Hogs #3 Fort Apache (18 page)

The
Cornfield

26
January, 1991

0418

H
awkins
gripped his
grenade launcher as a
second shadow erupted near the tank, this one bursting into a brilliant all of
fire.

“The Hogs!” Ziza shouted as the dark shadow of an
A-10A crossed against the flickering flames. A stream of red tracers erupted
from the anti-aircraft gun – and then it too erupted in an explosion. Hawkins
and his two men stood and gaped as the warplanes ripped up their enemy. In less
than ninety seconds, the entire Iraqi contingent had been vacuumed away. A
flare exploded above. The commandos watched in awe as the ugly forks of death
mopped up.

The A-10’s were the last thing the Iraqi force had
been expecting. They were about the last thing Hawkins had been expecting as
well.

But shit damn, they had great timing.

“Let’s go,” he shouted, jumping into gear as the
airplanes took a breather. The three commandos began running toward the open
plain where they expected the helicopter to appear.

He’d taken two steps when Hawkins felt something in
his leg tear. He began to limp, then nearly fell over.

One of the Hogs came in low, thundering overhead. They
were supposed to be quiet for jets, but damned if the plane’s engines didn’t
sound like tigers spoiling for a fight. Pushing back to his feet, he decided he
loved that sound.

The helicopter came over the far hill and blinked a
searchlight, either to show them where it was or to tell them to get their
butts in gear. His leg was fucked up bad, and he felt blood as he reached down
to hold it, hobbling forward. Turk grabbed him by the arm, half supporting him,
half pushing.

The Hog took another turn overhead, like a sheepdog
pushing her lost lambs toward the shepherd. The helo was less than fifty yards
away, loud and beautiful in the fading flare light.

Hawkins would have sworn the A-10 pilot gave him a
victory roll before pulling off.

OVER
IRAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

0419

H
eavy
felt the
F-111F move ever so slightly
to his left, Klecko compensating for some turbulence.

In the next instant he found their target.

“Yes!” he shouted, and the plane popped upward. In the
next few seconds a million things happened, but as far as Heavy was concerned,
nothing, absolutely nothing happened: he kept the thin needle of laser light
trained on one infinitesimally small shadow of a pipe. The plane banked and
rolled out, wings swinging and Pratt and Whitney’s whining. The Paveways edged
their fins and adjusted their glide slopes, striving toward the laser pinprick.
Heavy just sat there, all 136 pounds of flesh, bone and muscle thrown into a
small dot in the middle of a thin shadow near the center of his target screen.
His eyes, his brain, his fingers were all there, all locked, as much part of
the bombs as part of him.

The shadow mushroomed into whiteness once, then again
and again. The fourth bomb either missed or malfunctioned or he just totally
lost it. They were gone now, cranking away, accelerating and he let himself
ease back, taking a break to celebrate.

“Good,” said Klecko.

“Good,” Heavy said back.

And damn if his neck didn’t hurt like hell.

THE
CORNFIELD

26
JANUARY 1991

0419

H
awkins
threw himself
at the door of the
helicopter. Turk grabbed him and pulled as the AH-6 began moving away, its
pilot trying to get the hell out while the getting out was good.

Hawkins rolled on the floor, got up, and then wedged
himself between the two front seats. He was practically kissing the control
panel.

“Go to Sugar Mountain,” he told the pilot. “The rock
quarry. We got two guys waiting for us there.”

“With all due respect, sir, we’re going to be lucky if
we get back to the Fort. Real lucky,” said the pilot. “Part of our tail’s shot
up and the gauges say the fuel’s iffy.”

“Screw that,” said Hawkins.

The pilot grimaced but began an arc in the northward
direction toward the quarry. Hawkins managed to squeeze into the forward seat,
changing places with Quilly. He wasn’t quite settled when the Hogs radioed the
helicopter to tell the commandos they had spotted a new convoy heading east on
the highway. The column had trucks and tanks and was about four, maybe five
miles from Sugar Mountain.

“They’re going to see us, maybe even beat us if they
stay on the road,” said the pilot.

“What about the Hogs?” Hawkins asked. “Can they take
those bastards down?”

“One of them just called bingo,” said the pilot.
“They’re low on fuel. They’re engaging the vehicles on the highway but they’re
going to have to break off.”

“Just get us the fuck there!” said Hawkins.

As the pilot picked up the tail and began scooting
toward the mountain, the horizon flashed white. The Little Bird’s FLIR went
crazy for a second.

“Bomber just took out the bunker,” said the pilot.

“Fuck,” said Hawkins.

“Hogs are bingo. They’re breaking off. What are we
doing, sir?”

As much as he didn’t want to leave his men, Hawkins
realized going to Sugar Mountain now was beyond foolish. They might not even be
alive, depending on where they were when the bombs hit.

In every battle, there was a time to regroup. It
wasn’t necessarily the time you wanted it to be, but if you didn’t recognize
it, you usually didn’t get a chance to fight again.

“Back to the Fort,” said Hawkins. “Son of a bitch. Son
of a fucking bitch.”

OVER
IRAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

0419

D
oberman
squeezed his
stick tight enough to
wring water from it as he got the cannon into the second truck. Hot uranium mixed
with explosives as he erased the utility vehicle from the Iraqi order of
battle. He tried pushing his rudder enough to get a shot on another vehicle but
ran out of space and time, pulling off and flashing to the right so A-Bomb
could come in on his own run.

He figured it was safer to smash them without using
the flares; the shadows were thick enough, and while it wasn’t necessarily easy
to sort what was what, the Iraqis were totally confused and probably defenseless.
The few thin tracers raking the air arced in the wrong direction.

Unfortunately, he was into his fuel reserves.

Time to go home.

A-Bomb pulled up, his green and black camo a blur in
the dawn light.

“How’s your fuel?” Doberman asked his wingman.

“Yeah, I’m bingo.”

Doberman got their position on the INS and called it
in to the AWACS. Then he checked in with the commandos’ helicopter.

“We ought to refuel at Apache,” said A-Bomb after they
had set sail southwards.

“You figure out how to land in a thousand feet and
take off again, let me know.”

“They’ll have fifteen hundred feet with the mesh
they’re talking about,” said A-Bomb. “That’s more than enough.”

“They got bullets and Twinkies?”

“Negative.”

“Then I guess we’re going back to Al Jouf.”

“Man, you’re a grouch in the morning. You ought to
drink more coffee.”

“Hold your thermos out and I’ll grab a cup.”

“You got it.”

Doberman half-suspected A-Bomb might try it. He fought
the twinge of fatigue tickling the corners of his eyes. Then, he tapped into
the commandos’ frequency and hailed the helo pilot, who by now was almost at
Fort Apache.

“I understand one of our guys was on your mission,” he
told the pilot. “Like to say hi if I can. Lieutenant Dixon?”

“Dixon’s still on Sugar Mountain,” said Doberman.
“Squad leader got hurt and he stayed with him.”

“What?”

Another voice, obviously angry, cut off the pilot’s
answer with a single word: “Out.”

Even though he understood the need for the silent com,
ordinarily Doberman would have taken offense to the tone. But all he could
think about was the hole in his stomach, even as he reached to see if the throttle
could cough up some extra horses.

__PART
THREE___

I

OUT
THERE SOMEWHERE

SUGAR
MOUNTAIN

26
JANUARY 1991

0420

O
ne
second Dixon
was cursing himself for
not making the rendezvous here, for not finding a way to get the radio working,
for sending the commandos to their deaths. The next second, Dixon was throwing
himself downwards. A shriek from far above vibrated at the back of his head.
The jolt didn’t register consciously until after he hit the ground.

Dixon landed on the sergeant as the first of the F-111’s
Paveways hit the hill beyond them. The ground shook and then seemed to slide
away, the two-thousand-pound bombs acting like God’s foot, smashing and
grinding the Iraqi hilltop beneath its heel. Debris percolated through the air,
small bits of rock and sand propelled like the exploding steel case of a hand
grenade. To Dixon it sounded as if the air were on fire.

Even though they were some distance from the target
and had a hillside between them and the explosion, Dixon was covered with grit
when the tremors stopped. His eyes burned when he tried to open them. He put
his fingers into his mouth and tasted sandpaper. There was no moisture, nothing
to help clear his eyes; he rubbed them but the burning felt even worse.

Blind, he fumbled for his canteen and managed to get
some water on his hand. It was so cold it stung; he rubbed it onto his face, and
then splashed the canteen over his eyes. Finally, the crap cleared out and he
could see again.

He checked Winston. The sergeant was still breathing,
alive.

Dixon sat back against the rocks. He heard the whine
of helicopters and Hogs in the distance, or thought he did. He waited for
either the helicopters or the A-10s, but the sky remained empty. After a while,
he couldn’t even be sure he’d heard anything. The desert had a certain hum to
it, a way of being quiet that was not quite silent. That was the only sound he
heard.

He decided to scout the other hillside, see what the
bombs had done. As he got up and stretched some of the cold from his muscles,
Winston snuffled below him, alive but oblivious.

There had been days with his mother when he waited for
hours, thinking she’d open her eyes
—
or, more likely, die. This was different, he told
himself; Winston was going to make it.

Assuming Dixon figured out how to get help. He leaned
back down, making sure the blankets were wrapped tightly. Then he took a few
steps away, looking carefully to make sure the position was completely hidden
before tracking across the ledge and down to the road.

The door to the bunker was still intact. That
surprised him a little; he thought the force of the explosion would have blown
it open. As he walked up the roadway, giving the mines a wide berth, he saw a
huge hunk of rock had been taken out of the side of the hill. A pile of
boulders lay on the ground. Dixon guessed that the damage had been caused by
several laser-guided Paveways, probably two-thousand-pounders. He began
climbing the debris pile, wondering what he would see.

He was nearly to the top when he realized that any
containers holding chemicals or biological agents might have been ruptured by
the blast. Which meant that the dust he was climbing through could be poisonous.

There was no sense stopping
—
he was probably
contaminated by now anyway. If that was the case, he might just as well see
what was going to kill him.

Even so, Dixon went up the rest of the way more
slowly, using the M-16 as a balancing rod so he didn’t have to stoop down and
actually touch the dirt with his bare hands. Two feet from the lip of the
crater, the rocks began to slide; he nearly lost his balance sidestepping it
and then fell face-first against the hill.

He pulled himself up through the sand and small stones
to peer over the edge. He held the night viewer close to his eyes, expecting to
see a smoky hole and, the way his luck had run, ruptured barrels of green and
purple crud oozing with instant death.

But he saw nothing. The crater was filled with dirt,
sand and stones.

Dixon nearly threw down the viewer in disbelief. He
clambered over the side of the crater and slid down, expecting at any second to
fall through into the Iraqi shelter.

He didn’t. The bombs had torn the hell out of the
rocks. The pipe and its shaft were gone. But the crater surface was packed
harder than a runway built to handle a wing of B-52Gs. The bunker lay below,
bored into the rock at the base and protected by seventy-five yards or more of
solid stone.

###

Dixon found a shorter way back to the sergeant,
walking up the side of the crater and across a long, narrow ledge, through a
crevice, and finally up a steep hill that brought him just behind the position.
He was not particularly careful as he walked, letting his gun hang from his
shoulder and kicking small rocks indiscriminately.

He could hear the sergeant’s labored breaths as he
climbed the hill. They were eerily like his mother’s toward the end.

He checked him. Winston hadn’t moved. It occurred to
Dixon that he should have left him with a gun, even though the trooper was
probably now well beyond using it.

It would be more a respect kind of thing. Like the
nurse who put the lipstick on his mom’s lips the very last night. He’d always
remember that.

Carefully, Dixon leaned down and took Winston’s
Beretta out. He started to put it in the sergeant’s hand, but thought better of
that
—
some sort of muscle contraction might make him pull the trigger. Instead he set
it down within easy reach, as if the sergeant had just nodded off for the
night. Then he packed the blankets back around him.

The question was: What should he do next? Wait to be
rescued?

Only choice. Most likely that meant waiting until
nightfall.

They could do it. Winston wasn’t going anywhere. The
only thing Dixon had to worry about was boredom.

The Iraqis might come to check out their bunker. That
was fine, as long as they stayed tight. There was no way to see it from the
road in front of the door.

He took the binoculars as well as the NOD and climbed
a few feet up the hill where he had watched the battle earlier. At full
magnification, he could see a wrecked APC and maybe a truck; much of the
battlefield was blocked off by the terrain. He found an easy way to the top of
the rocks and used the binoculars, focusing first on the area to the east of
the tiny plateau they’d watched the road from. He saw was an Iraqi APC, blown
half apart. The back end looked like a paper shopping bag that had been twisted
into a small knot; he stared at the jumbled shape next to it, wondering if it
was a rock or melted metal, before realizing it was a body. A tank, its turret
cocked to one side, sat a few yards away. Its gun barrel had snapped in two,
and the jagged end now pointed like a stubby finger toward the rest of the
battlefield.

A hundred yards away sat an American helicopter. It
looked untouched – in fact, it looked like it was about to take off. But it
remained perfectly still.

Then he saw a body nearby, dressed in the brown camo
the commandos all wore.

One of his friends was dead. He cursed and moved his
viewer around, examining the area near the aircraft, expecting to see other
bodies, but finding none. He swept back around to the body, his eyes drawn to
it by some inexplicable force; Dixon found himself staring at the fallen
soldier, wondering who it was, thinking that the shape of the body looked like
Leteri, though he couldn’t be sure. He stared, and wondered if he should go and
bury the body. He stared, and wondered if the man had been in a lot of pain as
he died.

He stared, and then the body moved, twisting and
raising its his head. The man looked directly at him, and for a short second
his face was clear in the viewer.

It was Leteri.

In the next instant, Dixon found himself running
down the hill toward the highway, determined to rescue him.