle, and had shown amazing patience in not revealing it until they had a
target. And now they did, bullets beginning to spit even as the canvas was
pulled away. Wong leveled Sergeant Davis’s SAW at the truck and blew through a
good portion of the ammo box, raking the side of the vehicle but failing to
stop the machine-gun, which was protected by a low wall of sand bags or
something similar. He did, however, succeed in drawing the gunner’s attention— Wong
ducked as a barrage of bullets whipped in his direction, pinning him to the
ground.

Under
other circumstances, he might have felt some satisfaction that he had been
right about Dixon— that he had beaten the odds and found the lieutenant. But a
fresh spray of bullets made it clear that the gunner on the truck was
well-supplied with a long belt of ammunition, and as the line of exploding
earth danced inches from his face, he realized his had been a Pyrrhic victory.

OVER IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2250

A-Bomb
had never
felt
so bad about smacking an enemy vehicle in his life. He actually stuffed six red
licorice pieces into his mouth instead of his usual three as he pulled the Hog
around to inspect the damage.

Nailed
the sucker good. Land Rover looked smashed, too.

He
turned back to the small, fuzzy Maverick screen, viewing the wreckage. Glowing
hot stuff, not moving. Little like a fish bowl with all the water run out.

Or
maybe not.

A-Bomb
pushed the Hog southwards as he scanned with the Maverick’s IR head, trying to
search the area where he figured the D boys would be— or at least where he
hoped they had escaped to. He still had his STAR pods; they’d only be dropped
if the ground team had trouble with Doberman’s. They added weight and
resistance to the plane, but he didn’t notice it much as he banked and came
around above the main highway, the Mav’s head trained on the area he’d just
hit. His eyes had begun to fuzz from fatigue— a good thing, he realized, since
it blurred the numbers on the fuel gauges.

Something
sparkled in the lower corner of his glass.

Machine-gun.

Shooting
at somebody on the ground.

Big
machine-gun, so it had to be Iraqi.

Damn,
if that wasn’t the best news he’d had all day. If they were still shooting at
somebody, his guys were still alive. He hadn’t nailed them accidentally.

Without
really thinking about it, A-Bomb slammed his Hog into a nose-first dive,
tossing four or five g’s in a full-body slam toward the earth. Air brakes
screamed, flaps groaned, and the thick flare of a heavy machine-gun, probably a
Dushka, made a perfect X in the middle of his targeting screen.

And
wouldn’t you know it? Bruce Springsteen was on the CD player, just dishing up
“Born in the USA.”

O’Rourke
lit his cannon as the Boss wailed, the GAU grabbing the bass, rhythm and drum
lines with its own particular take on slash and burn rock ‘n roll. The enemy
machine gun disappeared beneath an onslaught of 30 mm shells, vanishing along
with its truck in a frothing white powder that turned red and black as the
vehicle’s gas tank blew.

Unfortunately,
the tank had been less than half-full; the explosion barely lit up the night,
throwing only a lackluster fireball across A-Bomb’s path as he veered off. The
fire wasn’t even strong enough to sear his wings.

“I
keep telling you idiots, keep your gas tanks full,” A-Bomb admonished the Iraqis
as he recovered from the steep dive. “Woulda had a 10 on the Boom Scale if
you’d just held up your end of the bargain. Losing the war’s one thing, but at
least score some style points while you’re at it.”

IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2253

As
the machine-gun
swung its dragon-like fangs back toward Dixon, a hawk flashed above it. The
Iraqi gun disappeared upwards in a furious windstorm. Flames shot everywhere;
dirt, dust, shrapnel, bits of plastic and rubber swirled through the air. A
ball of fire shot off at an angle. Thunder roared with a massive,
ear-shattering pop. Then silence returned, the night hushed by the faint
whisper of two turbofans churning in the distance.

Dixon
jumped to his feet.

“That
was a Hog, kid,” shouted Dixon, pulling the boy to his feet. “We’re saved.
We’re saved. Shit— we were about an inch from getting creamed. Holy Jesus.
Holy, holy Jesus.”

“Lieutenant
Dixon?”

Dixon
looked up and saw a soldier running toward him carrying a light machine-gun.

“I’m
Dixon,” he said. “Thank God you rescued me.”

“We’re
not rescued yet. I’m Captain Wong.”

“Lieutenant
William James Dixon, 535
^th
Attack Squadron. Wong? You?”

“Yes.
A pleasure to meet you in person.” Wong had joined the squadron after Dixon was
assigned to Riyadh, but had spoken to him briefly over the phone several times.
Then as now, he spoke in a bored monotone, as if he were on a train platform
waiting for the 6:03 to arrive. “We have a rendezvous to make,” said Wong.
“It’s two miles away and scheduled to take place in five minutes.”

“I
guess we better get going.”

Wong
took a step then stopped. “What’s this boy?”

“Budge.
I saved him.”

Wong
gave him a quizzical look, then bent to examine the child. He said something in
Arabic. Words flooded from the kid’s mouth.

“Your
name is Budge,” Wong told Dixon, translating a bit of what the boy had said.
“BJ, I assume. Budge. He misunderstood. He thinks you’re an angel sent from
God. He doesn’t understand who we are.”

“What’s
his
name then?”

“Nabi.”

The
boy nodded.

“Some
Iraqi soldiers were going to kill him,” Dixon told Wong.

“His
parents were taken away. I believe he saw his father shot. My Arabic is not
optimum,” said Wong. “Most likely, the father was executed, along with the rest
of his family. I believe we’ll find he was a Shiite Muslim and-or part of the
resistance, though there are other possibilities.”

“Doesn’t
matter now,” said Dixon.

“He
can’t come with us, Lieutenant. We have to run two miles; I suspect our
transport is already approaching. They won’t wait.”

“He
is coming,” said Dixon.

Wong
shook his head again. “We can’t take him back.”

“Are
we going to make the rendezvous or not?” Dixon asked.

Wong
frowned but said nothing. Turning, he began trotting to the southwest. Dixon
started to follow, tugging the child to come.

They’d
gone perhaps ten yards when the kid fell. He’d slipped well behind; it was
obvious he couldn’t keep up.

“Come
on,” said Dixon, running back to him. He picked Nabi up and took a few steps,
but couldn’t carry both the AK-74 and the kid, not and run at the same time.

He
threw down the rifle, pushed Nabi across the top of his shoulder, and set off
behind Wong.

“It’s
okay,” he told the boy between his labored breaths. “We’re going home. God must
want us to, because there’s no way we would have gotten this far without Him.
Yeah,” he said, running. “You don’t mind if I still call you Budge, okay? It
kind of sounds cool. That okay?”

The
boy murmured something.

“Thanks,”
Dixon said. “Shit Jesus— to make it back after all this. We’re going home.
Home.”

And
though his legs were liquid and his lungs wheezing, though he had a dozen
bruises and maybe broken ribs and a bum arm and a banged up head, he knew they
were going to make it.

OVER IRAQ

27 JANUARY 1991

2253

His
Maverick’s IR
head remained out of commission, but Skull had no problem seeing the splashed
trucks; one of them was burning rather spectacularly. Two other vehicles were
stopped nearby, also damaged or destroyed. A pair of vehicles were coming down
the highway from the west, maybe a mile and a half away. From what he
understood of the layout on the ground, they weren’t an immediate danger to his
guys, but that didn’t mean he was going to let them continue merrily along.

He
warned A-Bomb even though he was back by the main battlefield, then pitched to
climb and let off his last LUU flare. They popped at roughly nine hundred feet,
lighting the sky like a bank of high-powered stadium lights as Knowlington
continued upwards before spinning around to attack. A little anxious, he
started firing from 3,000 feet, the shells falling in a bent arc toward the
earth to catch the first vehicle, a six-wheeled truck, right across the grill.
Two dozen uranium-enriched slugs made short work of its engine compartment,
stalling it in a heap of steam.

Skull
kept coming, riding his rudder to put his nose across the path of the second
vehicle. He let loose with more cannon but could tell he missed; he jabbed the
pedals and nudged his stick, but just couldn’t hold the plane in the right
position, altitude and speed burning off and the light of the flare distracting
him. He pulled back and got a chop warning, the plane hinting that he had
pushed things a bit too far and was in danger of losing all forward momentum.

Knowlington
ignored it, rearing the plane up by her nose and dipping around, goosing the
throttle. The Hog divvied the air currents with her wing, skipping tightly back
toward the target with an appreciative giggle, her nose centered on the truck.
Knowlington clicked out a three-second burst, more than fifty rounds of combat
mix flaring from the business end of the Gat. He saw another shadow to his
right and pushed toward it, aware that he was getting precariously low but
still calculating that he could get off a burst. His aim was short; he zeroed
again and nailed his trigger but missed wide and now had to pull off.

As
Skull banked, he saw a new group of shadows fleeing south from the vehicles
Doberman had smashed earlier. But as he began to push the Hog in their
direction, the flare inexplicably burnt itself out. He fired anyway, hoping he
might at least scare the bastards. It was a waste and he berated himself as he
began to climb away, the Warthog gradually picking up speed.

“Devil
Two, what’s your situation?” he asked A-Bomb.

“Geez,
Skip, I was just about to ask you,” answered his wingman. “Got a Devil Dog
underway, and Bruce is poundin’ in the earphones.”

“You’re
a piece of work, A-Bomb. What about the BPM?”