Target Saddam

CHAPTER 31

Wong thumbed the contrast wheel at the top left of the AN/PAS-7 thermal viewer, dulling the glow of the approaching vehicle’s engine. It was more than a mile away, just turning north from the dogleg that would finally bring it into view.

There were two people in the front seat of the sedan. From his vantage twenty yards from the highway it was difficult to tell whether the men were soldiers, though that seemed obvious — the car was following a military transport, and besides, who else would be driving at night in Iraq? He could draw no other conclusions, however; a civilian vehicle might be part of Saddam’s advance party or it might not.

“Truck a problem?” asked Salt, lying next to him.

“Negative,” said Wong. “The Zil-130 6x6 is empty except for its driver. The sedan has two passengers, neither of whom would appear to be our target.”

Salt hastily set down the M82A1 Light Fifty sniper rifle. The long-barreled heavy rifle fired the same cartridges as the Browning fifty caliber machine-gun; equipped with armor-piercing shells, it could get through an armored car at roughly 1,000 yards. Salt sighted toward a slight bend that brought the road roughly three hundred and fifty yards away from their position.

“What kind of car?” Salt asked.

“I am not acquainted with the model.”

“You don’t know what kind of car it is?” asked Davis, hunkered on the other side.

“I am an expert on weapons, not automobiles,” said Wong.

“You sure it ain’t a Mercedes?”

“It is not a Mercedes, nor a station wagon,” said Wong. “Please keep your voice down.”

“It’s a piece of shit Jap car,” Salt told the other sergeant as it came in view of the starscope on his Barrett sniper rifle. “I could nail it.”

“The provenance of the sedan is irrelevant,” said Wong. “They are not our target vehicles. Saddam would not be traveling alone, and in any event, he is not due until midnight.”

“Nothin’ says he can’t be fuckin’ early,” said Salt.

The two vehicles continued up the highway toward Kajuk. Wong scanned behind them to make sure they were alone, then turned the infra-red viewer northwards, scanning past the intersection with the main highway, then up the road towards the nubby hill that guarded the turnoff to Kajuk. A T-72 tank sat in a shallow depression just to the west of the intersection; there were at least a half-dozen soldiers scattered there. Wong made out a small observation post on the nearby hill manned by two men. A second post, this with three or four soldiers, a Jeep-like vehicle and an armored car or personnel carrier, sat in the middle of the road at the very western edge of the hill, commanding a curve in the highway.

The post on the hill presented them with an immediate problem. If the soldiers there were equipped with the proper night vision equipment mining the road would be difficult. Still, doing so was important — if the bombers were late or there was confusion about the target, cratering the roadway would increase the chances of killing Saddam.

Of the two northern points they had selected as candidates, one had no cover at all; the gully which made it an attractive location for the explosives was directly exposed to the observation post. The backup candidate had a few rocks scattered around it and was further away; it seemed the better choice.

Wong watched the truck and the sedan pass the spot. If the highway were blocked there the rocks would make it difficult to pass but not impossible.

At most, it would slow the convoy down by a minute as they regrouped, then treaded their way off the road.

Blow up the other spot, however, and the vehicles would have to backtrack a good distance. They would be easy targets even for Salt with his sniper weapon.

The truck and the sedan continued northward, passing parallel to their position and heading for the T-intersection with the main highway. The charred remains of a Scud launcher and some anti-aircraft weapons littered a bulldozed area at the side of a small rise a quarter-mile or so to the southeast of the intersection; Captains Glenon and O’Rourke, with some help from a group of F-16s, had blown them up the previous evening. The scarred skeletons of the support vehicles sat in the dim light, ghosts jeering from the sideline.

The oversized T-underpass at the intersection itself had been obliterated during the attack, but the Iraqis had bulldozed a detour at first light. It took the vehicles a few moments to negotiate it, bouncing along the ruts before regaining the highway and continuing toward the tank checkpoint.

Wong swung his view back to the hill. Dixon had been near the base at the far side, opposite the area where the observation post was. Wong readjusted the contrast on his viewer, panning the area. The AN/PAS-7 thermal viewer was an excellent device, remarkably rugged and, at least as night viewers went, relatively light. It looked something like an oversized camera, with a single porthole to squint through at the top of its large metal case. Its ability to read heat sources was particularly useful in picking out bodies from a distance. But it did not have the range Wong would have liked.

Two minutes of observation by a J-STARS with its attendant armada of sensor craft would have told him everything he needed to know. Five minutes with a properly equipped drone, a real-time feed from a thermal-viewing satellite…

Wong sighed. It was always a trial when your mission did not rate significantly high enough to command proper resources.

“Captain, it’s almost time for our check-in,” said Davis.

“Proceed.”

The sergeant ducked back behind the small rise to activate the encrypted radio unit. Wong turned his attention to the west. He would flank the hill, approaching it in a semi-circle. It wouldn’t be necessary to walk more than a mile. There was some low cover and the moon was not bright enough to cast a strong shadow.

“I can hit anything along that elbow,” said Salt.

“You must establish your aiming point along the ravine,” Wong said, pointing further north. “I’ll have Sergeant Davis plant the charges there.”

The Delta trooper took his AN/PVS-7A night goggles and scanned the terrain. They worked by magnifying available light rather than heat.

“Damn easy to see from the post on the hill,” Salt pointed out.

“True. But charges there will stop the convoy, especially if the detonation is keyed when the first vehicle passes. The rest will have to back up. You will have a much longer time to shoot. I believe also that you will command a wider area.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Salt, nodding. “Worth the risk.” He continued scanning the area, assessing the defenses.

“They acknowledged. We’re set,” said Davis. He tapped his demolitions pack, a special hard-shell suitcase that contained a remote trigger and a set of small C-4 explosive packs. “We ready to plant these?”

“Take note of the observation post on the hill before proceeding,” said Wong, pointing it out. Salt gave Davis his viewer. “An infra-red viewer may spot you on the roadway. Move along that ravine side to limit your exposure, and slide your charges out along the road.”

“More like a ditch than a ravine,” said Salt. “I thought you said they wouldn’t have night equipment.”

“The possibility that they do is diminishingly low,” said Wong. “But it cannot be ruled out. We are therefore better safe than sorry.”

“Davis is better safe than sorry.”

“Yeah.” Davis handed back the viewer and took his demo pack. “Wish me luck.”

Salt grabbed his friend’s arm. “What about that spot there, Captain?” he said, pointing about a quarter of a mile further south than the bend he’d targeted before. “The drop off on that north side is immense. That would make them come this way, if they could get through the rocks, and I’d have a good angle on them.”

Wong studied the spot.

“Excellent choice,” he told the sergeant. “But in that case we will have to move further south with the designator.”

“Fuckin’ easy,” said Salt.

“Looks good to me,” said Davis, examining the area with his NOD. “Take us fifteen minutes.”

“Take your time,” Wong told him.

“We can set up the sniper rifle behind that little slope up there,” said Salt, pointing to a spot about a quarter of a mile from the road. He patted the metal stock of the gun. “Easy shot.”

“Yes. I will meet you there,” said Wong. He turned back to scan the area to the west.

“You’re not coming with us?” asked Davis.

“No,” Wong told him. “In the interval, I will am going to scout the hill to our north.”

“What?” said Salt.

“It has to do with the contingency of our mission that I referred to earlier.”

“No fuckin’ offense, Captain,” said Salt, “but could you just talk fuckin’ English.”

“He’s saying this is the need-to-know shit,” said Davis.

“Precisely,” said Wong.

“What the hell are we supposed to do if you don’t come back?”

“You are to carry on with your mission. Be sure to identify the vehicle for the bomber before you fire. Exit precisely as planned if I’m not here.”

“We’re not fucking leaving you,” said Salt.

“Hey, Captain. Seriously, what’s the story here?” said Davis. “We’re about two hundred miles deep in Iraq. You got to trust us.”

“I do trust you,” said Wong. “I trust you implicitly. That is irrelevant.”

“Fuck,” said Salt.

“Carry on with your mission. You should have approximately three hours before Strawman arrives.”

“If he arrives,” said Davis.

“I believe he shall.”

“We ain’t fuckin’ leaving you,” said Salt.

Wong sighed. This was exactly the situation he had sought to avoid.

“I assure you, Sergeant, my assignment is ancillary to the main mission. And to put it bluntly, Sergeant, I am expendable. If all goes well, I will meet you back here in precisely one hundred and thirty minutes. If it does not, you will carry on without me. Please, follow the plan and my orders to you now.”

“God damn Air Force assholes,” muttered Salt.

Wong checked his MP-5, then looked back up into Davis’s face. The sergeant seemed to be trying to find the words to say something.

Wong shook his head. Davis finally shrugged and scooped up the explosives kit. Wong made sure his extra clips were easily accessible, then turned to start the long loop around the Iraqi positions.

He’d taken only two steps when he heard a fresh set of vehicles approaching from the distance. He froze, turning his head toward the sound, holding his breath as the faint rumble grew slowly but steadily. There were at least four or five vehicles approaching, maybe more. Even before he began trotting toward the others with his IR viewer in his hand, he knew one of them would be a station wagon painted with the red crescent.

CHAPTER 32

Lars screamed as he pulled against the controls of the MC-130, pitting his muscles not just against DiRiggio’s but against gravity. The big plane danced on her wing, slicing a diagonal in the sky, losing altitude even as he managed to keep her nose pointing upwards. She was ready to roll — she wanted to roll — and as he struggled Lars considered just letting her, hoping against hope that there would somehow be enough room to get her back level. But even if he’d been twenty thousand feet higher, there was no guarantee he’d recover from such a violent invert, or even that the wings and control surfaces would survive intact. It was him and it was gravity; the plane was caught in the middle, skittering just above the cold sand.

Lars’s arms and chest disintegrated, his legs melting to flaccid bands of flesh. He threw his right arm literally around the control column, and with his left punched DiRiggio. He hit him as hard as he could, once, twice, then felt the yoke slam back hard against his jaw. With his knees and elbows and chin he smothered the controls, urging the plane upright, willing it into something approaching stable flight. The ground loomed, an optically-enhanced blur of oblivion. A stall warning sounded. A million thoughts occurred to him, a checklist of possible evasive action; he even considered popping the landing gear and wheeling in. But all he did was hold on, riding it out like a surfer caught in a monster tsunami.

The surfer would have swamped. The Herk somehow managed to level off inches from the gritty dirt. A moment later they began to climb.

“All right,” he said over the interphone circuit, which connected to the others in the plane. “All right. All right.”

He repeated the words several more times. Kelly, the flight engineer reached forward from his station and held him on the shoulder.

“The engines, do I have the engines?” Lars asked.

He did — he had to, or the plane wouldn’t be reacting as smoothly as it was.

“Captain, we’re fine,” said the sergeant.

“We’re fine,” repeated Lars.

“You’re right on course,” said the navigator. He spoke funny, as if half of his mouth had been Novocained — he’d been slammed violently as Lars struggled to control the plane. “Is the Major okay?”

Lars forced a glance toward DiRiggio, who was slumped back in his seat.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think — he may have had a heart attack.”

“Definitely.”

“I had to hit him. I had no choice.”

“Couple of guys banged up in the back, but no serious injuries,” said Kelly. “I think I busted my finger.”

He continued talking but the words bounced around Lars’ helmet, not truly registering. A crewman gave a fuller report from the back but he couldn’t make out any of it. He just flew, staying in their pre-set track but pulling up to three thousand feet, judging that the risk of being detected was worth the leeway with the plane. What he really wanted to do was take it to fifteen angels, to twenty, to thirty — get the hell up there, climb and keep climbing.

Climb and go home.

The flight engineer and navigator pulled DiRiggio from his seat, lifting him over the center control console and past the flight engineer’s seat. His head flopped down against Lars’ arm as they pulled him out, skin ghost-white, eyes rolled back like a bizarre toy. The two men took him back off the flight deck to the rear crew area, where the two paramedics aboard quickly began working on him.

Or at least Lars assumed they did. He was alone, sitting in the middle of a precarious bubble, struggling to keep himself afloat. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think — he ripped off the helmet and goggles, prying them away. His head rushed, as if he’d just surfaced from the bottom of a deep lake. He blinked at the massive wall of instruments in front of him, numbers and needles floating in space. He readjusted his seat restraints, felt his heart calming. Slowly, he began pushing the plane back towards the earth, flying in the track they had briefed.

“DiRiggio’s on oxygen,” said Kelly, returning to the flight deck ahead of the navigator. “We have to get him help. Fast. Real fast.”

Lars kept his eyes fixed on the dark landscape in front of him.

“Captain?”

The flight engineer leaned over the console. Lars cocked his head so he could see him from the corner of his eye but said nothing.

“We got to go back, don’t you think?” said Kelly. The middle and ring fingers on the engineer’s left hand were taped together.

“We really have to go back,” said the navigator.

Lars concentrated on the plane, working into his bank south. The border was less than twenty miles south; it would take at least — at least — thirty minutes to reach a base with a hospital big enough to handle something like this. He wasn’t even sure where that be; maybe King Khalid.

He could cut almost a straight line there out of this leg of his pattern. There’d be one tricky point near the border, but otherwise it was an easy run. And he could get an escort — hell, he could get half the Air Force.

He wanted to do it. He wanted to get the hell out of here.

But should he? If he left now, the three-man Delta team he’d dropped would be stranded. There were no other STAR-equipped C-130s available; if there had been, he wouldn’t be here.

They could scramble SAR assets. That was the backup plan. Send a helo.

Not really. Certainly not while the SA-11s and the other SAMs were still down there. The SAMs would make mincemeat of a helicopter. They’d factored that in already — that’s why Herky Bird was here.

They could divert planes, take out the SAMs, put real force down there. Hell, they should have done it that way to begin with.

But they hadn’t. And the truth was, this probably put less people at risk. Working at night, quietly, slipping in and out — that was the best way.

As if SAMs wouldn’t mince him up. As if the Herk didn’t just miss getting smashed to pieces by that flak — forget about the missiles.

Two night grabs — he had to do it twice. Five hundred feet in the pitch black, reel them in, go back, do it again. All at the edge of the acquisition envelope of one of the most powerful surface-to-air systems in the world.

No way. No way.

Lars had done it in an exercise, though. He had done it. He’d ducked under a Hawk radar without being detected and evaded a Patriot battery as well — at least as difficult as the mission tasked here.

But that was long before he came to the Gulf, long before he knew fear.

“Captain?”

Lars stared into the darkness. It was his call to make. Who did he owe — three men on the ground, or the pilot in the back of the plane?

Three men who had the odds against them anyway?

Or a fellow officer and Herk pilot, a nice guy with a family back in the States, a guy more or less like him?

Go home. Get the hell out of this. No one was going to blame him for running away now.

Lars reached down and pulled his radio gear back on.

“Major DiRiggio has had a heart attack,” he told the crew, though of course they all knew by now. “We’re going to complete our mission as best we can, and then we’re going to go home. The men on the ground are counting on us.”

He meant to say something else, something about DiRiggio wanting it that way — a lie maybe, but the kind of lie men often need to hear. But fear choked off the rest of the words.

No one said anything. Lars hands shook so violently as he began to bank in his pattern that he feared he’d roll the plane.

CHAPTER 33

Knowlington read the altimeter ladder in the HUD, making sure he was low enough to be heard from the ground. Then he glanced at his watch and the map, trying to figure out exactly where Vulture Three had been when he sent the call. There was of course no guarantee that the pilot had had his position correct, nor was it possible to know precisely where he had been when he pulled the eject handles. But search and rescue was basically about taking logical guesses. Skull began to turn the plane south, figuring it as the most likely direction.

Unless the pilot came back up on the air, however, no amount of guesses were likely to turn him up. The Maverick viewers could see only a tiny area at a time, and when they were designed no one was thinking of using them to spot bodies. An Iraqi airfield lay due north, about five minutes away for an enemy MiG with its pedal to the metal, increasing the tickle factor if not the degree of difficulty.

“Work out from me to increase what we’re covering,” Skull told A-Bomb as they began their second sweep. “I think you can take it further south on your turn.”

“Yeah,” replied A-Bomb.

“I’m going to turn now,” said Knowlington.

“Two,” replied his wingmate.

The Maverick screen remained a blurry, undefined mess. But at least that meant no one was down there to shoot at him — Skull was at three thousand feet, a juicy target flying at barely 250 knots an hour.

“Devil One, this is Coyote,” said the controller in the AWACS coordinating flights in the sector.

“Devil One.”

“We have no Vulture flight,” said the AWACS.

“What exactly do you mean by that, Coyote?” snapped Skull.

“There is no Vulture flight on the ATO at this time.”

The crewman paused between each word, strongly implying that Skull had made a serious mistake. The plane’s powerful airborne radar helped it keep track of everything happening north of the border; while it was possible that a plane had been hit without Coyote knowing about it, it was extremely unlikely. The call sign did not appear to be a valid one, since the plane was not on the tasking order for duty that night. That alone would convince even the most open-minded controller — and certainly his commander — that the transmission had been bogus.

Or some sort of auditory hallucination.

But Skull knew what he had heard.

“Acknowledged, Coyote,” he said. He maintained his course heading north, studying the view screen.

“Devil One, this Coyote,” snapped a new voice obviously belonging to controller’s supervisor. “Please advise your current status.”

Skull blew a long breath into his mask, then calmly noted his location and course.

Which wasn’t the answer Coyote wanted.

“There is no Vulture Three,” said the officer flatly. “We have no data indicating a downed plane at this time. Colonel, we’re concerned here that you’re being sucked into a trap.”

“I appreciate your concern. Maintaining search pattern.” Skull could almost hear the exasperation in the static that filled the radio band.

“See, now that’s why you get the big bucks,” said A-Bomb over the short-range radio. “I woulda told him to jerk off.”

O’Rourke would have been perfectly within his rights to suggest they break off their search. Most if not all of the wingmen Skull had flown with, from ‘Nam to Panama to Red Flag, would have at least asked if he was positive he’d heard the distress call.

But A-Bomb was a wingman’s wingman. And a Hog driver.

“Turning,” said Knowlington, starting his sweep. He hit the radio and broadcast a call on the Guard frequency used by stricken aircraft, asking Vulture Three to acknowledge.

Static.

It was a hell of a coincidence, he had to admit. Twenty years before, he’d lost his own Vulture Three during what had been a routine mission to hit a supply depot in North Vietnam. Skull had taken a four-ship of Phantoms north for the strike. It was about midway through his second tour in Vietnam — he’d flown Thuds on his first — and if the truth be told the mission had seemed almost boringly routine. They’d encountered no flak and no SAMs en route. Skull had a good look at the target through the cloud deck as he launched the attack, and a strong memory of his backs eater telling him they were clean, meaning that the Vietnamese had not managed to mount a defense. The sky had remained empty as Skull recovered and the planes regrouped, flying southeastward to the coast as they had planned.

It happened that a coastal air defense battery was being hit by Navy A-4s at the same time; Skull had seen a few black puffs of gunfire in the air, and four or five separate fires on the ground as he banked over the water and waited for his flight to catch him. It had seemed like glimpsing the corner of a movie screen through an open door as he passed through a theater lobby, a quick vivid glimpse that disappeared as he put his head back to the task at hand. His wingmate had caught up; they tacked south, waiting for the other two planes in the flight.

Vulture Four had arrived shortly, having been separated from Three as he went after a secondary target. Three never showed.

The Vietnamese had launched several MiGs to respond to the Navy attack, and things got tangled quickly. Fuel reserves low to begin with, Skull hadn’t been able to mount a proper search. The Navy did fly several flights in, but no trace of Vulture Three was ever found.

Knowlington forced his eyes down from the Maverick screen to the fuel gauges, running a quick check on his reserves. They had used considerably less fuel than planned, but he’d have to think about going south for the tanker soon.

He keyed back into the command and control aircraft plane running the Strawman mission for an update. Everything was quiet.

So had he imagined the distress call?

That sort of thing had never happened to him before. Not even when he was drinking.

Maybe it had and he’d just shut it out. Or didn’t even realize it.

“Devil Leader, I got something hot down there,” said A-Bomb. “Uh, looking about two, no one-and-a-half miles at say two o’clock off, uh, your nose.”

“One,” said Knowlington, dipping his wing as A-Bomb continued with more detailed coordinates. He pushed the Hog lower, easing the throttle back so slow that he was practically walking.

If this was a ruse, he was a sitting duck.

A road cut across the desert; in the screen it looked like a twisted piece of litter, the narrow cutting from a newspaper fresh off the press.

“Vulture Three, this is Devil One. Vulture Three, please acknowledge,” Knowlington said over the emergency band.

A bright shadow appeared at the top corner of the Maverick screen. Knowlington edged his stick to the right, the Hog stuttering a bit in the air — his indicated airspeed had dropped precipitously. He caught it smoothly, the plane gliding toward the growing glow in his monitor.

Long cylinder. Maybe a fuselage.

Maybe a heated decoy.

RWR clear.

But it would be if they were planning to use shoulder-launched heat seekers.

Flares ready.

Knowlington turned his eyes toward the windscreen, trying to sort through the darkness for something — anything.

If it’s an ambush, he thought, let’s get it over with.

“Vulcan Tres, Vulcan Tres,” crackled a voice over Guard. “Vulcan Three to approaching allied aircraft.”

Vulcan, not Vulture. Shit.

“Vulcan Three, this is Devil leader,” said Knowlington, flicking his talk button. “Relax friend. Give me a flare.”

Static flooded into his headphones, and for a long moment Skull feared that maybe he was imagining the whole thing. But suddenly a sparkle of red pricked the sky two-and-a-half miles southeast of his nose.

“There she blows!” sang A-Bomb.

“Coyote, this is Devil One,” said Knowlington. “I am in contact with Vulcan Three. Repeat, Vulcan Tres. French flier. I have a flare…” He looked over and noted the position on the INS, reading it off as he walked his Hog toward the downed airman. “Requesting verification procedures.”

“Copy, Devil Flight. You are in contact with Vulcan Three. Stand by.”

“Hell of an apology,” said A-Bomb.

“Devil One, I can hear you! I can hear you!” said the downed pilot. He was shouting, and added two or three sentences in indecipherable French.

“Relax Vulcan,” Knowlington told him. “Can you give me your status?”

“Merci, merci. Je ne comprends pas.”

“What?” asked Knowlington.

“De rien,” answered A-Bomb. “Nous sommes ‘Hog drivers’.”

“Ah, cochon! Le Hog.”

“Le Hog,” agreed A-Bomb.

“Magnifique.”

“What I’m talkin’ about,” agreed O’Rourke. “Comment allez-vous?”

“Je suis perdu.”

“Nah, you’re not lost. We got your butt,” said A-Bomb, adding words that seemed roughly the equivalent in French.

“You speak French, A-Bomb?” said Knowlington after his wingman and the downed pilot exchanged several more sentences.

“Got to,” said A-Bomb. “You never know when you’re going to find yourself in Paris, hunting down a cafe grande.”

“Devil Leader, we have an SAR asset en route, call sign Leander Seven. Request you contact him directly.”

“Devil One copies. We have one downed pilot, tells us he’s in reasonable shape. No enemy units at this time. My wingman speaks French and is talking to him. Feed him the questions.”

“Coyote.”

“Man, I love it when they’re humble,” said A-Bomb.

“Just run through the authentication,” said Knowlington, dialing into the search and rescue helicopter’s frequency.

CHAPTER 34

Doberman eased the Hog toward the director lights on the KC-135, sliding toward the refueling boom. The tanker had edged over the border and they were running well ahead of schedule. There was no need to rush, but he couldn’t help it — he wanted to tank and get the hell back north.

Check that. He wanted to see BJ back on the tarmac at Home Drome, walking around like a newborn colt, a little embarrassed when A-Bomb slapped him on the back. A-Bomb would say something like, “Fuckin’ A, Kid,” and Dixon would turn red. Kid was so pure he didn’t even curse.

Fuckin’ A.

That was what he wanted.

And to do that, he had to get his ass back north.

Taking out Saddam in his pretend Red Cross car wouldn’t be bad either. The job was tasked to a pair of F-111 sharpshooters, Earth Pigs that wouldn’t even be leaving their base for at least another hour.

Red Crescent. Whatever.

He wouldn’t mind taking that shot himself.

The tanker twitched right. Doberman pushed on, nudging his rudder pedal gently to stay with it. The boomer in the tail of the Boeing was watching, ready to aim his long straw into the fueling port in the A-10’s nose.

The lights on the big tanker told him he was there.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Doberman said to himself as the nozzle clunked in and the fuel began to flow.

CHAPTER 35

Air Force Technical Sergeant Rebecca Rosen was a cliché: the tough-girl tomboy playing hard-ass to make it a man’s world. She was the junkyard dog scraping with all the other dogs just to prove how tough she was.

She was tough. She’d been raised in the worst part of Philadelphia in, as it happened, a junkyard. Or as her uncle called it, “The crème-dalla-crème of the salvation industry.”

‘Dalla’ was supposed to be “de la,” but no one corrected her uncle, who though only five-eight could tear a car door off its hinges without breaking a sweat. Few people corrected his niece, either; there was almost never a need to. Rosen had a real talent for fixing things, and the Air Force had given her not just the training but the discipline she needed to put her skills and intellect to work.

Like her uncle and the cousin she’d been raised with, Rosen had a reputation for cracking people who got out of line — her personnel records put it more delicately, if in greater detail. Barely five-two and about a hundred and ten pounds, Rosen used every volatile ounce of her body to fight; she’d learned to wrestle pinning junkyard mutts as a ten-year-old and had yet to find a tougher opponent.

It was also true that her clothes and skin smelled more like JP-4 than Calvin Klein’s Obsession. And while she wasn’t ugly by any stretch, it had to be said that she wasn’t particularly pretty, either. In fatigues and with her cropped hair pulled back, she could look almost severe.

On the other hand, there was more to Rosen than the cliché, more than the tough kid who wrestled dogs and could fix just about any part, electronic or mechanical, on anything that moved. There was, for instance, a young woman who had discovered poetry during a bullshit college program she’d signed up for to shake off some of the boredom of downtime in the mid-eighties.

Sitting in a large auditorium with a hundred other students, most of them several years younger, Becky Rosen had heard poetry for the first time. Maybe not literally, but certainly figuratively. On the first day of class the professor stood in front of the podium and wheezed through a poem by Walt Whitman declaring America’s greatness, and then one by Emily Dickinson contemplating the nature of death and duty. Rosen found herself fascinated, so fascinated that she ended up taking enough courses to get a BA — and at the time of her assignment to the Gulf was in fact only a few credits from a master’s.

Not that she planned to use the degrees for anything. They were an excuse to read, entertainment better than movies — activities almost as engrossing as single-handedly overhauling an entire A-10A herself. From the day of that first class, she had spent at least ten minutes every night reading.

But tonight, sitting in her quarters in Tent City at the heart of the Home Drome, Technical Sergeant Rebecca Rosen couldn’t find anything to read, or at least nothing that sparked. Not Whitman, not Hemingway, not Jones, not the volume of Joyce she’d promised herself she’d slug through. Not even Dickinson.

She tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Lieutenant Dixon, lying dead on the ground near a cave that housed Iraqi chemical weapons.

William Dixon. BJ. KIA. RIP.

God, this is morbid, she thought to herself finally. She sat up and pulled out her small notebook from under the bed. She had been trying for the past few days to start a journal, vaguely thinking she might write a book about the Gulf when she got home — maybe get a million-dollar book contract and buy her own fixed base operation when she got home.

Or a junkyard. Hey, you went with what you knew.

She’d barely filled two pages so far with a few notes on the people she served with. She looked at her scrawl, barely readable even by her, then turned to a fresh page, starting to describe Tent City.

A well-ordered chaos of temporary quarters, theoretically intended for low-class enlisted types but housing even hoity-toity officers due to a severe shortage of facilities and poor political prowess on the part of muckety-mucks many echelons above.

Or not.

Her pen fidgeted on the paper. She thought of Dixon, his baby face. They’d kissed once, almost by accident. She felt the kiss now, felt him pressing against her body, rubbing his hands against her breasts.

Which he had not done.

A damn, damn shame.

She tried writing again, thinking of a routine day, but segueing into a dream she’d had before bugging out of Fort Apache, the clandestine Delta command post in Iraq.

She was in her uncle’s junkyard, back by the buses where her cousin Crank used to smoke dope. A turkey vulture swept down.

Red-headed turkey vulture. Never saw that in Philly, no way.

But that was the dream.

She thought about it, and then her pen began moving, the words arranging themselves on the blank paper:

Becky put down the pen and reread what she’d wrote.

Death and more death.

Her fingers tore the page out. She crumpled it up and shoved it in her pocket, then pulled on her boots to go see what needed doing in Oz.

CHAPTER 36

Dixon and Budge stopped for a rest amid a small collection of bushes just below the summit of the hill. Even in the dark, the scrubby vegetation wouldn’t provide much cover, but it was better than nothing. They didn’t seem to have been followed, and as far as BJ could tell the hill was unoccupied. It was lower than the hill opposite to the northwest, with occasional rock outcroppings and jagged terrain, difficult for the anti-air vehicles to climb. Or at least Dixon assumed.

The boy had recovered from his panic, or maybe he was just too tired to do much of anything — he sat on the ground next to his rescuer, knees pulled up in front of his chest.

“Hey Budge, what do you think?” Dixon whispered. “You think there Scuds on the other side of that hill there?”

He pointed with his thumb. The boy tilted his head, but said nothing.

“I’m not sure what the bombers hit,” Dixon continued. “I’m not exactly sure what kind of planes they were. I fly a Hog,” he added. “An A-10. I’m really a pilot. I came north to help target Scuds. A-10’s a great plane. They’re made to fly real low and support ground troops.” He began miming it with his hands, zooming in low and working the cannon with a stutter. He pretended to be in the cockpit, then threw his hands out like he was the plane, crouching and dancing. Budge smiled.

“We call it a Hog — short for Warthog. Kind of a joke, too, because it looks ugly and it moves slower than a farm truck. I could have flown Eagles — I was selected to. But I had to, uh, see, I had some personal stuff going on.” Dixon knew he was just babbling on, but the kid nodded, as if he understood and wanted him to continue. It felt good to talk; he’d been alone so long. “My mom died, she was dying. And my father’s been laid up with strokes since I was about your age. You lost your parents, too, huh?”

BJ hadn’t thought about that before, but now he realized it must be true — perhaps the kid had seen them die.

“Parents dead?” he asked.

Budge nodded solemnly, then said something in Arabic. Dixon listened, trying to pick up the meaning in the tone of the words. They were flat though, and the way the kid moved his hands he could be miming a parade.

Until he jumped up and began mimicking what BJ had done, flying a Hog.

“Yeah, kid, we’ll fly. We’ll fly out of here. If we can find our way. I know there’s got to be another Delta team around here. I just know it.”

Budge kept flying. Dixon extended his arms and for a moment the two of them flew together, bumping wings and laughing as if they were out on a playground a million miles from the war.

“Okay,” Dixon said finally. “All right. We have to get serious, Budge.”

The kid stopped and looked up at him. BJ slung the rifles over his shoulders and held the boy gently by the neck as they walked.

“What we’re doing here is kind of like a game,” Dixon said. “Kind of like hide and seek. Except the guys looking for us have guns, and they’re not going to count to ten before shooting. But we’re smarter than them, right? You and me. We’ll kick their butts if they try to do anything.”

Dixon let go, considering their next move. The plain to the west and southwest of the hill seemed open; they could sneak back to the Cornfield, several miles away along the highway west. They could get water there, and it would be easy to hide during the daylight.

He remembered passing a building or two. They might be able to get food — better to try there than in the village, where there were other people and troops around.

But first, he wanted to look to the south, see what was there.

Hide out tomorrow. As soon as it was dark, look for one of the Delta or British SAS teams that were Scud hunting. There ought to be at least one team a few miles further west. And beyond that there was a forward base, Fort Apache. They could go there, walk a few miles every night.

They’d get out of here somehow, Budge and him.

They began sidestepping toward the southern slope of the hill. Dixon slipped and Budge grabbed him, holding him up for half a second before tumbling over him. They rolled a few feet before coming to a stop.

It was so comical Dixon started to laugh, until he saw the flare of a cigarette ten yards away.

CHAPTER 37

The station wagon was the third car in the procession, trailing two troop trucks. Immediately behind it was a German transport, followed by a pair of armored cars. A Mercedes sedan was next to last, sandwiched between two Zils with canvas backs. The caravan was about a two miles from the spot they’d picked to put down the explosives. The rest of the vehicles followed at intervals of ten to twenty yards. With their lights out, they traveled no more than forty miles an hour — but that was more than enough; there was no way to get the explosives down to the spot they’d picked out. Wong sent Davis to alert Wolf, then stopped Salt as he bent to set up his sniper rifle.

“We’ll have to stop them or slow them down so the bombers have a chance to target them,” Wong told him. “Wolf will have to scramble the A-10s, and they will be at least five minutes away.”

“I can get a shot.”

“One may not be sufficient, even with the light fifty,” said Wong. “Do you think you could hit the first vehicle with the grenade launcher when it draws parallel to us?”

“I’ll have to get closer to make sure I hit.”

“Do it then,” said Wong. He reached down and grabbed the explosives set. “Wait until the last moment, but make sure that you strike it. Take your next shot at the Mercedes — the station wagon appears empty and in any event will be struck by the A-10.”

“Where the hell are you going with those explosives?” Salt yelled as he started away.

“I will attempt to divert the tank and give you more time to use your sniper rifle,” Wong yelled. “Please, you have less than three minutes to get into position.”