Within eight seconds the motors had burned out, and a wide, flat oval air intake popped open underneath the missile. Supersonic air was ingested and compressed by the shape of the now-empty rocket motor casings, mixed with jet fuel, and ignited by high-energy pulses of laser energy. The resultant energy propelled the missile to over ten times the speed of sound in just a few more seconds, and the missile ate up the distance between its launch point and its target in no time, climbing to two hundred thousand feet as it raced downrange. The missile burned all of its jet fuel in just a few seconds, and it quickly decelerated and began descending back through the atmosphere. Once the outside skin temperature was within safe limits, the bullet-shaped forebody detached from the spent propulsion section, which automatically blew itself to bits moments later.
Small stabilizer fins popped out of the forebody, and it became a supersonic re-entry vehicle, guiding itself to its target with its on-board navigation computer refined by Global Positioning System signals. Fifteen seconds to impact, the protective nosecap detached, revealing a combination millimeter-wave radar and imaging infrared scanner, and the warhead began uploading video signals via satellite to Boomer and Seeker back in Dreamland. The steering cue in the video image was several yards off, but Seeker used a trackball and rolled the steering rectangle back on the pickup truck, which sent steering correction signals to the warhead.
The video image from the warhead was sharp and clear all the way to impact. Patrick had a brief glimpse of a young man, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, wearing a mask and carrying an AK-47 assault rifle that looked almost as big as he was, who looked right up at the incoming weapon milliseconds before the image vanished. Patrick knew that the warhead was programmed to explode a tenth of a second before impact, splitting the warhead apart into thousands of small hypervelocity fragments, increasing the killing radius of the weapon out to about forty to fifty yards.
“Direct hit!” Boomer shouted happily. He looked at the control monitor and slapped his hands together. “Total time from detection to impact: forty-eight point nine seconds. Less than a friggin’ minute!”
“It’s more like a Maverick missile — or a sniper’s bullet — only fired from two hundred miles away!” Seeker exclaimed. She had switched back to the Global Hawk’s image of the target area and zoomed in to take a close look at the Streaker warhead’s impact spot. “Pretty good urban weapon effects, sir, exactly what you were hoping for. A really good-sized hole, about fifteen to twenty feet in diameter — looks like the center punched through the concrete parking garage roof into the floor below — but no damage to the nearby buildings that I can see except for a few broken windows. Even a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Small-Diameter Bomb might have caved in the sides of the building facing the blast.”
“With no explosive warhead on the Streaker, there’s nothing there to create any collateral damage,” Boomer said. “We put just enough shaped explosive charges in the warhead to break it apart milliseconds before impact, and that was both to increase the weapon effect slightly as well as to destroy as much of the evidence as we could. All they should find are tiny pieces of—”
“Oh…my…God,” Seeker breathed. She had zoomed out to survey a little more of the surrounding area. There were clusters of people, perhaps two dozen or so, just outside the apartment complex area lying on the sidewalk and street, with others attending to them, waving frantically for help. “What in hell happened here? Where did those people come from, and why are they lying on the ground like that? Are they from inside the apartment complex…?”
“The Streaker must’ve set off the Ra’ad rocket’s warhead,” Boomer said. They all carefully studied the image as Seeker took manual control of the camera and zoomed in. “But what’s going on? Those people over there weren’t anywhere near the blast, but they’re staggering around like they were hit. Was it shrapnel from the Ra’ad warhead? The Streaker doesn’t have an explosive payload — it’s all kinetic energy. Is the Persian army moving in? What’s going…?”
“A chemical weapon cloud,” Patrick said.
“What…?”
“It looks like some sort of chemical weapon cloud, spreading out from the target area,” Patrick said. He pointed to the monitor. “Not more than thirty feet away. Here’s a little bit of the cloud…see, it’s not rising like a cloud from an explosion or from heat, but traveling horizontally, blown around by air currents.” He looked closer. “Not twitching…it’s hard to tell, but it looks like he’s rubbing his eyes and face and is having trouble breathing. I’ll bet it’s a blister agent…lewisite or phosgene. Mustard agents would take longer to incapacitate someone, even in high concentrations…look, now someone collapsing across the street. Jesus, the warhead must’ve had several liters of CW in it.”
“My God,” Seeker gasped. “I’ve been operating remote sensors for almost twenty years, and I’ve never seen anyone die from a chemical weapon attack.”
“I have a feeling the powers that be aren’t going to like this,” Patrick said.
“Should we recall the Vampire, sir?”
“Hell no,” Patrick said. “We still have three more Streakers on board, and another Vampire loaded and waiting to go at Mosul. Keep on scanning for more insurgents. Congratulations, Boomer. The SkySTREAK worked perfectly. Nail a few more insurgents for us.”
“You got it, sir,” Boomer said happily.
Unfortunately, Patrick turned out to be exactly correct. The Global Hawk images were being beamed to several terrestrial locations as well as to Silver Tower, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff Operations Center in Washington, and it was there that he received his first call just moments later: “Genesis, this is Rook.” That was from the duty officer at the JCS Operations Center. “Stand by, please.” A moment later, the chief of staff of the Air Force, General Charles A. Huffman, appeared on the video teleconference channel, looking a little pale himself but still very angry as well.
Huffman, a tall, dark-haired, and very young man with husky, athletic features — more like a linebacker than a running back, Boomer thought — was typical of the new breed of leaders in the American military. In the five years since the Russian nuclear cruise missile air strike on the continental United States, known as the “American Holocaust,” which left several thousand dead, hundreds of thousands injured, several Air Force bases destroyed, and almost all of America’s long-range bombers wiped out, the military ranks had filled with eager young men and women wishing to protect their country, and many officers were promoted well below their primary zones and placed into important command positions years before it was ever thought possible. Also, since senior leaders with extensive combat experience were kept in charge of tactical units or major commands, often officers with less direct combat experience were placed in more administrative and training billets — and since the office of the chief of staff was mostly concerned with equipping and training their forces, not leading them into combat, it seemed a good match.
That was true of Huffman as welclass="underline" Patrick knew he came from the logistics field, a command pilot, wing, and numbered Air Force commander, and former Air Force Materiel Command commander with over fifteen thousand hours flying time in a variety of cargo, transport, and liaison aircraft in two conflicts, and extensive experience in supply, resource management, and test and evaluation. As former head of Materiel Command, Huffman had been notional commander of activities at the top-secret High-Technology Aerospace Weapons Center at Elliott Air Force Base, although that link was mostly administrative and logistical — operationally, the commanders at HAWC reported to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, the President’s National Security Adviser at the White House, or — at least under former President Kevin Martindale — directly to the President himself.