He thumbed the trigger, expecting the rocking motion that one felt as a missile left its rail.
It didn't happen.
Was the missile a dud, or was something wrong with his fire control system?
His dilemma cost Troy valuable seconds.
The Su-25 was now at Troy's altitude and climbing.
Troy was already headed in his direction, and he pulled back on his stick. As he climbed to match the Sukhoi's flight level, he watched the aircraft turn toward him.
The two miles of distance melted quickly as the two aircraft closed on one another.
Troy heard the pinging of a missile lock-on just as he pickled off his other Sidewinder.
The F-16 jerked slightly as the AIM-9 left its rail.
Knowing an R-60 Aphid was coming at him, Troy ignored his Sidewinder and broke hard to the right to evade the other guy's missile.
The Sidewinder was fire-and-forget, so he fired and forgot. Getting out of the way of the Aphid headed toward him was suddenly the only thing on his mind.
At this range, Troy had the offensive advantage with the heat-seeking missile, but avoiding an incoming infrared missile took a lot of skill — and an equal measure of luck. Having been shot down over Eritrea, he was not anxious for a redo. He had been very lucky that day not to have been killed in the explosion.
The trick, far easier said than done, is to outmaneuver the incoming missile without straying so far that it can match your evasion maneuver.
Troy turned and watched the faster Aphid turn with him and gain on him.
He jerked back on the stick and felt the G-force crumple his body.
It's funny, the kinds of things you notice at times like this. For Troy, it was that the Gs clinched his jaws so tight that his teeth throbbed. Better that than being blown into a zillion pieces.
Troy sensed for just milliseconds the ambient glow of the solid-fuel engine flame from the Aphid growing brighter and brighter.
Troy next sensed for just milliseconds the ambient glow of the solid-fuel engine flame from the Aphid growing dimmer and dimmer.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the Aphid as it arced away from him and raced at supersonic speed toward the Chiapas jungle.
It had missed him by about fifty yards. For a moment, he felt like a wuss for having let the damned thing worry him.
Okay. Now that that was over, where was the damned Su-25 and what happened to his Sidewinder?
Theoretically, the Sidewinder shouldn't have missed. But it had. Its glow, like that of the Aphid, was gone, as the two hundred pounds of ordnance had fallen into the triple canopy below.
The Sukhoi was still there, and a lot closer than he might have been after the past long seconds of wild maneuvering by the two aircraft.
Instinctively, Troy grabbed to fire again, but instantly realized that he had shot his only viable AIM-9. All he had left was the dud. He would have to go to guns.
To use his M61 Vulcan multibarreled twenty-millimeter Gatling gun, Troy would have to close the distance on the Su-25.
There wasn't much distance to close, but the Sukhoi pilot saw him coming and broke left just as Troy lined up on him.
Just as he touched his stick, Troy realized that he would be unable to stay inside the Su-25's turn radius. Troy couldn't afford to overshoot the guy's turn. He had to do what fighter pilots call a "yo-yo."
In the textbooks, they tell you to maintain back stick pressure and slightly decrease bank relative to the other guy. This allows you to arc up your nose. In other words, the effect of gravity on turn and velocity, combined with a turn in the vertical rather than horizontal, enables you to reduce angle-off, maintain your distance, and not overshoot.
That's what the textbooks say.
In reality, you don't have time to think about all the physics. You just pull back the stick to bleed off enough speed to be able to turn and still wind up on the other guy's tail.
He came out of the maneuver just where he needed to be and pressed the red button. Tracers swirled around the Sukhoi for less than a second. The bogie had turned again.
Once again, Troy turned, and once again he squeezed off a burst of twenty-millimeter cannon rounds. Suddenly, the Su-25 was gone and everything around Troy had turned light gray. The F-16 bucked violently. The cumulus!
Troy had plowed into the rainstorm that he had seen moving across the jungle earlier in the day.
"Gotta get out," he whispered to himself as he pulled up.
There was a sudden flash.
Was it lightning or another Aphid?
Seconds later, he was in smooth air and staring at blue sky.
He banked around to look for the Sukhoi.
It was nowhere to be seen — except on his radar.
His foe was somewhere below, somewhere in the clouds, out of visual contact.
Now was the time for the missiles he did not have.
Troy took a deep breath.
The Su-25 driver was taking a pounding down there inside that storm, and sooner or later, he'd make his break. Troy would be waiting, guns ready.
Chapter 27
"Firehawk One," a voice in the headphones crackled urgently. Troy was startled. Communications were supposed to be minimal, and he didn't expect any calls on this frequency while he was operating solo over Chiapas. "Do you read?"
"Firehawk One, roger," Troy answered hesitatingly, trying to figure out why the Firehawk base would be calling in such an earnest tone.
"Terminate, Firehawk One. Cancel."
It was Raymond Harris's voice.
"Return home immediately… no further action…. over."
The way that Harris stressed the word over underscored an intense finality to his orders.
"But—" Troy started to say. He had been involved in — was still involved in — an intense dogfight during which either he or the Sukhoi pilot might have died. Several times over, either of them might have killed the other, and Troy was seconds away from delivering the coup de grace and successfully completing his mission.
Terminate?
Why should he stop now? He had almost given his life to get to this point in the battle.
"Terminate. Now," Harris said.
Troy wondered. Should he just ignore Harris for thirty seconds?
He ignored Harris for ten seconds, maintaining his position above the cloud in which the Su-25 was flying.
He ignored Harris for twenty seconds, waiting and gritting his teeth, ready to dive, open fire, and get this over with.
"Terminate. Now," Harris repeated.
He ignored Harris for thirty seconds, and still no Sukhoi.
"Roger, Firehawk One… message received and understood."
As Troy banked to turn back toward Mundo Maya, he hoped that the Su-25 would suddenly break out of the clouds and come for him.
But it did not happen.
As he taxied into the Firehawk hangar, Troy could see Joe Turcios and Raymond Harris waiting. Turcios had a sort of bewildered expression, but Harris wore an ear-to-ear grin.
Troy shut down the Pratt & Whitney F100 engine and popped open the canopy. As he climbed out, he looked down at the black powder stains around the M61's muzzle and thought of what might have been.
Why was Harris grinning so broadly?
The mission had not been accomplished. The Svartvand, or Zapatista, or whatever it was, Sukhoi was still there. It was still flying around on the Chiapas-Peten border when Troy left it.
Maybe Harris thought Troy had downed the aircraft? Maybe he'd better just play along and break the news to him gently?
"Great news," Harris shouted.
Troy merely nodded. If the boss was happy, who was he to complain?
"We're done." The retired general smiled as he patted Troy on the shoulder. "We're out of here. Dinner in town tonight… It's on Firehawk… We'll celebrate."