Jim DeFelice - Going Deep

What a thing to wish for.

He heard something that very second. It was faint, delicate almost; he thought it had come over the radio, but the sound itself was nothing he had ever heard on a Hog communications set; nothing he’d ever heard in an airplane before, period.

It was a bell, a vague tinkle of a ring, as if the clapper of a small hand chime had gently kissed its metal mouth.

Silence followed in the next second and the next.

Then another.

He glanced at the RWR. Nothing.

He glanced at the other indicators. All were at spec. Nothing wrong, no alarms.

Time was moving in ultra-slow motion. He heard the sound again — gentle, almost quiet.

It was nothing like an alarm, or anything else in the A-10A cockpit.

A muffled church bell?

Except that it wasn’t muffled, exactly, nor distant. It was as if a small bell were whispering.

And again and again and again.

As soon as Mongoose followed Dixon into the cloud bank, he realized they were already being fired at. Shells were popping all around him.

Doberman yelped on the radio that they had their targets, bright and shiny.

“Go, BJ. Break,” he barked. “Good show. Turn off.”

He put the Hog in a hard pull over his right shoulder, wrestling the spitting airplane away as he realized they had flown in a little closer to the guns than originally planned. Otherwise, the kid had done perfectly.

The Iraqis hadn’t bothered to turn the big radar dish on, or at least if they did, it hadn’t activated the RWR. A thousand thoughts shot through his mind, propelled by the onrush of images and the plane’s momentum. He held the Hog steady, kinetic energy devoted entirely to gaining speed, altitude still dropping. He set a spot where he would start recovering, orbiting back to wait for word from the other element. He felt the Hog shake in the air, buffeted by the violence Saddam’s guns were wrecking on the atmosphere. He pulled back, rolling and yanking and turning, zipping off the chaff, bundles of the metallic, radar-confusing tinsel spreading out from his wings as he pressed the Hog into retreat, diversion accomplished.

The sounds grew closer together, as if they belonged to a song he could not hear, a triangle twanging on a solitary track as the orchestra wailed away on the main line. Dixon held his plane steady; he knew he had only to fly this straight line and no matter what else happened today, no matter what Major Johnson might say, he would have done his job. That was all he was interested in, all he had to prove — that he belonged.

Each second of his life equaled about five hundred feet. So why was he still in the clouds? He had been diving through them for whole minutes, not seconds. How thick could a cloud bank be, anyway? A few thousand feet, max?

But there were still clouds all around him, and the light tinkle of the bell, a church bell.

Johnson’s voice chased them away.

Break off, he was saying. Break off. They’re shooting at us.

I’m not running away, Dixon thought to himself. Not this time. I’d rather get shot down.

He held the stick steady, descending through the angry gray chocolate. The damn clouds couldn’t last forever.

As Doberman pushed toward the top of the cloud cover, he felt something in his eyes tighten. He took a quick breath and glanced at the Maverick television screen over his right knee. Until the guns started firing, he couldn’t be quite sure of his target. His fingers felt as if they were on fire.

There was plenty of time for this. Still, he wanted it to start already.

Done with waiting, A-Bomb lined himself up off Doberman’s wing and went for it. He had one eye on the screen, one eye on the HUD, and one eye on his stinking CD cartridge, which had managed to leap out of his flight-suit stereo as he took the Gs pitching toward the target.

The cartridge smashed into at least three pieces. And he just knew the CDs were going to be trashed by the time he got home.

Son of a bitch. That was his only copy of “Darkness at the Edge of Town.”

Fucking Saddam. Now he was really mad.

The Maverick targeting screen suddenly lit up like a video game.

“Hot shit!” Doberman said — or thought he said. He was so busy guiding his hands that he couldn’t pay attention to his mouth. Nearly instantaneously, two Mavericks shot out from his wings, gunning for the two gun emplacements further south. In nearly the same motion, he pushed his right wing down and started looking for the radar dish he’d missed yesterday morning.

A-Bomb had to wait until Doberman fired and cleared his path before he could launch his own Mavericks. It seemed to take his flight leader all day. Finally, the second missile kicked off Doberman’s plane, bucking like a wild bronco before putting its nose down and getting to work. Doberman cranked right, clearing his path. A-Bomb had already locked on a target; he squeezed off the Maverick and dialed up a second, pushing the crosshairs fat into the last of the truly dangerous big caliber guns they had targeted.

“Nothing like a high-explosive enema to start your day, eh, boys?” he shouted as the missile winged toward the ground.

Doberman scanned the ground through the windscreen.

Nothing. Was that because he was confused about where he was, or because the dish didn’t exist?

The Hog was screaming toward the earth. Sitting in his office, Doberman worked his head around the problem, checking the front corner of his screen for a large concrete building they’d picked as a good landmark. Sure enough, that was missing, too. He realized his mistake — he’d flown further north than he thought — then slammed the Hog nearly upside down in a twist back in the other direction, gravity sharpening its claws as he accelerated in a violent plunge.

Suddenly, the RWR screeched. The Iraqi operator had snapped on the dish to see what was coming for them.

And damn if that big, ugly catcher’s mitt didn’t smile for Poppa, front and center in the Maverick’s TV screen. The phosphorus glow warmed his belly as Doberman got a lock and slammed the missile out. He let off another for good luck, then took the stick hard left for his second priority target.

He’d been so focused on finding the dish in the small television screen that he hadn’t quite been aware how low he was. The pilot reacted with shock as the rapidly approaching earth caught his full attention. Two thousand feet lay between him and the roof of the building he was auguring toward.

A-Bomb lost Doberman through the clouds. He was at ten thousand feet, just barely in range of any of the heavy stuff the Iraqis had lefts, but they could have fired bulldozers at him at this point and A-Bomb wouldn’t have noticed. He put the A-10A on its wing, winced as a piece of a CD flew by him, then got a lock on his prime target, one of the trailers housing the GCI equipment. He fired; as the missile left the plane, he realized there was only half a trailer there. No matter; he was already lined up perfectly on the microwave transmitter, and that sucker was intact.

Not for long.

The powerful sensors in the Pave Low caught the Iraqi ground intercept radar as it snapped on.

Captain Hawkins glanced back at his squad members, then up toward the cockpit. Concerned, he looked at his watch for the thousandth time in the last five minutes. His eyes followed the second hand as it crept across the dark face. He hated digital watches, even if they were considerably more accurate and disposable. Digital watches didn’t bring you luck, though at the moment he didn’t need luck, he needed the damn Hog drivers to do their job, wherever they were.