Tom Clancy's HAWX

Chapter 6

"Fuckin' dust is everywhere," said a disembodied, half-asleep voice in the darkness.

Coughing sounds came from various corners of the darkness, and another voice angrily admonished the first voice to "Shut the fuck up and go back to sleep!"

Troy had awakened coughing the grit and phlegm out of his throat. He rolled over on the cot and took a breath. Again, the dust flooded into his mouth and nostrils, again causing him to gag. He opened his eyes to the stinging crud and wiped his forehead. Instead of sweat, it felt like mud.

The three F-16Cs of Falcon Force had arrived at dusk. The pilots had reported to General Harris's command post, but he was in the field, so they went to base operations to scrounge temporary quarters. Having flown all the way from Lakenheath to Souda, and from Souda to Atbara yesterday, Troy had been exhausted, so he took the cot in the tent to which he had been assigned, and just crashed.

Now it was nearly 0500, and he was awake. He couldn't possibly nod off again without hosing the dust off his face. He had two hours before Harris's operational daily briefing, so he decided to try to find a shower and get something to eat.

Finding a shower turned out to be a joke. The base was so new that such amenities didn't exist here yet. However, Troy was able to find water to wash the dust from his hands and face. The "officers' mess," with its lukewarm powdered eggs and cold hash from a can, was a bit like a Boy Scout camp gone terribly wrong, but Troy did manage to get fed.

Atbara Expeditionary Air Base was a sprawling, hastily assembled tent city across the runway from the main buildings of the Atbara Airport. Two C-17s were landing as Troy finished his plate of reconstituted eggs. It was always amazing to see such high-tech equipment in such a primitive context, but outsiders more technologically savvy than the locals had been waging war in Sudan since Lord Kitchener beat the Mandist Army out here in 1898—or since the pharaohs battled the Nubians in these shifting gravel hills thousands of years before that.

When he had flown in yesterday, Troy had seen no paved roads until he was well into final approach, and out beyond the perimeter wire, a few guys in turbans riding along on donkeys could have been a blast from centuries past.

The briefing, in a large room in the general's command post, was another incongruous display of the latest gadgetry in the primeval landscape. Live, subtly changing satellite photos were displayed on two large screens, and between them was a screen with an animated situation map of Sudan and Eritrea. It was similar to the map that Major Smith had shown them the day before in Souda, but much more detailed. The word Classified appeared at the bottom of the screen.

There were about fifty people in the room, and seating for just the first three dozen early arrivals. There were officers, including pilots and navigators, and enlisted personnel, mainly loadmasters from the transport aircraft. Troy stood in a place near the back of the room and noticed Hal Coughlin standing in the opposite corner. He thought he saw Jenna Munrough seated in the second row. A young captain stood on a raised platform before the group and explained the daily situation, told of the strike package that had gone out at 0400, reported the results, and pointed out enemy positions on the animated map. Finally, it was time for the star of the show to take the stage.

General Harris was a bear of a man, with close-cropped hair and a ruddy complexion.

"Bastards are on the move," he began, wasting no time getting to the subject. "They hit the UN troops here, there, and there yesterday. We hit 'em at 1800 yesterday and at 0400 this morning. Initial reports of the strike pack that came back from this morning's hit-and-run shows a concentration here, with supply lines running up here. Those of you who I briefed for the 0900 package will hit them here."

The general used his laser pointer like a light saber to stab the here to which he referred.

"The distance is short," he explained, looking at the pilots who had been assigned the 0900 sortie. "You won't need extra fuel, so double up on JDAMs and blow the shit out of those bastards."

He sucked a mouthful of tepid water from a plastic bottle and looked out into the crowd.

"I'm looking for mules," he said, scanning the shoulder patches of the assembled pilots for the insignia of the 95th Reconnaissance Squadron. "There's one. Did you come alone, Captain?"

"They're in the back, sir," Jenna Munrough confirmed.

"Good, I'm glad y'all didn't oversleep. See me after class, we need to talk."

With that, Harris turned to a mission overview for the C-130 crews, whose difficult mission for the day would be flying into Khartoum to pick up a UN regiment and haul them into a makeshift field that was only about three kilometers from the shooting. Troy had always been glad not to have wound up flying transports. Flying into harm's way was one thing — landing and taking off there was another thing.

"Let's get down to business," Harris said, eyeing the three pilots from the 95th who had moved down to the front of the room when the rest of the personnel had moved out to go to work.

"This is Eritrea," he said, changing the image on the screen. "This is the source of all our migraines. This is the snakepit the Al-Qinamah rebels crawl out of… and this is the snakepit that the Al-Qinamah bastards crawl back into. We can't hit 'em there… same old drill, y'know."

The three pilots from the 95th nodded. It had indeed been the same in numerous wars into which the United States had been pulled through the years. The bad guys had a safe haven — a safe snakepit in Harris's lexicon — where they could hide, untouched by American bombs or bullets, and where they could plan attacks against American troops or their allies.

"We got some wiggle room, though." Harris nodded. "The UN resolution has okayed recon flights over Eritrea… which is obviously where you come in. I have birds that conduct photorecon over Eritrea, but I need Sigint. That's why they sent you. Only ISR has the gear that can capture signals intel the way we need it captured."

"I wouldn't have thought these guys were that sophisticated, sir," Hal replied.

"That's what we all thought initially, but we thought wrong," Harris replied. "These bastards may look like a bunch of bush bunnies running around in makeshift uniforms, but they got people who are running some pretty complicated covert channels."

Harris proceeded to explain their mission for the day, and for the coming days. They were to enter Eritrean airspace at various points along its vaguely defined border with Sudan, from different and random directions each day.

The three Falcon Force pilots walked to their birds separately, a team in name only. They would work together because they were professionals, not because they were comrades. After their shared experience in the Colville, Hal and Troy could share no camaraderie, only awkwardness. Though she had reamed Troy for what he had done, Jenna kept her distance from both. She had her own agenda to fulfill. Like so many female pilots tasked with flying combat missions, she was single-minded in her determination to prove herself at least an equal to those of the traditional combat pilot gender.

Hal, by virtue of his having logged slightly more time in an F-16, was designated as flight leader, and he took off first. Once they were airborne over the desert east of Atbara, Troy and Jenna tucked their Falcons into an echelon formation off his right wing.

Troy sat back in his cockpit and relaxed. It was all very orderly, just like many of the training missions that he had flown in an F-16, but today would be different. Unlike the training flights, and unlike all of his missions in an EC-32, today he would be over territory where people really might be shooting at him.

He wasn't scared. His emotions varied between a sense of unreality and an adrenaline-fueled excitement. Ever since he had been bounced off the fighter track and shunted into ISR, he had imagined that he would never get a chance to fly a fighter into combat. Today, all that changed. He caught himself worrying that he might not get shot at.

A few minutes later, Hal called the initial point and all three F-16s banked left and dropped to one thousand feet. As briefed, they separated to a distance of about a kilometer to provide greater triangulation on the electronic whispers they scooped into the AN/APY-77 and AN/ASD-83 surveillance pods that hung on pylons beneath their wings. Troy didn't understand exactly how those things worked, but that wasn't his job. His job was to get them where they needed to be in order to do their jobs, then flick the switch.

As the concrete-colored desert flashed beneath him, Troy kept his eyes on the horizon and on the countdown clock that told him when the flight had passed into Eritrean airspace. The little LED stopped at triple zero, and he engaged the surveillance gear. That was it. There was nothing else to do but fly the mission as briefed, making a series of coordinated turns until the flight path took him back to Atbara.

The Eritrean desert looked identical to the Sudanese desert — an endless sea of rolling hills, an occasional deep gully or canyon, and rarely any sign of habitation. What villages there were flashed by in an instant. Anyone below would not hear the fast-moving, low-flying Falcons until they had passed.

Hal led them into a slight left turn at the appointed moment and dropped to five hundred feet. The large town of Barentu was straight ahead. The turbulence stirred up at the lower altitude rocked the aircraft as they passed over the rooftops.

Hal was first and Jenna second.

About half a kilometer off his right wing, Troy saw a flash out of the corner of his eye. Someone down there was firing tracers, probably from an AK-47 or some such infantry weapon. They missed by a wide margin. It's very hard to hit an airplane at five hundred feet and nearly five hundred miles per hour with an AK-47 and little or no warning.

Suddenly, it was over. The F-16s were back over the open desert, making the series of turns that would take them back to Atbara.

As they climbed back up to a higher altitude with less turbulence, Troy realized how tightly he had been gripping the stick to control the aircraft at low level. He relaxed a bit and thought back to that thirty-second pass over Barentu.

Was that all there was to it?

This is a piece of cake.

Then he remembered the tracer rounds.

It was the first time in his flying career that somebody had been shooting at him for real. He guessed that it would not be the last.