Free Hogs #1: Going Deep by Jim DeFelice Page A

poker.
    Another way to look at what had happened to his Hog was the opposite of luck. Hell, nothing
hit Dixon's plane, nothing,
and he'd flown through the same shit Doberman had. Now that was luck.
    Kid probably sucked what little luck he had right out of him. Some guys were like that. Luck
magnets.
    A couple of days ago Doberman had blown a tire landing. That was unlucky as hell. Hogs never
blew tires. Never.
    It wasn't luck that had kept the plane from becoming a pile of junk that afternoon.
    It was kick-ass piloting.
    Hey, you want to call that luck? OK. Maybe to a grizzled old sergeant who had been
there when Orville and Wilbur
traded in their bicycles, it was luck.
    To Doberman, it was skill.
    And the hell with anyone who said he was conceited about that.
    Doberman peered out the side canopy, staring through the thick, protective glass toward the
desolate undulations of
yellow below. The sand and grit hardly seemed worth fighting over; maybe staring at it all
day made you crazy.
    Sure, but so did thinking about the oil beneath it. Obviously Saddam's problem.
    “Yo, Doberman, buddy, how's our six?”
    Doberman snapped to attention at A-Bomb's call. He craned his neck around, making sure
his back, or his “six” as in six o'clock on the imaginary clock face of their location, was clean.
As he pushed his eyes toward the front windscreen, he realized that A-Bomb had
actually made the call to subtly remind him to keep his separation; he was off Devil Three by less than a quarter
mile, and closing.
    Subtle.
    “Nothing behind us but a lot of dirt and open sky, thank you very much, old buddy,” he
said.
    “Don't mention it.”
    “We're flying silent com,” barked Mongoose.
    Fuck you, said Doberman, without, of course, keying the microphone.
    He hadn't been paying enough attention, and now as he dropped back he realized he was also
muscling the stick. So he
had to wake up and relax at the same time. Doberman blew a long breath, letting the Hog ease
under him like a calm horse
out on a Sunday walk. His tendency to over manage the plane was a symptom of fatigue;
they'd been flying since nearly three this morning and his butt was dragging lower than the wheels.
    Mongoose had volunteered them for this stinking BAI hop,
another reason to be pissed off at him. The original frag— the fragment or portion of the
air tasking order that pertained to them— had them just sitting on alert at Al Jouf before going home.
    Yeah, but could you blame him? Who wanted to hang out while there were things to blow up?
    ***
    They were about three minutes from the assigned kill box when a familiar call sign crackled
over the radio.
    “Cougar to Devil Leader. Devils, stand by for tasking.”
    Tasking?
    Doberman slipped up the volume on the radio, even though the E-3 controller's voice had
been loud and clear.
    “We need you to head east, pronto,” explained the AWACS. “One of our Weasels spotted a
shipment of Scuds on the highway.”

CHAPTER 16
    AL JOUF FOB
    1200
     
    Dixon found himself wearing a rut in the sand at the
edge of the runway, unable to tear his eyes away from the stricken planes
straggling into the base. Every beat-up F-16, every flamed-out Tornado seemed to criticize him:
if its jock could take it, why couldn't he?
    Finally, he couldn't stand it anymore. Unwilling to go near anyone whose questions would
inevitably lead to more lies,
the young pilot collapsed butt first into the sand, covering his face against the gritty
wind. His mind blanked; his
brain fogging nearly as badly as it had up north.
    He'd sat there for nearly fifteen minutes when he felt a tug on his arm.
    “Excuse me, you Lieutenant Dixon?”
    Dixon looked up and found an Air Force special ops first
lieutenant with a greasy pad of legal-sized paper staring up at him.
    “Yeah?”
    “Two things. The maintenance people say the parts they don't have are en route; ought to be
here in an hour or less.
Plane looked worse than it was, or they kicked butt; Jimbo says