Hogs #4:Snake Eaters Read online

  At this rate, Saddam would be on work-release from a federal pen before A-Bomb got close enough to nail the bastard.

  The funny thing was, Coors hadn’t fired, at least not that A-Bomb had heard. That could mean that the Iraqi was just dinking shadows in the hills while the Delta trooper flanked him.

  It could also mean he was lying on the slope bleeding to death.

  A-Bomb waited for the Iraqi to fire again. The burst was shorter this time; the pilot managed only five yards before his belly flop.

  This much up and down was going to wear his flightsuit out. Then he’d be forced into Spec Ops jammies. Okay up here maybe, but what would they say back in Devil Squadron’s readyroom? They’d haul him right over to the Depot and make him buy everybody in the squadron a round of drinks.

  While he waited for the Iraqi to fire again, A-Bomb decided the liability to his ego, let alone wallet, didn’t permit any more fooling around. As soon as the soldier started shooting, he got up and began walking toward him, this time not bothering to stop or even crouch as the last round of Russian-made ammo echoed against the shallow hills.

  He got maybe forty yards before he heard the muffled, not quite delicate sound of the sergeant’s modified MP-5. The Iraqi immediately rose from the rocks and returned fire.

  Clear shot. Too far, but clear.

  A-Bomb squeezed off a round, cursing as he did. He was fifty yards away.

  The Iraqi jerked around, then fell back, struck in the side.

  “I knew I was going to miss,” the pilot grumbled.

  Winged, the Iraqi scrambled for his gun. A-Bomb waited until the soldier squared his rifle toward him before firing again. This time he nailed him in the middle of the forehead.

  “I thought I told you to stay back,” Coors screamed as he scrambled down the rocks. He’d been tucked into a crevice near the top and apparently escaped harm.

  “Yeah, you’re welcome.”

  “Fuck you,” said the sergeant.

  “Not today,” said A-Bomb. He scanned the area quickly, making sure there were no other Iraqis. The dead man’s position was in the shadow of the truck and hills, which had probably made him hard for Coors to see as he came down.

  “Yeah, well, thanks,” muttered the trooper as A-Bomb slipped his gun back into his holster. “I didn’t see him when I checked out the area from the ridge and then I got sloppy. Raghead must’ve heard a rock or dirt I kicked. He couldn’t get me, but he had me pinned down. I owe ya one.”

  “I’ll collect,” said A-Bomb. He snatched up the soldier’s AK-47 and started back toward the truck. “Lucky there wasn’t any traffic, huh?”

  Coors shrugged. “They mostly drive at night.”

  “Yeah.” A-Bomb laughed. “What do you figure the odds that he’s carrying jet fuel?”

  “Prohibitive,” said Coors.

  A-Bomb disagreed. Leaving a tanker full of Hog juice at their door would be just the sort of neighborly gesture Saddam might use to entice Devil Squadron to go home.

  It wouldn’t work, of course, but it was nice to be appreciated.

  “I think it’s water,” said Coors after clambering up the tanker to peer through the manhole at the top. “It ain’t gas or oil. . . no, wait.”

  He stuck his head down into the interior of the dull steel tank. The skin was marked by dents and dings; if it had ever been polished the finish had long worn away. The top was mated to a ZIL 130 chassis. What seemed to be military markings had been painted over with inelegant swathes of gray paint, completing the early junkyard look.

  “Water?” A-Bomb asked.

  Coors pulled it up with a laugh. “I think it’s milk. Still fresh, too. Or at least it don’t stink.”

  “Now all we need’s a truck full of cookies,” said A-Bomb, pulling himself up the ladder onto the back.

  He leaned over and took a whiff. It smelled like milk, though on the watery side and with a metallic aftertaste.

  “Milk,” he declared. “But you aren’t going to want to drink it. Be okay for dunking. Yeah.” He straightened, considering the scent. Milk wasn’t his beverage of choice. Would ruin good coffee with it. No. Dunking would be okay. But not just any dunking; would have to be hard cookies, like Italian biscotti or Russian rusks. Donuts are out,” he added as he jumped down to look over the rest of the truck. “Because they’re going to soak in too much moisture and that’s going to bring the aftertaste with it. What you need something with granules and surface area. So we’re talking biscotti. Hard cookies. Evaporation and crumbs, that’s what I’m talking about.”

  Coors pretended not to be interested. “What do you think they’re doing way out here with milk?”

  A-Bomb shrugged, looking into the cab to make sure it wasn’t booby-trapped before opening it. “Maybe they couldn’t get beer.”

  Outside of a screwdriver and a map, the cab was empty. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the truck that a half-hour in a carwash wouldn’t fix. Still, ZILs weren’t known for their reliability and it wasn’t until he had monkeyed with the carburetor for a few minutes that A-Bomb realized the driver had simply run out of gas.

  “You think we can siphon some out of the FAV?” he asked the sergeant. The old Soviet-era transports used petrol rather than diesel.

  “Won’t have to. Got a spare gas tank lashed on the top. You wait here and I’ll be back.”

  “Wait a second,” said A-Bomb. “You owe me one, remember?”

  “Yeah?”

  “So I’m collecting.”

  “You’re collecting by walking back to the FAV?”

  “And driving it here. I’ll be back before you have the body buried in the rocks over there.”

  Coors laughed. “You’re a piece of work, Captain.”

  “Nah. Just a Hog driver,” answered A-Bomb, returning his one-fingered salute.

  CHAPTER 9

  ON THE GROUND IN IRAQ

  26 JANUARY 1991

  1420

  Dixon’s mouth, throat and stomach had seared together, parched and burned by hunger, thirst, and heat. The only part of him that felt good was his fingers. They were curled around the stock of the Kalashnikov.

  If there had been other Iraqis near the quarry or bunker they hadn’t followed him. Alone and seemingly unnoticed, he trudged eastward, paralleling the highway by about a hundred yards. At first he crouched low to the ground, huddling as close to the scrubby vegetation as possible. Soon, however, he realized there was no one nearby to see him, and the open area would give him plenty of warning if a vehicle approached. He gradually came out of his crouch, walking slightly stooped over and then finally upright, continuing to turn back and forth, checking his six like the trained fighter pilot he was.

  Dixon kicked at the dirt. It seemed thicker stuff than the sandy grit and fine dust near the quarry. It was the kind of stuff that might almost be farmable, or at least hold enough promise to ruin a man once the summer came. There were irrigation ditches on the other side of the road. A few had water at the bottom, though most were dry. In the distance, Dixon could see a small hovel which he took to be a farmhouse. Beyond that on his side of the highway was a low set of hills, about five miles off. The hills were gray rather than brown or red. He assumed that meant there were bushes or trees on them; that would mean water and probably a town or settlement of some sort. Dixon debated whether to walk to it or not. He was hungry and he had to find food, but if there was food there would also be Iraqis.

  He had to eat, and soon. And he didn’t figure he could live off the land. His few days in survival training seemed more like a visit to an amusement park than anything useful to him now.

  Dixon was approaching the Cornfield, a pre-designated spot the Delta team he’d landed with had used to land a pair of helicopters the night before. They’d been ambushed; he’d watched the firefight from the hill near the NBC bunker, then come to rescue one of the survivors.

  Last night, it had taken only an hour to get this far. Now, it seemed as if it had taken
all day.

  He glanced at his watch, even though he knew it had stopped. The sun wasn’t quite halfway down in the sky.

  Two o’clock? Three?

  Dixon could see the top of a wrecked APC south of the road. Other hulks lay beyond it. He decided to go there; he might find food or more weapons or even something he could use to contact one of the Delta teams still operating in Iraq. He turned and began walking directly south toward the highway.

  Without thinking, he broke into a trot and then ran full force. The belt of AK-47 clips jostled against his chest and stomach. One fell out; he left it and kept going, off-balance and out of control, running for nearly a quarter of a mile until he slid down the sharp embankment of a dry creek bed. He threw himself against the other side, pulling himself up with his rifle and free hand, stumbling again and then starting to walk toward the APC about thirty yards away.

  The drive mechanism had been twisted out from the chassis, opening like a bizarre metal tulip that protruded from the once-smooth side of the truck. The sight of the jagged metal sobered him. When he was five yards away he dropped to his knees, finally catching his breath and regaining his sense.

  His eyes like telescopes, he began scanning the Cornfield for an enemy. Finally he approached the APC, his finger tensing against the trigger of the assault rifle. He moved the barrel back and forth across it, as if expecting another flower to burst from the metal and reveal a gunner taking aim at him.

  A ruined tank sat beyond the APC, maybe thirty yards further from the road on his right. He began sidestepping toward it, moving the rifle back and forth as if he’d been taking fire from both sides. Then he turned and ran as fast as he could toward the tank, the last dregs of his adrenaline flooding into his legs and head. AK-47 ready, he sidestepped around the blackened frame, approaching the front of the turret as if its long-barrel gun had not been shattered in two.

  When he was positive there was no one hiding behind or inside the tank, he stepped up onto the back of the vehicle to inspect it. A small bomb or missile had landed near the center of the chassis, ripping a mushroom of metal from the tank’s innards. Dixon carefully leaned in, worried that he might cut himself on the shards. Plastic soot covered the interior, a gritty mud that had coagulated and cooled after the initial explosion and fire. A hand, its fingers extended but its thumb missing, lay against a thick lump of metal at the front. The rest of the body was gone.

  Dixon stepped back, sliding down to one knee behind the turret as he surveyed the battlefield from the Iraqis’ vantage point. Greatly outnumbered, the American fire team had briefly held a small hill fifty feet high to his right, but had fought most of the battle in and around a series of ditches directly in front of the tank. Only the arrival of the helicopters had saved the day.

  Dixon jumped off the tank and made his way to the hill; it would give him a good view of the rest of the area. As he climbed it, he realized he hadn’t seen any dead bodies yet.

  There were no bodies here either, nor could he see any from the top. The only sign of the battle on the hill was a crater on the southeastern corner of the summit. The dirt in the center was tinged red, as if the earth had bled.

  As he stood at the edge of the crater, Dixon’s feet began to slip. He managed to throw his weight backwards just enough so that he fell down as if plopping into a seat.

  He stayed in the hole for a minute, eyes staring into the sky. Faint contrails teased him; twenty or thirty thousand feet above him allied planes were carrying on the war, oblivious to his existence or plight.

  Hunger pushed Dixon back to his feet. The lieutenant resumed his search, methodically inspecting the rest of the burned-out vehicles. The fact that no bodies remained meant the Iraqis must have come through already; it was unlikely he would find anything useful. Still, he kept looking. A Ural 6x6 sat almost unscathed nearly a quarter of a mile from the rest of the vehicles. He found a small metal canteen near it. He jiggled it in his hand and, though he didn’t hear anything, unscrewed it and held it upside down over his mouth anyway.

  A trickle of water surprised his tongue. The liquid felt like hot pebbles, burning holes in his mouth, and then it was gone. He gulped air, and his thirst became a fire, ravaging his body. Canteen in one hand and rifle in the other, Dixon ran to a streambed a hundred yards south of the battlefield. But he found only dust.

  He’d been here before, on this spot, last night. He’d kicked ice. Where was it?

  He walked along the dead streambed. The day had warmed to near fifty, perhaps more. Ice would have melted, but there must be water. It couldn’t have evaporated; he hadn’t imagined it.

  Dixon must have spent nearly a half-hour searching without finding anything. Finally, he whipped the metal bottle down against the rocks. He kicked at the ground and took the rifle and rammed it against the dirt, screaming and cursing.

  A voice at the back of his head told him it was a foolish thing to do.

  It was his father’s voice, rising from his institutionalized sickbed. A voice he hadn’t heard in many months. A voice that hadn’t been coherent for a much longer time, and could never have offered advice— his father had been in a mental institution since Dixon was ten or eleven.

  But the voice was right. Whether it was a temporary hallucination, or a memory. or just Dixon’s own conscience disguising itself, it helped him catch hold of himself. He sat down, pulling his shirt out from his pants to rub the barrel of the gun clean. Then he retrieved the canteen. Examining it, he found a fresh dent but no real damage. He stuffed it in his pocket.

  As he did he saw a small brown box on the side of the wadi, next to a twisted brown bush. Dixon approached it warily; carefully he scanned the area, made sure he was alone. Then he knelt and looked it over for booby traps. When he didn’t see any, he reached to his belt and unsheathed his combat knife. He punched it into the earth near the box, then began moving it around the ground, hoping that if there was a booby trap he’d somehow manage to find it before setting it off. When he didn’t find anything, he stood back, and used the AK-47 to poke the box. Nothing happened, and he finally picked it up.

  It was an ammo box. Inside were several banana clips of 7.62 mm ammo for the assault gun.

  He would have much preferred water or food.

  Dixon tucked the box under his arm and began walking along the wadi slowly. The streambed intersected an irrigation ditch a few yards ahead. He turned and walked down the ditch, realizing it was deeper than the wadi. A hundred yards down, past two or three other ditches in the network, he finally saw a pool of water.

  Fear welled up from his stomach with every step, clamping itself down like a force trying to keep him from moving. He slid to his knees and unscrewed the top of the canteen, lowering it to the surface of the water. There was at least six inches; he filled the canteen only halfway before rising. He intended on pouring the water over his fingers, to see if it was clean, but as he tilted the metal bottle his thirst jerked his hand up and he poured it nearly straight down into his mouth, every part of him trembling. He did it two more times, silt and grit rubbing against his teeth, choking in his throat.

  Nothing liquid had ever tasted as good. He leaned back, balancing on his haunches; finally he put the rifle down next to the ammo box and removed the campaign hat from his head, soaking it and then wringing it over his face.

  As he straightened, he heard trucks on the road a half-mile away. He pulled the hat down, took the gun and the ammo box, and crawled up to watch them pass.

  Except that they didn’t pass. They slowed and then stopped along the highway. He raised his head as high as he dared and saw someone running toward the Ural truck he had inspected before. The man shouted something and two or three others got out of a white pickup and came over.

  Dixon couldn’t see what they were doing. The pickup truck was part of a convoy of four or five vehicles, one of which was an APC.

  At the tail end were two tractor-trailers with long tarps covering their loads.

  He
’d stared at them for nearly five minutes before he realized he was looking at a pair of Scud missiles.

  By then, the Iraqis had concluded they couldn’t do anything with the 6x6 and had returned to their vehicles. Dixon rose; he watched the pickup jerk ahead, then the APC. Black smoke puffed from the exhausts of the lead Scud carrier as the motor revved.

  Belatedly, he pulled the assault rifle to his shoulder and aimed at the truck. He had it in his sights, but he was so far away that even if he managed to hit it the bullet would barely graze the canvas.

  Better to follow, get close, find a way to destroy it.

  Madness.

  But what else was there left for him to do? Stay here and die of starvation?

  Die for a purpose, at least. Better to go out in a blaze of glory than starve. Or worse, be found alive but passed out. The Iraqis would use him. That would be worse than torture, worse than death.

  Dixon shouldered his rifle and walked back up the low hill to study the area ahead. He couldn’t be sure, but it appeared that the last of the Iraqi vehicles that had just passed was following a turn in the road just beyond the hills.

  There’d be food if there was a village or settlement there. His stomach would stop hurting.

  He’d have to kill for it. Kill to eat, to survive.

  Dixon shrugged, as if he’d been debating with himself. Killing to survive meant he might kill civilians.

  So be it. There were no more civilians as far as he was concerned. Civilians were his father and mother, back home in the States.

  His father; Mom was gone.

  Could he kill his dad, standing face-to-face; shoot him if his own life depended on it? If he didn’t know him?

  If he couldn’t, if he wouldn’t, how could he shoot anyone?

  Dixon opened the ammo box and stuffed the extra clips into the belt and his pants. Pushing himself forward, Dixon stumbled once or twice but kept moving, gaining momentum as he walked.