Going Deep

CHAPTER 1

“Get into the damn cursor now!” Doberman shouted at the fuzzy shadow in the corner of his infrared targeting screen. He pushed all of his 120 pounds into the A-lOA’s seat harness, as if his body’s momentum might somehow improve his aim — or help hold the target steady. But the huge dish of the Iraqi ground intercept radar station continued to slosh around in the screen, refusing to lock. Doberman blamed the wind and clouds, cursed his adrenaline, and kept his hands glued to the controls as he pushed below twelve thousand feet, his only aim in life to blow a good hunk of Iraqi early-warning hardware to Hell where it belonged.

Outside the bubble cockpit, Devil Two’s straight, stubby wings cut through the thick air, balanced perfectly by several thousand pounds of ordinance. The Hog’s twin GE TF34 turbofans, mounted above the fuselage like Flash Gordon’s rocket pack, pushed the nose of the dark green warplane faster and faster toward the gristly sand of the desert.

From a distance, the A-10A looked a bit like a winged pickup truck headed for disaster.

Up close, it looked like a weathered two-by-four loaded for bear.

Inside the cockpit, Captain Thomas “Doberman” Glenon narrowed his eyes until he saw only the television screen in the top right-hand corner of his instrument panel. Slaved to the infra-red seeking device in the nose of his air-to-ground Maverick G missile, the display provided the pilot with a heat picture of the ground below him. Finally, it glowed radar dish; he locked, drew a half-breath, and clicked the trigger. Devil Two kicked slightly as the missile whipped out from beneath her wing. The pilot caught a glimpse of the Maverick’s exhaust and stared at it, momentarily entranced by his first launch in combat. He snapped back to attention, thumbed another missile up, and pointed the A-lOA’s nose in the direction of what ought to be a long metal trailer jammed with radar equipment. He launched, then rolled up another one.

No matter how much you trained for combat, no matter how refined the lines and arrows on the maps, real life blurred past you like a freight train flinging itself down a ravine. Doberman barely realized what he was doing, pushing buttons and talking to himself, searching his front windscreen for his second target. Forever and forever passed. Every curse known to man failed to get the stinking thing to show up. Altitude kept bleeding away. Doberman mashed his teeth together, his face gnarling into the unflattering pose that had helped earn him his nickname. He was ready to concede he’d lost his way when something clicked in his head; without conscious thought he pulled the trigger. In the next moment the Maverick went whoosh-bam-thank-you-ma’am, flinging its three hundred pounds of high explosive toward an Iraqi radar trailer.

Less than a minute had passed since he had begun his bombing run, but it had seemed like a lifetime. The plane was already low enough to draw serious anti-aircraft fire. He kicked his head back and got ready to take some Gs.

Flying in Devil Four, Lieutenant William James “BJ” Dixon had lost Doberman as soon as the lead plane began its bombing run. Dixon was late eyeballing his target area, late putting his eyes over to the Maverick screen. Everything came at him twenty times faster than it should. The fact that he’d practiced this attack several times over the past few days didn’t matter, and the abilities that had helped him rate among the best pilots at every stage of his training seemed to have deserted him. His head felt like it was a hand grenade with the pin removed. His arms and legs moved as if through heavy oil. The Hog growled at him, yelling at the pilot to get his shit together. No drill instructor had a meaner snarl.

Dixon glanced down at his right hand, aware that he was squeezing the stick hard enough to bend metal. He couldn’t unclench. The plane jerked toward the ground, propelled by the tension in his arms and legs.

His main target was a topo-scatter communications tower not far from the radar dish his flight leader had hit. His eyes darted from the windscreen to the television, back and forth, waiting for the shadowy figure to appear. Finally, he saw something in the tube and pushed the trigger to lock and fire in practically the same motion. As the missile burst away, he worried that he hadn’t locked up on the right target — the screen had been a blur and he’d only picked the biggest shadow. Quickly, he put another Maverick on line, yelling at himself to study the screen more carefully, trying to narrow the world down to the small tube and its depiction of the target area. But too much was happening. He’d drifted off course and now overcorrected, and if the tower was still there it wouldn’t appear anywhere in the screen. Finally, he saw a squat shadow he recognized as a radar van, slid the cursor in for a lock, and fired.

Glancing up at his windscreen, he realized he had gone lower than planned — a hell of a lot lower.

The altimeter read two thousand feet.

Dixon yanked the stick back, jerked it for dear life, his whole body trembling with panic.

Doberman returned to twelve thousand feet, reorienting himself to continue the attack. While he’d practiced mid-altitude bombing a lot in the last few weeks, he still felt vaguely uneasy attacking at this altitude. Nor was he used to going after something so placid, though well protected, as a radar installation — officially an “early warning ground control intercept station” or GCI for short. The Hog’s “normal” mission was close-in troop support and tank busting, and if it had been all the same to Doberman, he would have spent the first day of the air war against Iraq cruising about fifty feet off the ground and blowing up recycled Russian armor near the Saudi border. But the GCI stations located deep within Iraq were an important part of the enemy air defenses; taking them out was critical to the success of the allied air plan. The fact that such an important job had been given to Hogs meant that someone in Riyadh finally realized how capable the slow but steady low-altitude attack planes really were.

That, or they were desperate.

On the bright side, the mission planners had given them pictures and everything, just like they were Stealth Fighters. As his friend A-Bomb had said yesterday: Draw a little snout on a trailer and it practically looks like a tank, so what’s the big deal?

Keying the mike to ask his wingman, Lieutenant Dixon, how his Maverick run had gone, Doberman spotted a command building through the broken layers of clouds below. It was the last of his primary targets, too fat and juicy to pass up. He glanced quickly at the Maverick targeting screen, found the building. Locked it tight, and kissed it goodbye. As the missile clunked off the wing rail, the pilot glanced back to the windscreen and spotted two trailers within a few hundred feet of each other, looking for all the world like the photo he’d memorized before the mission. With his Mavericks gone, he was down to the dumb stuff — six cluster bombs sat beneath his wings, clamoring to be dropped. Doberman tucked the Hog back toward the ground, rolling the big plane over his shoulder like a black belt karate instructor tossing an opponent to the mat.

As the attack jet headed downward, the Hog’s leading edges grabbed at the air as eagerly as the pilot himself. Unlike a swept-wing, pointy-nose fighter, the A-10A Thunderbolt II had been designed to go relatively slow, an important attribute when you were trying to plink tin cans a few feet off the deck. Even so, with all the stops out and the plane growling for blood as she plummeted toward the yellow Iraqi dirt, she felt incredibly fast. The g’s collected around Doberman’s face, tugging at his narrow cheeks and unshaven morning stubble.

This was the part of flying he loved- the burning rush that made you feel hotter than a bullet rifled out a flaming barrel. His scalp tingled beneath its razor cut, and his over-sized ears — the only parts of his compact body that might be called large — vibrated with adrenaline.

But this was more than a rush, more than fun and games. He wasn’t flying a training gig, and the gray rectangles below hadn’t been plopped there by overworked airmen anxious for a weekend pass. White cotton balls appeared all around him. They puffed and curled around him as he flew, inside-out tennis balls that frittered into thin air as he approached.

The innocent puffs were shells, exploding just out of reach.

Okay, Doberman thought, they’re shooting at me. Fair’s fair; I hit them first.

He continued onward, flexing his fingers in his gloves as he held the stick, telling himself not to overdo it. Even a blue-collar dirt mover like the Hog was designed to be flown, not muscled.

You stay loose, you stay in control.

The cluster bombs vibrated on their pylons, demanding to be fired. Each bomb was actually a dump truck for smaller bombs; once dropped it would dispense a deadly shower of hundreds of bomblets for maximum damage.

Doberman was all eyes. His eyelashes blinked the flak away, blinked aside the other trailers, found the one that had been waiting for him, the one that had been dug into the side of sand dune months before in preparation for this exact moment.

Two CBUs fell from his wings. Doberman rocked in his seat, dodging the Hog to the left. He saw the dark shadow of another trailer slide into the middle of his windscreen as he jinked; he eased back, angling to get it into his sweet spot. Finally it slid in like a curve ball finding the strike zone; he held it for the umpire and pickled two more of his bombs.

He was low now, below five thousand feet, lower than he’d been ordered to fly and nearly too low to drop any more cluster bombs effectively because of their preset fuses. His head buzzed with blood and the exploding 23 millimeter antiaircraft shells the Iraqis were firing at him. There was so much flak in the air Doberman could get out and walk across it.

That was probably a bad sign.

On the other hand, a lot of stuff was burning. That was really good.

Gunning his A-10 off east of the target area, Doberman turned his neck in ways it had never gone before, looking for Dixon. His wingman didn’t answer the radio calls, but that wasn’t necessarily surprising — just before the attack the kid was so nervous he had obviously forgotten to key the mike before talking.

Two other members of the 535^th Tactical Fighter Squadron (Provisional), Devils One and Three, had been assigned to hit a second GCI complex about ten miles to the west. Doberman thought he saw a finger of smoke rising from where it should be. He and Dixon were due to head south soon and join up with the Hogs in ten minutes. From there they would head toward a forward air base in northern Saudi, rearm, and head back north for a second round of shoot-‘em-up.

Then they’d head home to bootleg beer, real long showers and a few good hands of poker. Doberman had lost over five hundred dollars the night before, the latest and by far the worst in a series of shellackings he’d taken since landing in Saudi Arabia. The pilot was determined to make at least half of that back tonight.

No way his luck could stay as bad as it was last night. He’d bitten off some of the worst hands of his life. And even when he’d had a good hand, inevitably someone else was fatter.

Doberman had held aces over eights in a full house on the last hand, hunkered down in front of a pot that held at least three hundred bucks. And damned if A-Bomb, of all people, hadn’t been holding four aces.

“Dead man’s hand,” said the other pilot, pointing to the cards on the table as he raked the chips in. “Doc Holiday drew that the day he was killed. Never bet on that. Can’t win.”

A-Bomb’s grin floated in front of Doberman’s face as he scanned the sky for Dixon. He saw a dark shadow rising through the clouds a good distance behind him. He lost it, saw it, lost it. “You got a little low, kid,” he told his wingman. “Get up over the flak.” Then he turned his attention back to the ground, looking for a place to put his last two bombs.

There was an Iraqi gun battery just off his right wing. The Hog seemed to growl at him when he spotted it through the clouds — as if she wanted a chance to kick a little dirt in the eyes of the people who’d been firing at her all morning.

Didn’t Doberman owe her that chance?

He banked sharply, hunkering down in the thick titanium bucket that protected the cockpit. As soon as he pickled the two cluster bombs, he knew he’d missed his target; the plane was running into a good hunk of wind and he hadn’t compensated for it. Angry at himself, he slammed the Hog around and worked into position for a run with his cannon. The plane screamed as she bled speed and energy, then whistled as the pilot edged her into a dive. The safe tactics of middle-altitude bombing were shelved — Doberman hunkered in for the kill, sliding down from five thousand feet.

The four-barrel Iraqi peashooter desperately spun around to face him. As its slugs spit past him, Doberman gave the Hog’s cannon a full five-second burst, then jinked left as the flak shooter burst into a magnificent collection of red, orange and yellow flames.

Climbing once again, Doberman caught the muzzle flash of a second gun as he tried tracking him through the sky. Something snapped inside his chest, and the methodical air force pilot was replaced by a seething werewolf screaming for vengeance. He tucked the Hog around for another attack. Just as he fell into the dive, he caught a shadow out of the corner of his eye.

“About time you caught up, lieutenant,” he said.

There was no answer.

“You have to press the little doohickey to get the radio to work,” he said sarcastically. Doberman pressed his Hog earthwards, deciding mid-plunge to leave the gun in favor of a building slightly to the south. It hadn’t been tasked, but what the hell, a building was a building.

“Seriously, Dixon, let’s see if that cannon of yours works,” Doberman called as he lined up on the building. “Get yourself oriented and trail on this pass, okay? Then we’ll head for SierraMax.”

Still no acknowledgment. Doberman felt a twinge of anger at his wingmate; he liked the kid but he’d be damned if he wiped the young newbie’s ass for him.

Dixon bored in, unconsciously sinking lower and lower in the well-protected cockpit. He worked the building dead into his sights, then felt the stutter-stutter-stutter of the Hog as it spat bullets from its nose. The top of the structure blew apart, bits of stone, roof tar and machinery cascading upwards — followed by a spectacularly showy explosion.

One of his shells had ignited a gas line.

Dixon winged through a fireball, shouting like a cowboy busting a favored steer at a rodeo. Banking and climbing away for all he was worth, he congratulated himself for expending ammunition in an extremely expeditious manner. The Hog swaggered a bit — not so much out of pride but because it had taken a few bullets in the stabilizer — but in general he was in fine shape for the return run home.

Dixon pointed himself toward the rendezvous point. He craned his neck to see if Dixon had followed in on the cannon run.

It was then that he realized why the young lieutenant hadn’t acknowledged his instructions.

The plane behind him wasn’t an A-10A. It was a Mirage F-l. And it wasn’t a French jet that had strayed over the lines, either. The dull green and brown camo on her wing was punctuated by a bright red streak of Iraqi lightning. Had Doberman had the time or inclination, he would have had no trouble picking out the three stars sandwiched between the red and green fields in the Iraqi flag on her tail.

CHAPTER 2

At roughly the same moment that Doberman discovered Dixon wasn’t on his tail, Dixon was staring into the blankness of the sky in front of him, slowly realizing that he was lost — completely and utterly lost. He was somewhere deep inside Iraq, without the vaguest notion of which direction he had to head in.

A compass sat directly in front of his face, and the center instrument panel across from his chest was dominated by an INS navigational system. While not without its problems, the unit could nonetheless be counted on to give at least a semi-accurate location. But at the moment it was about as useful to him as a map of Wisconsin.

Climbing after firing his Mavericks, Dixon had run into an aerial minefield. Antiair shells exploded in every direction, the Hog bucking and shaking like a car with three flat tires on a washboard highway. Miraculously, none of the shells did any damage, or at least not enough to affect the plane. Dixon climbed and climbed, his heart skipping as his lungs gulped in rapid staccato. Finally clear of the exploding black bursts, he kept going — to nearly twenty thousand feet, which took forever in a loaded Hog. It wasn’t what he had planned to do, and certainly not what he had rehearsed for days. Still, he got the plane’s nose angled down for a second run and prepared for a second run with the Mavericks; he was still in control.

Dixon had been a Division II quarterback in college, and he gave himself one of his old pep talks, as if he were clearing his head after a particularly vicious blitz. When Doberman failed to respond to his radio call he felt a twinge of anxiety, but pushed it away, hoping his flight leader was just too busy to respond.

He had flown wider than planned, and further north — and lost his leader, at least momentarily — but as he peered through the broken cloud layer he could feel his confidence returning. He pushed downward, searching both the air ahead for Doberman and the ground below for his brief targets. The clouds made both tasks difficult; he willed them away, sliding toward the Iraqi complex in a shallow dive. Suddenly the radar dish Doberman had targeted snapped into view.

Dixon was surprised to see it still intact.

Okay, he told himself, I have a target. He steepened the dive, confidence beginning to build.

Then clouds filled the windscreen. He turned quickly to the video monitor. A blur fell into the crosshairs and he pushed the trigger on his AGM, locking not on a dish but a building. He fired anyway, continuing downward into clear sky.

But now the site was jumbled around, different from the satellite pictures and maps he’d studied. Doberman’s dish was gone; the trailers were laid out in a different pattern. He shot his eyes back and forth, trying to orient himself. The muscles in his throat closed, desperately trying to keep his stomach acid from erupting in his mouth. Black bursts were exploding in front of him; there was fire and smoke on the ground. Finally, he saw a grouping of trailers he thought he recognized, locked on the middle one, and fired. The Maverick clunked away as the plane followed the motion of his arm, stiffly pulling to the left in a long descending bank as his eyes remained glued on the television display, now completely blank.

More than thirty seconds passed before he pulled his head upright. By then the Hog had flown well beyond the target area. There was nothing on the desert floor in front of him.

For a moment then, Lieutenant William Dixon- star athlete, star student, prized recruit, a young man headed toward a top F-15 assignment until his mother’s failing health complicated his career priorities- forgot how to fly. His arms and legs moved independently of his head. With his left hand he reached for the stick when he meant to adjust the throttle; with his right he tuned the radio when he meant to check the INS settings.

A voice in his head yelled that he wasn’t breathing right. He’d been hyperventilating probably since takeoff and the voice knew that a good part of his problem was physical. But Dixon couldn’t get the voice to do anything but yell impotently. The A-10, confused by its pilot’s commands, started heading toward the ground.

Doberman smashed the throttle and threw the Hog into a tight turn, trying to get inside the Mirage and set up an overshoot — putting the faster but less maneuverable plane ahead of him, a classic turn-the-tables ploy. The Mirage pilot anticipated the move, and traded some of his altitude for speed, breaking off in a diving straight line away. The move would have meant death for the Iraqi if Doberman had been able to complete his turn; even with the widening range and the lost energy, his Sidewinders probably could have caught the Mirage.

But Doberman didn’t have a prayer of turning in time, much less firing his heat-seekers; in fact, he didn’t dare complete his turn. The bogey had tossed off two heat seekers just as the Hog started away. One shot off wild, sucking the fire off one of the diversionary flares the Hog driver kicked out.

The other sniffed the air and caught a faint whiff of Hog turbofan dead ahead.

Dixon blinked his eyes, focusing not on the windscreen but the horizon indicator below it. He had to get it level. That was his first job, before all others.

The round sphere spun madly, whirling with no discernible axis. It fluttered and waved and shook without any pattern. It refused to be controlled, refused to assume any direction other than its own.

The pilot reached out and grabbed it, sparks flying from his hands. The sparks ignited his flight suit, burning his safety harness away, setting his arms and chest on fire.

He held on. His breath roared in his ears, rapid as the rod on a locomotive’s wheels. His entire body was on fire, but he held the sphere tight.

It stopped spinning. The cowl around his head lifted ever so slightly. He had both hands on the stick, and he had control of the bomb-laden Hog.

“The plane is level,” he heard himself say. Next step, climb to a safe altitude.

How do you climb? You put the nose toward the stars, you pull your arm gently back, you feel your chest relax…

Slowly, his eyes rose with the nose of the plane. The pilot found himself staring into the muddled gray of the Iraqi dawn.

But where there should be clouds, he saw flowers — hundreds and hundreds of grayish-white lilies. Their mouths turned toward him, delicate satin tongues that brushed gently against the hard surface of the warplane’s fuselage. Dixon and his Hog were surrounded, folded in an endless blanket of beautiful flowers.

It was the most wondrous thing he’d ever seen. And then he realized that he had seen these flowers before.

At his mother’s funeral three months ago.

CHAPTER 3

Several miles to the west, Devil One and Devil Three were mopping up their attack on a similar set of dishes and trailers. Flown by two of the most experienced pilots in the squadron, the Hogs had made a serious dent in the Iraqi air defense system. They might looked more like bathtubs with wings than attack planes, but together the two Hogs had done enough damage to impress even a snot-nose Strike Eagle commander.

With a lot less fuss than a sissy-ass state-of-the-art F-15E required, thought the pilot of Devil Three, Captain Thomas Peter “A-Bomb” O’Rourke. Like a lot of other committed A-10A drivers, A-Bomb had nothing but disdain for the pointy-nose, fast-jet community. Unlike most other Hog drivers, he expressed it at every opportunity.

Just now, his audience was an Iraqi radar trailer. In all likelihood, its crewmen didn’t hear a word he was saying, even though he was shouting at the top of his lungs.

They’d get the message soon enough. He held his Hog’s stick tight between his knees as he squeezed the trigger at the top of the handle. Dust erupted from the building, metal evaporating under the ferocious onslaught of cannon shells. The pilot stopped yelling and stared at the windscreen in front of him, pushing the trigger an extra second to complete the destruction. Then he pulled up, feeling the rubber of his mask and the tight fit of the helmet around his pudgy head. He could taste metal in his mouth and felt the steady rush of his breath down his throat into his lungs.

A-Bomb put the Hog on its wingtip, scanning ahead for the flight leader, Major James “Mongoose” Johnson. A greenish-black hulk was climbing maybe a quarter of a mile off to his left. A-Bomb checked his fuel, and did a quick scan of his instruments and warning indicators. Clean, he pitched the Hog more or less level.

“Devil One to Three. A-Bomb, you back there?”

“I got your butt in my sights,” A-Bomb replied.

“Let’s dance down to SierraMax and pick up Doberman and his pup,” said lead.

“Gotcha.”

Mongoose could be a hard-ass — a lot of the maintenance people hid when he came around the hangars — but he and A-Bomb went back a ways. A-Bomb had seen him pull strings to keep a fellow pilot from going to jail in Germany for a minor brawl; in his opinion that was as true a test of desirable character as any known to man.

The two jets climbed as they flew south. Without the weight and drag of the bombs, the ride to twenty thousand- practically outer space to a Hog pilot- wasn’t nearly as hard as it had been when they set out from their home base at King Fahd air base a million hours ago. But they took their time about it, careful to keep parading their eyes through the sky around them in case an intruder somehow managed to sneak nearby.

They were still climbing as they approached the checkpoint set for the rendezvous with their two mates. Devil One angled toward an easy orbit; Devil Three fell in behind. They were about sixty seconds early- an eternity for the notoriously punctual Doberman, who was leading the second element.

A-Bomb eased himself in his harness, loosening not only his restraints but his mask and helmet. Steadying the Hog with his left hand, he reached his right hand down to a custom-sewn pouch on the leg of his flight suit. There he removed a small titanium thermos- bulletproof, naturally- notched the cap to the open position with his thumb, and took a sip.

His radio crackled mid-swallow.

“A-Bomb, you want to look me over for damage while we’re waiting?” asked Mongoose.

“Be with you in a minute,” he grunted back.

Mongoose guessed what A-Bomb was up to. Few if any other Hog pilots would drink coffee on such a long mission- hell, on any mission. And at twenty thousand feet! If the sheer logistics didn’t get you, the piddle pack would. But that was one of the many wondrous things about A-Bomb- he never seemed to have to pee. And no obstacle, whether it was gravity, an enemy missile or a general out for his butt, ever stopped him from an objective.

Which made him the perfect wingman.

Mongoose shook his head, then rechecked their position for the third time. After they picked up Doberman and Dixon, they would fly back across the border to Al Jouf, a small spit of a strip in northwestern Saudi Arabia. There they would be refueled and rearmed. After that, they were supposed to cross back north and put some dents in Iraqi tanks- child’s play after this mission, though as far as he could tell things had gone pretty damn well so far.

Assuming Doberman and the kid showed up soon.

Thinking about anything too much made you worry about it, but sometimes it was impossible to clear your head. As flight leader and the squadron director of operations or DO, Major Johnson felt enormously responsible, not just for the mission but the men flying it. And that made him think. He thought about Doberman and Dixon, willing the two Hogs to appear. The cloud cover had gradually thickened; he worried that the second half of the mission would be grounded. He wondered about the other members of the 535th, who had been assigned to fly with other squadrons for the opening day festivities.

Mongoose took another gander at his fuel, then glanced back at his watch. Doberman was now a full three minutes late. He didn’t know him very well- the entire squadron had been patched together for deployment only a few weeks before- but it seemed uncharacteristic of the captain, who could be anal-retentive when it came to planning and poker. He was the kind of guy who not only stacked his chips according to color, but made sure they were all facing the same direction.

Which meant you always knew how much you’d won from him. The guy had the worst luck on the base.

A-Bomb replaced the thermos, then ran his hand into another pocket in his flight suit. “Born in the USA” blared from two small but powerful speakers carefully sewn behind mesh patches near his knees. He was thinking he might change the CD — he was in kind of a “Greetings From Asbury Park” mood — when Mongoose reminded him he was supposed to be checking for flak damage.

“You still with me or what?” barked the major, the radio barely audible over Springsteen.

A-Bomb closed in on Devil One and eyeballed the aluminum. The green camo looked completely unblemished.

“Jeez, Goose, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear you had that sucker washed and waxed.”

“One of these days you’re not going to get enough oxygen and your brain’s going to fry,” said Mongoose. “We’re pretty damn high to be screwing with your mask.”

“I got a straw goes right through.” By now A-Bomb had passed slowly under Devil One and was surveying the other side. “Cleaner than the day you drove it out of the showroom.”

“Let’s see how you made out,” said the flight leader, winging back to inspect A-Bomb’s A-10A.

“I thought I heard something hit my left wing,” said A-Bomb. “But it feels okay.”

“What the hell is that racket in the background?”

“RWR’s giving me trouble. Just checking the settings,” answered A-Bomb.

“I didn’t realize your threat indicator played guitar.”

“Shit, you wouldn’t believe the things Clyston’s techies can do with a pair of pliers,” said the pilot. “This sucker’s better tuned than a Spark Vark.”

“Uh-huh. Maybe we should just have you fly over the missile batteries and knock out the radar for us.”

“That wouldn’t be any fun. Ahmed has to have something to play with.”

A “Spark Vark” was an F-lll fighter-bomber outfitted with special gear to detect and jam enemy radars. The RWRS in the A-10A were based on technology that dated from Vietnam; while they could detect a variety of radars — usually they couldn’t jam them.

Or play guitar.

Jamming was left to a counter-measures pod carried on the right wing of the plane. The needle-shaped box was many years old and about two generations behind the times. The ECMs worked well against the radars it was designed to work well against, but the Iraqis had plenty of sophisticated defense systems beyond their reach. Devil Squadron hadn’t won whatever lottery was held for the few more advanced versions that had been shipped to the desert. Even those were considered a bit behind the curve.

But hell, a Hog with advanced ECMs? Kind of against the point, in A-Bomb’s opinion.

He held steady while the other Hog came in for an inspection. A-Bomb waved at Mongoose, then glanced at his watch again. Devils Two and Four were now more than five minutes late, an eternity in a war zone.

If it were up to him, he’d head north and find them. But it wasn’t his call.

Mongoose swung under the other plane, consciously trying to take his time and focus on the job in front of him. Doberman could take care of himself.

A-Bomb’s Hog was unblemished. They’d anticipated heavy anti-air, but the truth was, they’d encountered only sporadic fire, most of it unaimed. Still, all it took was one lucky shot to ruin your day.

Just as he was about to tell A-Bomb he was clean, Mongoose heard a hail over the radio from their E-3 Sentry AWACS controller. “Cougar” was flying back behind the border, helping coordinate the air war in this sector. The airborne situation room functioned like the coaching staff in a stadium skybox, calling in plays and alerting the pilots to blitzes and stunts.

“Go ahead, Cougar,” said Mongoose, expecting to be asked why they were playing ring-around-the-rosy in the middle of the desert.

“We’re tracking two Fulcrums headed toward SierraMax. Are you in contact with Devil Two?”

“That’s a negative.” Mongoose felt his voice start to crack, despite his straining effort to keep it level.

“He had an F-l in pursuit when we lost him on radar. We haven’t been able to reach him on any frequency.”

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

“Roger. Vector me in.”

“That is a negative. Repeat. Negative. You are to proceed according to your frag. Confirm.”

There were very few times in his life that Mongoose wished he flew a pointy nose, fast-moving fighter, but this was definitely one of them. He gunned the large turbofan engines that sat behind the cockpit, turning the plane northwards in what he hoped was Doberman’s direction.

He knew A-Bomb would follow, so he didn’t bother keying the mike to tell him.

There was no sense answering the E-3. All he’d end up doing was cluttering the airwaves with four-letter words.

CHAPTER 4

Doberman felt the heat seeking missile boring in on him as he flicked out more flares. Jinking toward the ground, he rolled the Hog’s engines away from the Iraqi missile, trying to present as cold a target as possible to the enemy. He couldn’t see what was happening behind him; it was all touch-and-feel, bred by hundreds of drills and simulations. The Hog’s GE power plants were cool for jet engines, and the primitive seeker in the Iraqi air-to-air missile sniffed the air for the plane in vain. It missed the flare as well, continuing harmlessly into the desert — though Doberman had no way of knowing that as he skimmed down as close to the ground as he could get.

Above him, the Mirage pilot gathered his senses and energy for another try. When Doberman realized he was free and began climbing off the deck, he found the F-l diving for him from about five thousand feet in a head-on attack.

The French had built the Dassault-Breguet Mirage F-l during the 1960s. It was a reasonable effort, capable of Mach performance and a variety of roles, with a single engine and a pair of 30 mm machine guns under the fuselage. Its wing area was better suited for low altitude flight than some of Dassault’s other efforts, and perhaps on paper, the plane ought to outmatch an A-10A any day.

But they weren’t flying on paper. Doberman kept on trucking, determined to stuff his nose into the Iraqi’s face. In a close-quarters attack, it was cannon versus cannon, and there the Hog had the advantage.

The Mirage driver poured on the gas, coming at him like a bat out of hell. Suddenly, the underside of his plane began to sparkle. Doberman resisted the impulse to return fire, realizing it was a waste of bullets from this distance. Instead, he continued boring in, expecting the F-l to turn in an attempt to swoop behind the Hog to finish him off. Sure enough, the Iraqi began angling away to the left, no doubt confident that he could outrun the strange and slow American machine.

Doberman executed his own turn into the Iraqi and lit the cannon. It was a textbook maneuver, the angle of separation nearly nonexistent, the Hog right on the Mirage’s rear end.

But he missed. The F-l jinked to the left then slid quickly into a scissors, and for all his maneuverability Doberman couldn’t quite get him locked in his sights. By the time he decided to fire the Sidewinders, it was too late; though he had a lock signal both heat-seekers rode wide as the Iraqi put out flares and accelerated clear.

Doberman watched his adversary disappear into the distance. Part of him was relieved — and another part of him was pissed, since he had blown an opportunity to make history by shooting down another plane in an A-10A. He pulled the Hog into a lazy turn south, once again looking for his wingmate.

He was beginning to wonder why no one answered his radio hails when a dark shadow in the top corner of his eye warned him he had taken the Iraqi much too lightly. Only an extreme, gut-wrenching pull to the right that shook every bolt in the Hog’s body saved him from being perforated by the diving fighter’s guns. Even so, he caught some lead in the rear fuselage; the Warthog grunted and hissed at the flesh wound.

Cursing himself, Doberman flattened his jet out less than a hundred feet off the hot Iraqi sand.

The Iraqi pilot was obviously out of missiles. But he had learned from the first head-on-head attack. He sat high above, staying south, obviously waiting for Doberman to run for it. He looked like a cat eyeing a can of tuna.

What a cat wouldn’t do for a can opener the size of those DEFA guns the Mirage carried.

Not that Doberman was worried. He knew he’d come up with something. Hog drivers always did. He just didn’t know what that something was yet.

Better to let the Mirage commit itself, he decided. Cannon versus cannon, I like the odds. I just have to make it quick while I still have enough gas to get home.

He tried contacting Dixon again; then called to his other squadron mates.

No response. What was with those guys?

The F-1 suddenly snapped out of a turn and accelerated in his direction. Once again the Iraqi had made his move too soon, though he had more altitude and speed and so would still hold the advantage when they finally closed.

Doberman drew a deep breath, then tapped the throttle bar for good luck. If he chose to, he might be able to break off now and run away to the west, slide back and escape. It would strain his fuel reserves to the max, maybe beyond, but it would keep him in one piece.

But where was the fun in that?

He was just moving his stick to angle for another head-to-head encounter when a white light seemed to shine on the F-1 from above the clouds. In the next second, the enemy plane disappeared, replaced by a burst of frothing white vapor.

CHAPTER 5

Pedals to the metal on as they flew north back toward the GCI site their two wing mates had been tasked to hit, A-Bomb and Mongoose heard the AWACS vectoring a pair of F-15 interceptors to nail the Iraqi fighter. The MiGs had changed course, but both the Mirage and the A-10A had gotten up off the deck and reappeared on the Sentry’s scope. The distance and effects of ground clutter interfered somewhat with the Sentry’s ability to track the planes, but considering that the controller was two hundred miles away and keeping track of several million other things, he did a hell of a job. The radio exchange crackled over the airwaves like an old-time radio drama.

“Turbo Three, contact fifteen east SierraSierra, five thousand,” called the lead F-15 pilot. He was telling his wingmate and the AWACS controller that he had the Mirage on his radar.

“Don’t hit the friendly,” answered his wingmate.

“Sorted. Aw shit. Clean now. Fuck me.”

A-Bomb echoed the Eagle pilot’s curse. The fighter had lost the Mirage. A-Bomb leaned forward in his seat, trying to urge a few more miles per hour out of the Hog. He and Mongoose had all the stops out but were still at least two minutes away.

“Clean high,” said one of the F-15 pilots. It wasn’t clear which one.

“Contact. Five thousand. At twelve, eleven east, uh—”

“Screw the numbers, just do it!” screamed A-Bomb.

His mike wasn’t open, but as if in answer to his urging, the Eagle pilot called a missile shot — “Fox One,” the time-honored signal that a Sparrow air-to-air radar missile had been launched.

“Fifteen, fifteen, turn right,” said the second Eagle pilot, the rest of the transmission scorching into unintelligibility.

Did they get the Mirage?

Static filled A-Bomb’s ears.

It was like listening to the final seconds of a basketball championship on a malfunctioning AM radio. Except that a lot more than bragging rights were at stake.

Cursing, he slapped the com panel, as if that might somehow clear the reception.

Wow, thought Doberman, as his adversary turned into a silver-black glow. I’m having a religious experience.

That or my oxygen hose is kinked all to hell.

In the next second, he realized that something had taken out the Mirage.

Something American, he hoped. F-15s flying combat air patrol out of the south, most likely. But why hadn’t he heard them on the radio? Why hadn’t he heard anything on his radio?

Doberman, turning the Hog southwest, flipped through several million frequencies before realizing, duh, that his communications gear had given up the ghost.

No wonder he’d lost Dixon. And his wing mates.

Damn, they were probably halfway back to Al Jouf by now.

Hell, he better watch for the Eagles, in case they decided to take him out for not answering their hails.

The pilot searched the skies in vain for his benefactors. They had to be F-15s, firing Sparrows from beyond visual range; anything else would be doing victory rolls in front of him. Maybe they’d gone on to put out some other fire.

Doberman’s relief mixed with disappointment as he checked his course toward SierraMax, the squadron rendezvous point. He’d been robbed of his best shot at the scumbag. Instead, he was going to have to buy some stinking pointy-nose jock a round of drinks.

Would he have beaten the Mirage?

Shit yeah. Damn straight. Cannon versus cannon, nothing could take the Hog. He was just lining up when those guys broke up the party.

Hell, even Dixon would have wiped the Iraqi’s ass for him. Where was that boy, anyway? He should have been over Doberman’s back; would have gotten the damn Iraqi before he launched the missiles.

Maybe he’d make the nugget stand for the F-15er’s beer.

Mongoose heard the Eagle pilot call “Hotel Sierra” as the Iraqi jet turned into instant scrap metal.

Hot shit. Got that son of a bitch right between the eyes.

Mongoose and A-Bomb were still a good ninety seconds south of Doberman. Meanwhile, the two Eagles had already kicked toward the east, backing up another pair of F-15s that had been sent after the Fulcrums Cougar had first warned them about.

“Devil One this is Cougar. We have you headed north. Please advise.”

Well, at least the controller was being polite, Mongoose thought to himself. He waited for the second call before answering. When he did, he asked a question of his own.

“We’re short one Hog,” he told the Sentry. “You see him anywhere?”

The overworked controller was temporarily stumped. Mongoose spotted Doberman’s plane — at least he assumed it was Devil Two. The Hog was heading south about two miles away.

“I’m on him,” responded A-Bomb before he could even finish pointing him out.

“His radio must be out,” Mongoose told his wingman after the plane failed to respond on any frequency. “Take him back to Al Jouf.”

“Where are you going?”

“I got to find junior.”

“Say Goose, you looked at your fuel gauge lately? It’s that big dial on the right side of cockpit, right near the handle you have to pull if the tanks run dry.”

Damn A-Bomb. Always a wise ass.

“Yeah, just take Doberman home,” he snapped. He glanced at the map folded out on his lap, calculating that he had just enough in his tanks for a pass back over the GCI site before running home.

Assuming he found a tail wind.

“Goose?”

“Go. That’s an order.”

“Aye, aye, Captain Bligh.”

CHAPTER 6

It took forever for Dixon to realize the lilies were just the clouds playing tricks on his eyes. He passed through them, climbing high above the earth where he could clear his head.

There was something wrong with his oxygen supply. At least that’s what he blamed the hallucinations on. He was incapable of panic; it had to be something physical, something tangible, something that could be fixed by turning a dial or adjusting a switch. He moved his hands deliberately around the cockpit, putting everything in order.

Slowly, the lieutenant regained control of himself and his plane. He began by breathing deeply. At first his lungs rebelled, aching with the effort. Then he felt his shoulders starting to sag, the muscle spasms finally giving way. He rocked his head to the left and then the right, his spinal cord cracking as the tension was released. Dixon was a long way from relaxed, but at least he could fly the plane.

He still had six iron bombs attached to the hard points beneath his wings. They were slowing him down, robbing not just air speed but precious fuel.

One by one, he let them go. The Hog seemed to buck slightly with each release, as if she were protesting that they had not been used on the enemy.

For all he knew, they might be dropping on one of Saddam’s palaces. Dixon had yet to work out his location.

He glanced at his watch, saw it was about time for him and Doberman to be hooking up with the others at the point they had called SierraMax.

Where in God’s name was that? Where was he?

He worked at the map and realized that he was now about twenty-five miles west and maybe fifteen miles south of the GCI site.

Not horribly off course, all things considered. But he was alone. Had the others tried to contact him? He hadn’t heard their calls? Had they been shot down?

It didn’t make sense to go to the checkpoint. His best bet was to head straight to Al Jouf.

He’d screwed up the mission, big time. But his job now was getting to the air base in one piece.

Strange things happened in combat all the time, confusing things, bizarre things. There were excuses, not necessarily bad ones, either — the fog of war and all that.

He’d gotten turned around, lost track of his leader, lost track of himself. But it had been his first time in combat.

The fog of war.

No, it was something more than that. You didn’t know who you were until you stared down the barrel of a gun. Life was one big question mark until then.

If that were true, William James Dixon didn’t like what the answer had turned out to be.

CHAPTER 7

The smoke curled in a thin line from the desert, as if fueled by the final embers of a spent cigar. It was about five miles south and three due east of the GCI site — exactly where a damaged Hog might crash after the attack.

Grimly, Mongoose altered course and continued lowering his altitude. He made double sure his radio was tuned to Guard — the band a downed flier would use to call for help.

The twisted wreckage in the distance could be a Hog. Then again, it could be a pickup truck, smoked by somebody returning home with some bombs or bullets to spare. He was by it too fast and too high to tell.

The radio stayed silent. A good or bad sign, depending on how he cared to interpret it.

Mongoose whirled his head around, making damn sure he was alone in this corner of the sky, then cranked the Hog back for another pass. This time he slowed the big plane down to a crawl; any slower and he’d be going backwards.

The major berated himself for picking Dixon for the mission. He liked the kid, but hell, he’d been in the cockpit barely long enough to qualify for a learner’s permit.

True, Dixon had fighter jock written all over him. Easy-going bravado, spit-in-your eye aggressiveness, and just the right touches of insubordination and selfless dedication to remind any older pilot of his early years — accurately or not. Lean and at six-four on the tall side for a pilot, he had an upper body toned by the squadron weight machines and a daily run. Dixon was a recruiting poster come to life.

Or maybe death. Mongoose pushed himself high in the seat as he walked the plane across the desert, his eyes sorting through the wreckage for anything that would mark it as a Hog — a flat, stubby stabilizer or a thick round engine among the most obvious.

But no. He saw a wheel and a body and then another body.

Some sort of truck, definitely.

He couldn’t help feeling relieved, even though he was looking at corpses.

Enemy corpses, but he shuddered a little.

Mongoose cast a wary eye at his fuel gauge — not great, but he still had a little to play with. He angled the jet toward the GCI site, marked out in the distance by a thick plume of black smoke. From here it was difficult to tell if the smoke was coming from one source or many.

Mongoose continued to monitor the rescue band as he headed north. Part of him hoped to hear the telltale chirp of an emergency survival beacon activated by ejection; part of him was relieved that he didn’t. He expected the gunners at the GCI site to start firing any minute. Sure enough, gray fingers began raking the sky ahead. The rattle wasn’t particularly threatening yet, falling far short of the Hog, but it distracted him all to hell. He had to stay low to see the ground clearly, which would mean running through the top of the triple-A in about ten seconds.

“Devil One, this is Cougar,” snapped the AWACS. “Are you reading me?”

“Go ahead, Cougar.”

“We’re showing a flight headed south we think is your boy. You copy?”

“Who does he say he is?” Mongoose asked.

“Not responding at the moment. We’re a bit busy here,” added the controller — a not too subtle hint.

“Yeah, right, I copy. Heading back,” said Mongoose. He pulled a U-turn and gave the ground batteries a good view of his twin rudders as he slid onto coordinates that would get him back to Al Jouf with three minutes of fuel to spare.

Assuming he coasted half-way.

CHAPTER 8

His domain had come down to this: a single pad of lined white paper in the exact middle of a plain steel desk, a thin, dented silver Cross pen he’d once thought of as lucky, and a telephone.

Colonel Michael Knowlington continued outlining the large triangle he’d drawn around the phone number on the top of the page, his eyes lost somewhere between the thick line and the memory of many other triangles, drawn on many other sheets, under many other circumstances.

Nostalgia was not useful. But it was difficult to push it completely away. Much earlier this morning, when the first group of “his” Hogs took off on their long mission to bomb radar sites in Iraq, Knowlington felt as if he were standing at an airline terminal, killing time before a flight. And then, just as he turned to walk back through the hangar area, he somehow remembered watching an RC-135 take off in Alaska a million years ago.

For a moment, the white-haired colonel thought his mind had thrown up a completely irrelevant memory. Then he remembered he’d watched that particular flight not with detachment but a premonition of doom; the plane had later gone down in a thunderstorm, all personnel lost.

It was at that moment that he admitted to himself how much he dreaded this afternoon. Knowlington felt — knew — he’d lose at least one pilot, maybe two or three, of the twelve he was responsible for. He was especially worried about the four-plane group led by the squadron DO, Major Johnson. In his opinion, they’d been assigned to do something well beyond the Warthog’s capabilities, flying hundreds of miles to bomb sites that were part of sophisticated anti-air systems. Going deep was not exactly a job the A-lOA was designed to do.

But his opinion didn’t count. His being here in Hog Heaven was only a freak of war, someone else’s unlucky throw of the dice. A few weeks before, these planes were headed for the scrap heap, and he’d been given “command” of them to make sure they got there. Then General Schwarzkopf himself decided there should be more Hogs in theater, and that was that.

Real War Rule Number One: Things Change. Rarely for the better.

What really bothered Knowlington watching the Warthogs take off wasn’t a premonition or pessimism, but a realization that for the first time in his life he didn’t care to have his fanny in the cockpit. He didn’t care, really, to be here at all.

What he did care for, what he wanted more than anything else, was a drink. But instead, Colonel Michael Knowlington, paper commander of the 535th Tactical Fighter Squadron (Provisional) of the 99th Air Wing (Temporary), picked up the phone and asked for help connecting to the stateside number. Yes, he told the communications expert on the other end, he was well aware of the time back in D.C. And yes, it was a private number. This was Colonel Knowlington on the line.

He waited. The building rattled as a misplaced Hercules crossed overhead.

The phone was answered on the fourth ring, just as he worried that the answering machine would take it and he’d have to try again later.

A sleepy voice asked, rather than said, hello.

“I’m looking for Nitro,” Knowlington said.

“What?”

“Hey Nitro. This is Skull. How the hell are you?”

“Mikey?”

“One and the same.” Knowlington slipped back in the stiff desk chair, relaxing a little, picturing his old wingman asleep in his pajamas.

“Jesus, Mike — where the hell are you? You in trouble?”

“Not exactly. Well, sure, I guess I’m always in some sort of trouble.” The phone line wasn’t secure. “You probably can figure out where I’m at,” he added. “It’s pretty warm, but I’m not getting a tan.”

“Jesus, Mike. You know what time it is back here?”

“I need an important favor. Today if possible.”

“I’m listening.”

Knowlington smiled, remembering another time Nitro — Captain Grenshaw at the time — had used that exact phrase. It was over a UHF radio as Knowlington — he hadn’t earned the Skull handle yet — tried to help vector in a Jolly Green to pick up the downed pilot.

“This is going to sound really, really dumb,” the colonel told his old friend, “but my chief needs a manual for something you guys make.”

“You’re shitting me, right?”

Knowlington laughed. He’d had the same response himself when the chief of his maintenance section — actually, his capo di capo, Chief Master Sergeant Alan Clyston — told him two days ago that the Air Force had somehow neglected to supply anyone in Saudi Arabia with a manual for the AGM-65G heat-seeking Maverick missile.

Something of an oversight, considering they were being used today. Everybody said they worked the same as the other models, except for the fact that they had shaped charges, were a lot heavier, and used infra-red instead of video.

Same thing, except different.

“I wish I were kidding,” Knowlington told Grenshaw. “My guys claim they’ve figured them out, but I want to make sure, you know?”

“Some things never change. Shit.”

The colonel’s telephone wasn’t secure, and while he doubted Saddam was listening still, he was squeamish about giving out too much information over an open line. But he wanted to make sure Grenshaw knew what he was talking about. “It’s a G,” he hinted. “Does that make any sense to you?”

His friend had to think for a second or two. “We’re talking about something we first used back in our war, right?”

“Well, you might have used it there,” said Knowlington, “I dropped strictly iron potatoes.”

“It was a piece of shit in those days, right?” asked Grenshaw.

“I was hoping your joining the company would make it work a lot better.”

“Fuck you. Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. It works great now. I can’t believe you don’t have the manual.”

“Can you do it?”

“Of course. I’ll get you a dozen.”

“There’s a friend of ours who can get them over quick, Bozzone-”

“That old phony is still in uniform?”

“Tucks his shirt in and everything.”

“Damn. I would have thought they’d kicked him out years ago.”

Bozzone was several years younger than Knowlington, but Grenshaw didn’t realize the irony.

“I think they tried, but he wouldn’t go,” said Knowlington. “Billy’s a general now.”

“Yeah, I heard. I thought they gave him the star to get rid of him.”

“Didn’t take the hint.”

“You know what, Mikey, I can get them there faster.”

“Really?”

“One of our congressmen is going over on a fact-finding tour. He’ll be leaving in a few hours, as a matter of fact. I can make some calls. It’s done.”

Our congressmen. Knowlington shook his head, but said nothing.

“Listen, you want some steaks?” added Grenshaw. “We’ll get you a crate. You still drinking Jack Daniels?”

His men would love the steaks. But the colonel declined. “Just the manuals,” he said.

“I’m not trying to bribe you,” Grenshaw laughed.

“No, we’re fine out here. Got more of that sort of thing than you’d think. It’s the manuals I need.”

The voice on the other end of the line changed. “How you doing, Mike?”

“I’m hanging in there. Have my own wing.”

“Your own wing?”

“Yup.” Knowlington didn’t bother explaining the paperwork, much less the fact that most of his meager supply of Hogs were under de facto control of other commanders here. Nor did he say that he had ceded much of his actual responsibilities to Johnson.

Maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe it was common knowledge that he was played out. Because Grenshaw immediately asked if he was being screwed.

“Nah.”

“You know, I can help if you need it,” said Grenshaw. “Shit, we can use somebody with your background ourselves.”

“Maybe after all this is over,” said Knowlington.

“Honor and country, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Don’t go punching out again. Leave that to the younger guys.”

“Don’t worry.”

“It’s been great talking to you, Mikey. We have to get together next time you’re in town. Dissect a few old missions.”

“Sure thing.”

“Fly straight,” said Grenshaw, his voice nearly thirty years younger as he recalled the first half of their personal motto.

“And get shot down,” answered Knowlington, hanging up.

CHAPTER 9

It began as a wobble so slight Doberman didn’t even realize the plane was shaking. But by the time he was ready to line up for his landing at Al Jouf behind A-Bomb, the A-10A was bucking sideways worse than an out of balance washing machine about to explode. Nothing he did seemed to calm it.

The funny thing was, the instruments were at spec and the wobble didn’t seem to affect the plane’s ability to fly. It was like driving a race car with one wheel way out of alignment on an empty track — it might whack the hell out of your perception, to say nothing of your body, but you were never in any danger of crashing.

At least, the pilot hoped that was the case. The plane didn’t seem to want to go down, or spin in, or implode — just slide back and forth a whole lot. It tried to move left, then right, then left and left, and then right. Doberman wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if he let it. And he didn’t intend to find out. He corrected constantly with the rudder and stick, eyeing the engine gauges carefully to make sure they were running precisely in parallel. No amount of adjustment or cursing cured the problem.

At least it took his mind off the Mirage. He was still pissed off that he’d lost his chance at shooting it down. He’d decided now that he definitely would have creamed the SOB if the F-15s hadn’t gotten in the way.

The scratch of concrete spreading out in his windshield was the centerpiece of a forward airbase. It had been carved out in the middle of the wastelands only as a staging area for some Special Forces units and Hogs, but Doberman saw all sorts of planes lining up in landing patterns. The sharp, businesslike commands of the tower personnel were punctuated by even sharper breaths for air; it was doing a brisk business in emergency landings today.

But hell, there weren’t any wrecks that he could see. Things must be going reasonably well.

Doberman did a last-second check of his instruments as the Hog’s wheels snapped into position beneath the fuselage, helped by the jet’s slipstream. Nosing toward the concrete, the plane finally shook off her shudder. Doberman felt a shock of relief run through his body as he pushed her onto the ground.

Doberman felt another kind of shock a few minutes later, surveying the rear of his plane from the ground. The back third of the A-10A looked as if it had been used as a backstop for a platoon’s machine-gun practice. Foot-long pieces of the interior were exposed, wires and fried metal falling through the jagged gaps. The engine cowling was nicked in a star burst pattern, and it looked as if someone had tried to write his name on the rear stabilizer. The radar warning antennas, light and most of the rest of the center part of the tail section had been ground into chewing gum. The fuselage in front of the twin tailfin was creased, spindled and corroded. Bits and pieces of the bag-like fuel tank was exposed; it looked slightly singed.

A-Bomb whistled, shaking his head as he trotted over. “Jesus, Doberman, the assholes who shot at you would have taken off your tail if you’d been going any faster,” he said. “Here’s why your radio was out. You lost the antenna.”

The pilot pointed toward the top of the fuselage. Somehow, the UHF/TACAN fin on the very top of the plane directly behind the cockpit had been blown clear away.

“Damn,” said Doberman. The fin was only a few inches from his seat. Why the hell hadn’t he heard — or felt — what hit it?

“Put a new one in, Dog Man, and you’ll be set,” said A-Bomb. “Hell, this is nothing. Hog eats this kind of stuff up. Shit, it likes taking flak. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“I guess so. Looks bad, though.”

“Nah. This is all sheet metal. It’s like on a car. Hell, they just take out a screw here, screw there, bam, you’re back to normal.”

A mechanic who had been listening to the conversation rolled his eyes, then left to get his chief so they could decide what to do. His guess was, put a bullet through the A-lOA’s nose and call it a day.

“The plane shook a little on the way back,” said Doberman. “But the instruments said I was fine.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.” A-Bomb held out his arms as if he had had to explain the facts of life to a raw recruit. “This fucking plane was made to get hit. Not like those sissy pointy noses. Now, you’re flying an F-16, right? You couldn’t have ejected fast enough. F-15? Man, Saddam’s serving you lunch right now. But this — God, all you need’s a new paint job and you’re outta here.”

“I don’t see any bullet holes in your stinking plane.”

“Hey, that’s not my fault,” said A-Bomb. He turned his head back toward the runway. “What do you think Dixon’s plane’ll look like?”

“I don’t know. I’m kind of wondering what happened to him.”

“He wasn’t too talkative on the radio coming in,” said A-Bomb. “I think he got rattled. First day and all.”

“He’ll be okay,” said Doberman. It was a reflex, like he was sticking up for his kid brother.

“Shit, I didn’t say he wouldn’t, did I?” A-Bomb pointed to a Hog steadying itself for a landing at the far end of the strip. “Maybe that’s him. We ought to start a pool on the number of bullet holes. Whoever gets the most wins.”

“Wins what?”

“I don’t know. A case of homemade beer.”

“Gee, there’s a prize,” said Doberman. “And how the hell would you count them on my plane?”

“Good point.”

The hot Saudi air whipped into Dixon’s face like a blast from an afterburner. He caught his balance against the fairing strip of the cockpit’s windshield, checked to make sure the ladder had scrolled itself downwards, then hoisted his long legs around and over the Hog^s front end. The uncontrollable urge to get his feet onto the pavement kept him from noticing the shake in his legs, kept him from noticing anything until he was down, leaning against the darkened green camo of the A-lOA’s body, leaning and then sinking.

Dixon had never puked from flying before, not even the first time he’d pulled negative g’s, but he lost his cookies now, guts erupting in a bilious flow that spread out below the big jet like oil from a ruptured tanker. He puked and puked, stomach and chest exploding as if they had just invented the phenomenon. His mind flew out with the fluids, evaporating on the tarmac.

Exhausted, still shaking, the lieutenant found himself on his hands and knees beneath the jet’s wing. He was soaked, though thankfully from sweat, not puke. Carefully, his stomach still turning, he backed out from under the plane. Still bent over, he found himself face to face with Doberman.

“Yo, Lieutenant, where the hell have you been?”

Dixon fell back, startled, his heart stoking up as if he’d been caught off-guard in an alley by a couple of thugs. He fell against the hard metal of the airplane, trapped there.

“Lost your breakfast, huh?” laughed A-Bomb, standing behind Doberman. “They teach you that in F-15 school? Oh that’s right — you never matriculated, right?”

“Ease off, A-Bomb,” said Doberman.

“Hey, I didn’t mean anything,” said the pilot. “You okay, kid? You look a little, you know, loose in the head.”

“I’m okay.” Dixon heard his voice crack, like he was nine years old. He pushed himself off the plane, standing on his own two feet for the first time. He towered over Doberman, who was short even for a pilot.

“What happened?” demanded Doberman. “Did the Mirage jump you, too?”

Dixon shook his head. “I lost you somewhere in the flak.”

“My radio went out,” the captain added. “Is that why you lost me?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“What happened?”

What had happened? Dixon started to tell him everything — how the plane and world had started moving in slow motion; how he’d lost track of where he was and fired his Mavericks poorly; how he’d risen through the flak and gotten rattled; how panic had flooded his bloodstream.

Something stopped him. Whether it was ego or A-Bomb’s grin or the look on Doberman’s face — a look that expected a right-stuff playback — Dixon couldn’t find the words to tell the truth with.

“Uh, I don’t know exactly,” was the best he could manage.

A-Bomb laughed. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“After I called the antiair battery when you started lining up your mavericks, I thought we were breaking the figure eight,” Dixon said.

I didn’t hear the call,” Doberman said. “My radio must have been out already.” He nodded. “Did your Mavericks hit?”

Dixon shrugged.

“Did you get the tower?” Doberman asked.

“I don’t think so

“No?”

“I don’t know. I thought I locked at first, but then I realized it wasn’t it.”

“You get anything?”

“A van. I can’t even remember.”

A-Bomb was scouting around the plane. “Jesus, you’re not even scratched,” he said. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch. You should have seen what happened to Doberman’s plane. Chewed up and spit out.”

“You all right kid?” Doberman put his hand on his bicep. Though the captain was half his size, his grip hurt.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I’m sorry I lost you,” said Doberman.

Dixon knew he was the one who ought to be apologizing, and more, but he kept his mouth shut.

Maybe it was the hard light of the desert, but to Doberman the kid looked like a teenager, and a scared one at that. His clouded blue eyes and fuzzy red cheeks seemed to belong to a thirteen-year-old, not a towering, over-achieving, aw-shucks fighter jock. Dixon had All-American good looks to go with a tall, athletic frame, but he suddenly seemed stooped over and frail. It could’ve been the after effects of the vomiting spell, but damned if the kid didn’t look a lot like he was going to cry.

Doberman opened his mouth to say something encouraging — he wasn’t sure what the hell that might be — when a damaged F-16 careened in for a landing on the runway not far away. The yelping roar of the plane’s engine took the words away; he settled for a punch to the shoulder.

They didn’t teach that in leadership training, but it was the best he could manage at the moment. Someone on the maintenance crew was shouting at him; there were a thousand things to get squared away before they took off again. Until Mongoose came in, he was in charge of the group.

A black chief master sergeant, nearly as fat as A-Bomb, pulled him by the shoulder and shouted in his ear. “Hey, you Glenon?”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“Call me Jimbo. I’m running this crew here,” he said, gesturing indiscriminately toward the swarm of maintenance people. The sergeant, well into his forties, had a confident, easy-going crease in the corner of his eyes, put there by a lifetime of squinting at airplane parts. “We were hustled out here at the last minute on loan, so we’re making do. What else is new, right?” The chief stopped and pointed at Doberman’s plane. “That your Hog?”

Doberman nodded, then followed as Jimbo started walking toward it. The sergeant nodded his head as he went, as if carrying on an imaginary conversation. Finally, he turned and smiled. His cheeks puffed out as if he were blowing into a tuba. “You took some beating, huh?”

“I didn’t even realize I was hit.”

“No shit.” The sergeant uttered the phrase without the slightest hint of amazement. Once again he began walking; the nods took up where they had left off.

“We got one more plane in our group,” said Doberman. “The Devils. Major Johnson. He’s running a little late. He was just clearing the border when we landed.”

“I’m sure he’ll be here,” said Jimbo. “We’re getting a hell of a lot more action here than they thought. A lot of guys short on fuel.”

“We’re supposed to be back up in an hour,” said Doberman. “What do you think?”

“You’re not going to make it in an hour.”

They had arrived at the rear of Doberman’s Hog. Three airmen stood staring at different sections of the plane, a little like gawkers at a museum.

Or traffic accident.

“We got a mission,” said Doberman, feeling like he ought to exert a little authority. Some of the older NCOs thought they ran the show.

They did, but you didn’t want to admit that to them.

“Don’t we have priority?” the pilot added when the sergeant didn’t comment.

“Oh, your planes have priority,” said Jimbo, “That’s no sweat. We’ll have the others shaved and perfumed before the puke’s dry on the lieutenant’s uniform. But you need a radio before you fly again, doncha think?

“So plop one in.”

The sergeant gave Doberman a world-class NCO-to-officer smile. “Well, sir, as soon as we get one here with an antennae and all, we’ll do some ploppin’. We’re kind of triage, me and my guys. Colonel just got us out here to keep the strip clear. Still, we can handle the sheet metal. Meantime, don’t you think you should be rubbing a rabbit’s foot or something?”

“Why?”

“You fucking Hog pilots are all alike.” Jimbo’s cheeks worked like a set of bellows as his head bobbed back and forth, smiling, shaking his head and frowning, all at the same time. Finally, he ran his thick fingers through his thicker brush of hair and smiled again. “Sir, no offense, no disrespect, all right? But whack me at night if you’re not the luckiest dead man on this base, all right?”

“It flew okay,” protested Doberman, defending the plane. “Except towards the landing. Then it shook a bit.”

“Sir. No disrespect. Here, come with me, all right?” Jimbo clamped Doberman’s forearm and pulled it toward the fuselage. “See this? Half an inch over, you got no more tail. No, seriously, sir. This? A little deeper, the cable’s gone. No disrespect but your hydraulic line was missed by what — the length of a thumb? Sure you got back up, but look at this. What’d it miss by, two inches? And here? Oh, maybe a quarter of an inch more, some of our Special Forces guys are looking to sweep you up and bring the parts back in a body bag.”

The sergeant continued around the plane, pointing out half a dozen places where, had the shrapnel landed an inch to the right, or left, backwards or forwards, Doberman would have been fried to, as Jimbo put it, crispy critters with extra sugar frosting.

“I got a guy who’ll patch up the worst of it so you can take it on back to King Fahd,” concluded Jimbo. “A couple of hours, tops, assuming we get that radio. It won’t look extra pretty, but hell, we don’t have the car wash working today.” He winked. “Mechanically, you pulled a miracle, getting hit like this without going down. I mean, hell, it’s a tough plane and all, but with this much flak, the odds are something would go. Like I say, sir, no disrespect and I admire your balls, but whack me at night if you aren’t the damn luckiest son of a bitch dead man on this planet right now.”

CHAPTER 10

Once Mongoose told the controller how low on fuel he was, he got pushed to the head of the line, right behind a Phantom Wild Weasel that had sucked an assortment of scrap metal into one of its engines. He had to sweat the last few miles into the field; the fuel dial increased its downward spiral quicker than the altimeter, and the turbofans started to complain. Finally he said screw it, concentrated on the gray-yellow blur of tarmac and put the A-10 down with a spoonful of petro to spare.

From the air, Al Jouf looked like sand punctuated by airplanes and dust storms. On the ground, the dust storms turned into people and the rest turned to chaos. As Mongoose trundled to the end of the runway, an Army corporal appeared from nowhere and began directing him toward the edge of the desert; for a moment the pilot wondered if the guy was an Iraqi infiltrator, trying to sabotage the plane by sinking it into a sand dune. But as he turned he spotted a long row of boxes on low-slung sleds, parked behind another Hog. Next to them was a dragon, the wheeled machine used to load the A-lOA’s GAU-8/A “Avenger” Gatling cannon.

The ground crew pitting the planes wanted him as far to the right as possible, so they could fit others into the small space they’d been allotted. Mongoose pushed along as best he could. Not only was he wary about running off into the sand, but he had to take a fairly severe leak; he nearly always did at the end of a flight.

Meanwhile, men were running all around without paying any particular attention to the moving aircraft. Barely missing a Special Forces sergeant with his left wing, he decided he’d gone as far as possible. He practically flew out of the seat and onto the desert, relieving himself directly into the Saudi soil.

Few pees felt as sweet.

“Hundred mile piss, huh?” said a familiar voice behind him.

“Five hundred miles, more like it,” he told A-Bomb.

“Ought to use your piddle pack,” said the other pilot, grinning into his face.

“Can’t a guy get some privacy?”

“Sorry.” Dressed in his flight gear, A-Bomb managed somehow to look totally disheveled and cool at the same time. He’d customized the gear so completely Mongoose half-suspected he had an onboard climate control unit.

“Did Doberman make it?”

“Ah, no sweat.” A-Bomb reached into one of the myriad of pockets and pulled out a thick cigar in a protective metal tube. “Want one? Clyston got me a bunch. Says they’re from Cuba.”

“No thanks. How about Dixon?”

“Not even a scratch on his fucking plane,” said A-Bomb, puffing the cigar into flame. “He looks like he was in a parade.”

“They do BDA yet?” asked Mongoose. Bomb damage assessment was especially critical, since their targets were part of the Iraqi air defense system.

“They’re running a little behind,” said A-Bomb. “A few more people decided to stop by than they planned, I think. Man, this is good.” He paused and spit out a wad of chewing gum. “Sure you don’t want one?”

Mongoose shook his head. “We have to be back in the air in a half-hour.”

“Yeah. Just enough time to find some coffee,” said the other pilot, starting away.

“Hey, A-Bomb, hold on — where are Dixon and Glenon?”

“Up ahead, near their planes I think,” said A-Bomb, pointing. “Say, ^‘Goose — better zip up, huh? You’re a little out of uniform.”

Mongoose found Dixon sitting beneath the wing of his Hog, next to the wheel, legs crossed beneath him.

“Yo Lieutenant, what the hell are you doing down here?”

Dixon gave him a blank look, said nothing.

“Doberman tells me his radio went out before you fired your Mavericks. What happened?”

Dixon continued to stare.

“Did you lose him before or after you fired your Mavericks?”

“I think it was after. He didn’t break the way I thought he would.”

“Did you try and find him?”

Dixon nodded.

“Did you have trouble reading the AWACS when they first contacted you?”

This time he shrugged.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you hit the tower?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Lieutenant, get the fuck out here and tell me what the hell happened.”

The six foot-four Dixon crawled out on his hands and knees like a kindergartner.

“Something wrong with you?”

“No,” said the young pilot. His thick, close-cropped blond hair was crusted with muddy sweat. “I need a drink of water or something. I/m thirsty. Maybe I’m dehydrated. After I fired the Mavericks, I spun around and went after a couple of trailers with my CBUs.”

“They hit?”

“No. I mean I don’t think so. I was too high.”

“How come you didn’t take any flak?”

“I’m supposed to apologize because I didn’t get shot down?”

Mongoose, pissed that he’d nearly run dry searching for someone who didn’t need to be searched for, rubbed the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes down with his fingers. “What about the AWACS call?”

“I acknowledged when I heard it.”

“Why didn’t you try contacting them sooner? Or me,” he added pointedly.

“I thought I did. Maybe I selected the wrong frequency.”

Mongoose frowned. That wasn’t unheard of, especially when things got hairy. But it wasn’t necessarily something to hand out a medal for. On the other hand, there’d been a lot of traffic and there were plenty of non-screw up explanations for missing a radio call.

“See if you can find somebody to check the radio out, just in case,” Mongoose told him.

Dixon nodded.

“Hey, you okay, kid?” Mongoose asked, making his voice as calm as possible.

“I’m fine,” snapped Dixon. “I just need some water, that’s all. When are we taking off again?”

“The triple-A was heavier than hell,” said Doberman. “It started before we even got in the clouds and followed us right down. I’m not surprised he’s rattled.”

“He’s more than rattled,” said Mongoose. “He couldn’t give me a straight answer on why he didn’t go to SierraMax.”

“We got separated. I think he got lost when we came out of the bombing run.”

“Yeah.”

“His Mavericks hit. I went over and checked it out with the intelligence guys,” said Doberman. He was sitting on a pile of iron bombs waiting to be loaded beneath Mongoose’s Hog. “He probably scored with the CBUs, too. They screwed up half his video with their equipment. Watch they don’t do the same to yours.”

“So why didn’t he tell me that?”

“He ducked under the wing and took a nap or something.” Doberman shrugged. “I think he’s just being cautious about taking credit. Kid’s never been in the frying pan before.”

Mongoose didn’t bother answering. He’d made a mistake, picking Dixon for this mission. The kid was too green. He saw it in his eyes.

“You mad because he lost me?” Doberman asked. “My radio was out. Could’ve happened to anyone. Check his INS — ten bucks says it gave him the wrong coordinate and he got confused. He just doesn’t want to admit it.”

“It’s more than ego,” said Mongoose.

Why the hell had he missed it back at King Fahd? Why hadn’t he realized it when he was slotting the pilots for the missions. Dixon was the only lieutenant he’d had fly the first day.

Hell, there probably weren’t more than a dozen lieutenants flying missions in A-lOs today. Going deep, right into the heart of Iraq — shit, what was I thinking?

He was a hell of a pilot, though. He had the stuff.

No, he had moves, but not the stuff. His eyes were empty. He was a liability in combat.

I made a mistake once; I can fix it now, Mongoose decided. I have to.

“I want you to trade planes,” he told Doberman. “You take Dixon’s north with us. He can hang out until yours is fixed enough to fly home.”

“Jeez, Major, don’t you think you’re being kind of hard on him? I mean—”

“It’s an order,” snapped Mongoose. “No discussion.” He turned before Doberman could react, and went off to see how much longer it would be before the planes were ready to go.

CHAPTER 11

He was a failure. He’d frozen and puked under fire. Worse, he’d just lied about it. Now he was trapped and ashamed.

But god, he’d never felt so scared in his life.

CHAPTER 12

The way A-Bomb figured it, any base that had more than a pup tent to it to have at least a dozen coffeemakers going at any given moment. All he had to do was find one.

True, it was a bare-bones, front line operation, but that was no reason to skimp. He figured the maintenance monkeys were just holding out on him when they answered his questions about scoffing some joe with cross-eyed stares.

You’d think he asked for tea or something.

A Special Forces unit had taken over a good portion of the base, adding homey touches like sandbags and trenches. A-Bomb figured his best bet lay in that direction. He soon found himself staring into the business-end of a highly modified Squad Automatic Weapon.

“Nice laser sight you got there,” he told the gun’s owner, pushing the barrel away. “You got any coffee?”

“Excuse me, sir,” spat the man, a sergeant who spoke with a very pronounced Texas drawl. “This here area’s off limits.”

A-Bomb smiled into the sergeant’s face. The thicker the accent, the further north they were born. “So you got any coffee?”

The soldier scowled. A-Bomb was at a slight disadvantage; he’d already decided he wanted to save his other cigar, and so had nothing to barter. His only option was flattery.

Fortunately, he had an easy subject.

“You do the work on that gun yourself, Chief?” he asked.

“This is a standard piece of machinery.”

“Shit. Besides the sight, the barrel’s reworked, and if that’s a stock trigger I’m Buck Rogers.”

The sergeant’s lip upturned ever so slightly, but his expression could not be considered a smile. “Jealous, Buck?”

“Nope. I’m just trying to figure a way to get my parachute rigger to fit a holster for one on my vest here.”

“You probably have enough trouble not shooting yourself with that Beretta in your pocket. Sir.”

A-Bomb smiled. “Pick out a target.”

“Excuse me?”

“Pick out a target. You hit it first, I go away. I hit it, you point me toward some coffee.”

“Just go away.”

A-Bomb unsnapped the top of his holster — not on the Beretta, but on his personal weapon, tucked into the opposite corner of his belt.

“Sir — ”

“Don’t think you can outshoot a pilot?” grinned A-Bomb.

The sergeant’s face balled up in anger, but he got only halfway into his crouch before the discarded bottle he’d eyed forty yards away exploded in dust. He looked up at A-Bomb in disbelief.

“At least, I figure that’s what you were aiming at,” said the pilot, pushing the custom-built 1911 A2 Colt back into its pouch. “I don’t bring the good sight with me because you have to conserve weight and all. With the plane.”

“You a gun nut?” asked the sergeant.

“Nah. I just like coffee. What do you say? Hate to kill Iraqis without a good shot of joe going through my veins, you know what I’m talking about?”

The sergeant grunted, frowned, then pointed toward a pair of general purpose tents a few yards off. “Coffee’s in there. Anyone barks at you, tell ‘em Rusty sent you.”

“Thanks, Rusty.”

“Don’t push it, sir,” said the sergeant, lumbering away.

Doberman found a corner of the desert near the bomb skids and resituated himself. He took out his anger at the way Mongoose had treated him on his equipment snaps, adjusting and readjusting his anti-g pants and the rest of his gear.

He was mad at Mongoose, but the sergeant — Jimbo — had shaken him with all his talk about dead men and luck.

Luck was a strange thing. It could easily run out.

Hell, he wasn’t lucky. His skill got him here. He was a kick-ass pilot, one of the best in the squadron. Everybody knew that. You relied on luck, they brought you home in a bag.

Doberman looked up and saw A-Bomb ambling over, a Styrofoam cup hanging out of his mouth.

“Want some coffee?” A-Bomb asked.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Hey, relax, Dog Man. It’s too early for a beer, right? Besides, we got more work to do.” He reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a small cupcake. “Want a Twinkie?”

“That’s not a Twinkie. Twinkie’s are rectangular. That’s round.’’

“No shit?” said A-Bomb, examining it. “All of them?”

“Yup.”

“How about that. Guy told me it was a Twinkie.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Special Forces.” He thumbed back in their direction. “Tell them Rusty sent you.”

“I don’t have time. Neither do you.”

“Shit, you’re going to be here all day. Guy told me it’d be a miracle to have that plane back in the air by dark. Guess they lost their manuals or something.”

“No, I’m going up with you and Johnson. I’m flying Dixon’s plane.”

“Really? How come?”

“Because the major told me to, that’s why. And he had a rake up his butt when he did it.”

“Really? What happened to Dixon?”

Doberman shrugged. “Johnson thinks he screwed up.”

“Did he?”

“No way,” said Doberman. He wasn’t sure why he felt so protective of the younger pilot all of a sudden. Today had been only the third or fourth time they’d flown together. “The kid got turned around after dropping his bombs and didn’t hear the AWACS calling, that’s all. I think he was looking for me and just ignored them so he could stay up there longer. Hell, that’s what I would do.”

A-Bomb nodded. Any self-respecting wingman would ignore his own skin to save a buddy.

“Johnson got righteous about it,” Doberman added. “He shoves his hand in my face and says, no discussion.”

This was a difficult concept for A-Bomb to fathom and he blinked his eyes trying to process it. He pushed the cupcake into his mouth and gulped down the rest of the coffee. A full third of what was in the cup splashed across his face and onto his suit, where it joined a well-established montage.

“He acts like he’s got a stick up his ass sometimes,” Doberman said. “A fucking rake. He just about told me I screwed up by getting my plane hit.”

“Ah, you’re exaggerating.”

“Listen, I heard a lot of stuff from guys who served in Germany with him. He’s probably frustrated because he’s not head of the squadron.”

“That’s not Mongoose. He’s a good guy, I told you. I’ve flown with him before. He knows his stuff and he sticks by you. What the hell else do you want?”

Doberman realized he was being harsh. It made sense to put your best pilots in the planes that were going to the dance; he probably would have done the same thing.

It was just the way the major went about it that had burned him. He could have been, well, more diplomatic.

“He could have asked me if I wanted to bump the kid,” said Doberman.

“Yeah, and what would you have said?”

“I don’t know.” Doberman shrugged, not wanting to admit he’d have pushed Dixon aside. “Hell, he could at least have been more diplomatic.”

“There’s a fucking war on,” argued A-Bomb. “How diplomatic do you expect him to be?”

“I don’t know,” Doberman conceded.

“How’d the kid take it?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“See? You don’t even know if he was diplomatic or not.”

“I meant with me.”

“Oh, fuck yourself. Nobody has to be diplomatic with you. You’re the Dog Man. And a god damn Hog driver, for christsake. Diplomatic. Give me a break.”

“Hey, where are you going? The planes are this way, remember?”

“I’m thinking refill before we take off,” said A-Bomb. “There’s time.”

“No there isn’t.”

“Shit, I can make it.”

“Hey A-Bomb, hold up. a second.” Doberman jogged the few steps toward his friend. “You think I’m lucky?”

“How’s that?”

“Lucky. You know.”

The pilot laughed. “You? You’re the least lucky person I know. Why the hell do you think we let you play poker with us?⁷’

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“Sure you don’t want no coffee?”

Doberman shook his head and watched as A-Bomb ambled off in search of more caffeine.

Not having to take a leak while you were flying — now that was luck, especially after twenty cups of coffee.

What Doberman had was skill.

Mostly.

CHAPTER 13

Mongoose walked Dixon off into the sand, trying for a little privacy. A big MH-53J Pave Low helicopter idled a short distance away, its throaty whine filling the air with anxious energy. The big special ops chopper sounded like it wanted to fly all the way to Baghdad and personally take out Saddam.

“Listen, kid, I’m putting Doberman in your plane for the rest of the day. I want you to babysit his Hog until it’s patched together well enough to get back to King Fahd. They may have to scrounge around for some spare parts, but the crew chief swears he’ll have it back well enough for you to fly. Jimbo’s a good guy; he crewed for me a couple of years ago. But listen, you look at it real careful, and you think it won’t fly, that’s your call. Then you stay here, all right? I don’t want you taking any chances. I’ve talked to the commander and I sent word back to Hog Heaven about what’s up. You got it? You all right, Dixon?”

“I’m fine.”

“This isn’t a grounding or anything. You don’t have to get pissed off or anything.” Mongoose had to tilt his head upwards to look into Dixon’s face. None of the emotions he’d expected — anger, resignation — showed through the dazed stare. “I just want the most experienced guys in the cockpit today. All right?”

Dixon shrugged.

Really, what more did he expect? What would he have done in his situation?

“You got something you want to talk to me about?” Mongoose asked.

“Should I?”

Yeah, thought Mongoose. You ought to fight me on this. If you’re smart, you’ll tell me to go to hell. You’ll tell me I’m out of my mind to keep you from going up. You’ll tell me you’re the best god damn pilot in the Air Force, anything to keep flying.

Because if you don’t, if you just keep standing here with a look that’s only half angry, I’m going to think you screwed up big time back there, for no reason but my gut tells me.

“I just think there’s something on your mind,” Mongoose offered. “You feel bad about losing Doberman when things got tight?”

“I guess.”

“The Mavericks look like they all hit. You got the tower. It’s on tape.”

Dixon nodded.

“You weren’t sure?”

“Things were moving so fast. The images weren’t sharp.”

“Well, this isn’t training. What about the CBUs? You saw them hit?”

Dixon hesitated. “I think I was too high.”

“You sure?”

He shrugged. “Pretty sure.”

“Did you have your targets in the sight, or what?”

“Yeah. Jeez.”

Mongoose couldn’t tell whether the kid was being overtly conservative. Hell, the kid might not even know.

No use belaboring this.

“All right. Hang in there,” said Mongoose. “I got to get going.”

Dixon watched Major Johnson walk back toward the planes. He felt the wind grip the sides of his face, rubbing sand against his cheeks.

Guys like Johnson and Glenon, it was easy for them. They didn’t think about what they were doing. They just went up and punched buttons, held on for dear life. Pilots like A-Bomb, shit, he was oblivious to half the world. He flew by the seat of his sticky pants.

BJ Dixon was different. He thought about things. Maybe he thought too much, but that was the way it was.

A fatal, deadly flaw.

CHAPTER 14

“This is CNN.”

James Earl Jones’ voice shook the walls of Cineplex. The network’s logo spun around and filled the immense television screen had not only given the Devils’ squadron room its unofficial nickname but had made it a very popular hangout.

Especially now. Off-duty pilots and most of the intelligence officers who shared the Devils’ Hog Heaven trailer complex crowded the room, watching as the TV flashed a picture of the night sky over Baghdad, shot from a downtown hotel room. One second, the night was dark, blank, peaceful. The next second, more triple-A than Skull had seen over Hanoi during the Linebacker raids filled the heavens.

Knowlington listened in fascination as one of the television correspondents described what it was like to watch an air raid outside your window. He’d never been on that end of it.

On screen, the sky erupted with flash after flash, reflections of explosions on the ground. The F-117As were hitting their targets.

“Take that, you god damn son of a bitch!” said someone in the room.

And with that, Cineplex erupted in a cheer.

Colonel Knowlington was still standing by the door, eyes glued to the television, when someone grabbed his sleeve fifteen minutes later.

He looked across at the balding head of Chief Master Sergeant Alan Clyston. Clyston had started as an airman crewing Knowlington’s Thud three decades before; he was now the squadron’s chief sergeant, in charge of everything from paperclips to cluster bombs. Knowlington called him capo di capo; the people who worked for him just said “Chief” — and genuflected. Pudgy, with gray whiskers and jowly cheeks, the man could still strip and reassemble an engine blindfolded faster than anyone on the base. He was a walking encyclopedia on everything the Air Force flew, but what Clyston was really an expert on was people. Anybody who crewed for him would march barefoot to Baghdad if he asked.

And any officer who crossed him would wish he’d done that instead.

“’Scuse me, sir,” said Clyston. He smiled — mostly, Knowlington thought, at using the word ‘sir,’ which he always did in public. “Can I catch you outside a minute?”

“You remember that guy on TV doing the commentary?” the colonel asked him in the hallway. “He flew F-4s.”

“Didn’t catch him,” said Clyston.

“Shot me down in a training exercise once.” Knowlington led him down his office. “Your manuals on the Maverick are on the way,” he added. “A congressman is hand delivering them.”

“Really? Jeez, sir, good work.”

Knowlington laughed. He half-suspected that tracking down the manuals had been something of a test: Clyston seemed able to locate and appropriate anything he really wanted.

Like the TV and the trailers.

“I got good news and I got bad news,” said Clyston, once inside Knowlington’s spartan office.

“Bad news first.”

“They’re connected. Major Johnson’s group got their target, all planes back to Al Jouf intact.”

“That’s the bad news?”

“One of them got chewed up pretty bad. I talked to Major Johnson and then a buddy of mine who was rustled out that way to make sure the planes are patched together. Jimbo. Remember him?”

“Round black guy, always nods to himself?”

“That’s him. He’ll get it back together as quick as anyone I know.” Clyston tried to make himself comfortable on the small steel folding chair, an exact mate to the colonel’s. He had offered to find the colonel better furniture several times, but Knowlington — who could have a leather-clad suite airlifted through his own connections if he chose — declined.

“They’re scrounging for parts,” added the sergeant. “One of the things they can’t seem to find is a radio. Johnson’s got fried.”

“That’s the bad news?”

“I’m getting there. I was thinking I would put somebody onto a Herc that’s heading in that direction. I could have them on the ground in two hours, tops.”

“So do it.”

“I had to use your name a little to get space on the plane,” said the sergeant.

Knowlington shrugged. Usually he could figure out where Clyston was going, but this time the sergeant had him flummoxed. He only beat around the bush like this if it had to do with personnel.

Damn.

The colonel realized what it was as the name formed on Clyston’s lips.

“Probably going to have to be Technical Sergeant Rosen,” said Clyston.

“Oh, Jesus, Alan. For cryin’ out loud. Not her.”

“Whatever it is, she can have the plane back here tonight. If I were sure it was just dropping a radio in, I could send half a dozen other guys. But Jimbo didn’t exactly have time to do an X-ray, you know what I mean?”

“Damn.”

“It’s either her or me, if you want the plane back tonight. Otherwise, there’s no guarantees.”

“Tell her I’ll cut her fucking tongue out if there’s another incident like General Smith.”

“You know, she wasn’t totally unjustified — “

Knowlington’s eyebrows ended the conversation.

“You keep your F-ing mouth shut the whole flight, you keep it shut at the base, you come back here and you report to me. You got it?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Rebecca Rosen told Clyston twenty minutes later, as she stood waiting for the C-130 crew to finish loading their gear.

“They’ll throw you the F off the plane if you act up. And at the base — you say nothing. F nothing. It’s a special ops base. They’ll bury you in the sand, we’ll never find a body.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Don’t yeah-yeah me, Rosen.” Clyston shook his head, and once again considered going out to Al Jouf himself.

“Look, Sergeant, I’m not a total asshole.” She stuck her nose up in the air like she was a stinking English princess. Five foot-two, a hundred and ten pounds when wet, and she thought she was a stinking Amazon. “I just don’t suffer fools gladly.”

Clyston rolled his eyes. “Your problem is that you never met another member of the Air Force who you don’t think is a fool.”

“I don’t think you’re a fool, Sergeant,” Rosen told him.

“Get the F out of here, Rosen. I want to see that airplane in my hangar by 1800. It has a date with Saddam tomorrow. You got it?”

“I’ll have it here if I have to fly it myself.”

Clyston would bet money she would. Better than most pilots.

Colonel Knowlington glanced at his watch. It was nearly ten a.m.

Where the hell had the time gone? He hadn’t done a damn thing all morning.

Not true. But he hadn’t done anything useful. He’d become one of those red-tape idiots he used to rail against.

Hell, that had happened long ago.

Knowlington slid his notes about the next day’s ATO into the drawer and locked it. Standing, he centered his pad on the desktop, then went to the four-drawer file cabinet and made sure it too was locked. The uncluttered order of the room reassured him somehow, the blank walls a comfortable contrast to the thoughts that jumbled and raced through his mind.

Down the hall, Cineplex was still filled to overflowing. Most if not all of the people watching CNN knew more about what had happened than all of the broadcasters and studio analysts put together; still, there was an undeniable fascination to the reports, especially the video of Baghdad being bombed.

Walking toward the chaplain’s tent, the colonel wondered about the coverage. Would it provoke sympathy for Iraq? Did Saddam now look like the victim?

Vietnam had been like that. You couldn’t blame everything on the media, sure, but they had to shoulder a shitload.

The worst stuff, maybe. People applauding — applauding! — when a pilot was captured.

Knowlington had argued with his two sisters only once about the war. He’d known it would be useless before he even opened his mouth. Something — booze probably, but maybe his love for them, too — made him try.

No way. They knew the truth — they had seen it on TV and in the papers.

Colonel Knowlington found the chaplain’s tent. There were a few people standing around a coffee machine at the back. He walked over silently, nodded to an officer from one of the transport units he knew vaguely. Nice guy. Young. Most of the other people who came to these meetings were enlisted. There were no ranks here.

Today was a busy day, and there wasn’t likely to be a crowd. The colonel had barely filled his cup when the informal leader of the group, known as “Stores,” cleared his throat near the small wooden podium at the front of the tent.

“We ought to try and keep things quick today, since there’s a lot going on,” said the man, who was a logistics sergeant. The others began sifting among the chairs, everyone sitting near the front, but not in the front row itself. No one was next to anyone else. “We’ll just be ad hoc for the next few days; catch as catch can, etcetera. Anyone who has to leave, you know, ought to go when they have to. Okay — anyone have anything to say?”

Knowlington glanced around. When no one else spoke, he rose slowly to his feet.

“My name is Michael and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober now thirteen days, going on fourteen. I thought it would be easier here, but it turns out its probably a bit worse. Too much Listerine.”

Everybody laughed.

CHAPTER 15

In theory, every A-10A had been stamped from the same sheet metal. The parts were completely interchangeable; weapons, performance, characteristics precisely the same. The bare-bones design and facilitated production lines were supposed to churn out the Air Force equivalent of a model T, available in any color, as long as it was muted green. Unlike most other military jets, there weren’t even different versions or model numbers to complicate matters. An OA-10A was just an A-10A on a target-spotting mission. The only thing different was the mix of bullets in its gun.

In reality, each Hog had its own quirks and characteristics. The one Doberman was driving, for instance, seemed to pull slightly to its left, a bit like a motor boat with a loose rudder. In fact, the characteristic was so noticeable on takeoff that the pilot triple-checked his flap setting and instruments. Eventually, he decided the problem was with the engines, even though the gauges said the two GEs were operating in precise unison.

His stomach said screw the gauges. One fan had just a little more bite than the other, a little more aggressive spinning around its axle. No amount of fine-tuning the throttle evened it out, either. The solution was all in the stick and rudder, all in Doberman’s attitude as he flew. He tensed his muscles a different way to fly Dixon’s plane; that’s what it came down to.

Another thing — the ACES-2 ejector seat felt different. Totally impossible, but absolutely true. Kid’s fanny must’ve bent it special.

Doberman noticed the rear end of A-Bomb’s plane had risen a bit high in his windshield; he tilted his nose up a tad more to correct. They were flying a loose trail formation north, climbing to twenty thousand as they ran over the berm marking the border between Saudi Arabia and its aggressive neighbor. A number of tanks were waiting to get their turrets blown off about a hundred miles away.

Luckiest dead man alive, huh? What the hell did Jimbo mean by that?

A quarter inch one way or another.

Yeah, right. A quarter of an inch one way or another and the damn shell would have missed completely.

Doberman snorted into his oxygen mask. He’d been unlucky as hell ever since he got here, and not just at poker.

Another way to look at what had happened to his Hog was the opposite of luck. Hell, nothing hit Dixon’s plane, nothing, and he’d flown through the same shit Doberman had. Now that was luck.

Kid probably sucked what little luck he had right out of him. Some guys were like that. Luck magnets.

A couple of days ago Doberman had blown a tire landing. That was unlucky as hell. Hogs never blew tires. Never.

It wasn’t luck that had kept the plane from becoming a pile of junk that afternoon.

It was kick-ass piloting.

Hey, you want to call that luck? OK. Maybe to a grizzled old sergeant who had been there when Orville and Wilbur traded in their bicycles, it was luck.

To Doberman, it was skill.

And the hell with anyone who said he was conceited about that.

Doberman peered out the side canopy, staring through the thick, protective glass toward the desolate undulations of yellow below. The sand and grit hardly seemed worth fighting over; maybe staring at it all day made you crazy.

Sure, but so did thinking about the oil beneath it. Obviously Saddam’s problem.

“Yo, Doberman, buddy, how’s our six?”

Doberman snapped to attention at A-Bomb’s call. He craned his neck around, making sure his back, or his “six” as in six o’clock on the imaginary clock face of their location, was clean. As he pushed his eyes toward the front windscreen, he realized that A-Bomb had actually made the call to subtly remind him to keep his separation; he was off Devil Three by less than a quarter mile, and closing.

Subtle.

“Nothing behind us but a lot of dirt and open sky, thank you very much, old buddy,” he said.

“Don’t mention it.”

“We’re flying silent com,” barked Mongoose.

Fuck you, said Doberman, without, of course, keying the microphone.

He hadn’t been paying enough attention, and now as he dropped back he realized he was also muscling the stick. So he had to wake up and relax at the same time. Doberman blew a long breath, letting the Hog ease under him like a calm horse out on a Sunday walk. His tendency to over manage the plane was a symptom of fatigue; they’d been flying since nearly three this morning and his butt was dragging lower than the wheels.

Mongoose had volunteered them for this stinking BAI hop, another reason to be pissed off at him. The original frag — the fragment or portion of the air tasking order that pertained to them — had them just sitting on alert at Al Jouf before going home.

Yeah, but could you blame him? Who wanted to hang out while there were things to blow up?

They were about three minutes from the assigned kill box when a familiar call sign crackled over the radio.

“Cougar to Devil Leader. Devils, stand by for tasking.”

Tasking?

Doberman slipped up the volume on the radio, even though the E-3 controller’s voice had been loud and clear.

“We need you to head east, pronto,” explained the AWACS. “One of our Weasels spotted a shipment of Scuds on the highway.”

CHAPTER 16

Dixon found himself wearing a rut in the sand at the edge of the runway, unable to tear his eyes away from the stricken planes straggling into the base. Every beat-up F-16, every flamed-out Tornado seemed to criticize him: if its jock could take it, why couldn’t he?

Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. Unwilling to go near anyone whose questions would inevitably lead to more lies, the young pilot collapsed butt first into the sand, covering his face against the gritty wind. His mind blanked; his brain fogging nearly as badly as it had up north.

He’d sat there for nearly fifteen minutes when he felt a tug on his arm.

“Excuse me, you Lieutenant Dixon?”

Dixon looked up and found an Air Force special ops first lieutenant with a greasy pad of legal-sized paper staring up at him.

“Yeah?”

“Two things. The maintenance people say the parts they don’t have are en route; ought to be here in an hour or less. Plane looked worse than it was, or they kicked butt; Jimbo says take your pick. If it’s fixed tonight you can go back to Fahd. If not, we get you a bunk. Check the sheets before you turn in; the pilots are ball busters.”

Dixon shrugged. The prognosis on the parts sounded hopelessly optimistic, given the chaos on the field in front of him, but he wasn’t about to argue with anything that even pretended to be good news.

“Second thing, my colonel wants to know if you can help out the intelligence guys. They’re, uh, kind of overworked.”

“Okay,” said Dixon. “What do I do?”

“Find a Major Bauer,” said the lieutenant, flipping through the pad to see what his next errand was. He’d already mentally crossed Dixon off the list. “Uh, he’ll give you the rundown. Your stuff stowed with your Hog, right?”

Dixon nodded. He rose, surprising the officer with his height. “Where is Bauer?”

“Got me,” said the officer, trotting back toward the tower area.

Dixon asked half a dozen people if they’d seen Bauer without getting a positive response. Finally he flagged down a marine captain with a clipboard who was trotting toward a British plane. Jet engines were roaring all around and he had to practically tackle the officer, shouting directly into his ear.

“I’m looking for Major Bauer.”

“Why?”

“I’m supposed to help debrief pilots.”

“Here you go,” said the captain, handing over the clipboard.

“You’re Bauer?”

“No. But my plane’s ready and I got to get back to my unit. Bauer’s up there. There’s a communications set up in the Humvee. See it?”

He didn’t, but the marine, obviously shanghaied into the job earlier, disappeared before he could ask for more directions.

The clipboard had a thick sheaf of unlined, completely blank paper. There was a pen beneath the clip, which turned out not to work.

While he recognized the type of plane before him — it was a two-place Tornado, one of the most common British types in the Gulf — he wasn’t precisely sure what kind of mission it would typically be tasked.

Had a hell of a drawing on the nose, though. A woman who was primarily boobs was getting a missile right where it counted.

“Like the tart?” the pilot yelled down from the fuselage.

“Excuse me?” Dixon yelled back.

“The drawing. It’s m’wife.” He laughed. “It’s the backseater’s wife, actually.” He laughed again.

Between the roar of incoming jets and the subdued whine of the Tornado, not to mention the pilot’s accent, Dixon caught maybe a third of any given sentence.

“I’m supposed to debrief you,” he shouted.

“What?”

“What was your mission?” yelled Dixon.

“My mission? Talmud.”

“Tail what?”

“Talldaul Air Base.”

“Did you hit it?”

“Of course.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.”

“Like?”

“Like what?”

“How bad did you hit it?”

“Well I didn’t have a bloody chance to land there and find out, now did I?”

“Was it, uh, destroyed?”

“What, the runway?”

“Damage?”

“Like a tart’s face.”

“Tart?”

“Prostitute, son. How bloody old are you?”

“Can you spell it?”

“Tart?”

The lieutenant took out his own pen and scribbled something he hoped approximated the shout. Meanwhile, airmen were waving the Tornado pilot forward, urging him toward a tank truck. Dixon got the man’s unit, his call sign, and the fact that he had nearly “gone empty” before the surrounding confusion and revving Turbo-Unions overwhelmed the conversation. Giving up, Dixon took a few steps back — and nearly got run over by a taxiing Hornet.

“Okay, that would be Tallil. So did they hit the field?”

“Yup.”

“How bad?”

“Like a prostitute’s face, if that means anything.”

“Did he get both JP 233s on it?”

“I don’t know.”

“JP 233s, the things they use to muck up the runway.” The Brits like that word. Did he say, ‘muck’? “The JP 233s?”

“I know what you’re talking about. He said it was as cratered as a prostitute’s face.”

Bauer crossed his eyes, then sighed. Though he was wearing an Air Force uniform, he had found or appropriated an army sergeant’s helmet. He was serious about it, too; the chin strap was synched so tight he could barely move his jaw. “All the prostitutes I know have smooth faces.”

“He claimed he hit it.”

“Don’t worry about it. Listen, there’s an F-16 on the ground somewhere that was going north with a package to Taqaddum.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, but I don’t need to know about that; he’s already been debriefed. On his way back they were flying right over a factory at the edge of a lake. Ask him if it was on fire or not.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I think the guy’s name was Franco, or something with a couple of vowels in it. It’s in the sheets somewhere but it’ll take me an hour to find it. He’s with that Guard unit out of New York.”

Dixon wondered what the F-16 pilot — whom he figured would have been in a very big hurry and flying no lower than twenty thousand feet — could possibly have seen with all the cloud cover, even if he happened to be looking in the exact spot the intelligence officer mentioned. But what the hell? It wasn’t like he had anything better to do at the moment.

CHAPTER 17

Even when they were on top of the coordinates the AWACS had sent them to, they had trouble raising the Phantom, possibly because there was so much damn radio traffic. It seemed like every aircraft in the theater was talking on the same frequency. Hell, Doberman thought without too much exaggeration, there were probably a few guys using it to call home.

Finally, a chopped transmission staggered through that included their call sign.

“All right, everybody but Sharp Eyes shut the hell up,” Doberman heard Mongoose bark. “We got a situation here.”

The Phantom pilot told them a pair of flatbeds with Scuds had parked about fifty yards from a water tower in the shadow of what looked like an industrial park. It was ten miles northeast of the way marker they were sitting on. He had also spotted a number of military trucks, including two troop carriers on the road headed in the same direction.

“I’m out of iron or I would have taken them myself,” said the F-4 pilot. He sounded younger than his plane, though that wasn’t a particularly difficult accomplishment. “I’m also about two pounds of fuel from bingo.”

“We’ll take it from here,” Mongoose told him. Doberman spotted the Phantom’s smoky tail at about ten o’clock due north. It seemed to wag a bit as it turned the target over to the Hogs.

Doberman felt his heart starting to pump as they swung down and began looking for the water tower, an easy marker. A-Bomb was ahead of his left wing a few hundred feet, Mongoose beyond that. The Hog snorted as its nose got closer to the dirt; the pig loved scraping along in the sand.

Suddenly he spotted a cloud of dust kicking across the sandpapery terrain to his right.

The two personnel carriers, most likely.

“Devil One, this is Two,” Doberman told Mongoose. “I got the dust bunny to the north there.”

“Roger that,” said Mongoose. “A-Bomb and I will head for the tower.”

Doberman angled his Hog toward the dust cloud, pouring on the gas. The cloud soon separated into the two troop trucks; they’d left the highway. If they thought that was going to help them they were sadly mistaken.

The Hog’s cannon began to bellow as he put the plane into a shallow dive and fired, perforating the path of the lead vehicle but missing the truck itself. He gave the Hog a bit of rudder, pushing her nose to the left and getting off a long, four-second burst.

Points for concept, but none for execution — he’d killed a lot of sand blowing a double air ball and was now beyond the rug rats. More a little pissed at himself, Doberman yanked his nose up and dragged the A-10A back over and under like a gymnast doing a flip. The heavy drag of the bombs beneath his wing — in his excitement and fatigue he had actually forgotten he was carrying a full load of iron — screwed up his sense of balance. The plane flailed wildly toward the ground, angry at his hot-dogging and inattention. For a second Doberman thought he had lost it. As he wrestled the plane back to level flight and got her off the deck, he realized it wasn’t quite as bad as he’d thought, though he deserved a serious kick in the butt for getting stupid.

The trucks continued to the west as he attempted to put a chokehold on his adrenaline and take things a step at a time. Gearing around for a cannon run, he saw that they were now separated from each other by a good distance. Choosing the one on the left as his first target, A-Bomb picked up his wing and drove the Hog toward the left rear quarter panel of the fleeing Iraqi. He started firing his cannon perhaps a second too soon; the plane lost a bit of momentum as the powerful Gatling fired, but this time Doberman had the green canvas locked in the crosshairs. The shells rippled in a tight line through the back of the truck. It looked like a zipper coming undone, the two halves peeling apart in a jagged twist of black and blue smoke, then fire, then more smoke, then a mélange of colors and death.

The guys in the other truck must have seen what had happened to their friends, for by the time Doberman had the A-10 pointed in its direction, the drab colored Toyota — it wasn’t at all, but somehow it was more fun to plink if he thought of it as one of the rice burners his brother-in-law sold — was wailing down a sandbank without anyone at the wheel. Doberman lit the cannon and waxed the cab three rounds into his burst.

The gray tower hulked over a trio of wedge-shaped shadows ahead. Mongoose decided the shadows must be buildings, and that the Scuds would be on the other side of the tower. “Swing with me to the east. We’re going to turn tight and come in low for a look,” he told A-Bomb. “Expect ground fire.”

“What, you think these guys have slingshots?” Mongoose was too busy concentrating on the ground to answer. He’d seen photos of Scuds, but never the real thing. Now he wasn’t totally sure he’d recognize one.

Not that it would matter. Anything down there was going bye-bye.

“There’s a good-sized gun on the roof of that building,” squawked A-Bomb.

Too late to do anything about it. Mongoose felt himself hunkering down into the titanium bathtub that protected the cockpit as he slammed the Hog forward, still trying to get a look at the parking area behind the water tower. Two long trucks sat nose to rear on a narrow driveway. They looked like oil trucks, except that the front of their tanks had coneheads.

There was more ground fire, but it was fairly light; even twelve millimeter stuff wasn’t going to do much damage unless the Hog stayed in one place for a long time. And he wasn’t about to do that.

“They’re right behind the water tank,” Mongoose told A-Bomb. “They have some heavy machine guns and maybe light anti-air.”

“Yeah. I’m past ^‘em.”

“Come around with me and let’s take them out.” Mongoose noted several trucks and smaller buildings nearby, and a fair-sized revetment with maybe a half-dozen, khaki-covered vehicles a quarter of a mile or so directly north of the Scuds.

“You take the Scuds and I’ll get the guys on the roof,” said A-Bomb. “Shit, Goose, there’s a battery of something in that half-donut north of the parking lot. Bitch fuck, these guys got peashooters all over the place.”

“You’d think they lived here or something,” said Mongoose, pushing the Hog into position to make a decent bomb run.

Doberman’s arms felt like lead as he pulled off the remains of the second truck. He heard Mongoose call out the location of the two Scud carriers and swung back in their direction.

A quick scan of the instruments showed everything running at spec. The slight pull to the left was still there, but the engines pegged in perfect parallel on the gauge. Plenty of gas, he told himself; plenty of explosives sitting under the wings to eliminate as many Scuds as they could find.

He was still looking for the other Hogs when the terrain ahead erupted with a thick black explosion. A-Bomb was yelling ‘hot shit’ and Doberman pulled his right wing up and pushed straight for the thunderclap of ex-Scud, aiming to mop up what was left. He caught a glimpse of a Hog orbiting back in his direction, off at two o’clock.

“Doberman, there’s a flatbed with two guns at least to the west of the tank. Take it out,” said Mongoose.

“No, I got it,” said A-Bomb.

“Where the fuck are you?” Doberman asked.

“Right here,” said A-Bomb, pulling his A-10 through the smoke cloud. He was well off to Doberman’s right but the roiling dust was so thick Doberman broke off, unable to get a target and not wanting to screw up what was quickly becoming a turkey shoot. He gathered his wits for a better run once A-Bomb cleared.

“What else is down there?” he asked A-Bomb, his back momentarily turned to the action.

A-Bomb’s response was garbled. Someone else jumped on the frequency and Doberman heard an F-16 flight ask if the Hogs needed help.

Meanwhile, Mongoose put himself in a shallow orbit and played quarterback. He had A-Bomb hold off while he directed Doberman in to drop his bombs on a truck park north of the now-demolished Scuds.

The haze made it tough to settle his target in the HUD. As he glared into the screen. Doberman realized the enthusiasm he’d felt this morning — hell, the giddiness, there wasn’t another word — had slipped away. Even the energy he’d just had smoking the trucks was gone. His arms throbbed as he worked the stick, his legs jittered. Time to get rid of the stinking bombs and head home. A thick shadow finally loomed in the center of his HUD. He went for the trigger, pickling his bombs and arcing back toward the sky, looking for his second wind.

“One of us ought to take out that water tank,” said A-Bomb. “Discourage them from coming back.”

“Yeah,” said Mongoose. “Who’s closest?”

“I am,” said Doberman.

“You got bombs?”

“Negative. Cannon’s ready though.”

“Okay. I don’t see any more ground fire,” added Mongoose. “You?”

“They ought to be out of ammo by now. Stinking machine gun bullets won’t do much anyway.”

“Yeah, don’t get too cocky,” said Mongoose. “All it takes is one.”

“I think anyone still alive down there’s hiding in the sand,” said A-Bomb. “They got a bad case of Hog-itis.”

Doberman pushed his Hog around and double-checked his cannon. “A good burst ought to nail it. Unless it’s filled with gasoline. Then one’ll do.”

“If you wait a minute, I’ll come in behind you.”

“I’m lined up now,” said Doberman, rushing a bit, as if getting the tower was somehow a competitive event.

“Doberman, take it out,” said Mongoose. “Then we go home.”

CHAPTER 18

Hakim Ibn Lufti was not religious by nature, but he prayed to Allah nonetheless as he snaked his way onto the catwalk surrounding the water tower. The American invaders were all around him; though he had lived in the desert his entire life, he had never felt more alone. The green-black planes had destroyed the missiles and all of his comrades; as far as he knew, he was the only one left alive.

Yesterday, Private Hakim had confided to another man that if the Americans came, he would most likely surrender; this was Saddam’s war, and he felt no particular fondness for the head of his country. But the man Hakim had told that to lay in the sand several hundred yards away; he’d caught a fist-sized piece of metal in his chest when the planes began dropping their bombs. Hakim’s ambitions had accordingly changed; he wanted nothing more than to extract some revenge on the invaders.

He had carried a missile launcher to the tower to help him do so. He wasn’t entirely sure how to use the weapon, however. It was a new model, an SA-16, and though he had heard others say it was considerably better than the SA-7, in fact he had never been trained to use either. He knew how to push a trigger, however, and had some hope that if the weapon were pointed in more or less the right direction, it could take care of the rest.

Hakim had almost fired at one of the jets zooming at him when he was distracted by a billow of thick smoke. He began to choke. By the time he recovered, the warplane was veering away.

Hakim cursed, and pushed the trigger anyway.

Doberman cursed as he watched his cannon shot spitting wide right, a bad putt on an uneven green. The first two slugs punctured the side of the tower but the plane’s pull and maybe the wind threw him off. He had too sharp an angle and then the smoke got in the way and he had to slide off and try for a better pass.

Damn it, I have to give myself more room this time, he told himself. I may be tired but I can still hit a fucking water tower.

God, he thought, I’ll never hear the end of it if I miss the damn tower.

It took a second for Hakim to realize why the weapon had not fired. The missile had a prime button which kept it from being accidentally launched.

Tears came to his eyes as he realized his error. Cursing himself, cursing his God, he unsafed the weapon and punched its stock against the steel rail in anger. The jet was far away now, and getting further.

And then, God brought it back. It was as if His hand took its nose, drew it up in the sky and yanked it backwards. Its strange, stubby wings straightened as it angled around and flew directly toward him.

Fire erupted from its mouth. The tower shuddered, crumpling above him. Hakim cringed, held his breath, waited for death to come. He felt the grating below him start to give away. He held the missile launcher up, falling as the plane flashed overhead. He pressed the trigger as his life evaporated in a steam of metal and fire.

CHAPTER 19

A-Bomb saw the flash from the tower, saw the rocket shoot out wide, and saw the tower disintegrate, all at the same time. He barked a warning to Doberman and pounded his own plane hard left, shooting flares and giving it gas and pushing his body to the side, trying to add mustard to the evasive maneuvers. Doberman jinked ahead, twisting, diving and climbing behind a shower of flares.

The missile had shot straight out from the tower, perpendicular to the Hog’s flight path. An ordinary SA-7, if it happened to get lucky and catch a whiff of the exhaust, would choke out its engine swinging back and fall harmlessly away.

This one didn’t. This one came around in a tight arc, snorting for Doberman’s turbofan.

“It’s still on you,” yelled A-Bomb.

Doberman sensed the missile before A-Bomb warned him. Something had moved on the tower as he closed in; a sixth sense told him there was a suicidal maniac on the rail with a shoulder-missile. The pilot pushed the Warthog hard in the direction of the launch as he flew past, tossing flares and jinking as wildly as he could. His cannon burst had slowed his momentum, and there wasn’t a huge amount of altitude left to use gathering speed. He danced and shook, shoving the forked-tail of the Hog in a wild streak across the desert, riding a roller coaster of right angles and flares. His stomach rolled into a pea as G forces slammed against his body in every direction. The pilot felt the flesh on his cheeks peeling under the sudden weight of the oxygen mask, plunging itself into his face. But it was a good feeling, blood running away from his head despite the best efforts of his suit. The heady, floating weightlessness told him he was alive.

Doberman had practiced this sort of escape under these sorts of circumstances at least a hundred times. He realized he should be clear now, a few miles and a dozen hard turns from the missile. The Russian-made SA-7 was a good weapon, but couldn’t hang with you on a serious G turn. He kept going a few more seconds just to be sure, pulled one more turn with more flares, being extra cautious, then turned around, looking for his buddies. His eyes shot over to the altimeter ladder on the HUD, focusing on the white numbers as he reoriented himself.

In that second, a sledge hammer hit his right wing.

CHAPTER 20

The next five seconds defied all known physical laws of time and space. Simultaneously, the universe moved at infinite speed and stood completely still. Doberman was paralyzed beyond comprehension.

Hit a bit beyond midway on its right wing, the Hog slumped in the air. Small bits of the wing were sucked into the turbo fan. The GE groaned, its fire quenched by the in-rushing rain of debris.

The engine munched the shrapnel, spit it out, and then, helped by the momentum of the air rushing through the blades as the plane hurtled downwards, kicked itself back to life. Doberman felt the surge in his arms as he coaxed just enough power to stay airborne; stutter-stepping off the ugly brown earth, he managed to hold the plane in a slow but steady climb. He was even going in the right direction, southeast — though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how he got that way.

Once the plane was stable, the pilot pitched his head back to look out the right side of the cockpit, back at the wing. The missile had gone straight through, blowing a fair-sized hole en route. A bit of the aileron had been taken away; he couldn’t quite bend his body around far enough to see how much or what other damage had been done.

On the bright side, the missile had missed the fuel tank.

That, or angels really did drive Hogs in heaven.

A-Bomb waited for the canopy to blow, then worried that Doberman had been hit too low, too fast, too hard to save himself. The distance between the two planes closed as quickly as the bile rose in his throat, the empty sickness of seeing a buddy go down.

“Dog man, get out,” he shouted again and again. “Eject. Eject.”

“Now what the fuck am I going to eject for?” growled Doberman. “A-Bomb, would you shut the hell up so I can think?”

Suddenly, the nose of Doberman’s Hog changed direction. The plane began lifting itself off the deck.

A hand reaching down from above wouldn’t have shocked A-Bomb more.

“Jesus Christ,” he yelped. “You are one lucky mother fucker.”

“Yeah, right. You’re going to explain your reasoning as soon as we put down.”

Adjusting his speed, A-Bomb pulled almost directly over the damaged Hog. The wing had a gaping hole, exposing organs and underwear, not to mention the ribs that held it together. But it was intact.

Just another day in the life of a Hog driver, thought A-Bomb. Damn, I love these planes.

The first thing Mongoose did when he realized Doberman was still alive was curse himself for not taking out the water tank first thing with bombs. Better, he shouldn’t even have bothered. The Scuds were the priority, and they were gone. Getting greedy was a good way to get killed.

It was one thing to put himself in danger, and a hell of a different thing to put his guys there. His job was to get them home. Period. Everything else was way second.

Fucking water tower.

“I have a question for you I need a real honest answer on,” he told Doberman as soon as the pilot had the damaged Hog headed toward the border.

“Shoot.”

“How far you think you can fly that thing?”

“Me? Hell, I’ll fly around the world if you want.”

Mongoose took a second before responding. His own arms and legs were tired as hell; Doberman’s must be aching even more. The control surfaces on the right side of the stricken Hog’s wing were shot to hell, and he’d feathered his right engine. Doberman’s fuel situation was strong enough to get him back to Al Jouf with only a little sweat, assuming he didn’t spring a leak. But that meant sailing through Indian territory just about the whole flight.

They could turn and fly directly south, safer if he had to punch out, but that made Al Jouf a stretch. King Khalid, another FOB the Hogs had used this morning to refuel, was even further.

And what did he do once he got there?

Mongoose took another glance at Doberman’s plane. The Hog looked shot to hell. How long could it stay airborne with a football-sized hole in the wing?

But the matter had to be broached delicately.

“Do you think you could tank?” Mongoose finally asked.

“If I have to. Why?”

“What I’m thinking is the tough thing for that Hog is going to be landing. Your flap’s probably not going to set right, and I’ll be honest with you, it’ll be a miracle if your landing gear works right.”

There was silence from the other plane,

“You can go ahead and respond,” he told Doberman.

“You want me to bail out.”

“Not necessarily. But that may end up the only option.”

“You’re also thinking we shouldn’t go straight back to Al Jouf because you think I’m going to have to bail before I get there.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’re thinking that.”

“Yeah,” admitted Mongoose. “If we go back to the base we’ll be over Iraq most of the way.”

“You ain’t going to jinx it by admitting it,” said Doberman. “Be straight with me.”

“I’m trying.”

“If we refuel, maybe we can coax it all the way back to Hog Heaven,” said A-Bomb. “Bail out in the sand and walk in for a shower.”

“I’m not bailing out,” snapped Doberman. “Period.”

Mongoose worked his lips together, not sure what to say. He would feel the same way. But feelings were irrelevant. What had to be done had to be done.

If it came down to it, would he order Doberman to jump out of the plane? Was it his job to do that?

Absolutely.

Not that ejecting was risk free. The seat manufacturer put survivability at eighty percent.

And they bragged about that.

The flight leader checked his own gauges, calculating distances and plotting a course in his head. There was no sense answering Doberman — what could he say? I’m in charge here?

“Yeah, okay,” said Doberman finally, breaking the uneasy silence. Mongoose couldn’t tell if he was disgusted, or just tired. “Let’s try for a tanker and then on to King Fahd. Line it up.”

CHAPTER 21

Dixon couldn’t find the F-16 pilot, if he existed. There were two F-16s at the base, one of which had been pushed off the side of the runway and left for scrap metal. Neither pilot had been anywhere near Tweedledum — or Taqaddum, the actual name of the Iraqi installation. They didn’t know anything about a lake, but they had seen plenty of things on fire.

Military intelligence at its finest, the lieutenant thought as he returned to the intel Humvee.

Bauer didn’t seem all that broken up about the lack of information. He sent him to debrief a pair of French pilots who had somehow wandered up to Al Jouf in their Jaguars.

Unfortunately, Dixon didn’t speak French. And though the other pilots spoke English, it rolled off their tongues the way a Mk 82 would fall down a flight of stairs at Versailles.

Like the A-10, the aging Jaguar was primarily designed to support front-line troops, but it represented an entirely different philosophy, something more akin to the F-16’s― get in and out as fast as possible. And that was about the only element of their mission Dixon could understand― the two pilots gestured freely as they described an attack on an installation that for all the world sounded like a circus tent. Even more of a mystery was how the pilots had managed to get way the hell out here. They were based at Al Ahsa, back near Riyadh. Dixon hadn’t seen the entire ATO; the air order dictating the first day’s game plan ran hundreds of pages. He knew the Frenchies had started out in the eastern part of the theater.

Every time he asked how they got here, the two pilots began replaying what sounded like a seriously awesome, close-in fur ball gun battle. Their desert-brown ships bore no evidence of a gunfight, however, and Dixon got a firm “no” whenever he used the word “damage.”

Eventually, the lieutenant decided he had as much information as he was ever going to get. He thanked the men, who now began to pepper him with questions about how in God’s name they could get home from here. Dixon nodded cheerfully, answered “yes” as much as possible, then turned and ran for Bauer.

At last he was getting the hang of this intelligence stuff.

The major reinterpreted the pilots’ pigeon English and added a few notes to a thick stack of papers on the Humvee seat. Looking up, Bauer pointed to an F-14 that had swung its wings out wide to land and announced that it belonged to the Saratoga, a carrier in the Red Sea; it had been part of a Navy package striking deep into west Iraq and lost its INS, among other things.

“You want me to go debrief him?” Dixon asked.

“Nah. I’ll get that one myself. Got a cousin on the ship I want to say hi to. Listen, the parts you were waiting for landed about ten minutes ago. Ought to be at the repair area by now. Why don’t you go make sure they get to the right place? Thanks for helping. If you’re ever looking for a job in intelligence, come see me.”

The Hog had been moved several times in the past few hours, and was at the far end of the maintenance areas. A tubular steel ladder had been erected around part of the wing and fuselage, and a small figure was atop it, busily tossing pieces of the plane to the ground. As Dixon got closer, he realized a succession of curses was accompanying the work. He also realized something else; the tech sergeant working on the plane was a woman.

Though he recognized her from his unit, Dixon didn’t know Becky Rosen; in fact, he didn’t know most of the maintenance people besides his own crew chief and one or two of the men who habitually worked on his plane. He’d heard a few things about her though, none of them pleasant. Short, built like a mud wrestler, she had cat eyes and round, freckled cheeks.

She turned around and saw him staring at her from the ground. “Dixon, right? What the hell did you do to this Hog? Drive it through a wheat thresher?”

“I didn’t do anything to it,” he said, taken by surprise. “Captain Glenon was flying.”

“Doberman, huh? I thought he knew better than this. Fuck, did he think we were bored or something?”

“Maybe,” said the lieutenant, not really knowing what else to say.

She scowled. “What the hell happened to yours?”

“My plane? Nothing.”

“Well where is it? Did you walk back from Iraq?”

Dixon felt his entire body begin to burn. His temporary assignment as non-intelligence officer had taken his mind off his failure, but now the guilt shot back in a heavy dose.

But damn it; when did a tech sergeant earn the right to grill an officer?

“Major Johnson bumped me,” he said stiffly.

“Oh.” She looked at him a moment, then turned back to the plane.

There was something in the look that pissed him off even more than her tart tone.

Pity?

He didn’t need that from a stinking technician.

“Say Lieutenant, you think you could hand me up that TACAN aerial cover?”

“What?”

“The big flat doohicky thing by your feet. The radio antenna? The fin?”

“I know what it is.” Dixon was so flustered with anger he couldn’t say anything else. He reached over and picked up the thick blade. Rosen had returned to work on the Hog, and so he had to climb up onto the wing to hand it to her.

“Thanks. Looks like the IFF is fine, but these wires here are toast. You all right, Lieutenant?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Get shot at?”

“I guess so.”

He tried to make his voice sound hard, but Rosen laughed as if he were joking. “Hand me the screwdriver out of the bag over there, okay?”

“What, you think I’m your gofer?”

“No, sir, Lieutenant,” she snapped. “But I was under the impression that you wanted to get this airplane back in the air as soon as possible, and helping me out a little will expedite matters.”

“Expedite. Where’d you learn that word?”

“I have a masters degree in English lit,” she said, holding out her hand for the tool.

Dixon couldn’t tell if she was serious. He reached into the large bag Rosen used as a tool carrier and handed her the screwdriver. He noticed that the bag, though covered with grease and dirt, was made of leather.

“My dad gave it to me. Sentimental value,” she said.

“The degree?”

“No, the bag, wise guy. I earned the degree myself. Romance poetry.” She took the tool and went back to work connecting the fin. Dixon couldn’t see what she was doing beneath the access cover and fin, but there were loose parts everywhere. “What was it like?”

“What?”

“Jesus! Bombing Saddam,” she said. “Did you hit your target?”

“I guess.”

“You guess?” Rosen turned so quickly her face almost smacked his. “No offense, Lieutenant, but we’re busting our butts back here for you guys, and a straight answer wouldn’t hurt now and then.”

Dixon stepped back. “What’s up your ass?”

Rosen turned around to him. “Lieutenant?”

“Why are you riding me?”

“I’m not.” Her eyes were all innocence. “I’m not. Come on, help me get these wires in here. Don’t mind the sheet metal. I had to bend things a little. We’ll straighten that out later. Not by the book, but you want to fly before tonight, right?”

She didn’t mean anything, Dixon thought to himself. She’s just blunt.

“Watch your hands. That end’s sharp. Twenty-seven millimeter went right through here, see? Doberman was flying?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s one lucky son of a bitch, I’ll tell you that. She slapped the side of the plane like she was smacking a favorite horse. “Of course, a Hog can take a lot of shit. But what I’d like to know is how he managed to take triple-A on the top of the plane. I can understand the holes in the belly and the back, but this?”

“Probably he had the Hog on its side, rolling out of the attack,” said Dixon. He motioned with his hands. “The shells would have gotten him like this. There was a lot of triple-A.”

“I thought you guys were supposed to stay above the flak.”

“We were. But the cloud cover was kind of high. Have to see where we’re bombing. And you know… ”

“Anything over five hundred feet you want oxygen, right? That Hog macho anti-snob snobbery shit.” She slammed an access panel closed, then scooped up her tools and slid down the ladder to the ground, half-running to work on another part of the jet. Dixon, still unsure what the hell to make of her, followed tentatively.

“By three. Four the latest,” she said.

“Huh?”

“It’s going to take me a little while to finish. I want to make sure it will work the whole way home. The rest of this we can tidy up back at the aerodrome. The crew here did a kick ass job. Looks like they stamped you out a new rear end. Honest. You’ll be taking off for King Fahd in no time.”

“Great.”

“You sound disappointed. You looking to go back north?”

“Yeah,” he said, his anger stoking up again.

“You’re not scared?”

Scared?

She wasn’t busting his chops. It was a real question.

“Yeah,” admitted Dixon. “I was petrified.”

Her eyes softened. They were pretty eyes, actually, when they looked at you like this.

“Takes balls to admit it,” she said, snapping her game face back on. “Don’t worry, you’ll get another shot. Say listen, Lieutenant, you think you can go steal a really big hammer off that crew over there? A really big one. I have to do some serious banging if we’re going to get you back to Fahd in time for dinner. And don’t tell them what it’s for. Somebody comes over here with a manual and we’re going to bed without supper for three weeks.”

CHAPTER 22

The first refuel was a piece of cake.

It was on the second that Doberman lost control of the plane.

They grabbed a tanker and top priority about three seconds after crossing the Iraqi border. Doberman had a good feel for the plane by then; the damaged Hog didn’t have the most desirable flying characteristics, but he could hold her reasonably steady at five thousand feet. The tanker, though, ordinarily did its business much higher than that. Apprised of the situation, the KC-135 pilot slid down to about ten thousand feet; Doberman coaxed the Hog toward her gently. Even under the best conditions with two engines, it took the underpowered plane an eternity to climb; now it seemed like he was climbing Mount Everest.

The director lights beneath the tanker normally provided a reference for approaching planes. This morning they seemed only to throw him off, juggling back and forth as he eased in. Finally, Doberman got close enough for the boom operator in the back of the tanker to hook his spike into the receptacle. The Hog snorted with pleasure as it sucked up the fuel.

That was the first time. Swinging southeast toward King Fahd, they had to be vectored out the path of a large package of bombers headed north. Doberman’s right hand started shaking uncontrollably as he brought the plane to the proper course heading. At first it was just a twitch in his thumb, and he laughed at it — compared to the immense knot in his back, this torture was amusing.

But as it spread from his thumb to his other fingers, he stopped thinking it was funny. He grabbed the stick with his left hand and shook his right in the air before him, as if he could shoo the problem away. When that didn’t work, he tried stretching his hand out against the top of the instrument panel. Finally, he yelled at it to stop.

It stopped.

“Doberman, you okay in there?” A-Bomb asked. A-Bomb had slid behind him; Mongoose was in the lead.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” said Doberman.

“You know you’re down to three angels.”

The pilot looked at the altimeter in shock. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. I was just looking for a good draw. I got an ace in my hand.”

“Huh? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m bringing it back up.” Doberman put his right hand back on the stick, holding the control with both hands for a few seconds, not sure he could trust it.

“How are you on fuel?”

“Fine,” he barked.

“Just asking.”

Mongoose called in with the time to tanker and the frequency, then double-checked the course headings with both pilots.

Doberman barely acknowledged. There was so much shit to do, so much blank sky to fly through.

Luckiest dead man, huh? What the hell were the odds of getting all shot to hell twice in one day?

Worse than pulling a full house on a four-card draw. Worse than hitting an inside straight.

Never in his life had he done that.

Nah, he must have. All the years he’d played cards, since his uncle JR taught him at age seven, and he hadn’t gotten one?

Didn’t remember if he did. Shit, it was just that he never tried to do it. A sucker’s move.

Good ol’ JR. Taught him how to play poker, taught him how to smoke cigars, taught him just about everything important.

Ought to call him.

Jesus, that would be a good trick, Doberman realized. JR died two years ago.

Hell of a thing to forget. Son of a bitch got crunched so bad in a car accident they had to close the coffin.

“Doberman, you awake back there? The tanker is trying to reach you on their frequency.”

The pilot gave the com panel a dirty look, as if it were responsible for JR’s death.

“They’re at twenty-four thousand feet,” said Mongoose. “You’re two cars back.”

At 24,000 feet? No way he was getting that high. Hell, even a perfect Hog didn’t like being that far off the ground.

“Devil Four?”

“Yeah, I’m switching to their frequency now,” Doberman snapped. “I need them to come down. Way down.”

The tanker was a KC–IOA Extender, a military version of the three-engine McDonnell Douglas DC-10 adapted to a tanker role. Taking the boom from the jet was similar to grabbing a line from the older KC-135, and in fact Doberman had flown his Hog into the Gulf following a KC–IOA. He could suck up to one blind, and had come close to doing so on several night flights.

But no way he was getting to 24,000 feet, not in this lifetime. He was at six thousand, and struggling as it was.

How high can you fly with a hole in your wing?

The tanker pilot brought the plane to about seven thousand feet and threw his landing gear out to help slow himself down. Doberman huffed and puffed against the wind to hold the Hog relatively steady as he closed in. Everything was taking so damn long but at least the A-10 was flying perfectly; slow and perfect.

Then as the pilot pushed the Hog the last few feet toward the long pipe extending from the plane’s rear end, he felt his head starting to spin. His eyes seemed to slip back behind their sockets and down into his cheeks. When he got them back in place, he thought he was coming too close too fast and backed off the throttle; the next thing he knew, he was heading downward in a spin.

A-Bomb, riding off Doberman’s starboard wing, saw the Hog tilting to the left. Before he could key the mike to say anything, Doberman’s plane had rolled toward the earth.

He tucked his wing and started to follow. There was no fresh sign of damage to the Hog, and the wing remained intact despite the stress of the dive. In fact, if A-Bomb didn’t know there was a hole in it, he would have sworn there was nothing wrong with the A-lOA that was plummeting toward the earth at several hundred miles an hour.

Doberman didn’t answer his hail. A-Bomb tried choking back the metallic taste that crept into the corners of his mouth, but it kept coming.

Lines and circles. You could divide the world into lines and circles. Everything could be measured. In the physical world, at least. Measuring changed it. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, right? But it could always be counted off somehow.

Counting off. Ten, nine, eight…

Doberman’s eyes found the altimeter clock as he pleaded with the stick to right the aircraft. He had a bum wing, but he could do it. He^’d been a check pilot, putting newly overhauled Hogs through their paces. This was a piece of cake.

Unlucky or not, he could do it.

His mind was flooded with images that rolled and pitched much faster than the injured Hog. He was dizzy as hell, and the shake had returned, only it was hitting his chest. He reached for the throttle, discovering with a start that his hand was already on it.

What the fuck is going on with my brain!

Yo! Snap the hell out of it!

Something in his head hiccupped as the Hog fell from his hands. Now he felt a numb pain in his chest.

Maybe the damage this morning was supposed to take him out. Maybe somebody, somewhere was fixing the ledger. Luckiest dead man, my ass.

JR was there, giving him advice. “Fold when you see the other guy’s eyes twinkle.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

Why’d you teach a little kid how to play poker for?

Because you’re too young to parachute.

JR took him up in Cessna for his thirteenth birthday, got him hooked on flying.

For his fourteenth birthday, JR got him a parachute ride, the damn coolest thing that had ever happened to him in his life.

Too cool to tell his mom, though, until after he landed intact.

Jump, JR was telling him. Just jump. Everything else is automatic.

A-Bomb watched as Doberman’s starboard wing began to edge upwards; the plane was heading into a spin.

“Eject!” he yelled over the radio. “Doberman eject! Get the fuck out of that plane!”

Doberman felt it getting further and further away from him. He couldn’t get the nose pointed back upwards, and now the wing was sliding out from under him.

The airbrakes weren’t working. The right aileron had been hit, and probably the inside ones were screwed up.

There was a simple formula in his head for fixing all of this. It was just a matter of finding it in the clutter.

Call with two pair. Fold on anything less.

A-Bomb was yelling at him, but Doberman couldn’t hear what he was saying.

He could hear his uncle, though. He was telling him to jump from the Cessna. Jump; everything else is automatic.

No, that was the problem; he was so tired he was trying to fly on instincts and the Hog didn’t like that, not with a frazzled wing.

He wasn’t compensating right. He was pretending he was just out of the maintenance shop. Straighten up and fly right, he told himself.

The refrain danced in his brain. JR used to hum that song. Meant he had a good hand. Gave himself away. Made it easy to beat him.

The Hog snorted as Doberman’s hands finally took hold of its sides. The metallic animal sniffed at the air, unsure where the hell it was. A small piece from its wing, part of the aileron, damaged by debris when the missile hit, flew backwards like a Frisbee. Then the craft straightened herself out.

Doberman leveled out at one thousand feet, heart pumping, feet shaking, but head clear.

“Man, you got a one-track mind with this ejection thing,” he told A-Bomb. “I don’t feel like jumping today. Maybe tomorrow.

CHAPTER 23

Mongoose found the two Hogs flying together at about three thousand feet. They were climbing back toward the tanker like a pair of little old ladies walking up a staircase.

“What the hell happened?”

“I think the wash from the tanker knocked something loose in the wing,” Doberman told him. “That and I might have had a touch of vertigo creeping in on the tanker.”

“Definite on that first theory,” said A-Bomb. “Part of your aileron is missing.”

“Can you fly that thing?” Mongoose asked.

“Watch me.”

“I don’t know how that fuckin’ wing is holding together,” said A-Bomb. “I say we head for the nearest set of sand bags and the hell with King Fahd.”

“I can make it,” said Doberman. “I just need some more gas, that’s all.”

“I think we’ve pushed it far enough,” said Mongoose. He pulled his map open, double-checking their position. “Let A-Bomb and me gas up, then call it a day. We’ll hang with you until the chopper comes.”

“Jesus, we’ve come this far,” said Doberman. “I know I can do that tanker. Just get the guy to come down to me instead of the other way around.”

“The tanker just bingo’d,” said Mongoose. “A replacement is on the way.”

“Fine. Have him meet us en route to Fahd,” said Doberman. “Hell, I got plenty of gas. I can squeeze another hundred miles out of what I’ve got left. I’ll back off power another ten percent.”

“You’re flying backwards as it is,” said A-Bomb. “No shit, Goose, I think we’ve pushed this as far as it can go.”

“You can’t order me to bail out. That’s bullshit. I’m not losing this plane.”

“You have to get a lot higher and faster to refuel,” Mongoose told Doberman. “I don’t know if you’ll hang together.”

“Get me a divert field then.”

“What if the gear doesn’t come down?”

“Man, why are you giving up on me?”

“I’m not giving up on you, Doberman. I’m trying to keep you in one piece.”

Mongoose bit back an angry response, then looked at the list of fields. They were all pretty damn far from here; might just as well go on to King Fahd. He checked his map and the latitude-longitude on the INS again. But it wasn’t until he glanced at his own fuel stores that it all clicked.

“Devil Two, give me your fuel status.”

Doberman reported the weight of the fuel in his tanks with a hair less belligerence than before. Mongoose worked out the math. He checked his altitude, then cut his own power to take the Hog down to about one hundred and eighty-five nautical miles an hour. The plane didn’t like it; he dropped the nose and went down to five thousand, where her complaints weren’t quite as vociferous.

“Were you serious that you can cut power ten percent and still fly that thing?” he asked.

“Shit yeah.”

“Do it.”

“What’s going on?” asked A-Bomb.

“I may have to take it lower,” said Doberman.

“Go where you feel comfortable,” said Mongoose. He could tell Doberman had already figured out what he was thinking. “Just don’t put it into the sand.”

“We have to correct three degrees back north.”

“Affirmative. I’ll have the controller tell King Fahd we’re on the way. A-Bomb, go to the replacement tanker, top off and come find us. There’s a track ahead that I’ll jump on as soon as you’re back. Doberman, listen — let’s talk it up the rest of the way back.”

“You think I’m falling asleep?”

“Man, I’m tired,” said Mongoose. “You got to be exhausted.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m a little beat. What do you want to talk about?”

“Who’s gonna win the Super Bowl?”

“Washington.”

“They’re not in it.”

“They will be by the time I land this thing.”

According to Doberman’s calculations, the stricken Hog had precisely enough gas to fall one hundred feet short of King Fahd. And no amount of math could change that.

What he hoped for was a strategic gust of wind at the last moment. Or maybe the incalculable effect of fumes and pilot willpower.

But even if he managed enough glide to make the strip, he needed several things to happen. First of all, he needed clearance. While the tower had relayed word that he would get it, things had a way of changing at the last minute.

Secondly, an A-lOA’s flaps were generally set at twenty degrees to land. Doing that on only one side would be like telling the plane to pretend it had been made by Black & Decker. He figured he would be going so damn slow he might be able to fake it. There was enough runway to roll for quite a ways — unless the strip was cluttered with too much traffic. Then he’d have to stand on very thin brakes and pray.

Assuming the right-side landing gear worked, of course. There was no way of knowing until final approach.

But aside from those minor considerations and the fact that for all he knew the wing could sheer off at any second, he was having a wonderful day.

The thing was, A-Bomb had a double standard. If it had been him flying the Hog, sure as shit, he’d have argued for King Fahd and told Mongoose not to sweat it.

But he wasn’t flying it — and that was no reflection on Doberman’s flying abilities because the dog man was a hell of a balls-out driver — but damn it, he should have punched out as soon as they were over the border. True, they would have lost the A-10 in the process. But better safe than sorry. You just didn’t fly a Hog with a hole in the wing.

Oh sure, you could. A-Bomb could. But he had a double standard.

“Doberman, you read that?” A-Bomb asked when the pilot didn’t immediately acknowledge the tower’s instruction that he was cleared to take it in any way he could.

“I got it,” snapped Doberman.

“You okay with this?”

“You’re sounding like my fucking mother today, A-Bomb. I don’t know which one of you assholes is worse, you or Mongoose. Why don’t you guys relax, huh?”

“Just making sure, prick-face. You ready to try your gear?”

“You gonna hold my dick for me while I pee, too?”

“I might.”

A-Bomb slipped his Hog lower, trying to get a good look beneath Doberman’s wings. The front wheel was down smooth, and so was the wheel beneath the damaged right wing.

But of all things, his left wheel was stuck.

“Uh, Doberman, you’re not going to believe this — ”

“I’m already trying to get it down manually. It must have been hit when the missile struck.”

“No, man, the left wheel. The right one looks fine.”

“You sure you know your left from your right?”

“What’s your indicator say?”

“Damn.”

Doberman hit the handle to lower the gear twice more. He couldn’t for the life of him figure what the hell the problem was. Like nearly all other aircraft flying, a hydraulic system automatically snapped the landing gear in place. But the Hog also had a safety system; because the wheels folded backwards, they could be manually released and locked into place with help from the slipstream or wind beneath the plane. And that should have happened by now.

One good thing — dropping the right wheel hadn’t snapped the wing in two. Not yet, anyway. But it hadn’t made it any easier to fly.

The runway was maybe a hundred feet away, and damned if the engine wasn’t starting to choke.

He reached for the handle and once again dropped it. Finally, he felt it move.

Or thought he did. Or hoped he did. There was no turning back now.

Mongoose felt a surge of relief as Doberman’s Hog rolled along the tarmac, smart and sharp as if she’d just been up for a quick qualifying spin. Right behind her came an HC-130 Spectre gunship, also low on fuel and just about trailing an engine.

The major gunned his engine. Looking for his place in the landing stack, he realized that he had to pee so bad he was going to have to duck under the wing once he touched down.

Assuming he could wait that long.

CHAPTER 24

Technical Sergeant Rosen did a decent job with the Hog, good enough to get the radio and all of the instrumentation working. Between her and the scrub base’s own mechanics, the A-10 was patched and ready to go in what must have been world record time. In fact, for a few minutes it seemed like the base colonel was going to stick it into a four-ship element tasked to go north and bomb trucks.

Dixon felt a twinge of panic when he heard that. But he was also disappointed when the idea was dropped and he was told just to go home instead.

The fuel queue was backed up worse than the entrance ramp to the LA Freeway at rush hour. There was an HC-130 at the head of the line, and damned if the big four-engined monster didn’t look like she was going to drain the trucks dry.

Dixon tried to look disinterested as he sat in the cockpit, checking his way points and all of the marginalia critical for his return trip through King Khalid Military City and back on to King Fahd. He was nervous, and he wasn’t nervous. He could do this in his sleep; it was an easy ferry trip home through friendly skies.

As long as he didn’t come under fire. Then all bets were off.

No they weren’t, he told himself. He’d gotten spooked, sure, but that was because it was the first time and he didn’t know what to expect. The next time would be better. The next time he’d nail the son of a bitch.

He hated the fact that he had lied to Mongoose about dropping the bombs. But on the bottom line, it really didn’t matter. He’d dropped them. He’d gotten his plane back in one piece. That was what was important.

He wondered if he shouldn’t feel a little pissed off at being moved into Doberman’s plane. Yeah, he was the lowest ranking pilot, the least experienced by far, but damn! That was his plane.

And the son of a bitch had kept him from redeeming himself.

You fall off a horse, you get right back on.

He could. He knew he could.

Whether the Herc was finally topped off or had just exceeded the limit on its credit card, the gas line began to move. Dixon eased up, wondering at the succession of jets that kept straggling onto the desert strip. The end of the runway and the access ramp were crowded with planes. If Jouf was this packed, he wondered what the home dome, King Fahd, would look like. Though much further behind the lines, it housed a full list of units, not to mention every A-10 in the theater. And its long, smooth runways would make it a convenient rest stop for battle weary planes based further south or on one of the two carriers in the nearby Gulf.

“Hey Yank! Yank!”

Dixon suddenly realized that a man in a green flight suit was doing jumping jacks in front of his right wing. His mouth seemed to be moving; in any event, it was fairly obvious that he wanted to talk to him. Dixon waved the fellow around to the left side of the plane and popped down the cockpit ladder. He soon found a British pilot leaning over the side into his seat. Damned if, through the myriad of fuel and oil smells, the stink of exhaust, sweat, gunpowder and metal, he didn’t catch a strong whiff of Scotch off the man.

The Brit gestured for Dixon to take off his helmet so he could hear better. Reluctantly, Dixon did so. It didn’t help him hear any better, and now he was sure it was Scotch.

“I want to thank you for helping rescue me,” said the visitor.

“When?”

“Just now. Up near Mudaysis.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“What?”

“Wasn’t me,” shouted Dixon. He tried to explain that the Hog had been grounded for the entire afternoon, and had only just been repaired. The Brit nodded at about half of what he said.

“Some of your mates, then,” said the other pilot. “They were definitely A-lOs.”

“There’s a bunch of us.”

“Bloody good crew. They risked their lives. All kinds of radar operating there.”

“Radar?”

The man nodded. “Got us coming in and out. My commander got a clear signal.”

“Commander?”

“Lost we think.” The pilot’s eyes edged downwards ever so slightly, then rose again, as if he had been watching a rowboat on a gently ebbing river. “Thank your friends.”

“I will.”

Dixon waited for the man to jump down and run off before obeying the ground crew’s wild gestures to come the hell forward and take fuel. Cinching up to get ready for takeoff, he wondered if he had heard what the man said correctly.

The GCI site they were supposed to take out that morning was just south of Mudaysis.

His fuckup had cost someone his life.