Snake Eaters

CHAPTER 32

Doberman checked the numbers on his INS, and glanced back at the map. He ought to be turning cartwheels over Al-Kajuk in twenty minutes.

Seventeen minutes and thirty seconds, to be exact.

He ran through his instrument checks and scanned the sky for boogies. His biggest enemy, though, was impatience.

There were certain tricks— straining the throttle with your eyes, leaning on your seat restraints to pull her along— but the bottom line was that Hogs could not go fast. They also really, truly, did not like to fly high. Doberman’s mount had groaned and grunted all the way to 18,500 feet, even though he promised to put the extra altitude to good use on the business-end of the trip. She was built like a tank and wanted to act that way; she seemed to whine with displeasure when Doberman didn’t turn in the direction of the thunderhead of flak at 12,000 feet two miles off her right wing.

Judging from the altitude and spread of the flak cloud, Doberman figured the exploding bullets came from two or three ZSU-57-2 self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, more than likely unguided by radar— though that didn’t make the monster shells any less deadly. The site wasn’t marked on the map. Doberman jotted the location down, just in case he still had some bombs left on the way home.

At precisely fifteen minutes from target, Doberman checked in with the AWACS controller tasked with coordinating support for the Apache mission. The crews rotated but he recognized the controller’s Carolina accent from earlier as the specialist acknowledged Devil One’s position.

The controller surprised him by saying that Wong hadn’t called in a strike— or even come back on the air in the past hour.

“No contact?” he asked.

“Negative, Devil One. We are out of contact with the Fire Team at this time.”

Out of contact?

“You’re aware they’re tracking Scuds,” he said, more a statement than a question.

“Copy that. We have two Vipers en route to that kill box,” said the controller. “We have a rotary asset en route, call sign Dark Snake. He is crossing north now. He may require assistance communicating with Apache Fire Team. We were told not to expect y’all,” added the controller. “But we’re happy to have ya.”

“Roger that.”

Doberman laid out the situation in his head. Dark Snake was the Spec Ops Pave Hawk, a specially modified Blackhawk designed for covert missions. Detailed to pick up Wong and the boys, the MH-60 would travel very close to the weeds, maybe only six feet off the ground, guided by special radar and other equipment. Because it was so low, it could have difficulty communicating with the ground team until it was almost on top of them. Doberman, much higher, could help out by establishing contact with the team and the helicopter individually. Then he’d relay messages back and forth like a telegraph operator in the Old West.

The Vipers were all-purpose F-16 fighter-bombers, most likely carrying dumb bombs and air-to-air missiles. The kill box was an arbitrary grid in the sky that included Al-Kajuk; the F-16s would be tasked to standby until needed. Unlike the Hog, the pointy noses could fight off enemy interceptors, if any were so foolish to appear. And unlike the Hog, they’d been designed to fly this far behind enemy lines.

What Doberman couldn’t puzzle out was why Wong hadn’t contacted the AWACS, at least to update the situation. But the controller didn’t seem too concerned.

Bottom line: Wong would have called in if the erector had moved or if the Scuds had appeared. So Doberman should just go on in and take out the erector in the bomb-shelter hideaway under the road. Blow it up and the missiles in the mosque were useless.

No, they’d still be important targets— Saddam could turn this little party into World War III with them. But the erector was his priority target.

Piece of cake with the Mavericks— he could launch both and never get close to the SAMs.

Take out the erector, go for the SA-9s with the cluster bombs. Wouldn’t want the pointy noses getting hurt when they came in to admire his handiwork.

CHAPTER 33

Wong touched his thumbs to his pinkies, then his ring fingers, then the others, again and again, controlling his breathing as he did. He’d begun the meditational exercise when he first heard the AK-47s below. It helped him maintain his poise, but it did not change the basic calculus of the situation: since there had been no answering fire by M-16s or MP-5s, he had to assume the worst. The three remaining Delta troopers had been ambushed and were dead. He and the sergeant kneeling on the ground nearby were on their own.

They were guarded now only by the Iraqi captain and one soldier. The others had gone to investigate the gunfire. The Iraqi commander surely recognized that the gunfire had come from Russian-made weapons, but he did not exhibit overconfidence, keeping his pistol trained on Wong the whole time. If nothing else, his enemy’s endurance was admirable.

The sun was at the horizon. The Scuds would be moving soon.

Captain Glenon would undoubtedly be on his way back. But a lone A-10A faced difficult odds against the SAM batteries, especially if Wong were not available to give him guidance.

Given the circumstances, it was time for a gambit.

“I wonder,” Wong asked the Iraqi captain, “if you would care to play chess.”

“Chess?”

“Why not?” said Wong. “I assume that we are not going anywhere for the time being.”

“I don’t see a chess set.”

“Pawn to queen four,” said Wong, giving the standard nomenclature for a time-worn opening move. It pushed the pawn in front of the white queen ahead two squares.

The captain laughed. “Thank you, no.”

“Perhaps you prefer white,” offered Wong. He nodded, as if sizing up the Iraqi. “You do seem like someone who would seize the initiative.”

“You think that you could play an entire game out in your head?”

“You couldn’t?”

The sharpness of his tone brought the desired response.

“Pawn to king’s four,” snapped the Iraqi.

“Queen’s bishop four,” replied Wong, mentally pushing a pawn out in front of his bishop.

Within three moves, he was well embarked on a Sicilian defense; he set his bishop on move six, castled on seven, and spotted his knight boldly on the eighth — the modern Dragon variation that was an aggressive, though tricky, defense that sought to turn the attack to black.

The Iraqi competently met the attack, though he hesitated over the moves, his eyes burrowing into the ground as he considered the invisible board. Wong studied his clean-shaven chin, trying to fit the accent and mannerisms into a profile. The man and his squad were obviously not Muslims, and were just as obviously members of an elite unit. That surely limited the possibilities.

A bodyguard unit?

For whom?

Wong took a step to left, contemplating the possibilities. He was appalled by his severe lack of knowledge regarding the Iraqi order of battle. It was a deficiency that would have to be rectified when he escaped.

As he was now confident he would do, for he could see the butt end of his M-16 in the shadow next to the rock.

“Where are you going?” snapped the Iraqi captain.

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Wong said contritely. “I have a tendency to move around as I think. The combinations beyond this point are complex.”

“You’ve obviously played this opening many times,” said the man dryly.

“That’s why the next move is difficult,” said Wong. “Did you play very much in America?”

“I will play chess with you to amuse myself,” said the Iraqi. “But I will not be drawn into conversation.”

“Not even with a spy?” Wong glanced toward the Delta Force sergeant, who was sitting on the ground with his knees up. His fingers were curled together against his kneecaps. Wong hoped that the man had a concealed weapon in one of his boots or taped to his leg; that would, after all, be the Delta way.

But no matter. It was enough now that the sergeant caught his glance.

“I realize that you are contemplating a trick,” said the Iraqi captain.

“Absolutely,” said Wong cheerfully. “I’m playing for a pawn advantage. Properly played, the Sicilian Defense allows… ”

“Not in the chess game. Why do you think you’re so much more intelligent than I am? Why are Americans so arrogant?”

Wong might have made any number of replies starting with the fact that he was not arrogant, merely naturally gifted. Before he could speak, he heard a truck motor from the village side of the hill. He couldn’t be sure it was a Scud carrier— the odds were probably against it— but he had to assume it was.

In the next second he heard something else: an explosion at the foot of the hill, a quarter of a mile away, maybe less. The Iraqi captain turned in his head in that direction.

“Knight takes pawn! Check!” shouted Wong, diving for the gun.

CHAPTER 34

Dixon heard the commotion as he ran up the hill. It was a distant, disorienting dream— American voices playing chess, followed by shouting, then gunshots.

The house flamed below. He fell forward like a soul tossed into the swirl of hell, momentarily removed from the raging torment. He rolled over to his back, then onto his stomach, realizing one of the voices was familiar— he grabbed at his rifle but saw nothing. There was a loud thud behind him, near the house— the thud of a light cannon, pumping a second shell into the ruined house. Dixon saw three or four rocks to his right. He pushed himself there on his elbows, dragging his gun and his legs. For a moment he worried about being captured. Then he coughed, his lungs filled with the dirt of the hill, choking. He dove behind the rocks, then noticed a branch a few yards below— a large, broken trunk that offered better protection. Jumping up, he ran to it, surprised when he made it without being shot. It seemed to him that he was surrounded, with bullets flying everywhere.

He thought of the woman in the house. The baby.

Had it died because he left the burner on the stove on?

Had it even been a gas stove? He couldn’t see it now — propane, gas? Or an old wood stove, the kind his mother used to talk about?

Why was he thinking about his mother?

The hill below him shook again. The Iraqis had some kind of armored vehicle or light tank, and were firing its gun into the remains of the building.

His mother ran from the smoldering ruins, waving her hands, trying to stop him.

He pushed his rifle over the tree, trying to clear his head.

Dixon realized as his hands touched the bark it wasn’t a tree at all. He was huddled against the burnt corpses of two dead Iraqi soldiers.

CHAPTER 35

The M203 attached to the M-16 did not have a hairpin trigger, and it took more than a heavy jostle to set it off. What it really took was a good pull on the trigger, but Wong couldn’t manage to slip his fingers in as he rolled. His hands flew around desperately, the ground shaking with a thud as a second shell hit the base of the hill in the distance. Finally the grenade flashed from the weapon; Wong rolled from his back as the 40 mm charge sailed square into the Iraqi commander’s face, knocking him off balance as he began firing his pistol.

The grenade ricocheted down the hill, exploding too far away to do any good— luckily for Wong, since any explosion this close would have killed him as well as the Iraqi. The Iraqi fell back, his gun flying with him.

Someone shouted. Wong spun around, his rifle now under control, and cut down a man near the Delta trooper who’d been captured with him. Then he slid around, unsure where the Iraqi commander he’d just shot had gone. He was confused by the gunfire at the base of the hill. As the Delta trooper grabbed a rifle off of the dead Iraqi, Wong ran to the top of the hill, spotting a knot of Iraqis. He flicked the rifle onto full automatic, peppering the three figures from the side. A shadow opposite the Iraqis jumped up; Wong realized it must be one of the missing members of his team. He could see something moving on the road directly below— three long tractor-trailers carrying tarp-covered cylindrical payloads.

Scuds.

A pickup followed behind, with three canvas-backed military vehicles.

A burst of submachine-gun fire to his right sent him to the ground. He scooted to the crest and peered down. Two figures were climbing the clear hill; he barely caught himself from sending a burst through Sergeant Golden’s chest, spotting the trooper’s chocolate chip fatigues at twenty yards.

The other side of the hill shook with a fresh round, something from a light tank.

The priority now was the Satcom— Wong turned to find it but instead felt the long, thin edge of a combat knife slide up against the side of his neck. The meaty curve rested atop the sternohyoid and sternothyroid muscles— not the placement he would have made, but nonetheless arresting.

“Rook takes knight,” hissed the Iraqi commander. “Checkmate.”

“I think if you examine your position carefully,” said Wong, shifting his weight shift to get a better balance on the slope, “you’ll find it’s a draw at best.”

The Iraqi jerked the knife. It was so sharp that Wong didn’t feel the cut, though he realized blood had begun to flow.

“I think, Captain, that you overrate your strategy,” said the Iraqi, twisting Wong around. “Stop!” he yelled to the others, “or your captain will die.”

The com specialist was stooped over the Satcom. The others on the hill were in the shadows and Wong couldn’t tell if they’d been seen or even precisely where they were. The Iraqi commander pushed him to move right; he did so.

“Now Captain,” the Iraqi told Wong, “we will be going down the hill.”

“As you wish,” said Wong.

The Iraqi pressed his left shoulder into Wong’s, forcing him forward, only to jerk the knife nervously against his neck. It would take considerable pressure to sever the artery or Wong’s windpipe. In Wong’s experience, the position was over-rated as a lethal hold; it was difficult to properly leverage the arm so close to the intended victim.

On the other hand, escaping it was not necessarily easy. Especially since he had to do so quickly— the Spec Ops troops could hardly be expected to value Wong’s life over their mission. Undoubtedly they were waiting for a good shot, even if it meant taking out Wong as well as the Iraqi.

“Excuse me,” said Wong, stopping momentarily. The Iraqi pushed hard against him and jerked the knife to the top of his chin.

Perfect.

“No tricks,” hissed the man.

“I was wondering if I might answer a call of nature,” Wong told him.

“No!” shouted the man. He pushed the knife hard against Wong’s throat, intending to intimidate him. But this was just what Wong wanted— the Iraqi’s legs were too close to his. As his weight shifted with the knife, Wong added to it, jerking his upper body into his captor’s and throwing both of them off-balance. They fell in a tumble. Wong pivoted and smashed his elbow into the man’s ribs as they swirled over. The knife jammed into Wong’s jaw. Wong could not turn himself into his opponent fast enough to escape a second stab, but he managed to duck enough that it fell on his shoulder. In the meantime, he pumped two quick jabs of his fist into the man’s face; the captain lost his grip on the knife and it clattered away as they fell into the dirt. The Iraqi managed a hard punch to Wong’s nose. He felt the snap and knew it had been broken.

That made him mad.

Wong reared back and slammed the top of his skull into the Iraqi’s forehead. The universe swirled. Wong thrashed his arms in every direction, raging as a thick flow of lava poured over him. He flailed and he writhed, and it seemed as if there was no longer one Iraqi but a dozen, all with knives and brass knuckles, pummeling him. He bulled his way through them, using elbows, knees, feet, fists, and head punching until finally he found his way to the surface of the inferno. With one last burst of energy he broke the molten iron bands holding his head back and staggered free, collapsing into the dirt.

He opened his eyes to see Golden’s worried face hanging over him.

“Shit, Wong— you OK?”

Wong pulled himself up as if doing a controlled sit-up. Without checking his other wounds, he reached to his pant leg and tore off a piece of material, then held it to the long cut at his jaw. Had he cared to, he could have felt bone inside.

“Wong? You in shock?”

“I am not in shock,” he told the sergeant calmly.

“You killed the fucker with your bare hands,” Golden told him. “You snapped his neck.”

“That is unfortunate,” said Wong. “He might have supplied us with considerable information. I apologize for losing my temper.”

Wong stood. His nose was bleeding as well as off-kilter. It stung, but was not a serious injury. There were various cuts and bruises on his body; the slash at his jaw was the worst injury. As long as he stopped the bleeding and did not get it infected, it would not be life-threatening.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” Golden told him.

“A clumsy escape, granted,” said Wong. “But within acceptable margins.”

“Margins! Like hell,” said the sergeant. “Lou was going to plunk you in about two seconds.”

Golden nodded at one of his men a few feet away. Wong merely shrugged and walked toward the Satcom.

“We had best get the attack underway,” he said. “Captain Glenon will have returned by now, though he is undoubtedly too high for us to hear. He is notoriously impatient and ill-tempered.”

“Company!” yelped one of the team members from the direction where the heavy-caliber weapon had been shaking the hill. “We have an armored car and two tanks coming up behind it now. Shit. T-62 mothers, and I’m looking at a platoon of Iraqis running up behind them.”

CHAPTER 36

Doberman swung back to the north, hunting through the blur of shadows for the highway and culvert. It was his second orbit south of the target area, but he still had trouble getting his bearings, let alone finding what he wanted to hit. Between his altitude— he was a nudge over 12,000 feet— and the twilight, most of what he saw looked like light chocolate and dark mud.

Ten more minutes and he’d only dark mud. The infra-red seeker in his Maverick could be used as a primitive night-vision device, but the small angle on the viewer made it at least helpful to narrow the general area down before trying to find the target. Doberman’s normally excellent eyes weren’t cooperating; between the shadows and his fatigue he wasn’t even sure he had the highway. What he thought was the highway jagged to the right, which didn’t seem right. He angled the Hog, nearing the northernmost edge of the circle he was drawing before he happened to glance to the left and saw a tiny brown brick at the left corner of his windscreen. He lost it as he began to turn, but he realized it must be the mobile SAM launcher.

Banking, Doberman quickly reoriented himself. And now the shadows had meaning— there was the village, there was the hill. He had the highway, knew now where the SA-9s would be. He mapped out a long wide loop that would give him an easy approach toward the culvert.

Be nice to hear from Wong about now. He’d tried twice already without getting an answer.

“Devil One to Snake Eaters,” he said, pushing his mike button in. “Yo, Wong, what’s the story? Come on! You up or what?”

Doberman took his eyes off the windscreen to double-check the frequency and repeat the call.

Nada.

Dark Snake, the Blackhawk that was supposed to be rendezvousing with the team, didn’t answer his hail either.

He came around at the southern end of his orbit, swinging into the approach. He was at nine thousand feet, roughly ten miles south of the culvert, lined up for a direct shot in. At twelve thousand feet, the Mavericks were accurate to roughly ten miles; the closer he got, the better his odds of hitting the target. The SA-9s protecting the Iraqi launcher had a range of about five miles at that altitude; that left him with a perfectly safe firing envelope of just under a minute, plenty of time to take two shots under ordinary circumstances.

But that would mean attacking the SAMs with the cluster bombs. Tricky in the dark.

Better to fire the Maverick, circle back, make sure he hit. Then he could dial up one of the SA-9s on the TV screen, blow it to smithereens. He’d then have the option of using the cluster bombs on the last launcher, or letting the F-16s worry about it.

Be nice to hear from Wong about now.

Gravity tickled his side as he righted the Hog and slotted into the attack run. Doberman saw a flash of light on the ground off his left wing; knew that meant the fire team was in trouble. But it was too late now— he pushed his head down into the Maverick monitor, easing the cursor toward the big shadow at the very corner of his screen. He waited for the shadow to move toward him— it was Zen, these final seconds, or maybe yin and yang, the target moving and the cursor moving, coming toward each other. It could be described by a mathematical formula: A x B = boom.

He had the dark spot under the highway, the cursor was there. His thumb moved over the trigger.

“Bing-bang-boom,” he said calmly, pushing the Maverick off from beneath his wing. The thick cylinder slipped downwards, its blunt nose locked on the target. For a moment it stood in the air, propelled only by forward momentum, still part of the airplane. Then the Thiokol solid-fuel rocket caught with a throaty roar; the missile flashed away, bobbing upwards briefly before setting her teeth to the job at hand.

Doberman pulled off, heart-pumping. He saw another flash in the shadow of the hill— something big was firing down there.

He had to make sure the erector was down. That was his priority.

There were more trucks, something moving of the road.

Too much.

He took a hard breath, focusing his attention as he snapped the jet back into the attack path. He pushed his whole body down to the right, as if he wanted to ram the video screen with his head. He slipped the Maverick’s aim point down and saw smoke lingering from the first missile hit.

Nailed the sucker. The culvert had been replaced by an immense crater.

He began hunting for another target, preferably the SAM at the close end of the highway. He found it, lost it, then pulled off, realizing he was at the edge of his safety margin.

He banked south, intending to turn to the east and come at the SA-9 from the other direction. He was just straightening out when he saw a long thick shadow several hundred yards south of the highway, in a cleared area to his left.

The Scud erector had been moved.

CHAPTER 37

Wong repeated his message into the communications handset as the Iraqi tanks began firing. Behind him, two of the Delta team members peppered the slope with automatic fire and grenades.

“Devil One this is Apache Fire Team Snake Eaters,” Wong said. “Do you have your ears on?”

“Ears on? What the hell, Wong, you think you’re talking into a god damn CB set?” responded Doberman. “Shit.”

“I selected a vernacular sure to attract your attention,” he replied. “You did not answer my first two calls.”

“What calls? I’ve tried hailing you three or four times over the past ten minutes.”

A fresh salvo of grenades exploded down the hill. The Iraqi tanks had so far aimed very high, their shells sailing far over the hillside. Wong had no illusion, however, that that would continue indefinitely. Golden ran back and began tugging his sleeve— they had to move out.

“There are three Scud carriers en route to the erector site,” Wong told Doberman quickly. “Do you copy?”

“I don’t see the carriers but I have the erector. It’s moved from the culvert. Are you under attack?”

“Immaterial,” said Wong. “The Scuds are your priority.”

“No shit. I’m going to vector in help. I see three tanks. Are you on the hill?”

“The SA-9s have a lethal envelope slightly beyond the published specifications that you may be aware of,” said Wong calmly. “Recent alterations to the infra-red seeker heads as well as some improvements in the rocket motor have increased their kill potential by a factor of one-point-five.”

The hillside reverberated as the T-62s fired their 100 mm guns nearly simultaneously. Their charges slammed into the hillside below the American position. Golden lost his balance, grabbing Wong as he fell.

“We have to go,” he said.

“Wong, there’s a helo on its way,” Doberman shouted. “Call sign…”

The rest of the transmission was swallowed by static.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to relocate,” he told Doberman as the ground shook again. The Iraqis had once more missed, but their margin was much closer. Dirt and debris showered around him; Wong lost his balance and the headset, rolling against the rocks.

“Now!” shouted Golden, managing to get to his feet. He told his men to cover the retreat with smoke grenades and move out. “Smoke! Smoke! Come on, Wong!”

Wong scooped up the satellite antenna and began dragging the Satcom rucksack down the hillside. He’d only taken two steps when he remembered that he hadn’t searched the Iraqi commander. He threw down the dish and turned back.

“Where the hell are you going, Wong?” shouted Golden.

“Be right with you, Sergeant. Please take the Satcom and proceed without me,” yelled Wong.

In the next moment a fresh set of salvos from the tanks rocked the hillside. Wong flew face-first into the hill. The last member of the fire team slid past to the left. Wong pushed himself to his feet.

The Iraqis were shouting below, their voices a cacophony of anguished cries and commands to attack.

Wong began to choke. He put his arm to his face, using his sleeve as a makeshift filter. The Iraqi captain lay heaped over to his right, perhaps ten yards away. As he ran toward it, the tanks launched another set of salvos. While their rate of fire was admirable, their marksmanship left a lot to be desired, though not by Wong. He stumbled sideways down the hill a few feet, lost his balance and fell onto the Iraqi’s body. The thick cloud of soot and dirt made it impossible to see what he was doing; he had to feel for the pockets with his hands. He found a folded map or document and something in one of the shirt flaps. That was going to have to suffice.

He threw himself backwards in the direction he’d come, rolling two or three yards downhill before managing to get his arm out and lever himself to his feet. He heard the sound of a tank shell whizzing by at close range and thought of the old saying about the shell you heard was never the one that got you. There must be some truth to that, he realized, given the innate lag time involved in the speed of sound and the human aural apparatus.

In the next second, he found himself flying through the air, launched by an explosion he hadn’t heard.

CHAPTER 38

Gravity slapped Doberman hard in the head, punishing him for trying to do too many things at once. He struggled, holding the hard maneuver and fighting the instinct that wanted him to ease off on the stick. He lost Wong’s transmission in a tangle of static; saw all sorts of ground fire and had a warning on the RWR. Fighting off the confusion, he steadied his hand on the stick and put his eyes back on the Maverick video monitor, pasting them there as he waited for the long gray shadow of the missile erector to appear. Some kind of ground battery, probably on a mobile platform, began firing flak at him; black pebbles and white streaks dotted the video screen as well as the canopy above him.

No target.

Doberman cursed. He pulled back on the stick, starting to bank to his right and try again. The long ladder materialized at the edge of his screen. It fuzzed, and for a moment he couldn’t be sure whether he had his target or an optical illusion. He stayed on course and switched the Maverick into what passed for close-up mode, doubling the magnification but narrowing his range of vision by about the same percentage.

The ladder morphed into a two-by-six with graffiti, then back into something approximating a construction crane half covered by a tarp. The crane portion was moving, swinging around slowly. Doberman steadied the small aiming cursor on the heart of the lumber and let the missile go. He kept his eyes on the screen for another two or three seconds, locked on his target, entranced by the gray fuzz. Then he shook himself out of it and yanked the Hog around, hitting the diversionary flares. He assumed the SA-9s had launched and jinked hard right then back left, leaving the small flares out to suck their IR sensors away.

At least he hoped they would. He counted off twenty seconds, shucking and jiving the whole way, cutting corners in the sky before starting to reorient himself for another attack. The altimeter ladder told him he’d fallen to 8,050 feet. The CBUs— long suitcases of miniature anti-armor and personnel bombs— had been preset to be delivered from roughly eight thousand feet; he’s have to get higher to get a good angle before letting them go. He swung out of his bank and put his nose upwards, now more than twelve miles from his target, well out of range of the missiles and flak in a swatch of open air. He could see large flashes near the hill on the left, in front of the village.

Wong’s team, taking heavy fire. He’d have to try and help them, the SA-9s be damned.

“Devil One to Bro leader,” he said, trying to raise the F-16s. Doberman angled to make his approach from the west, keeping as much distance between himself and the SAMs until the last moment. He saw a flash off his right wing, then something moving on the ground further along— maybe the Scuds.

Another set of muzzle flashes below the hill. If they kept that up, he’d have an easy time taking them out.

Couldn’t use the CBUs — no telling how close the tanks were to Wong.

Have to mash them with the cannon.

Lower attack. Have to hurry, too. The bastards were flailing.

He tried the F-16s one last time. When the radio didn’t snap back with pointy nose slang, Doberman called the AWACS, asking for information on the Vipers and giving his position. In the meantime, the Hog seemed to fly herself, homing in on the thick shadows at the base of the hill. He was near in range as his finger clicked off the talk button; his eyes separated the fresh muzzle flashes into real targets, thick and juicy. Doberman slammed the stick hard, pitching the Hog into the attack. A gray shroud filled his windshield, a cloud of dust or smoke or fog spewing from the hillside.

Come on, he thought to himself. Fire again you bastards. Show me where the hell you are.

“Bro flight is zero-three from target,” said the AWACS controller over the radio. Doberman lost the rest of the message as he struggled to find the tanks in the darkness. Something very bright flashed in the distance, back near the highway.

He was below four thousand feet and still didn’t have a target. He had mud and crap and dirt and shit, but no target.

SA-9s on their way. That was what the flash was.

Three thousand feet. Shit. What the hell happened?

Two thousand. Too late now. Sorry Wong.

He broke off, changing his plan as the Hog slid down into the mud, a thousand feet and still in a dive. He had a good view of the highway and saw a tower peeking out from the village— the minaret from the mosque, obviously— about eleven o’clock off his nose. A four-barreled Zsu-23 opened up near the edge of the village, its stream of bullets whipping for him. Doberman’s brain went critical, leaping into full-blown Hog driver mode; he dodged the stream of shells without thinking about them, hunkering in the A-10A’s titanium bathtub while his eyes hunted for something to hit. He had a long shadow in the center of the roadway a quarter of a mile off. He couldn’t tell what it was, but at this point it didn’t matter. Thirty-millimeter slugs from the Hog’s gun chewed into the thick brick, slicing it in two. There was no secondary explosion, however, and Doberman was by it before he could tell for sure what he’d hit. He banked hard, trying to cut a path low against the hill, away from the flak.

Dragged down by the four heavy cluster bombs on her wings, the Hog wallowed in the air, her energy robbed by the maneuvers and momentum.

He saw a flash from the corner of his eye. It was too big for tracers from the triple-A, but not big enough for the Scud.

The SA-9, closer than he thought, almost point blank.

He rammed the stick in the opposite direction and slammed his hand against the button to fire off more decoy flares. But he’d already shot his wad; there was nothing but cold air between his engines and the heat-seeker gunning for him.

The plane rocked to the right, down to five hundred feet, starting to slide sideways despite her pilot’s efforts to nose her around. Doberman felt something give way in his stomach, and he realized he’d pushed the line way too far tonight.

CHAPTER 39

Dirt and pain pushed Wong’s eyes closed as he fell into the ground. He seemed to fall right through the hill, through the rocks, into hell.

Curious. He would have thought he’d merit assignment to the other destination.

The ground rolled around him as he flailed. He heard the distinctive whine of a pair of A-10A turbofans above him and knew he hadn’t died.

Yet.

His left eye stayed closed; he saw only haze with his right.

On his knees, he felt around him, waiting either to die or see. Dust flew in particles in front of his head. Stones. The ground.

He found two small stubs, felt them gently, pushed his face down into them as his right eye gained focus.

Two fingers.

He pulled his own hands to his face to make sure they weren’t his. As he touched his left cheek a flame erupted there.

His hands were intact. He’d been shot in the face, or near the face. That was why he couldn’t open his left eye.

Burned, not shot. A piece of a red-hot shrapnel had glanced off his cheekbone. He was extremely lucky— the same shell had obliterated the Iraqi captain’s body; parts of the corpse were scattered around him. Wong’s uniform was soaked with the dead man’s blood.

An awful roar rent the air. The A-10A fired its cannon at a target on the highway. There was answering fire, explosions everywhere. Missiles and flames leaped into the air.

Perhaps this really was hell.

Wong worried that he had dropped the dead man’s papers. He began hunting around on the ground in front of him, hands spread wide like a sunbather who’d lost his contact lens in the sand. Finally he remembered he’d stuffed them in his own pocket— he pounded his chest and found them there, or at least felt something he’d have to pretend were them for now. Still unable to see through his left eye, he heaved himself down the hill toward a large shadow. The figure waved its arms at him, beckoning.

Charon or Sergeant Golden, at this moment it made no difference. He found his balance and began running with all the strength he had left.

CHAPTER 40

Until he’d come to the Gulf, Doberman hadn’t believed in luck. In fact, he’d hated the idea. Trained as an engineer, he thought— he knew— that you could roll all that BS together— luck, ESP, UFOs, ghosts, angels, Santa Claus— and toss it into the trash heap. The world could be expressed mathematically, with cold numbers and complex equations. Things that appeared random actually occurred within predictable parameters, and no amount of superstition could change them.

But he sure as hell believed in luck now, or at least he wanted to, ramming his body and hopefully the Hog to the southeast and as low as he could go, trying to get his nose pointed toward the SA-9s’ IR sniffers. The idea wasn’t as crazy as it seemed: the less of a heat signal he presented to the missiles, the harder it would be for them to find him. They were galloping toward him at maybe Mach 1.5; he had all of a second and a half to complete his maneuver.

Doberman got his nose in the direction of the SAM launchers and turned the Hog over, goosing the CBUs from his wings as he did. The plane was far too low for the bombs to explode properly; he just wanted to get rid of the weight.

Except, one of them did explode. And while the air rumbled around him and sweat poured from every pore of his body, the SA-9 sucked in the sudden heat and dove for it.

Doberman felt something ping the rear fuselage, a sharp thud and shake, but his controls stayed solid and he was actually climbing. Tracers whizzed well overhead. The air buffeted worse than a hurricane. He saw light and thought he felt heat, and then found a large telephone pole moving on the road ahead of him. It took another second before he saw that the pole was laid out flat and realized it was a Scud carrier, moving on the highway.

He had to pull back to get it into the aiming cue. The A-10A jerked her nose up and he fired, lead and uranium and blood flowing in a thick hose, splattering the ground and the air. He banked to his right, struggling to reorient himself in the peppery haze as the ground crackled with tracers and muzzle flashes.

The tanks were back on the other side of the hill. The SAM launchers were on his right; he was within range but he guessed— he hoped— that they’d already shot their wad. He hustled the Hog to the west, trying to keep an eye on the bouncing shadows of black and red. The T-62s were still firing at Wong.

Doberman drew a long breath. You could build a ship with the flak in the air. Fortunately, the tracers were arcing high into the sky, the shells apparently set to explode far above. For all its fury, the triple-A was harmless.

Unless, of course, the bullets actually flew through the plane.

Doberman had a good mark on a tank. He pushed the Hog toward it, judging that he could cut left after firing and avoid the worst of the antiair. Three hundred feet above ground level, he came in on a T-62 turret as the tank’s machine-gun began to fire toward the top of the hill.

“See you in hell, you son of a bitch,” said Doberman.

In the two seconds his finger stayed on the trigger, more than a hundred rounds spit from the front of the plane. The foot-long shells glowed in the dimness as they sped toward their target, ripping the highway, the metal of the tank, and then the ground beyond. Half a dozen of the 30 mm warheads made their way through the hard metal of the tank, bouncing wildly in a ricochet of death through the cramped quarters of the thirty-six ton tank.

By the time the last of the crew had died, Doberman had already trained the Hog’s GAU-8/A Avenger cannon on a second target and begun to fire. His angle was poor, however, and he didn’t have enough room to stay on the tank and not collide with the hill. He flicked off the gun and wagged his way clear for another run, cutting left and then flicking right to give the people firing at him less of a target.

And they were firing on him. He was at a hundred feet, barely higher than the hill. The Iraqis threw everything they had at him— anti-aircraft guns, rifles, pistols, maybe even a knife or two.

No rational man would have turned back for another run. But Captain Glenon wasn’t rational. He was a Hog driver. And having come this far he wasn’t about to go home.

The Gatling mechanism began pumping beneath his seat as Doberman whipped back toward the hill and immediately found the tank front and center in his HUD aiming cue. He mashed the rudder pedals back and forth, lacing the top of the tank. Two swishes and the tank disappeared, steamed into oblivion.

Dark black spitballs arced past his windshield, spewed by an optically-aimed ZSU-23 posted below the village. Doberman tucked his wing in and got the barrels sighted as they swung toward him. He rushed his shot, the enemy spitballs turning into footballs; he pushed hard on the stick, ramming his stream of bullets down into the target. His wings bounced up and down. He had a hard time putting the Hog where he wanted it to go, even though he didn’t think he’d been hit. He leaned on the trigger and finally squashed the gun, saw parts of the treads and one of the barrels flying upwards, but no more bullets. He pulled his right wing up, feeling his way back across the village, hugging the ground and looking for something big to shoot at.

Nothing. The anti-air fire seemed to have temporarily exhausted itself. One of the tanks was on fire. He pulled up into the darkness away from the Iraqi positions, quickly scanning his instruments. His heart pounded so fast it sounded like a downpour on a tin roof.

At spec. Controls good. Steady climb.

He’d made it. And hell, he even had a good twenty minutes of fuel to spare.

He was one lucky SOB. A good pilot, maybe even great— but luckier than anyone had a right to be.

Doberman relaxed a little, shoulders sagging ever so slightly as he leaned backwards against the Hog’s ejector seat. His legs were cramping; he rocked his knees toward each other gently.

“Devil One, this is Bro leader,” said the leader of the F-16 two-ship. “Request you stand off while we attack.”

“If you can find something standing down there to hit,” Doberman told the late-arrivers, “be my guest.”

CHAPTER 41

Dixon was pinned there, behind the bodies, by a fury of machine-gun and heavy-weapons fire. The air boiled with explosions and metal and heat. Flames flew in every direction and he had to hunker into the ground, barely aware of anything more than a foot away. He couldn’t even get up to retrieve his AK-47, even though it lay on the side of the hill only a yard or two away. Every time he rose or crawled or leaned in its direction, the ground exploded with bullets.

He wasn’t sure how long he stayed there, or why the Iraqis firing at him didn’t just charge and get it over with. The machine-gun seemed to be shooting from a good way off, though in the dark he couldn’t really tell. Shells from a tank or artillery piece peppered the top hill, most landing well behind him; even so, they threw up fierce amounts of dirt and grit.

Dixon’s lips pressed into the ground, waiting for something to happen. Images crowded at the corners of his brain, ghosts trying to haunt him— his mother, the first man he had killed at close range, the Iraqi woman caught in the crossfire below, the baby. He sat in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean; the ghosts clawed the sides from the icy water, reaching for him, crying to be saved. But he knew that if he let one into the boat, if he even reached for one, it would be the end; Dixon himself would sink, swamped by their pain, dragged to his own death. He resisted; he closed his eyes against the tracers and the smoke and the shrapnel and the metal and the gunpowder and the death. He told himself that the Iraqis had killed the woman and her child, not him. He pushed his body close to the dead soldiers, protected by their freshly wasted bones. He slipped his sleeve over his mouth, trying to breathe the last air unpolluted by the hot winds of death that flowed over the battlefield.

One of the bodies before him began to move. It sprung up, laughing in his face, leering over him.

He fought it back down, forcing his eyes to see and his brain to know that the man was truly dead.

The body collapsed as the foot of the hill exploded with a tumultuous hiss. The red flare of flames shot up toward the sky.

Dixon’s body burned with the heat, though the fire was far away. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He got to his knees, looming over the dead men, making himself an easy target, not caring that he would soon be dead.

And then he heard a sound in the distance, a low, familiar whump— the exact sound a Blackhawk helicopter made as it flew. He heard it over everything, the explosions, the curses, the wails of wounded men. He heard it and knew it was coming toward him.

He didn’t know if the Iraqis were still firing or not. He didn’t know if he was pursued by ghosts or bullets or bombs or corpses or curses. He knew only that he was on his feet and he was running, pushing toward the growing but still distant whomp of the helicopter, a heavy, continuous thud that drummed him full of hope.

CHAPTER 42

By the time Wong reached the roadway, the four Delta troopers had set up the Satcom and were talking to the Blackhawk helicopter detailed to pick them up. The helo— technically an Air Force Special Operations MH-60G Pave Hawk, call sign Dark Snake— had located them with the aid of its FLIR imager and had a calculated ETA under forty-five seconds. The troopers could hear it but not see it; the southwest horizon was now a dark blur. Two F-16s were about to make a run on the Scuds.

“I suggest we request that the F-16s hold off their bombing run until we have egressed,” Wong told Golden. “And in any event, it would be prudent to don our chemical gear.”

Golden tapped the com specialist indicating that he ought to follow the captain’s suggestions. The rest of the men silently reached to their rucksacks, pulling out the moon gear.

Wong had lost his rucksack back on the hill, and thus had no NBC suit to put on. Instead, he pulled out the papers he’d taken from the Iraqi, examining them with the aid of a small penlight he borrowed from Golden.

One of the folded sheets contained two photos, both fairly battered. In one, an older Iraqi woman waved hesitantly. In the second, a younger version of the dead captain waved in front of a stairway to the Chicago El. The paper had some writing on it in Arabic; it was faded and difficult to read, but Wong guessed it was a personal letter or will of some type.

The other papers were two small sheets from a notebook. These had numbers as well as letters on them, instructions or map coordinates. There wasn’t time to study them before the ground started whipping with grit thrown up by the helicopter’s whirlies.

“Incoming!” shouted someone as the team began scrambling for the Pave Hawk.

A shell exploded at least fifty yards short of the highway. Tossed by either a mortar or the light armored vehicle that had harassed them back at the hill, it proved more inspiration than nemesis. The team bolted for the helicopter as one; Wong caught up and leaped through the wide open door of the helo, colliding with the gunner as the helicopter pitched away. In nearly the same instant the F-16s launched their attack, pickling their 2,000-ton Mk-84 iron bombs in an impressive send-off.

Wong rolled to his back and sat up, shaking his head as the helicopter’s pilot slid into Warp drive for home.

“What’s wrong, Captain?” Golden asked. For the first time since they had met, the sergeant seemed actually concerned and almost friendly.

Obviously an aberration, thought Wong.

“The aircraft tasked to strike the S1-B or so-called Scud missiles were obviously early model F-16 without precision instruments,” Wong informed him. “Perhaps not as inappropriate as A-10A Thunderbolt IIs, but a bad match nonetheless. We can see evidence of this in the fact that they resorted to dropping Mk-84 bombs, which naturally will result in a tonnage to devastation ratio frighteningly close to that experienced in World War II.”

“What are you saying?”

“A pair of missiles at the lower, less expensive end of the Paveway series, or perhaps even the AGM-65s used by our friends in the Thunderbolt IIs, would have been the weapon of choice. Unless, of course, one belongs to the accounting branch.”

“You think they missed?”

Wong chortled. “Hardly. We saw clear evidence presented by the numerous secondary explosions.”

“So what’s the big deal?”

Wong reached into his pocket for the Iraqi’s notes without answering. People either understood efficiency or they didn’t; there was no use explaining it.

Modified for covert and special operations, the MH-60G Pave Hawk began life at Sikorsky as a plain-Jane UH-60 Blackhawk, the muscular successor to the UH-1 Huey, arguably the most successful military utility helicopter of all time. Powered by a pair of General Electric T700-GE-401 turbo shaft engines that were rated for 180 knots cruising speed, stock Blackhawks had a range of nearly 375 miles. All Pave Hawks, however, were rigged for extra internal fuel; this particular bird also carried two large 117-gallon tanks off her side, increasing not only her range but her ability to linger in the war zone. A long airborne refueling probe stuck out from her nose, making the craft look something like a medieval knight and horse rushing to battle. Mounted on each door was a .50 inch machine-gun. Pintle mounts for 7.62 mm Miniguns were set on the sliding forward cabin windows, though at the moment the posts weren’t manned. The chopper’s equipment set included FLIR or forward-looking infrared, ground mapping and weather avoidance radar, advanced INS and global positioning, and com gear. While similar to the gear in the larger Pave Lows, the avionics set was not quite as advanced or powerful, though the difference would hardly be noticeable on most missions, including this Injun-country extraction. The men manning the craft were hand-picked veterans, trained for a range of missions from rescue to covert action. Painted in a brown chocolate chip scheme somewhat similar to the troopers’ camo fatigues, the Blackhawk bore three white bands around the fuselage behind the cabin, a recognition code for coalition forces.

Wong’s Arabic was rusty and the captain’s handwriting poor. Jostled in the tight cabin, he stared at the scribbles for more than two or three minutes before finally realizing that they were in code. Wong looked up suddenly, realizing that Golden was staring over his shoulder.

“What do you have?” asked the sergeant.

“The first sheet contains a set of coordinates which are useless without the map they refer to,” said Wong. “But the second has hand-copied instructions, I believe. Can you decipher them?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.” Wong took the paper back without asking why everyone thought he was always playing the comedian. “Incidentally, your diversion proved useful, as it sent most of the Iraqi force away at an opportune time. How precisely did you acquire the AK-47?”

“What AK-47?”

“You did not fire near the northern base of the hill?”

“The north side? Hell no. We were in the village. We came back up the east slope. I didn’t even know you’d been captured until the shooting started. You saved us, not the other way around.”

“You were never on the northwestern side of the hill? Or on the ground there?”

Wong asked the question, though by now he realized that was impossible. He reconsidered the battle, sorting it into its different components.

Wong rose slowly, grabbing one of the long belts at the side of the bird’s cabin to steady himself as he passed forward. The helicopter’s pilots sat at a pair of well-equipped consoles, separated by a wide console with more dials, buttons, and indicators than the average nuclear power plant.

“Excuse me,” said Wong, bending across the central console. “I’d like to speak to the commander.”

“Yo,” said the pilot on the right.

“I will require immediate transportation to King Fahd Royal Airbase,” said Wong.

“Uh, Captain, first of all, don’t put your hand up there, all right? You’re too damn close to the throttle.”

Wong removed his hand without noting that it had been nowhere near the control in question.

“Thank you,” said the pilot. “Now as for King Fahd— that’s where we’re headed, assuming we cross ten million miles of SAMs, anti-air guns, hostile troop positions and rattlesnakes. I would appreciate it if you took a seat.”

“Very good,” said Wong. “Let me assure you that there are no known species of rattlesnakes in Iraqi, or in Saudi Arabia for that matter. Indeed, they are a New World species exclusively.”

“Ha, ha,” said the pilot. “Very funny.”

At a loss to understand why, Wong merely shrugged and went to the back.

CHAPTER 43

Doberman hunched to the side of the cockpit, leaning over the throttle console as he tried to get a good view of the highway. Four British Tornadoes had been detailed by the AWACS controller to mop up. Doberman had been asked to play impromptu spotter for them, mapping out the site. The F-16s, meanwhile, were swinging south to shadow the Pave Hawk in case it got into trouble.

There were three or four good-sized fires going where the Vipers had dropped their bombs on the highway. Red and yellow mixed with a black smoke so dark and inky it stood out in the heavy twilight. Doberman leaned the Hog gently on her wing, fixing his eyes on the largest and nearest fire. It seemed to be a fuel truck, not a missile, though from six thousand feet even in the daylight it would not be easy to tell. A second hulk further along seemed definitely to be a missile; only the tractor cab was burning. He continued south, spotting three medium-sized shadows near where he’d hit the erector. They looked like the most likely targets, though he wasn’t sure what they were.

He banked northwards, making sure the SA-9 sites were smashed. The ground looked flat— no flames, no smoke, nothing. The Vipers had reported a hit on the remaining launcher and they looked to be correct— if there had been a live SAM launcher down there, Doberman would be swinging from a parachute.

“Devil One, hay-low Yank, this is Tory Leader. We are five klicks south of you and request target guidance.”

“Yeah, One to Tory, hang tight,” he told the British pilot, who was under thirty seconds away. “I got three trucks near the erector. Hang tight, I’m coming back low and slow to eyeball this mess.”

Doberman lined up his weary Hog for one more walk through. He pushed his nose toward the ground, coming over the highway toward the smashed tanks and hill in a straight-at-the-road diving, dropping his altitude below two thousand feet. There was an armored vehicle of some sort, smaller than a tank, at the corner of the hill beyond the tanks he’d unzipped. He stayed with the road over the village, no longer drawing anti-aircraft fire. The idiots had shot themselves dry.

Doberman felt his heart beat picking up as he nosed closer to the road, down at a thousand feet now. It was low for a plane flying in the dark without ground terrain radar, even though he felt he knew the area pretty well. He arced toward the burning fuel truck, its flames flickering toward his hull. Two long cylinders lay in the dirt about a hundred yards away. One was definitely smashed — it looked like a broken crayon stomped into a carpet.

He couldn’t be sure about the other. He steadied the plane, riding out to the erector south of the highway. One of the shadows he’d seen was clearly a tent; the other two were small panel vans.

Not much for the Tornadoes to hit, but that was their business. He gave Tory Leader a quick rundown, offering to mop up himself with his cannon while they went on to another target.

“Thanks Yank, but we’ll stay with this tea party all the same,” said the British pilot cheerfully. “Our primary was scratched which was why we were sent here originally. And I’ve just received word that our secondary target has been hit out as well. You Americans are putting on quite the show. Hogging all the glory, eh?”

The Englishman meant it as a joke and even something of a compliment, but it struck Doberman the wrong way. He punched the mike button, intending to snarl that nobody here was doing it for the goddamn glory. Nobody. He wanted to scream that he’d lost a squadron mate today, a good kid, to this bullshit, and worried that he’d lose more.

He didn’t say it, though. For one of the few times in his life, Doberman controlled his temper and gave only a brief acknowledgment. Then he pumped the throttle and gave himself stick, setting course for the long and hazardous trip home.

CHAPTER 44

Dixon heard the helicopter’s engines whirl into high gear. He pushed himself to run faster, conscious now that his salvation was within reach. He ran and he ran, long legs striding, lungs wrenching against his ribs, eyes scratching the dark night to make out the helo. Finally he saw it, out ahead across the road, its dark hull stuttering, the rotor blades whirling. It seemed like a mirage.

It wasn’t. It was real and less than a half-mile away. He could feel the ground pounding with the heavy twin motors. He ran and he ran, forgetting his wounds and his hunger, his thirst and his fear, forgetting most of all his conscience and the ghosts.

And then he realized that the helicopter was moving, speeding away; already it was growing slower, already it was too far to stop. He ran another few feet and launched himself, arms grabbing the empty air in despair, two hundred yards away from being saved.

CHAPTER 45

Sergeant Rosen strained against the seat restraints in the AH-6 Little Bird, watching the narrow fringe of reddish light at the horizon sift into blackness. The desert before her lay empty, its vastness turned from idea to fact. Something in the human imagination hated the void, made it feel cold; Rosen braced herself against the frame of the small helicopter and stared. She had seen a great deal in her life: raised by her grandparents and aunt in a rough neighborhood; working her way through all kinds of crap growing up and then in the military. But she had not understood the fierceness at the edge of the horizon until the war. She had not understood that every human soul had a hollow place inside, a pocket where it could go to survive.

A strong gust of wind smacked against the helo’s bubble nose, whistling over the Allison turbo shaft and its main rotor. Whipping over the desert at almost a hundred and fifty miles an hour, the crammed chopper drew a straight line toward its rendezvous, skids less than six feet from the sand. It was their third and next-to-last trip. Only a half-dozen troopers and their gear were left at Fort Apache now.

The Little Bird had first undergone trials as the Army Defender light helicopter in 1963; christened the OH-6A Cayuse, the chopper saw extensive duty in Vietnam as a support and scout craft. The first production helicopter in the U.S. to use a gas turbine engine, the OH-6 was fast and maneuverable. It could sport a variety of weapons, starting with the smallish but popular 7.62mm minigun and progressing right up to TOW missiles. The versatile design had been enhanced several times after its introduction, proving more versatile than craft twice as costly.

Rosen admired the simplicity of design. Despite the high-tech cockpit with its fancy night-gear and radar, the Spec Ops AH-6G melded function with design without excess. It was like a stripped ’63 Chevy Nova, all engine and drivetrain, no BS like leather or climate control. You gunned it and you knew what you had.

“Sixty seconds to Sandlot,” announced Fernandez, the pilot. He turned his head slightly in Rosen’s direction; he’d donned night-vision goggles before taking off and looked more cyborg than human. Rosen turned back and looked over her shoulder at the three Delta troopers crowded into the back of the tiny helo; they all had heard and gave slight nods.

She couldn’t see the big PAVE LOW they were meeting until Fernandez whipped the tail around to pull the craft to a landing. The pilot of the big bird had found a shallow depression to sit in, waiting there patiently as the two AH-6s ferried men and supplies from the clandestine fort roughly forty miles away. The troopers in the back jumped from the Little Bird even as it settled in near the big helicopter, no doubt glad to stretch their legs after the knee-crunching shuttle. They were the Pave Low’s last passengers; the Little Birds would return and top off by themselves from the tanks the Pave Low had brought north for them. Then they’d zigzag across the border on their own.

“Okay,” Rosen shouted to Fernandez as the others got out. “Let me check the wires again.” The jury-rigged wire harness had slipped a bit on the last flight and she worried it would pull loose in mid-air, not a good thing.

“You want the rotor off?” the pilot asked her.

“Don’t get nervous,” she told him, grabbing her flashlight and screwdriver. The tech sergeant jumped from her seat and ran around the front of the helo, tucking her head down though with her short frame she had plenty of clearance. The repaired wire harness sat in the housing next to the AN/ALQ-144A omnidirectional infrared jammer, which meant there was less than a foot— a lot less than a foot— of clearance between the cover and the whirling rotor blades. But Rosen wasn’t attempting an overhaul. All she had to do was fight the damn tornado of wind and shine the flashlight in the right place.

She threw herself against the side of Little Bird, toeing the rocket tube. Grabbing the rear radio fin with her right hand, she worked the flashlight with her left as she inched upward. She slid the screwdriver out along the flashlight with her thumb, then poked forward to nudge the metal back — she’d rigged the access panel for an easy view after the first flight, when her check cost them nearly fifteen minutes.

She leaned in to look. The thick electrical tape she’d wound around the harness to hold it was still solid. She craned her neck just to check the front of the assembly when she felt her legs shifting out from under her. The Little Bird began to rise and move backwards. She lost her grip and started to slide in the rush of wind. Her instinct was to hold the flashlight and the screwdriver, but something inside made her let go. She found herself falling, and in that moment her eyes went hard and her hands turned to claws. She grabbed for the rear door handle, kept falling. For a second she felt herself getting chewed up by the rear rotor, sliced and diced into dog food. Her soul fell into its secret niche; she fought to remove it, not ready for salvation, or at least not death. Rosen managed to kick her leg into the helo’s body, then rolled her torso around to grab onto the rocket launcher tube, landing half in and half out of the craft. She managed to push herself into the back of the helicopter.

Fernandez’s horrified face loomed over hers.

“Okay,” she shouted, getting up. “Okay, okay. Go. Go.”

“Are you all right?”

“Go! Go!”

He waited until she had strapped herself in before pulling ahead.

The shadow of the Pave Low in the distance told her what happened— the draft from its massive whirly nearly knocked the Little Bird over.

“I’m sorry,” Fernandez shouted back to her. “Christ, I’m sorry.”

“No problem,” she said. “Next time I’ll wear my magnetic boots.”

CHAPTER 46

Major Horace “Hack” Preston scanned the F-15’s instrument panel, moving quickly through the dials and indicators on the Eagle’s high-tech dashboard. The large screen at the top right was clean— no enemy radars were active, at least not at the moment. He had plenty of fuel for the two more turns they planned before going home; the rest of his instruments declared the F-15C in showroom shape. Preston turned his gaze back to the HUD, which was projecting its white lines, letters, and numbers in front of a steadily darkening sky.

Their tour of Iraq had been extended due to some last-minute tasking snafus. Hack had welcomed the double shift, hoping it would give him a chance to redeem himself for the botched chance earlier in the day. But now he was just tired. Piranha One and Two were due to be relieved in less than fifteen minutes; he’d go home eagerly and very possibly fall asleep before the debriefing ended.

He hadn’t necessarily screwed up the MiG shot. On the contrary— he’d followed procedure to the iota, hesitating only because of the friendlies in the vicinity. He’d locked and launched within the Sparrow’s optimum target range, then jinked his plane and launched countermeasures. Everything had been precisely by the book.

But it nagged at him. He should have had nailed the damn thing. Anything less was failure.

He acknowledged as his wingmate checked in with two more radar contacts. They ID’d the planes as F-111s en route to Baghdad.

“All quiet on the Western Front,” added Johnny.

“Affirmative,” he told his wingmate, expecting that the formal tone would discourage him from chitchat.

It did. The two Eagles continued their silent patrol of the skies, trekking along their racetrack at a leisurely four hundred and fifty nautical miles an hour. Fuel flowed steadily through their thirsty engines. The video screens and dashboard lights filled the cockpit with a soft glow that faded from red to green to yellow. Hack worked methodically, fighting off fatigue, struggling to keep his focus as they completed their next-to-last circuit and headed north for one last run.

Somewhere far below, triple-A flared toward the heavens in a steady, thick stream of tracers. The gunfire was so furious that the line looked unbroken— a fairly sobering thought, given that typically only one in four of the rounds fired would be a sparkler.

“Coming to our turn in zero-one minutes,” Hack told his wingmate. They were in tactical separation, two miles abreast, with the wingman stacked above him about a thousand feet. The formation allowed each man to check the other’s “six” or rear, and provided clearly defined hunting spheres for their missiles. Offsetting each other’s altitude made it more difficult for an on-coming fighter pilot to spot both planes with one sweep of his eyes.

But the abreast formation did make turns a bit more difficult, especially in the dark; they had to be closely coordinated or the formation would be broken. The planes moved like parts in an old-fashioned clock. Hack called the turn and they went at it textbook style, Two pulling three gs as it started left, One easing around with a tight turn and roll-out that picked up his wingmate precisely abeam, two miles apart, still stacked but heading south.

Twenty-five thousand feet, four hundred and sixty nautical miles an hour. F-111s passing ahead of them, twenty miles.

Hack got another contact below eight thousand feet about fifty miles to the east heading west. He tickled the identifier.

A-10A. The Warthogs were all over the place today.

“What do you figure that A-10 is doing this far north?” Hack asked his wingmate.

“Got me,” said Johnny. “Maybe he’s lost.”

Hack debated asking the AWACS if it really was an A-10. Before he could decide, his radar kicked out three more low-level contacts, all moving relatively slow further southwest, most likely helos. He began to query them when the AWACS broke in with an alert.

“Two boogies coming off the deck,” screeched the controller. “No three, four— damn, they’re sending the whole air force after you.”

CHAPTER 47

Rosen, peering over Fernandez’s shoulder, had just spotted Fort Apache in the distance when the AWACS called out the MiG warning. She sat back in the seat, stretching the headset cord to the max as the pilot leaned over and punched the controls for the radio.

“We’ll monitor the interceptors,” Fernandez explained. “We don’t want them to see us at Apache but we have to make the pickup no matter what. We don’t have enough fuel to screw around. If we stay low they may miss us.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. They had to get their guys out.

“There’s our other Little Bird— you see it? He’s just leaving the strip.”

Fernandez needed both hands to control the helicopter, so he merely leaned his head forward. Rosen made out a low shadow ahead, darting across the left quarter of the windscreen. It was Apache Air One, the other Little Bird. There would now be only two men left at the Fort— Captain Hawkins and a gunner.

One of the fighter pilots squawked something about different targets and called a bearing number. It sounded to Rosen as if the Eagles were having difficulty locating the enemy planes, but she had never heard live air combat before. The voices had a clipped excitement to them, a high-pitch that came through the static.

Fort Apache with its fatally short runway lay a few hundred yards ahead in the dust. Fernandez slowed the helicopter as he crossed over the concrete, looking to land near the ruins that had served as the base’s command post.

Rosen thought of Lieutenant Dixon as she whipped off the com set and threw it into the front of the helo. His broken body lay somewhere to the north, unburied for all she knew, abandoned. She felt a cold blast of air from the open door, pulled her arms around her and walled off the part of her mind where his memory lived, sealing it away permanently as a dangerous keepsake.

Parallel to the ruins, Fernandez tilted the back end of the craft up to spin around. Suddenly the control panel went dark and the AH-6 slammed against the ground.

“Shit!” said Fernandez, slamming his hand on the top of the panel as if the electrical short were there.

“It’s the harness, it’s the harness,” yelled Rosen, jumping out of the craft. She pulled herself up to examine the panel before realizing she had left her flashlight on the ground back at Sand Box when she’d slipped. She had to lean back and get Fernandez’s light.

But her jury-rigged harness had held. What the hell?

It was difficult to see beyond the wires. She began to slide her hands along the harness but found them blocked by a jagged piece of metal. The metal moved when she moved her hand— it was part of the infrared jammer, which had come loose from the back of the motor assembly cover.

Not good.

Rosen slid her fingers around, gingerly touching the unit. The rotors were still revolving over her head; it was hard to shine the light and hold on at the same time. She used her fingers to feel for the problem. They slid across wires and a narrow tube and metal. Finally, her pinkie slipped into an empty hole. Her forefinger found another and then a third.

“Turn everything off!” she yelped. “Off! Off!”

“It’s off! It’s dead! It’s dead!” Fernandez yelled back.

Rosen draped herself across the topside of the helo, craned between the rotor blades. Exactly one bolt, no thicker than a Bic pen, held the entire AN/ALQ-144A and its ceramic radiator in place. One of its flanges had severed several wires as the helicopter tipped to land.

That was lucky. Had it flown off into the rotors, they would have gone straight down as fast as gravity could take them.

Rosen slipped down to the side of the helicopter and held the wire harness assembly aside. She pushed the jammer housing away about six inches before the bolt caught tight and refused to budge.

“Fuck you, Saddam!” she screamed, throwing her weight and fury headlong at the assembly, pushing it toward the side. The bolt hung on stubbornly, then sprang loose, sending her rolling head first across the cement. Parts of the ALQ-144 spewed around her as she fell.

Oblivious to what was happening, Hawkins and the other Delta trooper had been trotting nonchalantly toward the helicopter from a sandbagged position north of the landing strip, seemingly reluctant to leave. They saw Rosen fall and ran to her, yanking her up so fast that the blood that wasn’t pouring from her scraped-up face rushed to her feet.

“Into the helicopter,” she said, trying to shake them off. “Come on, come on. There are a bunch of Iraqi airplanes headed this way. We got to get out of here.”

“Are you okay, Sergeant?” Hawkins asked.

“No,” she said, grabbing the flashlight from the ground. She pulled the roll of black electrical tape from her pocket as she threw herself back onto the helicopter. The wires were all color-coded but she had no play; she had to yank the tape off her harness to get some. She pulled at the tape and then twisted the pairs together as quickly as she could, hoping her tape would hold.

She leaned down and yelled for Fernandez to see if he had power.

He did.

She had to add more tape to the front of the wire strands to make sure they’d stay put, now that they were exposed. The wind from the rotors threw sand into her eyes, but Rosen was operating in another universe now, one beyond the throb in her head and the screaming fire of her battered face. She punched the remaining shards of the jammer assembly base with her fist, bending or clearing away everything she could. Then she found a plastic wire clip flopping loose and managed to secure it against an exposed pin near the wires. Not pretty, certainly not permanent, but good enough.

“Go! Go! Go!” she yelped, flinging herself back into the back cabin feet first. “Why the hell aren’t you going!”

“We are going,” shouted Fernandez, emphasizing his point by slamming the helo forward, full-throttle.

CHAPTER 48

Doberman acknowledged the AWACS snap vector with a grumble, putting the Hog into the directed turn at nearly a right angle.

Not that he resented the E-3 Sentry and its powerful airborne radar. What really irked him was the fact that he had to climb to fifteen thousand feet, per standing orders. Granted, the altitude kept him safe from the triple-A nasties, but it was a piss-poor place to be with a flock of MiGs coming for you. Besides, the Hog didn’t like flying this high, and neither did he.

Fifty feet above ground level, dark be damned. That was where he belonged.

Doberman got his Hog on the new course east, then dialed into the intercept, listening as the interceptors began to break down the approaching enemy flight. Unlike most Iraqi scrambles, this one seemed intent on actually doing something— the bandits, tentatively identified now as MiG-29s, weren’t running away.

Doberman tacked their courses on the blackboard of his mind. They were north and west of him, heading in the general direction of Fort Apache.

His RWR screamed something, and the AWACS controller yelped another warning. A ground-control radar for a high altitude SA-2 had turned itself on directly ahead on the AWACS directed course.

Doberman cursed and threw his plane into a fresh maneuver, beaming the radar by temporarily heading north. The radar went off as quickly as it had come on. He judged that he was already outside the range of the missiles, but there was no sense taking chances; he took the plane three miles north before pulling around to the southwest.

As he did, the AWACS announced it had discovered a MiG-21 Fishbed flying under cover of the larger MiG-29s. The plotted course had it headed straight for him, and now the controller rattled Doberman’s helmet with a warning that it was juicing its afterburners.

That was the last straw. He kicked the Hog over into a full dive, gunning down to where the air was thick and the ground effects heavy. If the Iraqi kept coming, good. Doberman had snapped his last vector tonight.

Let the bastard come and get him. They’d slug it out, mud fighter to mud fighter— if the Iraqi had the balls to take on a Hog.

CHAPTER 49

This time, Hack wasn’t going to miss. He twisted his Eagle northward for the intercept, ignoring the pinch and pull of gravity as he snapped onto the vector supplied by the AWACS. His radar screen laid out the bandits as if peering down from above. The hostile MiGs were at the very top, triangles with pointers coming off their noses to show their headings. The screen showed friendlies as circles with similar pointers, along with way markers for reference.

The radio exploded with a cacophony of calls and commands, a chaotic wail that had confused him during the earlier encounter. But this time Hack was prepared. He and his wingman keyed into a clear frequency they had surveyed earlier.

“Two bandits, ten o’clock, your zone,” said Johnny, his voice crisp.

“Out of range. Two more coming behind them,” Hack said.

“Something low.”

There were now six triangles very close together on the screen. Two veered to the left and temporarily disappeared, possibly obscured by the reflected ground clutter. The other four Iraqi planes altered course, vectoring toward the flight of F-111s.

Hack rechecked the IDs, making sure he had the unfriendlies.

No answer. The lead contact was thirty miles away.

“First two are mine,” he told Johnny. The radar and its weapons control computer had already locked them up. They were tagged on the HUD; he could launch and take them out at will. “You got the others?”

“Negative, negative. I’m having some trouble here.”

“Johnny?”

“Uh, okay, I have it. I— shit! I’m spiked.”

The lead MiG had just turned its radar on his wingmate. Time to pull the trigger.

“Fox One, Fox One! I’m on number two. Firing. Fox One!”

Hack yelled so loud his wingmate probably could have heard him without a radio. He didn’t bother jinking or trying to beam the enemy radars— if his wingmate couldn’t target the other interceptors, he was going to have to close and take them out with his Sidewinders.

The four enemy planes— still out of visual range, but closing quickly— began moving wildly on his radar screen. One of the missiles seemed to hit the lead plane, he thought— but now everything was moving so quickly, Hack couldn’t afford to divide his attention long enough to make sure he’d gotten the kill. Something beamed him dead ahead. He thumbed into auto-guns mode, then realized he’d dropped to sixteen thousand feet and was still pointing downward. He began to pull back on the stick when a dark shape shot in front of him, less than a mile away.

His stomach flared as he waited for the glare of a missile or cannon tracer. He pushed the Eagle over on her wing, desperate to duck away. He got a warning, then a second warning— sounds and buzzes and lights. Once more his head was swimming with sweat, gravity, and panic.

Gravity pushed against his chest. Hack realized the shadow had been one of the F-111s, not a MiG. He cursed himself, rolled level, tried to raise his wingmate on the radio. The small circle representing Piranha Two floated across the HUD, but Hack had lost track of where he was.

Fear twinged at the corner of his stomach.

Not this time, he told himself. Clear your head. Do your best.

Something exploded about three hundred yards in front of his right wing. Fire flew through the air.

The pipper had a triangle boxed at ten o’clock. He leaned on his trigger, getting off a quick shot but missing as the enemy wagged away. He saw the red circle growing oblong and started to follow, thumbing a Sidewinder on line. But he was too slow and had misjudged the enemy’s turn in the dark. For a second he was in deep shit— inside and ahead of the MiG, the worst place to be. But somehow, knowing exactly where he was cleared his head. Somehow, his stomach went hard and his eyes became focused. He gave the big Eagle more thrust than a Saturn V heading for the moon. The plane shot forward, twisting out of danger as he spit out chaff and flares.

And then it was over.

The cockpit went silent. The night became black. Hack heard his breath loud in his ears, saw that he was level at fifteen thousand feet.

Carefully, almost slowly, he got his bearings and did his instrument checks, pointing the nose of the Eagle southward.

“Piranha One, this is Two,” said Johnny. “I’m lost airman.”

“Yeah, okay, okay, okay.” The words slurred out of Hack’s mouth; he couldn’t stop them or change them into anything coherent. But that was all right— his head was clear, and he calmly found his wingmate only two miles to the northeast, though considerably higher than him. Johnny began turning. Hack continued his climb, heart steady and almost slow.

“I think I nailed one of those MiGs,” he told his wingman.

“I think you nailed two.”

“Yeah?” Hack started to ask whether he’d seen the explosions when he got a new contact on his radar. They were running south at four thousand feet, about two miles west of where the MiG had snuck in and almost unzipped him.

“We have a fresh contact, Piranha Two,” he said, changing course to catch it.

CHAPTER 50

The MiG-21 changed course twice as Doberman pitched downward, adjusting to his zigs with ominous zags of its own. Knowing he couldn’t lose the MiG’s Jay Bird radar until he was under 3,000 feet, Doberman poured on the gas, hurtling downward so fast he worried about tearing the plane’s wings off.

The MiG-21 was a rugged and quick interceptor, well-suited to aerial combat. It was fast, maneuverable, and small. While its avionics systems were not comparable to frontline fighters like the F-15 or even the F-16, it outclassed the A-10A as a dogfighter by miles. It was capable of carrying beyond-visual-range weapons and could even be fitted with infrared night vision equipment, advantages Doberman couldn’t hope to counter in a dogfight. His best bet was scrambling around in the ground clutter until the Iraqi lost interest or the Eagles chased him off.

As Doberman’s altitude dipped below 2,500 feet, he pulled the Hog into a tight turn north, slashing around in a twisting roll that pulled nearly five g’s, in theory high above the plane’s rated capacity. He began pushing the stick to level off before realizing the horizon bar showed him heading straight downward. The wings started yawing on him and he had a fight now; he was behind the plane, temporarily out of control, reacting to it instead of having it react to him. He got angry— he screamed at the plane to cut the bullshit. As gravity tore at his face and chest, he managed to steady the wings and back off on his speed, pulling out in something approaching a controlled glide. He leveled off at three hundred feet, a lot lower than he wanted to be. The MiG was still up there somewhere, but he didn’t have any indication of it on his gear. The sky above and ahead was a uniform gray. He twisted his neck back and forth, trying to make sure his six was clear as he got his nose pointed directly south.

Doberman felt a cold stream of sweat running down the side of his flight suit as he stared through his front windscreen. He put his hand on the throttle, pegging his speed at three hundred and fifty knots. He didn’t like not knowing where the enemy was. He tried hailing the AWACS but didn’t get a response.

The MiG might have passed by him already. In that case it would be turning around somewhere ahead.

Or not. He was still deep inside Iraq. He started working out his position with the help of his paper map when he saw a stubby building break the undulating ground ahead; he saw a long, straight line and realized he was heading over Fort Apache’s landing strip. His brain seemed to contract— he hadn’t realized he’d come this far east, let alone back this far north.

Doberman nudged his nose up, working to give himself a little more breathing room while staying in the ground clutter.

A sand dune moved to the right.

No, a plane.

He jumped back in his seat, his mind computing the scenario as his eyes and ears threw the flight data at it.

MiG, closing for a front-quarter cannon attack. Kill him head-on.

No, it wanted him to break; he’d close on Doberman and use his heat-seekers.

RWR. He was spiked.

No, nothing. But obviously it saw him. It was coming for him.

Turning was suicidal. But if Doberman didn’t break, the MiG would go around, use his superior speed to catch him.

Nail him as he came through. Snapshot by yanking into him.

A millisecond of opportunity.

Then what? Where would he be?

The MiG would come at him from the offset, angling, cheating so he could cut into a tight merge, slide into his victim’s tail no matter what he did.

The Hog could out-turn the MiG. The Iraqi wouldn’t expect that— the Fishbed could knife around anything else in the sky. If Doberman could brave the front-quarter attack, he could turn inside him, twist back down and away.

Even better— let him get on his back, but with his nose out, then turn inside quickly at the first moment, have him go past. A tangled rope.

Nail him with the Sidewinders on the Hog’s right wing.

Show the son of a bitch not to mess with Hogs.

Turn the damn things on. The seeker heads have to do some calisthenics to warm up— or rather cool down, so the head can pick up the SOB’s heat.

Where is my goddamn radar and the RWR and the AWACS and those stinking Eagles?

Hell, ask for AMRAAMs while you’re at it.

Doberman snorted, laughing at himself. He pushed the nose of his plane toward the approaching hulk, heart pounding, ready to take his shot.

Then he realized it wasn’t a MiG.

He nudged his stick back; he was coming at the tail end of a helicopter, closing so fast the helo seemed to be standing still.

An American bird, running dark— one of the Spec Ops AH-6s. He glanced at his kneepad for their radio frequency.

The RWR screamed that the MiG was closing from above for the kill.

CHAPTER 51

Sitting in the backseat of the helicopter, Rosen had a difficult time puzzling out the situation from what the others were saying. There were apparently two different sets of Iraqi planes nearby, possibly coming for them. One of the groups included at least two MiG-29s; these were being engaged by F-15s.

The other plane, probably a MiG-21, was somewhere right behind them. They’d be sitting ducks if the Iraqi interceptor found them.

There was also an A-10A around somewhere— Devil One, Captain Glenon. The Hog had descended rapidly to their north; it wasn’t clear whether it was trying to hide in the ground effects that confused radar or if it had been hit.

For years, Rosen had listened to accounts of dogfights that seemed like clear-cut maneuvers— two fighters approached each other, one saw the other first, missiles were launched, bad guys smashed. But the reality of an honest-to-God furball defied description. It was like running through a swirling pile of leaves with your eyes closed, trying to grab a dollar bill. Even the best sensors could only show you two dimensions of reality.

“MiG closing off our port side,” snapped the pilot. “Eight o’clock. He’s at five thousand feet, diving on us. If he hasn’t spotted us already he will in a second.”

Rosen took that to mean she ought to grab onto to something and hold tight.

CHAPTER 52

The contact was low, below a thousand feet. Another plane was approaching from the north and there was a helo or something else incredibly slow in front.

Nobody answered IDs. Hack guessed that the helo was a Coalition Spec Ops craft; they’d been briefed during preflight to watch for operations here. The two contacts going in its direction must be Iraqis trying to nail it.

Hack lost the lead aircraft momentarily. The second one, gaining, had been tentatively ID’d as a MiG by the AWACS.

The first plane popped back up on the screen, closing on the helicopter. Hack was still fifteen miles away, too far to launch the Sidewinders. He tickled the IDs again.

Nada.

RWR was clear. The enemy planes didn’t realize he was here.

Ten miles. If he’d had any more Sparrows left, the bastards would be dead.

Sidewinders would nail them, soon as he closed. AIM-9s were ready and waiting.

The lead plane was going to nail the helo any second. He was already in range.

Hack corrected as the planes began dancing wildly; he had to keep his target within a 45-degree aiming cone to ensure the kill.

Eight miles. Seven.

Nada.

Lead bandit’s going to nail the helo.

The second plane, the one ID’d as a MiG, had the stops out.

He couldn’t get them both in one swoop. Stay on the leader.

Five miles.

The first plane jinked suddenly, pushing out of the optimum firing cone. Hack moved his stick to follow, waited for the growl from the Sidewinder telling him he had a hot target. His radar coughed up an unidentified contact dead west, flying north very low. He started to run through his queries one more time, still waiting for the Sidewinder to lock.

As it did, the IFF in the lead bandit beamed back a signal to Hack’s Eagle.

The plane closing on the helicopter was an A-10.

Oh my God, Hack thought, jerking his finger away from the trigger. I almost nailed a good guy.

CHAPTER 53

The ancient ALQ-119 ECM pod on Doberman’s right wing cranked away, filling the airwaves with a cacophonous symphony of electronic confusion. Designed to drive the Iraqi MiG’s radar and every dog within a hundred miles nuts, the Westinghouse unit was a first-generation noise and deception jammer that had joined the service before Doberman had.

But either it was working or the Iraqi pilot was doing a very convincing impression of being blind, for the Fishbed streaked down nearly in front of him, seemingly unaware that Doberman was now right on his tail. Doberman didn’t even have to move his stick as the low growl sounded from the Sidewinder AIM-9L indicated it had acquired its target.

Something about the way the shape fluctuated in his windshield made Doberman hesitate; in the next second the MiG flashed downward and to the right. He lost his firing position; had to pull the Hog tight over his shoulder to get the front of the plane back onto its target. He saw the helo out of the corner of his eye but couldn’t find the MiG, sensed it had turned around him, trying for a shooting angle.

He was the quarry again.

Doberman worked the Hog tighter, climbing slightly, then pushing the nose back down, bucking the plane in mid-air and swirling around. He heard another growl but worried the Sidewinder had locked on the helicopter. It took only a millisecond to realize it hadn’t; by then he’d lost the shot again, the MiG cranking and wanking in a series of high-g turns that Doberman couldn’t keep up with. He pulled his wings level, eyes blurry. He tried focusing on the compass heading, unsure where the hell he’d spun himself around to, when a sudden shudder passed over the Hog. The MiG had cleared his right wing at less than ten feet.

It was going south. With nothing between it and the Fort Apache helicopter.

“Damn me,” he yelled.

This time he yanked the stick so hard the only thing that kept it tied into its boot was the massive smack of gravity that punched the plane in the face. There was a theory that the Hog couldn’t withstand anything higher than 3 gs, but no Hog driver had ever subscribed to that notion, and if Doberman had been able to talk, he would have sworn twenty gs grabbed him and his airplane as it changed direction.

Amazingly, the wings stayed on the aircraft. So did the engines, which had every right to flame out but kept spinning just the same. Doberman found the tail of the MiG disappearing into a mist of sand a quarter mile ahead. He’d almost pushed the button to fire the AIM-9s when he realized he wasn’t locked. He jiggled the Hog to the right, hoping somehow that realigning his nose would give him a better target. It didn’t; he saw something below him on the desert floor, a small lump— the helo had stopped.

He caught a glimpse of it, saw that it was intact, whirlies whirling. He got his eyes back to where they belonged, couldn’t find the MiG, realized he’d flown to barely twenty feet. If he didn’t start climbing soon he was going to become part of the landscape.

Doberman pulled back on the stick, easing upwards. He got to eight hundred feet when he realized where the MiG was.

He yanked the Hog’s left wing over just in time to avoid the rush of a close-quarter cannon over his canopy, but didn’t have enough altitude to chance more than a shallow roll before recovering. A fresh stream of cannon exploded in front of his canopy and he felt something nudge his wing, an angel tapping him to see if he was ready for heaven.

The MiG had hung with him somehow and was right on his back. The stream of its tracers jerked toward his canopy.

Then the front of his cockpit filled with a dark green shadow. Thunder and lightning roiled around him and the air reverberated with exploding brimstone.

“Hog Rule Number One!” shouted a familiar voice in his earphones. “Never leave home without your wingman!”

Captain Thomas “A-Bomb” O’Rourke had arrived.

CHAPTER 54

A-Bomb’s front-quarter attack was mostly flash— heads-on was a notoriously difficult way to shoot down an enemy, even when you could see what you were doing— but it had the desired effect. The MiG broke off, banking hard to A-Bomb’s left as they passed.

“I got him low,” A-Bomb told Doberman as he began pulling the Hog around so the MiG couldn’t get him from behind. “He’s west of us, west. Shit, I’ve lost him.”

A-Bomb had a real hunger for some Good & Plenty, but the little pellets of licorice had a nasty habit of sliding down your mouth in the middle of a high g turn. He decided to settle for a Tootsie Roll instead. He reached for his suit when instinct told him his six was hot. He shoved his Hog down and to the left, ducking a nasty round of cannon fire from the MiG’s GSh-23.

Okay, so the Iraqi pilot’s pretty good, A-Bomb thought as the Fishbed tried to hang with him on the turn. The MiG had to slow down to make the maneuver. A-Bomb tried taking advantage of his tighter radius by breaking away to the south and getting away clean. But the MiG pilot somehow managed to stay with him, crossing back as they yo-yoed through the night sky. A fresh round of shells sliced just over the Hog’s fuselage.

A-Bomb cranked hard again back to the right. If he could let the MiG go ahead he’d fire the Sidewinders up its tailpipe. But the Iraqi pilot had finally realized the Hog could turn inside him; he stayed back, letting A-Bomb cut his tight zigs and then using his bigger engine to catch up.

A-Bomb realized what the Iraqi was doing as a fresh set of tracers flared at an angle past his windshield. He bucked the Hog so low he’d have to pull the nose up to extend the landing gear, and tried a full circle. The MiG stayed right with him, occasionally winking its GSh in his direction.

With an afterburner, the Hog would have easily snapped away and been gone. But A-Bomb didn’t have the horses to outrun the Iraqi, or even to break the twisting yo-yo. He cut left, then right, and got some fresh tracers.

Only one thing to do — crank up the Boss and wait for Doberman to nail him.

Good thing he’d had the foresight to put on The River before setting sail north. This might take a while.

CHAPTER 55

All of thirty seconds had passed since A-Bomb had chased the MiG from his tail. To Doberman it felt like a month.

He broke left as the MiG broke right, clearing the Iraqi pilot and the swirling chaos that had wrapped itself around his head. Banking to the north, trying to sort the situation, he saw the dark shadow of the AH-6 picking itself up off the ground.

There were two F-15 Eagles somewhere above. Another four were rushing north. The Iraqi MiG was either extremely lucky or flying too low for them to get a good fix. A-Bomb, after his initial radio yahoo, had gone silent and, for the moment at least, disappeared. All Doberman could hear over the radio was a loud hushing roar— something like the sound of a freight train out of control.

Doberman felt his anxiety growing as he hunted for his wingman. Be just like A-Bomb to get nailed saving his butt.

A-Bomb? Nailed?

Yeah, right. Hostess would stop making cupcakes before that happened.

An oblong blue flame caught Doberman’s attention as he began pushing his Hog’s nose further south. He squeezed the throttle for its last ounce of thrust. Two dark specks twisted against the ground a mile and a half in front of him. Tracers lit the night. The second plane had a commanding position on the first plane’s tail, but the lead pilot refused to give in, somehow knowing exactly where his enemy was going to fire before he did. The planes swirled to the south.

No way in the world A-Bomb would have missed at that range. He must be the one in the lead.

Doberman felt disoriented. He pushed the stick right then slammed it left, dead-on the tail of the MiG, four miles behind it.

Something screamed— it was the AIM-9Ls, begging him to fire already.

He squeezed off, felt the swish, keyed his mike to sound the warning that the missile was away.

“Fox Two! Fox Two!”

Before he got the words out of his mouth, the MiG exploded.