"What about the fifth?" Troy asked.
"The contacts that General Harris has in France told him that Svartvand approached a broker there about getting a single Frogfoot. We thought at the time that they were replacing one that had been lost in an accident, but we now know that there were five flying at once."
They compared a picture of the clandestine airfield with five Sukhois to the image that was hours old.
"What you see is what you get," Turcios said. "It doesn't seem that they ever made any effort to hide any of their jets. Just like you, they thought the Google Earth picture was months old. Now they're down to just one."
"So are we," Troy reminded him, nodding toward the hangar. "Until those parts get here from Texas, our squadron strength stands at one."
"Doesn't stop us from running a solo mission," Joe said. "General Harris wants to finish this operation sooner rather than later. This deployment is costing X millions of dollars a day, even without the price of fuel. And Firehawk is on a fixed-bid contract."
"Who flies?" Troy asked.
"You do. The general wants you to head up there and destroy the single Sukhoi on the ground."
"With what ordnance?"
"We don't have any air-to-ground missiles, but we did bring in a stock of JDAMs," Turcios explained. "You also have your cannon. One strafing pass and a couple of bombs ought to do it."
"What about air defenses?" Troy asked. "Can I expect any Triple-A… or SAMs?"
"I've studied these pictures myself, and there's no sign of SAMs. Wouldn't be surprised if they have thought about it, and I'm sure that they'll be thinking about it a whole lot tonight."
"What's to stop them from using this base again?" Preston asked. "They could bring in more jets and this thing could go through the same cycle. Harris would have to send us back down here for a million dollars, or whatever, a day."
"That's a good question." Turcios nodded. "The answer is that DefenseCo is going in there to sabotage it after you shoot it up."
"Who's DefenseCo?" Troy asked.
"They're the PMC that's handling ground ops up on the border between Peten and Chiapas."
"Why can't they go in there now and blow up the Frogfoot on the ground?" Preston asked.
"It's not in their contract," Turcios said, as if this were understood.
"How many PMCs are there in this part of the world?" Troy asked. "Seems like every time I turn around, there's another PMC popping up."
"There are three on this side," Turcios said thoughtfully. "And there's at least two on the other side… that we know about. That doesn't count the contractors who are handling logistics."
An hour later, Troy was airborne over the peten jungle in the lone Firehawk F-16. There was some low cumulus off to the west as a rainstorm moved into the area, but otherwise the sky was clear. He carried two five-hundred-pound GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition smart bombs on his underwing pylons, either of which would total the lone Svartvand Frogfoot.
Troy's mission was to depart Mundo Maya on a commercial aircraft heading and altitude so as not to appear conspicuous on radar, fly to the closest point on this flight path to the target, drop to a thousand feet, and conduct his bomb run. This latter action, Turcios and Harris had calculated, would take the F-16 about six minutes. It was unlikely, though still possible, that the Su-25 could be scrambled fast enough to be airborne before the bombs hit.
At the appointed time, Troy rolled the F-16 into a dive, leveled out at his strike altitude, and accelerated toward the coordinates of the patch of Chiapas where Svartvand parked its airplane.
The anticipation made the six minutes seem longer than they were, but finally, Troy could see the straight line in the jungle that marked the runway. He adjusted his heading slightly to line up on the runway and engaged his targeting device.
The straight strip in the jungle pointed straight to the cluster of buildings at the end of the runway like an arrow drawn on a map with a ruler and a wide-tip marker.
He grew closer and closer. At any moment now, he expected to see the familiar profile of the stubby-winged Frogfoot parked in this area.
"C'mon… c'mon," he whispered with impatience. "Where…?"
Suddenly there was a pinging sound.
This couldn't be!
He had been made.
The Su-25 wasn't there. It was airborne — and it was targeting him.
Seconds later, Troy was over the target — or what was to have been the target.
He released the two JDAMs as planned. They would hopefully do some damage to the base, and they were of no use to him now. In fact, their weight and drag would seriously degrade the maneuverability of the F-16, whose role had abruptly changed from bomber to fighter — a fighter fighting for its life.
He hadn't seen the Frogfoot on his radarscope because it had been playing Troy's own game: flying low, hugging the ground to conceal itself in the ground clutter.
Somehow, its pilot had taken off undetected before Troy arrived.
How?
That did not matter now.
The pinging had stopped. The same ground clutter that had hidden the Frogfoot had interrupted its missile lock.
For Troy, this was two pieces of good news rolled into one pleasing, but momentary, package.
Having had his foe lose his lock-on was good in itself, but this illustrated the better news that his foe was armed with semiactive radar homing missiles, rather than infrared heat-seekers — like Troy's Sidewinders. The Vympel R-60 Aphid air-to-air missiles often carried by Su-25s could be configured either way, and this Su-25 was flying with infrared Aphids.
The radar-guided missiles are good at long range, but inferior to heat-seeking missiles at dogfight range because they use tracking radar to acquire their target and illuminator radar for lock-on. Thus the radar lock has to be locked on from the time the target is acquired until the time the missile connects with it. At close range, this is more difficult. It was probably why yesterday's Frogfoot had resorted to using his cannon against Andy Preston.
Troy processed this information in about a second and concentrated on turning himself from hunted to hunter ASAP.
He scanned the sky, trying to get a visual on the Su-25.
On his scope, the aircraft popped in and out intermittently.
He was still flying low.
Troy accelerated upward. The best tactic now was to induce the enemy aircraft to come and get him. As Harris had pointed out to Preston — not that he needed to be told — the Su-25 is a bomb truck, and hence slower and less maneuverable than an F-16. Luring him into a dogfight on Troy's terms was the key to success.
The Su-25 pilot had no choice but to take the bait. There was nothing else that he could do. He had no place to run.
Knowing he was low and slow, the Sukhoi pilot now needed to grab altitude. If Troy pounced while he remained low, the F-16 would have all the advantages. If the Su-25 pilot could increase his altitude, he would erase one of Troy's advantages and he could convert altitude to speed using the power of gravity.
His first move was to run away, climbing as he went. This would either give him a chance to increase his altitude while he was momentarily out of Troy's reach, or lure Troy to dive to attack him; thus costing Troy altitude.
For a split second, it occurred to Troy that the Sukhoi was escaping, but he saw him climbing and understood that he was planning to fight.
As much as Troy's adrenaline-fueled eagerness longed for a dogfight, he defaulted to that old adage that says, "He who fights fairly, dies."
The Su-25 had gotten about five miles away as he ran and climbed, but it was still within the range of the Sidewinder.
"Missiles hot," Troy whispered to himself as he locked on the still-climbing Sukhoi. His foe was at his slowest as he climbed. It was not really fair, but it was oh so easy.