The War After Armageddon

His group’s informal motto was “Semper Fly.” He’d taken a lot of razzing about it when the Air Force pushed through the order to ground all manned aircraft “until the threat environment clarified.” If the blue-suiters didn’t want to go downtown, fine. But Dawg Daniels believed that Marines should make decisions for Marines.

Now he was out to prove that manned airpower was still a player. That pilots were still in the game. And he hoped he wasn’t wasting his Marines’ lives.

Don’t think like that, he told himself. Just fly.

And God, he loved to fly.

Despite the presence of his weapons systems officer in the dual cockpit, Dawg felt peculiarly alone. No intercom chatter permitted until they were on the target run. And no radio transmissions at any time. The only exception was if an aircraft was going down. The codeword for that was “Mudpie.”

Dawg’s initial impulse had been to ask for volunteers. But he decided that was the weak man’s way out of the moral dilemma the mission posed. So he just selected the pilots he thought would get the job done. Rank immaterial. If feelings were hurt, so be it. At least those with hurt feelings would be alive for evening chow.

* * *

Major Robert “Jinx” Jenks saw the cliffs coming toward him. Fast. Five hundred knots of fast. After glancing at his helmet display, he judged his designation and rolled right, hoping his wingman, a mile back and echelon right, was banking just as hard. Screaming over the sunlit waves, Jenks flew as low as he could without dipping his wings, hugging the radar shadow of the ridges. Punching it as if he intended to slam into the rank of cliffs at a forty-five-degree angle.

A lone aircraft shot north. One gleaming speck. Heading for the Haifa Gap.

Dawg Daniels. Good luck and good hunting.

Hold on, Jenks thought. One hundred percent certain that Shimmy was sweating blood in the back seat.

Jenks pulled the old bird right as hard as he could, feeling every seam in the fuselage complain. In a flash, he registered hundreds of vehicles on the strip of beach below. He was flying sideways, fighting to pull his aircraft away from the cliffs. Which were reaching out to grab him.

As he leveled out, tear-off-the-shingles low and heading south, Jenks gave his wings a quick wag.

Next stop, crispy critters for Allah.

* * *

The men on the beach nearly opened fire. Wary of yet another drone attack. When they realized — a thousand men at once — that two USMC F/A-18s were shrieking overhead, a cheer went up that shook the Land of the Scriptures.

* * *

Lieutenant Colonel William “The Willies” Morrison turned his four strikers back out to sea. Just far enough to bank again and go straight in, self-escorted, guiding off the ruins of Hadera and the broken chimneys of his number-one marker, the wrecked power plant on the coast. Ahead and to his left, he saw Jenks and his wing-man scream up Highway 65.

This was old-school flying to Morrison, and he simultneously reveled in it and worried that, without all the magic guidance gear, they’d miss the target. Forbidden even to use the intercom until he had visual, he had to hope that he got where he was supposed to go and that Banger would pick up the target and put the ordnance where it belonged.

The mountains of the West Bank came up fast, a perfect match to the briefing imagery. The problem was what waited beyond the ridges.

The formation he had chosen was unorthodox. Any student who proposed it would’ve flunked out of Yuma, and no O-6 Marine aviator besides Dawg Daniels would’ve gone for it. But Dawg, bless him, just cared about accomplishing the mission. If a Pickett’s Charge of F/A-18s on line was the only hope of putting steel on target and then getting out of Dodge, Dawg was ready to fly top-cover with the chain of command.

Morrison considered himself the least-sentimental commander in the group. But when he thought of Dawg Daniels heading deep in a lone aircraft, his eyes almost teared up.

* * *

Jenks said a quick prayer and shot toward the pass, hoping his attack run would be a surprise for the other guy, not for him and his wing-man. Unable to look down at his knee board and hoping he remembered every detail of the Z diagram for the mission, he switched from air-to-air to air-to-ground mode.

He got his azimuth steering line on the long black snake of the road. Coming in at 300 feet, the earth a rush and a blur.

Time to fly. Four miles out, he popped to just over 4,000 feet, banking to offset 30 degrees and give himself and Shimmy a few seconds to acquire the target.

There it was, right where it was supposed to be. A very busy defensive layout centered on the pass.

“Target captured,” Shimmy said over the intercom.