Hogs #4:Snake Eaters (9 page)

O
VER IRAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

1602

H
ack cursed, unable
to sort out the bandits in the chaos. More than fifty contacts crowded into the F-15’s powerful radar, and now he had another problem— the RWR warned that a ground radar had just popped to life north of him.

The Piranha’s radio frequency
— in theory assigned only to them— jammed with talk from two other flights as Hack’s brain began swimming with the black chaos of battle-induced stress. He flipped his radar back and forth through search modes, but he still couldn’t get a positive contact.

The AWACS did. The airborne controller identified the two Iraqi planes rising off the runway as MiG-29s and said they were on course for a flight of F-111s and a lone A-10, which was orbiting in the bushes at ten o’clock.

“Drop tanks,” Hack ordered his wingmate. Letting go of the extra fuel rigs beneath their wings would increase the F-15s’ maneuverability and speed.

Didn’t help the radar, though. He couldn’t even find the A-10.

Saw the F-111s now, though, cutting hard to the west, out of the line of fire.

The radio blared with static and more cross
talk. The AWACS controller asked for silence on the circuit, his voice several octaves higher than at the start of the mission. Then he gave Hack and Johnny a new vector.

“Okay
, okay!” Hack shouted as the Eagle’s APG-63 radar flicked two contacts about where the MiGs should be, ghosting them on the heads-up display at the front of the glass. That didn’t absolutely mean it had found the Iraqis— the vast majority of planes in the air were Coalition bombers tearing up Iraq. And he still hadn’t found the A-10, which he assumed would have a wingmate somewhere behind him. Hack “tickled” the contacts with the Eagle’s electronic query system, checking the planes for their IDs.

No IDs.

MiGs.

Or coalition planes too shot up to have working transponders.

Possible. Where was that damn A-10?

“I’m spiked!” Johnny yelled. An unfriendly radar had found and targeted him
— and they hadn’t even sorted the enemy fighters yet. “That MiG is on me.”

One of the unidentified contacts disappeared from Hack’s radar. He
didn’t have time to wonder why— the other, apparently the one that had turned its radar onto Johnny, began angling for his wingmate.

Bandit?

Or a confused allied plane with battle damage?

The Eagles and the unidentified contact were moving toward each other now at just under 1200 miles an hour. They were thirty miles apart; Hack had sixty seconds to decide whether to fire.

Maybe less. The RWR warned that a ground radar ahead had begun tracking him. Hack ignored it, trusting that the Eagle’s advanced avionics and his altitude would protect him, at least for the moment.

The bottom of Hack’s heads-up display indicated he had four Sparrow III AIM-7 air-to-air missiles, ready to go. He took a breath, narrowing his focus on the boogie. He was just coming into range.

He queried again. Still no ID. His heart was pounding on overdrive, but something in his head was warning him away – the plane wasn’t acting like a MiG, he thought.

“Tiger, I’m locked on a target,” he told the AWACS controller as calmly as possible. “I want IDs. I can’t find that A-10.”

But the transmission was overrun. He tried again; if he got through he didn’t hear the reply.

“Piranha One, I’m still spiked,” said Johnny.

If the boogie was a MiG-29s with beyond visual range weapons, Hack’s wingmate was going to be history in about twenty seconds.

If it was a beat-up Warthog, friendly fire was going to claim its first victim of the air war.

“Fox One, Fox one!” he shouted to his wingmate, warning him that he was firing a medium-range radar missile.

A
BOVE IRAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

1603

A
s soon as
Doberman heard the Eagle pilot call the radar missile shot, he slammed his plane back toward Wong and the rest of the Snake Eaters ground team. Their radio frequency buzzed with static; he worried that maybe the MiGs had been coming after them.

“Devil One,
this is Snake Eater. Please reply,” said Wong. The transmission crackled and broke up.

“
Devil One,” said Doberman, pointing his nose back in the direction of the highway. He was roughly eight miles south of the village. “Hey, Wong, you got a target for me?” he snapped.

“We have a tel erector approximately three miles west of Kajuk beneath a culvert on the highway,” Wong told him.

“Okay, good. Yeah, okay.” Doberman could see the hill in front of him on the left; the culvert would be almost dead on. He immediately began a sharp turn west, deciding to work the Hog down to a thousand feet for the attack. He’d swoop out of the north, turning around the village, riding down toward the culvert, trading a little bit of angle for a longer, better view.

“There are other developments,” said Wong before he had completed his turn.

“Yeah?”

“A Gaskin SA-9 mobile launcher has been set up on the hill behind the erector, immediately to the north. Excuse me,” added Wong. “I’m told another is approaching.”

Doberman cursed but didn’t alter course. The Gaskin was a seventies-era missile with a heat-seeking warhead. Compared to missiles like the SA-2, its range and altitude were relatively limited— but it was sitting just to the side of his attack route.

It would fire as soon as he pulled up. He could let off diversionary flares and jerk his butt around, but it’d be tight.

At best.

Doberman’s eyes hunted through the terrain, spotting the hills where the village was located. He was too far away to make out any buildings there, let alone the highway and SAMs.

He could go for the antiair first, but that would be a bitch with two of them. By the time he splashed the first— if he splashed the first— the second might be ready to fire.

And without a wingman.

“Give me the layout, Wong,” he said. “Are those SAMs set up or what?”

“One definitely is. The other has taken a position at the south side of the road. The mean time for launch
. . . ”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

It was too risky. Especially since he’d have a hard time seeing the launcher under the roadway.

Worth it if he could be sure
he was getting missiles— especially if they had chemical warheads.

Hell, if he had to bail he could always hook up with Wong and his Delta Forc
e buddies. Wouldn’t that be fun?

“What about the Scuds themselves?” he asked Wong. “Are they there too?”

“We’re working on it, Captain. Please be patient.”

“I have less than twelve minutes of fuel to play with,” Doberman said. “Don’t take all day.”

He banked the Hog back westwards, barely. The village and hill were between him and the SAMs, he was within their range; they could hit a hot target from five miles out.

Best thing to do, get low and go after the SA-9s first. Fifty feet head-on, no way they’d nail him.

Could be get both launchers in one run?

The Iraqis would have to be pretty stupid to line them up for him.

Duh.

“Devil One, we have a pickup truck entering the village. We are observing it now. It appears to be a command vehicle,” added Wong. “Please stand by.”

Doberman jostled his legs nervously, barely keeping himself from upsetting the rudders. He felt like he was waiting on the express line at a supermarket with a week’s thirst and a six pack in his hand, stuck behind a fat lady with a month’s supply of groceries.

The woman morphed into Rosen.

This was not the time to be distracted. Doberman pushed his head down and ran through the instrument readings, trying for a routine, trying to keep his edge and his focus. He began a steady climb as he slid his orbit further north toward the river. He turned and lined up to come into Al Kajuk with the Avenger cannon blazing. All he needed was a target. He’d smoke it, then use the hill for cover from the SAMs.

Tight, but doable.

“Come on Wong, what’s the story,” said Doberman. He now had five minutes of fuel left before he’d be at bingo and have to go home. “Is that pickup truck heading anywhere, or what.”

“We’ve found the storage facility,” said Wong finally. “We believe we have identified two missiles, but we do not have a positive confirmation.”

“That’s enough for me. I’m going in,” he said, bolting upright against his seat restraints. “Give me directions. I have that tower thing dead on.”

“The tower thing,” Wong said slowly, “is a minaret, and it is part of the target. We believe the missiles are being stored in a mosque.”

“Repeat?”

“Affirmative, a mosque. Please break off your attack until we have received authorization for the strike.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Doberman. Standing orders prevented an attack on a mosque without explicit approval.

“Repeat?”

Mosque or no mosque, if there were Scuds with chemical warheads down there, they needed to be taken out. He could see the building in the lower right quadrant of his screen.

I
n five seconds, he cross into the SA-9s’ range. They were going to get a strong whiff of his exhaust if he waited any longer to turn.

“Captain Glenon?”

“Yeah, I’m breaking off,” he told Wong. “Let’s think this through. I’m going to be bingo pretty damn quick. Shit.”

O
VER IRAQ

26
JANUARY 1991

1610

B
y the time
the two F-15s had recovered from their evasive maneuvers, the MiG had disappeared from the screen. Hack knew that his shot had missed; he blamed himself for waiting too long, probably giving the Iraqi time to hit his counter-measures and run away.

He and his wingmate swept north, their radars once again beating the weeds.

Hack’s screen popped up a fresh contact at a bare thousand feet, almost dead ahead.

Exactly where the MiG would be if it had hit its afterburners and dove into the ground effects, trying to duck his radar.

“I have a contact,” he told Johnny, giving him a bearing. “We’re close, we’re close.”

“You got a visual.”

“Negative. I’m locked.”

“I’m tickling
— shit, shit, he’s friendly! He’s ours, he’s ours.”

Hack cursed too
. The plane his radar had just locked up was an A-10A Warthog.

What the hell was it doing way up here? It sure as hell wasn’t on the air tasking order, at least not that he had seen.

The AWACS controller was yelping in his ear.

“Piranha One acknowledges,” Hack said coolly. “I understand that is a friendly. Tell him not to sweat it. We’re coming south.”

“Probably doesn’t even know you had him by the short hairs,” said Johnny as they turned to head south.

Hack didn’t answer. He suddenly felt angry as hell at the Warthog and its driver, as if the plane had made him miss the MiG.

Damn Warthogs had no business being in the war, let alone being so deep in Iraq. They were old, obsolete, slow, and worst of all, ugly.

Hack ought to know: he’d been a Hog driver for nearly three years before finally kissing enough ass to get promoted to the real Air Force.

Damn stinking Warthog and its dumb-as-shit drivers. Probably got lost.

He checked his position
and flicked the radar into air-to-air scan, hunting for his tanker.

A
PPROACHING THE IRAQ-SAUDI BORDER

26
JANUARY 1991

1620

E
ven a Hog
driver had his limits.

After nearly twenty minutes of temptation and ho-hum flight back toward Al Jouf,
A-Bomb was overcome by boredom as much as hunger. He reached down to the pocket flap for the Twinkie. The cellophane wrapper teased his fingertips— the pilot rarely wore flight gloves— but the package had somehow wedged itself in the bottom of his pocket and resisted his gentle tug. Under ordinary circumstances, A-Bomb would just yank, squeeze and swallow, but with your last piece of pastry you had to consider Karma. Squishing the delicate icing was very bad luck, especially while you were still over enemy territory. So he leaned down, trying to slip his fingers beneath the cardboard at the base of the pastry and tease it out.

As he did, his eyes caught something on the ground ahead, a small gray shape scuttling along like a crab in a shallow pool.
A-Bomb left the Twinkie in his pocket and jerked upright in the seat. A Zil truck with a trailer was running across the desert ahead, maybe ten miles from the Saudi border. This wasn’t some Iraqi dad taking his kid to college, either— the trailer was a 122 mm D-30 towed howitzer, a large and effective medium range artillery piece designed to harass well-meaning trespassers and Coalition troops on the good-guy side of the border.

The Hog sniffed and snorted, her appetite inflamed by the tasty treat. She was in almost perfect position to gobble it up; a good solid push on the stick, perhaps a tad of rudder, and the target would slide into the cannon’s crosshairs at maybe five thousand feet.
A-Bomb pushed in, so excited by his good fortune that he forgot he was flying with only one engine.

The A-10A promptly reminded him, bucking her tail behind him. It didn’t amount to more than a slight
whimper of complaint, however— A-Bomb barely noticed as the altitude ladder on his HUD scrolled downwards, falling promptly through eight thousand to seven thousand feet. At six thousand, the truck passed into his targeting pipper, but A-Bomb held off, deciding that he would bank behind the truck and come lower, attacking it from the rear with a long, shallow approach, a tactical concession to the fact that he was running with only one engine.

Technically, of course, the concession he should have made was to ignore the target and fly directly back to base. But
A-Bomb had never considered himself a technical type. He banked and came around, down now to nearly three thousand feet, a turkey shoot except that the Zil was not only moving faster than he thought but had cut to his right, leaving whatever trail it was following to dart and dodge in the hard-packed sand. A-Bomb corrected but then threw his momentum too far to the right, not only completely losing the shot but nearly putting himself into a spin.

Never again would he fly without a reserve supply of Twizzlers. Never.

He sighed, straightening the plane and circling back in a long arc, the target now running toward him in the left corner of his windscreen. A-Bomb kissed the stick with his fingertips, pulling the Hog’s nose onto the radiator of the Zil as he nailed the trigger home. The gun roared as he gave the Gat a good double-pump, a personal signature kind of thing. The cannon’s recoil practically stopped him in midair, the plane jittering as her nose erupted with flames and smoke from the gun.

As he let off on the trigger,
A-Bomb realized two things:

One, h
e’d blown the shot, because the truck was still moving.

Two, t
hings were suddenly awful quiet.

The shock of the recoil had flamed the plane’s one good engine. Under other circumstances,
A-Bomb would have undone his seat restraints and given himself a good kick in the rumpus area for flying like such an idiot. But he was down to two thousand feet, not a particularly good place to fly without means of propulsion. And besides, he was already being chewed out sufficiently by the plane’s problem panel. He nosed down for momentum, cursing over the stall warning as he worked to restart the engine. The turbines spun, the fuel combusted, and the GE turbofan on the left side of the hull kicked herself back to life. The Hog lurched and a whole lot of desert flew in front of A-Bomb’s face. He pulled out maybe three seconds before his job description would have changed from Hog driver to backhoe operator.

Any other pilot would have called it a day and set sail for the Saudi border a few miles away. But whatever other characteristics he possessed,
A-Bomb was not a quitter. He had a very deep sense of obligation, and realized that his boneheaded, hot-dogging stupidity had just brought serious embarrassment to Hog drivers everywhere. True, he had an excuse— obviously his blood sugar was out of whack. But how could he take his place in the great fraternity of Hog men, to say nothing of tomorrow night’s poker game, knowing that he had missed an easy shot on an unprotected target?

He couldn’t just go in with the cannon, though. It wasn’t simply that he might flame the engine again. Hardly. That could be avoided or at least prepared for by simply climbing higher and attacking with a steeper angle. But doing that would be tantamount to admitting he was unworthy; it would be expected, it would be boring. The stakes had been raised.
A-Bomb had to go beyond the mundane. Hog drivers the world over were counting on him to demonstrate élan and ingenuity.

There was, fortunately, a way.

He steadied the Hog at roughly twelve hundred feet over the desert, banking roughly two miles behind the Zil. Nudging his nose into the swirling grit, he picked up speed as he hurtled toward the rear of the truck. The Hog coughed for a second, wondering what he was up to, but A-Bomb kept on, his timing and aim perfect. He caught the Zil and whipped his right wing up in a terrific banking turn directly in front of the windshield, swooping into the driver’s vision so suddenly that the man yanked the wheel hard to the left, toppling the truck and trashing the howitzer behind him.

A-Bomb
’s wingtip was two feet off the road before he slapped the plane back level. He belatedly realized he could have smashed the truck’s windshield if he’d popped his landing gear at the right moment.

But that was Monday morning quarterbacking. The truck and its trailer lay sprawled upside down in the desert sand, the howitzer broken in a half.

A-Bomb checked his course for Al Jouf, did a quick instrument check, and then reached down for the Twinkie.

Which, shaken loose by the encounter with the Zil, slid right into his fingers, demanding to be eaten.