Hogs #1: Going Deep Read Free

discovered Dixon wasn't on his tail, Dixon was
staring into the
blankness of the sky in front of him, slowly realizing
that he was lost— c ompletely and utterly
lost. He was somewhere deep inside Iraq, without the vaguest notion of which
direction he had to head in.
    A compass sat directly in front of his face, and the
center instrument panel across from his chest was dominated by an INS
navigational system. While not without its problems, the unit could nonetheless
be counted on to give at least a semi-accurate location. But at the moment it was about as useful to him as a map of Wisconsin.
    Climbing after firing his Mavericks, Dixon had run into an aerial minefield. Antiair shells
exploded in every direction,
the Hog bucking and shaking like a car with three flat tires on a washboard highway.
Miraculously, none of the shells
did any damage, or at least not enough to affect the plane. Dixon climbed and
climbed, his heart skipping as his lungs gulped in rapid staccato. Finally
clear of the exploding black bursts, he kept going— to nearly twenty thousand
feet, which took forever in a loaded Hog. It wasn't what he had planned to do,
and certainly not what he had rehearsed for days. Still, he got the plane's nose angled down for a second run and prepared
for a second run with the Mavericks; he was still in control.
    Dixon had been a Division II quarterback in college, and
he gave himself one of
his old pep talks, as if he were clearing his head after a particularly vicious
blitz. When Doberman failed to respond to his radio call he felt a twinge of
anxiety, but pushed it away, hoping his flight leader was just too busy to
respond.
    He had flown wider than planned, and further north– and
lost his leader, at least momentarily— but as he peered through the broken
cloud layer he could feel his confidence returning. He pushed downward, searching both the air
ahead for Doberman and the ground below for his brief targets. The clouds made both tasks difficult; he
willed them away, sliding toward the Iraqi complex in a shallow dive. Suddenly the radar dish Doberman had targeted
snapped into view.
    Dixon was surprised to see it still intact.
    Okay, he told himself, I have a target. He steepened the dive, confidence beginning to build.
    Then clouds filled the windscreen. He turned quickly to
the video monitor. A blur fell into the crosshairs and he pushed the trigger on his AGM, locking
not on a dish but a building. He fired anyway, continuin g downward into clear sky.
    But now the site was jumbled around, different from the
satellite pictures and maps he’d studied. Doberman’s dish was gone; the
trailers were laid out in a different pattern. He shot his eyes back and forth,
trying to orient himself. The muscles in his throat closed, desperately trying
to keep his stomach acid from erupting in his mouth. Black bursts were
exploding in front of him; there was fire and smoke on the ground. Finally, he
saw a grouping of trailers he thought he recognized, locked on the middle one,
and fired. The Maverick clunked away as the plane followed the motion of his
arm, stiffly pulling to the left in a long descending bank as his eyes remained
glued on the television display, now completely blank.
    More than thirty seconds passed before he pulled his head upright. By then the Hog had flown
well beyond the target area. There was nothing on the desert floor in front of him.
    For a moment then, Lieutenant William Dixon- star
athlete, star student, prized recruit, a young man headed toward a top F-15
assignment until his mother's failing health complicated his career priorities-
forgot how to fly. His
arms and legs moved independently of his head. With his left hand he reached for the
stick when he meant to adjust the throttle; with his right he tuned the radio
when he meant to check the INS settings.
    A voice in his head yelled that he wasn't breathing right. He'd been hyperventilating
probably since takeoff and the
voice knew that a good part