Hogs #2: Hog Down Read Online Free Page B

flattened pull-off area. They were
standing on the coordinates the controller had given them.
    He
continued the long, almost lazy figure-eight pattern around the area, gave a
good scan again and still found nothing.
    “See
anything?” he asked his wing mate.
    “Nah.
You know what the problem is? We’re too high,” A-Bomb said. It was pretty much
his answer to everything. “They could have all sorts of things camouflaged down
there. We’re going to have to take it down.”
    Mongoose
reasoned that the plane that had spotted the launch site had probably been
flying a lot higher than they were. “We’ll hold off on that a second,” he told A-Bomb.
“You got that highway?”
    “Oh,
yeah. No missin’ it. Probably goes right to Saddam’s house.”
    “Let’s
follow it north and see if we can find anything worth taking a look at. Launch
site has to be near a road.”
    “Gotcha.”
    Thirty
seconds later, Mongoose caught the glare from something small and white moving
along the highway ahead. He quick-glanced at the weapons panel but kept his
stick hand solid. The white blur focused itself into a small pickup truck, too
insignificant to be a target.
    The
road edged to the left ahead. There was a spot that seemed darker than the rest
of the nearby desert; two or three shadows were at the edge, tents or
something.
    Good
place for a bunker.
    And
more than that. Beyond the shadows were several rows of boxes that just had to
be trucks, maybe armored personnel carriers or even light tanks.
    “A-Bomb,
there’s a wadi or something just northwest of the road where that truck is
passing. Follow that and you’ll see a bunker complex or some awfully funny
looking sand dunes looks like what, maybe a mile up it. Got it?”
    Before
his wing mate could acknowledge, the Hog’s launch warning system began shouting
that Saddam’s forces had just fired a surface-to-air missile in their
direction.
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    KING FAHD, AIRBASE
    21 JANUARY 1991
    1742
     
     
    F or some guys , the worst time was the
middle of the night. They’d lie awake in bed, sounds and shadows creeping
around the periphery of their consciousness. Innocent things, or maybe not so
innocent things, would poke at their memories, prod anxieties, fuel guilt.
They’d sweat and writhe; eventually they’d get up. From there it would get
worse.
    Colonel
Thomas “Skull” Knowlington had never minded the night. Even at the worst of
times, he could sleep. And if he wasn’t sleeping, he was up because he had
plenty to do, and having plenty to do meant he could focus on the present. That
he could do; that was easy.
    For
him, the worst time was the middle of the day, the dead time between missions,
when the paperwork was done, when he’d run out of things to check on, when he
had no more calls to make or people to see. The late afternoon, with all his
guys still out and everyone around him working or else off catching a quick
breather— that was the worst time. That was the time he could do nothing, and
doing nothing was the worst. Doing nothing led to old memories, and old
memories led to a powerful thirst.
    Thomas
Knowlington— commander of 535 th Attack Squadron (Provisional), wing
commander, if only on paper, decorated hero of the Vietnam War, a survivor of
not just combat but the more dangerous intricacies of service politics— would
do anything not to satisfy that thirst. He had been sober now for
going on three and a half weeks. “Skull” Knowlington needed to put one more day
on that streak, just one more day.
    There’d
be more, a long string beyond that, but for now, just one solid, drink-free day
was his goal.
    For
much of his air force career he had hated paperwork, abhorring the bureaucratic
red tape and bullshit. Now he welcomed it— not because he appreciated that it
was impossible to run an organization as vast and complex as the air force
without it, but because it gave him something to focus on. But inevitably, it
was over. When the colonel