Briggs, Wohl, and the two Night Stalkers quickly split up, taking separate exits into the building. They were gone before any other FBI agents had responded.
Special Agent Norwalk was in the middle of a sip of coffee when he heard the shot, and he nearly dumped the coffee on himself. 'What the hell…?'
'Don't worry-that's just the cavalry showing up,' Patrick said matter-of-factly. Norwalk was reaching for his service pistol when Patrick touched a hidden switch on his desk, then covered his eyes with his arm and tightly closed his eyes just as the room lights went out and an immense flash of light completely blinded the two FBI agents. The room lights then came back to normal. Patrick was able to simply walk over and disarm both men by plucking their weapons from their hands-the sudden flash of light disoriented them so badly that they could hardly tell up from down. Norwalk was shouting for help as he bumped and caromed off the furniture; the other agent couldn't stay on his feet any longer and finally slumped to the floor.
Briggs and Wohl rushed into the office moments later. Briggs looked at the two writhing on the floor. 'There's the last two. All present or accounted for,' he said, then shot both with the crystal nerve darts. 'I think the guy out in the hangar shot your plane.'
'Bastard. He'll pay for that,' Patrick deadpanned. 'Let's go.'
Within minutes, Patrick started up the DC-10's auxiliary power unit and powered it up while one of the Night Stalkers drove one of the company jet fuel trucks over to the DC-10. After Patrick directed him on how to use the DC-10's single-point refueling system, he went up to the cockpit and started getting ready for their flight out of the country. Meanwhile, Briggs and Wohl loaded up as many sets of the Tin Man battle armor, the powered exoskeletons, the electromagnetic rail guns, and as much ammunition, spare battery packs, tools, and as many other devices as they could carry in the DC-10. In less than twenty minutes, they had completely refueled the DC- 10, loaded it up, and were all on board.
'All that cargo space, and no weapons aboard,' Briggs said as he looked down the cavernous cargo area. They had enough cargo space and payload to carry two Megafortresses' worth of air-launched weapons-but they had no time to get any out from the storage bunkers. 'Too bad.'
'We got the fuel, the battle armor, and the rail gunsthat'll do for now,' Patrick said. 'The nerve agent will wear off in another thirty minutes-we need to be long gone before they wake up.'
'Unfortunately, we weren't able to bring many weapons with us,' Patrick said to Sayyid Muhammad ibn al- Hasan as-Sanusi. They were back in the big aircraft hangars at Jaghbub's military airfield, supervising the refueling of all the planes. One of the Megafortresses had to abort while over the Atlantic; in addition, all of the EB-1C Megafortress Two aircraft had been returned to their Air National Guard unit. Their remaining force: two EB-52 Megafortress flying battleships and two AL-52 Dragon airborne laser aircraft, Dragon One and Two, with Dragon Two carrying its untested plasma laser on board. 'But I would sure like to take another look at your weapon storage areas, Your Highness.'
'I think we may be able to help you there,' Sanusi said. Patrick hadn't had time to explore it yet, but the underground warehouses here supposedly held a lot of the latest military hardware. Some of it could be adapted for the Megafortress-if they had time to load it, mate it, program the weapons for release by the computers, and perhaps test them.
Patrick was amazed at the assortment of weapons they found in the weapon-storage bunkers a few minutes later. Zuwayy had collected a large and very impressive arsenal of Russian air-launched weapons: the BetAB- series of antirunway penetration bombs, the largest of which could create a three-foot-deep crater the size of a football field in twenty inches of concrete; a large variety of KAB- series laser-guided bombs, resembling copies of the American Paveway series, ranging from five-hundred- to well over three-thousand-pounders; almost the entire range of air-toair missiles, from the tiny R-60 heat-seeker to the massive R-33 long-range radar-guided missile with nearly a hundred-mile range; and a good selection of air-to-surface missiles, including the Kh-27 antiradar missile, the Kh-29 laser-guided missile, and the Kh-15 long-range attack missile, a copy of the AGM-69A Short-Range Attack Missile, except these had only three-hundred-pound high-explosive warheads, not nuclear ones.
'Can you use any of them, my friend?' Sanusi asked.
'I think so,' Patrick replied with a grin. 'All of the weapons have the Russian-standard two-hundred-andfifty- millimeter suspension lug spacing, so we need to get busy resetting all of the squibs on the bomb racks to accommodate them. Fortunately, our engineers in Nevada had thought of the real possibility of using pirated Russian-bloc weapons in the field, so it should be easy to do the conversion in the field. And most of the weapons are in surprisingly good shape-others look brand new, as if they just came right 'out of the box.' '
The Libyan weapons were hauled out of storage bunkers near the air base with block and tackle, makeshift trailersmost of the vehicles on the base had been destroyed by the fuel-air weapon attacks by the Megafortress days earlierand pure old-fashioned muscle work. The weapons were dragged, pulled, or manhandled across the runway and to the largest and most undamaged hangar on the field, on which a large canvas tent had to be erected to hide the Megafortresses' protruding tails, which had to remain outside the hangar. Muhammad as-Sanusi's men had devised a bomb-loading 'jammer' out of an engine jack for the larger weapons; the smaller weapons were simply carried into position by however many men it took to do the job. Once they were loaded, it was simple to get them ready for releasethe Megafortress's attack computer already had ballistics information for every possible air- launched weapon in existence, even Russian ones, so it was just a matter of telling the computer which weapon was on which station.
The first EB-52 Megafortress battleship that would lead the attack carried longer-range standoff weapons, including four Russian Kh-27 antiradar missiles in the forward bomb bay, eight Kh-15 long-range inertially guided missiles on the rotary launcher in the aft bomb bay, four R-60 heat-seeking air-to-air missiles on each external pylon, and two FlightHawk unmanned combat aircraft on wing pylons-unfortunately, the FlightHawks did not carry any weapons of their own. The second EB-52 Megafortress battleship carried a rotary launcher in the rear of the bomb bay that held sixteen one-thousand-pound unguided bombs in eight two-round clips, with inflatable parachutes attached to each one to allow them to be released from low altitude if necessary. The slant racks in the forward bomb bay held thirty-six five-hundred-pound unguided cluster munitions in six rounds of six bombs; and the external weapon pylons held two Kh-27 antiradar missiles plus four R-60 heat-seeking missiles on each pylon.
Even though the Russian guided weapons were state-ofthe-art, they couldn't interface well with the Megafortress. The antiradar missiles were programmed on the ground to detect and attack any height-finder radar, an integral part of a surface-to-air missile or fighter ground-controlled intercept radar; the air-to-air missiles' seeker was caged straight ahead and would only report if a bright enough heat source crossed its path-they would never know if it locked on or hit its target. The inertially guided missiles had to be programmed with a target on the ground before takeoff, and then their guidance systems had to be aligned on the ground before takeoff-and their accuracy couldn't be updated while in flight. -
Patrick took the king on a quick tour of the AL-52 Dragon. Workers from Sky Masters Inc., including Jon Masters himself, were still poring over it, adjusting components and voltages while a laptop computer measured magnetic fields and predicted power yields and safety margins. 'A truly impressive weapon, Dr. Masters,' Sanusi said after he had been introduced.
'I wish I could take all the credit for it,' Jon said. He motioned inside the belly of the AL-52 just as a little girl emerged, covered in grease and dirt but wearing a big smile. 'Your Majesty, may I present Dr. Kelsey Duffield of Nevada, my partner and chief engineer of this particular weapon system. Dr. Duffield, may I present the king of the United Kingdom of Libya, His Majesty, Muhammad as-Sanusi.'
'Jon, for Christ's sake!' Patrick gasped. 'Pardon me, Your Highness, but… Jeez, Jon, you brought Kelsey Duffield… to Libya!'
'I couldn't keep her away, Patrick,' Jon said. 'If you're going to yell at me, stand in line-Kelsey's mom isn't done chewing on me yet. Patrick, this is Dr. Kelsey Duffield, our new partner; Kelsey, Brigadier-General Patrick McLanahan, retired, our v.p. in charge of operations.'
'Pleased to meet you, General,' Kelsey said, giving Patrick a big hug and a kiss. 'Don't worry about Dr. Wendy, sir-we'll get her back for you and Bradley.' She gave Sanusi a little-girl curtsy, then went back inside the Dragon's fuselage and back to work.
'Not exactly what you expected, huh?' Jon asked.
'I expected anything but a nine-year-old in a war zone, Jon,' Patrick said. 'We will get her out as soon as we can.'
