Scimitar SL-2

fast.

Your Patriot would nail it, but you’d have to get it away in split seconds. Not minutes. The soldiers working on the La Palma airfield knew that. The first four launch trucks moved off now, down towards Atlantic Highway 1. They were heading south to begin with, but would soon swing up the west coast of the island towards the volcanoes and the rugged rim of the Cumbre Vieja, where they would set up their missile battery in readiness, perhaps, for their last stand, against a lethal enemy.

There were sixteen young soldiers in this first group, four of them officers. Each of them knew that if the system acquired their 600-mph incoming target and they missed, it would be their last act on this earth. It would spear in at them from a high trajectory, and the Scimitar would blast the great mountain peak to smithereens, sounding a violent death knell not only for them but for the whole of the East Coast of the U.S.

Maj. Blake Gill was in overall command. Age thirty-five, he was a career officer trained at West Point. Back home, in Clarksville, Tennessee, his wife and two sons, ages five and eight, were waiting. As one of the U.S. Army’s top missile experts, he was stationed, along with the 101st Air Assault Division, at one of the biggest military bases in the country — Fort Campbell, Kentucky, hard on the Tennessee border.

Blake Gill had been in an army missile team seconded to the U.S. Navy’s cruisers during the Patriot testing programs off Hawaii. He was an acknowledged aficionado of the Patriot system, and a glittering career awaited him with either Raytheon or Lockheed Martin, if and when he ever finished with the Army.

But Blake Gill was like his missile, a Patriot. He was a man cut in the mold of Adm. Arnold Morgan himself, a sworn enemy of his country’s foes, a man to whom personal gain was a total stranger. The heavyset Southerner, with his scorched-earth haircut, was plainly headed for the highest possible rank his branch of the Service had to offer. If anyone was going to slam the Scimitar, it was Blake Gill, husband of Louisa, father of Charlie and Harry. Missile man.

He rode in the lead truck in front of the launcher, the four hunter-killer Patriots towering behind him. He carried with him three different ground elevations of the Cumbre Vieja site — one, a satellite photograph of the entire area, taking in the coastlines; another, a map drawn from much closer in; and the last one, a detailed map of the undulating terrain directly around the crater.

Since no one had an exact estimate as to which direction the incoming missiles were to be fired, Blake Gill was relying on the facts presented to him at the Pentagon on his way to the Charleston Air Force Base. He knew he must cover the westerly approach and the more unlikely north, but he had been carefully briefed by both Adm. Frank Doran and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs himself, Gen. Tim Scannell, that the biggest threat was from the east and southeast.

The Barracuda ultimately had to get out of the way of the tsunami or it too would be destroyed. And that meant it had to seek cover on the eastern side of La Palma or Gomera if it launched at close range.

Major Gill had penciled in one of his mobile launchers to face outwards from the eight principal points of the compass. Any preprogrammed cruise missile could be directed on the most circuitous route into any target, but not without GPS. Therefore a major detour around the volcano, and then a route in from the north or west, seemed utterly unlikely.

Yes, the Pentagon was nearly certain that the missiles would come straight in, out of the east or southeast, simply to give the submarine a chance to save itself. Major Gill knew he must place launcher number five to the southeast. The problem of the northeast occupied him, however. There would be no course correction to the incoming weapons, and no cover out there in open water, nor any place the submarine could reach to find shelter before the tidal wave slung it straight onto the sandy beaches of Western Sahara.

And yet…he knew these suicide bastards from the Middle East…Maybe sacrificing himself was the master plan…Maybe they just did not care…They would fire and forget from any spot they pleased and let Allah do his worst. Paradise, perhaps, beckoned. It was not, after all, particularly unusual for the young braves of Hamas to terminate their lives willingly in the Jihad against the West.

Major Gill was thoughtful. Clearly, the Barracuda was on its final mission. They were never going to take it home. To where? It could never again come to the surface, never again fire a missile. The forthcoming launch would betray its position, and the odds of it evading a strike force like the U.S. Navy currently had at sea were close to zero.

No, the Hamas terrorists almost certainly knew the game was up the moment they opened fire within a very few miles of ASW warships and helicopters. So they just might launch from anywhere. And he, Blake Gill, had to be ready for a threat from any direction with plenty of overlap.

He would position his mobile launchers, evenly spaced around the compass, facing out from the crater, in all directions. His maps showed the ground to be extremely rough and uneven, once the end of the road had been reached, and he was grateful for the huge U.S. Marine Chinook helicopter awaiting him up at the summit, which he knew would place the launchers with effortless efficiency precisely where he wanted them.

They drove on down to the village of Los Canarios de Fuencaliente, where hot springs had once bubbled but, long buried by the eruptions of various volcanoes, now formed part of the deadly, roughly 10-mile-long cauldron beneath the mountain.

Major Gill studied his maps. To the south, he knew, was the Volcan San Antonio. A signpost directed visitors to a pathway and a visitors’ center around its gaping black crater. Even farther south was the Volcan Teneguia, which is off the beaten track and where only a few adventurers could struggle up its slopes and peer in over the shattered rim.

The convoy of launchers was headed the other way, north, up towards the Cumbre Vieja, glowering under the crystal-blue arc of the sky above the islands. As they drove on in a cloud of black dust, the Major could see the Chinook parked up ahead, about 200 yards off the main road.

It took about twenty minutes to secure the cables that would take the weight of the launcher. Major Gill and the missile crew climbed aboard for the short ride to the summit, and under his direction, the Navy pilot put the launch truck exactly into position, facing due east, overlooking the Atlantic and the distant shores of Gomera and Tenerife.

The giant helo had already deposited all the equipment needed for the Engagement Control Station farther up the escarpment, to a slightly higher peak to the north. Twelve more technicians who had traveled across the Atlantic in the Truman had already begun to erect the station, ensuring it had views in all directions overlooking the Atlantic to the east and west, where the frigates were patrolling. And, of course, overlooking the Patriot batteries around the crater to the south, with clear radar range at every point of the compass.

The Engagement Control Station was the only manned station in a Patriot Fire Unit. It could communicate with any M901 Launching Station and with other Patriot batteries, and it also had direct communications to the higher command facilities, in this case Admiral Gillmore’s Coronado.

Three operators had two consoles and a Communication Station with three radio-relay terminals. The digital Weapon Control Computer was located next to the VHF Data Link terminals. One of the C-17 Globemasters had brought in the trailer-mounted Raytheon MPQ-53 phased-array Army radar unit, a band-tracking radar capable of identifying one hundred targets at a time. It was a superb component of any top-of-the-line shore missile batteries, and it would carry out search, target detection, track and identification, missile tracking and guidance, plus electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM) functions.

Its radar was automatically controlled, via a cable link, by the digital weapons control computer in the Engagement Control Center sited farther up the hill. The radar had a range of up to 55 miles, and could provide guidance data for up to nine missiles at any one time. Its wideband capability provided target discrimination never before achieved.

In normal circumstances, this overwhelming piece of electronic equipment might have been considered overkill in the search for one or possibly two incoming “birds.” However, in this case, by express orders of Admiral Morgan, there was no such thing as overkill.

As the Patriot missile came flashing into its target, the TVM guidance system would be activated, and the weapon could scarcely miss. And it would not require a midair collision to blow Admiral Badr’s Scimitar clean out of the sky. The Patriot just needed to be close enough for a proximity fuse to detonate the high-explosive warhead, in this case, an M248 91kg—200 pounds — TNT blast fragmentation.

The MIM-104E was over 17 feet long, 16 inches in diameter, and weighed 2,000 pounds. At Mach 5, its range