Hog Down

CHAPTER 1

He’d meant to read the letter from his wife earlier. In fact, he’d been meaning to read it since last night, but one thing or another got in the way. Now, sitting in the cockpit of his A-10A Warthog fighter-bomber waiting for clearance to takeoff, Major James “Mongoose” Johnson eyed the edge of the greenish-blue envelope, wondering if there was enough time to slit it open and read it.

Probably, there was. Having just been refueled and reloaded, Mongoose and his wingman were standing at the edge of the runway, ready to launch their third foray that day behind the enemy lines. But an F-16 with battle damage had been given priority to land; they were waiting for the plane to make its appearance.

Thing was, if the F-16 took too much longer, this sortie would have to be scrapped. There wasn’t a heck of a lot of daylight left and besides, the two Devil flight Hogs had been working since before sunup nearly twelve hours ago.

He could’ve, should’ve, read the letter earlier. He’d had plenty of time between the first and second missions, sitting in the refueling pit. And actually, there had been nearly a half-hour after his preflight before dawn that he’d spent rechecking details that had been checked three times already.

The truth was, Major Johnson got fixated on routines as well as details; he usually read his wife’s letters at night before writing to her, and missing that chance had thrown him off. It didn’t feel right to read it at any other time, in any other place but his quiet bunk in tent city.

This was the flip side of the personality that made Tommy “Mongoose” Johnson one of the best Director of Operations in the entire A-10A community, if not the US Air Force. The positive side led him to meticulously diagram not just a planned mission route but all the alternatives. The positive side led him to take over a lot of the squadron commander’s tasks, pushed him to find problems in planes that had been cleared by someone else, made him carefully evaluate not just a pilot’s physical abilities but his mental state before drawing up a game plan.

The negative side made him a pain in the ass. He knew that; he was trying to be less by-the-book, bend more on the bullshit, bring out the best in people by giving them slack.

The negative side also meant that when his routine was disrupted, he tended to let things drop off the side.

Like the letter. He could read it now; undoubtedly it would give him a boost, as Kathy’s letters always did. But somehow it didn’t feel right.

Reading the letter would be like removing his helmet before goosing the throttle to take off, or undoing the straps that bound him to the ACES II ejector seat while in the middle of an invert. As tempting as it was to think about home, to savor the memory of his wife and their new baby, it was important for him to keep to his usual cockpit routine. Granted, the sortie— the third and last of a very long day— was nothing special, easy pickings. Devil One and Two were tasked to smash the hell out of an artillery emplacement a quick drive over the border. Ride in, ride out, no big deal.

Still, it needed his full attention. The letter could wait.

A wobbling blur appeared at the edge of the afternoon sky, fumbling over the runway haze with a sizable gash in her right wing. It was the injured F-16. Johnson watched as the plane seemed to fight off a sudden burst of wind— it might actually have been a problem with the damaged control surfaces— then righted itself and skimmed into a good landing pattern.

The sleek and versatile F-16 Viper or Falcon was generally reckoned as one of the best all-around planes in the allied inventory, a hell of a dogfighter that drew second straw only to a balls-out F-15 Eagle or— and this was a heavy point of contention between the services— an F/A-18 Hornet, the versatile two-engined attack plane favored by the Navy. In contrast, Mongoose’s A-10A Warthog was more a mud wrestler than a modern fighter. She was built to fly low and slow, and she looked it. Her long wings stood straight out from her pudgy fuselage, exactly the way they would have on a 1930’s monoplane. The large fan-jets behind the cockpit looked as if they’d been stolen from an early 1960’s airliner. Officially called a Thunderbolt II, the plane had been nicknamed the Warthog because she was twice as ugly as one.

But she was also three times as ornery. Those simple wings could hold a heavier weapons load than the average World War II bomber. The fan-jets couldn’t get the Hog up to the sound barrier, but they allowed the plane to twist and turn cartwheels in the sky. Part of the A-10A’s muscular frame was made of titanium; all of her important control systems were redundant and well protected. The Hog could take more lead than a target at a turkey shoot and keep on flying— a fact, not a brag; Mongoose had seen it himself. She was also incredibly easy to service, and meant to be used right in the heart of trouble. Gassing and arming her were easy enough that army troops could do it. In fact, rumor had it that more than one Hog driver had gotten fed up with the wait over at Al Jouf FOA the first day of the war and hopped out to refurbish his craft himself.

The tale was probably apocryphal, though Mongoose had no doubt that his wingman, Captain Tommy “A-Bomb” O’Rourke, had contemplated something along those lines already.

A-Bomb— the pilot of Devil Two— was exactly that kind of guy, the prototypical wingman and a born Hog driver. But he was unlike any other pilot in the entire service. His legend extended well beyond the small confines of the 535^th Attack Squadron (Provisional). A-Bomb could fly with one hand on the stick and the other wrapped around his coffee thermos, in manual reversion with no help muscling the controls from the hydraulics. He’d be listening to a Bruce Springsteen CD that played on the stereo in his specially modified flight getup, plunking Iraqis while microwaving a hot dog.

Actually, he didn’t have a microwave in his cockpit.

Yet.

The F-16 hit the runway a bit fast, wheels squealing and a wing popping up before settling down. Mongoose glanced again at his wife’s letter, staring at the return address with its carefully printed block letters. The thin blue lines of her text were folded against themselves, backwards and showing through the thin paper.

She would have used her favorite Cross pen to write the letter. It was her good luck pen.

Maybe it wasn’t anal-retentiveness about his schedule and duties that had made him put off reading this letter. Maybe it was something else, something unconscious. Bad karma or something.

Maybe he sensed bad news.

He’d devoured the others. Read them and read them and read them, until the words were burned into his brain.

But this one…

Not bad news, not a premonition, just— something weird. Like maybe it would be bad luck.

Jesus, he told himself. You’re getting like Doberman. Next thing you’ll be doing is snugging your helmet exactly twelve times before getting into the cockpit.

“Devil One?”

With a start, Mongoose realized the tower had cleared him to take off and was waiting for him to get his butt in gear.

He gave the letter a frown, then pushed it securely into his pocket.

“Sorry, honey,” he told it, as if it were really his wife. “I’ll get to it later. I promise.”

CHAPTER 2

Most combat pilots, especially ones facing a sortie sure to stretch several hours, stayed away from coffee hours before climbing up into their winged chariot. Most pilots would sooner bring an armed hand grenade into a cockpit than a loaded half-gallon thermos. Especially Warthog drivers— the plane lacked an autopilot, and wrestling with the piddlepack in flight was probably more hazardous than running past a dozen SA-6 installations, the fiercest Russian-made anti-air missiles in Iraq.

Of course, most pilots weren’t Captain Thomas “A-Bomb” O’Rourke, the commander of Devil Two.

As A-Bomb stowed his thermos back in its specially designed compartment in his flight suit, he considered the possibility of rigging some sort of pressurized device that would operate with a tube and spigot. This way he could sip coffee even pulling high g’s. Nothing like a little caffeine to counteract the effects of all that blood rushing into, or away from, your head.

Of course, he could just go ahead and use a cup, but the ground crew tended to complain about splashes on the instruments.

A-Bomb still had about a few ounces of coffee in his plastic “preflight” cup, not as much as he wanted but enough to keep his hum level up for the trip north. He sipped it delicately, like a connoisseur checking out fine wine. Truth was, this Java Roast was really Chase & Sanborn from the windy side of the vineyard, but what the hell. Sacrifices had to be made in wartime.

King Khalid Military City was a forward operating area, in theory a scratch base near the front where A-10As could reload and get back into the fray as quickly as possible. But Khalid didn’t look like a typical scratch base. Sure, there were army guys running all over the place, which gave it the homey look. There was also the requisite Saudi dust, and the change in temperature could provide a very handsome fog in the early morning, exactly the sort of thing you wanted to accent sheer chaos.

But there was also an immense dome and office building complex nearby— a pit helmet and band box— which made the place look more civilized than Charles DeGaulle Airport, in A-Bomb’s humble opinion.

Now DeGaulle would be kick-ass FOA. Those Frenchmen knew how to throw the fear of God into a pilot, the one thing they did right, as far as A-Bomb was concerned. Plus as an extra bonus you could fly under the Eiffel Tower on the way in for a landing.

The pilot gave his instruments a final check as his Hog rumbled across the tarmac. The pointy nose F-16 had finally gotten his butt down on the airstrip in one piece. He’d obviously been shot up pretty bad, and A-Bomb didn’t begrudge the Viper’s pilot for taking so long to land. He was, after all, working under a hardship— he wasn’t driving a Hog.

A-Bomb’s eyes pegged the indicators on the dials over his right knee as he made sure the twin engines were running at spec. Together, they put out over eighteen thousand pounds of thrust, enough in theory to lift fifty thousand pounds of Hog off a strip faster than he could finish a Twinkie. The plane couldn’t actually go all that fast— her posted top speed was 439 miles an hour in level flight at sea level, a mark A-Bomb had never actually made, partly because he rarely found himself at level flight at sea level. But the Hog wasn’t about speed; she was about pounding the crap out of bad guys, and that he had done, and done well. Going slow was a point of honor.

When the dials confirmed his gut feel that the power plants were pumping at shop manual spec, A-Bomb swept his eyes across the panel on the right, making sure the fuel tanks hadn’t sprung a leak. Then he glanced down at the switches for the INS navigational system, marching his glance around the rest of the cockpit in a sweep that took in the radio and weapons switches and worked over to the large, globe-like horizon indicator at the top center of the dashboard before returning to the canopy. With all instruments present and accounted for, A-Bomb shifted his one-hundred and sixty-something pounds in his seat, hunkering in the cockpit like a medieval knight getting into joust position on his horse. To his everlasting disappointment, the ACES II ejector seat could not be customized as his flight gear had been; otherwise, A-Bomb might have fit it with a gun rack and maybe a massage unit.

But then, being a Hog pilot was all about roughing it.

He reached his left hand to give his steed more throttle. The TF34 GE power plants whinnied hungrily, winding their turbofans into a snorting frenzy. The plane jumped forward, her nose sniffing the air for the smell of battle as A-Bomb nudged toward the firing line. She gave the pilot a snort and a gentle shake as she flexed her muscles and strained for the sky.

He still had the coffee cup cradled in his lap. He liked to hold out as long as possible for the last sip. There was nothing like the feeling of a perfectly-timed takeoff— one where gravity forced the final gulp of joe down your throat.

CHAPTER 3

Lieutenant William Dixon shuffled through the listing of Republican Guard units the army wanted bombed, in theory reviewing their priorities as targets. In reality he was doing nothing more than providing a fifth check on someone else’s math. One of Devil Squadron’s most promising young pilots, Dixon was currently assigned as a “floating liaisonary aide” to the FIDO, or fighter duty officer at Black Hole. It might sound semi-impressive outside of Riyadh, but it was actually a make-work job created especially for him, a velvet-barred temporary exile cum dog house.

Black Hole was the nickname for the command staff under Lt. General Buster Glossom in Riyadh. They prepared the daily air tasking order, essentially the daily game plan for the air war. The ATO was, in effect, Lt. General Charles A. Horner’s main tool for directing the battle, and Black Hole amounted to the right brain of USCENTAF and the allied air effort against Saddam. Everything that flew higher than a grasshopper, from Marine AV-8B Harrier jump jets to U.S. Air Force F-117 stealth fighters, got its marching orders from Black Hole.

The FIDO— a rotating assignment from each squadron— was a pilot who acted as a liaison and advisor to both the planners and the guys on the line. But as the FIDO’s sidekick, Dixon wasn’t here to liaison with anyone, much less give them advice. His squadron commander, Colonel Michael Knowlington, had shipped him over after the lieutenant had screwed up on a mission the first day of the war and then glossed over exactly what had happened. Before being shipped out, Dixon had partly redeemed himself by shooting down an Iraqi helicopter and becoming an instant celebrity— a good thing, as far as he was concerned, or he would now be cleaning latrines somewhere in Alaska.

Dixon’s contriteness after the affair had also played in his favor. Knowlington had as much told him that, if he kept his nose clean for a few days, he would rejoin Devil Squadron by the end of next week. And that meant he would find himself back in the air— the only reason to be in the Air Force at all, as far as Dixon was concerned.

So he was on more than his best behavior. Staying out of trouble wasn’t all that hard, actually, since his exile was more than just symbolic: The FIDO needed less than no help, and no one else at Black Hole had any place to put him. He’d been given a back desk in a back office carved from a custodian’s closet in an auxiliary building some distance from the main Black Hole contingent in the Royal Saudi Air Force building. He was so far from the action scorpions didn’t even bother to visit.

Which was why the knock on the outside wall literally scared the hell out of him. Dixon jerked his head up and saw the door frame filled by a six-six bruiser of an air force officer, with round, dark black cheeks and a smiling face that seemed semi-familiar.

“Ben Greer. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Dixon, rising to shake the major’s hand. He and Major Greer had shared root beers together at King Fahd his first night in Saudi Arabia— neither he nor Greer drank alcohol. “How are you?”

“In one piece. How the hell are you? I hear you’re a hero.”

“Nah. I came around behind my lead and bam, there was a chopper in my face. I don’t know which one of us was more surprised.”

“That’s not the way they tell it on CNN.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily believe everything I heard.”

“This is your reward, huh? Looks more like purgatory. I didn’t even know this was an Air Force building.”

“Kind of a long story.”

Greer flew an MH-53J Pave Low Super Jolly Green Giant chopper, a serious piece of whirly meat specially fitted for clandestine missions behind enemy lines. Based at Fahd like the A-10As, the Pave Lows were under the direction of the Special Ops command, a special group that combined army, air force and navy commandos. They were tasked with a variety of jobs, most importantly— at least as far as Dixon was concerned— SAR or search and rescue missions. They spent a lot of time in the hot and dusty regions of the war zone.

Because SAR was not specifically an air force operation, there was friction at the command level and a bit of grousing from some pilots, who questioned whether they would get the operational priority they needed when the shit hit the fan. Nonetheless, the crews who manned the Pave Lows were full-blooded members of the right-stuff fraternity, and Dixon felt a little awed by the much older Greer.

“Want to go grab dinner?” Greer asked.

“I’d love to but, uh, shit, this guy invited me to his house, and— ”

“Coffee? Just take a minute.” Greer had a strange look in his eye, as if this wasn’t completely a request.

“Well sure, what the hell.”

“Off-campus, so to speak.”

“Off-campus?”

“I wanted to talk to you about something where we won’t be disturbed. I got just the place.”

“Um, OK. Let me just tell the sergeant where I’ll be.”

Greer gave him a “you-weren’t-listening” squint.

“I mean, let me just tell her I’ll be out for a while,” said Dixon.

Ten minutes later, over some of the sweetest yet strongest coffee Dixon had experienced outside a hangar, the major laid out a plan for a Special Ops strike of Scud sites.

It was, as Dixon told him, a brilliant plan. But why, exactly, was he hearing it?

“We’ve been getting nowhere with the brass, and when I heard you were at Black Hole, I figured that was a message from God.” Greer gave Dixon a huge, Special Ops grin— his twentieth, at least, since they had sat down.

“I don’t have much influence,” Dixon told him.

“You can talk to some people, right? I heard Glossom likes you.”

“General Glossom? I’ve never even met him one-on-one.”

“Shit, guy like you? Splashes a chopper with a Hog? They’ll listen to you. Just bring it up in a meeting, offhanded kinda. We can take out the Scuds. I guarantee that. We’ll blow those little fuckers into so many pieces no one’ll even know they were there.”

“It’s just I don’t think I can talk anyone into it. Shouldn’t you guys be working on the CINC?”

“His Cincship?” Greer gave him a disrespectful grin. “Boss is working on Schwarzkopf personally. This is more a guerrilla operation me and some of the guys are drumming up.”

There was that smile again. Then something lit in Greer’s eyes, a bit too obvious to have been anything but rehearsed.

“Hey, I just thought of something,” he told Dixon. “You ought to sign up for some Special Ops yourself. As an observer. I can get you in, no sweat. We can use Hog pilots.”

“Go on.”

“No shit. A lot of pilots are bitching about the SAR flights. You could tell them what’s going on. That’s how we sell it from your end, and I’ll take care of it on mine. Shit, you’d be perfect. Forget SAR. You can come with us and blow up Scuds. I’ll pull strings and get you on board. My colonel is an A-1 guy. Man, he loves Hogs. Love ‘em. I think he creams just thinking about them.”

“I’d love to, but —”

“It’s done then. My colonel’ll make the call. In the meantime, make the pitch for us, OK? This is the kind of thing we’ve been training for.”

A half hour later, Dixon found himself in his supervisor’s office, repeating word for word— except for an occasional stutter— what Greer had told him.

The answer came quickly.

“No.”

“I’m sorry, Major, I knew you wouldn’t —”

“At ease, Dixon, relax. You’re the fifth guy who made this pitch today. Special Ops is putting on a full court press to get into the Scud game. I think they’ve assigned someone to work over everyone in Riyadh.” The major drew back in his chair, cracking his knuckles with a full finger spread. “I hear you’re getting bored around the office.”

“Who told you that?”

“Little birdie gave me a call just five minutes ago. Listen, I know the only reason you’re up here is that some general somewhere wanted to make sure the press could get a look at you. Well, they have. You’re chomping at the bit, aren’t you?”

“I would like to get back to my squadron.”

“I’ll be honest with you, BJ. I know there’s nothing here for you to do, I mean, besides waiting for somebody else to catch a cold. I know you’ve been bored. So I’m going to see what I can do about your request to ride with Special Ops as an observer. Not a bad idea, actually. We need more of our guys looking over their shoulders. Keep them from getting taken over by the god damn Green Berets. Pretty soon, these guys are going to be driving tanks instead of helicopters.”

Dixon sucked a quick, deep breath. He hadn’t exactly expected Greer to follow through on the offer, especially this fast.

Truth was, he’d be surplus material in the highly trained and capable crew that worked Special Ops.

On the other hand, this might be a kind of backhanded way of putting him back at King Fahd where he could just walk across the tarmac to Hog Heaven and get back in the starting rotation. It might be a way of getting around all the paperwork normally involved. Knowlington knew everyone in the air force; hell, he probably set this whole rigmarole up.

“I certainly wouldn’t pass up the chance to do anything, uh, anything important for the air force,” Dixon said.

“Good. If it was up to me, SAR would be entirely an air force mission. Special Ops is fine, don’t get me wrong, and I’m not against joint commands and all that bullshit, but— hey, this will work out. I’ll get on it right away,” said the major. “Listen, if anybody asks, you can handle a rifle, right?”

Dixon hesitated a moment. Since getting in trouble, he had made a solemn vow not to lie or even shade the truth.

“Absolutely, I can handle a rifle,” he said finally, deciding that handling wasn’t necessarily the same thing as aiming, firing and hitting anything he happened to point it at.

CHAPTER 4

Three-quarters of the world was blue— the light, delicate blue of a woman’s summer dress, inviting, scented with a fragrance that tickled and enticed.

The last quarter was hell, dirty yellow and brown, punctuated by black splotches and fingers of smoke and fire. Mongoose looked down through cockpit glass as the Hog chugged upwards, struggling to make the lofty twenty thousand feet prescribed as the “safe” altitude to cross the border. The A-10A was designed for smash-mouth, chin-in-the-mud flying. While other aircraft might consider twenty angels medium altitude, a heavily laden Hog worked up a serious sweat getting up there.

And to a Hog pilot, twenty thousand feet was just about in orbit. Hell, once the altimeter cranked over a hundred feet most guys called for oxygen and maybe a stewardess. But the brass had ordered the planes high to put them out of range of what was left of the Iraqi air defenses; though they’d been pounded pretty well on Day One of the air war, Saddam still had a formidable array of anti-aircraft guns and low-altitude missiles.

An Iraqi highway appeared in the distance as Mongoose oriented himself. It ran in a faint, gentle arc across the earth, like the scar left from a botched suicide attempt. Somewhere along it was an artillery encampment that Mongoose and A-Bomb had hit on their last run a few hours before, a five-clawed puppy paw of a site they had left mangled like a teenage girl’s wad of chewing gum. The pilot stared to the east, looking for the dark blotch of blackness that ought to mark it and the graves of the Iraqis who had worked the guns. There had been no resistance to speak of; the run had been quick, in and out, their bombs and missiles released from no lower than nine thousand feet, precisely as briefed. If anyone had fired at them, they hadn’t notice.

That was just fine as far as Mongoose was concerned. The medium altitude tactics felt awkward, but you couldn’t argue with the goal of getting everybody back in one piece. As the brass were fond of saying, there wasn’t anything worth dying for up here.

Which wasn’t to say that they wouldn’t get down and dirty if the situation called for it. Mongoose pushed his back against his seat, trying to undo a knot that had been tightening practically since leaving King Khalid. Part of him was convinced that the Hog had knotted his muscles itself because it didn’t like flying so high.

He double-checked his INS, mentally calculating that they were about ten minutes south of the quadrant in their assigned “kill box” or grid where they were to look for their target, another artillery park. Mongoose edged his eyes in that direction, his anticipation starting to build as he let the Hog nose ever so slightly into a very shallow dive. He aimed to arrive over their target at about fifteen thousand feet. The plane, happy to be on track for thicker air and sensing that she’d soon get a chance to do some snorting, gave him a happy growl, picking up speed.

Devil One and Two were each carrying a pair of Maverick B air-to-ground missiles and four Mk 20 Rockeye II cluster bombs. The Maverick B models were relatively primitive versions of the tank-busting weapon; a video camera in the nose displayed its target in a small television screen or TVM on the right side of the Hog’s control panel. Once a target was designated and locked, the pilot could launch the missile and move on; the Maverick’s own guidance system took over, flying its 125-pound shaped-charge warhead to the crosshairs. Newer models featured better seekers with infrared targeting and a heavier payload, but the B was still a deadly piece of meat, and only cost the air force about $22,000, a relative bargain— especially when compared to what it blew up.

The Mk 20 Rockeye II weapons were unguided but devastating; their bomblets spread out when dropped, a deadly hailstorm particularly suited for “softer” targets. The bombs were preset for this mission to be dropped from ten thousand feet; their need to be calibrated before taking off removed some of their flexibility, which was their only real drawback.

When the Hogs were about five minutes from their target, Mongoose did one more check of his paper map and coordinates. He was just rechecking their egress route back to base when their airborne controller, Red Dog, squawked out his call sign.

“Stand by for new tasking,” said the controller after running through the acknowledgment codes.

That meant: We got something juicy for you, so get your pen and paper handy.

Or in this case, your Perspex; Mongoose scrawled the heading and way markers directly onto the canopy glass with a grease pen. The nine-line brief began with an IP— an “initial point” to fly to that acted as the marker for most of the rest of the instructions.

The numbers on the glass were sending them about sixty miles further in Iraq, and well to the west, up in the direction of the Euphrates River and the better sections of the Iraqi air defense system. It was a hell of a long way to send the Warthogs, and Mongoose immediately guessed why.

He asked anyway. “What are we looking for, Red Eyes?”

“Scud launchers. F-111 crew saw them on the way out. Two, possibly more. Some auxiliaries.”

“Copy,” said Mongoose, immediately bringing his plane to the new heading.

The Iraqis had started launching the ground-to-ground missiles shortly after the start of the air war. Because of their range and ability to carry chemical and biological agents, Scuds had top priority as targets. So far, none had actually done much damage— but the allies’ luck couldn’t hold for very long.

The controller added that a Phantom Wild Weasel was being vectored into the area and would suppress any surface-to-air nasties. Like all the Weasels in the theater, the F-4 had a “beer” call sign: Rheingold One.

“The one Weasel to call when you’re slamming more than one,” sang A-Bomb in Devil Two. “I hope this Scud launcher is the son of a bitch who woke me up last night. Man, he pissed me off. I was in the middle of a wet dream.”

The rest of his transmission was covered by another flight. In theory, the squadron frequency should have been reserved just for them, but the large number of allied sorties and the fog of war had a way of mangling theories.

Mongoose wasn’t a particular fan of chitchat anyway, especially in this situation. If his map and memory were right, the suspected launch site was pretty close to several Iraqi SAM sites. The missiles had been hit at the beginning of the war, but that didn’t necessarily mean a few weren’t still there. But that’s what the Weasel was for.

He took a quick glance at his instruments. Everything was at spec. His heart was well into its pre-action rumble and his throat tightened a half-notch. Something inside his brain flicked a switch and the irises in his eyes widened. His situational awareness— a mental balloon of wariness around him— expanded as he gripped the stick between his knees, nudging the Hog toward the first reference marker.

His eyes turned upwards as a pair of F-15 Eagles on combat air patrol screeched across the sky well ahead and above the two A-10s. The pointy-nosed fast movers had just gotten word that an Iraqi plane was scrambling from an air base nearly a hundred and fifty miles to the north. The two jets looked like a pair of famished wolves, anxious for a kill.

Mongoose put his mind and eyes back where they belonged, scouting the ground ahead. The Hog was barely making two hundred knots, moving slow because of the altitude and its bomb load.

They were just three minutes to the target coordinate when Rheingold One checked in. He was swinging in from the northwest, obviously diverted from something else. His scopes were clear.

An old soldier now, the F-4 was equipped with radar-seeking HARM missiles that homed in on anti-air defenses. The missiles were extremely potent, but worked only when the radar sets were turned on— something the Iraqis had quickly learned not to do until they definitely wanted to shoot something down. The Weasel pilot sounded a little disappointed as he told Devil One things were quiet and would probably stay that way.

“Okay. Let’s keep it at fifteen thousand feet,” Mongoose told A-Bomb. “Take a circuit and see what we can see.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“You see that smudge off my right wing?”

“Four-barrel ZSU, gotta be.”

“Yeah, I think. Nowhere near where our missiles are supposed to be.”

“I got a good view. No missiles there. Looks like some sort of APC next to it, nothing else.”

“Okay, good. Let’s keep our distance.”

“’less we get bored.”

Mongoose held the Hog on its side so he could take a good gander at the ground, tilting his wings carefully. He told himself to break everything down, take things in pieces, and punch the buttons. This far north anything could happen. You had to go at it very deliberately.

There was no denying the adrenaline. In a certain way he almost considered this fun— not amusement park fun, since people were or could shot at him— but fun in the sense that it was what he was meant to do, what he was trained for and good at.

So where the hell were these things? He put his eyes out back toward the anti-aircraft gun he’d seen; well to the east now, its smudge had disappeared. It sat alone at the edge of the wasteland, with seemingly no reason to be agitated and too far from them to be of any immediate concern. He passed his eyes around in the other direction, noting that the desert was less stereotypical sand and dune desert here, more like a dirt parking lot that hadn’t been used in a long time. Scrubby vegetation and even some trees poked up everywhere in the packed-dirt wasteland before giving way to the more resolute stretches of sand.

Intel had passed around various pictures of Scud sites, and both Mongoose and A-Bomb had seen— and smoked— a carrier the other day. A typical launch site would arrange five or six missile erectors like fingers on a hand around a central command area. The Russian-made launchers were large trucks that looked like squashed soap pads with toilet paper tubes on them. But the Iraqis also made their own launchers from the transport trailers. From the air at this altitude they would look like long tanker trucks, dark pencils against the darker earth.

Mongoose saw nothing manmade below except the faint ribbon of a road. No trucks, no launchers, no Scuds. Definitely no base or flattened pull-off area. They were standing on the coordinates the controller had given them.

He continued the long, almost lazy figure-eight pattern around the area, gave a good scan again and still found nothing.

“See anything?” he asked his wing mate.

“Nah. You know what the problem is? We’re too high,” A-Bomb said. It was pretty much his answer to everything. “They could have all sorts of things camouflaged down there. We’re going to have to take it down.”

Mongoose reasoned that the plane that had spotted the launch site had probably been flying a lot higher than they were. “We’ll hold off on that a second,” he told A-Bomb. “You got that highway?”

“Oh, yeah. No missin’ it. Probably goes right to Saddam’s house.”

“Let’s follow it north and see if we can find anything worth taking a look at. Launch site has to be near a road.”

“Gotcha.”

Thirty seconds later, Mongoose caught the glare from something small and white moving along the highway ahead. He quick-glanced at the weapons panel but kept his stick hand solid. The white blur focused itself into a small pickup truck, too insignificant to be a target.

The road edged to the left ahead. There was a spot that seemed darker than the rest of the nearby desert; two or three shadows were at the edge, tents or something.

Good place for a bunker.

And more than that. Beyond the shadows were several rows of boxes that just had to be trucks, maybe armored personnel carriers or even light tanks.

“A-Bomb, there’s a wadi or something just northwest of the road where that truck is passing. Follow that and you’ll see a bunker complex or some awfully funny looking sand dunes looks like what, maybe a mile up it. Got it?”

Before his wing mate could acknowledge, the Hog’s launch warning system began shouting that Saddam’s forces had just fired a surface-to-air missile in their direction.

CHAPTER 5

For some guys, the worst time was the middle of the night. They’d lie awake in bed, sounds and shadows creeping around the periphery of their consciousness. Innocent things, or maybe not so innocent things, would poke at their memories, prod anxieties, fuel guilt. They’d sweat and writhe; eventually they’d get up. From there it would get worse.

Colonel Thomas “Skull” Knowlington had never minded the night. Even at the worst of times, he could sleep. And if he wasn’t sleeping, he was up because he had plenty to do, and having plenty to do meant he could focus on the present. That he could do; that was easy.

For him, the worst time was the middle of the day, the dead time between missions, when the paperwork was done, when he’d run out of things to check on, when he had no more calls to make or people to see. The late afternoon, with all his guys still out and everyone around him working or else off catching a quick breather— that was the worst time. That was the time he could do nothing, and doing nothing was the worst. Doing nothing led to old memories, and old memories led to a powerful thirst.

Thomas Knowlington— commander of 535^th Attack Squadron (Provisional), wing commander, if only on paper, decorated hero of the Vietnam War, a survivor of not just combat but the more dangerous intricacies of service politics— would do anything not to satisfy that thirst. He had been sober now for going on three and a half weeks. “Skull” Knowlington needed to put one more day on that streak, just one more day.

There’d be more, a long string beyond that, but for now, just one solid, drink-free day was his goal.

For much of his air force career he had hated paperwork, abhorring the bureaucratic red tape and bullshit. Now he welcomed it— not because he appreciated that it was impossible to run an organization as vast and complex as the air force without it, but because it gave him something to focus on. But inevitably, it was over. When the colonel finished proof-reading the last fitness report— something that could have waited for weeks if not months— he found his small desk completely empty. He got up, deciding to check things in the shop area, a short walk from the complex of trailers used as the squadron offices and dubbed “Hog Heaven” by the men. Besides Devil Squadron, seven A-10A units, over a hundred planes, used King Fahd as their home drome; it was also home to an assortment of helo and C-130 units, not to mention serving as a safe place to set down for anyone in the area. O’Hare on the day before Thanksgiving wasn’t half as busy.

Out in the Devil’s repair areas, one of Knowlington’s crews was refurbishing a Hog damaged during action earlier in the week. A new starboard rudder was being fitted in place on the large double tail at the rear; the colonel stopped to watch as the wing and its new control surface were quickly made whole. It was a testament not only to the crew, but to the men who had designed the plane for rapid repair in battle conditions.

“Colonel, can we help you, sir?” snapped off Sergeant Rebecca Rosen. She had a piece of a radar altimeter in her hand.

That or the liver of some unsuspecting airman who’d come on to her.

Officer’s liver would be larger.

“I’m in good shape at the moment, Sergeant,” Knowlington told her. “How about yourself?”

“Well, there was one thing, Sir.”

The colonel resisted the temptation to say, “How did I guess?” Instead he took a step backwards, gesturing that she should continue. One of the tricks to dealing with Rosen was to keep her from a completely private area where she would feel at liberty to vent for hours.

She squinted, obviously debating whether to ask to speak in his office. The colonel, an old hand at hearing grievances real and imagined, stood hard-faced. It wasn’t that he disliked dealing with true problems. Rosen, however, was a walking folder of potential disciplinary BS. Just under five-two with a trim and not unpleasant build, her most distinguishing feature was the six-by-six chip on her shoulder. Knowlington’s chief sergeant rated her among the best technicians in the air force, an expert on the Hog’s avionics and a tireless worker. He also had her pegged as the top problem magnet in the squadron, a judgment Knowlington couldn’t argue with.

“The other afternoon,” she said. “Captain Meyer, sir, well he, uh— ”

“OK, now tell me. Meyer is who?” Knowlington asked.

Rosen stopped, her eyes receding into their sockets as she realized she had miscalculated. The spec five had obviously expected Meyer to complain about something she’d done; now that Rosen realized he hadn’t, she beat a slippery retreat. The squirm on her face was almost worth the pain she’d cause him next time. “Um, never mind, sir. I have to get this installed pretty much right away.”

“Any time, Sergeant,” said Knowlington cheerfully.

He distributed a few other nods, making sure the crewmen knew he was there but trying at the same time not to bother them. A good part of his job as commander was to be a cheerleader, as much as possible applauding the men— and now women— coming up with incentives to keep the team together and moving in the right direction, but trusting his subordinates as much as possible to do their jobs. Over the past few years he’d found it less and less necessary to be a scumbag; either the air force was getting better, or he was.

A Navy A-6 Intruder touched down on the runway with a loud screech. Knowlington stepped forward to watch as the muscled gray swallow taxied. The first time he’d seen one he’d been at Da Nang, diverted for an emergency landing after flying a bit too close to a triple-A battery in his Thud. He was in good enough shape to circle the field while the Navy pilot, low on fuel, made his own pit stop. The plane had suffered an unexplained electronics failure, a common failure of planes of the era, Intruders especially.

They had beers later. The Navy guy, a lieutenant with two tours under his belt, bemoaned the fact that he would take a hell of a ribbing when he got back to the carrier; real pilots brought their planes back to their ship, no matter what.

Later, on their third or fourth beer, Knowlington saw the glance. It was the first time he’d truly seen fear in a pilot’s eye. In retrospect, he realized that he’d seen other signs before, but not recognized them, didn’t know what they meant: the furtive glance at your hands, the slight hesitation before speaking, the quick order of another drink, the urge to talk too much. It wasn’t fear so much as being afraid of fear, as doubting yourself, and that was what killed you.

He heard later the guy had been shot down on his very next mission. MIA.

Knowlington tried to move his mind off the past, think of something else as the Intruder disappeared down the runway. Hell of a thing, trying to land on a carrier. Skull had never had the pleasure, and he counted himself lucky. Landing on a dime was one thing; landing on something that rolled beneath you was quite another.

Just another thing to make you doubt yourself, squinting for the ball in the dark when you were just about out of gas and probably had to take a leak besides.

Intruders were supposed to be pretty stable bombers, muscular workhorses that carried a ton-load of bombs— 15,000 to 16,000 pounds— off a carrier without breaking a sweat.

Thuds were champion haulers themselves. The notched-wing fighter-bombers had been designed to hump nukes at breakneck speed over enemy lines and get the pilot back in one un-radiated piece. Skull had carried some dummy nukes very early in his career, but what he used the F-105 for was dropping sticks on the North Vietnamese. He’d been pretty damn good at it, too.

Carrying a nuke. Now there was a pucker-ass job, if you stopped to think what you were doing. Some of the real old-timers talked about jets where they knew they’d never get away from the blast. Who was it— Schroeder, maybe? — laughed about the F-84, hanging his butt over Cuba three days in a row.

No, that was a different story. They had a tendency to blur together.

Damn, he wanted a drink.

His heart started pounding. He was back in the Thud, Ol’ Horse, plane one, stone ages. Smell of raw kerosene and something that reminded him of a dentist’s office thick in his nose. Muscling the stick after dropping his load. Tail-end Charlie and he’d lost the rest of the flight. Just like the nugget he was.

Nothing to panic about. Knowlington brought the plane around to his course, climbing and then something happened, something made him crane his neck back. Maybe it was training or luck or intuition or just random chance, but as the young pilot pitched his eyes toward the rear quarter of his plane he saw the double dagger of a MiG-17 coming up to get him.

They were tough little bastards, in theory obsolete but in reality more than competent dogfighters. They got you in a fur ball and you could easily get your throat slit. The eggheads could pretend the F-105 had them outclassed but experience said otherwise. Had Knowlington not realized the bastard was on him, he would have been nailed in thirty seconds.

But he saw him. And instead of opening the engine gates and running like hell— his briefed routine, his orders, the prudent thing to do, what he absolutely would have done in ninety-nine out of one hundred other chances— he tucked his wing, pushing the stick as he began a ballet maneuver that suckered the MiG into following into a dive-and-scissors roll. He saw it all in his head a split-second before it happened: the second of danger as the enemy sighted him; the spin around instead of breaking off; behind the enemy now; the 20mm M61A1 cannon rotating slowly at first, then gaining momentum as he caught the MiG just behind his right wing, and stayed with him as the plane jinked, and stayed with him until he realized the commie bastard was out of it; seeing the wing breaking off even as he fought his own stick to level off; and finally getting the hell out of here, straight on course for home.

It turned out another F-105 pilot had seen the whole thing, raved like hell, and Knowlington had earned the first of his long series of “good” nicknames, “Killer Kid,” and notched an improbable air-to-air victory in a plane not known as much of a dogfighter. His victory was due as much to surprise and probably inexperience on the MiG pilot’s part as his own skill, but that was the sort of thing that got glossed over in the first rush of victory. In any event he had plenty of chances later to show it wasn’t just luck that kept his wings in the air.

So long ago now, though the surprise in his chest when he realized he’d nailed that son of a bitch still felt fresh.

More than twenty years. Shit, twenty-five. He should be long-since retired.

Or made a general, though everyone knew why that didn’t happen.

Skull blinked his eyes and turned away from the runway, hoping to wipe his mind clean. Replaying old glories was something you did when you were sitting down for dinner at the old age home.

Or when you were drinking. He headed back toward his office. Maybe he’d reread the Devil’s frag— the portion of the air tasking order that pertained to them. The next-day’s to-do list had ten of the squadron’s twelve planes committed to battle. It was a tight schedule, with one left in the repair shop and only one other as a spare. Even so, if the crew got the damaged plane back together in time, the backups might be tasked for their own mission.

Knowlington was dying to lead a mission himself. He’d been told not to, and there were good reasons for him to follow orders— starting with the fact that they were orders— but still. What good was a squadron commander who didn’t fly?

He put his head down, pushing the question and its inevitable answer from his mind as he walked back toward his office.

He was a few steps from the door to Hog Heaven when he was caught by the bear-like voice of Chief Master Sergeant Alan Clyston, his “capo di capo”. Clyston not only headed the squadron’s enlisted contingent but oversaw the squadron’s maintenance efforts personally, arranged for all manner of off-line items to appear with paperwork signed (or lost), and knew more than the World Book Encyclopedia on any subject anyone could quiz him on.

In short, a typical chief.

“There you are, Colonel,” said the Chief in his most respectful public voice. Clyston’s grin, though, betrayed the fact that he had known Knowlington well before he’d achieved that rank. He had, in fact, been a member of the crew that took care of the Thunderchief Knowlington had just been thinking about.

The chief’s memory of the plane would undoubtedly be a great deal different than the colonel’s. The Thunderchiefs were notoriously difficult to maintain.

“What’s up, Alan?”

“Got a little bit of a hitch. Need a check pilot, and Captain Rogers is down with that flu or whatever the hell he’s got. Still puking his guts out.”

“Three’s back together?”

“My guys got it buffed and shined, Colonel. Shit, you give them any more time and they’re going to put a sunroof in.”

“I’ll take it up,” snapped Knowlington.

“Sir?”

The ‘sir’— with its attached tone of surprise— hurt. Knowlington endeavored to turn it into a joke. “Afraid I’m going to break your plane?”

“No, sir, Colonel. Not at all. I just thought maybe you’d borrow somebody from one of the other units.”

Though he commanded the squadron, Knowlington had come to his post through a round-about series of events. He actually had barely a hundred hours in the A-10 cockpit, by far the lowest of the squadron’s pilots. The inspection flight called for a prescribed set of maneuvers designed to stress its systems in different regimes; it was far from a picnic, and ordinarily handled by a functional test pilot, someone who had considerable experience with the plane.

Still, it was no reason for the concern evident on his chief’s face.

“You’re thinking I can’t do a milk run?”

“No way, sir. You’ll do fine.”

“Good. When do you need me?”

“As soon as you can, Colonel.”

“Good. I’ll be right over.”

Clyston held eye contact for just a second longer than necessary. Knowlington chucked his old crew chief a sharp punch to the shoulder. “Meet you out back, Chief,” he said, heading away before his old friend could decide what words ought to go with that look.

CHAPTER 6

In normal times, Lieutenant Col. Fred Parsons flew a commercial 747 for American Airlines. The big Boeing was a handsome plane, predictable, steady and recently upgraded with every bell and whistle the Seattle wizards could stuff into the cockpit. She was everything the FAA and a travel agent could want in an airliner.

Which meant she was boring as hell.

The G model F-4 Phantom he was hot-sticking had more miles on her than a fleet of Greyhound buses. Smoke poured out of her tail thicker than a wet barbecue, making her easy to spot at a distance. In full-afterburner go-for-it mode she could top the sound barrier, but the Vietnam-era mainstay couldn’t come close to matching the top end of an Eagle or even the Grumman Tomcat, her Navy successor. This particular plane also had a tendency to drag her left wing— not so much that the maintenance crew could figure out what the hell it was, but enough so the pilot felt it on a hard-butt turn.

He loved it.

Never very good as a twisty-turny hot rod, the Phantom hailed from an era when designers first realized missiles and beyond-visual range tactics were the way to go in a dogfight. They got so excited about the future that they forgot about the present. Her real value was as a sled for every imaginable weapon and fantasy the air force and navy could load under her wings. The Phantom was still flying now, nearly forty years after being conceived, because the two-seater could accommodate all manner of equipment without completely compromising performance. Just over fifty radar antennas were currently feeding data to Parson’s backseat wizard, who in the great tradition of weapons officers or backseaters went by the name of “Bear.” The Phantom could carry nearly her weight in arms and fuel— and at 29,000 pounds soaking wet, that was a very full load of groceries. The fact that she had a backseat allowed Parson to concentrate on flying while Bear studied the dials and maybe the latest copy of Playboy.

Equipped with extra fuel tanks, the Phantom could also stay aloft for an incredibly long time, an asset that Parsons was putting to good use at the moment, just entering his third hour in Indian country. He and another Weasel had started the afternoon with a bombing package, looking to suppress integrated SAM defenses deep in Iraq. The other Weasel had launched a pair of missiles at one of the sites, but otherwise the mission had been so quiet Parsons had gladly brushed aside his fatigue when the request came to assist the Hogs on their Scud-hunting gig.

“I’m beginning to think they’re out,” said Bear, whose dog tags identified him as Captain Harvey Jackson, another member of the Air National Guard and a high school English teacher in what he called “the real world.” Intel suspected that at least one battery of SA-2’s and another of SA-6’s were still breathing below.

“If they’re not coming up for those Hogs, they’re not coming up,” Bear predicted. “They should be able to see them. I say we got three minutes to worry about, then it’s downhill. I hope these assholes try something— I want that SA-6.”

“Me too. But not if it nails our little buddies.”

“Hey, those Hogs are tough bastards. I bet you could put a missile through each wing and they’d still come home— after they made their bomb run.”

“Probably been done.”

“Don’t worry, Fred. I’m not letting them get hit.”

In some of the early model Phantoms, the backseater could look past his control panel and see the pilot; in fact, it was possible to pass notes back and forth and even lean forward or backward for an ataboy. In the Gs, though, the two crewmen were separated by an “iron wall”— actually a wall of aluminum and glass, electronics, wires and gauges, but it might just as well be iron as far as Bear in his cave was concerned. Fly with the same guy long enough, though, or through enough shit and the distance disappeared. His thoughts became your thoughts; the back-and-forth chatter became a kind of binary code plugging into your head.

“I’m going to take us further north near that SA-6,” Parsons told Bear. “I have a feeling they’re down there and waiting.”

“Hang loose, Colonel.”

It wasn’t the words but the tone that told the pilot his backseater had a tingling. The APR-47 radar attack and warning receiver sniffed out a quick hit as Parson’s grip on the stick tightened.

“Oh yeah. He’s turning it on and off. Just a two-second burst. I have him. SA-2. Hasn’t launched yet. Okay, okay.”

“Roger that. Scope’s clear except for Squeaky,” answered Parsons. “Putting him on beam.”

“Still looking for the SA-6.”

“I have ten miles to target. That SA-2 battery’s going to launch any second. You ready to fire?”

“PPI has it,” said the pitter, referring to the Plan Position Indicator, which displayed enemy threats in relation to the Weasel. “I’m handing off.”

It took a bare second for the Phantom’s computer to send the targeting information to the HARM AGM-88 missile under her wing. The antiradiation missile took in the numbers, crunched them to fit, and blipped the light on Bear’s panel telling him it was ready to talk turkey with the Iraqis.

“Got a light.”

“Launch.”

“Missile away.”

“They’ve launched!” Parsons saw the ground flash and blew hard into his mask. The SA-2 had been in action since the Vietnam War; it had a small bag of tricks, and to a plane as fast and as high as Rheingold One, it did not pose much of a threat. Still, he had to be careful. He was just about to push the Phantom into a roll when his backseater shouted into the com set.

“Son of a bitch— there’s two batteries. Hold it— there’s our SA-6. Colonel, go to twenty-five mile scope.”

“Roger that. We got a telephone pole headed in the other direction. Get the six first. How far is it?”

“Fifteen miles. In two, start your turn to the left. We’ll take a beam shot, then go back for the twos.”

“Shit— more launches. The twos. I thought these motherfuckers were hit day one. It looks like Cape Canaveral down there.”

Parsons tightened his grip on the control stick. The SA-6s, persistent missiles immune to the ECM pods used by many USAF planes in theater, had top priority.

The Hogs were on their own against the SA-2s.

CHAPTER 7

Somewhere at the edge of his consciousness, the radar warning receiver was lit up like a Christmas tree, telling Mongoose that the missile was coming at him from the northeast. By the time the information fully registered, the pilot had already begun turning the plane to “beam” the missile’s radar guidance system— pulling the Hog ninety degrees to the radar to defeat its pulse-doppler signals.

“Missile in the air,” said A-Bomb, his voice cold and crisp in Mongoose’s helmet.

When his first maneuver and the chaff failed to shake the missile, Mongoose rolled the Hog, tucking his right wing to the earth as his eyes hunted the sky for the enemy bullet. Gravity crashed into his face and side, Newton’s laws of motion making him work for a living. His fingers tightened on the control stick as he felt the Hog tug a bit. The Mavericks and Rockeyes were still tied to his wings but the plane wasn’t complaining so much as letting him know it could still do its job once this diversion was over.

First he had to get clear. He poked his nose back, still coming down, but the last thing he wanted to do was fly right into the son of a bitch.

But it was fine. Around it was okay. Away from it was better.

A-Bomb yelped something else. The words rushed by incomprehensibly.

Mongoose looked in the direction the warning unit advised but saw nothing. The edge of his helmet slammed against his neck as he jerked his head around; the sting crept down his back like a pack of night crawlers.

The Weasel pilot barked something at him, another break most likely.

More missiles. His warning unit had them.

One problem at a time.

He sucked air hard twice before his eyes found what looked like a thick telephone pole pushing toward him. It looked more like a tree trunk propelled by a tornado than a missile, more blunted than streamlined. Mongoose caught a good glimpse of its nose as he pushed the Hog down, trading altitude for energy and speed. He was lucky; he could already tell from the trajectory the missile would miss him. It was too big to come back to his course. Too big, too fat, too ugly, too old, even for a slow mover like the Hog.

He was clear; none of the other missiles had locked on him.

He had a good view of one of them. Big bastard, but kind of a wimp— didn’t even have the guts to spin back in his direction and keep the fight going.

Then he realized the missile was going after A-Bomb, whose big green shadow passed through a low cloud a depressingly short distance from the thirsty, blunt nose of the SA-2.

CHAPTER 8

A-Bomb fired another round of chaff and kicked a couple of flares out the back for good measure. He could feel the missile starting to breathe in gulps, like a tiger closing in for the kill.

“Screw yourself,” he told it, bending the nose of the Hog as he jackknifed the airplane toward the ground. He rolled and caught sight of the missile closer than he’d suspected, so close in fact that he knew he’d almost blown it big time.

He saw the wobble and then the shock wave that consumed the SA-2’s long shaft as the warhead exploded. He saw that before he felt it, before he hunched his shoulders up and reflexively ducked his head, steadying the stick and telling the Hog not to worry. Energy and shrapnel rushed toward him; he swept his plane to the left, riding some of the wave but rocking like all hell, knowing they were going to make it okay. He squeezed the A-10 close to him, swaying with her like a teenager at a prom, whisking her off to a quiet corner of the dance floor where he could feel beneath her bra without the chaperones taking notes.

Of course, that was exactly the sort of thing that got him kicked out, that and the beer cans in his tux, but what the hell.

His plane stable again, the pilot keyed his mike, not for Mongoose or Rheingold but for the Iraqi who’d launched the missile:

“Missed, Saddam. Kind of a sissy explosion, if you ask me.”

Mongoose replied but A-Bomb didn’t have time to explain, spotting a fresh trio of missiles silhouetted against the ground, rising off his right wing just as he began pushing his nose back toward the few scattered clouds in the sky.

“More missiles,” he called. He squeezed his chaff button and began a new jinking routine.

All this maneuvering was starting to work up a good sweat, the kind of thing Gatorade was invented for.

Problem was he hadn’t packed any. A-Bomb pitched the Hog back for the ground. This time he was putting the plane down so low not even a gopher could follow it.

All three missiles were coming for his butt, not his commander’s. Which was what he got for making smart ass remarks over the radio.

One of the SA-2s inexplicably disappeared. The other two kept coming. A-Bomb leaned forward in his seat as the radar warning receiver started to get frantic. He was out of tinsel and didn’t have all that much sky left in front of him either.

SA-2s ought to get lost in the ground effects, their guidance system confused by the natural shadows and echoes thrown up by the earth.

Nope. They were coming for him big time.

The Hog didn’t like this. She had her head down and was running for all she was worth, screaming as she broke below two thousand feet.

She didn’t like to run away. She wanted to turn around and nail the missile in the teeth with a few rounds from her gun.

A-Bomb held on, skimming the ground at five hundred, four hundred, two hundred feet. By all rights he should have been clear by now — that or bagged— but he could feel he wasn’t. As he jinked, the shadow of one of the missiles poked into the far corner of his vision, dark and ugly. Stinking Saddam must have loaded this one up personally and fueled her with his piss, because the bitch was staying with him.

The missile was now in terminal-intercept phase— its onboard guidance system had locked on the Hog. It didn’t have to hit him; it just had to get close. There was no question of outrunning the missile in the much slower airplane, and A-Bomb didn’t seem to be lucky enough to outlast it.

No way the damn missile should still be on him. At two hundred feet?

Maybe it smelled his Twinkies.

He yanked the Hog back, pushing, shoving, straining, standing the sucker on her tail as its nose spat right in the missile’s face before he shoved back toward the dirt in almost the opposite direction.

It was like flashing a mirror in front of a charging bull and then diving down a manhole. The SA-2 twisted to follow the last echo of its radar, shuddering as its momentum carried it beyond the Hog.

It exploded with an angry tear, but by then A-Bomb had revved the engines higher than an Indy race car, flinging himself away from the last SA-2, which had been flying roughly parallel maybe a hundred yards behind the first. He was so low he could have landed. Its explosion rattled the American plane bad, pushing it down and yanking its tail sideways so violently that, at first, the pilot thought he’d been hit.

By the time he managed to steady the plane and dance his eyes through the gauges to confirm that the plane was still in one piece, A-Bomb was heading for a small observation post on a hill that stood over the desert like a crow’s nest. He had maybe three inches of clearance over the roof of the tent and had he lowered his landing gear he could have wrecked it.

A-Bomb would have left the post alone and started tacking north to hook up with his lead if it weren’t for the fact that the Iraqis manning the post decided to protest his low flight by firing every weapon they could find at him. Fortunately, they had nothing more formidable than AK-47s, and possibly the newer AK-74s, which had almost no recoil, a really good bark when you pulled the trigger, and a bullet that squished up good like a dum-dum.

Deadly against a person at a few hundred yards, but useless against a Hog.

Still, it was the thought that counted. Hunkering in his titanium bathtub, A-Bomb brought the plane around in a quick, tight bank. No one fired at a Hog without paying for it. He dialed up his cannon, steadied his hand, and let loose with a stream of high-explosive and depleted uranium that turned the position into a dervish of sand and burnt flesh.

Past the outpost, he gunned the throttle and nosed northwards, looking for Mongoose.

As he did, he reached inside his flight suit and hit the replay on his CD unit until he could hear the beginning of “Born in the USA.” Something about that song brought out the best in an airplane, no shit.

CHAPTER 9

Whoever was working the Iraqi SA-6 missile battery was either very good or very cautious, or both. Since the brief blip that alerted Bear to his presence, the intercept radar had been completely silent.

It didn’t matter though— the Weasel Police had his number. Parsons took a half second to make sure the SA-2s weren’t a threat and then closed for the kill.

The Phantom wasn’t completely immune to the SA-6. The missile had a range of approximately fifteen kilometers. Its control radar used two different bands and could acquire multiple targets. The SA-6 itself could out-maneuver a fighter and contained its own semi-active radar; once fired, it stood a better than average chance of hitting its target even with counter measures going full tilt.

“Turning,” called Parsons, pulling the Phantom in a sharp bank, directly toward the missile’s now-silent radar.

“Two is back up. Okay, here’s our six again. We’re going to nail the bastard. Okay. Hand off.”

Bear was busier than a one-armed paper hanger behind the iron wall separating the two men. The computer took the target information on the SA-6 and gave it to the HARM missile’s onboard guidance system. The big AGM-88 took the info, hiccupped, then thundered away. Immediately Bear dialed in one of the two SA-2 radar sites the plane had detected.

“Got the light,” he told Parsons.

“Fire!”

“Away.”

The thud of the rocket igniting beneath the gull-shaped wings felt reassuring. Parsons had already started a jink to keep his butt clean, planning on spinning back to pull the Phantom in the direction of the last SA-2 battery. He could see ground fire from anti-aircraft cannons, too far off to bother anyone. One of the A-10As was cutting paper dolls out of sky in the distance, evading a SAM.

“Keep your turn coming,” Bear told him. I have one more. He’s up. He’s dotted.” The pitter’s slang referred to the icons on his screen that said the enemy radar had been located and targeted by the Phantom’s gear.

“Handing off,” Bear said, giving the target information to the missile so it could attack while he concentrated on finding more threats.

“Optical launches on those twos,” warned the pilot.

“Ready light!”

“Fire.”

“Away. Shit— we got that six. Mama! Secondaries. There we go! Got the trailer on the two! Whole damn thing’s burning like all hell. Oh yeah, baby! Kick ass!”

The HARM’s warhead was designed to explode large, nasty shards of tungsten into the control facility of the missile’s radar. By doing that, the HARM wiped out the valuable electronics gear, rendering the battery useless. It was a more effective way of destroying a threat than blowing a hole in a radar dish, which could be easily repaired.

It also generally meant you got the men working the missile. The good ones were harder to replace than the gear they worked.

Parson caught a glimpse of the damage through the top of the canopy as he rolled the Phantom and began letting off chaff. One of the SA-2’s that had been fired before the site was hit was now headed in their direction.

“Telephone pole’s gunning for us,” the pilot told his pitter— his way of apologizing for the six-and-a-half g’s he pulled as he yanked the F-4 around to confuse the missile’s guidance system. The force of the maneuver squeezed his mouth and made his words sound strange, even to him. As he recovered, he juiced the throttle, accelerating to put a good chunk of real estate between the Phantom and the Iraqi missile. But the missile, fired without proper targeting to begin with, had already fallen away.

“Hogs are still with us,” reported the backseater.

“Devil Flight, this is Rheingold One. Sorry for the excitement,” Parsons told the A-10s.

“No problem,” snapped Devil One. “We like things hot.”

The colonel did a quick check of his systems, made sure he hadn’t caught something in the nether reaches of the plane. His fuel was still pretty good, but they’d fired all their radiation missiles; time to call it a day.

“How you doing in your cave back there, Bear?”

“’Bout ready to take a nap,” said the pitter.

“Miles to go before you sleep,” said the pilot.

“Hey, I’m the English teacher. When did you study Frost, anyway?”

“Haven’t you heard? Mandatory training for all airline pilots.”

“I’ll be impressed when you quote Whitman.”

“’Flood tide below me, I see you face to face’,” said Parsons, reciting the beginning to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

It was the only part of the poem, or Whitman for that matter, that he knew, but it was good enough to elicit a snort of surprised approval from Bear.

CHAPTER 10

The plane the A-10A reminded Knowlington of wasn’t the Thud, which, after all, was a straight-line in-and-out mover. It reminded him of the Spad, the propeller-driven A-1 Skyraider, a Navy plane adopted by the air force for close-in ground-support work. Drawn up at the tail end of World War II as a torpedo bomber, the Spad was a throwback to an era when sticking really meant sticking.

Knowlington had never actually been assigned to an A-1—he’d been a pointy-nose, fast-mover jock from Day one— but he wormed his way into the Spad’s cockpit a few times to satisfy his curiosity. He’d even once volunteered for a combat mission, though he was probably lucky he’d been turned down. He was flying Phantoms by then, and if a Viet Cong gunner hadn’t gotten him, the shock to his system would have.

Still, the A-1 was a hell of a plane, all stick and rudder, able to eat bullets with the best of them. She had her quirks. Skull always had a bit of trouble with the armament panel; it was right above his knee but he had a bad angle while flying. Still, the plane felt substantial around him, like a big old Mercedes. He had a fairly good flying position high up top, unlike the Phantoms and especially the early Thuds, where it felt like you were in a cave. And she did what she was told. Think left and you moved left. She could stand just about stock-still if you wanted, and pound the bejezuz out of what you were looking at.

The Hog was like that, only a bit faster.

Well, maybe not faster, come to think about it.

Skull thought right bank and the Hog went right bank. He pulled the stick back and she corrected, her forked tail snapping into place like a slot car coming out of a turn. He pulled a few more turns, each one a little sharper, making sure the control surfaces were still in place and working well.

Even though he’d flown the Hog back in the States as much as he could, Knowlington had been awkward as hell his first few flights over here, muscling the plane through her paces, hitting his marks mechanically. It wasn’t physical, it was mental — like he was thinking about flying, or maybe worrying about what some of his more senior pilots must be thinking: old man in a plane, old washed up hack shuffled into the wrong command.

No one said that, of course, but he could read it. More than one Centcom staffer just about told him he was washed up, though the generals were much more tactful— most of them, after all, had been his friends for a long time. Inside the squadron, there was plenty of resistance, even from Major Johnson, maybe especially from him. Johnson felt with some justification that he could lead the squadron, and probably resented being number two behind a guy who’d hardly even flown the plane. A-10 drivers were a special fraternity among combat pilots; their mission and plane was different than anyone else’s, and they tended to be different, too.

Good pilots, definitely, but with maybe the tiniest of chips on their shoulders about it.

A few realized that Knowlington had helped save the Hogs and possibly their jobs from the scrap yard, volunteering when he got word through the back channels that the CINC himself wanted more Hogs in Saudi Arabia for the ground war. They were grateful, but even they thought he was too far removed from “real” flying to lead them into battle.

Nobody mentioned his drinking. No one ever had.

The gray-haired colonel in him agreed that he ought to stand aside for the younger men when it came to flying missions; most of them were better Hog pilots than he’d ever be. But this afternoon he felt something ease into place as he snapped himself into the A-10A’s ejector seat, something familiar; as he pushed the nose up and started to climb toward ten thousand feet, Colonel Thomas “Skull” Knowlington lost track of the line that separated him from the plane. Some awkwardness lingered. He kept expecting more in the HUD, and maybe a better view out of the side of the canopy; his eyes tripped when they felt for the fuel gauge. But he knew this plane the way he knew the others; after so many years of estrangement, the sky had welcomed him back.

No reason I shouldn’t go north, he told himself. As long as I’m not a liability, it’s where I belong.

Except that the generals above him wouldn’t like it. As long as he didn’t screw up, they wouldn’t court martial him over it, of course, but they could force him to retire.

Then his string of non-drinking days would surely end.

Knowlington pushed the Hog through a series of twists and turns, gradually increasing the pressures against the control surfaces. He had written down a cheat sheet with all the maneuvers, just to make sure he didn’t miss any. But he didn’t even have to glance at it. His hands were slower, true, and his eyes— damn, his eyes weren’t the telescopes they’d once been. But his head was still there; that was sharper than ever.

Your head could also be a liability. Memories were like bullets in your wing. One slipped into his brain now as he pulled the Hog into a steep dive. He tried to work it away, ignore it. He even closed his eyes. But it came back, hard and fresh.

He was in a Phantom. They had just pulled out of a dive every bit as steep, bombing a bridge near the Laos border. Knowlington recovered and started the long run home. His wingman called out a SAM launch.

Soviet telephone poles coming for them. The SA-2 was relatively new then, very formidable. But he had encountered them a few times before; so had his wingman. He jinked the missile onto his beam, pulled a few g’s and let the engine roar. Nothing to it.

But his wingman couldn’t break free. Somehow, some way, Captain Harold “Crush” Orango had taken a SAM right in the tail. Skull’s backseater saw the hit. He saw, or thought he saw, two ejections and chutes. By the time Skull recovered from his evasive maneuvers and made sure his six was clean, they had lost track of the stricken Phantom’s crew. Skull cranked back, unable to find the parachutes in the low-lying clouds or draped in the jungle below. They found the wrecked Phantom soon enough — the sucker kicked up more smoke than a flaming oil tanker — but the pilot and weapons officer were nowhere to be found.

Skull keyed his mike and called in the crash. At the same time, he greased his Phantom down to treetop level, looking for his buddy in the thick canopy of trees. He’d flown with Crush on something like twenty missions; he wasn’t about to lose him.

Hell damn, he’d have to start paying for his own drinks.

There was no ground beacon, no signal from the pilot’s emergency radio. They were over Laos a few miles, not the best area to be. For all Skull cared he could have been pulling circuits over the Kremlin. He crisscrossed twice, low and slow, he and his pitter taking turns peering out the side, looking in vain for a pucker of nylon or a flash from a signal mirror.

He spotted a village — sized clearing at the edge of the canopy just to the east, probably straddling the border with North Vietnam, though he wasn’t about to get out a map and check. Holding the F-4 about as slow as it would go, he eased toward it. The clearing was a perfect place for a chopper to land. With luck Crush would be hiding nearby.

Red and brown rocks rose from the jungle to his left as he approached. There was a long rift in the ground, a mountain ridge heaved up by some ancient geological pressures that had dented the South Asian peninsula. He passed the clearing.

“See anything?” his backseater asked.

They called him Little Bear. Not exactly original, but he claimed to be part Cherokee.

Might’ve been bull.

“Negative. I’m trying another sweep.”

“Copy.”

Skull brought the Phantom back around, her engines whining. Fuel burn was light. Flaps felt a bit sluggish for some reason. He was at five hundred feet, slipping toward three hundred as he made the pass, lower than the top of the nearby ridge.

Nothing. And nothing again on the third run. He brought the plane up. This much flying over any one spot in Southeast Asia was extremely dangerous, especially at low altitude.

But where was Crush? On the other side of the ridge? He took the Phantom around, still craning his head toward the ground for a sign of something.

“I’m going to run along that escarpment a way,” he told Little Bear.

“Shit— a mirror. Right wing. See it?”

His backseater leaned forward past his equipment to poke him in the back and make sure he had his attention. Skull looked over his shoulder out the F-4’s canopy, but couldn’t see the light, couldn’t see anything but the infinite variations of green below.

“Where?” he asked.

“Back there. It was something.”

“Yeah, hang on. I’ll go back.”

He could barely contain himself or the Phantom as he pulled around for a better look. He put his wings almost on the trees, holding the jet barely above stall speed, begging the mirror to catch a fresh glint of the strong, overhead sun.

He got a nose full of heavy machine-gun fire as a reward. What seemed like a hundred thousand 23mm anti — aircraft guns opened up on him from the ridge.

There was a disconnect for a second, a short between his brain and his body. Knowlington’s hand threw the throttle to after-burner, or maybe beyond; the rest of him reacted to push the plane into a line over the ridge and out of fire. None of this registered in his brain. All the pilot saw was black lead headed straight at him from all directions, red muzzles burning into his eyes.

Breaking off was the prudent thing to do, the thing any commander would have insisted he do, the thing that was right. He did it as soon as his limbs began taking instructions from his brain again.

It felt very, very wrong.

They were back at twenty thousand feet, still climbing and halfway to Burma before his backseater’s voice pulled him back to the plane.

“Throttle stuck,” Skull answered lamely. He began pulling the Phantom back, but he was spooked. They were now low on fuel, so low that he couldn’t have made another pass even he wanted to. He radioed a warning about the anti-air and headed back to home base in Thailand.

After that, the real drinking started.

No one ever found Crush or his pitter. They weren’t among the prisoners released at the end of the war, nor did their names show up among the dead, either in the North or interred in Laos. Their names were on the Wall in Washington, D.C.; Skull had traced his finger over them himself.

Officially, the Air Force decided that the two men had gone down with the plane; unofficially, Knowlington knew that was a bunch of bull, since the Vietnamese would have recovered the bodies. The reds had definitely found the plane; they had released propaganda photos of it as part of a campaign to prove that America had no respect for Laos’s borders.

As if the scumbags did themselves.

Despite the fact that he’d driven through a cloud of flak, Skull’s Phantom didn’t have a nick on it when he landed. A lot of guys interpreted that as one more sign of his incredible luck. Even Little Bear was amazed.

Knowlington saw it as confirmation that he had chickened out and was a coward at heart.

All the recognition, all the medals that had come before that flight— and certainly those that came later— couldn’t counterbalance those dark five minutes on that sortie.

He never talked about it with Little Bear. In fact, he started avoiding his backseater, worried that he might want to talk about the mission, about his chickening out. The weapons officer would have known the throttle sticking was a bunch of bull. He would have felt the second of indecision. He would have known they should have toughed it out despite the gunfire— prudence be damned.

“Devil Twelve, Devil Twelve, this is Fahd control. Colonel, how are you reading me?”

“Twelve. Go ahead, Control.”

“Sir, we need to move you around a bit.”

Snapped back to the present, Knowlington did a quick check of his instruments before responding. The plane was flying at spec and had passed all her tests; no need to keep it up any longer than necessary. Tightening his grip on the stick, the colonel pushed a long breath of air out of his lungs into his face mask, reminding himself to stay in the present, to work on just today. He told the controller that what he’d really like to do was land.

“Ah, Miller time, is it?”

“Something like that,” he told the kid.

Spinning back to take his slot in the landing pattern, Skull admired the way the Hog picked her tail up and put her nose right where he wanted, He tried hard not to think of anything else.

CHAPTER 11

Mongoose heard A-Bomb. He had his bearing, but still couldn’t see him. He continued climbing, spotting the highway they’d been flying along earlier, still without his wingman in view. Finally he caught the plane in the distance, much lower than he thought it would be.

He keyed the mike and asked A-Bomb if he was all right.

“Yeah, I told you I’m fine. Iraqis couldn’t hit a zeppelin.”

Damned if A-Bomb didn’t sound like he was munching on something. And did he have his music cranked?

“Can you see me?” Mongoose asked.

“Yeah. Gonna take me a minute.”

“We’ll come east and follow that highway again. You see it?”

Their little adventure in advanced jinking and jiving had taken them a good distance from the road and the bunkers they’d been aiming to inspect, before the SAMs interrupted. Mongoose kicked the throttle open and slipped the A-10A into a straight tack north, calculating a new plan of attack as he went. The brown ribbon that marked the highway gradually grew wider. He decided they would cross it, then slide down out of the northwest.

A-Bomb caught up to him as they reached the road. They angled northwestward, making just over 380 knots.

Combat did weird things to time. The actual encounter with the surface to air missiles hadn’t lasted more than two or three minutes, yet it seemed to fill several hours. Everything immediately before it felt like it had happened days ago. Everything now felt like slow motion.

And yet, sitting on the strip at King Khalid while waiting for clearance, that seemed to have just happened. Mongoose glanced at his pocket where the letter was, then reached his hand over and patted it, as if for luck.

He’d left his wife and baby in the living room. He’d kissed her, kissed him, kissed her again. He walked backwards to the door. A leather and fabric duffel bag sat there, worn from a thousand hellos and good-byes. Through the screen door he could see his ride waiting impatiently by the curb.

He lingered, watching her feed their baby, Robby. The infant’s eyes were closed. The deep frown of worry on his wife’s face gradually faded as she stared at her child.

“Hey, are those your bunkers at two o’clock?” asked A-Bomb. “Shit, look at that. Goddamn Saddam’s got a used car lot down there. And I’m in the market for a flamed-out APC.”

Mongoose’s head nearly hit the canopy as he snapped back to the present. He tacked south a second, aiming to come back and orbit the site from above. A-Bomb, following off his right wing in a loose trail, actually had a closer position behind him as they turned.

“You see any Scuds in there?” the major asked.

“Negative. I think the report was wrong.”

“Maybe.”

“Screw the Scuds,” said A-Bomb. “I say we dust these mother fuckers. We’re gonna run out of sun in less than a half-hour.”

“Yeah, hang loose,” Mongoose told him. “Let me think this one through a second.”

They had given the area a fairly thorough search without finding the Scud site. Sunset was rapidly approaching. Tough hombre or no, the Hog was not a night fighter. Mongoose relayed the information back to the ABCCC controller, telling him that they had come up blank on the Scuds but found something almost as juicy. Unless someone aboard the C-130 had serious objections or a better read on the Scuds, they were going to expend their stores against the parking lot and then go home.

The controller was juggling about ten million things at once. By the time he cleared Devil flight to make the attack, Mongoose had blueprinted the raid three times. He noted what were probably two four-barrel anti-air guns at each end; neither had activated its radar, either out of smart tactics or, more likely, because the Hogs were well out of range and hadn’t been spotted. Assuming they were ZSU-23s— the most common anti-aircraft guns the Iraqis had— the weapons would have to be respected, but were not an insurmountable problem, especially at medium altitude.

What he’d seen as a bunker was actually a low-slung building. It could be the top of an underground complex, though there was no way of really knowing from here. He debated using the Mavericks against it on the chance that it would hold ammunition and make a really spectacular boom. But the building wasn’t going anywhere. With a good INS read, it could be attacked whenever the targeters back at Black Hole wanted to hit it. The trucks and tanks— two or three seemed to be dug into shallow trenches— were a different story.

Mongoose would descend to ten thousand feet and use the Mavericks on the tanks. If the flak guns got annoying, they could go after them with the cluster bombs; otherwise the GBUs would be dropped on the trucks. They’d hold off using the Hogs’ cannons— and dropping below eight thousand feet— unless absolutely necessary, as per the general rules of engagement.

“I’m going to roll and take the vehicles furthest from the building,” he told A-Bomb. “I think they’re tanks. Come around and see what’s left.”

“Copy.”

“Watch your altitude and don’t get too low. Keep your eye on that dune where the ground turns into the real desert? You see it?”

“I’m with you.”

“Got to be a ZSU. You see that one and the other one?”

“Yeah. I’ll let you know if they open up shop.”

Mongoose came around in a half circle, lined up before he pushed over into a rolling dive, swinging the nose of the plane toward his target. He could see the three tanks clearly now, their guns pointing east rather than south.

The sand heaped around them would provide some protection against a near miss. But he wasn’t going to miss. He felt his way into a thirty-five degree glide, the turret of the tank at the right end inching toward the center of his screen. Mongoose moved eyes over the Maverick’s small targeting screen, probing for the heart of the shadow in the middle of the screen, sucked there like the tip of a compass seeking north. They wobbled, then stuck, glued themselves right in the center of the turret.

Mongoose held his stick dead steady and pickled. He felt the Maverick slip away and blinked his eyes, pulling the next missile on-line. He had to work the crosshairs hard, nearly losing his target. His altitude was burning off faster than he’d planned; he was nearing eight thousand and was going to fall lower before he could fire. His recovery would probably bring him within range of well-managed AAA, but it couldn’t be helped; he was going to have that tank. Finally the cursor slipped in. He had a lock and the missile was off, winging toward the lollipop that marked the top of the northernmost vehicle.

He moved his eyes up to the canopy, scanning the ground as he leveled off and began orbiting to the south. He missed seeing the first missile hit. He caught the second: a small, almost insignificant splotch of brown and black flared into the shape of a mushroom and then quickly flattened. The top of tank jerked up and down as if it were a warm can of soda being opened.

The sky below his left wing began filling with black puffs of flak. In the same instant he realized the desert undulations had hidden two gun positions almost directly beneath his egress path.

CHAPTER 12

A-Bomb called the flak location about two seconds after it began, warning his lead to take evasive action. In the same moment he adjusted his course to eliminate the threat. He was at ten thousand feet with a clear view of the muzzle flash— it was a four-barrel ZSU-23, firing far too short to do any damage. Still, it had fired on a Hog, and its fate was sealed. He switched the Maverick’s TVM to six times magnification; his target was dead center. He locked and fired, looking up in time to see the two other emplacements begin firing as well.

He wasn’t in the best position to take out either one, so he put them on hold, deciding to use his last AGM-65B on the remaining tank instead. It was already lined up in the TVM, just about blinking “kill me.” Nudging the cursor onto the big sucker, he locked and fired. The missile clunked off his wing with a sharp note of enthusiasm— one thing you could say about Mavericks, they sure liked to blow shit up.

A-Bomb hit his armament panel to ready the cluster bombs as he recovered from the shallow dive. His altimeter read seven thousand feet, still well above the flak, though too low to drop the preset Rockeyes.

“Saddam’s going to have a fire sale tomorrow,” he told Mongoose, whose tail appeared on his left as he climbed to get into a better position. “I count three dead tanks and one busted flak-feeder.”

A dusty haze covered the ground, making it difficult to see what was left. Two big bubbles of black flak boiled well off his right wing as the Iraqi gunners did their best to shoot themselves out of ammunition. The Hogs wheeled above the site, moving into a circle approximately 180 degrees from each other.

The ZSU’s were starting to annoy him; they made it tough to target the rest of the site besides. A-Bomb realized he was better oriented than Mongoose to splash them, and told his lead he would take them out.

“I can get them both on one swing. Then we can shoot up what’s left downstairs.”

“Go for it.”

A-Bomb pushed the Hog into a dive, tightening his attack angle into a steep plunge, the A-10 screaming down at close to ninety degrees. He was going to pee on these bastards. No one shot at a Hog and got away with it.

Bastards started dishing serious flak in his direction. The Hog snorted. She knew she was being fired at, and it pissed her off. She held her wings and tail stiff, urging her pilot to drop the Rockeyes and giving him an iron-stiff platform to do it from.

A-Bomb pickled two of his four bombs on the first battery. Immediately he realized he hadn’t adjusted properly for the wind. But it was too late. Cursing, he pulled the stick back, determined to reset himself quickly for another attack. The Hog angrily slid her tail around, spanking the pilot for his miscue. But the CBUs were very forgiving weapons. A total of 187 spiked grenades, originally designed as armor piercing weapons, peppered out from each bomb. Though the majority fell well wide, enough fell close enough to silence the gun.

“There’s another gun or something under netting on the northeast corner,” said Mongoose as A-Bomb got ready to pounce on the remaining gun. “Shit— did you see that?”

A-Bomb twisted his neck like a pretzel, trying to see what Mongoose was talking about. By the time he figured it out, his commander had his nose just about on it. The Iraqis had done an excellent job of camouflaging the site defenses; there seemed to be another pair of ZSU-23s, or maybe larger-caliber guns, covered by the latest in desert wear.

“Hell of a lot of defenses for some old trucks,” said A-Bomb. “You think Saddam’s got one of his whores in that bunker or what?”

“Could be.”

“Probably screwing her right now.”

“I’m on that gun.”

He watched Mongoose dive into the attack just as the Iraqi gunner opened up. This was a big gun, probably a ZSU–57; the black wall of its shells appeared nearly twice as high as the others, though they were a bit behind Devil One’s flight path. Suddenly the nose of the Hog veered upwards and to the left; two thin cigars plummeted past the swinging stream of anti-aircraft fire toward the position. The canisters burst with a spectacular pop, an entire Iowa cornfield doing the Jiffy Pop thing as the double-barreled gun and its crew got perforated.

Mongoose wasn’t done— rather than breaking off the attack, he took his Hog just about sideways, lining up his last two CBUs on the last ZSU on the northwestern dune. A steam of red-hot metal engulfed the four-barreled cheese grater and the black cloud of flak it had been dishing suddenly disappeared.

“Double bang,” A-Bomb told his lead before pushing into his own attack against the trucks.

This time, the Hog just about did the wind calculation for him, nudging its tail up and screaming when it was time to fire. A row of transports turned into molten dust.

“How’s your fuel?” Mongoose asked as A-Bomb fell into an easy orbit above the smoking debris.

A-Bomb glanced at the dash. “Thirty minutes linger time, give or take a century,” he said.

“Few more vehicles down there. You feel like cranking up your cannon?”

“Does a private shit in the woods?”

But as he slid around to get ready to cover Mongoose, something caught his eye. He let the Hog drift a bit as his gaze found a hard — packed road. Five, six miles off, it headed toward a highway.

Something was happening there, something just beyond his vision.

A-Bomb felt a twinge in his nose, as if he’d just caught a whiff of late-season Brazilian beans being freshly roasted.

“Hey, Goose, hang tight a minute while I check something out,” he radioed, pushing the Hog to follow the road. The terrain below gradually became less of a desert and more a generic wasteland, though it didn’t look like anybody would be farming there soon.

The road led back north to the highway, where it plunged below it. A line of trucks was just now pulling off the paved road, kicking off a bunch of dust as they moved.

“Say, Goose, we got some sort of action going on south there, say three o’clock. You see that road?”

Mongoose broke his orbit and slid south, trailing A-Bomb. They were still a good way off as the last truck in the caravan dipped off the highway, disappearing in the underpass.

It was a trailer type of truck, with a long, roundish cylinder in the back.

The sort of cylinder you made a missile out of.

No wonder they hadn’t found the Scuds. The Iraqis had moved them.

CHAPTER 13

Mongoose yanked at the stick, angry that they’d wasted so much time and ammunition on the desert parking lot. Both planes had only their cannons left— excellent weapons, but it was going to be harder than hell to get a good shot at the bastards under the overpass.

Not really. Not at all. Hell, they’d done this sort of thing maybe a hundred times in training, working over highways throughout Europe. Not one underpass ever got away. All he had to do was take the Hog down to where it was designed to operate, and the missiles would be easy pickings.

Granted, they weren’t supposed to fly so low. But Scuds overrode everything.

Besides, he wasn’t flying a stinking Strike Eagle or a BUFF. He was in a Hog.

Mongoose mapped a quick game plan— a low-altitude scream and pop, quick away, then up for the border, head for a tanker, track directly south instead of KKMC. The tanker contingency was a nod to their dwindling fuel supply and any problems that might follow their close encounter of the Scud kind.

A-Bomb practically took his ear off with a war whoop when he told him they were going to nail the bastards at fifty feet.

“See, this is what I’m talking about,” said his wingman. “This is the way to fight with a Hog.”

Mongoose could feel the mask pinching his jaw as he worked to keep his voice flat. “We’ll swing back and use what’s left of the sun,” he told his wingmate. “It’s lined up almost perfectly. Let the fucking chips fall where they may.”

“Yeah, I’m on you. Show me the way.”

The flight leader marked the INS and gave the ABCCC the location. Then he swung northwest, working to get into position to make a straight-on shot up the road, sun at his tail. He began picking up momentum, energy and speed fanning each other as the plane revved herself toward a feeding frenzy.

“Ready?” he asked A-Bomb as he geared into the attack.

“I was born ready.”

Mongoose felt the plane roar as her nose sniffed out the underpass. The ground became a pebbly blur, the asphalt of the highway a thick black arrow pointing her toward hell. Mongoose sorted out the target area ahead in his windscreen, working his eyes deliberately, slowing the world down so he could nail the crap out of it. The underpass was very wide and deep, maybe even designed from scratch as a bunker area. There were three support vehicles in the front on his right, lighter trucks that as far as he was concerned were mere annoyances. Two Scud carriers were at the left end of the thick underpass. There was a big cloud of dust and sand beyond the roadway, a tractor or something moving. The terrain rose to the right; he saw more activity there, a truck moving around.

If there was going to be any air defense, it would be there. His RWR was clean but shit, at this altitude, a guy with a water pistol could get a bead on you.

The pilot blew a long, hard wad of air from his mouth, trying to control his adrenaline. Anger rumbled through his stomach— he wanted to nail the Scuds and wring Saddam’s neck personally.

Bad.

Push the buttons and do your job. Checklist mode. Getting angry got you killed.

He was at two hundred feet, nearly dead on. He kept coming, nose in the dirt, eyes starting to itch, a vague pinch around the edges of his body, partly from the increasing g’s and partly from tension. He edged right slightly, felt himself falling into that perfect space, his spine aligned with the plane’s spine. The missile carriers had grown from distant cigarettes to thick, enticing sausages, and finally into big fat targets filled with very combustible fuel.

Mongoose squeezed the trigger, the gun growling an angry roar as its one-and-a-half pound charges leapt toward the enemy. The pilot leaned into the trigger, his eyes following the smoke. He gave the ship rudder to hold the line of bullets into the rear of the missile truck nearest the road. The force of the gun was so awesome it held the Hog back, slowing it in mid-air so that the plane seemed to hang around him, defying all laws of gravity and motion.

The underpass evaporated beneath the onslaught. He pushed his aiming point to the right without a clear target, searching for the next missile. He fired and he fired and finally the Scud’s rear fin or something was right there, right in the middle of his bullets. He fired some more and thought he could feel the heat of his gun firing. The plane rocked with the cannon, everything jumbling into one tremendous quake. He’d nailed the rear units of both missiles.

Webbed in fine fuzz of total concentration, Mongoose pushed himself and the plane to get away. His throttle was full out as he zoomed away, beyond the attack.

It was a vulnerable moment; he was moving quickly but well framed against the horizon. He pushed his stick, kicked his rudders and bent his body hard to the right. He hit flares as a precaution against a shoulder-fired weapon, and bolted from the bubbling cauldron of fire and burning sand. They were shooting at him. All Iraq was trying to kill him; even if their bullets were puny, a bullet was a bullet. He held it full bore, hell-bent on getting away, skimming the ground low enough to count grains of sand. Finally sensing he was clear, Mongoose started to nose up, grabbing for more sky. He felt his chest muscles relaxing. There was a vehicle now he hadn’t seen here along the highway; they were firing, too, a lot of shit reaching out for him but nothing he couldn’t handle. He pushed the plane to get around, to get back and cover A-Bomb’s run.

He’d smashed the crap of Saddam, nailed both Scuds. Who knew? Maybe the stinking chemical crap the bastard intended dumping on the Americans— or maybe the Israelis— was now wafting below, killing his own men.

Served them right.

Mongoose took a long, relaxed breath, the easiest since they had cross the border, and keyed his mike to tell A-Bomb he could start his pass.

In that second, something thumped behind him, and he felt a flutter in his stomach that extended all the way back to his engines.

CHAPTER 14

A-Bomb shouted when he saw the flash from the far end of the underpass. By then it was far too late for anything he could do to have much of an effect, but he didn’t think about that. He keyed his mike to give the warning, and in practically the same motion he pushed the nose of his plane down and smashed the trigger, hoping that his flailing bullets would suppress any more fire. He couldn’t hold the angle well enough to nail the target, which passed by in a blur; he tried rolling and diving back but even A-Bomb could only bend Newton’s laws so far. He got a good glimpse of the bastard, though— a Roland SAM launcher, sitting atop an AMX tank chassis and just about ready to dish up another missile.

At him.

He yanked the Hog hard to the north, goosing the throttle and hunkering down, wondering why the Scuds hadn’t caused a big enough explosion to take out the Roland. The Hog’s ECM unit was useless against the missile’s Siemens J-band low-PRF tracking radar, which used techniques perfected well after the pod came on line. All he could do was jink and fly like hell.

A-Bomb keyed his mike and shouted his warning to Mongoose again. Then he concentrated on his own plane, his own body, pushing it away. He had the throttle to the firewall. The Hog leapt forward with the lust of a race horse leaving the gate. He let the plane have her head for a few seconds, then took another hard turn, rolling out at the same time and just about cracking the plane’s back as he whacked it sideways, exploring new dimensions in geometry. He flew the Warthog harder than an aerobatics plane, pushing it over, and under, and back again, trying to undo the knot the SAM had tied.

The Roland could move just over Mach 1.6. She had a limited range, though; he could win if he could run just a little further.

He glanced back and saw it coming for him, just about softball size and getting bigger in the rear quarter of his canopy.

Maybe he didn’t see it at all; maybe his imagination was painting it there for him, because no way in real life could you see a Roland this long after it had been fired. He’d gone what? Ten miles at least. And still he felt the damn thing homing in on his head like Saddam had painted a big bull’s eye there.

No way it could still be coming for him. Damn thing weighed less than 150 pounds, and it couldn’t all be fuel.

He jinked again, this time so low to the desert floor he would have had to look up to change the oil on a Jeep. There was a thud or something behind him; the Hog seemed to gain speed. A-Bomb pushed his stick hard and held on, fingers crossed, one more gut-smearing turn before he was finally sure that the cloud of dirt and shrapnel represented the last remains of the French and German missile.

A-Bomb blew a breath and caught a glimpse of Mongoose’s plane, well east and much higher than him, flying in the opposite direction toward Kuwait.

“Jesus, ‘Goose, I thought they got you,” he told his wingmate.

Devil One continued to climb to the east, rising from its run as easily as if were on a training mission. The ugly dark green shades of camo smudged into a black blur, its pudge nose and fat tail as pretty as a black Ferrari steaming around a race track. The late sun gleamed off the front of the canopy, its glint refracted into reddish-white fingers of light.

Then he saw the Hog waddle in the air, its left wing flailing upwards, out of the pilot’s control.

Most of the other wing was gone. One of both of the missiles had blown right through it.

“Bail out, Goose!” A-Bomb called. “Bail the fuck out!”

CHAPTER 15

The emergency indicator lights were on. The engine was screaming. The plane was trying to pull herself over.

Hit.

Engine, must be. Right side.

Checklist mode.

Compensate for the dead engine, push the rudder, hold the stick.

Wing took something, too.

Rudder not responding. Hydraulics out. Go to manual reversion.

Shit, there’s no plane here.

Manual reversion.

Is there time?

Checklist mode.

Caution panel dotted with more lights than a power grid station.

Controls still not doing their job.

Blue sky ahead.

Air speed dropping.

Still climbing.

Momentum’s a beautiful thing. Still moving somehow.

Stick feels like it’s not connected.

Do I have Kathy’s letter?

Restart the other engine.

Not this slow, no way.

Five thousand goddamn feet, a miracle to be this high.

Pointing north. Wrong direction.

Shit, no wing.

Can’t hold it.

Have to jump now while the jumping is good.

Shame to leave this old Hog. Hell of a plane. Rescued from the scrap heap to whup Saddam’s butt.

Got two Scuds at least.

Less than three seconds passed from the moment he was hit until Mongoose’s eyes shot down toward the big yellow ejector loops at the edge of the ACES II seat. His body was still going through the motions but his head was already outside the plane.

Eject. Eject.

He reached up and made sure his crash visor was down, hard hat secure, passport punched.

Eject. Eject.

He felt a soft pop, then closed his eyes as a powerful force yanked his legs back and pushed him against the seat. Wires below were severed by razor knives as the canopy blew out with a rush and the space below him exploded with a mad froth. Mongoose felt himself hurled upwards, enveloped in an icy whirlwind, then wrapped in a dark, blank void beyond time or place.

CHAPTER 16

A-Bomb pulled eight or nine g’s in the turn, whacking the Hog down into the dust and going like all hell. He had to take out that Roland or no way anybody could get close enough to pick up Mongoose when his chute landed.

He saw, or thought he saw, an ejection, even though Mongoose didn’t acknowledge. He’d have to go back for him; the Roland had to be taken out first.

A nice little Spark Vark jamming plane flying overhead right about now would have been immensely convenient. That or an up-to-date ECM pod on the right wing, where the ancient ALQ-119 was hanging.

But hell, A-Bomb told himself. He didn’t need that fancy stuff. He was flying a Hog.

He came at the site about twenty feet off the ground, so low and close he could see the Roland crew members working frantically on the top of the mobile missile launcher. They had rolled it out from under its hiding place, whether to reload or get away from the fire on the other end, he couldn’t be sure.

And he really didn’t care. A-Bomb pressed his trigger and tore the hell out of the lightly armored piece of French dog meat, framed by the roadway behind it. A dozen armored piercing and high explosive shells ripped through the tank chassis, the metal steaming with death. The four or five men who’d been atop it literally vaporized as the pilot sat on his trigger.

Some enterprising troops had set up a fifty caliber machine gun at the edge of the packed dirt road about twenty yards beyond the overpass. A-Bomb gave them the finger as he zoomed out, whipping back for a run at the Scud carriers. As he came back and started to get into position to take his aim, he saw that both missiles were lying in splinters beneath the underpass.

They’d been decoys.

No matter— he danced his bullets into the underpass as he galloped forward, working his pedals to rake the area right to left. Then he turned his attention to the machine-gun, awarding his own personal medals of heroism to the soldiers manning it.

When he came around for another pass, all he saw were dead bodies.

One more quick turn revealed nothing else was moving. He started climbing, heading in the direction he had last seen Mongoose’s plane take. As the Hog gained altitude, he tuned his radio to the emergency band, hoping for a locator beacon.

All he heard was static.

CHAPTER 17

He was thinking of the hospital. His wife Kathy was lying in the bed, scrunched up, her face red.

She was grunting. The doctor was standing at the edge of the bed.

Robby was being born. He felt himself trembling, worried that something was going wrong. But the nurse who had been with them was smiling. He trusted her, more than the doctor.

“You have to push harder,” the nurse told her. “Get into this one.”

Kathy looked at him. She didn’t say anything, but he felt fear in her eyes.

“You can do it,” he told her. He stepped forward and gripped her hand, pushing confidence into his voice. The wave hit her and she pressed against him, her muscles contracting to push their baby down the birth canal.

“Here,” said the doctor. “You can feel his hair.”

Johnson smiled as he let the doctor guide his fingers. The sensation was wet, oily even.

“That’s your son.”

The idea barely registered. The head slipped back inside Kathy’s body.

“Here comes another one,” said the nurse.

He leaned toward his wife, who raised her body with the push. She groaned and screamed and suddenly the baby squirted out, born, alive, his body all red. He looked like a wrinkled Martian.

Jesus, that’s my son, Johnson thought.

The vision snapped black. He whirled around, the moving eye of a tornado.

He was tumbling.

His visor and oxygen mask were in place, shielding his face somewhat, but still the wind was a sharpened icicle, chiseling at his face.

It was so cold that his nerve inputs couldn’t process it all and told his brain that he was on fire. He was hot and frozen cold at the same time.

Mongoose thought about his arms and legs. It was easy to break them getting out of the plane. He tried to move them closer to his body, belatedly trying to protect them. The base of his skull hurt and his neck and shoulders burned.

A stiff, hard hand whacked him backwards. The breath ran out of him; by the time he could breathe again he saw that the ejection seat’s drogue parachute had deployed. He was falling, but much slower now.

The wind was still a bitch. It was whipping cold against him, and dragging him east. But he was lucky— the seat’s canister of emergency oxygen was making it easier to breathe, easier for him to clear his head.

The main chute kicked in. He fluttered, head whirling; he reached his hands to his chest and blanked again, momentarily.

Now surplus material, the seat that had saved him fell away. He had a vague notion that he was still moving forward in the air— he’d come out an angle, propelled like a performer from a circus cannon, right over the big tent, way out past the parking lot. The sun shimmered in the hazy edge of the dirt a few yards away, as if it had gone out three seconds ahead of him and its chute had failed to open.

Mongoose felt the harness pulling against his body, his parachute being pulled by a stiff wind. He felt like he was going faster than the damn airplane.

There was a way to steer. He knew how to steer, he’d practiced it before.

It hadn’t been like this. The wind had been calmer and the air warmer, his heart beating much slower.

Checklist mode, he told himself. One item at a time.

“There’s nothing in Iraq worth dying for.”

Who had said that? General Horner? Colonel Knowlington?

Checklist mode. Item one— steer the chute away from the enemy. Steer south.

Assuming the sun still set in the west, he was already headed in that direction. The chute responded and moved even faster.

For a second he thought he might actually steer all the way back to Saudi Arabia.

But then the ground started moving faster than he did.

CHAPTER 18

The thing was, there ought to be more smoke. A Hog going down ought to make a hell of a big splash. Tear a hole in the desert and send a half-million Iraqis to hell with it.

Here there was nothing, not even dust. Just a vague whisper of gray in the air around it, haze only.

Or a soul, taking one last look at the bent body.

It was the Hog, all right though, no question. Even with the light fading, A-Bomb could see the wing section flat against the sand. The end had sheered and mangled, but a good hunk of it was intact.

Hell, you could probably dust it off, bang out the dents and put it on another plane, no sweat.

Couldn’t do that with the fuselage. It lay in a twisted tumble almost a mile away, crunched worse than a candy bar wrapper. The plane had been a trooper to the end, flying nearly ten miles before finally pancaking.

No way Mongoose would have survived that.

He’d gone out, though. A-Bomb knew he had. He had a memory of seeing a seat vaulting in the air.

Or at least, he saw how it should have happened. And at the moment, that was good enough for him. Because any other way, his lead was snuffed. They were damn close to the Euphrates, way far north in bad guy territory at the edge of the desert, within gum-spitting distance of the Republican Guard. No way Mongoose was catching it here, no way. Guy was going to live to a ripe old age and bounce grandkids off his knee.

So where was he now? The survival radio didn’t seem to be broadcasting. A-Bomb keyed his own mike a few times, hoping for an answer.

Worst case, the radio ought to at least be putting out a locator beacon. Mongoose carried two, so he had a backup.

Nada.

A-Bomb rode his Hog higher in the sky, scanning the ground for a parachute. By now the sun had set and the desert was starting to turn into a twilight fog. Wind whipped the loose dirt below, making it even harder for him to see.

But hell, anybody could spot a stinking parachute.

A-Bomb saw a clump of trees and scrub vegetation to his northwest, and another to his east; he rocked over both in a wide figure-eight but found no one.

A trio of squat buildings sat about two miles south of the wrecked plane. He investigated them next, flying low enough to read the number on the mailboxes.

If there had been mailboxes. All three buildings were in shambles, roofs blown off. There was a narrow road nearby, not so much a road as a path, dirt of a different color.

A-Bomb checked his radio and keyed the mike again.

“Yo, Goose. How’s it hanging?”

Still nothing.

Maybe he hadn’t seen him eject.

Damn it, Mongoose was alive. Stink-ass Iraqis could not kill a Hog driver. No sir. Hog driver was a serious entity, not quite superhuman but not susceptible to fingernail breaking crap like this.

Even if the missile had been a NATO job, better than the Russian crap, it still wasn’t good enough to take out a Hog driver, especially Mongoose. He was an anal son of a bitch who played engineer in the cockpit, painting by numbers and more careful than a goddamn girl scout.

Well, almost. Point of the matter was, he was a kick — ass pilot and squadron DO besides and could not be taken off the board by the Iraqis.

Most likely, he was hiking back to the Saudi border by now. Probably halfway home. Maybe even sitting at the bar in the Depot, ordering a double bourbon.

On the rocks.

A-Bomb edged the Hog higher, pointing the nose southeast, as if he really did expect to find the flight leader hiking in the sand below. There was a town— or at least a group of buildings that could be a town— six or seven miles further east, back toward Kuwait. Mongoose would stay away from that, for sure, but would the people there stay away from him?

“Devil Two, this is Red Dog. We have two Vipers approaching your location. Stand by for frequency.”

A-Bomb waited impatiently for the airborne controller to read off the numbers. He would have preferred a pair of Hogs instead of the F-16 “Vipers” or “Falcons,” but the fast movers would have to do. He was running low on fuel and would have to leave soon to tank.

The single-engined fighters were using the call sign “Boa,” as in boa constrictor. A-Bomb snorted when he made contact, but didn’t bother commenting on the cuteness of the name. You had to expect that sort of thing in a pointy nose.

The irony of snakes hunting up a Mongoose, well that was a different story. That was almost karma.

“Boa One to Devil Two, do you have a location on the emergency beacon?”

“Negative. I have the plane, but I haven’t made contact.” He ignored their ominous silence, reading off an INS marker and giving them a vector as he picked up their location.

“You sure he got out?” asked Boa One as the two fly — by — wire jockeys approached.

“Bet your fucking ass he did.”

“Hey, relax buddy. We’re on your side, remember? We’ll find him.”

A-Bomb didn’t answer.

The two F-16s, diverted from another mission, were flying at about eighteen thousand feet. Using the buildings and the wrecked Hog as landmarks, he sketched the area out for them. Even though they were pointy-nose types, they seemed relatively good-natured. They had no problem putting their chins down to get a good look at things.

Eagle pilots, though, those guys would cop attitude. Now that would be something to deal with.

He checked his fuel. Even an optimistic run at the math left him with two minutes less flying time than it would take to find a tanker.

But hell, this was a critical moment. Night was coming on, and no way Mongoose had thought to pack his flannels. Somebody had to find him and fast.

But really, if he waited much longer before going for gas, he was going to join him on the ground. That wasn’t much help.

It wasn’t like he was leaving Mongoose alone up here. The ABCCC had tasked a force to sponge the area clean of any more Iraqi missiles hiding in the bushes; the sky was starting to get busy. A-Bomb knew that the Special Ops troops working with Air Force Pave Lows had been tasked to air rescue operations. A-Bomb had a high opinion of the commandos, especially the Green Berets— and their coffee, which he had helped himself to during a visit to one of their forward airbases a few days ago.

But even they couldn’t mount a rescue if the pilot was nowhere to be found. The crews had orders not to cross into Iraq until the man was found and verified.

One more pass, then he’d tank. A-Bomb made sure the volume on the radio was full blast as he edged the Hog down, running along the dark ribbon of a road not far from the buildings.

Why the hell didn’t Mongoose use his radio?

“Yo, Goose, come on buddy, this is A-Bomb. I promise I’ll share my Big Mac pack with you tonight.”

Boa One asked if he had something. A-Bomb let the static fuzz in his helmet before telling the Viper pilot that he thought he’d seen a glint on the ground.

“Roger that. We’ll take a pass. Controller’s trying to get you,” relayed the pilot. “They’re thinking you should be returning to base before you run your tanks dry.”

“Well screw them.”

“Yo man, I’m just the messenger,” answered the pilot. “But running out fuel isn’t going to help your buddy.”

A-Bomb punched the Hog down for a last peek at the abandoned buildings, hoping he might find Mongoose doing jumping jacks on what was left of the roof. Beyond the building, he gave the control yoke an angry yank to put his nose skyward. The Hog groaned a bit, complaining that it wasn’t its fault its companion had gone down.

He spotted another pair of F-16s circling just to the west. They had been sent to make sure the Scuds were toast, and to mop up any remaining SAMs.

“OK, guys, I’m going to go tank,” A-Bomb told Boa One. “I’ll be back ASAP.”

“Don’t sweat it,” said the pilot. “Your guy’ll be back at base draining beers in no time. And for the record, I prefer a quarter — pounder with cheese.”

“Copy that,” A-Bomb told him, plotting his course to the nearest tanker.

CHAPTER 19

When he landed, Mongoose felt his knee give slightly. But he was already well into the roll, already peeling over. He tumbled onto his side and thought for a second that he was going to roll forever. Realizing the chute’s harness was still attached, he wondered why he hadn’t released it. He had dirt in his mouth. He pushed himself forward, put weight on the knee, and again thought of the chute. One hand began reaching for his knife as the other slipped the harness restraints.

Okay, he told himself, calm down. The hard part is over; all you have to do is wait for the search and rescue helicopter. Just relax. Push your buttons.

Remove the radio from your vest.

Turn it on.

Very simple.

Very calm.

Breathe first.

No one answered his first hail.

He was having trouble talking anyway, still gulping air. He put his hands to his chest and steadied a slow breath in and out. Making sure his finger was on the microphone button, he tried again.

He gave his call sign, asked for a response. Something floated in, a mangled transmission from far off. There was too much static for him to make any sense of it.

Bits and pieces of his SERE training — Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape— came back to him as his mind slowly cleared. The first few minutes on the ground were critical. You wanted to keep yourself in control.

Push your buttons. Check your list.

He was going to be picked up. It was just a matter of keeping his head clear.

Damned if there hadn’t been a shitload of rain during his SERE training. And heat. Now it was just cold.

This was a desert, or actually on the edge of one. You’d think it would just be hot all the time.

Mongoose tried the radio again. Its range varied according to weather, terrain, and time of day, but he could probably count on about thirty miles. Planes could zip in and out of its envelope without getting a good fix; he tried to keep it straight up and down for maximum range, to speak slowly as he transmitted, and stay calm.

His head was still foggy. He had only a vague notion of where he’d been hit, relative to his target. It was well south and east, he knew that. And after he had been hit he’d flown through the sky like a missile, away from the plane.

His breathing was starting to come back under control. He thumbed his radio to a new frequency, took it from the top.

From the air, much of southern Iraq looked almost featureless, undulating sand and gristly dirt extending for miles and miles. Here on the ground, Iraq turned out to be a silty waste, tiny grains of sand and grit sifting among stubby branches, as if the desert had flooded an orchard. A rough progression of hills began immediately to his right, long bumps nudging back north; they could have been part of an ancient stairway leading to the Euphrates, worn down by time. A dry creek bed or wadi lay about a hundred feet ahead of him; its gully oriented approximately east — west. A hard-packed road skirted close to it about twenty yards from where he was standing. Beyond the road, the terrain seemed a little harder. There were several clumps of short trees and more hills.

Wind kicked up grit and slapped his cheeks as he tried the radio again, reminding him that every transmission by the PRC-90 emergency radio in theory helped the enemy as much as his would-be rescuers. He had to ration his calls, at least until he was sure someone was coming for him.

He’d have to ration his water, too. He had only his pocket canteen and four packets in his vest.

Mongoose took out the small canteen and sipped very slowly. But the sips were larger than he thought; it took only three to drain the container.

A-Bomb ought to be around up there somewhere. No way A-Bomb would have left him. He repeated his hail and then switched to beacon, setting the radio to emit a distinctive SOS that in theory all allied planes could recognize.

Any Iraqi who wasn’t blind probably saw him land. He had to get the hell out of here.

He’d thrown his helmet off after he’d gotten to his feet. It lay upside down a short distance away, looking a bit forlorn. His chute had tangled in the stubby vegetation. The ejection seat, its emergency survival pack, and life raft were all set out like props upstage in a surreal play.

He ought to hide what he didn’t need, even if it was getting dark. They’d point the Iraqis toward him, when they came.

As he stared at the seat, he felt a pain in the back of his head. It was like a fist pounding from the inside, whacking at the base of his skull and neck. He put his fingers into the wedge behind his ears, tried to relieve the pressure by kneading the muscles there. Closing his eyes, Mongoose attempted once again to control his breathing, slowing it and relaxing all this muscles, hoping to ease whatever spring had over-wound itself. His body was starting to shake, whether from shock or the cold he couldn’t tell. He wanted to take stock of his survival supplies and equipment. All he could think of for nearly a full minute was the pain. A shock-induced trance was slowly taking hold of him.

The sound of an approaching truck on the roadway knocked him out of it.

CHAPTER 20

Colonel Knowlington was still going over the A-10A check flight when Captain Wong’s perpetual frown appeared over Sergeant Rosen’s shoulder. Wong was a rarity— an intelligence officer who was actually intelligent and had a sense of humor. His dry, anti-bureaucratic wit was so funny that just looking at his face generally made Knowlington start laughing.

Not today, though. His face was drawn and worried, and Knowlington knew exactly what the problem was as soon as he approached.

“Colonel, you want to get on with Lieutenant Dixon at Riyadh right now, sir,” Wong told him.

Knowlington nodded, and without saying or doing anything else, immediately began walking toward his office in the squadron building. An A-10A fresh from combat screeched onto the runway, but he didn’t hear it. Nor did he see any of the several people who greeted him as he walked. He walked in a gray, cold space alone, nerve endings hardened, ready, though not enthusiastic, to do his duty.

He didn’t even greet Dixon when he came on the line. All he said was, “Who is it?”

“Looks like Major Johnson in Devil One,” said the lieutenant. “I’m still pulling in details. It was their last mission of the day. Their tasking was changed and they went after Scuds about sixty miles further north. I happened to be in—”

“He eject?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Knowlington nodded but said nothing, as if his lieutenant could see his response.

“What else do you know, BJ?”

“Nothing, really,” said the lieutenant. “A-Bomb’s still up there. They have a search and rescue operation going, but I don’t have any details. I don’t know that he’s been heard from. In fact, I kind of think he wasn’t. But I wasn’t, well, obviously back here—”

“I understand, BJ. I appreciate your getting the word to me right away on this.”

“I thought you guys might have heard something.”

“Not yet. Most of the squadron’s just coming in.”

“You want me to…”

Dixon’s voice trailed off, most likely because he didn’t know exactly what to offer. Knowlington told him just to keep his ears open, but otherwise to go about his normal routine. The colonel had more than enough sources, formal and informal, to fill in all the blanks on his own.

“Thanks for calling me,” the colonel told him. “Look, don’t piss anybody off over there. I’m going to get you back ASAP.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

Knowlington just barely resisted the impulse to shove the phone through the wall. Mongoose had been diverted sixty miles north? Shit, why not just send him up to Baghdad and get it over with?

Sending Hogs that far into enemy territory was contrary to just about every lesson the air force had learned since Eddie Rickenbacher got his sights on a German biplane. The plane had been specifically built for close-in ground support. Because of that, she was slow, didn’t carry much in the way of sophisticated ECMs, and was unsuited for anything but low altitude tactics.

She was a fantastic tank buster and a hell of a ground attack meat-grinder; the Army loved her. The men who flew her rated as some of the best stick and rudder jocks Knowlington had ever met. But send her on missions deep into Injun territory and eventually you were bound to lose her. This wasn’t a black jet or a Strike Eagle you were talking about here.

Knowlington had written something like that in a report many years back, when the Hog’s viability was being studied and he was pulling an unwished-for stint on someone’s evaluation staff.

He had, in fact, recommended the plane been phased out.

Ancient history.

But the missions on Day One of the air war had been just as deep, and he had gone along with them. Where was his head then?

More to the point, why did he let someone else lead them? Over-the-hill or not, it was his job, his duty, as commander to be at the head of the line, not back. Screw anyone who had a different opinion.

And screw his other problems. He was beyond them. Today, anyway.

In his experience, the odds on recovery were a real downward curve against time— the quicker you made radio contact, the better the odds of a good extraction. The problem was that things had a tendency to go less than perfectly. In the first rush of landing your head got scrambled and even the most experienced pilot made poor decisions. Shock jumbled your brain in weird ways; he’d heard of guys who’d neglected to use their radios or flares, and even one who inflated his life raft and got aboard in the middle of a jungle.

It was getting late; if they hadn’t already made contact with him, there was a real good chance Mongoose would be spending part of the night in Indian country.

Assuming he wasn’t already a prisoner, or permanent resident.

Looking out his small office window at the steadily darkening sky, the colonel refused to consider those possibilities.

CHAPTER 21

Mongoose dropped flat in the sand. He pushed up and saw the truck, still maybe a mile away on the road, then reached beneath him for his service pistol.

The 9mm Beretta was a serious gun, a good one, well-cared for, meticulously cleaned at least once a day.

Hopefully he wouldn’t have to use it. He tucked his elbows beneath his body and levered himself into a kneel, and then a crouch. He looked toward the roadway and out into the wasteland. The blur driving toward him in the darkening twilight sharpened into a white pickup. It seemed out of place, and for a moment he felt a strange dislocation, as if instead of being in southern Iraq the wind had carried him all the way back to the States, over to Iowa or South Dakota.

Had the terrain looked a hair less desert-like, he might even have believed that.

Just because it was a pickup didn’t mean that it wasn’t an army truck. And even if it was being driven by a civilian, it still presented a very real danger. Most likely there was a price on his head.

Dead as well as alive.

The truck kept coming. The driver had his running lights on but not his headlights; probably he could see well enough without them since the sun had only just gone down. Besides, putting them on was an invitation to get smoked.

Mongoose felt his legs and back stiffening. The truck driver would have a clear view of him, assuming he looked in his direction.

He could easily be seen if he got up and ran. Best to stay still, hope the guy wasn’t paying attention, or the shadows obscured him. Movement attracted the eye.

The Beretta had a faintly oily feel to it. It was warm in his hand, and heavy. He put his left hand around the right, giving himself a good, steady platform to fire from.

Mongoose had learned to shoot when he was ten, plinking cans with his dad’s BB pistol in the backyard. He’d moved up to a .22 rifle, took a gun safety and marksmanship course in the Boy Scouts. By the time he got to the service he’d become a reasonably accurate shot, even with a handgun. He might not be a marksman, but compared to most Air Force officers he was William Tell.

He had a good firing position, well anchored in the ground. If the guy stopped, he could smoke him. The road was less than ten yards away— a good shot with a pistol, but not spectacular.

Belatedly, the pilot thought of trying to hide. But there didn’t seem to be any sense; it wasn’t like he had enough time to dig a hole in the streambed.

It was his job to take out this guy.

No, his job was to survive. First rule, only rule.

Most likely, the guy would pass him by.

If he was like a farmer in Iowa, probably he’d be so focused on his work or where he was going or what was playing on the radio, he’d never notice someone crouching five meters off the road.

But the truck started to slow.

Mongoose’s mouth was dry. The gun was heavy in his hands; he tried to relax his arm muscles a bit, ignoring the pain in his head.

What could the guy have seen?

The plane? Sure, but that was miles away.

The chute?

Maybe. Falling objects did have a tendency to attract attention, even in Iraq.

The truck stopped directly in front of the wadi. It looked like a Toyota, five or six years old at least. Its front end was crimped and crinkled, and it had a dirty sheen to it.

It was ten yards away, even a little less.

The driver cranked down the window and looked at him. The man’s face was illuminated by a dull glow from the instrument panel. It was unshaven, with a thick mustache but a spotty beard, black and grayish whiskers patched around his chin. He was wearing a white shirt and some sort of hat. He stared at Mongoose the way a man might stare at a tiger found in its cage on a city street.

I should smoke him, Mongoose thought.

Had the man gotten out of the truck, had he raised a gun to the window, the pilot would have brought his pistol up an inch and fired. There was no question of hitting him. Mongoose saw it all in a far corner of his mind, saw himself pumping the trigger four or five times, saw one of the slugs catching the man in the shoulder, wounding him only, but enough to stop him from getting away. Mongoose saw himself jumping up from the crouch, breath hot and shallow in his lungs, saw himself run and pump two bullets into the man’s head.

He could have done all this, and he would have had the man done anything but stare. He would have done it without agonizing or even thinking much about it, because it was his job to survive. He would have done it because he had to.

But the man never moved toward him. He only stared from the truck, a voyeur in an unreal world. Mongoose stared back, equally out of place.

The hard thunder of an F-16 crossed into his consciousness. The plane was flying high, but very close.

The radio was on the ground. He’d have to take a hand off the gun to reach it.

Not possible.

Unless he shot the guy first. He should just squeeze the trigger and fire. Get him right through the open window, hit him in the face.

He was looking at him with such a blank, open expression. Something like wonder, not hostility.

A real enemy. A real person.

They stared at each other as the fighter’s noise faded. There was no question the Iraqi knew Mongoose didn’t belong here, and no question that by now he would have realized there was a gun in his hands.

Any move, even opening the door, even waving hello, he’d smoke him.

But why didn’t he just kill him now? He had a good, clean, clear shot.

Mongoose remained stock still, his movements held in balance by a hair-thin thread of fate.

Finally, the truck started to ease forward. It moved slowly, only gradually picking up speed, continuing down the highway in the direction it had been going before stopping.

The pilot remained kneeling until it had shrunk to the size of a worm in the distance. Slowly, carefully, he rose. He started to walk down the wadi, gingerly at first, then quickly, his legs falling into a trot.

For some reason he couldn’t fathom, he stopped and looked both ways before crossing the empty highway.

CHAPTER 22

A-Bomb was next in line behind a Marine F/A-18. Thing was, the damn Marine wasn’t used to sipping from an Air Force straw, and had trouble attaching to the hose at the tail end of the KC-135. It didn’t take more than a minute, but A-Bomb had never counted patience as one of his virtues.

Still, he kept his curses to himself. Even if the guy was just a Marine, you didn’t dis him in the air.

Certainly not when he was ahead of you in the tanking queue.

When it was his turn, A-Bomb practically rammed his nose into the long nozzle at the back of the KC-135. The boomer, sitting in the rear of the plane and controlling the refueling apparatus, was supposed to do all the work, but A-Bomb didn’t have time to mess around; case like this, he figured, they ought to have do-it-yourself service. Stick your credit card in the slot and pump it yourself.

The pilot thumped his leg with his hand as the fuel rushed into the Hog’s empty tanks, trying to increase the flow with his own hurried beat. He was off the straw and cranking back toward Iraq faster than a kid skipping out on a bar bill.

Not that he didn’t trust the F-16s to do a good job looking for Mongoose and protecting him. It was just that, some things were better done by a Hog.

The F-16C Fighting Falcon was a good aircraft, a fine, all-around, all-purpose jet. Designed and first flown in the seventies, it had been built ground-up as a close-in dogfighter, a lightweight plane that could actually out-duel an F-15 up tight and carry a full load of bombs through high-g maneuvers. Except for the odd position of the stick — it was alongside you instead of in front of you— it was a sweet thing to fly. There were a million of them in theater, doing everything from reconnaissance to bombing to combat air patrol.

But they weren’t Hogs. A Hog carried sixteen thousand pounds of bombs without thinking about it. A Hog lived in the mud. A Hog just flew and flew and flew.

And a Hog took care of its own. Part of the rescue package or not, equipped for night operations or not, A-Bomb belonged there. Hell, he’d haul Mongoose into the helicopter himself if it came to that. Land in the desert, hop out, pitch him in, and take off again.

An A-10 probably could do that. Just no one thought to try it yet.

A-Bomb tracked back in a straight line, or as straight as any fighter pilot would fly riding into Injun territory without stealth or 120,000 feet between him and the ground.

“You’re back?” Boa One asked as A-Bomb returned to the area where Mongoose had gone down. “I thought you just left.”

“Where’s my guy?”

The Vipers hadn’t heard a thing. They had scanned the wreckage pretty well, and gone low and slow— for F-16s— over the entire area. But they’d seen and heard nothing. Nor had any of the other assets.

Not good news.

A-Bomb nosed the Hog down toward the mud, deciding to trace this thing out. First stop was the underpass where they had encountered the SAMs. The site had been pounded again and it absolutely glowed, as if it were a radioactive dump.

As he approached, aiming to duplicate Mongoose’s pass, he saw a black shadow coming down the road. He nosed forward, made it as an Iraqi army vehicle, a deuce-and-a-half troop-type truck. He lit his cannon, splashing bullets into the thick vehicle. As it veered off into the sand, A-Bomb caught the ground sparkle of the soldiers emptying their rifle clips at him as he started to pull off. The bullets helped him hone in on the target despite the darkness; he pressed on and fired his own cannon, whacking the truck with a quick burst that ignited a pretty fireball from the gas tank.

The Viper pilots were jabbering in his ear as he pulled off, asking if he needed assistance.

“Next time,” he told them, taking a quick orbit around the truck roast. When he was sure nothing was moving down there or nearby, he spun his plane in the direction he had last seen Mongoose taking. He couldn’t be precisely sure of where the major had been, though, and the difference of a small angle would mean a lot.

Plus it was really dark now. Too dark to see with anything but his gut.

Here was the wrecked Hog, lying in pieces strewn across the earth.

A-Bomb pushed his plane down, trying to get another look at the fuselage. He had to face the fact that Mongoose might not have gotten out.

He was going almost slow enough to land. Even so, there was no way to see anything more than a few mangled shadows. Three circuits and he still couldn’t tell for sure if he’d really found the plane, let alone whether Mongoose was still in it.

For what felt like the millionth time, A-Bomb keyed the emergency frequency, looking for his flight leader. The only answer was static.

He put the Hog at two thousand feet and made for the buildings again.

If Mongoose was down there, too much close attention like this would draw the enemy. But damn it, he had to find him so the helos could come and pick him up. All he needed was one little flare, and he’d have the choppers here in no time. They liked making their pickups in the dark.

The Boas handed off to a second pair of F-16s.

Still nothing.

“We’re not giving up on you,” the controller assured A-Bomb when he suggested Devil Two return to base. “But, uh, you’ve been flying a long time now.”

“I’ve got plenty of fuel.”

“We copy, sir. We copy.”

He didn’t add “but,” though it was clearly implied.

But.

But common sense said the longer A-Bomb stayed up, the less efficient he was going to get. And hell, it was dark. The Hog was many things, but it wasn’t a night fighter.

Shit, thought A-Bomb, all I need is a damn flashlight.

At some point, even U.S. Air Force Captain Thomas O’Rourke had to be realistic. Common sense said that there was a reason they weren’t getting a transmission from Mongoose.

Common sense said he wasn’t going to find him in the dark. Sooner or later he would have to call it a day.

A-Bomb keyed the emergency frequency again, then cut his throttle back ten percent, hoping to push “sooner or later” a bit further out.

CHAPTER 23

Mongoose had walked nearly a half mile from the road, and begun to parallel it south toward a clump of low trees, before realizing that he had left the seat’s survival pack back where he landed. He stopped, nearly slapping his forehead with his right hand, though he was still holding his pistol.

He spun around to go back, then stopped himself.

“Checklist mode,” he said aloud. “Think, don’t react.”

To get the pack, he would have to cross the road again. It was getting truly dark and he might not make it back here, let alone to the trees. He wanted to be near them to direct the helo in when it came.

The seat pack had a spare radio and more flares. Mongoose debated whether they were worth getting. He already had a radio. He had his water, the gun, his knife, some flares. Going back would take at least a half-hour, maybe more; he might or might not find his way back.

If the Iraqis had found the chute and seat, they might be there now, setting an ambush or booby-trapping them.

He had to keep away from the enemy, make contact with an allied plane, and hang tight until the rescue team got there. The seat pack wasn’t essential. It was a backup really. He could do without it.

Probably get picked up in a few minutes.

Mongoose felt a twinge in his knee as he squatted and holstered his gun. The pain at the back of his head had settled into a steady but low rhythm, vaguely reminiscent of the throb of an out-of-tune Chevy Camaro he’d owned as a teenager. He could live with the thump and his slightly strained knee; all things considered he was in great shape.

The survival radio felt like a thin Walkman in his hand as he made another transmission. The squelch sounded a bit different, but there wasn’t an acknowledgment. He flipped over to the beacon, broadcast a while, waited.

A-Bomb would have the helos on their way. Best to find a landmark to steer them toward.

The trees. He started walking again.

When he was less than fifty yards from the trees’ shadows, they began to move. He stopped, drew his pistol, slid down into his crouch. Mongoose told himself it must be the wind, even though the movement seemed human. He rocked his upper body back and forth, scanning with the gun, waiting for the shadows to either stop moving completely or separate.

Neither happened. He straightened slowly, pulling the gun back close to his body. The trees were hardly tall enough to be worth calling them that; they had thin, bent trunks and scraggly tops. Not even a kid could have hidden behind them had there been daylight.

But in the dark their shadows were a thick blur. Though he’d been watching the copse for probably close to an hour now, Mongoose was no longer sure of it, or himself; he couldn’t trust his eyes. He began sidestepping, moving to his right, gun still drawn against an ambush.

If an Iraqi soldier was hiding in the copse, he’d have wasted him by now. This distance with a rifle, he’d be diced.

Or maybe not. The guy might be scared, not know whether Mongoose was armed or not— might not even know he was the enemy.

Why would he be waiting, then?

Mongoose ducked as he saw something move. He pushed the gun out, steadied it with both hands.

Nothing.

He sidestepped some more. The copse was small, with a half-dozen trees, its circumference twenty yards tops. The ground tilted toward it, as if it were the bottom of a bowl.

The night was as quiet as the inside of a funeral home at midnight.

Something moved again. This time Mongoose was sure it was a man taking aim at him, and fired.

The crack of the gun had a hollow sound that lasted for what seemed like hours, not an echo but the long strand of the only noise in a deep vacuum of silence. Mongoose strained to keep his finger from pushing the trigger again, waiting for a muzzle flash to show him where to aim. Sweat started to drip across the back of his cheek, even though he was colder than he’d ever been in his life.

There was no muzzle flash. He resumed his sidestep, quicker now, knowing that if no one had returned his fire there was no one there. The movement and shadows had only been his imagination, but still he felt his stomach boil.

When he had circled the copse, Mongoose pushed forward to the trees, closing his eyes as he passed between two trunks into the small clearing at its center. When no one rushed him, he opened them again and saw there was a small depression here, almost a trench. He plopped down and took one more look around, told himself aloud he was all right, then laid his pistol aside and yanked at his vest, grabbing for one of the water packets. He tore it clumsily and drank in a gulp, losing a good portion down his face and neck.

It took a lot to keep from ripping open another.

“You have to make this stuff last a while,” he said to himself, against speaking out loud, though this time in a whisper. “It’s your job.”

Mongoose took his radio out and came up on the emergency frequency once again, broadcasting first in beacon mode and then voice.

Still no answer. He couldn’t understand that. Except for the brief flutter when he first landed, the radio had been silent. There ought to be a good amount of traffic up here; certainly someone should be in range to pick him up.

Mongoose gave another burst, held the small radio to his ear, listening.

Was the damn thing even working? He could hear static. He shook it, listened again. Half the air force ought to be close enough to hear him.

Not to mention A-Bomb.

Unless he’d been bagged, too. Mongoose didn’t know what had hit him; it had happened so fast he hadn’t really been able to tell. He thought it was probably a shoulder-fired heat-seeker, even though there had felt like too much damage for that.

He stopped himself from replaying the hit. He had to stay in the present, the future. Mongoose tried the radio again, then checked his watch. He’d wait fifteen minutes before transmitting again. The battery wouldn’t last forever.

It was possible that there was something wrong with the radio. He might be transmitting, but not receiving. Or some vagary with the altitude, the clouds, sun spots, or fate might be screwing him up.

Checklist mode.

Time to move on. He had to face the possibility that he was going to be spending the night.

A very strong possibility.

It was cold. The wind was starting up again, and that only made things worse.

This was the only sheltered area nearby, and any group of Iraqi soldiers would undoubtedly head for it if they were searching the area. He would have to leave it, go far enough away to be safe, but still close enough to use it to guide the air-rescue chopper in if it came.

Not if. When it came.

Now the shadows of the trees felt comforting, as if they could protect him. And there was wood on the ground, maybe enough to start a small fire, something to keep warm.

Not enough wood to make it last very long. And it would definitely risk alerting the Iraqis.

The guy in the pickup might have taken care of that already.

The time to start the fire was an hour or two before dawn. He’d minimize his exposure to the Iraqis. Most of them would have given up searching by then, or at least taken a break.

But shit, he’d be frozen solid if he didn’t do something to warm up.

The faint whisper of Hog fan jets in the distance turned his head around with a jolt.

His imagination?

Or A-Bomb, looking for him?

He listened again, trying to blank his mind. Nothing. It had been a trick of his imagination, a tease of fear like the shadows had been.

Even so he took out his flare set, loaded the small gun with a pencil flare, poised to fire.

Complete silence and not a moving shadow in the sky.

Checklist mode.

He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but he didn’t feel hungry yet. Which was a fairly good thing — there were no Big Macs lying around, and the nearest falafel stand was quite a hike.

He had to leave the copse. He squatted down and began to re — inventory his gear, justifying the delay with the thought that it was the last time he might have a chance to do so before morning. He took each item out and placed it directly in front of him, the way a little kid might take stock of his Hot Wheels or baseball card collection. The ritual of touching each piece of equipment was comforting, reminding him that he had the tools to get out of this alive. Besides the survival radio and gun, Mongoose had a flashlight, three smoke-flares, the tiny flare gun and its bandoleer of flares, a compass, a strobe light, a whistle and matches, his maps, and Kath’s letter.

He held the still-sealed envelope in his hand as he continued examining his equipment. A magnesium striker — ought to be good for a few laughs, trying to spark kindling.

Hell, he’d done that in Boy Scouts, for christsakes. Pretty damn well, too. He had a merit badge for camping, didn’t he?

A couple of them. No shit.

He loved the survival hikes; just take a backpack and walk for a couple of days. What you carry is what you got. You can live off the land, if you’re tough enough.

For some reason he remembered his Boy Scout days better than the survival course he’d taken. Maybe because they had been so much fun, and the SERE had just been wet. His buddies in the Scouts would have loved a challenge like this.

Well, they would have said they would. Deep in enemy territory, on your own? They probably had talked about this kind of thing, not dreaming or wishing it, exactly, just kind of playing, the way kids did.

Wouldn’t his friends Blitz and Beef like to get their hands on this knife? Huge, well-sharpened blade and a round pearl handle, acquired two years before at a pawn shop in Germany.

Not a pawn shop. Some sort of specialty store.

Whatever. Checklist mode. Stow memory lane and play it back forever, to warm you up.

Stock taken, his next job was to move away from here. Again he contemplated firing a flare, but told himself he had to conserve them, wait until he heard something nearby. Besides, the Iraqis would be searching for at least a few more hours. Even though the flares were made so they would be difficult to see from the ground, they were not necessarily invisible, and he didn’t want to do anything that might encourage them to keep looking.

When he heard a plane or got an acknowledgment on the radio, of course, that would be different. But in the meantime, Job One, Item A, was to survive. And that meant being as low-key as possible.

Mongoose returned all of his equipment to its various nooks and crannies in his survival suit.

The last item was the letter.

He considered reading it, and even slid his finger to the pasted flap before stopping.

It could be bad news. Kathy could be telling him she’d found someone else and wanted a divorce.

Oh, yeah, right. Like that would really happen.

They were always good news. In the last letter, she’d written about how Robby could almost say “daddy.”

Not bad for a three-month-old.

He was almost four-months now. He didn’t feel a picture in the envelope, but you never knew unless you opened it.

A picture would keep him going.

Mongoose slipped his finger under the side of the paper. It was one of those tissue-thin jobs, where the writing paper folds up to become the envelope.

He’d feel a photo, and there wasn’t one here. If he opened the letter, it would be impossible to keep from reading it.

He ought to ration it like the water, spread it out so it would last. Read a few lines then stop.

No way he could do that. It wasn’t like stopping at just one water packet. He would read one sentence and his eyes would automatically grope for the next. And then the next. He’d have to use his flashlight and it would take five, ten, fifteen minutes.

He had to get going. This was the first place the Iraqis would look if they came for him.

Better to save the letter. A treat, make it. When he really felt down and couldn’t go on.

Carefully, he folded the envelope in half and the half again. He kept it in his hand as he started to walk from the small copse, kept it between his fingers for a long time before finally tucking it away.