Jim DeFelice - Going Deep

Not that Mongoose would have let that stop him. But he would have used it as an argument to keep Doberman and A-Bomb home.

And as for Dixon, no way did he want him on the mission.

“That’s great guys,” said Knowlington. “But slow down for a second. We only have two planes. I think Johnson and Glenon, if they’re up for it, get the first shot. Rank and time of service.”

“I’m up for it,” snapped Mongoose.

“Great.”

Before he could say anything else, Knowlington swept the group into a discussion of tactics, as if they were all sitting around a bar discussing possible baseball trades. It wasn’t that anyone was saying anything particularly stupid or wrong. There were only so many ways to go after the radar dish and trailers. What Mongoose objected to was the discussion itself. Planning a raid wasn’t a team sport.

And given the sudden change in Knowlington’s behavior, it was impossible not to think he might have hit the bottle.

But he sure acted sober.

“Assuming we get these two guns here,” said the colonel, pointing to the board, “we go for the dish next. The question I have is, what else is left up there that we have to make sure we get?”

“Damned if I know,” said Doberman. “If the Maverick didn’t hit the dish, who knows what else we missed. I don’t understand how the missile could have screwed up.”

“Maybe the guidance didn’t,” suggested Captain Blake, one of the pilots with extensive weapons training. “It might be that it flew right through, if the fuse screwed up. So you’d just have a hole.”

“Could have just blown up part,” said another pilot. “But left enough for it to work, or at least send out a signal.”

“Maybe we should put the cannon on it,” said A-Bomb, talking like he was going to fly on the mission. “No way you miss with that.”

“Way too dangerous,” said Jimmy Corda, the squadron’s intelligence officer. He had come back a few days ago from serving as a liaison with Black Hole and had helped plan the original mission. “You’ll we walking through a minefield.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of triple-A,” said Doberman. “You go low enough to make sure you hit it, the plane’11 get fried. And the cloud cover’s supposed to be worse tomorrow than it was today.”

“We have to make sure we get hits,” said A-Bomb. “Hell, if we can’t trust the Mavericks, what can we trust?”

“There’s another dish!” blurted Dixon.

Everyone turned around to look at him. He’d been standing behind the couch, arms stiffly at his side.

“What do you mean, BJ?” asked Knowlington.

“I — when I started to make my second run with the Maverick, I saw a dish. It was strange, because I knew that Doberman had fired on it already. I didn’t think he could miss.”

“A second dish?” asked Corda. “It didn’t show on the photos.”

“Locate it for us,” suggested Knowlington.

Dixon walked slowly to the front of the room. Mongoose saw that his hands were shaking.

Kid was fried. He felt sorry for him. He’d had a hell of a lot of promise, but not the stomach.

“I don’t know,” said Dixon. He took the target photos the squadron had received, and the map, trying to correlate them and put the spot on the diagram. “Maybe this shadow. I–I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. If I could back up there and see — ”

“Let me see,” said Corda. He took the photos in his chubby fingers, examining them. “You know, if it is there,” he told Knowlington, “the satellite’s angle might have obscured it.”

“If there were two dishes instead of one,” said A-Bomb, “then it explains what the problem was. And it explains why the radar is still up when we know Doberman’s Maverick hit.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Doberman. “I didn’t see another one. But you know, the RWR got something that I couldn’t account for. Like a second dish being turned on for a quick second. I thought it was just a flakeout.”

“There are definitely two,” interrupted Wong. He walked to the front of the room with the intel photos. “The layout of the trailers gives it away.”

“In case you haven’t met him, this is Captain Wong, the newest member of the squadron,” Knowlington explained. “The captain came over working on a little intelligence project, and now he’s going to hang out with us a while.”

Wong’s head practically snapped off its neck in surprise.

“I just talked to the general and it’s all set,” Knowlington told him. He turned back to the group, ignoring Wong’s expression — which was somewhere between confused and ballistic. “Captain knows more about Russian weapon systems than the goddamn commies. Or ex-commies, excuse me. Come on, Captain, give us the spit.”

Wong stifled his objections and began explaining how Soviet intercept radars were configured; a few paragraphs into his lecture, one of the pilots cut him off. “So why didn’t Black Hole catch it?”

“It is camouflaged, as you noted. Some things even I cannot answer.”

“It’s not their job. They only get the sites and then dish them out in the frag,” explained Corda. “They don’t usually get so specific, like trailer A, not B. Besides, there’s a real disconnect between the planners and the intel people. Hell, I’m surprised we got this much data to begin with. Pictures, shit! Anybody here ever see photos in an A-10 strike folder?”

“Only of Goose’s wife,” said A-Bomb.

He was about the only one in the squadron who could make that crack and not get his butt kicked.

“You can target both dishes to make sure,” said Wong. “Let me make another suggestion,” he added, walking to the dry-erase board and its layout of the target area. Taking a black felt marker from his pocket, he pointed to two Xs in the lower left-hand corner, sites where 23 mm guns had been located earlier in the day. He added two more Xs, then moved his pen across the board and added several more.

“If I can see those photos again, please.” He waited while they were passed up, then once more began drawing on the board. “There are many more guns here than you have diagrammed. And they are not merely 23 mm weapons, though, of course those can be quite effective at low altitude, even if you jam the radars and they use optical aiming. Of greater importance for your strategy are these 57 mm S-6 canons. Very significant weapons. We can quibble about the guidance systems, but that is academic if you are hit, I assure you.”

He scratched his cheek. “The four at the south are all big ones. There are considerably more large-caliber weapons than the Iraqis usually employ. So they have you high and low. By high I mean for you; these guns are not particularly effective above, oh, we should say, thirty-five hundred meters. This is an interesting deployment, incidentally. The Russians use this pattern themselves every so often for a number of reasons… ”

He was about to list them, but changed gears at a glance from the colonel.

“The thing that is important is that they are effective at a much higher altitude and longer range than you have calculated,” he said. “If you are protecting your helicopters, you must consider that.”

“No shit,” muttered A-Bomb, just loud enough to provoke a nervous laugh from half the room.

Wong ignored it. “The configuration gives them very potent killing cones through eleven thousand feet. Even when optically aimed, they are bound to hit anything passing through these arcs.”

He drew a pair of thick cones that included the flight pattern Doberman took on his bombing run this morning.

“Those Xs at the bottom aren’t 23 millimeter?” asked Corda.

Wong shook his head. “This barrel configuration, do you notice it?”