Death Wish

CHAPTER 32

Colonel Knowlington pulled the survival vest over his flightsuit. Always in the past it had felt familiar, like an old jacket that had been around for years. But this morning it felt awkward and odd, heavier than it should, as if the pockets were filled with lead rather than a few survival necessities.

He double-checked his gear, moving quickly through the preflight ritual. He’d gotten bogged down with some extraneous maintenance details and was running late, very late; Antman was buttoned up in his Hog already, waiting.

The Colonel was still wrestling with his decision to lead the flight. He knew he was sober. He knew his fatigue and the last vestiges of his headache would clear after a breath or two of oxygen in the cockpit. He had several times the experience of anyone else he might tap to fly the mission; he could nail it with his eyes closed.

But should he go? Did he deserve to?

Wasn’t a question of deserving; it was a question of duty. There was no backup — he’d sent Dixon on to KKMC already to fill in for Hack. No one else in Devil Squadron could take this gig.

So it was his duty. That was something he could handle. He took his helmet, grabbed the board with the map and crib notes on the mission, and began walking toward the waiting Hog.

A certain élan, the British general had said.

Damn straight. Stealing a MiG out under Saddam’s nose. Impossible! Ridiculous!

So why had he gone along with it then?

Because he wanted to die? Because life wouldn’t be worth living if he wasn’t in the Air Force?

He couldn’t let that be the reason. The others — his men, his people, his boys — were putting their necks on the line. They weren’t doing that for some foolish, empty romantic notion, a vain piss in the wind that would satisfy his mistaken vanity. They were doing it to give the Allies a usable edge in the war and maybe beyond.

How could you tell the difference? A lot of people thought that’s what Vietnam was — vain, not worth the lives that were lost. He’d never believe that, though he had grieved the friends he’d lost, the many, many people who’d died.

The war had had an effect; in his opinion if in no one else’s. It had held the Soviets and the Chinese down for a while, helped divert attention from other trouble spots, in a way prevented something much, much worse.

And the truth was, sometimes did you lose, sometimes you gave it a shot and that wasn’t good enough; you had to accept that and move on. This war was justified for many reasons — to calm the Middle East, to keep the balance of power, to keep oil flowing, to stop Saddam from getting the bomb. It was being run much more intelligently than Nam.

So where did this mission fit in? Two Brits who might or might not be there, a Russian plane that was interesting, granted, but already a known quantity, as Wong himself had admitted.

Wong. He thought it was worth it. And Wong would know. But then, he had a wild side to him beneath all his dispassionate talk about “mission coefficients” and “risk parameters.” He wasn’t a Pentagon desk jockey, as Knowlington had initially thought. Wong had been involved in dozens of infiltrations and covert actions over the past few years.

The colonel walked toward his aircraft, his mind still trying to sort itself out. Maybe he wasn’t up to it at all — he was experienced, yes, but he was also damned old. His reflexes and his eyes weren’t what they once were, back when he was Skull in Vietnam. His stomach wasn’t as tight, his hesitations were more pronounced.

Clyston stood now at the foot of the access ladder, a stogie in his fat fist.

To say good-bye for good?

“Ready for ya, Colonel,” said the Chief Master Sergeant.

“Let’s take the walk,” snapped Knowlington, already snapping back into his old personae Skull as he started his preflight inspection of the plane.

Fueled, armed with four AGM-65s and a pair of cluster-bombs, the Hog seethed on the apron, anxious to get going. The crew members stood a respectful distance away, craning their necks to see as the pilot — their pilot — checked the plane — their plane.

Even though he was on a tight schedule, even though he knew an aircraft that Clyston was responsible for was an airplane so perfect it could possibly fly itself, Lieutenant Colonel Michael “Skull” Knowlington looked the aircraft over carefully and slowly. To do anything else would have seemed disrespectful to his crew. He inspected the control surfaces as if seeing them for the first time. He looked into each engine, eying every inch of metal. He ducked under the wings and even examined the tread on the tires. He left nothing to chance, performing the ritual as carefully as a priest at midnight mass in Rome. From left to right, from front to back to front, he moved solemnly, not merely checking his plane but absorbing it, driving it deep into his being.

Doubts and nostalgia vanished.

“Let’s kick butt,” he told Clyston, finishing.

“Don’t break my plane,” growled the old sergeant.

Skull chucked Clyston’s shoulder — a little gentler than usual maybe, but in the same spot and with the same emotion he had had more than twenty years before, standing beside a Thunderchief. He took a step up the ladder, then turned to give his people a well-done salute, a thank-you beyond words.

A lieutenant from the intelligence unit that shared some of Devil Squadron’s HQ area came running toward the plane.

“Colonel! Colonel! General’s returning you call,” shouted the man, nearly out of breath. “Said he’d hold.”

“Tell him you missed me,” Skull shouted, climbing into the cockpit.

CHAPTER 33

The rotor blades on the Huey bringing Dixon into KKMC couldn’t quite keep up with his heart. He leaned toward the rear door of the helicopter, wind and grit whipping against his face. The roof of the large mosque across from the main area of the base gleamed with reflected light, glowing in the darkness like a candle left for an exhausted pilgrim.

Dixon steadied himself as the chopper pitched toward its landing area. He pulled the bag with his flight gear and helmet toward him, then pushed through the door as the helicopter’s skids tipped down. He ran to keep his balance, adrenaline continuing to build. The smells overwhelmed him — jet fuel, diesel exhaust, burnt metal, his own sweat. Colors and dark shadows blurred around him, as he hunted for the vehicle that should be waiting to meet him.

“BJ! Yo, Dixon, here dude!”

Dixon turned abruptly, continuing on a dead run to a topless Humvee waiting near a building on his right. Though the chassis of the truck was familiar, it seemed to have been modified until it looked almost like a surfer’s vehicle.

“What I’m talkin’ about!” shouted the driver, a large man fully dressed in flight gear — A-Bomb O’Rourke, the one and only. “We’re late. Hop in. You can chow down on the way over.”

Dixon threw his gear into the Hummer and climbed aboard. It didn’t surprise him that A-Bomb had met him, nor was he shocked when offered a large and seemingly authentic McDonald’s bag of fries and a double-cheeseburger.

“My daily McDonald’s fix,” said A-Bomb, whipping the vehicle in the direction of the life support shop, “figured you’d be hungry.”

The food was warm — as incredible a feat, no doubt, as A-Bomb’s inexplicable ability to have one FedExed fresh to him each day no matter where he was. Dixon, who hadn’t realized he was hungry, started wolfing the fries.

“Sorry. All I got’s a Coke,” said A-Bomb, thumbing toward the back. “Was supposed to be a strawberry shake. Can’t count on the help these days.”

“Good to see you,” said Dixon between bites.

“What I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb. He whipped the wheel to the right; the Hummer rose off two wheels and then plumped back down. “Got some Sat pix, map for you,” added the captain.

“Pictures?” Normally Hog drivers did without elaborate target intelligence; most guys considered getting an exact coordinate for an IP, the initial point to start an attack run, to be a comprehensive mission plan. Rarely did they work with photos of what they were going to strike..

“I take care of my guys.” A-Bomb whipped the wheel to the right and then back to the left, dodging a fuel truck. “We cross the border, hook up with the colonel and Antman. Go north, blah-blah-blah. Only thing we worry about is an SA-2 that has some coverage near the southwestern tip of the base. We have to jog around that, which is a pain in the butt, but once we’re in, it’s a free ride. Not much to worry about at the target area. Right now it looks like they have two missile trucks there, SA-9s. I have ‘em marked out. I take that SA-9 on the right, splash some guns on the hills overlooking the field. You get the other launcher, that gun at the far western end. Helos come in. We blow up anything that fucking moves, blah-blah-blah. Routine.”

“Yup.”

“Weather’s improving. Shit-ass wind last night, but supposed to be calm, clear skies tonight. Picnic weather. It’s what I’m talking about.”

“Uh-huh.”

A-Bomb turned to look at Dixon. His voice changed, suddenly serious. “You up for this kid?”

“You sound like my high school baseball coach.”

“You up for this, kid?”

“I can nail it.”

O’Rourke didn’t say anything.

“I’m going to fucking nail it,” Dixon said, glancing forward. “Uh, there’s a truck coming.”

A-Bomb whipped the wheel hard, getting out of the way. His eyes remained on BJ. “Tough time up there. I heard about that little kid.”

“Yeah.” The word bleated from his throat, more a groan than an actual syllable with meaning.

“You got a problem, you let me know. No matter fucking what.”

Dixon nodded. “Let’s kick some fuckin’ butt, huh?”

“What I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb, mashing the gas pedal.

CHAPTER 34

By the time the British transport helicopter approached the small base near the Iraqi border where the Delta and SAS team was holed up, “Hack” Preston knew he was going to nail this mission. Colonel Knowlington and Wong had arranged for him to speak via satellite phone with two different Western experts about the MiG, who had confirmed his own impressions and filled him with good advice. The Fulcrum was a pilot’s plane, steady and predictable, faster than hell, and relatively uncomplicated. It was difficult if not impossible to get her to stall or to spin unintentionally. Takeoff and landing were faster than in most Western jets, but straightforward. Piece of cake.

Of course, they didn’t know the mission details, and only one of them had actually flown the plane. But that didn’t matter — Hack was doing it.

His main worry was starting the MiG off auxiliary power; he decided that if he could figure that out, he could get it into the air. The strip was very short, allegedly twelve hundred feet, which was more than four hundred less than the rated takeoff distance. But the MiG’s engines were powerful as hell and the airplane had been designed for STOL or short-takeoff-and-landing operations. Hack wouldn’t be carrying weapons, nor did he have to worry about having enough fuel for a round trip. Besides, the Iraqis wouldn’t have landed there without having a way to get off.

Once he was in the air, it’d be a piece of cake. He would climb to thirty thousand feet and fly along a prearranged course — nearly due south, with a turn at the border. A pair of F-14s would escort him, communicating with him over the UHF band. His only problem would be landing at KKMC — not technically difficult perhaps, but the first time landing an unfamiliar plane always got the adrenaline going. Still, it would be daylight, in perfect weather, with no traffic and a thousand cheerleaders.

Piece of cake.

Assuming they got the plane. The Brits had assigned forty more men to the assault team, along with a mechanic who had worked on a German MiG during a brief exchange program. But their time on the ground would be severely limited.

If the runway really was that short, maybe the Iraqis didn’t actually intend on flying the plane out. The tanker truck Wong had seen might turn out to be filled with water. The MiG might turn out to have no engines or worse, much worse, just be a wooden dummy.

No way. It was his.

Returning home with a full intelligence report would be fine. Everyone at CentCom would want to talk to him. After the war it would send him on a talking tour of the Pentagon, NATO, and probably Congress as well. But he wasn’t about to settle for that. He was nailing this baby, and he was going to be famous: Major Horace Gordon Preston, the man who stole Saddam’s MiG.

Colonel Preston, more likely.

General Preston, without doubt.

Hack hoisted the canvas duffel bag with his backup flight gear and jumped down from the British transport helicopter as it touched down. Breaking into a trot, he ran past a set of artillery pieces sandbagged near a bunker area. The night was quiet; it was like being on a movie set, not a base a grenade’s throw from the enemy.

“You’re out of your fucking mind if you think we’re getting that plane out of there in one piece,” said Hawkins, materializing from behind a pile of sandbags. They’d never met, but his voice — and attitude — were instantly recognizable. “The Iraqis aren’t going to stand back and let you take it.”

“Listen Captain. You do your job, I’ll do mine,” Hack told him. “And I’m a major, thank you.”

“That don’t mean jack up here,” said Hawkins.

By reputation as well as demeanor, Delta Force was the toughest, most daring unit in the entire U.S. military, if not the world. Hawkins pissed him off, but what did it say that he didn’t think this could be done?

That Hawkins was a wimp. Because Hack was doing it.

“If you think your guys can’t complete the mission, you should have said so,” Preston told him.

“Oh, we can do our job,” said Hawkins. His tone changed abruptly. “All right. Let me introduce you Major Gold. He’s English and he’s now in charge of the assault. Wong’s in with him.”

Hack followed past a stack of filled sandbags and a much larger pile of unfilled ones, walking down a wide ramp bulldozed out of the desert. Hawkins disappeared around a corner; Preston found himself in a small maze, working his way through a series of Z-turns in the dark. Finally he saw a pair of guards — British SAS men, who stood as motionless as the sandbags lining the walls.

Just beyond them was an open doorway, a hole in the earth filled with a faint red glow from the light within. Hack had to duck his head to enter; his neck muscles pulled taut, cramping with fatigue and cold.

“Major Preston, Major Gold,” said Hawkins. “You know Captain Wong.”

Gold and two lieutenants were standing over a map table a short distance away. Wong, arms crossed and face almost on the map, frowned at some of the sqiggle marks on the paper. Gold extended a thin, long hand to Preston, who shook it and tried to look relaxed while the rest of the staff and some NCOs were introduced. His neck muscles had gone completely spastic, and he could feel the strain in his vertebrae.

“You’ll be with my guys,” Hawkins told him. He jabbed his finger at a corner of the table where a diagram of the Iraqi base had been cut and pasted together from intelligence photos. A thick red marker had been used to outline buildings and other features of the base, which had been labeled “SPLASH” with capital letters and thick underline above the diagram.

“We come in here, right over the runway, turn across the apron, and take a run at the MiG hangar right behind two Apaches,” said Hawkins. “Depending on what we see, we come down as close to the plane as we can. My guys take the hangar, move around here, secure this end of the field. Second team is going across this way, behind the hangar, to cut off any approach from the highway. SAS teams should be keeping the Iraqis on the base busy. Burns has a separate team on the tanker. They come at us this way, fuel if we can.”

The captain switched from the diagram of the base, running his hand across a large topo map where Splash was rendered to much smaller scale.

“We’ll fuel it,” interrupted Preston.

Hawkins ignored him. “If there’s too much resistance, we land here, beyond the approach to the runway, where we’ll be covered from these guns. At that point, you and Wong wait until we secure a path to the hangar.”

“If we land there,” said Wong, “in effect our portion of the mission will have been called off. The timing is severe. We should expect the Iraqis to send troops from Catin, which would be an additional risk.”

Hawkins didn’t contradict him. Catin was a built-up area about ten miles away. Symbols on the larger map indicated that the Iraqis had a battalion of troops and possibly helicopters based there.

“We can do it,” said Preston. “Piece of cake.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Gold. He had a singer’s voice, a rich baritone that vibrated even in the cave like bunker. “James, review the timetable, would you?”

One of the two lieutenants began running down the game plan for the assault, accenting the highlights with a flick of his hand, as if he were throwing confetti over the map. Splashdown would begin at precisely 0550, with an attack on the SA-2 site southwest of the attack area; the assault package was now so large that the planes would need to escape over the missile site’s coverage area. In any event, it was well past time to make sure that the enemy site was truly dead.

At the same time, two Devil Squadron Hogs, led by A-Bomb, would eliminate the most potent defenses at Splash itself; based on the latest intelligence, these had been expanded to include two short-range mobile missile units, more than likely SA-9s. A number of ZSU anti-aircraft weapons would also be targeted; any remaining would be the first priority for the wave of Apache gunships that would spearhead the assault at 0555. Defenses neutralized, the Apaches would cover the arriving ground troops, who would strike at the buildings where the prisoners might be at precisely 0600.

Four separate groups would launch the assault. One each was devoted to the possible prisoner buildings, with a third smaller team to be used to secure the highway leading to the base, preventing reinforcements from arriving. The fourth, made up of Delta and two different SAS squads for a total of twenty-four men, would concentrate on the hangar area and plane as Captain Hawkins had just described. Wong and Hack, along with a British airman with expertise on MiG systems, would fly in with Delta.

“You are to take the upmost precautions,” said the lieutenant. The major nodded over his shoulder; Hawkins merely frowned.

All told nearly one hundred and sixty men would be making the assault. Four Chinooks and a pair of American Spec Ops Blackhawk MH-60 helicopters, dubbed Pave Hawks, had been added to the original package. There were now a total of eight transport and six attack helicopters in the plan. Two MC-130s had been added to refuel the whirlybirds on a staggered schedule, some before the landing and some after. Besides the Hogs and Tornados, four F-16s would be available to provide ground support. Two F-15s were watching in case the MiG managed to get off before they arrived, and four Navy F-14 Tomcats had been shanghaied to escort the package — a development that struck Hack as more difficult to arrange than cooperation between the Americans and Brits.

“It’s a very tight schedule,” said the lieutenant, summing up. He sighed contentedly, as if he had just summed up the planned menu for an elaborate meal.

“We need to be aboard the helicopters now,” said Hawkins.

“Jolly good,” said the British major. “Good luck to all.”

Hack tried to surreptitiously unkink his neck as he followed Hawkins back out through the maze and down to the helicopter landing area. The Delta force soldiers stood around their gear, leaning against some sandbags thirty yards or so from the helicopters, most of them smoking cigarettes.

“Jerry, give Major Preston the 203 and show him how to use it,” Hawkins said.

“I’d rather have an M-16,” said Hack. “I’m not too bad with it.”

“A 203 is an M-16 with a grenade launcher,” Hawkins said, his voice so sarcastic that Hack wasn’t sure he was telling the truth until the weapon was thrust into his hands. The Delta sergeant told him he wouldn’t need the launcher, then demonstrated how to work it. It was a fairly straight-forward device mounted below the rifle barrel; it fired 40mm grenades which looked more like fat shotgun shells than what Preston imagined a grenade to be.

“This is what they look like,” the sergeant told Hack, showing but not giving him the grenades. “One shot at a time. Give ‘em loft, but not too much loft. You know what I’m saying?”

“Shit yeah,” said Hack.

The sergeant snorted. “Three hundred yards is the most they’ll carry. Aim at something a hundred and fifty away, look through the quadrant — you paying attention, Major?”

“I’m all ears, Sergeant.”

“You look through here, edge it up a little, just to be safe because you never done this, then push.” He hit the trigger. “Make sure you got it against your shoulder snug. It ain’t gonna knock you over, but you want to be more accurate than not. You use an M-16 before?”

“I have a marksman badge,” snapped Preston.

The sergeant smiled, as if to say, “Ain’t that sweet.”

“Excuse me, Major,” said Wong, “but I wanted to review our priorities before we start.”

“Flight gear is number one,” said Preston. “There must be some sort of life-support shop near the plane. I think the hangar, but maybe with the fuel truck or in that area. I want to talk with the men who…”

“Our priority is to survey the airplane,” Wong interrupted. “I am primarily interested in the avionics. And any missiles. You should concentrate on any upgrades to the control system. Our British sergeant will examine the fuel capacity and type, in an attempt to ascertain performance levels. The type is regularly de-tuned to extend maintenance intervals, which naturally affects its performance. After that, he will survey the flight control surfaces. The flaps…”

“I need the gear to fly,” Hack told him. “My connectors are kludges, and even if they work I won’t have a radio.”

“Taking the plane is secondary to our main objective of intelligence gathering.”

Hack curled the rifle beneath his arm. He’d blast his way into the stinking hangar single-handedly if he had to. Screw Wong and the Delta jerks.

A flak vest hit him in the chest, nearly knocking him down.

“Gear up,” said Fernandez. “Both of ya. You’re gonna wanna pee before you get on the helicopter. Otherwise you’re pissin’ out the door, which means into the wind, which usually means in your face.” He snickered. “No sense peein’ yourself until the fun starts.”

CHAPTER 35

A-Bomb did a quick check of his instruments, then reached down to his Twizzlers pocket for a piece of licorice. He and Dixon were running a good ten minutes ahead of schedule and in fact a simple flick of the wrist would put him practically on the planned IP or ingress point for the attack. Ten seconds beyond that he’d be able to cursor in his first SAM and reach for a celebratory Three Musketeers bar.

In just about any other line of work, running ahead of schedule was a good thing. But here being ten minutes early was nearly as bad as being ten minutes late. Striking now might cost the assault teams the advantage of surprise they were counting on. Worse, the ten minutes they had to wait was ten minutes’ worth of fuel they wouldn’t have to support the commandos and Delta boys when the fun started.

At least his stock of candy was strong. He had two more packs of Twizzlers, a full complement of Tootsie Rolls, three bags of M&Ms and four over-sized Three Musketeers bars in his specially designed candy pockets. And that didn’t count the pastry in his vest, nor the backup Peppermint Patties and gumdrops taped under the dash. Of course, if things got really desperate, A-Bomb could always dig into the survival stash attached to the seat. But you didn’t want to get into your contingencies if you could help it.

“Yo, Devil Two, we’re going to keep this orbit another few minutes. Splash is on time,” he assured his wingman.

“Two,” acknowledged Dixon.

The sharp click reminded O’Rourke of Doberman, very businesslike as tee time approached. Dixon had some of the Dogman’s moves as well, and while he wasn’t yet the marksman Glenon was, he still had acquitted himself well enough to nail an Iraqi helicopter with his cannon during the early hours of the air war. Of course, no one had Doberman’s explosive temper, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. BJ was a kickass Hog driver; A-Bomb’s six would be well covered when they made the attack.

Still, O’Rourke felt slightly unsettled — not uneasy and certainly not worried, just slightly out of whack. The thing was, he wasn’t used to playing lead guitar. He was more like Miami Steve, humping in the background. Oh yeah, doing very important work, but not actually fronting the band. Hitting the notes, setting the rhythm, working the solos even — but not the Boss. Playing lead had a different head to it.

Splash had grown so complicated that it was now being coordinated by its own control plane, code named Head, flying behind the lines somewhere. It was mostly referred to as Splash Control by the others in the package — another little thing that p’d A-Bomb off, because what was the sense of having a call sign if you weren’t going to use the thing.

Head came over the circuit, counting down the time to Splashdown — thirty minutes away.

“Devil One acknowledges, Headman,” said A-Bomb. “On station.”

On station. On station. If he were the wingman, he could have said something like, “Got your butts covered” or “Cheery-oh” and asked after the Queen. Because a wingman could do that kind of thing.

Flying lead, you had to be serious.

No wonder Doberman was such a grouch.

The Tornado tagged with nailing the SA-2 radar site southwest of the target area checked in. They were running five minutes late. So were the Splash Apaches, which according to the support craft had had trouble refueling. The helicopters themselves did not actually come on the circuit; given that they were much more vulnerable to the Iraqi defenses, they were on radio silence until the attack began. Besides, they were flying so low — roughly six feet above the desert floor — that it would have been difficult for the command ship to communicate with them directly.

Six feet above ground level. That was where A-Bomb’s Hog wanted to be. She was getting a nosebleed up here at eighteen thousand feet. Other planes flew such altitudes routinely; most might even consider it low in a war zone. But an A-10 pilot this high looked around for asteroids to avoid.

A-Bomb’s A-10 grumbled as they took a bank to avoid the outer reaches of the SA-2’s radar. He patted the throttle, trying to soothe her.

“I’ll take you down soon,” he said. “I promise. Think of it this way — the higher we are, the faster we dive.”

Unimpressed, the A-10 continued to stutter. It was subtle perhaps, but it was definitely coughing when it had no reason to cough.

A-Bomb glanced at the instruments — the temp was rising on engine two. His oil pressure was good, but there was something wrong with the power plant, whose rpms were fluctuating. He throttled back gently, lightly trimming the rest of the plane to compensate.

The temp edged higher. Then the oil pressure began whipping up and down, with the turbine’s rpms doing the same.

A wingman with a full complement of bombs and Twinkies could have ignored the readings as either a product of misplaced sensitivity on the gauge’s part, or his own overworked imagination. But a pilot leading an important element of the attack had to assess them coolly and coldly and conclude that, against all odds, against all human experience, one of the A-10’s engines was actually threatening to quit.

The engine sputtered.

“Shape up,” he told his plane, smacking the fuel panel switches as if the problem were due to indigestion.

The Hog responded by surging nearly sideways, the engine suddenly back in the green, all indicators at spec. Then A-Bomb heard a soft pop behind him and felt a shudder. By the time the warning light told him the engine had put in for early retirement, he was muscling the stick to keep the heavily laden plane from spinning toward the ground.

CHAPTER 36

Skull moved his eyes carefully, using them as an astronomer might use a telescope to examine an uncharted part of the sky. Nudging them across the reddish-blue band of the horizon, he studied the thin wisps of clouds for black specks and odd shifts, looking for enemy fighters that might somehow have managed to avoid the comprehensive Allied radar net.

That was virtually impossible for a primitive air force like the Iraqi’s. But Knowlington had learned to fly against a supposedly primitive air force. The Vietnamese MiGs had been outdated, outmoded, and son of a bitchin’ good. They came at you from a cloud or caught your tail or suckered you into a turn where their wingman popped up behind you. They hid in the sun, or the blind spot of your inattention. They waited until you were out of missiles or low on fuel. They took advantage of your arrogance and sloppiness, your failure to hit the marks just so. It was more the men than the machines — but that had always been the case, back to the very beginning over the trenches in France and Belgium. Skill and machine and luck.

Never forget luck, the under-rated factor in every equation.

Skull’s eyes reached the right wing of his Hog, then slipped upward, repeating the ritual search. He blew a long breath into his mask, nudged his stick just barely left, staying on course. A hundred other missions played at the edge of his brain, memories of mistakes and triumphs that pricked his adrenaline. A list of contingent to-do’s played constantly at the back of his mind: if this, then that; if that, then this. Skull had only the vaguest awareness of the list, knew only that if it was needed his brain would flash it like an urgent bulletin to his arms and legs and eyes. His actions would be automatic.

To fly you had to “think and not think” at the same time. To fly well you had to forget you were flying.

An old instructor had told him that. Skull could still remember nodding solemnly at the time, not knowing what the hell the geezer was talking about. He’d had to shoot down two Vietnamese MiGs before he started to actually understand — before, really, the tension of combat became familiar enough to relax him. Before the jagged rhythm of an over-pumped heart became a thing to live for.

Knowlington would be giving that up, quitting now. It was his duty to resign.

Who wanted to go out that way, sneaking off in the middle of the night? Better to burn out in a last fireball.

That was why he’d gone along with the plan to steal the MiG. One last burst of glory. He wasn’t coming back from this mission. Auger in.

Years from now, people would talk about him in awed tones: Michael Knowlington — Skull — the guy who bought it carrying out the impossible dream.

Arrogance. Vanity.

He tightened his eyes and continued scanning the sky.

CHAPTER 37

A-Bomb wrenched the stick to the right, crunching the rudder pedals at the same time, more for leverage than actual effect. The plane’s wings finally steadied and he started working his nose back up, regaining control. He’d lost nearly three thousand feet in little more than the time it took to chew through a half-stick of red licorice.

That was nothing. He’d dropped the other half of the candy, losing it somewhere on the floor of the plane. That was the kind of thing that hurt your ego, as well as attracted ants.

Cycling through the restart procedure on the starboard engine, he considered that what he really needed right now was a good cup of Joe, something beyond the Dunky in his thermos. Dunkin’ Donuts made a mean batch of caffeine, but in a situation like this there was no beating the takeout at Joltin’ Joe’s Diner in Schenectady, N.Y. A-Bomb had thought several times of arranging a pipeline for just such emergencies, but hadn’t been able to come up with a way of keeping the coffee hot in transport to the Gulf. A cold Jolt didn’t do it.

At the moment, he’d take any jolt, cold or hot. The power plant just wasn’t willing to restart, and nothing he did — including a very unsubtle string of curses and a harsh rap on the instrument panel — worked.

“Hey, Two! Yo kid! I got a situation up here,” he told Dixon. “One of my thinks it belongs in a Ford.”

“One?”

“Left engine died.”

A-Bomb checked his position against the paper map on his kneeboard as Dixon acknowledged. He’d drifted west, edging dangerously close to the SA-2 site, which wasn’t due to be taken out for a good ten minutes. So close, in fact, that a direct course to his target area would take him inside the missile’s envelope.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” he told his wingman. “We change the game plan slightly — I’ll go after the SA-9s, then nail the guns with the cluster-bombs.”

“Uh, lost some of that One,” said Dixon. “You’re looking to hit all the targets on one engine?”

“What I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb. “Can’t fly with all this weight under my wings. Might as well get rid of it where it’ll do the most good.”

“Uh, Captain—” Static swallowed the rest of Dixon’s voice. His meaning, however, was clear. A-Bomb was out of his mind to not cut his stores loose and head home.

Maybe if he’d been flying another kind of plane, that might have been true. But in a Hog, A-Bomb’s decision made perfect, logical, conservative sense. At least to him.

“Got to shoot my wad,” explained O’Rourke. This way, I get rid of it quick and leave you a full load to back up the assault team with. Let me get what we know is there, you handle the contingencies. I’ll turn around, you hang out, catch up over the border or back at base, whatever.”

“You’re flying back alone?”

“I think I take a left and keep going until I hit the stop sign, right?” A-Bomb lifted his finger off the mike, remembering he was flight leader and had to make a pass at sounding like one.

What would Doberman do in this situation?

Curse and snarl something nasty.

Couldn’t curse the kid, though. It was tough to be nasty to BJ.

“Unless you’re thinking of pushing, it’s not going to make much difference if you’re on my butt or not going home,” said A-Bomb. “Besides, I don’t want you to miss the show.”

Under duress, A-Bomb might have admitted that he knew vaguely of some sort of standing order — or suggestion or maybe a whimsical thought somewhere — about dealing with engine failures that might, under certain very specific circumstances, be interpreted as advising against proceeding to a target on one engine. He’d also admit, again under heavy duress, that although the plane could fly quite adequately with one engine once properly coaxed and flattered, she wasn’t particularly happy to do so while carrying a full load — a fact she emphasized now by giving him a stall warning.

He traded a little altitude for speed.

“You with me, Two?”

“Your call, Gun.”

“What I’m talking about. One other thing,” he added. “I want you to leave me and track back to our original course. I have to cut a closer line to Splashdown.”

“Uh…” The rest of his transmission was covered with static.

“You got to work on that stutter, kid,” said A-Bomb. “Ruins a really beautiful singing voice.”

“Captain, anything like a straight line is going to take you right through the target area for the SA-2. It’s still live.”

“Our British buddies are going to take it out any second,” said A-Bomb.

There was a pause. O’Rourke knew what Dixon was going to say — it was, after all, exactly what he would say.

“I got your butt,” said Dixon.

“Kid…”

“You really ought to think about upgrading your choice of toilet paper,” said his wingman. “And maybe doing something about that hair.”

“What I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb, nosing onto the course.

CHAPTER 38

BJ kept his eyes nailed on A-Bomb’s good engine, trying to ignore the churning juices that had spit up from his stomach to his lungs and throat. He’d always thought O’Rourke was a little crazy, but this was insane. In approximately ten seconds they were going to cross into the scanning area of one of the most potent missiles in the Iraqi arsenal, a missile that had been downing Western aircraft for something like thirty years.

If the SAM operators decided to target the a-10s — and even if no radar anywhere in Iraq had detect them, the planes were certainly low and slow enough to have been eyeballed by now in the early light — the chugging Hog was dead meat.

Insisting that he take all the known targets was equally insane. The Maverick launches were one thing — the AGM-65s could be targeted and fired from a good distance away. But the cluster-bombs had to be released essentially over the target, which meant that likely as not O’Rourke would be plunging into a hail of flak to kick them off. With one engine — hell, with two — yanking and banking to duck even optically guided 23mm shells was not an easy way to make a living. Half the push as you recovered meant the gunners had twice the chance to nail you.

BJ shifted against his seat restraints, hunkering over his stick, pushing himself into the red zone.

The Iraqi missile was probably dead. It hadn’t come up last night. Wouldn’t now.

Dixon checked his weapons panel, made sure he was ready to go with the Mavs, glanced at the targeting screen. It took patience to work the blurs into a hittable target, and he wasn’t feeling particularly patient.

His mind flashed on Becky, the warm feel of her body next to his in bed, her softness. He wanted her warmth. He hadn’t realized how good it could feel before, or perhaps he hadn’t needed it before. It didn’t erase everything. It didn’t banish the memory of the kid or everything else, but it was something he wanted. He didn’t feel cold anymore.

BJ’s eyes itched. He moved them up from the screen, looked outside the plane, checked the HUD, went back to the IR image in the video.

The target area dribbled into the top corner of the screen. Dixon found the dim shadow of an SA-9 launcher, or at least thought he did — definitely yes. He slipped the cursor toward it in case A-Bomb missed. He took a breath and checked his altitude, nudging through thirteen thousand feet. His left hand tightened on the throttle and he looked toward A-Bomb’s plane, watching for the burst that would show he’d fired; waiting for the yell in his ears over the short-range radio announcing the game was on.

He waited, but what he heard was not A-Bomb’s triumphant screech but the warning blare of the RWR, and a scream from the AWACS controller, their impromptu duet announcing that the Iraqi SA-2 battery had launched a pair of missiles in their direction.

CHAPTER 39

Captain Hawkins leaned back, trying to see their target area through the Pave Hawk’s windscreen. It would have taken better eyes than he possessed — Splash was still nearly ten miles away. The two helo pilots worked silently in the cockpit, fingers jumping across the cockpit panels in an elaborate ballet. Every so often one would point to something; inevitably the gesture would be answered by a thumbs-up.

The aircraft the two men were flying was based on the Sikorsky S-70/H-60 Blackhawk, the military’s standard utility helicopter. The successor to the ubiquitous UH-1 Huey, the base model could carry an eleven-man squad and three or four crew members roughly six hundred miles before refueling. While combat use generally shortened the range, the type was considerably faster and longer legged than the versatile Huey. The MH-60G Pave Hawk — an Air Force ship often used on Spec Op missions, as well for combat SAR or rescue operations — differed from the standard H-60 in several key aspects. Among the most important for this mission were advanced ground-following radar, an infra-red radar, satellite communications and position finder, and range-extending fuel tanks.

Hawkins pushed back against the wall of the helicopter, tightening his grip on the restraining strap. He’d been standing pretty much the whole way. He hated sitting for more than five minutes as a general rule; going into combat he could never sit, could hardly even stand still. He didn’t fidget over the operational details, much less worry about what might go wrong or what could go wrong. He also didn’t check his gear a million times — once after takeoff was good enough for him. But he couldn’t sit, and he couldn’t stand still.

Most of the D boys were standing, too. The exception was Fernandez, whom he’d told to mind Major Hawkins and the British mechanic, who were crouched on the floor talking about the MiG. The Delta sergeant perched on a jumpseat behind the two men, occasionally glaring at their backs like an angry babysitter.

The British sergeant was an older man who looked as if he’d been rousted from bed. Huddled on the floor beneath an over-sized parka, he looked more like a mound than a man, his limbs hunched together, his face whiter than porcelain. The man had no more volunteered for this mission than Fernandez had asked to watch him; how much he might really be able to accomplish was anyone’s guess, even though he seemed to know a lot about the plane. He’d told Hawkins his name was Eugene, pronouncing it with great emphasis on both syllables. If he had a last name, it had been drowned out by the noise of the helicopter.

Preston, on the other hand, was practically tap-dancing. He kept gesturing and nodding. Obviously a blowhard, the Air Force major had no perspective on anything beyond his nose.

What the hell did any pilot know about war, anyway? The fucks flew a million miles away from any real danger, pushed a button, went home. That was their war — roll around with a local girl, trying to forget the hardship involved in drinking beer instead of champagne.

Granted, some of the A-10 pilots were different.

Doberman had personally saved Hawkins’s butt by nailing a MiG in air-to-air combat. He was a nasty son of a bitch with a temper so fierce he would have been washed out of Special Operations training — hell, out of the Army — in maybe five minutes. But he used it to his advantage in the air.

BJ Dixon had humped a rucksack and saved one of Hawkins’ best squad leaders, and to hear the old coot talk about the pilot now you’d think he was in love. Dixon had lived off the land for a couple of days and managed to get his butt snared in a STAR pickup — so you knew he wasn’t the usual wimp shit pilot.

A-Bo0mb, what a piece of work. Stranded temporarily at Fort Apache, he’d helped one of Hawkin’s sergeants capture a tanker truck that turned out to be a chemical weapons ferry. Even more impressive, the SOB won a desert “dune buggy” off a Spec Ops command in a poker game and knew more about weapons than half the men in Delta Force.

And Colonel Knowlington had bona fides that stretched back before Hawkins was born. So four exceptions to the general rule of pilots being shitheads.

The only other Air Force officer that Hawkins knew well was Bristol Wong, but he was in a whole different category — a Spec Ops guy born and bred, assigned to the Air Force only by some weird fit of fate, or maybe as penance for serious sins in an earlier lifetime. Just now he was leaning over the door gunner, no doubt offering some arcane tip on how to increase the weapon’s accuracy.

But Preston was a typical goober. No way was he getting the plane out.

Hawkins suspected the MiG would be gone before they got there. The Iraqis weren’t quite as dumb as they seemed.

But what the hell. They were in it now.

He turned his head and glanced toward the sliding window, where one of the crewmen was fingering the 7.62mm mini-gun. A long tube attached to the gun would catch spent shells, ferrying them outside where they could be safely ejected. The gun was similar to the SAW Hawkins had outfitted himself with, and nicely complimented the .50-cal door-mounted weapon.

Zipping over Iraqi territory at more than a hundred miles an hour, their route had been carefully planned to follow an empty path in the desert; they had seen no sign of life except for two highways in the last half-hour. Now as he looked past the gunner Hawkins saw, or thought he saw, a row of houses only a few yards away. He pushed forward, trying to get a better view, not sure if the Iraqi village was an optical illusion or a detail he had somehow missed when the pilots went over the ingress route with him.

Illusion — just rocks.

But there were buildings there, a half-mile away, no more. People or animals or something were moving, something live.

The sky flashed red in the distance. One of the crew members began talking loudly, relaying radio information from the command plane.

The chopper seemed to pick herself up by the tail, her pace quickening. The door gunner leaped forward to man his weapon.

“Missiles in the air ahead! Flak!” warned the co-pilot. “The game’s afoot!”

A Sherlock Holmes fan, thought Hawkins, glancing at his watch. They were five minutes from Splashdown.

CHAPTER 39

A-Bomb nailed the cursor on the SA-9 just as the missile warning blared. The timing couldn’t be more perfect — his CD player had just dished up “Rock the Casbah.”

“Sing it, boys,” he told the band, joining in on the chorus as he goosed the first missile toward the small mobile launcher, which was just over eight nautical miles away. A second, unbriefed launcher sat maybe twenty yards to the right of the first; A-Bomb zeroed the targeting pipper on the hatch right in front of the four-barreled launching arm and cooked off Maverick number two.

He kicked chaff out, but didn’t bother zagging to avoid the SA-2 — the way he figured it, he was flying so damn slow a cut left or right wasn’t going to throw the enemy missile anyway. Besides, it would make it even harder to find the other SA-9 launcher, which didn’t seem to be in shadows of the hill where it was supposed to be. Perhaps sensing his difficulty, the Iraqis kindly lit their ZSU-23 flak guns, streaming bullets into the sky to advertise his secondary targets.

“I’ll get to you, I’ll get to you,” he told them, realizing from the position of the ZSU-23s that he had been looking for the SA-9 a little too far to the east. He slipped his cursor left, working the gear like his grandpa used to nudge the old Philco to improve reception. “Light touch, young’un, that’s what it takes,” Grandpa O’Rourke always used to advise, and just like that the baseball game would flood in with Phil Rizzuto shouting “There it goes!” — the Yankee Scooter two hundred miles away calling a Roy White home run into the upper deck in right field.

And just like that A-Bomb nudged the Maverick target cue precisely into the sloped grille of the SA-9 Gaskin launcher, itself a throwback to the days of stifled offense and a big strike zone. The Russian-made launcher lacked White’s deceptive speed and couldn’t play the difficult sun of Yankee Stadium’s left field, but it did possess something of the outfielder’s quiet grit — the launcher puffed up two missiles just as A-Bomb sent his fastball its way.

“Nice try, my friends,” A-Bomb told the Iraqis.

He was just coming into the missiles’ extreme range. Essentially hopped-up SA-7 heat-seekers on a mobile platform, the Gaskins were somewhat old-fashioned and relatively small, though of course any amount of explosive with wings attached was nothing to sneeze at.

A-Bomb kicked defensive flares and deepened his angle of attack, sliding right as he came for the AAA guns at the foot of the hill to the right of the airstrip. He found four of them, staggered in pairs, each pumping enough lead in the sky to keep a million batteries from ever running out of juice. A-Bomb thumbed his last Maverick at the first stream he could designate, then pushed his Hog right, leaning against his good engine to get an acceptable glide path for his CBUs.

Problem was, the bombs were preset for release around five thousand feet, and there was no way he was going to be that high when he got over the target. He couldn’t fudge it either — he was passing through seven thousand already and very far off the mark.

The air percolated with exploding shells, the gunners homing in on the slow-moving, chugging target. A-Bomb wasn’t quite in their range, though that didn’t stop them from giving it the ol’ Iraqi college try.

Nor did it prevent at least a few shells from bursting close enough to the Hogs skin to rattle the wings.

“Gonna melt your barrels you keep shooting like that,” he told them.

People were yelling at him over the radio. The Clash had moved on to “Red Angel Dragnet.” The Hog added a few jangles and rumbles of its own. The SA-2 was somewhere behind him, The SA-9s sped upward somewhere to the left. The 23mm slugs were coming for his nose. A-Bomb felt right at home.

Almost perfect.

“I could really go for a good cup of Joe right now,” he told the Iraqis, pushing his nose down sharply. “Got any?”

His Maverick erupted, erasing the first Zeus.

“I’ll take that as a no,” he said, dropping his bombs into the flak dealer to its right. The Hog jerked slightly as the bombs fell, helping as A-Bomb pushed right, angling for the second group of guns, which inexplicably stopped firing before he pickled.

“I told you not to start firing too soon,” A-Bomb told the Iraqis as he pulled back on the stick. “Damn. Didn’t the Ruskies teach you anything?”

“One, repeat?”

“Oops, did I transmit there?” A-Bomb asked Dixon over the squadron frequency.

“You’ve been doing play by play,” answered his wingman.

“Any good?”

“Don’t give up your day job. That the Clash on the soundtrack?”

“What I’m talking about,” said A-Bomb, who always appreciated when a youngster picked up on the classics. He checked his position — three thousand feet, give or take, a mile north of Splashdown, air speed 185 knots.

Must have a tailwind, he thought.

“What happened to that SA-2?”

“Got confused and blew up right after launch,” BJ told him. “Tornados nailed the site right after the radar came on. Gave them a good beacon.”

“Always glad to help out our allies, even if I’m just playing clay pigeon.” A-Bomb flicked the CD player back to the beginning of side one; something about “Know Your Rights” always got his juices moving.

“A-Bomb, did you hear me tell you about that SA-9 launch?”

“Musta missed it,” A-Bomb told him. A gun far to the north began firing, probably at him. The defenses to the north and west were serious and numerous; he banked southward, still climbing slowly. He could just make out Dixon beyond the thick gray smoke rising from his targets. “You got it, kid?”

“I’m taking a run at the field now,” Dixon told him.

“Go for it,” said A-Bomb. He checked his instruments, working through the numbers slower than usual — a difference of approximately one nanosecond.

Fuel a little lighter than he’d expected. More than enough to make it back to KKMC, though, especially on one engine.

A-Bomb spotted Dixon’s Hog diving toward the smoking airfield. A plume of black smoke erupted in its path; the dark fingers climbed high into the air, far higher than the ZSU 23 had been.

“Heavy artillery gunnin’ for ya kid,” A-Bomb shouted, as Dixon’s plane disappeared in the geyser of 57mm shells.

CHAPTER 40

Dixon hadn’t seen the antiaircraft gun in the web of shadows and smoke. The first shells — fat twists of glowing metal hurling past his windscreen — seemed unreal, old nightmares remembered long after sleep.

If he’d seen it, he could have nailed the obsolete but still deadly self-propelled ZSU-57-2 gun with his AGMs, dropped the CBUs, or even lit his cannon and erased them with a quick burst of combat load. But Dixon wasn’t seeing very well — or rather, he was seeing in slow motion. It had been less than two weeks since he’d last flown, but those two weeks had been a lifetime. Shapes that would have crystallized immediately into threats remained vague and distorted for an agonizingly long time before he could decipher them.

In truth, the difference in reaction time might have only been a matter of a second or two, but in war, under fire, a second or two was the difference between life and death. He pushed his Hog right, ducking the path of the flak, increasing his speed as he dove.

The gun firing at him threw massive shells to twelve thousand feet in the air, but it was an ancient system, manually aimed. The bullets chewed the air behind the Hog, not quite fast enough to catch the plane’s tail.

Gravity smashed into Dixon’s face as he zagged away. Weighed down by her munitions, trying to respond to her pilot’s harsh inputs, the plane slammed downward. The flight suit tried desperately to compensate for the forces trying to squeeze blood from BJ’s body, but there was only so much it could do. Dixon felt his head begin to float above his body, icy blackness poking at the edges of his conscience.

This had happened to him before. On his very first combat mission, it had shaken him so badly he’d launched his weapons without targets, broken his attack, run away.

He didn’t do that now. If the days that had passed since he last flew had robbed him of his instantaneous reactions, they had also changed him irrevocably. He might flinch, but he would never again run away from anything ever again. He would bite his teeth together hard enough to taste blood flowing from the gums, hard enough to taste the smoking cordite of the grenade that had killed the boy, hard enough to hold off the yawning blackness of fear.

And then he would do his job, without fail.

As the g’s backed off, Dixon pushed the Hog into a wide banking turn, his hand reaching for the armament panel. Close on the target, below the prime altitude for dropping the cluster bombs, he selected his cannon. He straightened his wings, saw the thick line of flak turning toward him, and pushed the trigger. The seven-barreled Gatling spun in the Hog’s chin, spitting spent uranium into the open gondola of the Iraqi gun. Metal hissed into steam and another vehicle parked near the 57 erupted in a fireball as Dixon’s bullets caught it.

He let go of the trigger, quickly scanning the area for another target. There were dug-in positions on the hills opposite the airstrip; small weapons, probably, nothing that could hurt him but a problem for the assault teams.

No other defenses. And damn — there was the MiG, sitting on a ramp just waiting for Preston to come and snatch her.

“Kid! Kid!” screamed A-Bomb.

“I’m here. Nailed the gun,” said Dixon.

“Yeah, I see that,” said O’Rourke.

“Climbing,” he told him, double checking the ladder on his HUD as he cleared five thousand feet. “Going to take out some trenches on those hills with the CBUs, then clear Splash in.”

“What I’m talkin’ about.”

Dixon turned his attention back to the hill, where the enemy positions looked like a series of thumbprints on a misshapen cookie. BJ rolled on them, descending quickly into the sweet spot of his bomb swoop and pickling right on target. The Mk 20 Rockeye II Mod.2’s were veritable dump trucks. Their munitions fanned out in an elaborate and deadly pattern as the CBU unit ignited over its target. The bombs were capable of piercing light armor, and could do very nasty things to flesh.

Dixon recovered, sweeping his eyes around the battlefield one last time.

“Splash zone is clear,” he announced, glancing at his watch. They were two minutes ahead of schedule.

CHAPTER 41

The helicopter’s tail whipped so hard to the left that Hawkins fell sideways, losing his balance as the door gunner began blasting away at a defensive post at the southern end of the runway. One of the Apaches roared across their path, bullets whipping from its chain gun. Hawkins pushed upright and caught sight of the MiG, sitting in front of the hangar not ten yards away. The Pave Hawk veered back right, whipping around — one, maybe two Iraqis were running from the plane back toward the hangar, cement flying around them as the door gunner and the Minimi operator turned their attention on them.

The plane was out in the open, canopy up, a ladder nearby. The hangar door was open. Another Apache crossed between the plane and the building, unmolested.

The ragheads had been caught completely by surprise. Idiots!

You couldn’t pray for luck like this!

“Down! Down!” Hawkins yelled, anxious to get on the ground. “Get us on the runway! In front of the plane! In front of the plane!”

The Pave Hawk had already pitched toward the ground, fluttering and then coasting along as if on a gentle wave. It touched down not five yards from the nose of the enemy plane. Sergeant Crowley, the point man, leapt through the open door. Pig followed, with Wong right behind him.

“Go! Go! Go!” Hawkins yelled to the others, leaping forward himself. Only Fernandez, with Preston and Eugene, remained behind.

The helicopter jerked forward as Hawkins jumped out. He tripped against the edge of the doorway but somehow managed to keep his feet squared so that he hit the cement clean, even though he was falling off balance. He rolled, got up, whipped the nose of his heavy gun around to cover the MiG. Satisfied that it was empty, he ran toward the hangar. He caught sight of the British Chinook with its SAS team descending beyond the northeastern corner of the hangar area. The commandos were uncharacteristically late, though only by a few seconds — their big helo dropped nearly straight down, obviously not encountering any resistance.

We’re in, we’re in, Hawkins thought. Wong and that bozo Preston are going to pull it off.

Hot shit!

Hangar. Stop celebrating and secure the hangar.

Hawkins pushed forward, spotting Crowly at the large open door. The sergeant reached his hand back. Hawkins threw himself down, realizing the D boy was going to toss a flash-bang into the building, neutralizing any resistance with a grenade.

It wasn’t necessarily the optimum move — there were maybe a dozen flammable substances inside a typical hangar that the grenade could easily ignite. A fired could ruin the plane, not to mention snare Crowly. But in the fury of the moment, he wasn’t thinking about that.

The grenade went off. He pumped another. There was a puff of smoke, but no secondaries. The Iraqis who had run for the hangar were either dead or severely wounded.

Something flashed from the hedge of dirt on Hawkins’ right. He whirled around, saw Pig near the crest of the berm working his MP5.

“Secure the plane! Secure the plane!” Hawkins yelled before realizing that Wong was doing just that. He had already started to wheel the large, unpowered ladder platform toward the cockpit.

Hawkins turned back toward the helicopter to look for Fernandez when he a tan stick popped up into his periphery vision near the hangar. Hawkins jerked around, pressing his trigger at the same time. His SAW cut the Iraqi in half.

The captain dropped to one knee, covering the area more carefully now. When he was satisfied that there were no other soldiers there, at least that he could see, he jumped up and ran toward the trench where the Iraqi had hid, quickly making sure no one was hiding beyond the hangar.

The trench ran down from the helicopter through a small sewer pipe at the edge of the berm. Thick black gook covered the bottom. To Hawkins, it conjured up an image of oil draining from an old car engine.

A jet roared overhead and two Chinooks stuttered in on his left, the reserves being ordered in to help one of the units. Dirt flew into his face. “Incoming! Incoming!” yelled someone.

The damn A-10 is firing at us, Hawkins thought.

Then a fresh spray of dirt and chips of cement showered over his head. He realized that the Iraqis were firing some sort of mortar from beyond the hump of dirt below the hangar and runway area.

“Incoming!” yelled someone, and Hawkins realized it was him. Something ripped over his head, a hot stream of air pushing him flat on the cement apron in front of the MiG — the Pave Hawk had jerked upwards, giving the machine-gunners an angle on the mortar man.

Crowley had raced to the far end of the berm beyond the hangar, pumping his 203. His grenade and the Pave Hawk’s machine-gun bullets hit the Iraqi defenders at the same time. Blood and dirt flared into a large secondary explosion behind them. A vehicle had been wedged into the berm. Crowley’s grenade ignited the gas tank.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Hawkins shouted. He turned around, saw that Wong was on the plane. One of his men was following up the berm.

Secure against counterattack.

Crowley and Pig were already blazing away at two knots of Iraqis in ditches nearly a hundred yards away. Those trenches had obviously been intended as fallback positions for attacks from the south, and were open to the berm. His men had the Iraqis in them pinned down, though they didn’t have enough of an angle to get them all.

Two Apaches were concentrating on a vehicle or a bunker or something about three hundred yards to his right, across and well beyond the runway. The rest were whipping back and forth above the two barracks-type buildings the SAS were attacking. Heavy machine-gun fire announced that the Iraqis were putting up stiff resistance. Smoke poured from one of the windows.

Hawkins turned and called for Krushev, his com specialist. The team tasked with grabbing the fuel truck had landed; its Chinook was still on the ground. He couldn’t tell whether they had met resistance or not.

Wong was lying across the wing of the MiG.

Hit?

Hit?

No. The Intel expert jumped up and then did a hand-roll off the wing, obviously inspecting something.

So where the fuck was Preston? Had the prissy major wimped out under fire?

CHAPTER 42

Hack slammed his knee against the helicopter door. his body slid sideways into the open air, the world pirouetting around in a grayish-white tangle. His head slammed hard against the concrete and he cursed, his lungs flaming with anger as he pushed back to his feet then collapsed, his knee crumbling with pain.

Smoke and the spent exhaust of the helicopter hung thick in the air, making it difficult to breath and even harder to think; an Apache gunship whipped toward him, its nose gun revolving downward as if Preston were being targeted. Something tried pushing him down from behind; Hack wheeled around and slammed the butt-end of the M-16 at it, only to realize that it was Fernandez, the Delta sergeant assigned to get him safely off the helicopter and into the plane. The blow landed against Fernandez’s side, but if he felt it, the sergeant gave no hint. The burly Delta trooper set Preston on his feet, then ran back to the helicopter to get Eugene, the British mechanic.

A ladder had been pushed near the plane. Hack hobbled, then skipped, finally gaining momentum and managing a full run. But before he could get to the ladder, the ground rocked with a heavy explosion. He lost his balance and dropped his rifle as he spun. Once more, he slammed his head hard against the concrete surface of the runway access apron as he landed.

Something red covered his eyes — he thought the MiG had exploded and felt a pit in his stomach; anger at the thought of his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity being taken from him. Cursing, he got to his feet, so mad that he nearly smashed the rifle barrel end into the ground. He might have tried putting the fire out with his bare hands, but with his first step he realized that the plane hadn’t exploded — it was standing there not five feet away, untouched by the chaos around it.

“Major, I am ready for your assessment,” said Wong, his voice calm as he appeared at Preston’s side. He nudged Preston toward the other side of the plane, where a large boarding ladder constructed of tubular steel sat next to the cockpit. Painted bright orange, the contraption looked like a piece of scaffolding for a construction site.

It held Preston’s weight easily. With his rifle in one hand, he climbed up quickly and touched the cobra cowling along the forward fuselage, The fin extended forward from the wing, which helped give the Russian plane extraordinary flight stability in difficult maneuvers.

The cold metal stung his bare hand. Hack ran his fingers along the louvered vents for the cannon, the tear-shaped port seemingly too small to house the muzzle of a weapon. Adrenaline boiled through his arms and legs, breaking his movements into sharp jumps and harsh jerks. He grabbed the edge of the cockpit, hauling himself onto the chin fairing. The Zvezda K-36D ejection seat sat behind an old-style dashboard of dials and rocker switch-gear. The instrument set was much closer to that of an A-10A than an F-15C.

The restraining straps were cinched against the seat. No helmet. No flightsuit.

Not that he expected to find them here.

His own gear — where the hell was it?

Shit. Back on the helicopter. He’d forgotten it in the rush. Even if he didn’t need the suit and helmet, he wanted the flight board. He’d taken it with him on every flight he’d ever made, even the Russian Fulcrum spin. It was good luck.

“Major, the jamming station control panel is in the upper left hand-quadrant, below the angle-of-attack.,” said Wong. He popped the back of a small camera, quickly changing the film as he spoke. “Please examine it first. Information on the radar warning scope would likewise be beneficial. I have photographed the cockpit and the flight computer. I will now document the exterior hard points and other areas of interest.”

Hack spun around, nearly kicking Wong in the face.

“I need my gear,” he said. “It’s in the helicopter. Get it.”

Wong looked at him coldly. “Your bag is on the apron there, where Sergeant Fernandez placed it.”

“Good.” Hack looked to his right. The hangar was open and unguarded. “The Iraqis must keep their flight gear in the hangar. Come on.”

“Please. We must complete our evaluation of the aircraft first,” said the captain, refusing to clear off the ladder.

Hack stepped away and leapt off the airplane, holding the M-16 in front of him for balance as he landed. It wasn’t as far as he thought; his right leg buckled slightly but he kept his balance, staggering a step ahead. Then he turned to run to Eugene, who was examining the underside of the wings.

“Not plumbed for air-to-air refueling,” the British mechanic announced. That wasn’t big news — almost no MiGs were. “Or for wing tanks. I’m not familiar with the mounting on points three and five; perhaps it is an Iraqi arrangement for unguided bombs.”

“Forget all that,” Hack told him. An Apache whizzed low overhead drowning his words. He shouted as loud as he could. “Fuel. Is it fueled?”

“What?” said the mechanic.

“We need to fuel it!”

“Yes. Captain Wong wants me to examine the radar.”

“Fuel! Does it have fuel?”

The mechanic blinked, then ran his hand over his bald head, perplexed.

Hack pushed the mechanic toward the plane, then began running toward the hangar. Short and squat, the building was made entirely of metal. It looked more like a civilian warehouse than a military hangar building. Thick bands of smoke slithered from the dark interior. The heavy sulfuric odor made Preston cough as he ran. As he reached the door he pushed his rifle up. He couldn’t see anything inside the building, but squeezed the trigger anyway, as if a random spray of bullets would guarantee his safety.

Nothing happened. He glanced down and realized he’d placed his finger not on the rifle trigger but on the grenade mechanism.

He coughed again, this time so hard that he had to drop to one knee to recover. But the air was even thicker here, the scent stifling. He rose slowly, telling himself to slow down.

A small fire burned about midway down the far side of the building, casting a reddish glow across the interior. Metal ramps and a small hand truck sat near the glow; a set of benches and lockers were lined against the wall.

A tractor was parked on his right. Hack sidled toward it, trying to hold back his coughs. A bomb trolley had been hooked to the back of back of the vehicle; two slim anti-air missiles sat in its base.

Hack put his arm over his mouth to filter the stench. Something moved on the floor a few feet from a workbench beyond the weapons carriage.

This time his finger was in the right place. Bullets ripped through the figure and ricocheted everywhere, the hangar reverberating with the automatic-weapons fire.

Hack coughed uncontrollably and threw himself down, rolling and starting to retch, his lungs and throat scratched by the toxic fumes of the smoldering fire. He tasted metal in his mouth; his nose felt like it had been filled with shavings from a metal lathe. Hack lost his hold on the gun and fell against the floor, stomach heaving.

He knew he had to stand up to breathe, but he wasn’t sure if there were other Iraqis in the hangar, or even if he’d killed the man he’d aimed at. Finally he summoned his energy and jumped up, threw his hand over his face and pumped his lungs against the fabric of his jumpsuit.

A man sprawled across the ground ten feet away. Hack froze, then realized the man wasn’t moving. He could see the man’s head glowing with the dim red light of the fire across the way.

A helmet. The pilot.

He walked toward the man, looking this way and that. His lungs felt pinched in his chest. He had to get outside and breathe.

The building rattled with an nearby explosion. Hack reached down and grabbed the man’s leg, hauling him backwards toward the yawning blue light. He started slowly, then felt himself tripping. He managed to keep his balance long enough to reach the entrance, where he fell over backwards. He whirled around, still coughing as the clean air hit his face. He gulped it, then reached back for the boot, pulling the Iraqi clear into the sunlight.

The dead pilot’s fingers were wrapped around a pistol. He was fully dressed in a pressurized suit and helmet. While his torso and limbs were intact, his nose and forehead looked more like a smashed pumpkin covered with red pulp than anything human. Part of the flight helmet was missing; the rest was cracked and fused to the man’s skull.

Something warm touched Hack’s shoulder. He flinched, thinking it was blood, but it was Fernandez, the Delta soldier.

“I shot him,” Hack said.

“I think a grenade got him, Major,” said Fernandez. “Look at the helmet.”

“Maybe,” said Hack, though he knew he’d seen the man move. He dropped down, examining the flightsuit. It seemed intact, though there were blood splatters all over it. The survival gear and belts, nicked here and there but seemingly sound, were thick with blood, already congealing into brown crust.

A helmet and mask. He’d have to go back into the hangar. There must be a dressing station further back.

“Fuel’s on it way, coming across the strip,” yelled Eugene, running up to him and pointing across the field.

“Can you load missiles?” Hack asked.

“Missiles?”

“There’s a pair in there, attached to a tractor. Can you get them on the plane?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hangar’s on fire,” Fernandez said.

“I know that,” said Preston, running back into the building. He bunched his flightsuit up to cover his mouth, and tried to hold his breath as much as possible. He pointed to the tractor, hoping the others were following, then kept going, kicking his 203 on the floor as he ran.

There should be a rack of suits standing against the wall, lockers for personal gear. A readyroom, an area to brief pilots.

Or maybe not. Maybe they used the buildings on the other side of the base.

No. He was thinking about this all wrong. It wasn’t a real air base. It was more like a lone bus terminal, a solitary stop.

Might be no gear here at all then.

The fire licked across the row of benches at the left, blue flames circling a tank of some sort. The light waxed and waned, cycling from red to purple to blue. The fire seemed to die but then flared back again.

Three large trucks sat at the back the building. Empty sacks sprawled on the floor near the far corner. Several benches and metal structures looked like lockers. Hack moved toward the lockers, then saw that the sacks were men’s bodies.

Something rumbled behind him. Hack whirled, throwing up his hands and expecting the building to come crashing down. But it was just the tractor — Eugene and Fernandez had managed to get it started.

Hack stepped over the bodies, looking for the suits or at least a helmet. The dead men were just workers or soldiers, of no use to him. There were large metal tool chests under the benches, and some old machinery that seemed like farming equipment. Tires were stacked against the wall, not far from where the fire was slowly working its way through a pile of rags.

As Hack turned to go back to the other side, his right leg kicked something on the floor. The fire flared bright and he saw it was an oxygen mask, its long hose curled in a neat spiral. As he scooped it up, something popped behind him. Now there was plenty of light to see — the fire leapt into a can on the floor, exploding and flaring up the tires. Hack ran out of the hangar, feeling the heat as the flames suddenly found plenty of fuel to ignite.

“The plane! Get the plane out of the way! The fire!” he screamed.

Fernandez and Eugene had already hooked the front of the MiG up to the tractor. The plane jerked and screeched as it moved — the Fulcrum’s parking brakes were obviously still set. Hack tucked the gas mask beneath his arm and ran for the wing, hauling himself up over the trailing edge flap as the plane stuttered forward with a groan. He caught the back end of the canopy and threw the mask inside, then squeezed himself around and down into the seat, his right leg catching on one of the panels as he fell in. He curled his leg beneath him as best he could, trying to orient himself.

So where was the brake?

He flailed on the left side of the cockpit of the unfamiliar plane. He couldn’t remember a thing, not from the MiG he had flown in or the briefings.

The emergency extension for the landing gear was on the left, at the bottom of the panel near his knee.

His mind blanked. He couldn’t find the parking brake on a Chevy, let alone work a foreign airplane.

On the panel. On the panel.

Hack found the small, slender handle right above the turn-and-slip indicator. He clawed at it, and the MiG rolled forward and then sideways, stopping abruptly. Unsure of himself again, not trusting his memory, he fumbled around the cockpit, looking for something else.

Wong appeared on the right wing, shouting.

They’d stopped the tractor.

“The configuration appears to be the most primitive export model,” said Captain Wong. “Do you concur?”

“Yeah, whatever,” said Preston, pushing himself up. He pulled the oxygen hose out from under his leg, untangling himself in the process. He found the end and inserted it into the panel, then sat back down, getting his bearings now — remembering himself, his plan, his checklist.

He needed his flight board. Not for the few notes he’d scribbled. Hell, they were useless now. He had all the important stuff memorized and he could, would remember it. But the cartoon, and Ecclesiastes, and most of all his dad’s advice — he couldn’t fly without them.

Wisdom exceeds folly.

Do you best

Don’t be superstitious, he told himself.

Hack turned his attention back to the plane. It had been outside the hangar, so the Iraqis might have already fueled it.

Power the instruments, find out.

Hack turned to the power panel on the right and began walking himself through the checklist he’d repeated on the flight from KKMC to the Delta base.

Power, number one. Switches set, check them front to back.

He remembered Lieutenant Romochka Dmitri Krainiye, the Commie pilot who took him up at Kubinka. He had walked Hack through it step by step. Easy stuff.

They’d puffed that engine, though, starting off an external power source.

Do your best.

Hack looked at the voltmeter in front of his crotch.

He had a good battery. Hot shit.

What was next?

As his eyes rose across the rest of the instruments, he felt a twinge of vertigo, dizzy suddenly, the rush from the hangar catching up with him.

Do your best.

He remembered his dad saying that to him during a Little League game when he was walking to the plate, bases loaded.

He’s struck out.

Blinking and then rubbing his eyes, Hack stared at the gauge faces. He recognized the clock, an old-fashioned dial at the base of the panel. It was his anchor.

Compass at the top right. HUD, of course, slaved to the radar. Gear below it. Armament on his right — hard to reach in a dogfight, not natural.

No place for a critique, he told himself.

Fuel gauge was a bar indicator with a flow gauge on the right side of the central panel. He’d had trouble keeping track of it during his flight at Kubinka — you had to stare at the damned thing to figure it out.

No fuel.

“Do you have power?” asked Wong.

“Yeah. Needs fuel. Get us some juice. I can go!” he yelled to Wong, pushing up out of the seat. “Four thousand kilos, no more. The runway’s damn short and I need this plane light.”

Wong started to complain, but Hack pulled himself out, rolling off the plane to get the flight gear.

Flames licked out of the hangar.

He’d have to undress the dead pilot, use his own helmet.

Preston rolled over the side of the plane, intending to walk along the cowling. He slipped, plummeting right to the ground. He hit awkwardly, but kept his balance, running to the dead man as a Hog whipped overhead, fifty feet off the runway. The ground shook with a massive explosion. An arm caught him as he began to fall.

“The Iraqis are sending reinforcements,” said Captain Hawkins, pulling him up and yelling in his face as two Apaches crossed overhead. “Maybe tanks and helicopters. If you’re going, you better make it fast.”

CHAPTER 43

Skull banked his plane back south, cutting back over the line of hills that lay to the east of Splash. Smoke curled from a dozen places as he flew, the battle sorting itself into several messy knots.

Closest to him was the hangar and apron area, where he could see the MiG being worked on perhaps seventy yards from the hangar. A Pave Hawks at the edge of the runway; .50-caliber bullets spitting from its doorway. An RAF Chinook skittered from the hangar area toward the buildings on the northwestern end of the complex.

Apache gunships zipped around the buildings, peppering them and the surrounding emplacements with rockets and gunfire. Smoke furled everywhere, in every sort of permutation — gray wisps and thick black clouds, red-tinted mushrooms, and diaphanous white scarves.

The commandos had entered the buildings. From what Knowlington could decipher from the excited communications, neither team had found any trace of their quarry. The SAS men were using mobile infrared radar units and other detectors. To lessen the chance of hitting their own men, the Apaches were in direct communication with the helicopters, but the gunships were not exactly subtle — every so often their chins would erupt in smoke and blue flame, and part of the buildings would implode.

The F-16s, their services not needed for the initial assault, had diverted to nearby secondary targets, including a small ammo dump or bunker area just below the runway. They were already en route home, leaving three A-10s — Skull and his wingman Antman, along with Dixon — to cover contingencies. The scheduled escort flight of four Navy F-14s had been reduced to two, apparently because of mechanical problems, the planes had just relieved the F-15s and would remain to escort Hack and the MiG back.

As Skull banked west, he saw a glint on the road about ten miles away, up toward the river and the highly populated area. He told Dixon and Antman to stay in a wheeling orbit over the airfield, then nudged his stick. As he did, he noticed a cloud of dust where the highway should be.

Splash Controller came over the circuit, reporting that one of the Apaches had seen a column of vehicles and possibly a helicopter approaching. Someone else came on the line, ignoring the controller’s attempt to keep them quiet. By the time the circuit cleared, Skull had changed course and identified targets in the dust cloud:

A dozen vehicles, including at least three light tanks or self-propelled guns and a jeep, coming along the highway toward Splash.

“Add two transport helicopters,” Skull told the Splash controller as the helos caught up to the column.

They were at a very low altitude, slowing as they caught the column. Mi-8 Hips, probably, large transport types that occasionally carried rockets in side packs along the cabin.

Skull studied the area beyond the helicopters, expecting escorts or other Hips to appear. He suspected there would be more — an entire formation of Mi-8’s and Mi-24 Hind gunships and Fishbeds, everything Saddam could throw at them.

Nothing.

They’d have to swing with the highway at a bend three miles away. Get the lead vehicles there with Mavericks, while the F-14’s splashed the helicopters.

On beam for that.

“I’m at two o’clock,” Dixon snapped as Skull alerted his flight. “I have the Hip.”

“Negative. Let the Navy boys take the helicopters. Stand off and let them in,” Skull told him. “We’ll get the column as it clears that bend northeast of the airport.”

Devil Two swooped ahead, well out of formation.

“Dixon? What the hell are you doing,” Skull said, flipping the transmit button off quickly and listening for an answer.

“Dixon, you’re supposed to be east where I told you to orbit. Acknowledge. Dixon! Dixon!”

CHAPTER 44

The seeker head in the Hog’s Sidewinder misled growled at him, anxious to launch. It had locked on the helicopter’s hot turbine engines from nearly eight miles away — much too far to fire and guarantee a hit.

BJ had done this all before. He pushed on toward the Iraqi helicopter, keeping the large angled exhaust square in the middle of his windshield, a juicy target for his missile.

The helicopter skittered on oblivious to him, flanking a line of dark tan vehicles, dust billowing behind. BJ goosed his throttle. Barely twenty feet off the ground, he nudged over three hundred nautical miles an hour.

The Sidewinder’s growl deepened, its target getting tantalizing close — six miles, then five and a half, then five.

Something flared on his right, something on the ground firing at him. His helmet jangled with static, then a voice.

Knowlington, ordering him to stand down, to back off, get out of the way — a Tomcat was targeting the helicopters.

Static swallowed the voice, then silence replaced the static. The helo was dead on now, four miles away.

Dixon took a breath. He pushed the trigger and an AIM-9 whipped off the double launcher on his left wing tip. A string of smoke curled through the air as it nosed down toward the Hip, which jerked violently around, finally realizing it was in trouble.

Dixon watched as the missile sailed straight over the helicopter, flaring as it ignited in one of the vehicles beyond.

As he started to curse, he realized he was about to fly into the rising ground ahead. He pulled his stick back just enough to keep from scraping the sand, and at the same time reached to switch his selector to cannon. At inside two miles from his target he slammed his rudder hard, pushing the targeting cue dead onto the Hip’s tail. But the helicopter moved to his right, and Dixon was so low and had lost so much momentum, he found it difficult to stay with it. All he could do was take out another truck — he lit the Gat and erased a jeep, bullets pouncing on the soft metal of the vehicle’s body. He worked his rudder and slid his aim into the nose of a self-propelled gun, getting off a half-second burst before losing the angle and some of his altitude.

As he started to recover, the other helicopter appeared almost overhead; Dixon avoided the temptation to target it; the shot would have been nearly impossible and would have cost what little he had left of his momentum besides. He banked right, still picking up speed, and saw the helicopters off on his right — along with two dark hulls streaking to join them.

Not the F-14s, which must still be a good distance off. Not the other Hogs, which for a moment he’d lost track of

They were Hinds, serious gunfighters that carried anti-air missiles as well as ground attack weapons.

No match for a Hog, though. He’d proven that in the first days of the war.

Dixon put his nose toward the biggest shadow, still a good seven or eight miles off. The second Sidewinder, his last, growled from its wing-tip rail.

He waited ten long, long seconds, closing to inside five miles before firing. Then he lined up on the second gunship as it broke south, just out of range of his cannon.

A single word broke through the static in his helmet, as if it were fighting its way through the circuits and wires. Short and guttural, it had a sharp snap that could only come from Colonel Knowlington. Before the meaning of the actual word registered, Dixon knew it was a warning:

“Missile!”

CHAPTER 45

Becky Rosen bolted upright from the cot. It felt like stones had been placed on her body, heavy weights that made it difficult to move. The gray light turned purple and the warm air froze.

“BJ! BJ!” she shouted.

The empty tent remained silent, Slowly she caught her breath, senses returning to normal.

It was only a dream, she told herself, curling her arms across her breasts.

A dream, a bad dream.

Rosen started to pull the covers back over her, then realized she was late for duty and bolted from the bed, still feeling heavy weights damping her movements.

He’s okay, she told herself, pushing on her boots. She tried thinking of everything she had to do, tried imagining what she might have for breakfast, tried remembering her uncle’s junkyard, but the light in the tent remained a dark tinge, not unlike the color of dried blood.

CHAPTER 46

Skull fired the Maverick at the knot of men who had jumped from the truck to set up the shoulder-launched missiles. Something flared in the targeting screen just as the AGM launched; Knowlington punched the transmit button, barking another warning though he couldn’t be sure the Iraqis had actually fired a SAM. He caught a glimpse of Dixon’s Hog wheeling in the sky over the Iraqis eight miles ahead, then lost it. His attention was drawn back to the Maverick screen, where he had to target the lead vehicle in the convoy to stop it.

It was too late to do anything more for Dixon. The kid had left his butt wide open. Luck might save him, but it was too late for anything else.

Why the hell hadn’t he done what he was told?

Knowlington locked the AGM-65’s targeting cursor on the armored personnel carrier following the lead jeep, then fired. As the missile clunked off the rail, Antman said there were more helicopters coming almost due south from across the river, a bit over ten miles away.

Moving much faster than the others. Skull cut back, banking in a wide orbit south of the Iraqi convoy so he could sort out the situation. His wingman approached the convoy from the southwest; he reported that the colonel’s two missiles had hit their targets.

“Smoke and shit all over the place,” said the wingman.

“Column stopped?”

“Not all of it,” said Antman. “I have a good view of two tanks.”

“Get ‘em, then wheel back south. I’ll come up more or less in the same orbit. I’m on your back,” added Skull, pushing his Hog around to turn back north. He had two Mavericks and a pair of cluster-bombs left, along with his gun and the Sidewinders.

He watched a Maverick drop from Antman’s wing, fuming away. The Iraqis were still coming. The troop helicopters were still with them.

larger choppers were cutting a vector toward Splash, the helicopters now almost dead-on in Skull’s HUD.

The F-14’s were having trouble targeting the helicopters — they were apparently so low that even the vaunted long-range radars in the Tomcats couldn’t isolate them in the ground clutter.

The helicopters coming south were larger though much further away. He saw them as he began banking, spiders skipping over the ground, cutting a vector toward Splash.

Mi-24 Hinds. Deadly bastards that combined the firepower of Apaches with the troop carrying capability of Black Hawks.

So where the hell were the damn Tomcats?

And where was Dixon?

“Shit!” yelled Antman as something flared from the spider on the right. Steam erupted from the other helicopter, and red streaks filled the sky.

They were targeting the SAS team holding the highway with rockets and air-to-ground missiles.

There were a dozen men there, dug in maybe, but no match for the brawny helicopters.

Knowlington was just about ten miles from the helicopters. Out of range for the Sidewinders, even at their most optimistic.

Stinking helicopters ought to be out of range, too, but the bastards were really going at it, lighting their rockets now. The ground erupted with furious explosions.

Skull pushed his throttle, coaxing the Hog for more speed. His elbows sagged against his body, and his groin muscles cramped the Hind tracked toward their prey.

Was this why he’d taken the mission, his last mission: To go out a failure? To let his guys die?

Skull slammed his stick, angry at himself — not for failing, but for the bullshit self-pity. Remorse didn’t mean jack to the poor bastards on the ground; it was useless, as useless and ultimately destructive as drinking.

He was closing the distance but it wasn’t going to be enough. The Sidewinders had trouble spotting the baffled heat signatures of the gunships, especially with the rockets acting as decoys.

Skull glanced at the Maverick screen. The targeting cursor sat just under the fat rotor at the top of the helicopter on the right.

Nail it?

With an air-to-ground missile?

In range. And shit, the damn helicopter was only five hundred feet off the ground. It wasn’t going anywhere.

No way.

Mavs couldn’t be confused by the flairs, or ECMs for that matter.

No fucking way.

By the time the debate played out in Skull’s mind, he had already fired the first Maverick at the chopper. The second clicked off the rail for the other Hind a half-breath later.

The solid-propellant rocket motors that powered the two missiles had been designed for reliability and ease of handling; while they weren’t exactly slow, they propelled the AGMs at less than half the speed of a typical air-to-air missile. Likewise, the guidance system in the Mavericks had been optimized for its intended targets — tanks, which were rarely moving faster than thirty miles an hour, and were hardly ever found off the ground.

On the other hand, the Maverick’s guidance system might be rated more accurate than that of many missile systems, and once locked could not easily be confused. In fact, there was no reason — at least in theory — why the missiles could not hit something hovering aboveground, so long as it stayed more or less stationary.

Which the helicopters did, until nearly the last second.

The pilot in the second Hind realized the thick splinter on the right side of his cockpit glass was not a crack, but a missile coming for him. He wheeled his helicopter hard to the left, kicking flares and spinning his heat signature away.

The maneuver would have worked perfectly had Skull launched a Sidewinder. Here, the Maverick merely pushed its nose down a little steeper, slightly increasing the speed at which its three-hundred-pound payload smashed through the armored windscreen of the weapons-system operator’s cabin. The missile continued through at an angle, obliterating the crewman and carrying off a good hunk of the pilot’s control panel as it smashed its way out of the aircraft.

It did not explode, and in fact the Hind continued to fly, though now without the benefit of control. The chopper flopped straight up at its top speed of nearly 2,500 feet per minute. Its tail whipped around as the main blades pulled the craft onto its back. It stuttered for a second, drifting like a leaf caught in a steady wind. Then slowly it began to sink toward the earth, its tail circling as it plummeted with a fiery crash.

In contrast, the warhead on the second Maverick not only hit precisely where the targeting cursor had sent it, but detonated as well, obliterating the upper cabin area and engines and initiating a fireball that flashed over the entire helicopter. The flames continued to burn as the helo fell nearly straight downward, its charred skeleton neatly depositing its ashes in a small heap.

By that time, Knowlington had pushed east to drop his bombs on the elements of the Iraqi convoy that had managed to get around the vehicle he’d destroyed. He also realized why the Tomcats were late — they had just nailed a MiG-21 that had been scrambled to assist the Iraqi counter-attack.

What he didn’t know, though, was where Dixon was.

CHAPTER 47

Dixon hit his flares and dove for the desert, zigging hard enough to pull six or seven g’s as he tried to evade the shoulder-launched missile. It clawed for his tail like an animal groping in the dark: he flew like a machine, working the stick and rudder with sharp precision. He didn’t feel fear — he didn’t feel anything. He just flew.

A white cigarette sailed fifty yards from his canopy; he glanced at it, then bucked his nose in its direction and kicked out more flares, calculating that the Iraqis might have launched a pair of the missiles and the second would be closer to his tail.

They hadn’t had time. The first missile continued on, its self-destruct mechanism apparently defective. Dixon caught another glimpse of it arcing toward the line of gray buildings near the river. The Iraqis would undoubtedly blame the deaths it caused on the Americans, pretending that the Allies were targeting civilians with their weapons.

To Dixon, the distinctions between civilians and combatants no longer made any sense. There was only the war, only the job to be done. He pushed his Hog into a wide bank, reorienting himself. He’d flown far north; a sizeable Iraqi town was laid out below his right wing. A few days before on the ground, he had seen a similar town almost as if it were an isolated outpost in Wisconsin, where he’d grown up. Now he saw it merely as something he flew over, a place where an antiaircraft gun began lobbing shells behind him. Sighted manually and too light to be a threat, the gun’s bullets pointed him back toward his target.

The static in his radio flared again. It was another warning, this time from Coyote, the AWACS plane monitoring the section.

“Devil Two, break! Break! Break!” shouted the controller in hoarse voice as his words were once more consumed in a cacophony of electronic rustling. Dixon heard “MiG-21” and began tucking south, assuming that was the most logical direction the controller would have given him. As he made his cut, his warning gear tripped over an Iraqi Jay Bird radar, trying to get its sticky fingers on him. The warning cleared, but Dixon punched chaff anyway, rolling back toward the battlefield.

His headphones had gone quiet again. Neither Skull nor Antman answered his hail.

He looked over at the com panel. Something was definitely wrong with his radio; the staticky chatter that ordinarily provided background listening as he flew had faded into dead silence. He clicked through different frequencies, retrieving nothing. He switched back, broadcasting to Coyote, though he couldn’t be sure he was sending. Calm and slow, his voice nonetheless sounded strange inside his head, as if the radio’s failure had affected his own sense of hearing.

“Devil Two is experiencing radio problems. If you’re hearing me, I can transmit but not receive. Repeat, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

He clicked off the mike button, checking altitude and speed — 3,500 feet aboveground, level flight, 285 knots, nosing south by southwest. Splash was on his left; he had a straight line to the black smoke rising from the Iraqi column and the splashed helicopters. The ruined Hinds sat in heaps just before the highway. One of the transport helicopters, its rotors turning, was disgorging men near the wrecks. Beyond them, scattered near and on the road, were the Iraqi vehicles and troops that had been racing to Splash’s aid.

An A-10 dove toward the rear of the column. Bullets spewed from its mouth, red and gray and black lightning striking the earth. Steam hissed from the desert where it struck. A fireball followed, exploding about fifty feet off the ground as the Hog cleared and banked south. A few hundred yards away, an Iraqi helicopter — seemingly untouched, though it must have been targeted by a missile — rolled over in the air and folded into the ground, flames shooting out from the side.

Dixon repeated his can’t-hear-ya call on the squadron frequency, but again got no response. He checked his fuel situation, and saw that he was edging toward bingo, the magic point in his fuel tanks when it was time to head home.

Long way to go without a radio.

CHAPTER 48

Hawkins ducked as one of the Apaches flashed dangerously close overhead, hustling toward the escalating firefight out on the highway east of the airfield. Distant explosions shook the ground. The Pave Hawk that had deposited him circled back over the road below the southern end of the enemy base, the door gunner occasionally firing at the last defenders still holding out there.

One of the buildings the SAS had attacked had now been secured. The other was surrounded, and an SAS interpreter was trying to get the last defenders to surrender. The clipped radio communications gave no clue about the missing commandos they’d come for. The heavy resistance didn’t mean much, one way or another.

Burns and his men had found the Iraqi fuel truck without resistance. Failing to get it started, they’d pulled and pushed it out of its bunker by hand, muscling it across the runway. It was fully loaded and the going was excruciatingly slow.

Finally, Wong and Fernandez took the tractor they had used to pull the MiG and drove out to the fuel truck, wheeling behind it and pushing it toward the MiG. In the meantime, Eugene and Preston fussed around the plane, getting it ready and even trying to load a missile onto its wing.

They’re going to pull it off, Hawkins realized. Tight-assed Major Preston is actually going to fly the goddamn plane out of Iraq.

What in God’s name were the odds against that? Talk about stinkin’ luck.

Hot damn.

Something moved in the ditch beyond the runway apron beyond the MiG. The plane’s landing gear obscured it, made it invisible — but Hawkins was already running for it, his SAW tight against his side.

It took ten long strides to pull parallel with the nose of the MiG. Two more strides, three, and he had the top of the ditch in view.

Empty.

But he knew he hadn’t imagined it. He kept running. The truck, prodded unevenly by the tractor, heaved forward on his left. One of the British paratroopers coaxing it alongside was laughing. Burns was holding onto the door, talking with the driver, helping him steer.

Nothing in the ditch. Nothing.

But he hadn’t hallucinated.

He kept running, spotting another trench ten feet beyond the ditch, parallel to the runway.

Empty, except for three sacks of cement.

Men. A gun.

The SAW burst, then clicked clean. One of the bags of cement imploded. Burns fell off the truck.

The Iraqi at the far end of the trench stood with a long spear, jostling its pointed nose.

A javelin against a fuel truck?

Hawkins threw his empty gun away, still ten yards from the trench. One of the SAS men was grabbing for a weapon, but no one had started to fire.

Seven yards, five. Not a javelin, an RPG-7 or something similar. The Iraqi was screwing the propellant cylinder into the head, jamming it into the launcher muzzle, ramming it against the ground to steady his shot.

Hawkins screamed as he leapt into the ditch. A small bee whizzed over his head and another below his leg. The rocket flared inches from his eye. His right hand burned and something wet covered his face.

Then a fist punched him in the side. Hawkins threw his elbow in the direction of the blow, pushed up and saw a blur in the shape of a rifle about a foot from his belly. He lunged for it, falling over it and into the man holding it. Three bullets shot from the rifle as they struggled; Hawkins managed to push his body into the Iraqi, pinning him against the side of the dirt. He kicked his foot back as hard as he could, continuing until he could wrestle the gun free. He jerked it around and smashed it against the man he’d pinned, then sprung away, twisting to get his bearings. As he did, he saw a pipe roll from the top of the trench to the bottom near his foot.

By the time his conscious mind processed the fact that the pipe was not a pipe but a grenade, Hawkins had already grabbed hold of it. In the same motion he tossed it skyward. As it left his fingers he thought how incredibly lucky he must be that it hadn’t gone off.

Then he realized that he had thrown it in the direction of the tanker truck.

In the next moment, it exploded.

Hawkins had hunkered down, but could still feel the impact. Pieces of shrapnel and rock rained against the back of his body armor. He smashed his hand against the trench in anger, then rose, pushing away the body of a dead Iraqi that had fallen on top of him, struggling to see the runway.

The tanker sat in front of the MiG, thirty yards away, intact. With his customary presence of mind, Wong had continued pushing it forward, while Hawkins and the others had dealt with the Iraqis and their antitank weapon. The grenade had landed on the runway, but its shrapnel had missed the vehicles.

Not Burns, though. Hawkins pulled himself and walked to the SAS sergeant, whose body lay at the edge of the concrete. He’d been hit in the neck and legs and face; at least one of the holes had been caused by the Iraqi gunner and not the grenade, but it would have been difficult to tell which one was which. Hawkins knelt down. Burns lay face up. The flap of the sergeant’s breast pocket was open. Hawkins saw the back of the photograph Burns had shown him yesterday. Five kids and a wife, who thought an afternoon in an amusement park was the time of their lives.

They always would, now.

Blood trickled toward the photo. Hawkins reached down and took it out gingerly, holding it up as one of Burns’ men ran to him.

“Iraqis got him?” asked the man.

Hawkins just frowned at him, handing him the picture.

“Let’s get that fucking airplane the hell out of here!” Hawkins shouted, starting after the truck.

CHAPTER 49

Major Preston had just climbed back into the cockpit and turned to check where the fuel truck was when the grenade exploded. He ducked, losing his balance and nearly falling over the side. He slammed his side and back against a sharp piece of the fairing: hid kidney hurt so badly he through he’d been hit by the grenade. He crumpled against the seat, disoriented and confused, head swirling as if he’d taken nine or ten negative g’s. Somehow he got upright and tried to shake the black cowl away from his head. He didn’t dare look at his body, still thinking he’d been wounded by the exploding grenade.

I’ll fly no matter what, he thought to himself. He felt his side with his hands. His fingers slipped lightly over the fabric, then pushed against the folds, pressing finally against his back.

He hadn’t been hit.

The truck continued toward the plane. Hack climbed out of the cockpit to help refuel, extending his legs to the ladder. An Apache whipped overhead from the other side of the runway; for a second it looked like its skids would ram into the airplane. Hack ducked, cringing. The helicopter pulled away at the last instant and Hack tightened his grips as the wash rattled around him. He stepped back, toeing the step, then lost his balance as he tried to move too quickly to the ground.

He twisted as he fell, smashing his left wrist and hand against one of the ladder’s metal steps. A fresh burst of machine-gun fire somewhere nearby froze him, and once more he thought he’d been shot.

Pulling himself away from the ladder slowly, he felt punch drunk. A flash of queasiness hit his stomach. His left wrist hung off at an angle, a bone probably broken. The thin layer of flesh between his thumb and forefinger turned purple as he watched. The rest of his forearm quickly began to swell. The pain began to multiply wildly, a puff adder suddenly excited. The wound’s poison paralyzed him. Preston pushed his head down, flexing his shoulder and back muscles as if they might somehow take over for the injured bones and ligaments.

Then he forced himself to his feet and way from the plane, yelling to Wong and the others on the truck that they had to hurry. He turned toward the hangar, consumed with the next problem, flight gear.

He could wear his own speed suit with the fudged hose connectors his survival experts had supplied. But it would be infinitely better to take the gear the dead pilot was wearing.

Preston ran to the figure he had dragged from the hanger. He bent his head away from the mess that had been the man’s face, took a deep breath, and began to undress him.

Using only his right hand, he pulled off the bib-type outer flight suit. Despite the bloody crust, neither the bib nor the g suit below appeared damaged. The leg material was covered with dark black figures, a sort of freehand graffiti that seemed more like a superstitious scrawl than a mark of ownership.

Preston stopped and undid his own boots, then stripped to his cotton long johns. He tried to use his left hand to pull off the man’s boots, and his wrist throbbed so badly he ended up using his knees and even briefly his head for leverage as he finished stripping the Iraqi.

The back of the g suit was stained black. The pilot’s intestines had released a stream of shit as he died.

Hack pulled the suit away from the sodden underwear, gingerly rolling the pants legs up with his right hand before standing to slide them up. The Iraqi pilot had been about two inches shorter than Preston and five pounds lighter. The suit snugged very tightly in the groin, but the top fit well enough for him to move his shoulders freely. He pulled his boots back on, grabbed the mask he had found and left nearby, then took one last look at the helmet.

Broken beyond use.

He went to his bag and ripped it open, scooping out his own liner and helmet, fitting them on as he ran back toward the plane.

The explosions in the distance had stopped; so had most of the gunfire. He heard a few soft clicks as he snugged the helmet down — then nothing.

Eugene had placed the AA-11 antiair missile below the wing, but not attached it. Hack ran to the knot of men helping fuel the plane, pulling at one and then another before finding the RAG mechanic.

“The missile,” he yelled, pointing. “Get the missile on. It’ll help.”

Eugene shook his head and started to say something, but Preston pushed the mechanic in the direction of the weapon. “Do it! Do it!” he shouted, then ran around the front of the plane, to see if anything obvious was out of place. It wasn’t exactly an FAA inspection, but the plane was there, all there. He touched the afterburner nozzles, their gray housing designed to lower IR signatures, then ran around the tailplane, around the wing — navigation light cracked by shrapnel — and back to the ladder. Eugene was stooped under the wing examining the hard points, he had not mounted the missile.

“You need help? What?” Hack asked.

“The missile is irrelevant,” said Wong, pulling at Hack’s shoulder.

“Not to me,” said Hack.

A pair of Chinooks shot overhead, their heavy rotors shaking the earth. Wong started speaking nonetheless.

“It is an AA-7 Aphid, not an AA-11. The type is thoroughly understood. Even if we can install it, the missile will only add needlessly to your weight, and time is short. You won’t need it,” added Wong.

The captain was right.

“Is it fueled?”

“Four thousand kilos, as you directed. That will cut your range…”

“It’s fine. I’m not going to California.” Hack pushed the ladder back against the plane. His left wrist collapsed but he ignored the pain, shoving the ladder with his shoulder.

Wong helped, but grabbed Hack as he started up. “Your left hand?”

“Banged my wrist.”

“Can you fly?”

Hack shrugged. “Let’s see if I can get the damn thing started. Get the fuel truck out of the way.”

Still holding onto Hack’s flight vest, Wong put his other hand around Hack’s wrist and squeezed. Even if it hadn’t been injured, the pressure would have hurt — but Hack did his best not to acknowledge the pain. He pulled away and climbed the ladder.

By now the cockpit seemed almost familiar, the ten-degree-canted seat a favorite La-Z-Boy recliner. The parachute harness attached with a single clasp at the chest. Hack had trouble with it, struggling to position his body and cinch it at the same time. His left hand was so worthless, he kept it in his lap as he donned the oxygen mask and mad the connections on the left side of the cockpit. He checked the brake, took a breath, and began working through the engine start procedure.

Do your best.

His flight board. He didn’t have it.

Screw it now. He had to go, go, go.

Designed from the very beginning to work under primitive conditions, the MiG-29 had an admirably austere feel that would not go unappreciated by an A-10A aficionado. Though a completely different aircraft with an entirely different mission, the Fulcrum had also been engineered to rely on mechanical systems — not cutting-edge computers and fly-by-wire gizmos. One of those systems was the doors that closed off the engine inlets to avoid ingesting debris when taking off. Another was the auxiliary power unit, which sent a big breath of compressed air across the left Tumanski R33D turbofan, spinning until it coughed and clicked and surged.

And died.

If Hack’s left wrist hadn’t been sprained already, he would have sprained it when he slammed it against the throttle bar, pissed that he had come this far only to fail. He screamed the whole way through a second start sequence, but couldn’t get the engine to kick again — he had no power, in fact, on the panel.

From the beginning, he told himself. Start over. Slow.

He was already trying to think up a way to have the tractor puff the Tumanski when the plane’s auxiliary unit managed to wind the power plant with a small huff of air. This time it coughed loud and whirled into a steady roar, everything vibrating wildly.

Hack checked the rpm — sturdy, in the middle of the gauge, but what exactly was the spec?

He’d blanked, but the number didn’t matter. He got the next engine up anyway. The rumble was firm; there was no doubt he was in the green.

Was there?

The dials were all over the place — he was sitting in an F-15 with instruments from an A-10 that had been arranged by a schizophrenic engineer.

Weren’t all engineers schizophrenic?

Go over the restraints again, check the flight gear, don’t fuck up. Oxygen — something was wrong, because he wasn’t getting anything out of the mask.

As he leaned over to examine the panel near his left elbow, he realized for the first time that the hose had been split between one of the coils. He’d need to repair it. He pulled it apart, then saw it wasn’t just split; shrapnel or bullets had blown a series of holes clear through.

He could just tape it.

No time.

Fly low.

F-14s expected him at thirty thousand feet.

Tough shit on that. Stay at five thousand feet, lower.

Get nailed by antiair. Forget the Iraqis, the Allies would nail him.

He would fly low, though not quite so low as that; it made sense. But it didn’t make sense to fly without an oxygen mask since he had his own, even if its hose fitting was only a kludge. As the MiG shook against its brakes, Preston loosened his restraints and leaned over the side of the plane. Wong and Hawkins were standing a short distance away with another member of the Delta team, both trying to listen to a single com set.

“My bag!” he screamed. “My bag! My bag!”

They couldn’t hear him over the whine of the engines. Finally, Eugene saw him and ran over.

“My mask! My mask!” Preston shouted, holding up the mask he had taken from the Iraqis. “Get the whole bag! The whole bag! I want my board, too!”

Might as well.

“My bag! Shit!” he screamed.

The engines were too loud. Eugene ran to the get the ladder.

Hawkins and Wong finally glanced up.

“My bag!” Hack shouted to them. “I need the mask. And the board.”

Wong pointed to the far end of the runway. At first, Hack didn’t understand what the hell he was trying to tell him. Finally, he turned around.

One of the Chinooks had crashed there and was on fire.

CHAPTER 50

Devil Leader, this is Splash Control. Buildings are secure and exfiltration is beginning. We have another difficulty. Please acknowledge.”

Skull had just turned his nose back toward Splash. A billow of black smoke rose between two Apaches. One of the Chinooks had crashed after being hit by gunfire.

Knowlington listened to the terse explanation, then assured Splash Control that he would stay nearby in case he was needed.

He had his own problems, though. The Iraqi relief column had been neutralized. Three of the helicopters were burning on the ground and the fourth had scrambled away to the west. But Dixon was still lost and not answering hails.

As Skull tried to reach the AWACS to request a fix on his squadron mate, a dark wing crossed behind the smoke wisping from the carcass of a self-propelled fun at the far end of the highway. He clicked onto the squadron frequency, hailing Dixon and asking why the hell he hadn’t responded.

He didn’t get an answer.

“Antman, you see him?” Knowlington asked his wingman.

“Uh, I got him at, uh, call it five miles, four and a half. He’s heading south of the highway, just passing that open truck I hit with the gun.”

“I don’t think he has a radio,” Knowlington said. “Let’s catch up.”

“Four.”

The two Hogs spread out in the sky. Devil Leader looping ahead and Four angling tighter, aiming to make sure Dixon noticed at least one of them as he flew. Dixon saw Antman first, wagging his wings slightly, then starting to climb toward his altitude. By the time Skull swept back around and drew alongside, Antman had pulled close enough to use hand signals.

“Says he’s all right except for the radio, if I’m reading his sign language right,” said Antman. “Got to work on his penmanship.”

By even the most optimistic calculation, Dixon would be well into his reserve fuel by now. He had to get straight home, and he needed someone to run with him.

Skull knew it had to be Antman; there was no way he would leave the kid here to take out the MiG y himself. But shepherding a stricken Hog home wasn’t going to be a picnic either.

Antman was a good, decent pilot with a strong sense of what he was about. But he was still a kid. Dixon was still a kid. They’d have to fly more than two hundred miles before putting down; they’d have to do so over hostile territory at slow speed and relatively low altitude.

Knowlington wanted to go with them — not because he didn’t think they could do it, but because he felt as if his presence would somehow protect them, somehow balance against the unpredictable contingencies and chaos of war.

They weren’t kids, not really. But he felt as if he ought to be there to protect them.

Hubris. As if he were the omnipotent, not an old goat with eyes and hands that were steadily slowing.

But that was the way he felt. The closest thing he would ever feel to a paternal instinct.

“Dixon’s going to be low on fuel,” Knowlington told his wingman. “You take him south. I’ll hang back and cover Splash.”

“Check, six, Colonel,” said Antman, wishing him luck with the time-honored slogan of goodwill — and caution.

“Yeah,” Knowlington said. “Check six.”

CHAPTER 51

Dixon answered Antman’s thumbs-up with one of his own, then settled onto the course heading he had flashed with his fingers a few moments earlier. The other Hog edged further off his wing, though it remained so close that BJ thought Antman might be able to hear him if he popped the canopy up and yelled.

That was the kind of thing A-Bomb would suggest. Hell, it was the kind of thing A-Bomb might do.

O’Rourke was a damned good flight leader, Dixon thought as he matched Antman’s slow, steady climb toward the border. He’d laid out the mission well, kept BJ aware of the situation, responded to his own problems in a way that guaranteed the mission would succeed. He acted like a goof-off sometimes, but that was just an act.

The man William James Dixon truly admired was the old-dog colonel who’d put Antman on his wing as his personal guide dog. Knowlington was a gray-hair, but there he was, circling back to cover the Splash team, moving as methodically as a freshly refurbished grandfather clock.

Not long ago, Dixon figured that guys like Knowlington hung around either out of vanity or in hopes of catching an adrenaline rush. Now he realized it was neither. After a while, after you went through enough shit, you didn’t feel any more adrenaline — maybe you didn’t feel anything. You did your job, and you kept doing it because that was your job. If your job was the be the gray-haired geezer who knew everything, you did it.

And his job?

His job was to get home, to see Becky, feel her next to him.

As he passed through seven thousand feet, Dixon spotted a small group of clouds dead ahead. The furls on the left side reminded him of a kid’s face; it became impossible not to think of the boy who’d saved his life.

Why had the kid done it? Dixon had saved him a short while before, but still — to jump on a grenade?

The cloud disappeared as Dixon approached. Perhaps it hadn’t even been there at all, for the sky before him was about as clear as he’d ever seen in his life. The Iraqi desert, bleak and cold, spread out below him. A thick pall hung over the horizon to his left — oil fires in Kuwait, most likely. Antiair artillery rose up about a mile away, futilely searching the sky for something to hit.

Why was he here? He could have gone home to America. Knowlington and the others had made that clear.

The only answer Dixon had was the unlimited sky and the furling clouds on the ground, the feel of his fingers curling around his stick, the cold scratch of fatigue at his eyes. There were no answers to any of his questions about the kid, about his mother, about himself. There was just gravity and the force of the engines, pushing him along.

That, and the memory of Becky’s body folded against his.

BJ checked his instruments, then corrected slightly to keep in Antman’s close shadow.

CHAPTER 52

Math had never been among A-Bomb’s favorite subjects. While unable to avoid numbers, he nonetheless made it a practice whenever possible to treat them with the sort of disdain he might show a month-old French fry.

His loathing of basic arithmetic could not, however, alter the fact that his fuel gauge was taking a steady and dramatic plunge toward negative integers. And it didn’t take a quadratic equation to calculate that there was no way in hell that he was going to make it back to Saudi Arabia, much less the Home Drome, on his rapidly dwindling supply.

It didn’t make sense — he was flying on one engine and ought to be using a lot less fuel than normal, which meant the camel’s hump ought to be at least half full.

Unless, of course, some of those Iraqi gunners had managed to nick his fuel tanks just right. He had no warning lights. The plane seemed to be flying just fine. But there was no arguing with the fuel gauge; A-Bomb had to tank, and soon.

A pair of MH-130s had been tasked with refueling the helicopters. A Pave Low with a buddy pack was also part of the package as an emergency backup. Unfortunately, the drogue-and-basket system they used was incompatible with the boomer receptacle the Hog had in its nose. But as he glanced at his notes for the nearest tanker track, A-Bomb wondered if there might be some way to make the system work.

If the A-10 had only had an auto-pilot, he might have set it, then popped the canopy and crawled on the nose, stuffed the hose inside the open fuel door and told them to pump away.

Fortunately, Coyote, the AWACS controller monitoring the area, had a better idea.

“We have a KC-135 on an intercept to you,” said the controller. “Call sign is Budweiser.”

“What I am talking about,” said A-Bomb, though Budweiser’s position left him somewhat less enthusiastic — he’d have to climb ten thousand feet and jog sixty miles west to catch the straw. He turned onto the course, hoping for the best — and ignoring the math, which showed that even if he did manage the climb on one engine, he’d run out of fuel about the time the KC-135 came into sight.

Budweiser, fortunately, was a typical member of the tanker community, those unsung but well-hung fraternity of guys who never wanted anyone to go home thirsty. The crew had already touched the throttle to accelerate toward the stricken Hog, passing over enemy territory.

“Devil One, we understand you have a fuel emergency,” the pilot radioed as soon as A-Bomb dialed in the frequency. “State your situation.”

“Pretty much bone dry,” replied O’Rourke. “Got a problem with one of my sumps, it looks like. I think I’m leakin’ like a water bucket without a bottom. Worst thing is, I’m down to my last bag of Twizzlers.”

“This A-Bomb? Shit. I’m always bailing you out.”

“I was countin’ on it, Bobby,” A-Bomb told the pilot. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have let Saddam shoot-up the tanks.”

“Thought those Hogs were impenetrable.”

“What I’m talkin’ about,” answered A-Bomb. “But that don’t mean they don’t leak a little.”

“Stay on your course and altitude, we’ll come down to you,” said the pilot.

“Just what I like — a beer guy who delivers,” said A-Bomb. “And hey, you still owe me ten bucks from that poker game.”

“Watch it, or I’ll tell my boomer to miss on his first try,” joked the pilot, referring to the crewman who handled the refueling gear.

“Won’t work,” said A-Bomb. “I owe him fifty.”

CHAPTER 53

Skull lowered his head, giving himself a moment to gather himself under the guise of checking his map.

He was remembering a mission, flying a Phantom F-4E out of Alaska, where he’d intercepted a Tupolev Tu-95 Bear — standard Cold War show, part of an ongoing project at the time where each side tried to out-chicken the other. Except this one was different. The Bear was very low, under five thousand feet, and flying erratically. It failed to answer a hail, and as it approached American territory, Skull’s flight leader fired a warning shot over the nose — except he hit the plane.

The Bear abruptly banked and headed back to Russia.

Skull had thought the Russian pilot wanted to defect, not bomb LA or even Anchorage. He had mentioned the possibility to his flight leader as they closed on the lumbering bomber. There was certainly no pressing need to fire on the plane, much less to hit it, even if the damage was probably minimal.

But his boss got a promotion out of the incident, bumped directly to general and fast-tracked at the Pentagon after that. He retired as a three-star muckety-muck with serious industry connections, and now worked, if you could call it that, as a consultant and lobbyist.

Hack reminded him of the Phantom commander. In some ways, the comparison wasn’t fair — Preston’s record showed he was a much better pilot, and undoubtedly wouldn’t hit something he wanted to miss. But he had a knack for finding himself in the right place at the right time, and for making recklessness look good.

Recklessness? Was it reckless to try and pull off a major intelligence coup? Was the whole mission reckless?

It came down to your perspective. The strike at Son Tay, the POW camp in North Vietnam, had been bold, even though it came too late to actually rescue anyone. Eagles’ Claw, the aborted attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages under Carter, was scored by most people idiotic, solely because of the accident at Desert 1 that doomed the mission.

And Splash?

Knowlington tapped his map, then sat back upright. He was four miles south of the airstrip. He checked the position of the helicopters carefully as he pushed northward, making damn sure to stay out their way. The last Apache, its fuel reserves pushed to the max, flittered over the ruins of the smoldering hangar and headed south. Two Chinooks followed, leaving three others and the Pave Hawks hovering in various spots over the base perimeter.

Then there was the wrecked Chinook on the ground, sitting in front of the buildings the SAS commandos had raided. Her nose slanted into the cement, her cabin crushed; smoke wicked from the side.

The Fulcrum stood astride the ramp maybe a hundred yards from the head of the runway. The wrecked Chinook was situated in such a way that the plane might not be able to squeeze past. Even if it did, the runway didn’t look incredibly long; the downed chopper might make it impossible for Hack to get off.

No prisoners, no airplane. Downed helicopter, God knew how many casualties. Total wash.

Preston would come out of it okay. He had that air about him. Pentagon would want to know what the MiG looked like: he’d end up serving as some NATO liaison or something. Get his squadron command a few months after that.

He was getting that as soon as Skull got back to Home Drome.

They had given Hack a radio frequency to use to communicate with Allied planes, including Devil Flight, but it was clear when Skull snapped onto it. That wasn’t surprising — Preston was going to have his hands full just figuring out the flight controls, let alone the radio.

“Devil Leader to Splash Delta. What’s your situation?” he said, switching to the D team’s com frequency.

“Devil Leader, this is Hawkins. We’re about to leave with the package.”

“Acknowledged. Captain, can he get around the helicopter?”

“Not sure. He’s fueled. No radio, they’re saying. You need details?”

“No. Okay.”

As Knowlington banked south in a loose orbit parallel to the western perimeter of the base, he saw two more Chinooks take off south. Splash Controller came on to ask about his fuel situation.

“Within parameters,” Knowlington responded blandly. He was actually at bingo, but had plenty of reserves to play with. Besides, it was obvious from the other traffic that he was the last available allied air asset — several fighters were now being scrambled to chase an Iraqi making a dash to Iran further north, and a group of Tornados had just been diverted to raid a suspected Scud site. If Preston couldn’t take off, he had to smash the MiG.

He tried Hack again but got nothing. His RWR flickered with a warning. Either a GCI station far to the southeast had turned on briefly, or the equipment was just getting jittery from being north so long. In any event, the threat seemed nonexistent.

“Helis are coming out,” said Splash Control, acknowledging a transmission from the Chinooks. One of the Pave Lows hovered near the MiG, which was still sitting on the access ramp. Men were scurrying near it.

The AWACS controller warned that two more Iraqis were on the runway at an airfield further north, preparing to take off. The Tomcats would have to deal with them.

No escort for Hack.

Skull tucked back north, eying the obstructed runway. Takeoff distance was down to close to a thousand feet, maybe less.

No way, Skull thought. He slipped his finger edged across the cannon trigger, then began a wide bank to line up his shot.

CHAPTER 54

Hack watched the smoke pour from the rear motor of the helicopter, black furls leaking downward before dispersing sideways into a web of gray curlicues. Men were running furiously back and forth — the pilot and copilot actually seemed to have survived.

This damn close, he thought.

“Major! Major! What do you need?”

Hack jerked back around. Eugene had grabbed the flight bag and hauled it to the plane.

“My mask!” He mimed as he shouted, repeating the words. The British mechanic grabbed the mask and its hose and tossed it to him.

“The nozzle and the clamps!”

But Eugene had already realized he’d forgotten the adapter pieces and fished them out. Preston dropped one of the clamps, and had to wait for the mechanic to retrieve it from the ground.

He looked back at the helicopter. A fresh volley of flames shot from the rear. An orange fist rose from the spine and smashed downward, a full body slam that shattered the metal rivets and joints.

“My board!” Hack shouted, making a rectangle in the air. The mechanic fished it out.

Slapping it around his leg, he felt as if he was walking to the plate and someone told him he was going to knock it out of the park.

His dad. He had this nailed.

Hack reexamined the oxygen hookup on the left panel. The modified end of the mask hose, with its flexible tubing and hand-cut nozzle face, looked and felt a little like a vacuum cleaner tool, with a metal spring clamp embedded inside. It also seemed to be about the right size without adding the second, more elaborate, plastic adapter-ring assemblies and their clamps. Hack jammed the nozzle into the receptacle on the panel and felt it click home. He pulled at it. It stayed. Oxygen flowed through. When a second jostle didn’t disrupt the flow, he stowed the adapter in one of the bloodstained flaps in his pants. Then he turned to his attention to getting off the runway.

With his left wrist still not working, he tried nudging the throttles with his forearm and elbow, but couldn’t manage it. He had to reach across and push up the power with his right, the plane instantly jerking against her brakes, which someone had only partially set.

Hack’s right hand shook so badly as he grabbed for the stick, he had to wrap his left hand around it to keep it steady before the shock of pain reminded him of just how badly he’d hurt it. Somehow he managed to get the brakes completely off and began to steer the MiG down the apron, in the direction of the still-smoldering helicopter.

An Apache whipped across his path, hovering near the Chinook. The helicopter was several hundred yards away., but he was starting to move fairly quickly.

“Get out of my way!” yelled Hack. The gunship launched rockets into the hulk of the aircraft, apparently to finish off its destruction. A fireball shot from the front of the craft.

“I’m going to hit you, you asshole!” Hack shouted, knowing, of course, that no one could hear him. He reached for the brake. The Apache whipped away, and Hack grabbed the control stick again, his legs jelly as he slopped back and forth across the taxiway, the oscillations increasing despite his efforts to even them out.

Two modes, he remembered — the steering could be switched into a less sensitive setting.

Preston glanced down at the stick, looking briefly for the selector, but there was no way in the world he was screwing with that now. The end of the ramp was barely fifty feet ahead. He had to slide around precisely, cut the angle and get by the rear end of the burning helicopter.

If he went off the ramp he’d sink in the sand. He steadied his feet on the rudder pedals and leaned forward to get the pit of his stomach into his elbow, glancing at the knee board as he did.

“Just do your best!” he yelled. With every part of him jittering, he started the turn. The plane slid sideways as he pushed the stick, then jammed at the rudder. He felt a thump, knew he was off the concrete, and saw the back end of the Chinook looming on his right.

What a stinking green newbie idiotic jerkful dumbshit asshole fucked-up jackoff numbskull thing to do putting the stinking plane off the runway and losing fucking control before, before, before even taking off.

Numbskull. His dad used to say that.

The Fulcrum, its engines still set at seventy percent for ground idle and its canopy still wide open, plowed across the soft earth, but kept moving. The right wing nudged one of the bent rotors of the Chinook but cleared it without damage. The MiG hopped across a cluster of potholes, and began moving cockeyed down the short strip, her nose bent slightly downward.

Clear, Hack cinched the top. It moved painfully and slowly. He cursed himself for not having closed it earlier — he couldn’t afford to give up even a yard of takeoff distance. With the top still inches from slamming home, he pitched forward on the stick as slowly and deliberately as he could, though the movement was still fairly abrupt. The nudge sent the leading edge on the tailerons downward. As they angled, he took the stick with his injured wrist and tried closing his knees on it, holding it as best he could while reaching with his right hand for the throttle. He slid to full military power and then jammed to afterburner. The plane jerked forward, everything rushing now, the MiG veering right.

Hack grabbed the stick, holding the runway, calmer now, in control. He didn’t look at the sky, or the rapidly approaching gravel at the end of the runway. He ignored everything but the speedo, got 200 km on it, then eased his control column. The front wheel slapped into the stones and dirt, a cloud of debris coming off with him as the wheels whined and the wings groaned and the plane fluttered a moment. Hack was weightless, caught in the moment when the earth and sky balanced against each other too perfectly.

The nose of the plane slammed upward and the MiG rammed herself forward, jumping into the air like a sprinter bolting from the blocks. Hack felt the rush of speed as the engine doors opened, the need to protect against debris gone. The plane began to buck, her nose trying to slip out of his hand — but he steadied it. He began trimming, cleaning the airfoil, breathing regularly now through the oxygen mask, its fudged connector working without a leak. The pure air cured most of his aches and pains, even dulling the throb of his damaged wrist.

He backed the engines off, climbing steadily now, in control. Checking the ladder on the HUD, he took a moment to orient himself, get used to thinking in kilometers and kilograms.

Damn. Goddamn. Thirty minutes from now he was going to touch down a hero.

Hot shit. Not too much of a numbskull, after all.

His dad was going to be damn proud.

CHAPTER 55

Hawkins watched with the rest from the open door of the helicopter as the MiG rolled onto the runway and then raced toward the end, veering sharply upwards and then racing away.

“Shit yeah!” yelled Fernandez. “I knew he’d make it.”

The others were laughing and cheering. Hawkins pushed back into the helicopter, where he found Wong leaning against the wall, examining a diagram of the base drawn out on one of the satellite photos.

“You pulled it off,” Hawkins told his old friend. “Another medal.”

Wong looked up from the map and blinked twice, an owl surprised by a searchlight in the forest. Hawkins laughed so hard he nearly lost his balance.

“What?” asked Wong.

“Nothing, Bristol.” He looked back at his men, who were now settling in along the far side of the Pave Hawk. From their perspective, it had been a kick-ass mission — one enemy base neutralized, one front-line fighter stolen. Saddam had had his ass kicked, and his toilet paper stolen from his stall for good measure. The D boys were all wearing smiles, trying to tell stories over the steady beat of the MH-60’s rotors.

Things weren’t likely to be so light-hearted in the SAS choppers. Miraculously, the crew in the Chinook that had crashed had gotten out with only minor scratches. Still, the Brits had lost two men — Sergeant Burns and one of the paratroopers assaulting the buildings. There had been maybe a half-dozen wounded besides. More importantly, the captured SAS men hadn’t been found.

Two men, a helicopter. Even without the hijacking of the MiG, the general commanding the operation would no doubt consider the losses acceptable, given their objective. You took care of your own, no matter the odds or circumstance.

Hawkins agreed with that. But Burns hadn’t died in the assault on the buildings. He’d been killed getting the plane, maybe by Hawkins himself. The plane wasn’t worth a man’s death. Wong himself said the West already knew a great deal about the fighters.

But they were all going to look like heroes, Hawkins especially.

Fernandez said something and everyone around him, even Eugene, laughed. As Hawkins leaned toward them to catch what it was, Wong grabbed his arm, pulling him with him as he leaned into the cockpit area and peered through the front glass.

“What’s up?” Hawkins yelled to him.

The Air Force intelligence officer ignored the question, pointing back to the east and yelling at the pilot. The Pave Hawk helicopter pilot pitched the helicopter back toward the southern edge of the base.

“What’s the story, Bristol?” Hawkins yelled as Wong slipped over to the window next to the Minimi gunner.

“The bunker area south of the base,” said Wong.

“Yeah? We pinned them down but left them. They were too far to bother us, and across a minefield.”

“Why were there soldiers there?” said Wong. “Why so far from the area of importance when they could not expect an attack by land? The bunkers, well hidden — what do they hold?”

He handed Hawkins the sketch he’d been examining before. Hawkins stared at the area Wong had referred to, but saw nothing.

“Bombs?”

“Too far away.” Wong pointed. “Buzz that gully there, running south from the road. There is another bunker there.”

“What?”

Wong frowned, then pushed past to talk to the pilot. Hawkins put his head to the window.

Dead Iraqis lay in the distance, slumped behind the meager defensive posts they had manned. The base lay well beyond them, the smoke now thinning.

A scratch road, no more than a trail in the desert, ran along the perimeter of the base, linking the defensive posts. It jogged south at a point parallel to the southwest corner of the airstrip, running to a small circle in front of a bunker. Calling the dug-in position a bunker was giving it a status it didn’t deserve — it was more like a tarped lean-to, and a small one at that.

There were footprints in the sand near it, though, a lot of footprints. As he stared at them, Hawkins realized that there was another bunker there, this one an actual concrete structure hidden by the sand.

“The guns, man the guns!” he shouted. “Yo, get your weapons. Wake up! Wake up!”

A figure popped out of the bunker, then another, and another. The .50 caliber gunner took aim.

“No,” said Wong, grabbing the man. “They’re surrendering.”

Wong was right. Six Iraqis came out of the bunker in the desert, waving white and tan shirts.

Two other figures came out behind him.

The paratroopers, who had now reversed roles with their captors. They motioned at the Iraqis, and all six of the soldiers dropped to their stomachs, hands on the backs of their heads.

“Holy shit fuck,” said Fernandez. Hawkins had to grab him to keep him from leaping from the helicopter. They were still a good fifty feet off the ground.

“Obviously not Republican Guards,” said Wong, who seemed disappointed. “We may have to call for help to take the prisoners,” he added. “There won’t be room.”

“I think we can manage to squeeze the bastards in,” said Hawkins, far from disappointed. “I think we can manage very well.”

CHAPTER 56

Skull had run ahead of the MiG as Hack took off, but the Mikohyan made up the distance quickly, climbing upwards faster than the A-10 could go in level flight. The last of the helicopters cleared off the ground a few seconds later. Skull’s job there was done.

He tracked onto the MiG’s trail, intending to run behind until the backup escorts caught Hack. In the meantime, he gave the AWACS a good read on its location and direction, relaying the fact that “Splash Bird” had no radio communications.

“Devil Leader, be advised Vapor Flight has been diverted,” added the controller. He told Knowlington that not only the F-14’s but the backup flight of F-15C’s had now been vectored north in an attempt to splash Iraqi MiGs. A pair of F-16s were being pressed into service as guard dogs for the helicopters, which were now clear of Splash and flying to the west.

Coyote asked Skull to hang on with Preston as long as he could. “Mirage 2000s’s en route, call sign Jacques. Should meet you near the border. Request you hold your present course until they arrive.”

“The escort is French?”

“They speak English,” snapped the controller before giving him their frequency and contact information.

Skull took down the data, then clicked into the Frenchies’ circuit, but couldn’t pick them up. The planes flew out of Bahrain and were still a good distance away; even optimistically, they wouldn’t be within radar range for at least ten minutes.

The AWACS had alerted the Allied fighters to the fact that the MiG running south was on their side. The controller assured Skull he’d broadcast updates on its position, as well as warn anything that came close. At the moment though, Skull was the only plane even near him.

Near, being an extremely relative term, as was evident by the controller’s fix. Hack was twenty miles ahead and pulling away.

“Still climbing,” said the controller.

“Thirty angels was briefed,” Hack reminded Coyote. They had set thirty thousand feet for the egress to lessen the possibility of getting nailed by gunfire or pursuers, but the relatively high altitude was a problem for Skull. The Hog’s engines whined just clearing fifteen thousand feet. Thirty thousand feet might very well be a world altitude record for a Hog.

Maybe Hack would bring it down a bit when he realized the pointy-noses had missed the rendezvous. Hopefully, he’d at least slow down.

Preston would be okay as a commander. He would come off as too arrogant, a bit to stuck up — but hell, after this, he’d have the bona fides. Show down one MiG, stole another. People would line up to serve with him.

Preston would be too famous for a Warthog squadron. Hog drivers were blue-collar workers, lunch-pail guys who took the bus to work, not a limousine.

Was that what Skull would do now? Take a bus to work? Where the hell would he work? What would he do?

Did he really have to resign? Should he resign? If he never took another drink — if he never needed another drink?

Bullshit. He’d always need another drink. Always. That was a fact of life.

But what had his sister said?

“So you’re going to quit?”

“I don’t want to hurt these kids.”

“And you wouldn’t be hurting them by quitting?”

“I’m not quitting.”

He was. It wasn’t exactly running away, and it wasn’t like there weren’t plenty of other guys, plenty, who could take over for him. A lot of them could do better, even if he wasn’t hitting the booze.

Maybe. Maybe not.

That was beside the point. You could always find someone better. And worse, for that matter.

The point was: What should he do?

Walk away. Give up.

Such a loaded phrase. Better to say retire.

Prospective again.

Maybe it was better that he hadn’t bought it. He was walking away while he could still walk. He didn’t have a death wish after all: that wasn’t what the drinking was all about.

Somehow that seemed reassuring as he pushed the throttle for more speed, trying to catch the MiG’s thinning contrail.

CHAPTER 57

Hack backed off the throttle gingerly. He still used his right hand, though the pain had gone down quite a bit in his left; he could now manage a fair amount of pressure on the stick with it, his hands crossed awkwardly.

He flexed his left thumb as he grabbed the stick back with his right hand. The thumb itself seemed okay. Maybe that meant the injury was only a bad sprain, not a break.

As if the exact injury would make any difference at all. He switched the stick back to his left hand, working like a contortionist as he reached for the HUD controls, hoping to knock down the ambient light. He had his radar on, though the selectors were both unfamiliar and balky.

The F-14s still hadn’t shown themselves. Granted, he was much lower than planned, only twenty thousand feet. He didn’t want to go any higher with the fudged oxygen connector, though it seemed to be working fine. The radar ought to make it easier for them to find him, even if he wouldn’t work it well enough to find them.

Of course, it would also mean that other Allied aircraft could see him and possibly think he was an enemy plane.

Not if the AWACS was doing its job.

But was the radar working? The display was clean.

That couldn’t be true, damn it. Did he have it on?

Hack fiddled with it some more, but finally gave up. He looked at the MiG’s RWR in the bottom right-hand corner of the dash, just above his right knee. Similar to many Western units, the display was dominated by a crude outline of the aircraft. An “enemy” radar would set off the bottom row of threat lights and then touch off LEDS indicating distance, bearing, and type indicators around the shadow of the plane in the dial.

Never before in his life had Hack wished for a threat indicator to flash.

There should be a pair of F-14s. If they were tangled or diverted, two F-15s would take their place. So where the hell were they?

He wasn’t sure about the Navy guys, but he knew the Air Force pilots would be smart enough to come look for him if they couldn’t find him at thirty thousand feet. Surely someone had told them that he’d gotten off by now; surely the AWACS had seen him get off the ground.

Hopefully Eugene had told them about the mask. Wong would know that was significant.

How many stinking MiGs could there be in the air anyway? On this course? Hell, they’d be all over him if he was a real Iraqi.

Hack laughed. He started an instrument check, looking first at the radar warning receiver. The location of the RWR was not the best, though admittedly a pilot who actually belonged in the plane wouldn’t have to spend much time staring at it till necessary — as with Western models, an alarm tone would alert him that he was being scanned. Not having the proper helmet gear had deprived him of that capability, along with the radio.

He worked across the unfamiliarly panel, eyes flitting back and forth because the instruments were in unfamiliar places.

Otherwise he was doing fine. Burning through too much fuel, maybe, but fine.

The ladder gauge on the fuel flow device was confusing as hell. He’d taken off with four thousand kilos, now had 3,800.

No. 2,800.

Had to be closer to 3,500.

Yes. No more than five hundred pounds to get into the air. They’d gone over that.

Five hundred kilos. Rough one thousand kilos translated into a little more than fifty nautical miles of flight, with a bit of reserve. So with about 150 miles to go, he had plenty to spare.

About 150 miles? No he was further along, much further along. He ought to be in Saudi Arabia any minute.

No. Time was compressing. He’d only just taken off.

When?”

He glanced at his watch. He’d forgotten to set it when he took off.

Now that was a numbskull move.

Hack tapped the throttles back, slowing his airspeed. The poorly designed instrument layout kept tripping him up. He had to look on the left side to get his attitude indicator, one of the most basic checks since it told him whether he was flying right side up or not. Then he had to cross back to the right to check the engines, then go up to the middle of the panel to check compass and navigation. The vertical velocity indicators were also on the right side, turning his usual across the board sweep into a swirling zigzag back and forth across the old-style instrument panel. Too many passes too quickly, he thought, and his head would be spinning.

No need for that. Just truck home. Go south, look for the big ditch, turn left fifty degrees. KKMC would be that big smudge in the center of the windscreen.

Nice if the Tomcats would show up right about now.

Hack glanced down at his knee board. The top page had notes on his contact frequencies. He didn’t need them now — the radio was useless. Nor was the map on the next page of much use, nor the Western coordinates for his course, nor the notes he’d scribbled about some of the instrument settings. But he glanced at the board anyway. Just habit. Reassuring somehow.

Hack had six thousand meters on his altimeter — just over twenty thousand feet, with a forward air speed of 675 kilometers an hour; a bit over 350 knots. He had the heading they had briefed, but he was much lower and going fifty knots faster than they had set out. He eased back on the throttle again, the plane jerking slightly as he fumbled.

If the Tomcats weren’t here and the Eagles weren’t here, something must have happened.

Maybe Saddam had scrambled someone to catch him.

Skull and the others would be sitting ducks in their slow-moving A-10s.

Not his problem.

They were his guys, though. He had to help them. He had the cannon, if nothing else.

Did he even have that?

The armament panel was on the right side at his elbow. Neither of his Western sources had touched on it, but Harry and he had discussed cannon shots at length before taking off a year ago.

Huge slugs. Had to slow down to use the gun. Bitch of a targeting computer. You had to get really close to fire, and hit the speed brakes if you were moving over four hundred knots.

Four hundred klicks maybe? But that was really slow, much too slow.

He did remember the procedure for arming the gun — the HUD flashed into gun mode.

Hack killed it. He had to fly onto to Saudi Arabia. That was his job.”

Let his guys go down?

That he couldn’t do.

Hack hesitated for a moment, then pushed against the stick. It took more effort than in the F-15 to start a turn, but less than in a Hog.

CHAPTER 58

Skull tore his eyes away from the canopy glass as the RWR began to bleat. A Slot-Back radar was looking for him twenty miles ahead, at roughly twenty thousand feet.

Either Hack had just turned around, or Saddam had somehow managed to get a MiG in the air without telling anyone.

“Coyote, this is Devil One. Splash MiG has turned back in my direction.”

“Coyote confirms,” snapped the voice from the AWACS. It was older and sharper than before — the sergeant he’d been talking to had been replaced by the officer in charge. “What’s our boy up to?”

“I believe he’s looking for me,” Skull said. “How are our escorts?”

“Still approaching.”

Knowlington clicked back on to the French frequency and tried his hail again. This time he got a response.

“Jacques One reads you, Devil Leaders,” said the French pilot, giving his position. They were a little over eighty miles away, descending from thirty thousand feet.

“I have a visual on Splash Bird. I make him twelve miles away, he’s descending a little, but still around twenty thousand feet.”

“Twelve miles away, and you have a visual?”

“I eat a lot of carrots,” said Knowlington. Despite the immense distance, he knew he saw the MiG.

Maybe his eyes weren’t aging at all. He pushed his nose up but kept his course steady, feeling a bit like an old-fashioned commuter train chugging along as the express raced by.

So why the hell had Hack turned around? He was maybe five minutes from the border. The MiG didn’t carry all that much fuel.

Probably he had realized the wires were crossed on the escorts and decided to look for Skull. Without a radio, he might worry that he wouldn’t get clearance to land at KKMC. He’d know what he was doing fuel-wise.

Idiot was probably worried about him. Shit.

He’d have done the same thing.

“Devil Leader, Splash reports two packages aboard along with prisoners. The entire family is headed home,” said the AWACS controller. “Thought you’d like to know.”

“Devil Leader acknowledges,” said Skull, taken by surprise.

Had they gone back and found them? Who? Wong and Hawkins and the D boys were the last to leave; he’d heard them clear the base himself.

Wong.

“Well done,” added the controller.

Knowlington didn’t respond. Congratulations always waited until you touched down and stowed your gear. That wasn’t superstition; it was experience, hard-earned.

But. But. Hell of a way to go out. Last mission — recovered two lost SAS men, stole an Iraqi MiG.

Stole an Iraqi MiG. You couldn’t top that.

Skull glanced up and saw the Mikoyan continuing toward him. Its nose rode up at a slight angle, and the wings tucked up and down, as if she were a bronco and Hack a cowboy trying to break her.

Knowlington put the Hog on her side, showing his belly to the approaching plane.

Here I am, you son of a bitch,” he said. “Come on, Hack. Let’s go home.”

CHAPTER 59

Hack bounced the radar controls back and forth, trying to cajole the radar into action. He’d hit the buttons, then jerk his head back up and grab the control column, nervous about taking his attention off the sky for too long.

He ought to be able to see the Hogs, at least. And any Iraqis coming for them.

The smoke from Splash — he hoped it was Splash — filled a small finger of the hazy horizon in the lower left quadrant of his windscreen. His eyes hunted for a black stick in the mist, or a glint, or anything moving.

Turning back was dumb. He was eating up fuel.

Although not according to the gauge. Three hundred kilos for takeoff, only two hundred since then. Much better than expected.

And it was all flowing fine. Forget the gauge — he could hear the engines humming.

Go by time in the air. Forget the tanks, he told himself.

He glanced at his watch.

Twenty-five mini-minutes after the hour.

Mini-minutes. What a joke.

Wisdom and folly, folly and wisdom. It depended on who was making the interpretation.

They were going to think he was very, very wise after this.

A black bird flapped in the sky below him, rolling its wings before belly flopping down.

One of his Hogs.

About time. Hack banked, turning the MiG back toward Saudi Arabia. She had a tight turn — he could feel the g’s popping him in the chest, even with the suit.

Too bad for the Iraqi pilot. Might have been interesting if they had captured him alive, gotten him to talk to them.

Hack hadn’t been thinking of that in the hangar. Wong had mentioned it as a possibility before.

Wong. What a character.

Hack glanced at his watch. It was still 7:25 A.M. Had it stopped?

No. Time was just moving very slowly. He must not be having any fun.

His left arm jerked upward, the wrist and forearm muscles spasming. Hack stared at them as if they belonged to a creature that had somehow invaded the cockpit from a cheap sci-fi movie. Finally he put his hand back down on the throttle, slowly palming the thick level.

Time to go home. His legs and arms and head were heavy as hell.

So were his eyes.

Jesus, he was tired. Normally, Hack carried a small packet of amphetamines in one of his small flap pockets. While he loathed using them — had in fact never used them — he reached down now, afraid he wouldn’t be quite up to the demanding task of landing the unfamiliar plane without them.

He tapped his fingers against his leg, then felt a wave of disorienting panic — the pocket with the pills wasn’t there.

He’d forgotten he was wearing the Iraqi gear.

The Hog was on his right, climbing through maybe fifteen thousand feet, struggling to reach his altitude. Hogs were great at everything except climbing.

The MiG jerked sharply to the left, plunging downwards as its wing tipped toward the ground. Hack’s head floated somewhere above his body as warning lights flashed. As his lungs gasped, he stared at the dials, unsure what had happened.

Fuel. He was out of fuel.

Fuel?

No, the RPM gauge indicated that the left engine had stopped working.

Hack struggled to clear his head, struggled simply to breathe. His hands seemed to work on their own, stabilizing the MiG as if fell through sixteen thousand feet, grabbing it by its bootstraps.

Restart, he told himself. Go.

His fingers fumbled; his brain stuck in a block of plastic, unable to communicate with the rest of his body.

The fuel flow. What was the stinking gauge saying?

Why was he so concerned with fuel? He had plenty — just go for the start.

The engine rumbled, seemingly on its own. Hack tried to calm his breathing, pulling the MiG back level. Knowlington had swooped on his right, trying to close up the distance. Hack gave him a thumbs-up but was too busy to try any other hand signals.

Both of his briefers had said the Mikoyan never flamed out, and if it did, it would be easy to keep from spinning.

Easy for them to say.

Forget that. Both power plants were working now.

He’d been doing nothing that should have given the engines trouble. More than likely, the problem was a result of crappy Iraqi maintenance, not his flying — hardly reassuring. Hack gingerly pulled back on the control column, leveling off at 4,500 meters, roughly fifteen thousand feet.

Fifteen thousand white-robed angels, fluttering in the sky.

He glanced at the yellow handles beneath his leg. The seat would save him, but damn, no way he was going out now. Not this close. They couldn’t be more than two minutes from the border.

The RWR lights blinked on.

Two contacts, on his left wing. The lights’ colors would have given him more information, but he couldn’t remember the code.

Had to be friendlies. Where the hell was his Hog?

On his right, maybe a hundred yards away. Knowlington.

It would be Knowlington, that son of a bitch. He was an alky in D.C., but here, damn it, here he was a hero. Couldn’t ask for a better commander or wing mate.

Jesus, his head hurt. He blew a wad of air into his mask. Sky was dark.

Fifteen thousand feet. Damn low. The lowest he’d ever flown.

High for a Hog driver.

His head felt too light. The amphetamine had kicked in.

He hadn’t taken the amphetamine.

Oxygen, numbskull.

Problem with the oxygen.

You’re hyperventilating.

CHAPTER 60

Skull pushed his nose level as Hack knifed downward on his left wing, slinging the MiG nearly parallel to him. It was a nice piece of flying, actually, thought for a moment if seemed as if the MiG’s engines had flamed, the plane stuttering in the sky.

“Jacques One to Devil Flight, we are advised that you and your friend are now on course.”

“Devil One. Affirmative. You still don’t have us on radar?”

“Negative,” said the Frenchman, whose accent sounded slightly British. In any event, his voice was clear and crisp. “We should be within radar range shortly.”

The French warplanes were equipped with a pulse-Doppler unit that was supposed to be able to pick up targets from outside fifty miles. But the specs were proving too optimistic: the AWACS commander told Knowlington they were now within forty miles, and he should correct due south five degrees if possible to complete their intercept.

“Hang with me, Hack,” said Skull, turning to eye his silent wingman. He waved again, trying to signal the course adjustment and that the Mirages were ahead, but Preston’s eyes remained fixed dead ahead.

“Won’t be long now,” he said, checking his position against the map. He made it five minutes to the border.

The MiG spurted ahead as Skull made his adjustments. Coyote asked for a situation report, and Skull told him they were still looking for the Mirages.

“You have clear skies to Emerald City,” said the supervisor, sounding jaunty — or at least jaunty for an AWACS controller. This was one mission no one was going to forget. “How’s his fuel?”

“No way of knowing,” replied Skull. “Maybe tight, maybe not.”

“You’re over Saudi territory. Anything happens and he wants to bail, he’s safe,” said Coyote. “Half the Air Force’ll be there to grab him.”

“Thanks.”

“Affirmative.”

No way Hack would bail now, thought Skull. He pushed his throttle, trying to keep up.

CHAPTER 61

The MiG’s altimeter pegged 4,800 kilometers. He’d never gone over 6,5000 klicks, which was about twenty thousand. Too low for him to suffer decompression problems — in theory.

But when Hack looked at the panel, he saw that not only wasn’t his oxygen hose snugged, it wasn’t in at all. He must have pulled it out at some point, probably twisting his arms across his body. He’d been hyperventilating for God knows how long. No wonder he thought everything was a joke.

Preston reached over to the panel, angry that he’d let himself get tripped up by something so simple. He shouldn’t even need oxygen here. This was a Sunday drive. All he had to do was breathe slow and easy.

His wrist gave way as he touched the nozzle end and shrieked with pain. He pushed back in the seat, gathered himself, made sure the MiG was flying all right, then did his instrument check. Finally, he reached across to push the nozzle in with his right hand.

The left engine picked that moment to quit again. But this time, the right engine joined it.

Hack slammed the tube adaptor home. Then he grabbed the stick, pulling back in an attempt to stop the MiG from entering a dive. Realizing he’d pulled too hard, he eased off. Two full, clean breaths of pure oxygen later, the black haze that had been slowly strangling his brain melted away.

Hack began working through the restart procedure, fingers fumbling against the panel on the right side of the cockpit as he tried to hold the control column with his left hand. But the buffeting against the hydraulic controls was too much for his injured wrist, and the plane jerked from his weakened fingers

He grabbed for the stick with his right hand. As he did so, his gaze fell on the fuel gauges, and he realized that he had been misreading the indicators from the start.

The engines hadn’t stalled. They’d run out of fuel. The flow seemed to be restricted somehow, but at this point, he no longer trusted the indicators or his ability to read the gauges.

And in any event, it was rapidly becoming academic.

The plane yawed sharply to the left, fighting the stick. He was losing altitude fast.

He calculated what he had to do: keep his hand on the stick, get the plane stable, then play with the fuel selectors and try to restart.

Glide you son of a bitch. Glide!

He got the wings even, got the nose almost level. He gave a push against the stick, nudged his left elbow there, holding the plane as he tried to restart the engines.

But it was too much to do with only one good arm.

Out! Out! I have to get out.

Out!

Fuck that. Not now.

Restart. There had to be fuel in the damn thing. Switch the tanks. Get into the sumps.

You’re not flying a Hog.

Out! Out! Level the wings and get out!

Just out!

His body seemed to spin from inside his spine. His stomach pushed out through the flightsuit, past the restraints. His left hand screamed with pain and his legs were being pushed against the seat.

The handle, pull the handle.

He already had. The canopy failed to clear but Hack shot through it anyway, propelled like a human cannon ball from the plane as it turned upside down. He was shooting toward the ground faster than the speed of sound, yanking around as the seat did its magic, the world a complete blurry rush. He remembered his father, saw him now smiling at him when he was nine, a Little League game.

“Hey dad, I hit a home run. I hit a home run.”

And then the strap from the Iraqi pilot’s suit, which had been ever so slightly torn by the shrapnel from the grenade that killed its owner, gave way.

CHAPTER 62

The crash happened so quickly that Skull didn’t realize what was going on until the MiG started to spin.

The way he saw it, the way he would tell it to the investigators later, both engines quit at the same time. The plane edged down, then one of the power plants caught again, hard, exploding as if the afterburner suddenly slammed on, sending the plane into an uncontrollable yaw.

Until that moment, Hack had probably figured he could control it. That was the kind of guy he was — he didn’t give up and was cocky enough to figure he could work himself out of any jam.

But everyone has his limits. Hack must have gone for the handles. The canopy didn’t come off, but the seat sure came out, flying almost straight down. Skull started to bank, keeping one eye on the MiG which was now pirouetting not fifty yards from him.

Knowlington saw, or thought he saw, the chute to the seat open. Debris was in the air, or at least he thought he saw debris, or just sensed there was something. Pulling up on his stick, he tried to stay clear.

He circled back, dropping low and slow. By that time, the parachute was skittering along the ground, crazy-curled by the wind.

Skull spotted the seat, and then saw Preston, who ought to have released the chute, who ought to have been standing there, probably kicking the desert because he had been so God damn close, so stinking damn close, to hitting a grand slam, landing an Iraqi MiG back on a U.S. base for all the world to see.

But he wasn’t. Preston was lying in the sand, his body crumpled. It didn’t take more than a single pass to know he was dead.