charged down the track. She put her head down and galloped, hard and proud, determined to hit her marks.
The Megafortress charged 150 feet over the Pakistani trucks at about 500 knots, loud and low. Looking like startled spectators at a horse race after a thoroughbred jumped the fence, the half-dozen Pakistani troops dove for cover.
“P-3 object dead ahead, one mile,” said Englehardt as the Megafortress continued toward their target.
“No offensive action from the ground troops,” said Sullivan, watching the rear-facing optical video. “Look more startled than anything.”
Dog stared at the screen in front of him, which was projecting the forward video camera view. The desert rose up then fell off into a slope. In real time, the ground was a blur; Dog had trouble separating the rocks from the shadows.
Englehardt pushed the nose of the aircraft down to get closer to the terrain, then counted off his turn, beginning a wide, almost leisurely bank to the east.
“Paks are still doing nothing,” said Sullivan. “Scratching their heads, probably.”
Dog hit the preset for the video screen replay, showing what the camera had seen in the past thirty seconds. He slowed the action down, freeze-framing the ground they had flown over.
“This looks like it might be it,” he said aloud, zeroing in on a gray mound on the left side of his viewer. The shape seemed a little jagged, but there was a line behind it, as if the object had dug a trench as it skidded in.
The more he looked at the image, though, the less sure he became. Where was the body of the missile? Why would it have come in on a trajectory that would allow it to ski across the landscape before stopping?
“Dreamland, I need your opinion on this,” he said, tapping the button to make the image available over the Dreamland channel.
“I don’t know, Colonel,” said Englehardt, who’d brought it up on one of his screens. “Looks like a rock to me.”
“Definitely a warhead,” said Sullivan. “Skidded in and landed nose up in the sand. Look at it.”
“Dreamland Command?” said Dog.
“We are examining it, Colonel,” said Ray Rubeo. “We will have something definitive in a few minutes.”
Dog glanced at his watch. Danny and the Marines would be at the go/no-go point in exactly thirty seconds.
“You want another run, Colonel?” asked Englehardt. “I can come in from the opposite direction.”
“No,” said Dog. “But let’s let the Pakistanis see us orbit to their north. If they’re going to get curious, let’s have them get curious in that direction.”
He took one last look at the screen, then pressed the preset on the radio to talk to Danny.
The tone in his headset alerted Danny Freah that they were five minutes from the landing zone. Tucking the M16 the Marines had loaned him under his arm, he twisted his body left and right, stretching his muscles in anticipation.
Had they been in a Dreamland version of the Osprey, he would have been able to switch the view in his smart helmet so he could see the terrain in front of them. Then again, he thought, had he been in a Dreamland bird, he’d also be leading the mission. Right now he was basically a communications specialist, relaying information from Dreamland and the
Once on the ground, Danny would work with two Navy experts to determine if the warhead was armed and could be moved. The men had been trained to handle American “broken arrow” incidents, cases where U.S. nukes had been lost or otherwise compromised. Besides his own training, he’d had experience disarming a live nuke two years before in Brazil.
“Danny Freah to Colonel Bastian. Colonel, what’s the status?”
“The experts are looking at the image right now. Shouldn’t be long.”
Danny turned and signaled to Dancer that they should go into a holding pattern. She’d just leaned into the cockpit when Dog came back on the line.
“It’s a warhead,” said the colonel. “Proceed.”
“Roger that.” He tapped Dancer and gave her a thumbs-up. The Osprey, which had just barely begun to slow down, picked up speed once more.
“What about the trucks?” shouted Dancer over the whine of the engines.
“I’m checking,” said Danny.
He had Dog describe the layout. The two trucks looked to have about six men in them. They were two miles from the warhead and maybe another half mile from the landing area. It looked as if they’d been ordered to the road and told not to leave it, but there was no way of knowing for sure until they landed.
“First sign of trouble,” added Colonel Bastian, “and we’ll fire a pair of Harpoons at them.”
“Acknowledged. Thank you, Colonel. We’re two minutes from the landing zone.”
Danny tapped Dancer on the shoulder and relayed the information. She gave him a thumbs-up. Her face was very serious, eyes narrowed, cheeks slightly puffed out, the shadow of a line — not a wrinkle, just a line — visible on her forehead.
“Marines! Make your mothers proud!” shouted Dancer as the Osprey touched down.
Danny went out with the corpsman and one of the bomb experts, toward the end of the pack. By the time he reached the warhead, the Marines had set up a defensive perimeter around it.
The scent of unburned rocket fuel was so strong, his nose felt as if it were burning. He’d run the whole way, and now had to catch his breath by covering his face with his sleeve. For a moment he thought he might even have to resort to the protective hood and contamination gear the Navy people had brought — gear that he knew from experience was so bulky he’d never be able to actually work on the bomb.
The warhead and upper end of the missile had buckled and split off from the body when they came to earth, skidding along the ground and making what looked like a shallow trench littered with rocks before stopping. On closer inspection, it was clear that the rocks were actually bits and pieces of the missile that had fallen off along the way. The warhead itself looked like a dented garbage can half submerged in the sand. The protective nose cone had been cracked and partly shredded, but the framework that covered the top portion of the missile remained intact. The black shroud of the bomb casing was visible below a set of tubes that had supported the cone section and the battered remains of instruments, electrical gear, wires, and frayed insulation.
Danny’s smart helmet was equipped with a high definition video camera, and he used it now to send images back to Dreamland Command.
“You getting this, Doc?” he asked, scanning the crash site and then bending over the warhead.
“I keep telling you, Captain, I’m not a doctor,” replied Anna Klondike a bit testily. “I wouldn’t associate with Ph.D. types.”
“I’m sorry, Annie. I thought I was talking to Ray Rubeo.”
“What Dr. Rubeo doesn’t know about nuclear weapons would fill a very large book.”
“How are you, Annie?”
“Cranky without my beauty rest. Please get closer to the base of the warhead,” she said, quickly becoming all business. “Scan down the body. Our first step here is to confirm that this came from a Prithvi SS-150.”
It took several minutes before the scientists were satisfied that it was indeed a Prithvi SS-150. The Prithvi family, derived from the Russian SA-2 surface-to-air missile, were all single-stage liquid fueled missiles; they differed mostly in terms of range and payload, though the family’s accuracy had also improved as the weapons evolved. The 150 could deliver a thousand-kilogram payload 150 kilometers.
As nukes went, the egg-shaped bomb Danny and the Marines were standing around was relatively small; its theoretical yield was fifteen kilotons, though members of the Atomic Energy Commission had told the Dreamland scientists its effective yield was probably ten to fifteen percent lower.
The difference meant the weapon’s blast would obliterate everything within 0.569 kilometers rather than, say 0.595. Since most people within 1.5 kilometers of either weapon would be burned or fatally radiated anyway, the difference was largely academic.
As he continued to pan the weapon, Danny could hear the scientists discussing the system among themselves in the background, sounding like they were looking over a new Porsche before it went on sale.
