"C'mon…c'mon…" I gritted my teeth. Forcing my aching jaws to relax, I pulled the throttle back farther and dropped the F-16's nose a few degrees toward the ground. As the Viper slid down into the dusty brown mess below us, I felt unaccustomed anxious twinges jab through my gut.
"All Players, all Players…this is Luger on guard for emergency close air support. Any CAS-capable flights report to Luger on Indigo Seven…repeat—any CAS-capable flights report to Luger on Indigo Seven. Emergency CAS in progress. Luger out."
I stared at the stack of mission materials on my knee. I'd never heard of Indigo Seven, but I had a comm card that was supposed to have every frequency in the galaxy on it for a given mission.
Another freq I don't have. I swore at the idiots who'd done the mission planning in the six months before the war. They drank coffee, sat on their butts and generated an enormous amount of material, 90 percent of which was useless.
I knew some of them. Smart guys, but so utterly convinced they were correct that they'd failed to heed anyone else's suggestions. The results spoke for themselves. I didn't even have a decent large-scale map of Iraq, and no provision had been made at all for close air support missions. I was a Wild Weasel, a surface-to-air missile killer—close air support was not in our job description. But those of us who'd fought the First Gulf War or Kosovo knew better. When troops on the ground needed help, any fighter available was supposed to be there—fast.
FUEL…FUEL…the green symbol flashed in the center of my heads-up display (HUD). Toggling it off, I quickly typed in a new minimum fuel number. A much lower number. It might keep the warning signal from bothering me, but it wouldn't put another pound of JP-8 in my fuel tanks. It was also a cardinal sin. If you didn't have enough fuel to finish your mission, then you returned to base. Simple.
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