Jim DeFelice - Going Deep

“Dead man’s hand,” said the other pilot, pointing to the cards on the table as he raked the chips in. “Doc Holiday drew that the day he was killed. Never bet on that. Can’t win.”

A-Bomb’s grin floated in front of Doberman’s face as he scanned the sky for Dixon. He saw a dark shadow rising through the clouds a good distance behind him. He lost it, saw it, lost it. “You got a little low, kid,” he told his wingman. “Get up over the flak.” Then he turned his attention back to the ground, looking for a place to put his last two bombs.

There was an Iraqi gun battery just off his right wing. The Hog seemed to growl at him when he spotted it through the clouds — as if she wanted a chance to kick a little dirt in the eyes of the people who’d been firing at her all morning.

Didn’t Doberman owe her that chance?

He banked sharply, hunkering down in the thick titanium bucket that protected the cockpit. As soon as he pickled the two cluster bombs, he knew he’d missed his target; the plane was running into a good hunk of wind and he hadn’t compensated for it. Angry at himself, he slammed the Hog around and worked into position for a run with his cannon. The plane screamed as she bled speed and energy, then whistled as the pilot edged her into a dive. The safe tactics of middle-altitude bombing were shelved — Doberman hunkered in for the kill, sliding down from five thousand feet.

The four-barrel Iraqi peashooter desperately spun around to face him. As its slugs spit past him, Doberman gave the Hog’s cannon a full five-second burst, then jinked left as the flak shooter burst into a magnificent collection of red, orange and yellow flames.

Climbing once again, Doberman caught the muzzle flash of a second gun as he tried tracking him through the sky. Something snapped inside his chest, and the methodical air force pilot was replaced by a seething werewolf screaming for vengeance. He tucked the Hog around for another attack. Just as he fell into the dive, he caught a shadow out of the corner of his eye.

“About time you caught up, lieutenant,” he said.

There was no answer.

“You have to press the little doohickey to get the radio to work,” he said sarcastically. Doberman pressed his Hog earthwards, deciding mid-plunge to leave the gun in favor of a building slightly to the south. It hadn’t been tasked, but what the hell, a building was a building.

“Seriously, Dixon, let’s see if that cannon of yours works,” Doberman called as he lined up on the building. “Get yourself oriented and trail on this pass, okay? Then we’ll head for SierraMax.”

Still no acknowledgment. Doberman felt a twinge of anger at his wingmate; he liked the kid but he’d be damned if he wiped the young newbie’s ass for him.

Dixon bored in, unconsciously sinking lower and lower in the well-protected cockpit. He worked the building dead into his sights, then felt the stutter-stutter-stutter of the Hog as it spat bullets from its nose. The top of the structure blew apart, bits of stone, roof tar and machinery cascading upwards — followed by a spectacularly showy explosion.

One of his shells had ignited a gas line.

Dixon winged through a fireball, shouting like a cowboy busting a favored steer at a rodeo. Banking and climbing away for all he was worth, he congratulated himself for expending ammunition in an extremely expeditious manner. The Hog swaggered a bit — not so much out of pride but because it had taken a few bullets in the stabilizer — but in general he was in fine shape for the return run home.

Dixon pointed himself toward the rendezvous point. He craned his neck to see if Dixon had followed in on the cannon run.

It was then that he realized why the young lieutenant hadn’t acknowledged his instructions.

The plane behind him wasn’t an A-10A. It was a Mirage F-l. And it wasn’t a French jet that had strayed over the lines, either. The dull green and brown camo on her wing was punctuated by a bright red streak of Iraqi lightning. Had Doberman had the time or inclination, he would have had no trouble picking out the three stars sandwiched between the red and green fields in the Iraqi flag on her tail.

At roughly the same moment that Doberman discovered Dixon wasn’t on his tail, Dixon was staring into the blankness of the sky in front of him, slowly realizing that he was lost — completely and utterly lost. He was somewhere deep inside Iraq, without the vaguest notion of which direction he had to head in.

A compass sat directly in front of his face, and the center instrument panel across from his chest was dominated by an INS navigational system. While not without its problems, the unit could nonetheless be counted on to give at least a semi-accurate location. But at the moment it was about as useful to him as a map of Wisconsin.

Climbing after firing his Mavericks, Dixon had run into an aerial minefield. Antiair shells exploded in every direction, the Hog bucking and shaking like a car with three flat tires on a washboard highway. Miraculously, none of the shells did any damage, or at least not enough to affect the plane. Dixon climbed and climbed, his heart skipping as his lungs gulped in rapid staccato. Finally clear of the exploding black bursts, he kept going — to nearly twenty thousand feet, which took forever in a loaded Hog. It wasn’t what he had planned to do, and certainly not what he had rehearsed for days. Still, he got the plane’s nose angled down for a second run and prepared for a second run with the Mavericks; he was still in control.

Dixon had been a Division II quarterback in college, and he gave himself one of his old pep talks, as if he were clearing his head after a particularly vicious blitz. When Doberman failed to respond to his radio call he felt a twinge of anxiety, but pushed it away, hoping his flight leader was just too busy to respond.

He had flown wider than planned, and further north — and lost his leader, at least momentarily — but as he peered through the broken cloud layer he could feel his confidence returning. He pushed downward, searching both the air ahead for Doberman and the ground below for his brief targets. The clouds made both tasks difficult; he willed them away, sliding toward the Iraqi complex in a shallow dive. Suddenly the radar dish Doberman had targeted snapped into view.

Dixon was surprised to see it still intact.

Okay, he told himself, I have a target. He steepened the dive, confidence beginning to build.

Then clouds filled the windscreen. He turned quickly to the video monitor. A blur fell into the crosshairs and he pushed the trigger on his AGM, locking not on a dish but a building. He fired anyway, continuing downward into clear sky.

But now the site was jumbled around, different from the satellite pictures and maps he’d studied. Doberman’s dish was gone; the trailers were laid out in a different pattern. He shot his eyes back and forth, trying to orient himself. The muscles in his throat closed, desperately trying to keep his stomach acid from erupting in his mouth. Black bursts were exploding in front of him; there was fire and smoke on the ground. Finally, he saw a grouping of trailers he thought he recognized, locked on the middle one, and fired. The Maverick clunked away as the plane followed the motion of his arm, stiffly pulling to the left in a long descending bank as his eyes remained glued on the television display, now completely blank.

More than thirty seconds passed before he pulled his head upright. By then the Hog had flown well beyond the target area. There was nothing on the desert floor in front of him.

For a moment then, Lieutenant William Dixon- star athlete, star student, prized recruit, a young man headed toward a top F-15 assignment until his mother’s failing health complicated his career priorities- forgot how to fly. His arms and legs moved independently of his head. With his left hand he reached for the stick when he meant to adjust the throttle; with his right he tuned the radio when he meant to check the INS settings.