Harley checked the computer screen: “Two miles.”
The time seemed to drag on forever. Hardcastle couldn’t see a thing in the sky — the few lights and the remains of the fires to the south were destroying his night vision, and now the sirens wailing around the city prevented him from hearing anything. “Range!” he shouted.
“One-point-five miles…”
“I see it… Jesus, it’s low!” Hardcastle shouted. It was a small single-engine Cessna with a fixed landing gear, and it looked like it was less than a hundred feet in the air. It was just south of the Tidal Basin, skimming the treetops. An occasional gust of wind or thermal current from the fires pushed the plane sideways or caused it to lose altitude, but it always regained its heading — it was homing directly for the White House. Hardcastle moved the large lever behind the pistol grip down until it snapped to the stop, and he heard a sudden shot of high-compression air and a loud whirring sound. “I think it’s on. What next?”
“Large button on the very front of the grip — squeeze it with your thumb and hold to open the seeker-head shutter. Look through the sight and center the target in the sight.” Hardcastle looked over the sight, first to line up the Cessna, then looked through the sight. There was a sawtooth frame under a tiny round circle in the center of the sight. When Hardcastle placed the Cessna inside the center of the circle, he heard a loud beep beep beep beep beep… “It’s beeping. What next?”
“Pull the trigger and kill that motherfucker,” Harley said.
Hardcastle squeezed the trigger.
There was a very loud fwoosh! with very little kickback. The missile popped out of the aluminum tube and sailed skyward… and immediately fell to earth about fifty yards ahead of them. A second later the missile’s motor fired, and it skittered across the ground for hundreds of yards until it was lost from sight. “Shit! It didn’t track! It didn’t go!” Hardcastle shouted.
“It should’ve gone, ” Harley shouted. “We did everything right.” But Hardcastle was already scrambling to remove another missile from the Avenger launcher. He removed the launch tube from the shoulder grip, twisted off the hot battery cylinder, loaded another missile on the shoulder grip, and twisted on another battery unit.
By the time Hardcastle hefted the Stinger onto his right shoulder again, the Cessna was over the Jefferson Memorial, swooping lower and lower. Its wings swung wildly as it caught in the hot lower air currents as it passed over the flaming ground path of the terrorist 747. Hardcastle lined up on the Cessna once again, flipped the BCU activation lever down, and…
… as soon as he did so, white acidic gas began streaming out both ends of the missile. Hardcastle threw the missile and launcher on the ground. The gas was coming out at high pressure now, and the battery unit underneath the grip was smoking. ‘The missile must’ve been bad,” Hardcastle said. Harley was already moving toward the Avenger launcher to pull off another missile, so Hardcastle opened the second case to get another launcher — and he had a chance to study the instructions himself…
That's it! he exclaimed to himself.
The missile was pushed out of the launch tube by compressed nitrogen gas, and there was a 1.5-second delay before the rocket motor fired. The launch tube needed to be “super-elevated,” or raised high enough so the missile would not hit the ground before the rocket motor would fire. The last drawing before squeezing the trigger described the final lineup of the target in the sight and how to superelevate: after the target was acquired and locked on with the beeping tone, the Stinger had to be raised until the target nestled into one of the sawtooth notches on the bottom of the sight, depending on the direction the target was flying, to lead the target. The missile’s seeker head would still be tracking the target all the way, and when the rocket motor fired it would home in and kill.
By the time they loaded the third missile and screwed in a new battery unit, the Cessna was almost directly overhead, flying less than the length of a football field west of the Washington Monument. Hardcastle could clearly see two objects under the wings of the Cessna — those had to be the fuel-air explosives. He let the Cessna fly north of his position, then, as it flew over Constitution Avenue, activated the battery unit, squeezed the seeker head uncage switch, heard the beeping sound, lined up on the Cessna for the last…
“Freeze!” someone shouted behind him. “FBI! Drop that missile launcher now! ”
“No!” Harley shouted. “I’m Harley, Secret Service!” She held up her U.S. Treasury Department ID wallet, hoping that the FBI agent would notice the standard federal agent “safe signal”—looping one finger over on the badge side and two fingers on the ID card side. “We’re trying to stop that plane!”
“I said drop it!" Obviously he was too keyed-up to notice Harley’s safe signal. To the FBI agent who had driven up to the group at the Washington Monument, it looked as if Hardcastle were trying to launch a bazooka round at the White House or the Commerce Department Building.
“No!” Harley shouted. “I’m Secret Service! He’s authorized! Don’t!”
Hardcastle felt the bullets crash into the middle of his back like two sharp rapid punches — but the bulletproof vest saved his life. He superelevated the Stinger launcher, placing the target in the middle notch on the bottom of the sight so the muzzle of the launcher was raised well over the Cessna, and squeezed the trigger… just as two bullets hit the back of his Kevlar helmet. The FBI agent couldn’t get the shooter in the back, so he tried for a head shot, and this time he got him.
The missile popped out of the launch tube and sailed high overhead, nearly out of sight — but nowhere near the Cessna. Hardcastle thought it was flying out of control again. It was our last chance, damn it, he thought as he fell forward on his face, dazed and immobilized by the shock.
Our last chance… God, no…
He looked up toward the White House when someone shouted, “Look!” Two quick puffs of fire could be seen on the wings of the Cessna as the fuel-air explosives canisters released, just as the Cessna passed over the Zero Milestone — at the north end of the Ellipse and continued on toward the White House.
“Everyone get down! Get down!” Hardcastle murmured. “The bombs… the bombs are going… going off…” But he couldn’t seem to make his mouth move anymore.
Just as the Stinger missile started to nose over and head back to earth, the rocket motor ignited with a bright orange tongue of fire, and a split second later the missile arched gracefully and smoothly right into the front left side of the Cessna’s engine compartment, near an exhaust stack. The one-and-a-half-pound warhead exploded on contact, and the Cessna nosed over, spiraled down, and crashed on the south lawn of the White House.
But as the canisters began to disperse the deadly high-explosive mixture, the Stinger missile exploded. The cloud of explosive vapors had no chance to properly disperse and mix with the air that would have given it its tremendous explosive power. The fireball that erupted just over the south lawn was still a thousand feet in diameter, large enough to blacken the entire south lawn and blow out windows at the Old Executive Office Building and the Treasury Department. The polycarbonate antisniper windows of the White House rippled and shook from the explosion, but remained intact. Harley could feel the intense heat of the fireball a half-mile away. There were several loud explosions as the bomblets from the fuel-air explosives harmlessly hit the ground, tossed several hundred feet away by the force of the blast.