Hogs #2: Hog Down Read online

  <<<<< -------- HOGS 2-------->>>>

  The first rule of the air war above Iraq is …

  Never leave a Hog behind.

  HOG DOWN

  By Jim DeFelice

  writing as

  James Ferro

  Book #2 in the HOGS Air War series

  based on the exploits of the A-10A Warthog pilots in the 1991 Gulf War

  Copyright © 1999 by Jim DeFelice

  Black Coyote Inc.

  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: [email protected]

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  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

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  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

  __A NOTE TO READERS__

  Other Books by Jim DeFelice

  PROLOGUE

  soMEWHERE IN nORTHERN Saudi Arabia

  21 January 1991

  1600 (aLL dATES AND TIMES LOCAL)

  Finally, they’d gotten a day with nearly full sun, the sort of day you’d expect in the desert. The weather had been horrible the past few days, more like Idaho than Saudi Arabia.

  Private Smith rubbed his mouth, trying to chase away the late-afternoon dog breath. A few more hours and the sun would set: he’d go off duty and get some real zzzs – assuming Saddam didn’t lob any Scuds their way tonight.

  The slime.

  Leaning forward against the sandbags, Private Smith stared out across the vast wasteland in the direction of the enemy, his eyes straining to separate the dust from the earth. A huge earth berm sat a few hundred yards away. It was both the border of the country and the line between boredom and insanity.

  Private Jones poked him in the back good-naturedly.

  “How’s it going?” asked Jones.

  “Not too bad,” said Smith. “You get any action going on the Super Bowl yet?”

  The answer to his question was drowned out by a sudden roar. Two dark monsters swept up over the nearby berm, almost on top of them. The jets were so close to the earth, their wheels would have touched if their landing gear was out.

  “Motherfucker!” screamed Smith, throwing himself on the ground.

  The ground rattled with the sudden roar of the planes. Their noses bristled with the business ends of GAU-8/A Avenger seven-barrel rotary cannons, whose 30mm shells could chew through a concrete wall in a heartbeat. Thick wings jutted defiantly straight out from the fuselages, throwbacks to an earlier, rougher era. The planes’ huge engines hung off their backs like a devil’s forked tail: the rear rudders looked like legs trailing a flying witch.

  The two fighter-bombers pounded over the sand like a pair of Satan’s minions sent to return some escaped soul to eternal torture. Smith cowered, sure that his next address would be chiseled in granite.

  “Relax,” Jones told Smith as soon as the planes passed. He laughed, reaching down and hauling his companion to his feet. “They’re only the Warthogs.”

  “Shit. I didn’t even hear the bastards.”

  “Good thing they’re on our side, huh?”

  “Damn fug-ugly planes,” said Smith, staring after them. “Uglier than the back end of a Humvee.”

  “Uglier than your girlfriend.”

  “That ain’t no thing.”

  “Kick-ass ugly plane,” agreed Jones. “Gonna go tank up, then go back and rip some Iraqi hide.”

  “I’m for that,” said Smith.

  __PART ONE__

  EASY PICKINGS

  CHAPTER 1

  KING KHALID MILITARY CITY

  SAUDI ARABIA

  21 JANUARY 1991

  1703

  He’d meant to read the letter from his wife earlier. In fact, he’d been meaning to read it since last night, but one thing or another got in the way. Now, sitting in the cockpit of his A-10A Warthog fighter-bomber waiting for clearance to takeoff, Major James “Mongoose” Johnson eyed the edge of the greenish-blue envelope, wondering if there was enough time to slit it open and read it.

  Probably, there was. Having just been refueled and reloaded, Mongoose and his wingman were standing at the edge of the runway, ready to launch their third foray that day behind the enemy lines. But an F-16 with battle damage had been given priority to land; they were waiting for the plane to make its appearance.

  Thing was, if the F-16 took too much longer, this sortie would have to be scrapped. There wasn’t a heck of a lot of daylight left and besides, the two Devil flight Hogs had been working since before sunup nearly twelve hours ago.

  He could’ve, should’ve, read the letter earlier. He’d had plenty of time between the first and second missions, sitting in the refueling pit. And actually, there had been nearly a half-hour after his preflight before dawn that he’d spent rechecking details that had been checked three times already.

  The truth was, Major Johnson got fixated on routines as well as details; he usually read his wife’s letters at night before writing to her, and missing that chance had thrown him off. It didn’t feel right to read it at any other time, in any other place but his quiet bunk in tent city.

  This was the flip side of the personality that made Tommy “Mongoose” Johnson one of the best Director of Operations in the entire A-10A community, if not the US Air Force. The positive side led him to meticulously diagram not just a planned mission route but all the alternatives. The positive side led him to take over a lot of the squadron commander’s tasks, pushed him to find problems in planes that had been cleared by someone else, made him carefully evaluate not just a pilot’s physical abilities but his mental state before drawing up a game plan.

  The negative side made him a pain in the ass. He knew that; he was trying to be less by-the-book, bend more on the bullshit, bring out the best in people by giving them slack.

  The negative side also meant that when his routine was disrupted, he tended to let things drop off the side.

  Like the letter. He could read it now; undoubtedly it would give him a boost, as Kathy’s letters always did. But somehow it didn’t feel right.

  Reading the letter would be like removing his helmet befor
e goosing the throttle to take off, or undoing the straps that bound him to the ACES II ejector seat while in the middle of an invert. As tempting as it was to think about home, to savor the memory of his wife and their new baby, it was important for him to keep to his usual cockpit routine. Granted, the sortie— the third and last of a very long day— was nothing special, easy pickings. Devil One and Two were tasked to smash the hell out of an artillery emplacement a quick drive over the border. Ride in, ride out, no big deal.

  Still, it needed his full attention. The letter could wait.

  A wobbling blur appeared at the edge of the afternoon sky, fumbling over the runway haze with a sizable gash in her right wing. It was the injured F-16. Johnson watched as the plane seemed to fight off a sudden burst of wind— it might actually have been a problem with the damaged control surfaces— then righted itself and skimmed into a good landing pattern.

  The sleek and versatile F-16 Viper or Falcon was generally reckoned as one of the best all-around planes in the allied inventory, a hell of a dogfighter that drew second straw only to a balls-out F-15 Eagle or— and this was a heavy point of contention between the services— an F/A-18 Hornet, the versatile two-engined attack plane favored by the Navy. In contrast, Mongoose’s A-10A Warthog was more a mud wrestler than a modern fighter. She was built to fly low and slow, and she looked it. Her long wings stood straight out from her pudgy fuselage, exactly the way they would have on a 1930’s monoplane. The large fan-jets behind the cockpit looked as if they’d been stolen from an early 1960’s airliner. Officially called a Thunderbolt II, the plane had been nicknamed the Warthog because she was twice as ugly as one.

  But she was also three times as ornery. Those simple wings could hold a heavier weapons load than the average World War II bomber. The fan-jets couldn’t get the Hog up to the sound barrier, but they allowed the plane to twist and turn cartwheels in the sky. Part of the A-10A’s muscular frame was made of titanium; all of her important control systems were redundant and well protected. The Hog could take more lead than a target at a turkey shoot and keep on flying— a fact, not a brag; Mongoose had seen it himself. She was also incredibly easy to service, and meant to be used right in the heart of trouble. Gassing and arming her were easy enough that army troops could do it. In fact, rumor had it that more than one Hog driver had gotten fed up with the wait over at Al Jouf FOA the first day of the war and hopped out to refurbish his craft himself.

  The tale was probably apocryphal, though Mongoose had no doubt that his wingman, Captain Tommy “A-Bomb” O’Rourke, had contemplated something along those lines already.

  A-Bomb— the pilot of Devil Two— was exactly that kind of guy, the prototypical wingman and a born Hog driver. But he was unlike any other pilot in the entire service. His legend extended well beyond the small confines of the 535th Attack Squadron (Provisional). A-Bomb could fly with one hand on the stick and the other wrapped around his coffee thermos, in manual reversion with no help muscling the controls from the hydraulics. He’d be listening to a Bruce Springsteen CD that played on the stereo in his specially modified flight getup, plunking Iraqis while microwaving a hot dog.

  Actually, he didn’t have a microwave in his cockpit.

  Yet.

  The F-16 hit the runway a bit fast, wheels squealing and a wing popping up before settling down. Mongoose glanced again at his wife’s letter, staring at the return address with its carefully printed block letters. The thin blue lines of her text were folded against themselves, backwards and showing through the thin paper.

  She would have used her favorite Cross pen to write the letter. It was her good luck pen.

  Maybe it wasn’t anal-retentiveness about his schedule and duties that had made him put off reading this letter. Maybe it was something else, something unconscious. Bad karma or something.

  Maybe he sensed bad news.

  He’d devoured the others. Read them and read them and read them, until the words were burned into his brain.

  But this one . . .

  Not bad news, not a premonition, just— something weird. Like maybe it would be bad luck.

  Jesus, he told himself. You’re getting like Doberman. Next thing you’ll be doing is snugging your helmet exactly twelve times before getting into the cockpit.

  “Devil One?”

  With a start, Mongoose realized the tower had cleared him to take off and was waiting for him to get his butt in gear.

  He gave the letter a frown, then pushed it securely into his pocket.

  “Sorry, honey,” he told it, as if it were really his wife. “I’ll get to it later. I promise.”

  CHAPTER 2

  KING KHALID

  21 JANUARY 1991

  1704

  Most combat pilots, especially ones facing a sortie sure to stretch several hours, stayed away from coffee hours before climbing up into their winged chariot. Most pilots would sooner bring an armed hand grenade into a cockpit than a loaded half-gallon thermos. Especially Warthog drivers— the plane lacked an autopilot, and wrestling with the piddlepack in flight was probably more hazardous than running past a dozen SA-6 installations, the fiercest Russian-made anti-air missiles in Iraq.

  Of course, most pilots weren’t Captain Thomas “A-Bomb” O’Rourke, the commander of Devil Two.

  As A-Bomb stowed his thermos back in its specially designed compartment in his flight suit, he considered the possibility of rigging some sort of pressurized device that would operate with a tube and spigot. This way he could sip coffee even pulling high g’s. Nothing like a little caffeine to counteract the effects of all that blood rushing into, or away from, your head.

  Of course, he could just go ahead and use a cup, but the ground crew tended to complain about splashes on the instruments.

  A-Bomb still had about a few ounces of coffee in his plastic “preflight” cup, not as much as he wanted but enough to keep his hum level up for the trip north. He sipped it delicately, like a connoisseur checking out fine wine. Truth was, this Java Roast was really Chase & Sanborn from the windy side of the vineyard, but what the hell. Sacrifices had to be made in wartime.

  King Khalid Military City was a forward operating area, in theory a scratch base near the front where A-10As could reload and get back into the fray as quickly as possible. But Khalid didn’t look like a typical scratch base. Sure, there were army guys running all over the place, which gave it the homey look. There was also the requisite Saudi dust, and the change in temperature could provide a very handsome fog in the early morning, exactly the sort of thing you wanted to accent sheer chaos.

  But there was also an immense dome and office building complex nearby— a pit helmet and band box— which made the place look more civilized than Charles DeGaulle Airport, in A-Bomb’s humble opinion.

  Now DeGaulle would be kick-ass FOA. Those Frenchmen knew how to throw the fear of God into a pilot, the one thing they did right, as far as A-Bomb was concerned. Plus as an extra bonus you could fly under the Eiffel Tower on the way in for a landing.

  The pilot gave his instruments a final check as his Hog rumbled across the tarmac. The pointy nose F-16 had finally gotten his butt down on the airstrip in one piece. He’d obviously been shot up pretty bad, and A-Bomb didn’t begrudge the Viper’s pilot for taking so long to land. He was, after all, working under a hardship— he wasn’t driving a Hog.

  A-Bomb’s eyes pegged the indicators on the dials over his right knee as he made sure the twin engines were running at spec. Together, they put out over eighteen thousand pounds of thrust, enough in theory to lift fifty thousand pounds of Hog off a strip faster than he could finish a Twinkie. The plane couldn’t actually go all that fast— her posted top speed was 439 miles an hour in level flight at sea level, a mark A-Bomb had never actually made, partly because he rarely found himself at level flight at sea level. But the Hog wasn’t about speed; she was about pounding the crap out of bad guys, and that he had done, and done well. Going slow was a point of honor.

  When the dials conf
irmed his gut feel that the power plants were pumping at shop manual spec, A-Bomb swept his eyes across the panel on the right, making sure the fuel tanks hadn’t sprung a leak. Then he glanced down at the switches for the INS navigational system, marching his glance around the rest of the cockpit in a sweep that took in the radio and weapons switches and worked over to the large, globe-like horizon indicator at the top center of the dashboard before returning to the canopy. With all instruments present and accounted for, A-Bomb shifted his one-hundred and sixty-something pounds in his seat, hunkering in the cockpit like a medieval knight getting into joust position on his horse. To his everlasting disappointment, the ACES II ejector seat could not be customized as his flight gear had been; otherwise, A-Bomb might have fit it with a gun rack and maybe a massage unit.