'And they don't want to share?'
'The Sandies are dealing from a position of strength. They have the government wrapped around their proverbial fingers since they beat the rebels. They don't feel that they need to share with anyone. I told him to cut Buddy some slack, and he said he'd think about it. He got cagey and told me we'd talk in the morning.'
'That sounds indecisive.'
'Well, he needed to talk to his bosses,' Harris said. 'And his bosses talked to our bosses, and that night, I got a call from Herndon. The Firehawk board of directors had gotten a call from the head Sandy down in the Caymans. They came up with a novel solution.'
'What's that?' Troy asked, intrigued.
'The head Sandy said make us an offer, and Firehawk offered to buy Sandringham,' Harris said. 'The Fire- hawk board figured that if Firehawk owned Sandringham, then they would just tell the Sandies down at Kuantan to back the hell off.'
'That sounds like it ought to work,' Troy said, thinking that all's well that ends well.
'Except for one little detail… it didn't work. The Sandies turned down the Firehawk offer. They didn't even counter. Firehawk upped the bid and the Sandies just hung up the phone on 'em. I went back to see the bastard in Singapore the next morning, and he basically told me to go fuck myself… and take Buddy Keropok with me. That's why we gotta get involved and show the bastards that Firehawk means business.'
'How can we do that?'
'We have seven F-16s here at Kota,' Harris said, thinking out loud. 'We'll load up with JDAMs. The Sandies have a staging base down on the coast near Kuantan. We'll just teach 'em a lesson the old-fashioned way.'
'Can we do that?' Troy asked. 'I mean, does our mandate, our contract, allow us—'
'Sure as hell,' Harris said. 'Remember when we were out in Sudan and the Al-Qinamah were hiding in Eritrea and we needed to go after 'em, but we had those damned `rules of engagement'?'
'Yeah…'
'We were allowed to fire if fired upon?'
'Yeah…'
'Well, every PMC contract that's been written has a provision that permits every PMC to defend itself…. and the lawyers have told us that this means we can go after the sources of threats just like we did with the damned SAM missiles over there in Eritrea.'
'Just to clarify, then,' Troy said. 'Our job would be to curtail the Sandringham threat against Buddy Keropok, who is our protector here in Malaysia?'
'Screw it,' Harris said. 'This is a fuckin' war. We're gonna do more than that. We're gonna blow the Sandies the hell out of Malaysia.'
'Do they have any airpower, any fighters that might oppose a bomb run?' Troy asked, interjecting an element of practicality.
'Nothing more than a few choppers and a Gulfstream or two.'
'Should we do a recon flight over their base just to make sure?'
'Absolutely, but we'd better do it quick,' Harris said, eager to get his operation off the ground. 'I want to feed real-time data back here so that we can launch the strike package as soon as possible… like I mean within an hour or two.'
'I'll volunteer to fly the recon flight,' Troy said.
'Plan on a long day, then,' Harris said. 'I want a maximum effort on that target, so as soon as you touch down after the recon flight, I want you to load up and fly as part of the strike package.'
'Absolutely.' Troy smiled. His job was to kill bad guys, and if the bosses at Firehawk said the Sandies were the bad guys, then it was them he would kill. However, he thought it so ironic that had the acquisition negotiations, handled between people safe in their comfortable offices, gone differently, the killers and victims would suddenly have been friends. After his last mission in Guatemala, though, these ironies were no longer surprises.
'Isn't this great?' Harris asked as the two men parted company outside the operations shack.
'What's great?'
'Being able to declare a war when it needs to be declared, and then just go do it.'
'As opposed to…'
'Having to wait for a big room full of politicians to argue and bicker about it and quibble over rules of engagement. That's why all wars ought to be run by the PMCs. We're a hell of a lot more efficient than governments… don't you think?'
'Absolutely,' Troy said, not quite able to get his head around what Harris perceived as the logical future of armed conflict.
Chapter 30
Troy was taking the long way around. From the Firehawk Compound at Kota Bharu, Malaysia, he had flown due east, rather than south to Kuantan. Over the South China Sea, he leveled out at twenty-two thousand feet and snuggled into the flight path, the highway in the sky that was traveled by commercial flights between Manila and Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. The odds that Sandringham was tracking Firehawk flights on radar was remote, but Raymond Harris was taking no chances.
Troy might have climbed up to a commercial altitude above thirty thousand feet, but he didn't want to be seen visually by the airliners on their highway, and he wanted to be closer to his operational altitude when it came time to turn on his camera pod. He would cross the Sandringham base at around ten thousand because a low-level pass would seem too deliberate. At ten thousand, he'd be high enough to be just another plane in the fairly busy airspace, but low enough to get good resolution on the digital images that he would be transmitting back to Kota Bharu.
As he approached the Malay Peninsula and began his descent, Troy could look off to the left and see the sprawl of red roofs and occasional ivory-colored skyscrapers that marked the city of Kuantan, Malaysia's ninth largest.
Turning north, he could soon make out the Sandringham base. It was larger than he expected, dwarfing the nearby village of Kemasek. He saw the black stripe of a recently paved runway. He also saw — and did a double take when he did — what looked to be a pair of F-16 fighters, just like his.
How could this be?
Harris had insisted that Sandringham airpower consisted of helicopters and executive jets.
It's a good thing we're doing this recon flight, Troy thought to himself as he imagined Harris reacting to pictures of the F-16s that were streaming back to Kota Bharu from his camera pods.
'How the hell did they get those?' Harris asked rhetorically and angrily as Troy climbed out of the cockpit. It was almost as though he were mad at Troy for them being there — blaming the messenger for the bad news.
'Good thing we know about them,' Troy said. Maintenance people were already pumping fuel into his F- 16.
'We had the rest of the crews watching the feed from your pods live. They're loaded and just about ready to go.'
'Just let me drop the camera pod and I'm ready to load some JDAMs myself.'
'Change of plans,' Harris said. 'Loading bombs would take time. I want to launch the strike ASAP. I'm going to have you fly CAP for the strike package. The aircraft carrying bombs won't be able to maneuver as well as they enter the target area. They'll be at a disadvantage if they're challenged. If you come in with just your Sidewinders, you'll be ready to engage immediately.'
'Sounds like a plan,' Troy said. He was no stranger to air-to-air combat, and the idea of going into a dogfight without a ton or so of bombs under his wings was appealing.
'The strike pack will go in at five thousand feet and drop to one thousand for their bomb runs,' Harris explained. 'They'll be in two waves of three, hitting separate targets. They've already been briefed on this. You'll
