HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) Read Free

it. See?”
    He did see – now. A-Bomb had incredible eyes.
    “How come everything is food to you, A-Bomb?” he
asked.
    “Could be I’m hungry,” replied his wingmate.
    A-Bomb’s “candy” looked suspiciously like howitzer
shells. Their frag— slang for the “fragment” of the daily Air Tasking Order
pertaining to them— allowed them to hit any secondary target in the kill box
once the tanks were nailed. Still, Hack contacted the ABCCC controller circling
to the south in a C-130 to alert him to the situation, in effect asking if they
were needed elsewhere. Important cogs in the machinery of war, the ATO and the
ABCCC (airborne command and control center) allowed the allies to coordinate
hundreds of strikes every day, giving them both a game plan and a way to
freelance around it. Dropping ordnance was one thing, putting explosives where
they would do the most good was another. Coordination was especially important
this close to Kuwait, where there were thousands of targets and almost as many
aircraft.
    The controller told them the building was a
hospital and off-limits.
    “No way that’s a fucking hospital,” said A-Bomb.
“I’m looking at a dozen fucking artillery pieces, sandbagged in. Fuck.”
    Hack waited for O’Rourke’s curses to subside, then
gave the ABCCC controller another shot. But he wasn’t buying.
    “Devil One, we’ll have a FAC check it out on the
coordinates you supplied,” said the controller finally. “I have a target for
you.”
    Hack’s fingers fumbled his wax pencil and he had
to dig into his speed-suit pocket for the backup. He retrieved it just as the
controller began the brief, setting out an armored vehicle depot as the new
target. He scrawled the coordinates on the Persipex canopy, then double-checked
them against his paper map, orienting himself. The target was to the east, a
stretch for their fuel.
    Doable, though.
    A-Bomb continued to grumbled about the ersatz
hospital, even after they changed course.
    “Hospital my ass.”
    Hack tried coordinating the numbers against his
map, but lost track of where he was for a moment, thrown a bit by the INS. You
could get distracted easily in combat, no matter what you were flying. He had
to keep his head clear.
    The opposite seemed true for A-Bomb. “I’ve seen
more convincing hospitals in comic books,” he railed.
    “O’Rourke, shut the hell up and watch my six,”
barked Preston.
    “What I’m talking about.”
    This time, there was no difficulty seeing the
target. It had been bombed in the past hour or so; smoke curled from the
remains of buildings or bunkers at the north and south ends of what looked like
a large parking lot. Roughly two dozen vehicles were parked in almost perfect
rows at a right angle to the buildings. Beyond them were mounds of dirt—
probably more vehicles, dug into the sand. Whatever air defenses the Iraqis had
mounted had been eradicated in the earlier strike.
    A flight of F-16 Vipers cut overhead as Hack turned
to line up his bombing run. At least five thousand feet separated him from the
nearest plane, but it still felt like he was getting his hair cut. He hadn’t
known about the flight, which was en route to another target; Hack fought
against an impulse to bawl the controller out for not warning him that the
aircraft were nearby.
    Do your best, he reminded himself, as he
nudged tentatively into the bombing run. The A-10A’s primitive bombsight slid
slowly toward the row of vehicles as he dropped through nine thousand feet.
They were small brown sticks, tiny twigs left in the dirt by a kid who’d gone
home for supper.
    Hack’s heart thumped loud in his throat, choking
off his breath. He began to worry that he was going to be too low before the
crosshairs found their target, then realized he’d begun his glide a bit too
late. He was in danger of overshooting the vehicles. He pushed his stick,
increasing his angle of attack. The cursor jumped onto a pair of fat sticks and
he pickled.
    Wings now