Hogs #3 Fort Apache (16 page)

SUGAR
MOUNTAIN

26
JANUARY 1991

0340

T
he first
thing
Dixon thought when he heard the
noise was that his friends in the truck were returning. A half-second later he
realized it was far too loud to be just one vehicle.

He shifted around behind the rocks near the sergeant,
pulling the M-16 and its grenade launcher next to him but not shouldering the
weapon. He was so cold he was shivering. They’d left him with one of the night
scopes and it felt like an ice cube when he held it to his face.

An armored personnel carrier was leading a pair of
light trucks on the highway; there was another APC, and maybe a second and
third in the blur behind. A tank loomed behind them like a vast battleship on
the horizon. It took a moment for his eyes to separate enough detail so he
could tell that it was riding on a flatbed.

There were two other flatbeds.

More tanks. No, these were self-propelled guns. Anti-air,
or maybe tracked howitzers.

Anti-air. Four barrels. ZSU-23s.

Dixon glanced down at his watch. The helicopter was a
half-hour away.

He pushed back against the rocks as the lead elements
of the procession rounded the bend. They’d be at the cave in a minute to start
setting up their defenses.

No way the helo was getting in with those guns. Dixon
had to leave or he’d be trapped.

Winston rasped gently. He had a smile on his face. The
morphine, maybe.

I’m not leaving him, Dixon decided. Even if it means
taking on the whole damn Iraqi army.

Which it might.

Several trucks in the convoy didn’t have mufflers. The
roar against the sheer rocks was deafening. The noise surrounded him, shaking
every part of his body.

The trucks were all around him.

And beyond, still on the highway. Still moving.

Dixon scrambled to his feet. Clutching his rifle, he
went out to the slope where he could get a view of the highway. He was exposed
momentarily, but it was dark. Unless someone was looking directly at him, he’d
be hard to spot.

He saw the large shadow of an armored personnel
carrier speeding away. Then the tank carrier. And the rest.

Dixon couldn’t help feeling enormous relief, even
though he knew the heavily armed convoy was heading in the direction of the
Cornfield.

Near
the Cornfield

26
January 1991

0345

C
aptain
Hawkins found
himself leaning forward
in the helicopter, as if his weight might add more momentum to its speed.

The Little Bird was cranking, but it wasn’t going fast
enough. Hawkins needed it there now, at the Cornfield, his men climbing aboard,
the helo taking off.

With the exception of his Air Force FAC, he knew all
of the members of the Ruth team. Green, who had been killed, had worked with
him just a few days before. Green had filled the medic slot for Ruth, but had
also worked point and como in recent missions.

Was. Past tense. They’d get his body back when this
was over. Maybe there’d be enough time to get it back now.

Hawkins turned to the pilot. Fernandez tapped his
watch but said nothing.

He was counseling him to be patient. They were ahead
of schedule.

The AH-6Gs were skimming about six feet over the
terrain. Hawkins, who unlike the pilot wasn’t wearing the night-vision goggles,
braced himself against the side of the helo and stared into the darkness. The
ground below was patchy scrubland, becoming more fertile the further they went.
For him that meant there were more people in the area, more things that could
go wrong.

The AWACS told them bombing attack would now probably
coincide with their pickup. Fernandez assured him they’d be far enough away. It
would be a good diversion really, in case anyone was nearby or watching.

You planned, you trained, you tried to cover every
contingency, but you couldn’t. That was part of the excitement of it, part of
what made it almost fun.

Except it wasn’t fun, because it was way the hell too
serious. It was a job, a work, something with severe consequences While he
didn’t consider the new mission itself that difficult – like dead friends.

The helicopter flicked briefly to the right. Hawkins’s
arm was so tense it felt like it was going to snap in two against the metal
panel.

In-out. No sweat.

They had the mesh units in place, but his runway was
still way too short. Tomorrow night, a Herc was supposed to try dropping some
motorcycles by parachute. Hawkins wondered if he could somehow arrange to get a
bulldozer instead. Move the culvert into place and then fill around it. Cover
it with mesh. The runway’d be two thousand, three thousand feet in no time.

Could they parachute a bulldozer?

Sure they could. Goddamn combat engineers could do
just about anything. Hell, one would probably ride it down.

“Shit,” said the pilot.

Hawkins looked up and saw the bright red tracers
arcing ahead. A pepper of green flared from the opposite direction.

“Looks like a problem,” said the pilot. “Big fucking
problem. LZ is hot.”

Aside from a string of curses, it was the last
coherent thing Hawkins heard him say.

Over
Iraq

26
January, 1991

0355

H
eavy
pushed himself
upright in his seat,
working his neck around to loosen his muscles. The Vark weapons officer had
first gotten the kink from a fall on a 5.12 climb in the Idaho Sawtooths two
days before the deployment orders came through. Nothing he had tried While he
didn’t consider the new mission itself that difficult While he didn’t consider
the new mission itself that difficult
—
aspirin, massages, home-brew
—
had cured it.
Short of sticking his neck in front of his F-111F’s radar for half an hour, he
was willing to do anything, even see a chiropractor, to get permanent relief.

He hadn’t found one in Saudi Arabia yet. And the
medical doctor he
had
found gave him lousy advice, fortunately
unofficial: take a few weeks off.

That he wouldn’t do.

Heavy’s job entailed putting his face into a small view
screen for as long as it took to designate and vaporize whatever Black Hole
wanted smashed. This magnified the kink into something abominable, since
inevitably it tensed every muscle in his shoulder and back. While he knew it
would feel better if he relaxed, that was tough to do when the F-111 was
cranking at 650 knots at two hundred feet above the ground.

They’d been doing that now for nearly ten minutes,
thanks to Heavy’s detection of some over-achieving Iraqi SAM operators in their
path. But such was war.

Klecko gave him a quick tap. The two men had worked
side by side in the F-111’s unique cockpit for more than a year. They had long
ago given up using words during the business part of a mission; communication was
more like ESP. Every gesture, every word, was densely packed code. The tap just
now meant half a dozen things, including “Are you okay?” and “We’re just about there.”

Heavy gave Klekco a thumb’s up and got his head back
into the game.

The quartet of Paveway III laser-guided bombs beneath
the F-111’s variable-geometry swept wings were controlled with the use of a
revolving laser designator carried in a pod glued to the F-111’s belly. Once
they found their target, Klecko would buck the Vark upwards and they’d pickle,
lofting the missiles toward the NBC facility. Rolling ninety degrees, the pilot
would give his weapons officer
—
aka “you over there” in the Vark community
—
a nice long
look at the target. Heavy would steady the laser designator where he wanted the
bombs to hit. The Paveways would fly their two-thousand pound payload of
explosives right to the spot.

The tactic was called a “ramp toss,” as if the plane
were running up a ramp and throwing the bomb at its target. It wasn’t
necessarily the easiest way to hit something but they had practiced it
extensively and used it from the first night of the war.

And despite what it did to his neck, Heavy liked it.

Of course, he also liked 5.12 climbs.

The ground erupted with tracers to their north. Heavy
realized immediately that they weren’t being shot at, but it took a second for
him to wrestle his eyes and full attention back in the direction of their rock
quarry, just now coming into view.

He scanned carefully but quickly for his aim point,
the small pipe on the side of a hill above a shallow rock face. Something
inside his brain clicked, and he forgot not merely about the tracers but about
his shoulder, the seat, the physical parts of the viewer, the cockpit, the
world. He was in full hunter mode, sifting and searching, running his eyes
deliberately against the shades of gray, searching for the one particular
shadow he wanted. He was on the rock face, eyes straining for the
infinitesimally small nub that would friction him up two more feet, the
handhold that would get him closer to his goal.

Not there.

Patience.

Not there.

He was shocked to see the miniature outline of two men
in his viewer.

A hallucination? His neck spiked stiff, pulling every
muscle from his ears to his toes into spasm.

Relax.

His eyes climbed the rock, scaling it slowly, looking
for the pipe, his pipe.

Patience. He would find it. It was just a matter of
working the screen, feeling the rock.

Patience.

In
Iraq

26
January, 1991

0355

E
ven as
he cursed,
the helo pilot began
firing his 50-caliber machine guns into the Iraqi position. In the confusion
and the dark, Hawkins couldn’t immediately tell what they were facing, but it
was obvious there was serious firepower down there. He tried patching into the
AWACS, hoping to get some support. But the chopper was too low to get the
controller directly, and when the E-3 Sentry AWACS operator failed to
acknowledge his second try, Hawkins tried his ground team instead.

They didn’t answer either. He could tell from their
red tracers where they were, however; he told Fernandez and the pilot behind
them to roll up the flank of the Iraqis, drawing their attention at least
temporarily away.

The pilots were a step ahead of him, sweeping in with
a coordinated rocket attack. Hawkin’s chopper stuttered with the force of the
70 mm rockets gushing from the tubes on both stubby wings; he felt himself buck
forward and then wrench violently to the side. The Little Bird’s machine guns
opened up again, a quick burst that perforated a black shadow 250 yards away.
The shadow turned into the outline of an APC, which morphed into red flame.

Someone was hailing him on the radio but in the
confusion Hawkins couldn’t hear precisely what they were saying. He pointed to
the spot he wanted the chopper to fly to, and felt the aircraft comply
immediately, as if
it
and not the pilot were responding to his command.

A new line of tracers erupted on his right, arcing
away; these were thicker than the others, colored green
—
the enemy.
Hawkins felt the AH-6G twist to get a better aim on this new threat, saw the
line of bullets beginning to turn as they did.

“Get that son of a bitch!” he shouted, and in the next
second something happened to the front of the helicopter; it seemed as if it
were the outside of a giant tea kettle suddenly bursting with steam. Hawkins
looked at the pilot, saw that he was bent over his control stick, and then felt
the ground ram against the skis beneath his legs.

IN
IRAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

0355

T
he first
flickers
of the firefight looked like
a fireworks display, errant sparkles shooting off at odd angles.

Then it turned into green and orange roman candles,
rockets flashing, white streaks igniting everywhere.

Then a piece of hell opened up, volcanoes spitting
fireballs into the air.

Dixon watched it all as if IT were a movie. This
seemed different than real combat. Combat was flying a Hog and shacking a
target, g’s hitting you in the face as you pulled up and whacked yourself the
hell out of there. That was real. You felt that. Your head swam with blood and
sweat. You struggled to keep your eyes cold and hard and focused. You tried to
hit your buttons on time. It screamed in your face and it was real.

This was far away and surreal. He could feel the
ground shake with the explosions, but it didn’t feel like war.

His friends, Leteri, Turk, the others, were in the
middle of it. They were shooting, maybe dying. But it was so unreal it didn’t
make sense.

Except for this: The gunfight probably meant the
helicopters wouldn’t be coming for him.

He looked at his watch. The bomber would have taken
off by now. He wasn’t sure what they would send. Most likely it would be an
F-111 or a Nighthawk, something with fat, laser-guided weapons. Most likely,
they’d aim for the pipe he’d spotted.

Winston coughed. The sergeant wasn’t smiling any more.
His expression was bland and pasty. Dixon leaned over and checked for a pulse.
He didn’t find it at first; frantically, he pushed his thumb around the bone at
the inside of the sergeant’s wrist. Finally, he got a beat.

Not strong, but there.

Odds were, Winston was bleeding internally. Back was
all shot up; probably he was already paralyzed. He was coughing. Dixon knew
from his mother that wasn’t a good sign. Probably meant his lungs were filling
up with fluid.

He’d die soon; certainly, if they couldn’t evac him.

Dixon cursed himself for not demanding an immediate
evac the second they got out of the minefield. They should have been out of
here hours ago.

Maybe not.

Shit, what did he want? They were closer to Baghdad
than Saudi Arabia.

Winston knew that when he volunteered for the mission.

So did he.

Not really. He hadn’t thought it out. He hadn’t
figured that shooting his mouth off about skydiving would lead him to find a
hidden Iraqi bunker in a rock quarry, divide him from his team, and get them
ambushed.

He hadn’t thought that staying with Winston would mean
he’d be stranded. He might have known it was a possibility, but he hadn’t really
played it out, actually picturing it happening.

He had to now. Because without the helicopters, he and
Winston were a hell of a long way from anyplace good. Whatever happened next
was going to depend a hell of a lot on what he thought out. And more importantly,
on what he did.