Free Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 by Wings of Fire (v1.1)

fire?”
                “Very slim,” Patrick replied. “If
they have no safeties in them or if the ones the Russians installed haven’t
been maintained by the Libyans, the worst that will happen is that the
high-explosive jacket surrounding the core will cook off and scatter
radioactive debris around.”
                 “What
if the trigger gets activated by a concussion or even by our shock beams?”
                “I don’t know,” Patrick said. “Try
not to hit the warhead with your beams. But there would have to be no pressure
or acceleration safeties and pretty unstable triggers that then happen to work
perfectly to produce a yield. Don’t worry about it. Expose your missiles with a
heat source as best you can so the FlightHawk can drop on them, and let’s get
out of here.”
                 Several
seconds later, Patrick saw another explosion, this time farther north. “Hot
damn, that works good!” Briggs crowed. “I’m liking this!”
                 Patrick
started running for the perimeter fence, then hit his boots’jump-jets. A shot
of compressed air propelled him twenty feet into the sky and almost a hundred
feet forward. When he landed, he jogged forward while scanning the area with
his helmet-mounted sensors. Libyan soldiers were pointing in his direction. He
had to run several yards until the accumulators built up enough pressure, then
propelled himself with ease over the perimeter fence. His sensors and
self-protection weapons worked automatically—any soldiers within thirty feet
were knocked unconscious by a bolt of energy strong enough to start a jet
aircraft.
                 Two
more jumps and six blocks later, Patrick was at the southernmost garbage pit.
It was exactly as Chris Wohl described it: a strong net, steel or even Kevlar,
with enough real trash piled atop it to hide a huge wide truck carrying a large
rocket. One step inside the pit revealed a second transporter about fifty yards
away. He immediately found the fuel filler port and set the first SS-12 afire
just as Wohl and Briggs did, and the TEL’s right rear wheels blew apart,
sending the SS-12 rocket rolling right off its launch rail. In a few seconds it
was going to be covered in burning diesel fuel—he hoped the nuclear warhead
would just melt away and not cook off. He had no idea how sophisticated the Russians’
nuclear warhead safety mechanisms were, or how well the Libyans had maintained
them, so he had to assume that the explosive material surrounding the nuclear
core would explode and scatter radioactive debris everywhere. He wanted to be
off the base before any of them did just that.
                 Patrick
quickly attacked the other two SS-12 launcher vehicles. Now there were
explosions everywhere, mostly in the north where Hal Briggs was creating havoc.
He turned just as his battle armor’s defensive weapon downed another Libyan
soldier that had run out from an underground shelter, an AK-47 raised and ready
to fire. “Base, status of the FlightHawk?”
                 “Inbound
sixty seconds, coming in hot,” Wendy McLanahan responded. “FlightHawk One has
good imagery of all three garbage pits and good downlink to FlightHawk Two. You
guys can bug out anytime. I took the liberty of calling for the Hammer too.”
The “Hammer” was the CV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft. Accompanied by
another tilt-rotor aircraft acting as an aerial refueling tanker, the Pave
Hammer had flown them in across Egypt from the S.S. Catherine the Great in the Mediterranean Sea and had been waiting
for them about a hundred miles to the south in the Sahara Desert.
                 “Good
thinking, Base. Stalkers, rendezvous at Sierra One.” The team had buried caches
of battery packs, spare parts, water, and medical supplies in various places in
the desert for their withdrawal; if they were not used within three days,
explosive charges would