the center increased viciously, and he ducked as rounds began to whip past his head, pinging off metal car bodies, shattering nearby windows, and occasionally striking flesh with a dull, terrible thud.
Within six minutes the tactical withdrawal was complete, and the colonel signaled to his own detail that they could bug out, which they did with considerable speed and profanity. Kinninmore felt one bullet snag a fold in his pants leg as he sprinted away from the buildings, but he didn't dive for cover, knowing that he was in much greater danger remaining in close proximity to them. At one point, just as he ducked out of the main line of fire, he was tempted to look up to see if he could spot any of the laser designators painting the landmark, but he plowed on, calling himself an idiot for even entertaining such a foolish notion. 'FAC confirms all friendlies have exited. We are cleared to release.'
'Weapons,' said Havoc, 'you have a go. Bring down the sky, Michelle.'
He heard the acknowledgment and a brief burst of chatter down the link before two heavy clunks signaled a sudden loss of weight beneath the wings of the Stratofortress, causing it to jump nearly a hundred feet higher into the air. He tried to watch the pair of hardened penetrators as they began their fatal dive toward the target, but the GBU-28s quickly disappeared into the cloud cover and there was no chance he would have seen them anyway. He just couldn't help himself. He knew they would fire their little rocket motors in a second, accelerating the pair of five-thousand-pound bunker busters down toward the city. The kinetic impact alone would be enough to destroy vast swaths of any normal target, but the 630 pounds of high explosive that would detonate deep inside the target building, collapsing it from within, would seal the deal.
'Adios, Captain Hook,' he quipped over the intercom before turning the huge, lumbering plane around to the west and climbing another five thousand feet to prepare for the secondary attack.
Simultaneous with Havoc's release of the two laser-guided bombs, nicknamed Deep Throats, four other B-52s released identical packages. Ten of the twenty-five-foot-long, superhardened lances speared down toward the famous cluster of buildings. They dropped silently, tiny servomotors adjusting the stubby fins on their tails as the intelligent seeker heads at the nose of the bomb maintained an obsessive lock on ten separate points, all of them illuminated by infrared dots sourced from small laser devices operated by special forces high up in skyscrapers a few blocks back from the target. 'Oh, man, this is gonna be so fucking sweet,' Wilson said.
Milosz forced himself to stay fixed on the complex of four buildings within the greater Rockefeller Center that had been indentified as harboring the greatest concentration of enemy forces. He was acutely aware of Technical Sergeant Gardener crouched next to him, keeping the laser designator pointed at the window where he could see at least two men firing wildly into the thick banks of drifting smoke down on the streets below. Her blond hair and the sweet scent of chewing gum were driving him to distraction, but he did not wish to miss this moment. It would be, as Wilson had said, so fucking sweet.
And then it happened. A blur. A thin black flicker that shot down at a steep angle and punched right into the window he had been watching. The two men standing there disintegrated in a spray of bright pink mist and colorful clothing. The very walls on either side of them seem to shudder, and then there was a brief eerie moment when nothing happened.
He knew intellectually exactly what was going on over there. The long iron spike was spearing itself into the guts of the building, waiting until the small chip in its warhead decided it had embedded itself deeply enough to do the maximum amount of damage.
And then the bomb detonated.
All ten of them did at the same time.
The four buildings flew apart as though constructed of honeycomb and icing sugar. The blast atomized massive slabs of thick gray concrete, blowing them outward, removing a significant supporting structure from the overall building, which began to collapse in on itself with a volcanic roar. The three special operators were four blocks away, high in a residential tower, but Milosz could feel the destructive power of the strike in his very guts, under layers of Kevlar and ballistic plate.
'Goddamn,' Wilson hooted. 'Didn't I say that'd be sweet?'
Gardener placed a pair of binoculars to her eyes and smiled.
'When you want the job done, send a grunt. When you want it done properly, call the United States Air Force. The best is yet to come, gentlemen. Observe. This is a little trick we learned from our jihadi brethren.'
Milosz watched where she pointed at half a dozen undamaged buildings out of which hundreds, maybe a thousand or more enemy fighters were now fleeing. Lieutenant Colonel Porter frowned as he banked his plane around and lined up for the incendiary run.
It didn't seem fair that the first time they'd been allowed to get medieval on these cheeky little fuckers, the weather had shut down any chance of him enjoying the spectacle. Indeed, he had to wonder whether this next phase of the mission was even worth bothering with, given the wet conditions on the ground. He waited, expecting orders to scrub, but the radio link to Fort Lewis remained silent.
'We have good uplink data for the second package,' his weapons officer reported.
'Release on my mark,' said Havoc. 'Aaand… mark!'
Hundreds of incendiary bombs fell away from the cavernous interior of the fuselage, whistling down toward the streets of Manhattan, where the survivors of the bunker buster attack had flooded into the open to escape what they thought must be an inevitable second strike. As Milosz watched, a strange and unexpected sick feeling churning his stomach, the swarm of antlike creatures pouring into the streets around Rockefeller Center were suddenly consumed in a volcanic eruption. Hundreds of firebombs rained down on them, ringing the pocket of the city into which they had been carefully penned by the fighting of the previous days. Vast, apocalyptic rivers of flame, hundreds of feet high, poured through the canyons, washing over the tiny creatures below, wiping them from the face of the earth.
Even at this distance from the carnage it sounded like the end of the world. An epic rip in the fabric of things as the world tore itself asunder and the flames of hell came gushing out.
'Is very much like Dante's Inferno. Or perhaps Towering Inferno. Except down on the ground,' said Milosz.
Technical Sergeant Gardener put an arm around him and gave the Polish commando an unexpected squeeze.
'You're quite the poet, aren't you, Freddy?'
55
Texas Administrative Division Just a minute or two before Miguel had been riding over flat, dry ground, but his horse was now splashing through a wide racing stream, a filthy torrent befouled with the churned-up mud and manure left in the wake of the herd. To his right, only dimly visible in the ferocity of the storm, two thousand head of cattle plunged wildly through the rising water, bellowing their distress and unbridled terror. Riders added their cries to the caterwauling din, Sofia among them.
He was wild with fear for her, which was made worse by his utter powerlessness. The flood had come up so quickly and the storm was so intense, he was completely cut off from her on the other side of of the panicked, stampeding herd.
'Come left, come left,' he yelled to D'Age, who had surged just a little ahead of him.
There was slightly higher ground out there. But the Mormon was too far ahead, lost in the savagery of the tempest. The valley channeled the worst of the storm's power right over them, and in its folds strange, contrary twisters and sudden shifts of wind direction did their worst to disorient him. How would Sofia be coping? Was she even still alive, or had she been swept from the saddle and trampled already? The one thin hope to which he could cling was the memory of her and Trudi Jessup spurring on for slightly higher ground before the worst of the storm hit them. Trudi was a good woman, he knew. She would not let any harm come to Sofia if she could help it at all.
Dark shapes peeled off the herd as cattle bolted in all directions, driven mad by their panic. Miguel could feel Flossie's terror in every twitching sinew and muscle. He began to ease her away from the black, heaving mass of the stampede, leaning her toward the slightly higher ridgeline he knew was somewhere to their left.
But the water piled up beneath them with shocking speed. The flood had started as a stream down at her
