Sanusi smiled. 'I think I know where you belong now, Mr. McLanahan-or is it General McLanahan? It's still not out here in the desert, though.'
Soon the effects of the electromagnetic pulse in the atmosphere from the explosion at Mersa Matruh were subsiding, and shortly after that, they started receiving position data. 'We're only twenty miles from Jaghbub,' Patrick pointed out.
'Correct.'
'The radiation levels are getting higher,' Briggs said. 'They'll reach danger levels soon.'
'The radiation levels are high enough to affect normal radio communications,' Sanusi said. 'If a Libyan patrol doesn't have radiation detectors-and by now, all of them do-the disruption of radio communications would get their attention.' Patrick wondered why Sanusi would bother to offer that unusual detail.
By the time they were within five miles of Jaghbub, the radiation levels had reached danger levels. From here they could see the base-and there was no doubt that the base had suffered a tremendous attack. The sand was scorched black, like the ruins of Mersa Matruh; armored vehicles, buildings, helicopters, and all sorts of objects, most unidentifiable, lay bent and smoldering. Bodies, charred black and burned almost to the skeleton, could be seen scattered everywhere, along with the carcasses of vultures and other desert scavengers who tried to feed off them. The Libyans had erected signs on every road and path, warning in Arabic and English to stay away from the area because of deadly radiation. Obviously many Libyans had ignored the warning, because they could see abandoned Libyans armored vehicles everywhere-they imagined they were filled with the bloated, rotting corpses of radiationpoisoned soldiers.
'My ancestral home,' Sanusi said, 'or at least what remains of it after Qadhafi and Zuwayy desecrated and perverted it.'
'I'm sorry it's been destroyed,' Patrick said.
'You should be-you did most of it, at least to the base,' Sanusi said. He smiled, nodded, then added, 'Nah, don't be sorry. The base was an abomination to the spirit of my ancestors. They created a place of worship and a place of learning here-Qaddafi and Zuwayy turned it into an armed fortress and a den of sin. You only did what I've wanted the power to do-flatten it. Come on.'
'You're going there!'
'Of course,' Sanusi said. Some of his men dismounted to examine the new armored vehicles; shots rang out, indicating that some half-dead soldiers were being dispatched by Sanusi's men. But then, to Patrick's surprise, the soldiers started up the vehicle and drove it off-not away from the base, but toward it!
'Patrick…'
'It's okay-I get it now,' Patrick said. Muhammad Sanusi just smiled and nodded as they continued on.
As they got closer to the carnage that was once the holy Islamic town of Jaghbub, the details became clearer: Some of the corpses were real, but most of them were faked plaster or wooden mannequins. Some of the armored vehicles had been destroyed not from a nuclear blast but by regular antitank or RPG rounds or by the Wolverine cruise missile's Sensor-Fuzed Weapon rounds blowing through the weaker upper hull. The blackness surrounding the base Tvas dark sand, gravel, or charcoal, not the vaporized remains of buildings. 'You faked a nuclear blast here?' Hal Briggs asked incredulously.
'It wasn't hard to do after what you guys did here,' Sanusi said. 'The base had been pretty much evacuated by morning-we cleaned up a few security patrols, captured a bunch of good equipment, blew up several thousand pounds of high explosives and ammunition for realism, and used the dead and destroyed vehicles to create the look of a decimated base.'
'And the radiation…?'
'Some captured medical radioisotopes, scattered along the roads and paths. Not enough to be picked up by a radiation-detecting aircraft or satellite, but plenty to be picked up by ground-based sensors. You don't need much if you got the rumor mill going properly-start spreading rumors by radio and teletype that there's been a nuclear detonation in the desert, and bad news travels real fast.'
'So all the messages and reports about an American nuclear attack…?'
'Provided by us,' Sanusi said. 'Complete with pictures, eyewitness accounts, sensor data, even some soldiers suffering radiation sickness. Combined with what's happened at Mersa Matruh, folks will believe anything now.'
'Eventually the army will send in troops to secure this base,' Chris Wohl said. 'You can't fool them forever.'
'We'll be out of here before they get brave enough to send someone with more brains, Sergeant,' Sanusi said. 'But I think the action will be starting elsewhere, and they'll hold off on investigating Jaghbub for a while.'
'Why do you think that?'
'Because I'll be the one starting the action,' Sanusi said with a smile. 'And now, with your help, we'll make an even bigger splash.'
They drove out to the flight line, where the burned-out hulks of several helicopters and one large jet, about the size of a Boeing 727, sat. The runway was lined with dozens of bomb craters-there didn't appear to be more than one or two hundred feet of usable pavement any-
where. But Patrick already figured that Sanusi and his men were masters at concealment and camouflage. 'Okay, Your Majesty-how did you do it?'
'A little sand, a little wood- it won't stand up to closer scrutiny, but visually, they look real enough,' Sanusi replied. 'A couple men can sweep them off to the side in a few minutes, and it takes less than an hour to put them all back in.' He stopped his Humvee. 'Your attack destroyed most of the buildings and facilities aboveground, but not all of them-and best of all, the POL storage is intact.'
'It is?'
'The army put most of the petroleum storage underground, so your big explosive didn't destroy it,' Sanusi explained. 'The fuel farm your bombs blew up were the old tanks. The underground tanks were topped off, toothere's probably one hundred thousand gallons of jet fuel down there, ready to go. Maybe more. All his weapons are underground, too-bombs, missiles, rockets, guns, rifles, and ammunition from seven-millimeter to fifty- sevenmillimeter. I would need a thousand men to help me haul it all away.' He looked at Patrick. 'And I'll trade it all for some help.'
'What do you want us to do?'
'Stop Zuwayy and whoever's behind this sudden military buildup of his,' Sanusi said. 'Zuwayy's got something up his sleeve, and he's getting some big-time financing to do it. I'm only irritating him right now-but you could really put the hurt on him. I assume that because you were still in the vicinity of the base, you didn't use all your resources here-I'm convinced you can destroy any base, any military site, in Libya or Egypt.'
Just then, Patrick heard, 'Tin Man, this is Headbanger.'
'Go ahead, Headbanger.'
'Thank God we got you, sir,' George 'Zero' Tanaka, the pilot aboard the EB-52 Megafortress bomber, said. 'We were just about to bug out for an emergency landing strip. What's your situation?'
'We're secure,' Patrick reported. 'What's youi status?'
'We're a few minutes past bingo for the secondary recover base,' Tanaka said. Patrick knew that the secondary recovery base for the EB-52 was an isolated abandoned air base near Vol'vata, in the extreme southern tip of Israel-no support, no fuel, just a relatively safe piece of concrete on which to set a two-hundred-thousand- pound plane and wait for help. It was also their last planned emergency recovery base-any other emergency strips they might use from here on out would be in Egypt, Libya, Sudan, or Algeria-or they would ditch in the Mediterranean Sea or Red Sea. 'We lost our tanker support. Got any instructions for us?'
The question, Patrick thought, was rather moot now. Patrick knew he shouldn't trust anyone, especially a Libyan, but Muhammad as-Sanusi was different-or so he hoped.
'Yes, I have instructions,' Patrick said. 'Get a fix on my location-you'll find a seven-thousand-foot concrete airstrip here. We have fuel, possibly weapons, some support equipment.'
There were a few moments of silence as the Megafortress crew plotted his location; then: 'Ahh… verify this location, sir?' Tanaka asked.
'The location is accurate: Jaghbub, Libya.'
'And you are secure?'
'Affirmative.'
