HOGS #6 Death Wish (Jim DeFelice’s HOGS First Gulf War series) by Jim DeFelice Page B

Dixon looked at her, waiting for her eyes to glance upwards from the
floor. He hadn’t thought she liked Doberman, not that way at least.
    He’d thought, in fact, that she liked him .
    She must. Otherwise, why was she here?
    “Was it bad?” she asked.
    He wanted to tell her about the boy. He saw the
boy and he saw the grenade as he began to speak. But instead of telling her
about the kid, instead of talking about Iraq and the howl in his head and how
much he’d forgotten and how bad his stomach hurt, his tongue found a different
story altogether.
    “My mother died about a year ago, a little more
now,” said Dixon. His head seemed to pull back from the words, as if they were
physical things filling the air between them. “I sat by her side for a long
time, just waiting.”
    The words stopped. Rosen nodded, then stared at
him.
    Nothing else had ever seemed so beautiful.
     “I better go,” she said abruptly, turning for the
door.
    He caught her arm. The biceps was harder than he
expected, a thick tree branch.
    “Don’t,” he said.
    The kiss was softer, way softer, than he expected,
and way longer than he could have hoped.
     

CHAPTER 27
    HOG HEAVEN
    28 JANUARY 1991
    2145
     
    “The hangar roof makes positive
identification difficult, admittedly,” Wong told Colonel Knowlington. “And the
enhancement technique that has been applied to the simple infrared rendering
has been known to distort images under similar circumstances. Nonetheless, the
pitot head at the nose confirms the identification. It is a Mig-29. No other
plan in the Iraqi inventory would cast such a shadow.”
    Knowlington took the paper and held it less than
an inch in front of his eyes, trying to distinguish the black shadow from the
rest of the black shadows on the thermal-print paper. The image had started as
an infrared videotape of the Splash airfield taken by the Tornado shortly
before it had been shot down. British intelligence had analyzed and enhanced
the image with a computer program that could separate objects of different
primary heat characteristics – in other words, find objects hidden beneath
tarps or, in this case, thinly roofed buildings. According to Wong, the
aircraft had either been recently flown, or had been heated by the exposure of
a day’s worth of sun before being moved into the relatively small hangar
building at the Splash airfield. Since it definitely hadn’t been there
yesterday, it must have recently arrived.
    Knowlington saw only a vague and dark arrow inside
a gray rectangle.
    “You might prefer viewing this image,” said Wong,
removing another sheet from his folder. This was an even blurrier photocopy of
the same image, with a portion outlined in fine red pen.
    Granted, the outline looked vaguely like the
outline of a MiG-29.
    Or an F-15. Or a chipped piece of slate.
    “It’s an aircraft, I assure you,” added Wong, as
if reading Knowlington’s mind. “And it was flown, or at least exposed to the
sun, within the past eight hours.”
    “But why would they put it there?” the colonel
asked.
    “I can think of several reasons. The simplest
would be to hide it, hoping that the base had been overlooked. It would be
easier to get it there than Iran.”
    Several Iraqi fighters had scrambled to Iran over
the past several days, possibly for safekeeping, though it wasn’t entirely
clear why they had gone or what they intended on doing. The Iranians had
claimed the planes would be interred, but no one entirely trusted them.
    “Maybe they’re staging to Iran,” suggested
Knowlington.
    “Possible, though once in the air their modus
operandi has been to continue east.”
    “Mechanical problems?”
    “Possibly, though again, I can think of much
better places to land.”
    “Maybe they’re going to plumb it for bombs and
send it south.”
    Wong nodded grimly. “The so-called Death Wish
scenario cannot be ruled out. It would not be difficult to adapt the plane for
use as a bomber, especially if the mission were