“That’s the best offer I’ve had all day.”
Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Farley saw two red indicators on his weapons panel wink on. “Firestorm, Firestorm Five,” he called. “Signal acquired.” He tapped an icon on the screen, watched another indicator light up. “I have target lock.” A moment later, a second indicator winked on, his second target, illuminated at a slightly different wavelength. “Firestorm, Firestorm Five, I have
“Five, Firestorm Leader. Copy. Arm the force packages.”
“Roger that. Arming the packages.”
Using the touch-screen controls, he told the computer on board his F-22 Raptor to arm the two JDAMs nestled into his internal bays and to open the bay doors. The Raptor was an extraordinarily stealthy aircraft — at certain angles it had the radar cross-section of a steel marble — and carried its munitions internally to maintain that stealth.
On the advanced touch-screen readout, the schematic drawings of both JDAMs switched from gray to green.
“Firestorm, this is Firestorm Five,” he called. “Weapons hot, I repeat, weapons hot. Bays open. Ready to engage.”
It had been a long flight. The six F-22 Raptors of the 43rd Fighter Squadron had lifted off from Tyndall Air Force base on the Florida panhandle nearly four hours earlier. At a supercruise speed of Mach 1.8, the coast of Africa was less than three hours’ flight time from home, but they’d needed two rendezvous along the way with KC- 135 Stratotankers for midair refueling.
Each aircraft carried two one-thousand-pound LJDAM-modified Mk 83/BLU-110 gravity bombs in internal bays; LJDAM stood for Laser Joint Direct Attack Munition, the kit that turned an ordinary dumb bomb into a precision smart weapon. Guided in by a laser designator on the ground, a Raptor traveling at Mach 1.5 could precisely plant one of those babies on a moving target from twenty-five nautical miles away and fifty thousand feet up. The weapons could also be precision-guided by onboard GPS units, but the mission planners didn’t have precise GPS targeting data on all of the targets, and so the decision had been made to use laser guidance instead.
Old tech — but it would work just fine, so long as there were no clouds or smoke in the target area.
Six aircraft, twelve LJDAMs; the extra was along as backup in case of weapon malfunction or a problem with one of the aircraft. Firestorm Five’s targets were the southernmost two in a line of ten. The Raptors were strung out now in a long line at forty thousand feet, angling toward the island of La Palma from the northeast at Mach 1.2.
“Firestorm, Firestorm Leader.” That was the voice of Colonel Edward Mackelroy, in Firestorm One. “Firestorm is clear to engage.”
Farley tapped the release icon for his port-side weapon—“force package” in the newspeak glossary of military terminology. The aircraft bounced higher as a thousand pounds of bomb dropped from its belly.
“Five, weapon one away.” He tapped the second icon. “Two away.”
Death hurtled toward La Palma through the brilliant blue of the Atlantic sky.
The assembly was almost complete.
The suitcase nukes purchased from elements of the Russian
It took a matter of minutes to prepare one of the weapons for detonation. They were broken down so that they would fit inside the suitcase; assembled, one of the weapons was half a meter long and thirty centimeters wide at the widest.
In standard drilling practices, most rigs created a borehole just under twenty centimeters wide — about eight inches. The specialized drilling equipment they’d purchased from the Frenchman, Chatel, allowed JeM to drill boreholes thirty-five centimeters wide, including the thickness of the high-strength tubing necessary for keeping the boreholes open.
Each nuclear device had an eye ring soldered to one end of the plutonium housing; the boreholes were wide enough to allow each device to be lowered at the end of a long cable deep into the shaft. The electrical wire paid out behind as it was sent down the hole, attached to the reels of electrical cable flown in from Morocco. When the device was in place at the bottom of the borehole, the radio receiver was attached to the surface end of the cable and placed high up on the crater rim. A single radio signal transmitted from a safe distance would detonate the plastic explosives, which would drive the plutonium masses together, creating critical mass and detonating the bomb. The timers were included in case circumstances forced a change in plan, but the idea was to have one radio signal detonate all ten bombs at the same instant, something impossible with separate electrical timers.
Al-Wawi himself came up with the idea years ago, after seeing a documentary program on the BBC. Seeing the plan through, however, had been a monumental effort. Factions within both the JeM and al-Qaeda wanted to use the Russian suitcase bombs against American and European cities, or even simply to hold them in reserve as bargaining chips or for future blackmail efforts. The politics involved had been the most difficult part of the entire operation, harder even than drilling down through hundreds of meters of solid basalt. Al-Wawi had gotten his way at last only by giving up two of the recently purchased weapons for a Palestinian attack by Hamas against the Jewish government in Jerusalem.
The operation had been expensive. Not only had millions been paid for the weapons themselves, but the cost of the drilling operation itself, the bribes paid to Aramco and Petro-Technologique and the authorities in Santa Cruz, the cost of the helicopter charters out of Marrakech, all of those had amounted to several hundred million dollars. Only massive financial assistance from the Chinese had made the effort possible.
As for the technical difficulties, they had been almost insurmountable. Drilling over a hundred meters down through the solid basalt within the throat of each of the selected volcanos had been expensive, time-consumming, and fraught with breakdowns and delay. Along the way, the Aramco engineers reported that as the boreholes went deeper, they were approaching a magma chamber beneath the island. On the one hand, that was excellent news; the nuclear detonation might well trigger a massive volcanic eruption, and that, it was hoped, would hide indications that the explosion had been triggered by nuclear weapons, suggesting that it
Now, at last, everything was in place. The last borehole was complete, the last weapon about to be lowered into the depths of La Palma’s volcanic ridge. After this, it
“Al-Wawi!” a fedayeen standing nearby called. “Where are Abdullah and Nadhir?”
Azhar’s head snapped up. A hundred meters away, the boulder where he’d posted the two guards outside of the lava tube rested bare and empty. The guards were gone.
They would not have simply wandered off. The fedayeen — the fighers — attached to JeM’s La Palma operation had been extensively trained in Pakistan’s Northeastern Territory, and most had fought the Americans in either Afghanistan or Iran. They were well disciplined and knew the penalty for deserting their post. If they were gone, it could only mean …
“Suhair! Amir! Get your men! Get them to the cave!”
His eyes flicked across the crater rim looming in every direction about the drill site. If the Americans had already infiltrated troops, they would be up there among those heights somewhere. He reached for his radio. “Shihadeh!” he called. “Do you hear me?”
