HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) (3 page)

Fuel was low, but not desperate.

Where the hell was A-Bomb?

“Devil Two,” he said over the squadron frequency.
“Lost Airman. A-Bomb?”

“Yo,” responded his wingmate.

“Where the hell are you?”

“I’m just north of Saddam’s used parking lot, helping
them put up the going out of business sign.”

“Where the hell are you?” Hack repeated.

“Relax Devil leader,” said O’Rourke. “I got you.
Hold your horses and I’ll be on your butt. We’re clean.”

“What do you mean, we’re clean?”

“I mean the only thing we have to worry about is
running into some of those pointy-nose types on their way to mop up.”

“What are you screwing around for? Check your
fuel. Come on. Didn’t you get a bingo?”

A-Bomb didn’t answer, which was just fine with
Hack. He turned southwards to intersect the original course back to King
Khalid, where they would refuel before heading back to the Home Drome at King
Fahd.

Dark curls of black wool filled the eastern
horizon. Saddam had set the Kuwait oil fields on fire and released thousands,
maybe millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, doing to the environment what
he had done to Kuwait.

“Got your back,” said A-Bomb, announcing that he
had caught up and was now in combat trail, roughly a mile offset behind Hack’s
tail. “How ‘bout we find a tanker instead of going into Khalid? Their coffee
sucks.”

“Can it.”

“Man, you’re being bitchy. What happened? That
SA-7 get your underwear dirty?”

This time, Hack was the one who didn’t reply.

HOG HEAVEN, KING FAHD
AIRBASE, SAUDI ARABIA

28 JANUARY 1991

1200

Lieutenant Colonel Michael
“Skull”
Knowlington
lowered his head toward the desktop, stretching his neck and
shoulder muscles until he could feel the strain in the middle of his back. Then
he rolled his head around slowly, trying to keep his shoulders relaxed as he
completed each revolution, counterclockwise, moving his head as slowly as he
could manage. Six more times and he put his chin on his chest, covering his
face with his hands, fingers massaging his temples. Then he dropped his arms
and sat upright in the chair, breathing slowly.

Though dissipated, his headache had not quite
disappeared. The throb was familiar and low-grade, potentially manageable by
one of several additional therapies, including what Skull called “the oxygen
cure” — breathing pure oxygen through his pilot’s face mask. But there were only
two real cures— one was time, the other was a drink.

Or perhaps they were the same, for wasn’t he
destined to drink, again, and again, and again, sooner or later?

Knowlington had been sober for twenty-three days
before last night. Then, on the ground at KKMC, waiting for his umpteenth
debriefing, someone had stuck a beer in his hand and he’d slipped down a long,
familiar hole.

Wrong.

No one made him drink the beer. He didn’t slip, he
went willingly. He took the beer and drank it, then got another and another.

There were extenuating circumstances. He’d gotten
back from a hellacious sortie north, fighting the odds to help rescue one of
his pilots, one of his kids. B.J. Dixon had been a ground FAC, helping a Delta
team spot Scuds deep in Iraq territory. Dixon— who was or at least ought to be
sleeping in his quarters in nearby Tent City— had saved the life of one of the
Delta boys but got separated from them in the process. Devil squadron had found
him and brought him home.

As squadron commander, Knowlington had felt
responsible for the kid and went along personally to bail him out. Everything
had gone well— too damned well, which was the problem. He’d let his guard down.

Liar!

He’d wished for it. He’d known what was happening.
The tingle in his mouth, the roar in his head— he knew what he was doing.

Just a few beers.

How long had he been sober before that? Two weeks?
Three? He couldn’t even remember now.

Yesterday, he could have counted the minutes.

Michael Knowlington pushed back in his office
chair, staring at the blank wall of his trailer headquarters.

God, he wanted a drink.

It would take him ten minutes, fifteen tops, to
walk over to the Depot, an illegal “club” located just off the base property. A
few slugs of Jack Daniel’s and he’d be back on his feet.

He wasn’t fit to command the squadron. He
should resign
.

Someone knocked. Skull turned toward the door,
waiting a moment before saying anything, though he had already recognized the familiar
rhythm of knuckles tapping against the frame.

“Come,” he said.

Chief Master Sergeant Allen Clyston pushed into
the small office like a bear inspecting a new cave.

Clyston was the squadron’s first sergeant— and
much, much more. He personally oversaw the maintenance of Devil Squadron’s
twelve Hogs. In the squadron’s stripped-down organization chart, every enlisted
arrow pointed to him: Knowlington’s capo di capo, the colonel’s right arm— and his
left, and his legs, eyes and ears. Clyston was the last of a veritable mafia of
enlisted men who had helped Knowlington through half-a-dozen commands and
assignments stretching back to the waning days of Vietnam.

“Allen.”

“Colonel.” Clyston groaned as he slipped onto the
metal chair across from Knowlington’s desk. “Ought to let me find you a real
chair.”

“Don’t want visitors getting too comfortable,”
said Skull. He tried smiling, then realized how forced it must seem.

“I hear ya,” said the sergeant. He folded his arms
around his chest, leaning back in the chair so his gray-speckled head
touched the wall. “Got a problem I thought you could help with.”

“Fire away.”

“Got a fix for the INS units,” said Clyston,
referring to the gear that helped the A-10As navigate. Though a basic piece of
equipment, the gear was notoriously unreliable and needed  constant
readjustments. “Kind of a work-around-upgrade thing, but we need a pair of
special diodes I can’t seem to get through the usual sources.” Clyston reached
into his pocket for a piece of paper. “Becky Rosen says she can give them a
five-year, sixty-thousand-mile warranty if she gets this stuff.”

Skull’s head throbbed at the mention of Sergeant Rosen.
She was a damn good worker and smarter than hell, but she had caused Skull
nothing but trouble. She had a way of pissing off half the officers who crossed
her path. The rest made passes at her— not her fault certainly, but her way of
dealing with them fell somewhat outside the parameters of the Military Code of
Conduct.

Worse, she’d recently joined Delta Force in an
unauthorized foray across the border to help the Army retrieve a battered
helicopter. A good many butts were hanging in the wind because a woman had gone
over enemy lines.

Not that she hadn’t done a kick-ass job and
probably single-handedly saved the operation.

“Your usual channels can’t get this stuff?” Skull
asked, trying to make sense of the specifications.

“My channels are military,” said Clyston. “Turns
out, those are pretty rare little circuits. Rosen claims she can adapt them to
regulate the voltage and then use that to feed back against the errors. Has a
little card designed and everything, neat as a pin. She’s a whip, I’m telling
you.”

“It’ll work?”

“She says so, if we can find the parts.” Clyston
shrugged. “You know somebody at GE, right? They probably have something like
that. Or they’d get us onto someone. Maybe a regular supplier of theirs or
something. That G.E. guy now— Rogers, right?””

No, not Rogers. Jeff Roberts, who’d flown Phantoms
with Skull out in California. Some sort of senior vice president at the company
now. Probably didn’t know shit about radios, but he’d like this. Roberts had
always talked about finding ways around the brass, military or otherwise.

Skull did know a Rogers, though. Had known.

Captain “Slammin’ Sammy” Rogers had gone out over
Vietnam, ended up a POW. Supposedly, he’d been at Son Tay with a bunch of other
guys shortly before the raid there in ’70. Knowlington had led one of the
support packages, flying a Phantom.

The raid came up empty; Rogers never came home.

“Captain Roberts,” said Clyston.

“I think he went out as a lieutenant colonel,”
said Skull.

Clyston’s left shoulder edged up slightly in a
shrug. “Pretty much a captain’s attitude, though. It stays with you

“Oh, that’s a new theory.”

“F no,” said Clyston. He smiled. “Guy has a rank
stays with him for life, whatever the stripes say. Or what have you.”

“What rank am I?”

“Oh, a colonel. Definitely. Not full of shit
enough to be a general. No offense.” Clyston smiled.

The capo probably hadn’t come here to give him the
parts list. He must know about Skull’s drinking. The reference to Roberts— a
subtle hint that he ought to resign?

Clyston could be very subtle. But he was also
pretty straight. Very straight.

Skull folded the piece of paper and put it down on
his desk. “You got something you want to say, Allen?”

“Huh? Not me. You?”

A ton of things. Angry things: How dare a sergeant
hint that a colonel hang it up? A stinking decorated colonel with three
confirmed air kills and well over a hundred combat sorties, medals up the
yahoo, friends in all the right places— what gave some sergeant who’d never had
his fat butt graze an enemy’s gunsight, by the way, the right, the audacity, to
hint that he was over the hill?

Calmer things: Gratitude for pulling the men
together maybe a million times, for making planes whole, for moving heaven and
earth to keep the Hogs flying.

Other things: Sadness over people like Rogers who
hadn’t made it back, frustration over the delays and screwups and the human
factors, fatigue and nerves. Rage that they were both growing so damn old, that
after all these years, after all they knew, they had to keep sending kids to
places where they could die.

But words were not things that came easily to
Skull. There were too many, and no way of prioritizing them— no checklist to
follow, no map to plod your way through. Much easier to stay silent— and so he
did.

“Saddam’s taking a poundin’,” said Clyston
finally.

“Hope so,” agreed the colonel.

“How much longer, you figure?”

“That’s a hard game to play,” said Knowlington. He
thought of all the times before he’d played it— ‘Nam, mostly, ancient history,
but he’d also had a squadron during Grenada and one that just missed a mission
in Panama. Then there were the alerts, probably a thousand of them.

They were silent a moment longer.

“You sure nothing’s bothering you, Chief?”

“Gettin’ old, is all,” said Clyston. He smiled,
but it wasn’t his usual smile; Allen definitely wanted to say something, his
eyes hunting the office. But before they could settle on anything, there was
another knock on the door.

Skull glanced at Clyston, then said, “Come.”

Captain Bristol Wong, an intel and covert ops
specialist Knowlington had “borrowed” from the Pentagon, pushed open the door.

“Colonel, Captain Hawkins and Sir Peter Paddington
would like a word,” announced Wong. His voice seemed more high-strung than
usual, possibly because of the thick bandage wrapped around his chest beneath
his uniform. A dark patch of skin on his face covered a fractured cheekbone,
and there were several burns along his hairline, all souvenirs from his recent
trip north to save Dixon. He’d also dislocated his shoulder, though it had been
placed back in its socket by a burly Para rescuer on the ride home.

Wong shrugged off the injuries, claiming he’d been
hurt worse trying to grab the last seat on the shuttle between Boston and D.C.

“Tell them to come in.”

“With all due respect, sir,” said Wong nodding at
Clyston, “this would be a code-word classified discussion, strictly
need-to-know.”

“I doubt you could fart on this base without The
Chief catching a whiff,” said Skull.

The welt on Wong’s cheekbone turned dark purple.

Clyston got up. “I was just leaving,” he said.
“Appreciate it if you can get us those doodads, Colonel. Let me know.”

Knowlington pushed his chair back against the
desk, making room for the other men. Hawkins was a Delta Force captain who had
worked with Devil Squadron before and helped rescue Dixon. Paddington’s exact
status wasn’t clear. He apparently served with a British MI-6 agency and worked
for one of the British commands. He was an expert on Saddam Hussein and the
Iraqi command structure, and seemed to fill a role as a liaison with the
British Special Air Service. The SAS commandos were working north of the border
spotting Scuds, scouting troop locations and sabotaging enemy installations.
Sir Peter had been involved in a failed plot to assassinate Saddam that the
Hogs were in on, helping set the time and place. He flitted freely around Saudi
Arabia, but his rank and role in the Allied war effort were far from obvious.

What was obvious was the stench of gin emanating
from his breath, so strong that it threatened to turn Knowlington’s stomach.

“Captain Hawkins, good to see you again,” said
Knowlington. He’d first met Hawkins two months before, planning a clandestine
operation known as Fort Apache.

“Thanks.” Hawkins flexed his shoulders, a
linebacker waiting to blitz. “We appreciated your help on that bug-out.”

“My men did that on their own,” Skull said. “Right
place, right time.”

“Yes, sir.” Hawkins sat down in the chair.

“Paddington.” Skull frowned in the British agent’s
direction, then looked at Wong. “So?”

“The British command desires our assistance,” said
Wong.

“Not precisely, Bristol,” said Paddington. He
twisted the cuff of his blue wool blazer, as if adjusting a watch.