Hogs #2: Hog Down Read Online Free Page A

beginning of the war,
but that didn’t necessarily mean a few weren’t still there. But that’s what the
Weasel was for.
    He
took a quick glance at his instruments. Everything was at spec. His heart was
well into its pre-action rumble and his throat tightened a half-notch.
Something inside his brain flicked a switch and the irises in his eyes widened.
His situational awareness— a mental balloon of wariness around him— expanded as
he gripped the stick between his knees, nudging the Hog toward the first
reference marker.
    His
eyes turned upwards as a pair of F-15 Eagles on combat air patrol screeched
across the sky well ahead and above the two A-10s. The pointy-nosed fast movers
had just gotten word that an Iraqi plane was scrambling from an air base nearly
a hundred and fifty miles to the north. The two jets looked like a pair of
famished wolves, anxious for a kill.
    Mongoose
put his mind and eyes back where they belonged, scouting the ground ahead. The
Hog was barely making two hundred knots, moving slow because of the altitude
and its bomb load.
    They
were just three minutes to the target coordinate when Rheingold One checked in.
He was swinging in from the northwest, obviously diverted from something else.
His scopes were clear.
    An
old soldier now, the F-4 was equipped with radar-seeking HARM missiles that
homed in on anti-air defenses. The missiles were extremely potent, but worked
only when the radar sets were turned on— something the Iraqis had quickly
learned not to do until they definitely wanted to shoot something down. The
Weasel pilot sounded a little disappointed as he told Devil One things were
quiet and would probably stay that way.
    “Okay.
Let’s keep it at fifteen thousand feet,” Mongoose told A-Bomb. “Take a circuit
and see what we can see.”
    “Sounds
good to me.”
    “You
see that smudge off my right wing?”
    “Four-barrel
ZSU, gotta be.”
    “Yeah,
I think. Nowhere near where our missiles are supposed to be.”
    “I
got a good view. No missiles there. Looks like some sort of APC next to it,
nothing else.”
    “Okay,
good. Let’s keep our distance.”
    “’less
we get bored.”
    Mongoose
held the Hog on its side so he could take a good gander at the ground, tilting
his wings carefully. He told himself to break everything down, take things in
pieces, and punch the buttons. This far north anything could happen. You had to
go at it very deliberately.
    There
was no denying the adrenaline. In a certain way he almost considered this fun—
not amusement park fun, since people were or could shot at him— but fun in the
sense that it was what he was meant to do, what he was trained for and good at.
    So
where the hell were these things? He put his eyes out back toward the
anti-aircraft gun he’d seen; well to the east now, its smudge had disappeared.
It sat alone at the edge of the wasteland, with seemingly no reason to be
agitated and too far from them to be of any immediate concern. He passed his
eyes around in the other direction, noting that the desert was less
stereotypical sand and dune desert here, more like a dirt parking lot that
hadn’t been used in a long time. Scrubby vegetation and even some trees poked
up everywhere in the packed-dirt wasteland before giving way to the more
resolute stretches of sand.
    Intel
had passed around various pictures of Scud sites, and both Mongoose and A-Bomb
had seen— and smoked— a carrier the other day. A typical launch site would
arrange five or six missile erectors like fingers on a hand around a central
command area. The Russian-made launchers were large trucks that looked like
squashed soap pads with toilet paper tubes on them. But the Iraqis also made
their own launchers from the transport trailers. From the air at this altitude
they would look like long tanker trucks, dark pencils against the darker earth.
    Mongoose
saw nothing manmade below except the faint ribbon of a road. No trucks, no
launchers, no Scuds. Definitely no base or