Hogs #1: Going Deep (20 page)

KING FAHD ROYAL AIRBASE

0310

Dixon had never
seen anything like it. What seemed
to be the entire squadron's worth of maintenance experts were working on the
plane, slapping parts in and out, checking and rechecking equipment, fueling,
arming and maybe even buff-waxing. The lieutenant had always heard that the Air
Force technical experts,
the people who handled the planes, were without peer in the world, but this was
unbelievable. They were going at the plane like a team of surgeons doing a
heart transplant. Not only had the
wing been completely repaired, but it looked as if it had been repainted. It
was hard to imagine this was the plane that had barely made it back to the base
less than twelve hours before, a
basketball-sized
hole in its wing.

Someone stuck a cup of coffee— black— in Dixon's
hand. It was far too hot to drink,
even if he had wanted to,
but it somehow
seemed wrong to refuse it.

Sergeant Clyston materialized in front of him.
"Yeah, I
know
Lieutenant— you want your Hog, right? I don't blame you. We're kicking ass, but
no guarantees, okay?" He pointed at the coffee. "You're not going to
drink that, are you?
You'll be peeing all the
way to Baghdad."

Dixon shook his head. He started to pour it out, then
felt a powerful hand grab the cup.

"No sense letting it go to waste," grinned the
sergeant. Clyston took a slug,
winked, then turned back to his crew. "Pull that F-ing dragon back up here
and get the
damn Hog
loaded while Rosen finishes up," he shouted. "Come
on, come on. Let's look alive. What
the hell, you guys
looking to join the Navy?
Get moo-ving!"

The dragon was pushed into place beneath the Hog's
belly. A large flatbed with a special
treadmill, it loaded
the A-lOA's cannon with
bullets.

Things looked chaotic, but Dixon could tell that even
with the rush, the crew was still
dotting the i's and crossing the t's.

"Rosen, kick butt up there," Clyston
called. "I need you done in five
minutes. Got that? Five!
No,
that's too long. Make it three. Hey, Larry— what the
hell are you doing up there, sawing
fucking wood? Let's go,
people—
we have some Iraqis to bomb! This ain't a goddamn
high school play we're putting on!"

Suddenly, all of the techs were doing rolls off the
plane. Equipment was trundled away
and the crew fell silent.

"Lieutenant, let's preflight," barked Clyston—
more an
order than a
request. The gray bear loomed in front of the pilot. A smile broke on his
grizzled lips. "Now you take your time, sir. Anything you want fixed, it
gets fixed. You just go at this like you have all day, you hear? Don't let
us rush you."

Dixon nodded and started toward the nose of the craft.
He liked to touch the very tip of the
Gatling gun before he
began
his walk around— it was a superstitious thing, and he sure as hell didn't want
to miss it this morning.

As he leaned forward to touch the weapon, he realized
he had an audience. The squadron's
entire mechanical crew
was
looking over his shoulder, worried that he had found a
problem.

"It's okay," he explained sheepishly. "I
just like to
touch it. For good luck."

A murmur of approval passed through the techies.

The crew members followed him around the plane,
silently shuffling along as he
examined the belly, the
weapons,
the flaps. Clyston hovered at his shoulder, silent,
nodding, sometimes frowning, once or
twice ducking in to
take
a look at something himself. Dixon moved deliberately, trying not to rush
things and yet be as thorough as possible
given
the time limits.

The bottom line was that he had to trust the people who
had just given over the plane to him.
But it seemed somewhat
disrespectful
not to look closely at their work, not to nod
or pat the part and move on. Once or twice he thought he
saw
something; each
time, three or four crew members would leap
to the plane and help make sure there wasn't a problem.

Dixon had done many preflights; certainly he had done
more thorough examinations of the
airplanes he was to fly.
But
he had never felt so confident climbing into the
cockpit.

"Kick ass job, Sergeant," he said, swinging
onto the
ladder.
"I'll say hello to Saddam for you."

"You beat the living shit out of them, you hear
me?" said Clyston, slapping the pilot on the rear.

From the crowd, Dixon heard a throaty female voice yell
out, "Hey lieutenant. Break a
leg up there, huh? Just make
sure it ain't
yours."

He turned down and saw Rosen, gave her, gave everybody,
a salute.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, get going. And don't break my
god
damn plane,"
snapped Clyston. "All right, everybody, party's
over— we got eight more planes to work
on. Get your F-ing
butts moo-ving!"

KING FAHD ROYAL AIRBASE

0330

For a long
, long second, Doberman thought he
lost the plane fifty feet off the runway. It was still dark, and as
the Hog roared off the concrete he
felt a touch of
weightlessness.
He started to bank as planned— they had choreographed just about every foot of
this mission— and
felt
his right wing coming up too fast. He began to correct,
then felt he was over-doing it, then
felt a queasy hole in
his stomach.

He wasn't sure where the hell he was. The dark night
loomed out in front of him, vast and empty; clouds covered
the stars. The wind rushed around his
head, spinning it, confusing him. He saw the earth, an old mistress, trying to
lure him back to her bed.

Doberman's head swam. He was back under the tanker,
trying to connect. He was playing
cards, getting creamed
again.

Lucky my stinking ass, he told himself. I got the luck
of Job.

Somehow his eyes found the artificial horizon in the
center of his dash. Somehow his brain
managed to tell him he was precisely at the proper angle. Somehow his hand held
the
stick steady, calming the rest of his
body.

I'm okay, he told himself. It's vertigo because of the
dark.

Fly your instruments, not your eyes.

He flexed his fingers inside their Nomex gloves, felt
the lucky penny in the palm of his
hand, frowned at himself for being superstitious, and put the Hog on course.

***

Mongoose could feel the fatigue riding behind his eyes.
He hadn't gotten any real sleep, undisturbed,
head sinking
below-the-horizon
sleep, for nearly a week now. He promised
himself he would have a full eight, ten, twelve hours at
the end of this mission.

But none until then.

The pilot had a small pill box in a pocket on his leg;
he hoped not to have to use any of
the pills inside, but he
would if absolutely
necessary.

He envied A-Bomb. The guy could fall asleep anytime,
anywhere, doze ten minutes and then go
another twenty four hours.
Not
only that, but he could then go party his butt off,
snooze twenty minutes on a pile of bombs,
and come back
fresher
than a flower the next morning. Truly amazing.

Of course, he drank coffee like it was water. But damn
if he never had to pee.

Inhuman. No wonder he'd become a Hog driver.

Mongoose checked the INS, hoping to hell it would work
more accurately than usual.

KKMC was now just under an hour away. The crews there
had been alerted to perform the
fastest hot pit they had
ever attempted.

They'd be over their target fifty-five minutes after
taking off from KKMC. Assuming the
planes cruised well, didn't run into an unexpected head wind, and didn't
suddenly
run low on fuel.

It was all doable. Mongoose had worked the calculations
himself. But that was on paper. This
was for real.

On paper, everything always went precisely according to
plan. Everyone followed the dotted
lines. The Iraqis swallowed the bait and Doberman and A-Bomb went in unscathed.
Dixon didn't get lost on the quick jink toward
the guns, then followed him out to safety and the tanker.

In real life, Mongoose hoped like all hell the kid hung
in there. He'd never forgive himself
if he lost him.

***

A-Bomb rocked off the strip, feeling a little like he
was straddling his first Harley,
unwinding the big old
bastard
up the Pennsylvania mountains on 1-81, wind cutting into his face as the road
narrowed for a bridge through the
fog.

The crew had done something special to the Hog tonight,
goosed her engines or something—
maybe even juiced the plane with super-unleaded. She was cranked and she was
cranking.

"There's a darkness on the edge of town,"
wailed Bruce
Springsteen in his ears.

The man knew what he was talking about.

***

The plane wrapped itself around him like a familiar
coat, taking him in its arms as it
leapt into the Saudi sky.
It
was as if it had been waiting for him, counting the hours
until Lieutenant Billy James Dixon
would return to the
cockpit
and push its nose toward the dark shadows of Iraq. There was no logic to it,
but this A-lOA felt very different than the one he'd ferried back from Al Jouf
only a few hours
before.
It felt different than the others he
^’
d flown, more
familiar than any plane, even the old
T-38 he'd spent so
much
time in. There was definitely something particular,
something personal about this
particular arrangement of
sheet metal.

Everything was going to be perfect on this flight. He
had Mongoose's butt pasted to his
windshield and wasn't
going to lose him.

Step by step by step.

Screw the major if he didn't think he could handle it.
Everybody else did. Everybody in the
squadron was cheering
him on.

Dixon walked his eyes through the cockpit,
triple-checking the gidgets and gadgets. Fuel was good, airspeed
was fine, even the INS seemed
perfect. The weapons hung low
and ready on his wings, each one signed and sealed with a
personal kiss for Saddam.

I'm going to make it, Dixon told himself. I'm going to
help rescue the pilot and make up for my fuck up. I'm going
to be brave this time.

I'm going to redeem myself.

SAUDI ARABIA,HEADING FOR
IRAQ

0501

The first hop
went smoothly enough. Mongoose led
the group off from King Fahd and headed north to King Khalid Military City,
changing course only once, and even that was
minor; they lowered their altitude to accommodate a pair
of transports heading across their flight path. The KKMC ground
crew did the hot pit with engines
idling on the tarmac; the four Hogs cranked it up and headed into the night sky
ten
minutes ahead of schedule.

Five minutes out of KKMC, running parallel to the
Saudi-Iraqi border, Mongoose spun his eyes around the cockpit on a routine
instrument check. At first glance,
everything seemed to be fine― temperature, fuel, everything
was exactly where it was supposed to
be. But when he returned his eyes to the large navigational display in the
center of the front panel, he realized
something was wrong―
way
wrong. The INS numbers marking his exact location hadn't
changed since he lifted off from KKMC.

That shouldn't have been possible. It was like a car
odometer not moving while the car was
doing sixty on the
highway.

Mongoose gave it the old car mechanic's fix: he
pounded it with his fist.

Didn't move. He quickly double-checked the compass
heading against the dial that sat at
the top of his
windshield.
They agreed— until he tilted the Hog a few
degrees
north.

The INS was whacked beyond belief. Big problem.

The game plan called for Devil flight to fly parallel to
the Saudi-Iraqi border until they were almost due south
of their target. They would then
angle hard north, flying
nearly
in a straight line to their target. The one serious
jog was an angling maneuver around
the edges of the radar
belonging to a suspected
mobile SAM site.

Making the turns without a reliable INS wasn't
particularly advisable. Especially
since the rest of the
group would be keying
off him.

Mongoose blinked at the display a few times, hoping
he'd made a mistake. When he finally
admitted he hadn't, he
felt
as if he'd taken a shot directly in the stomach.

There were exactly two options: abort the mission, or
have someone else take his slot as
pathfinder.

And the most logical person to do that
was Dixon.

***

Back in his plane, Dixon concentrated on not screwing
up.

It was easy, really. All he had to do was keep the dim
glow of exhaust from Mongoose's plane
in his eyeballs. Every so often he marched his attention around the cockpit,
making
sure the Hog was
running normally. Flying at night,
especially on silent com, had a special loneliness to it. It was
all glow and hum. The plane hulked
around you; depending on your particular mood, it could feel tremendously huge
or
tremendously small and fragile.

Dixon didn't want it to feel anything. He cleared his
mind of all emotion and extraneous
thought. He focused
entirely on where he was.

All he had to do was follow Mongoose and he'd be fine.

***

Mongoose hesitated before hitting the
speak button.
It came down to trust.

He'd chosen the kid to go on the first
day's mission
because he had seen something in him. A lot
of people had.

And Knowlington believed in him. That meant something.

Did he believe in him? Or had he only said he deserved
a second shot?

The major keyed the mike. "Dixon, you awake back
there?"

"Devil One?" The startled voice sounded as if
it had
just been woken from a deep sleep.

"Look kid, I've got a situation here with my
navigational system. What do you say
we trade places?"

The static that followed his transmission seemed to last
forever. Finally, the voice came back.

"No problem."

There was no time to analyze if the words sounded
confident or worried. Mongoose told
the rest of the flight
that
they'd close up the trail a bit, but otherwise would
proceed as planned.

With Dixon leading them to the target.