HOGS 6
Air War in the Gulf
Death Wish
By Jim DeFelice
Book #6 in the HOGS Air War series
based on the exploits of the A-10A Warthog pilots in the 1991 Gulf War
Copyright © 2002 by Jim DeFelice.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by any means, without permission from the author, except for short quotes in reviews or discussions. Contact: author@jimdefelice.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Death Wish
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
PART TWO
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
PART THREE
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
A NOTE TO READERS
Other Books by Jim DeFelice
PROLOGUE
SAUDI ARABIA
28 JANUARY 1991
Standing watch one morning in their trench a few yards from the Iraqi border, Private Smith and Private Jones began discussing aesthetics.
Or more particularly, how shit-fully ugly the desert in front of them was.
The conversation soon turned to a comparison of the ugliest things they had ever seen.
“The back end of a seventies’ Buick,” said Jones.
“Mary Broward’s face,” said Smith.
“Things, things,” said Jones, trying to rein in the discussion.
“She was a thing.”
“If you’re including stuff like that,” sniped Jones, “Sergeant Porky’s rear end.”
“You saw Porky’s butt?” asked Smith.
Jones’ response was drowned out by the whiz and explosion of a series of Iraqi shells landing uncomfortably close to their position. It was the third attack of the afternoon, and by far the most accurate. Geysers of dirt burst over their trench, covering their prone backs with grit. The ground shook as the pounding continued, and it quickly became clear that this time, the Iraqis were serious about what they were doing— the rain of explosives started a slow but steady walk toward the privates, the enemy homing in on their position.
“Mayday! Mayday!,” screamed Smith, grabbing for the com pack that connected them with HQ. “Shit, incoming. We’re taking serious incoming.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” shouted Jones, grabbing his buddy. Just as they rose, a blast pushed them face down in the sand.
“Pray! Pray!” yelped Smith.
As Jones started to carry out his friend’s suggestion, a fresh sound filled the air: a hum that managed to carry over the steady roar of the steadily approaching explosions. The hum became a roar, then a piercing whine and a loud metallic hush, the sound a steel bar might make if it were being beaten back into molten ore. The ground reverberated with the hiss of a thousand volcanoes. The sky flashed with lightning. Both men felt their ears pop.
Then, silence.
Smith and Jones managed to rub the sand out of their faces and look skywards just in time to see their saviors circling above: a pair of U.S. Air Force A-10A Thunderbolt II attack planes, better known as Warthogs, or simply Hogs. The A-10s had flattened the enemy artillery with a strong but simple dose of Maverick AGM-65 air-to-ground missiles. The dark-hulled beasts tipped their ungainly wings back and forth in greeting, then flew off.
“Now that’s fuckin’ ugly,” said Jones.
“Ugly, fuckin’ ugly,” agreed Smith. “How the hell do they fly?”
“Damned if I know. Too ugly to land, I guess.”
“I could kiss ‘em.”
“Me too.”
“Saved my butt,” said Jones.
“Now that’s ugly.”
“Not half as ugly as yours.”
“Not half as ugly as theirs.” Smith thumbed back toward the planes.
“Damn ugly.”
“Most beautiful fuckin’ ugly I ever saw.”
“Damn straight.”
PART ONE
DRIVERS
CHAPTER 1
OVER SOUTHEASTERN IRAQ
28 JANUARY 1991
1100
It briefed damn easy: Head exactly north four miles off the last way marker, dive below the cloud cover, plink the tank.
But in the air, falling through thick clouds at five thousand, just finding the T-54 battle tanks was an accomplishment.
Or would be. Major Horace Gordon Preston, better known as “Hack,” clenched his back teeth and pushed harder on the stick, urging the nose of his A-10A Thunderbolt II “Warthog” downward. The Hog grunted, her angle of attack slicing through forty-five degrees as she finally broth through the thick deck of clouds. Unblemished yellow sand spread out before her, oblivious to the war. The targeting cue in the plane’s heads-up display ghosted white and empty over the dirt as Hack hunted for the vehicles.
They were supposed to be dug into a revetment on the southwestern end of Kill Box Alpha Echo Five. He had the fight place, and it was unlikely that the Iraqis would have moved the tanks this early in the morning. They had to be around here somewhere.
He was going to nail them the second he saw them. A pair of Maverick AGM-65B electro-optical magnification air-to-ground missiles hung on his wings, balanced by four Mark-20 Rockeye II cluster-bombs. The Mavericks would be fired first. He’d then close on whatever was left of the target and pop the Rockeyes.
Assuming he found something to pop them on.
“Yo Devil One, you got our cupcakes yet?”
“One. Negative,” snapped Hack, acknowledging his wingmate, Captain Thomas “A-Bomb” O’Rourke.
“Try nine o’clock, four miles.”
Hack glanced to the northwest. A brown smudge sat in the distance there, too far away for him to make out. Still, it was something; he angled his wings and turned in that direction, leveling out of his dive. The nine-inch television screen at the right side of his cockpit control panel fed video from the optical head in the missile
on his port wing; Hack had a perfect gray-scale image of undulating sand.
Preston glued his eyes to the altitude indicator in the middle of the dash, momentarily worrying that he’d lost his sense of where he was. Low and out of position for an attack, he realized he should tell A-Bomb to take the lead. But that would have felt too much like giving up.
I’m only flying a Hog, he reminded himself. I can plink tanks with my eyes closed.
Three or four years ago, that might have been true. He was a high-time A-10 driver then, with tons of experience in Europe. But he hated slogging around in the slow-moving, low-flying planes. Flying them was about as glamorous as going to the prom with your mom’s grandmother, and not half as good for your career. Thankfully, his Washington connections came through with better gigs, transferring him briefly to the Pentagon before finally sliding him into an F-15C wing. He came to the Gulf with the fast movers, flying as a section leader; only a few days ago he’d nailed a MiG in aerial combat over Iraq.
Within twenty-four hours— hell, within four— he was transferred to Devil Squadron, back out of the fast lane, back into Mom’s grandmom’s Model T.
The general who came through with the billet advertised it as a command move, the chance to lead a squadron, admittedly one of Hack’s most cherished goals. He hadn’t told him it was with A-10s until it was too late. Nor was it a real command— he was only the squadron’s director of operations or DO, second in line behind the commander.
The way Hack was flying today, he was lucky someone didn’t bust him back to lieutenant. He needed more altitude to make the attack work. Still not entirely confident that the smudge was anything but a smudge, he began a tight bank, intending to spiral up like a hawk as he proceeded.
The A-10 groaned. Never particularly adept at climbing, the plane labored with a full load tied to her wings.
“Yo, Hack, you got ‘em?” asked A-Bomb.
“One. I’m not sure that’s our target.”
Preston could practically hear A-Bomb snickering through the static. He came through his bank and pushed his wings level, now dead on for the dark brown clumps. Maybe tanks, maybe not— the video screen was a blurry mess.
Could be a pair of T-54s buried in the sand. Then again, it could be an I Love Lucy rerun.
A few stray clouds wisped in to further obstruct his vision. Hack cursed at the gray fingers, flipping back and forth between the two magnification cones offered by the missile gear in a vain hope that it would magically help him find the tanks.
He needed to find the damn things. Partly because he wanted to prove to A-Bomb and the rest of the squadron that he did really and truly have the right stuff. And partly because he wanted to prove it to himself.
Not that he should need to. But somehow the fuzzy picture in the small targeting screen and the rust in his Hog-flying chops negated everything else.
Hack checked his fuel and then his paper map as he legged further north. He pushed the air through his lungs slowly, telling himself to calm down.
Below the map and the mission notes, taped to the last page of the knee board, were three pieces of paper. He flipped the sheets up and looked at them now, talisman’s that never failed him.
One was a Gary Larson cartoon about scientists and bugs. He looked at it and laughed.
The second was a Biblical quotation from Ecclesiastes, reminding him that “wisdom exceedeth folly.”
And the last was the most important, a motto he’d heard from his father since he was seven or eight years old:
“Do your best.”
All he could do. He blew another wad of air into his face mask and put his eyes back out into the desert, trying to will some detail out of the shifting sands. The smudge had worked itself into a dark brown snake on the ground.
Not a tank. Something, but not a tank.
Hack sighed— might just as well let A-Bomb take a turn; he was used to looking at things on the ground, and maybe his eyes were even better. But as Preston slid his finger to click on the mike, the transmission from another flight ran over the frequency. Waiting for it to clear, he saw a gray lollipop just beyond the snake. Then another and another and another.
“Thank you, God, oh thank you,” he said. Looking over, he dialed the Maverick targeting cursor onto the first T-54.
“You say something, Major?” asked A-Bomb.
“Have three, no four tanks, dug in, beyond that smudge,” said Hack as he coaxed the pipper home. “Stand by.”
“Story of my life,” said A-Bomb. “Yeah, I got them. Your butt’s clear. Snake’s the track from a flak gun. Zeus on the right of the target area. Two of ‘em. Firing!”
As if they’d heard his wing mate’s warning, the four-barreled antiaircraft guns sent a stream of lead into the air. They were firing at extreme range and without the help of their radar, but even if they’d been in his face Hack wouldn’t have paid any attention— he wanted the damned tanks.
His first Maverick slid off her rail with a thunk, the rocket engine taking a second before bursting into action. By that time Hack had already steadied the crosshairs on a second tank. One hundred and twenty-five pounds of explosive dutifully took its cue as he depressed the trigger, launching from the Hog on what would be a fast, slightly arced, trip to its target.
Hack jerked his head back to the windscreen, belatedly realizing he was flying toward the anti-aircraft fire. Well-aimed or not, the 23mm slugs could still make nasty holes in anything they hit. He jerked the plane sharply to his right, narrowly avoiding the leading edge of the furious lead roiling the sky.
CHAPTER 2
OVER SOUTHEASTERN IRAQ
28 JANUARY 1991
1110
As soon as Hack cleared to his right, A-Bomb dished off his two Mavericks, targeting the pair of four-barreled 23mm anti-aircraft guns that were sending a fury of shells at his flight leader.
“What I’m talking about,” A-Bomb told the missiles as they sped toward their destinations. “What I’m talking about is nobody fires on a Hog and gets away with it. Go shoot at an F-15 or something. Better yet, aim for a MiG.”
Never one to waste a motion, A-Bomb nudged his stick ever so slightly to the left, lining up to drop his cluster-bombs on the buried tanks. In the fraternity of Hog drivers, A-Bomb stood apart. He was a wingman’s wingman, always checking somebody’s six, always ready to smoke any son of a bitch with bad manners enough to attack his lead. But he did have his quirks— he never entered combat without a full store of candy in his flightsuit, and never dropped a bomb without an appropriate soundtrack.
“Sweet Child O’ Mine” qualified as appropriate, if you skipped the mushy parts.
As W. Axl Rose prayed for thunder, O’Rourke tipped into a gentle swoop toward the targets, planning to drop his Redeye cluster-bombs in two salvos. In the meantime, Hack’s first Maverick hit its target, the nose of the flying bomb sending a small gray-black geyser into the air.
“Decoy,” said A-Bomb. “Son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER 3
OVER SOUTHEASTERN IRAQ
28 JANUARY 1991
1115
Hack rarely cursed, but he found it nearly impossible not to as he swung back toward the target area. A-Bomb might or might not be right about the tanks being decoys— hazy smoke now covered the target area, making it impossible to tell whether the tanks had been made of metal or papier-mâché. Flames shot up from one of the antiaircraft guns his wingmate had hit; black fingers erupted in crimson before closing back into a fist and disappearing. He turned on his wing, edging north, still trying to figure out what the hell he was seeing on the ground.
In an F-15, everything was laid out for you. AWACS caught the threat miles and miles away, fed you a vector. The APG-70 multimode, pulse-Doppler radar sifted through the air, caught the bandit eighty miles away, hiding in the weeds. You closed, selected your weapon. Push button, push button— two Sparrows up and at ‘em. The MiG was dead meat before it even knew you were there.
Push
button, push button.
If the MiG got through the net, things could get dicey. But that was good in a way— you scanned the sky, saw a glint off a cockpit glass, came up with your solution, applied it. You might even tangle mano a mano, cannons blazing away.
But this— this was like trying to ride a bicycle on a highway in a sandstorm. You were looking at the ground, for christsakes, not the sky.
The desert blurred. Hack shifted in the ejection seat, leaning up to get a better view. His elbow slapped hard against the left panel, pinging his funny bone.
Stinking A-10.
Hack pulled through a bank of clouds and ducked lower, jerking the stick hard enough to feel the g’s slam him in the chest. He’d been out of sorts his first few times in the Eagle cockpit, out of whack again when he’d come over here for his first combat patrols, unsettled even the day he nailed his Iraqi. There were no natural pilots, or if there were, he didn’t know any and he certainly wasn’t one of them. There were guys who worked at it hard, set their marks and hit them. You learned to keep the bile in your stomach, slow your breathing, take your time— but not too much time.
Do your best.
“I’m thinking we of our cluster-bombs and maybe have a go with the guns on that cracker box.”
A-Bomb’s transmission took Hack by surprise. “Come again?”
“Cracker box, make that a box of Good ‘n Plenty, two o’clock on your bow, three, oh maybe four miles off. Looks like the candy’s spilling out of it. See?”
He did see – now. A-Bomb had incredible eyes.
“How come everything is food to you, A-Bomb?” he asked.
“Could be I’m hungry,” replied his wingmate.
A-Bomb’s “candy” looked suspiciously like howitzer shells. Their frag— slang for the “fragment” of the daily Air Tasking Order pertaining to them— allowed them to hit any secondary target in the kill box once the tanks were nailed. Still, Hack contacted the ABCCC controller circling to the south in a C-130 to alert him to the situation, in effect asking if they were needed elsewhere. Important cogs in the machinery of war, the ATO and the ABCCC (airborne command and control center) allowed the allies to coordinate hundreds of strikes every day, giving them both a game plan and a way to freelance around it. Dropping ordnance was one thing, putting explosives where they would do the most good was another. Coordination was especially important this close to Kuwait, where there were thousands of targets and almost as many aircraft.