Jim DeFelice - Going Deep

“You get anything?”

“A van. I can’t even remember.”

A-Bomb was scouting around the plane. “Jesus, you’re not even scratched,” he said. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch. You should have seen what happened to Doberman’s plane. Chewed up and spit out.”

“You all right kid?” Doberman put his hand on his bicep. Though the captain was half his size, his grip hurt.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I’m sorry I lost you,” said Doberman.

Dixon knew he was the one who ought to be apologizing, and more, but he kept his mouth shut.

Maybe it was the hard light of the desert, but to Doberman the kid looked like a teenager, and a scared one at that. His clouded blue eyes and fuzzy red cheeks seemed to belong to a thirteen-year-old, not a towering, over-achieving, aw-shucks fighter jock. Dixon had All-American good looks to go with a tall, athletic frame, but he suddenly seemed stooped over and frail. It could’ve been the after effects of the vomiting spell, but damned if the kid didn’t look a lot like he was going to cry.

Doberman opened his mouth to say something encouraging — he wasn’t sure what the hell that might be — when a damaged F-16 careened in for a landing on the runway not far away. The yelping roar of the plane’s engine took the words away; he settled for a punch to the shoulder.

They didn’t teach that in leadership training, but it was the best he could manage at the moment. Someone on the maintenance crew was shouting at him; there were a thousand things to get squared away before they took off again. Until Mongoose came in, he was in charge of the group.

A black chief master sergeant, nearly as fat as A-Bomb, pulled him by the shoulder and shouted in his ear. “Hey, you Glenon?”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“Call me Jimbo. I’m running this crew here,” he said, gesturing indiscriminately toward the swarm of maintenance people. The sergeant, well into his forties, had a confident, easy-going crease in the corner of his eyes, put there by a lifetime of squinting at airplane parts. “We were hustled out here at the last minute on loan, so we’re making do. What else is new, right?” The chief stopped and pointed at Doberman’s plane. “That your Hog?”

Doberman nodded, then followed as Jimbo started walking toward it. The sergeant nodded his head as he went, as if carrying on an imaginary conversation. Finally, he turned and smiled. His cheeks puffed out as if he were blowing into a tuba. “You took some beating, huh?”

“I didn’t even realize I was hit.”

“No shit.” The sergeant uttered the phrase without the slightest hint of amazement. Once again he began walking; the nods took up where they had left off.

“We got one more plane in our group,” said Doberman. “The Devils. Major Johnson. He’s running a little late. He was just clearing the border when we landed.”

“I’m sure he’ll be here,” said Jimbo. “We’re getting a hell of a lot more action here than they thought. A lot of guys short on fuel.”

“We’re supposed to be back up in an hour,” said Doberman. “What do you think?”

“You’re not going to make it in an hour.”

They had arrived at the rear of Doberman’s Hog. Three airmen stood staring at different sections of the plane, a little like gawkers at a museum.

Or traffic accident.

“We got a mission,” said Doberman, feeling like he ought to exert a little authority. Some of the older NCOs thought they ran the show.

They did, but you didn’t want to admit that to them.

“Don’t we have priority?” the pilot added when the sergeant didn’t comment.

“Oh, your planes have priority,” said Jimbo, “That’s no sweat. We’ll have the others shaved and perfumed before the puke’s dry on the lieutenant’s uniform. But you need a radio before you fly again, doncha think?

“So plop one in.”

The sergeant gave Doberman a world-class NCO-to-officer smile. “Well, sir, as soon as we get one here with an antennae and all, we’ll do some ploppin’. We’re kind of triage, me and my guys. Colonel just got us out here to keep the strip clear. Still, we can handle the sheet metal. Meantime, don’t you think you should be rubbing a rabbit’s foot or something?”

“Why?”

“You fucking Hog pilots are all alike.” Jimbo’s cheeks worked like a set of bellows as his head bobbed back and forth, smiling, shaking his head and frowning, all at the same time. Finally, he ran his thick fingers through his thicker brush of hair and smiled again. “Sir, no offense, no disrespect, all right? But whack me at night if you’re not the luckiest dead man on this base, all right?”

“It flew okay,” protested Doberman, defending the plane. “Except towards the landing. Then it shook a bit.”

“Sir. No disrespect. Here, come with me, all right?” Jimbo clamped Doberman’s forearm and pulled it toward the fuselage. “See this? Half an inch over, you got no more tail. No, seriously, sir. This? A little deeper, the cable’s gone. No disrespect but your hydraulic line was missed by what — the length of a thumb? Sure you got back up, but look at this. What’d it miss by, two inches? And here? Oh, maybe a quarter of an inch more, some of our Special Forces guys are looking to sweep you up and bring the parts back in a body bag.”

The sergeant continued around the plane, pointing out half a dozen places where, had the shrapnel landed an inch to the right, or left, backwards or forwards, Doberman would have been fried to, as Jimbo put it, crispy critters with extra sugar frosting.

“I got a guy who’ll patch up the worst of it so you can take it on back to King Fahd,” concluded Jimbo. “A couple of hours, tops, assuming we get that radio. It won’t look extra pretty, but hell, we don’t have the car wash working today.” He winked. “Mechanically, you pulled a miracle, getting hit like this without going down. I mean, hell, it’s a tough plane and all, but with this much flak, the odds are something would go. Like I say, sir, no disrespect and I admire your balls, but whack me at night if you aren’t the damn luckiest son of a bitch dead man on this planet right now.”

Once Mongoose told the controller how low on fuel he was, he got pushed to the head of the line, right behind a Phantom Wild Weasel that had sucked an assortment of scrap metal into one of its engines. He had to sweat the last few miles into the field; the fuel dial increased its downward spiral quicker than the altimeter, and the turbofans started to complain. Finally he said screw it, concentrated on the gray-yellow blur of tarmac and put the A-10 down with a spoonful of petro to spare.

From the air, Al Jouf looked like sand punctuated by airplanes and dust storms. On the ground, the dust storms turned into people and the rest turned to chaos. As Mongoose trundled to the end of the runway, an Army corporal appeared from nowhere and began directing him toward the edge of the desert; for a moment the pilot wondered if the guy was an Iraqi infiltrator, trying to sabotage the plane by sinking it into a sand dune. But as he turned he spotted a long row of boxes on low-slung sleds, parked behind another Hog. Next to them was a dragon, the wheeled machine used to load the A-lOA’s GAU-8/A “Avenger” Gatling cannon.

The ground crew pitting the planes wanted him as far to the right as possible, so they could fit others into the small space they’d been allotted. Mongoose pushed along as best he could. Not only was he wary about running off into the sand, but he had to take a fairly severe leak; he nearly always did at the end of a flight.