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  “You told me we did not have the plutonium for a nuclear weapon, in spite of my orders. Colonel Ahmed. Now suddenly there is a super weapon?”

  “We started with the airframe of the Mitsubishi Hiroshima missile, the high-altitude supersonic cruise missile we worked so hard to buy from our Japanese advisors.”

  Sihoud glared at Ahmed, but seemed to be paying close attention.

  “We filled the warhead space with what we call the Scorpion warhead. Its core is a lightweight high explosive. The HX is surrounded by three layers— — a vinyl acetate monomer liquid bladder, a high-pressure bottle of ethylene gas, and a bag of finely ground plutonium particles.” Ahmed checked Sihoud, knowing the general hated overly technical briefings, but there was no other way to explain the system with out the details. “The cruise missile flies at supersonic speed toward its target at an altitude of eighteen kilometers, slowing and diving at the last moments to about a thousand meters above ground zero. The high explosive detonates, blowing the monomer and plutonium dust into the ethylene bottle which then ruptures, and the heat and pressure of the explosion create a sort of reactor system. The monomer and ethylene react to form a liquid polymer emulsion — —glue, if you will, sir — —which suspends the plutonium in a matrix that floats down to the ground below. The glue cements the plutonium onto every surface it contacts— — no wind or rain or decontamination procedure can dislodge the plutonium, and the radioactivity of the plutonium is enough to kill the entire target population within about two kilometers of ground zero, and the deaths are not merciful ones. Radiation poisoning causes a slow and painful death, exactly what the enemy deserve. The target is so contaminated that it must be abandoned forever.”

  Sihoud looked at Ahmed and replaced the knife in its scabbard, his face filled with something that had not been there moments before, a look that Ahmed imagined to be some evidence of a newly found hope.

  “How many can we make?”

  “Three, perhaps four.”

  “This weapon, the Scorpion. You put it in the Hiroshima cruise missile … but the Hiroshima only has a range of 3,500 kilometers. That’s not far.”

  “We can target Europe from UIF territories but——”

  “But that isn’t good enough. We need to target their seat of power.”

  “Washington … I have a plan to deliver the warhead there, but it will take some time,” Ahmed gestured at the electronic map showing the advancing armies of the Coalition, “and we must hurry.”

  “What is the plan?”

  Ahmed glanced at the electronic chart, wondering if this was the time to tell General Sihoud the rest of the bad news, perhaps the worst news of all. He saw Sihoud’s penetrating eyes and decided that Sihoud needed the facts, whether or not he elected to believe them.

  “Before I go into the Scorpion deployment plan, I need to tell you about something else, something of an immediate nature—”

  “Another assassination plot. Colonel?”

  “In a way, sir. I have been seeing intelligence that Coalition forces may plan a decapitation operation. They may try to take you out and we need to respond to that quickly.”

  “There will be no decapitation. Rakish. These are the same people who fought Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Hussein. Not one of them was ever assassinated. Colonel.”

  “Exactly, sir. That’s why we worry that you will be the first.”

  “Your paranoia begins to reflect on you. Rakish. A warrior does not worry about assassination plots. But go ahead. What’s the proof?”

  “A large airliner took off from Volgograd several hours ago on the way to Alma-Ata and disappeared over the Aral Sea. It never landed, yet it is not on our radars. It makes me very suspicious. This plane could be bringing paratroopers.”

  “An airplane,” Sihoud said skeptically, beginning to lose interest. “An airplane lost on a radar screen. This is not something even worth a discussion. Colonel.”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sure you’re right, still … At about the same time the mystery jet took off, our geosynch satellite detected three sudden heat blooms in the Arabian Sea off Karachi and two more in the Mediterranean east of Cyprus.”

  “Heat blooms …?”

  “Infrared scanned heat sources, sudden and very hot.”

  “Perhaps gun tests or flare launches. Disposal of defective ordnance, maybe.”

  “Or maybe the Coalition is targeting us with cruise missiles. The heat blooms could have been their rocket motor first stages.”

  “That’s it?”

  “We can’t track cruise missiles from the ground, sir. We don’t know if they are coming. And the aircraft approach is perplexing. As I said, it could hold paratroopers.”

  “Enough of this,” Sihoud said. “Two weeks ago you were certain a commando force had landed outside Ashkhabad and was coming for me. We never heard from them. I will not fight this war from the rear, Colonel. We must return to the field.”

  Ahmed nodded, feeling equal parts frustration that Sihoud was not hearing him and hope that Sihoud was right.

  SEVEN MILES SOUTH OF KIZYL-ARVAT, TURKMENISTAN

  Augusta’s first-fired Javelin cruise missile hugged the ground, barely twenty feet above the brushland of the Turkmenian plains, flying at 650 miles per hour. As it did every six minutes, the onboard Javcalcor computer commanded a full self-check and the missile’s systems reported in. Fuel was getting low at forty percent; fuel flow rate was within limits. Compressor inlet, combustor discharge, and turbine discharge temperatures were all nominal. The warhead system reported satisfactory interlocks with the detonator train disconnected and open-circuited. The guidance system reported that the rudder and elevator control surfaces were functional. The navigation system was taking continuous fixes on the terrain-following contour-radar set, and the shape of the land below, matched the computer memory; the flatness of the Turkmenian Plain had caused some concern, but a backup star fix showed the terrain navigation to be within limits. The missile was about a half mile ahead of where the clock indicated it should be, and since arrival at the target at a precise moment in time was vital, the computer decided to slow the missile down by twenty feet per second. The amidships fuel flow control valve shut slightly, cutting down on the combustor fuel feed. The combustion chamber’s discharge temperature dropped and the turbine whined down slightly. Nozzle thrust fell a fraction and the missile slowed.

  The computer scanned the memory map of the Turkmenian terrain and the approach to the Main Bunker Complex outside of Ashkhabad. The weapon would approach from the north at reduced altitude. At a range of one mile it would execute a pop-up maneuver, climbing almost vertically up to 2,000 feet, then arc over and dive into the bunker from directly overhead.

  The computer reminded itself to wait 200 milliseconds after impact before detonating the warhead’s compact high explosive, to ensure the weapon had traveled all the way to the fourth sublevel before exploding — the target was almost 140 feet below the ground floor level of the mosque.

  The missile’s only concern was successfully flying the remaining miles to the target and detonating in the proper sequence.

  SEVENTY MILES NORTH OF ASHKHABAD, TURKMENISTAN

  The 200-knot slipstream punched into seal commander Jack Morris’s guts and threatened to send him tumbling in spite of his textbook-correct body position. He bounced through the turbulence, feeling the shock of the cold after the shock of the wind began to die down. He sailed in the thunderous gale winds of free fall at 115 miles per hour, terminal velocity with his flying-squirrel thermal coveralls, wondering what the wind chill was — wind of 115 miles per, starting with air at forty below zero. Whatever it was, it would be cold enough to freeze him into an iceball in another few seconds if not for his electrically heated suit. He fell toward the black desert below, trying to see the luminescent altimeter.

  This jump was to be a hop-and-pop, the free-fall portion less than a minute. As expected, he felt a minor jolt as the drogue chute popped out of his back, the altimeter automa
tically deploying the parachutes of the entire team at the same altitude. The drogue rose overhead and pulled out the silk of the mattress-shaped parasail. Jack Morris felt a hard jerk, as if the gallows trapdoor had opened and sent him dangling, but instead of choking him the harness gave him a stern kick in the crotch.

  A half second later the bungee cord attached at one end to his harness and at the other to his heavy equipment crate grew taut as the box continued to fall. Taking the weight of the crate nearly deflated the parasail for a moment; Morris waited and let the chute stall out, knowing that this was the moment that killed most sky divers. A deploying canopy could tangle itself and get in the way of the reserve chute, like Bony Robbins’s had before Christmas. His main chute had become a cigarette, an obscenely tangled streamer flapping uselessly in the wind above him. Bony had struggled to cut away the main, but the reserve’s altimeter had kicked in and pushed out his reserve, which promptly became tangled in the main chute. Bony had hit the frozen cornfield at over 100 miles an hour. But Morris’s main behaved and filled with wind while the equipment crate settled out forty feet below. Morris steered south and looked for the rest of the 100-man force. In the moonless night, he couldn’t see anyone, but he could hear the canopies around him. There was no noise from the KC-lojet. It had already dived back down to terrain-hugging altitude now that the seals were out, most likely streaking home as fast as the coffee-drinking, paper-pushing zoomies could fly.

  The jump point had been seventy miles from the UIF main bunker. They had left the jet at 45,000 feet and opened the parachutes after a minimal fall. Morris had counted on flying the parasails twenty miles with the wind. By the time they hit the desert floor, they would still be fifty miles from Sihoud’s living room. With fifteen minutes to assemble the desert patrol vehicles, that gave them an hour and a half to get to the bunker perimeter with a half hour of contingency time. So far the mission had been on-target: the jet hadn’t been gunned down and, assuming the bus drivers knew where the hell they were, the jump had gone off without incident. But every mission screwed up somewhere. The only difference between a successful raid and a miserable rout was the magnitude of the unexpected foul-up. Plenty could still go wrong, he thought as he glanced at the altimeter and compass. The landing could be rough with the equipment crates, perhaps injuring some of the men. The DPVS could be damaged, and without the desert patrol vehicles they would not make the fifty-mile trip in time. They might find company waiting when they landed, or at the bunker perimeter, or anywhere in between. And even once they secured the perimeter, the god damned Javelin cruise missiles might decide to hit the seals, and it would be Jimmy Carter and Iran all over again.

  Morris turned up the thermostat on his suit, the fabric filled with electrical heat resistors like an electric blanket.

  He continued flying the parasail south, his equipment crate swaying below him while he waited for the trip to end. Finally his altimeter read 1,000 feet, and he jettisoned the cargo crate. His chute seemed to fly up for a moment as his descent eased from the lost weight. Morris strained his ears and heard the sounds of parachutes popping open on a hundred equipment crates as they were released. The digital altimeter reeled off the numerals, until Morris’s toes were only a few hundred feet from the ground. He strained his senses, his eyes on where the horizon would be if it were visible, and tried to feel the ground with his mind. He’d always hated night jumps like these made on moonless nights; night-vision goggles had never worked for him on night drops, since the single combined monocular lens took away depth and caused vertigo. Somehow he had always been able to sense the approach of the ground at the last second, in time to flare out the parasail. Failure to pull its trailing edges down to stall it out meant crashing at up to forty miles per hour, enough kinetic energy to maim a man.

  He held his breath and waited, finally hearing more than seeing the ground. He pulled his chute-control cables from the harness straps all the way down to his knees, and the parasail wing-shaped canopy inclined upward into the air flow, tilting up like an airliner flaring out over a runway.

  The aero-braking worked, slowing Morris almost to a stop, neatly collapsing the canopy just as his combat boots hit the sand at walking speed. Morris stepped away from the deflating parachute and let it flap in the wind on the sand. He released the tabs on his harness, unzipped and took off his flying squirrel suit, and dumped his oxygen mask on the pile, rolled it all up into a ball, and buried it in the sand. Surrounding him were a hundred seals doing the same. Morris reached into his vest and pulled out his night-vision goggles and strapped them on. The desert came to life around him, men scurrying for the equipment crates, pulling out weapons and ammunition and pieces of the desert patrol vehicles.

  Morris walked the sand, watching his men opening the crates, a few men sent to find crates that had landed a few hundred feet outside the drop zone. The contents of the crates were snapped together quickly, the tightly packed crate contents becoming space frame vehicles, with aluminum tubes for the framing, collapsed tires with inflation bottles, unfolding seats made of lightweight and compact foam, the heaviest components the engines, the transmissions, and the machine guns. Not believing in keeping his hands clean, Morris bent to help one heaving group of men tilt an engine assembly up to accept the front portion of one of the DPV frames. The men worked frantically, bolting high-horsepower engines together in the dark, the clumsy night-vision goggles the only aid to sight. Morris stepped back and allowed himself a moment of pride. With a pit crew like this, any Indianapolis racer would be a winner. The moment ended too soon as Morris checked his watch. It had been eight minutes since his boots had hit the desert. Too damned long.

  Morris found Black Bart Bartholomay and went over the assault plan one last time while an ensign and a chief assembled their DPV-4. Once completed, the lightweight and queer-looking vehicle resembled the bastard son of a moon buggy and a Baha race car. It held four seals, driver included, had oversized dune tires, two frame-mounted machine guns, and a 300 horsepower supercharged small-block Chevy. The desert burst into loud burbling noises, the drivers gunning their engines. Morris strapped on his motorcycle-style helmet, got the radio boom microphone adjusted, and loaded the clip into his MAC-10 machine gun, the weapon heavy and satisfying in his hand. Bart returned from a tour of their assembly area and reported that all DPVS were running and there had been no injuries on the insertion.

  The mission was still on track, if a few minutes late.

  Morris checked the DPVS geosatellite navigation system, the navsat receiver no bigger than a loaf of bread, and looked at the map. Heading one seven seven led straight into the main bunker. He climbed into the DPV with Bart driving, the ensign on the rear gun, the chief next to him. He tapped Bart’s thigh, and Bart cautiously accelerated, avoiding getting stuck in the sand, and the hightech dune buggy sped off to the south, two dozen buggies following behind it in a roaring race.

  ASHKHABAD, TURKMENISTAN

  MAIN BUNKER COMPLEX

  “How will we deliver the Scorpions to Washington? And how soon can we do it?” General Sihoud stared at the electronic chart on the wall and thought about the destiny of the Islamic people, how the Westerners had only gained a foothold on UIF soil so that their eventual withdrawal from Muslim territory would be that much more significant for the UIF.

  After all, fourteen centuries ago Mohammed had himself been driven from Mecca to Medina — the holy exile, the hegira, during which Mohammed founded Islam. The Prophet had then fought his way back to Mecca in an astonishing and triumphant battle, winning an immortal glory. By the time he was forty Mohammed and Islam had taken over the Arab world.

  Now Sihoud had been given the Scorpion, just as Mohammed had received supernatural power from the archangel Gabriel, and now the war would be won. The infidels would sneak away and hide, and Mohammed al-Sihoud would triumph. Sihoud truly believed that.

  Chapter 2

  Thursday, 26 December

  ASHKHABAD, TURKMENISTAN


  UIF MAIN BUNKER COMPLEX

  Sihoud yawned. It was many hours past the time he had hoped to sleep, and there was more to do before dawn than stare at the machine’s screens. He had a war to win, troops to command, armies to move, but first he must deal with his Iranian chief of staff, the worrying technocrat Rakish Ahmed. Still, he reminded himself, Ahmed was more than worth his pay — he had delivered the Scorpion weapon. For that Sihoud could stand to indulge his worldly fears; he just wished Ahmed could comprehend that they were destined to prevail. He believed that.

  Colonel Ahmed frowned in low conversation with one of the officers at the tactical command console, who occasionally put one finger in the air and talked into a secure radio-telephone.

  Sihoud could see Ahmed’s expression grow darker. Finally he turned from the console and faced Sihoud, a pained look on his face.

  “Sir, we need to leave, now. I believe an attack is imminent on this command center.” Ahmed had been trained by the Iranian Air Force to state the conclusion first, the supporting evidence last. It was a habit that irritated Sihoud, but he waited. “An antiaircraft station, the north post, reported radar contact on a large airborne blip. The radar was a height-finding unit, and reported the plane climbed up from zero to fourteen kilometers very rapidly, then dived back down again. At first we didn’t believe it, but the south station just confirmed, they saw the same thing. This correlates to the lost jetliner, sir. It has to be paratroopers.” Ahmed paused to grab a radio handset and barked orders into it, something about a Firestar fighter and a Kawasaki U-10 truck at the south utility tunnel exit.

  Sihoud calmly shook his head. There were no paratroopers and there would be no withdrawal through the utility tunnel.