Jim DeFelice - Going Deep

“He claimed he hit it.”

“Don’t worry about it. Listen, there’s an F-16 on the ground somewhere that was going north with a package to Taqaddum.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, but I don’t need to know about that; he’s already been debriefed. On his way back they were flying right over a factory at the edge of a lake. Ask him if it was on fire or not.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I think the guy’s name was Franco, or something with a couple of vowels in it. It’s in the sheets somewhere but it’ll take me an hour to find it. He’s with that Guard unit out of New York.”

Dixon wondered what the F-16 pilot — whom he figured would have been in a very big hurry and flying no lower than twenty thousand feet — could possibly have seen with all the cloud cover, even if he happened to be looking in the exact spot the intelligence officer mentioned. But what the hell? It wasn’t like he had anything better to do at the moment.

Even when they were on top of the coordinates the AWACS had sent them to, they had trouble raising the Phantom, possibly because there was so much damn radio traffic. It seemed like every aircraft in the theater was talking on the same frequency. Hell, Doberman thought without too much exaggeration, there were probably a few guys using it to call home.

Finally, a chopped transmission staggered through that included their call sign.

“All right, everybody but Sharp Eyes shut the hell up,” Doberman heard Mongoose bark. “We got a situation here.”

The Phantom pilot told them a pair of flatbeds with Scuds had parked about fifty yards from a water tower in the shadow of what looked like an industrial park. It was ten miles northeast of the way marker they were sitting on. He had also spotted a number of military trucks, including two troop carriers on the road headed in the same direction.

“I’m out of iron or I would have taken them myself,” said the F-4 pilot. He sounded younger than his plane, though that wasn’t a particularly difficult accomplishment. “I’m also about two pounds of fuel from bingo.”

“We’ll take it from here,” Mongoose told him. Doberman spotted the Phantom’s smoky tail at about ten o’clock due north. It seemed to wag a bit as it turned the target over to the Hogs.

Doberman felt his heart starting to pump as they swung down and began looking for the water tower, an easy marker. A-Bomb was ahead of his left wing a few hundred feet, Mongoose beyond that. The Hog snorted as its nose got closer to the dirt; the pig loved scraping along in the sand.

Suddenly he spotted a cloud of dust kicking across the sandpapery terrain to his right.

The two personnel carriers, most likely.

“Devil One, this is Two,” Doberman told Mongoose. “I got the dust bunny to the north there.”

“Roger that,” said Mongoose. “A-Bomb and I will head for the tower.”

Doberman angled his Hog toward the dust cloud, pouring on the gas. The cloud soon separated into the two troop trucks; they’d left the highway. If they thought that was going to help them they were sadly mistaken.

The Hog’s cannon began to bellow as he put the plane into a shallow dive and fired, perforating the path of the lead vehicle but missing the truck itself. He gave the Hog a bit of rudder, pushing her nose to the left and getting off a long, four-second burst.

Points for concept, but none for execution — he’d killed a lot of sand blowing a double air ball and was now beyond the rug rats. More a little pissed at himself, Doberman yanked his nose up and dragged the A-10A back over and under like a gymnast doing a flip. The heavy drag of the bombs beneath his wing — in his excitement and fatigue he had actually forgotten he was carrying a full load of iron — screwed up his sense of balance. The plane flailed wildly toward the ground, angry at his hot-dogging and inattention. For a second Doberman thought he had lost it. As he wrestled the plane back to level flight and got her off the deck, he realized it wasn’t quite as bad as he’d thought, though he deserved a serious kick in the butt for getting stupid.

The trucks continued to the west as he attempted to put a chokehold on his adrenaline and take things a step at a time. Gearing around for a cannon run, he saw that they were now separated from each other by a good distance. Choosing the one on the left as his first target, A-Bomb picked up his wing and drove the Hog toward the left rear quarter panel of the fleeing Iraqi. He started firing his cannon perhaps a second too soon; the plane lost a bit of momentum as the powerful Gatling fired, but this time Doberman had the green canvas locked in the crosshairs. The shells rippled in a tight line through the back of the truck. It looked like a zipper coming undone, the two halves peeling apart in a jagged twist of black and blue smoke, then fire, then more smoke, then a mélange of colors and death.

The guys in the other truck must have seen what had happened to their friends, for by the time Doberman had the A-10 pointed in its direction, the drab colored Toyota — it wasn’t at all, but somehow it was more fun to plink if he thought of it as one of the rice burners his brother-in-law sold — was wailing down a sandbank without anyone at the wheel. Doberman lit the cannon and waxed the cab three rounds into his burst.

The gray tower hulked over a trio of wedge-shaped shadows ahead. Mongoose decided the shadows must be buildings, and that the Scuds would be on the other side of the tower. “Swing with me to the east. We’re going to turn tight and come in low for a look,” he told A-Bomb. “Expect ground fire.”

“What, you think these guys have slingshots?” Mongoose was too busy concentrating on the ground to answer. He’d seen photos of Scuds, but never the real thing. Now he wasn’t totally sure he’d recognize one.

Not that it would matter. Anything down there was going bye-bye.

“There’s a good-sized gun on the roof of that building,” squawked A-Bomb.

Too late to do anything about it. Mongoose felt himself hunkering down into the titanium bathtub that protected the cockpit as he slammed the Hog forward, still trying to get a look at the parking area behind the water tower. Two long trucks sat nose to rear on a narrow driveway. They looked like oil trucks, except that the front of their tanks had coneheads.

There was more ground fire, but it was fairly light; even twelve millimeter stuff wasn’t going to do much damage unless the Hog stayed in one place for a long time. And he wasn’t about to do that.

“They’re right behind the water tank,” Mongoose told A-Bomb. “They have some heavy machine guns and maybe light anti-air.”

“Yeah. I’m past ‘em.”

“Come around with me and let’s take them out.” Mongoose noted several trucks and smaller buildings nearby, and a fair-sized revetment with maybe a half-dozen, khaki-covered vehicles a quarter of a mile or so directly north of the Scuds.

“You take the Scuds and I’ll get the guys on the roof,” said A-Bomb. “Shit, Goose, there’s a battery of something in that half-donut north of the parking lot. Bitch fuck, these guys got peashooters all over the place.”

“You’d think they lived here or something,” said Mongoose, pushing the Hog into position to make a decent bomb run.

Doberman’s arms felt like lead as he pulled off the remains of the second truck. He heard Mongoose call out the location of the two Scud carriers and swung back in their direction.

A quick scan of the instruments showed everything running at spec. The slight pull to the left was still there, but the engines pegged in perfect parallel on the gauge. Plenty of gas, he told himself; plenty of explosives sitting under the wings to eliminate as many Scuds as they could find.