Free Hogs #4:Snake Eaters by Jim DeFelice

pairs as roving marshals on the Wild Western frontier. Their missions had become progressively more aggressive and free-wheeling as the air war proceeded. While other Eagles and Coalition fighters might be part of large packages of planes with specific flights to escort, the Piranhas had been tasked today as roving interceptors. Working with a controller in an AWACS E-3 Sentry, Hack and his flight would Fly a long loop or racetrack high over enemy territory. At the first sign of activity, they would be vectored in for a kill.
    While the other Piranhas had flown several such missions already, they had yet to fire in anger. Today, however, promised to be different. For the first time, their track would take them near a large enemy air base. It housed at least a dozen MiGs and its runway had survived numerous bombings by the British RAF. The intelligence specialists at Black Hole reported that the Iraqis were getting anxious; a U-2 spy plane had caught support vehicles moving around the ground. Word was, the Iraqi planes were going to try and make a run for it, maybe to Iran.
    Which pl eased Hack no end. His mission— his job and his life— was dedicated to splashing MiGs. He hoped and had even prayed last night to get his chance to do that today.
    He’d also prayed that he wouldn’t screw up.
    Hack snapped the mike button and requested clearance from ground control. Acknowledged and approved, he slipped the Eagle’s dual throttles out of idle and eased out from his parking spot.
    Hack hated this part of the flight . His stomach stirred with anticipation, juices building. Inevitably he poked the stick around like a novice, shaking the plane’s control surfaces like a new lieutenant queuing for his first flight.
    “Tower, Piranha One, in sequence,” he began, asking the controller for his departure ticket.
    “Piranha, the wind three-two-zero at 12 knots, cleared for take-off.”
    “Piranha,” he acknowledged, leading the rest of his flight toward the long gray splash of runway where they would take off. His stomach jerked back and forth furiously, bile climbing up his windpipe as he glanced through the large bubble canopy at his wingman Captain “Johnny” Stern.
    Stern gave him a thumbs up . Hack returned it, then got serious about his throttle, poking his Pratt & Whitneys to full military power while checking his instruments. RPM, turbine inlet temp, oil pressure and fuel flow were at spec. He checked them off in his head, working quickly through the numbers for engine two. His stomach boiled— the temp gauge for the inlet read 322 degrees Celsius, about 900 Fahrenheit, and he might have believed that was measuring his own temperature.
    Do your best.
    When the brakes were released, the Eagle didn’t roll down the runway— it bolted, pushing itself against his back as it jumped from zero to 120 knots in nothing flat. Hack brought the stick back steadily. The F-15 could literally fly straight up off the runway, but there was no need to show off. The Eagle ascended into the desert air, past the fine mist of sand, beyond the heated air radiating in waves off the concrete. The fire in his stomach subsided. He settled into the routine, cleaning up the airplane by cranking in the wheels and adjusting his flaps. The Eagle was already moving through the air at over 220 nautical miles an hour.
    As the unsafe gear lights blinked off, Hack checked through his instruments quickly, making sure he was in the green. Then he swept his head around the cockpit glass nearly three hundred degrees, from one end of the ejector seat cushion to the other, back to front to back again, before beginning a bank to set course to the flight’s rendezvous point.
    Once airborne, the four Eagles split into two sections . Hack and his wingmate went north. The second group stayed south, queing up to tank. They would trade places in roughly forty-five minutes, one group in reserve while the other zipped over southwestern Iraq at roughly twenty-five