Tom Clancy's HAWX

Chapter 26

"Intel shows that the zaps are down to just one Frogfoot," Joe Turcios said, placing an aerial photo on his desk for Troy and Andy to examine. "As you can see, there's only one parked here in this picture."

Troy picked it up and studied it. The single Su-25 was parked in a clearing in a jungle. There were a few buildings and a long runway camouflaged to look like a straight stretch of crudely paved country road. In fact, the more he looked at it, the more it looked as though the thing being used as a runway really was a straight stretch of crudely paved country road.

"How do you know this is current?" Troy asked. "I thought these Google Earth images were usually weeks or months old."

"The Google Earth ones are." Turcios grinned. "I downloaded these from a SPOT satellite less than an hour ago."

"How…?"

"Don't ask."

"Okay, then how do we know that they don't have more Su-25s parked in the woods? The jungle is really thick around there. You could park a jetliner in there and it wouldn't show up in a SPOT image."

"Good question," Joe acknowledged, opening a drawer in his desk. "It's a calculated conclusion, based on these."

He fanned out a selection of photos of the same place, with dates written in the corners.

"These pictures were taken over the past few weeks. You see in the earliest picture that they hadn't cleared the brush from the runway areas. Then there's cleared brush and then two Sukhois arrive. Eventually there are four. Some pictures show three, but those correspond with dates we know that they had one out flying."

"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.

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.