Meant what?

“Missile?” Smoky asked.

“Yeah,” said Mack. “Probably took off the wing, exploded the fuel tank in the wing.”

“Wow.”

There had definitely been an explosion—there were shrapnel holes all over the place. But no fire?

Too wide a spread for a missile, actually, unless the explosion had been right under the wing or maybe in it, smashed it to smithereens so that this jag and that one, and that one and all the others, were from the wing sharding off.

“This thing catch fire?”

“No.” Mack shrugged. “Sometimes you get a fire, sometimes you don’t. This looks like a pretty direct hit with a really good-sized warhead.”

He remembered a crash he’d seen where there hadn’t been a fire—the accident that had claimed Jeff Stockard’s legs. Funny that he remembered that and not his own shoot-down a few months ago.

“Wow, look at these holes,” said Smoky, pointing to the belly of the plane. “Flak?”

Mack bent down to take a look. “Too varied. Probably from the explosion. Besides, see how this folded down there? This damage here was from the impact. Metal came away. See the bolt on that panel? Gave way.” He stepped back and took a picture.

Two small warheads maybe? Happened to hit just right and snapped the wing clean off?

He’d want odds on that.

“A missile probably got the wing and exploded it. That big an explosion, though—I don’t know. Pilot got out.”

He went to study the cockpit, which had been munched by the impact into the mountain. Still—no fire.

RAZOR’S EDGE

51

Mack walked back to the right wing root. The wing had almost certainly been sheered off before impact.

He’d need to see it.

Some parts of the root were white, as if the metal had been on fire and just disintegrated into powder. But there clearly had been no fire. Mack bent over an internal spar; the bolts were loose.

Sympathetic vibrations after the explosion, he thought, shock wave knocks the metal loose.

He took some pictures.

What the hell missile hit them? An SA-2?

That clean, it had to be something smaller. Three little shoulder-fired missiles?

Three heat-seekers all nailing the wing? Very strange.

Crashes were strange by definition. Mack stood back and took pictures, changed his film, took more pictures.

The engineers could tell a lot by looking at the way the metal had been bent; those guys were the real experts. He was just a moonlighting pilot who’d happened to command a crash investigation during the Gulf War. He moved in for close-ups, then bent his head under the fuselage.

The metal was scraped and not exactly smooth. Some panels and spars seemed to have buckled, probably on impact. He saw a few more loose bolts and popped rivets, but nothing here contradicted his theory that the damage emanated from the right side of the plane.

Nice to find that right wing, he thought. Real nice.

He backed off the plane onto the top of the slope, taking more pictures as he walked upward.

Stockard had managed to eject after a collision with a robot plane he was piloting from an F-15E Eagle. He’d been way low when he went out, and his chute never had a chance to fully deploy—though it was never clear to Mack whether he’d been injured going out or landing.

His plane had been a mangled collection of thick silver 52

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

string strewn over the desert test area where they were flying at the time. Mack could close his eyes and still see Zen’s body lying in a heap against the flat dirt, the lines to his parachute still attached. The canopy had furled awkwardly, as if trying to pull him to his feet.

What if a stream of flak had shot through the metal, exploded the wing tank, sliced the wing right off, he asked himself.

Not to be totally ruled out—except for the shrapnel over the rest of the plane’s body. The wing definitely seemed to have exploded.

Had to be a missile, had to have ignited the wing tank.

Except that it clearly hadn’t.

Mack took some more photos, then stopped to change the roll. As he closed the back of the camera, Smoky came running across the rocks.

“We got problems, Major!” shouted the PJ. “Company coming.”

Before Mack could answer, the ground shook and he fell backward against the hillside, the roar of an exploding tank shell blaring in his ears.

Over Iraq

0815

AS THE PAVE LOW LIFTED OFF WITH THE INJURED PILOT, Torbin and Fitzmorris saddled up to go home with the rest of the escorts. The Wild Weasel ducked her wing gently to starboard, steaming gracefully into a turn. Her turbines chewed on the carcasses of a thousand dead di-nosaurs; the slipstream melted into a swirl of blue-white vapor. Torbin jerked his bulky frame forward, still minding his gear but more relaxed now, redeemed by the hits on the missile control radars.

RAZOR’S EDGE

53

Let them try and say he fucked up now, he thought. He had two fresh scalps to prove he hadn’t.

Screw building houses. Honorable profession, oh yes, but just not what he wanted to do right now, even if his brother-in-law’s cousin Shellie was pretty good-looking.

Find some sort of job doing something worthwhile.

Crew on a stinking AWACS if it came to that.

Torbin pushed his legs against the side consoles, stretching some of the cramps out of them. He rolled his shoulders from side to side, still watching the threat scope. They had a long haul home, made all the longer by the fact that the Pave Low they were accompanying would be lucky to top 175 knots.

A jumble of happy voices filled the radio as the escorts checked in with the AWACS. Then the pilot in the second Pave Low called for radio silence.

“Flag Two has vehicles on the roadway,” said the strained voice over the loud cluck of helicopter blades in the background. “I’m looking at two BMPs, a tank maybe.”

“Snake One acknowledges,” answered the leader of the F-16 flight.

Torbin did a quick check of his gear as his pilot rejig-gered their plans—they’d dog south to provide cover for the F-16s wheeling to attack the vehicles.

“How you doing back there?” Fitzmorris asked as they came to the new course bearing.

“Not a problem.” Torbin shrugged. “Scope’s clean.”

In Iraq

0821

THEY WERE NAKED ON THE SIDE OF THE HILL, EXPOSED TO

the tank firing from the dirt road two hundred yards away.

54

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

Mack spotted a large group of boulders on his right and began sliding toward it. Smoky had the same idea, but not nearly as much balance—he flopped past Mack, just out of his grasp as another shell hit the hillside, this one so close that Mack smelled the powder in the dirt that flew against his helmet. He tumbled after the sergeant, rolling over three or four times before landing on his belly and sliding another four or five feet. He pulled himself up against the rocks, twisting his head back to get his bearings. Smoky’s leg lay nearby, off at an odd angle.

Severed?

It began to writhe, and Mack felt his stomach falling backward into a vacuum.

The dirt beyond the leg moved. “Jesus, this hurts like hell,” groaned Smoky, unfolding himself from the ground.

Mack stumbled over, took his arm and dragged him behind the rocks. Another volley resounded against the hillside. Mack heard the MH-53 hovering in the distance, then something else.

“Duck!” he yelled.

If the bomb whistled in—and undoubtedly it did—he never heard it. What he did hear was the muffled crack of a pair of five-hundred-pound iron bombs bracketing the turret of a T-62 Iraqi main battle tank. A chain of explosions followed as a second F-16 loosed a pair of cluster bombs on the other vehicles. The bombs hit slightly to the south of their aim point, the pilot’s mark thrown off slightly by the gusting wind and the vagaries of trying to hit a moving object while diving at five or six hundred miles an hour from fifteen thousand feet. Nonetheless, the loud rumble of a secondary explosion followed the rapid-fire popcorn of the bomblets going off.