He repeated the test with all four barrels, satisfied that he had the good stuff. Hydrazine and aluminum perchlorate were two highly explosive compounds all by themselves, but mixed together they formed a thick, unstable vapor that, mixed with oxygen and ignited with a spark, created a huge, violent explosion hundreds of times more powerful than gasoline or TNT. “Drove all this way across the desert at night with simple nylon ropes securing these barrels, did you?” Townsend asked as he stepped out of the truck. He knew that there was enough aluminum perchlorate and hydrazine in that truck to once and for all bring down one of the World Trade Center towers. “You’re either braver or stupider than I suspected.”
“Not as stupid as you two are, Townsend,” Crenshaw said, motioning with glee at the twin-engined de Havilland cargo plane. “We got here in one piece. Let’s see how brave you two are when you gotta fly outta here in that piece-of-shit cargo plane. You opened the drums. One wisp of hydrazine lingering in the air or near those engines when you start them up—poof. You blow the hydrazine, scatter the perchlorate, make an even bigger boom.” Townsend had to nod at that last remark — yes, it was going to be tricky going.
“These are the real prizes, gents.” Crenshaw stepped over to the second truck and opened a canvas flap, revealing several different oddly shaped weapons. There were eight devices in all, all about four to five feet long. “Took some time collecting these bad boys,” he said proudly. “All Gulf War veterans, all fully operational. Three Mark-77 napalm canisters, three CBU-55 fuel-air explosives units, and six CBU-59 cluster bombs units. Best stuff in the arsenal.”
“Very good,” Townsend said. It was indeed an impressive haul — perhaps too impressive. The Navy didn’t let ordnance like this just lie around. Crenshaw was a top munitions maintenance man, but even he had to carefully account for stuff like this. “My flashlight, if you please?”
“Suit yourself,” Crenshaw said, motioning to one of his men, who handed Townsend his flashlight. Townsend jumped up onto the truck, placed the flashlight in his teeth, and carefully examined each weapon.
The Mark-77 was little more than a large blunt-ended gas tank filled with chemical beads, which Townsend checked. Once filled with gasoline, the beads dissolved to form napalm, which could blanket nearly an entire city block with a sheet of fire. The CBU-59, with the words CONTENTS: LIVE LOADED BLU-77/B stenciled on the sides, were metal containers that, when released and opened by a barometric nose fuze, scattered seven hundred APAM (anti-personnel, antimaterial) bomblets across a four-hundred-foot oval swath. The one-pound baseball-sized bomblets were filled with steel dartlike projectiles that could mutilate anything — or anyone — in their path. Some of the bomblets exploded on contact, while others had timer fuzes which would detonate them minutes or even hours later.
The real prize was the fuel-air explosives bombs. The CBU-55 canisters were simply very large fuel tanks that would be filled with the hydrazine and aluminum perchlorate, the stuff in the other truck. Behind the endplate of each canister was a dispenser holding three BLU-73 bomblets. When released, the two compounds would mix, the canister would automatically spray the target area with a large cloud of explosive gas, and then the parachute-retarded bomblets would ignite the gas — the resulting explosion would be equivalent to ten 2,000-pound bombs going off at once. Pound for pound, the CBU-55 was the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the American military arsenal. In limited service in the Vietnam War because the dense foliage dissipated its explosive effects, it was the weapon of choice in the wide-open deserts of Iraq. Officially it was used only to “clear minefields,” but it was used with terrible effect on large masses of Iraqi troops, squashing and incinerating anything within five hundred yards of ground zero. Its devastating killing power was considered — unethical, almost on a par with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.
“Very impressive, Crenshaw,” Townsend said, swinging the flashlight beam into Crenshaw’s face, then snapping it off. Acquiring the fuel-air explosive weapons would make Cazaux very happy indeed. “I hope bearer bonds are acceptable. They have been in the past.”
“As long as you got my share in U.S. greenbacks in there, I don’t care about that shit,” Crenshaw said. “The officers want the fuckin’ Kraut bonds, not me. Now get the fuck down and—”
Distracted by the flashlight beam, Crenshaw didn’t see what Townsend was doing until he had nearly finished doing it — he had unscrewed the butt cap off the three-cell flashlight, removed the two rear D-cell batteries, screwed them together, and aimed it at him. Before Crenshaw could raise his submachine gun, Townsend pressed a button, and with a barely audible pufff, a two-inch razor-edged arrow pierced his chest, sliced through his heart, deflected off a rib, and ricocheted around inside his body like a pinball, slicing up blood vessels and lungs in the blink of an eye. He turned and shot darts into the first truck driver and two more gunsels standing nearby, then leaped off the truck. Everything had happened so fast that the driver of the first truck was still idly sitting behind his wheel when Townsend ran over to his door, put the weapon to his left temple, and fired a bolt into his brain.
Ysidro disdained the use of any sort of fancy James Bond-type weapons. As soon as he saw Crenshaw go down, Ysidro was on the move. He bashed the heavy metal briefcase into the soldier nearest him, grabbed his gun as he went down, and started pumping bullets at anything that moved, remembering not to shoot toward the explosives- laden trucks and counting on Townsend to kill anyone near him. The massacre of the three soldiers near him was complete in a matter of seconds. The guard at the rear of the hangar took off running as soon as he saw Ysidro sprinting after him, but luckily the back door to the hangar was locked. Ysidro dropped him with a bullet in his chest from fifty feet, then stepped up to him and put a second bullet in his brain.
“Jesus Christ, Ysidro, one bullet ricocheting in the wrong direction could’ve cooked us all,” Townsend said.
“Hey, we’re already fuckin’ stupid for accepting this assignment in the first place — this is a job for the grunts,” Ysidro said. “I’m a guerrilla, not a trash-hauler, and if we blow, we blow. Let’s just get the hell out of here. Linnares, get your ass out here and load these explosives now!” Johann Linnares, the leader of the flight crew, stepped out of the de Havilland along with his crew — they had killed the two guards who tried to lock them up in the plane as soon as they were alone.
“I still don’t fucking understand why we had to kill these guys this time around,” Ysidro said as the crews began to load the explosives and weapons aboard the cargo plane. “These guys were swaggering assholes, but they were generally straight with us, and we been trading with them for a long time. What gives?”
“Things are going to get too hot around the clubhouse once we begin the next series of attacks,” Townsend said. “We paid these blokes pretty well, but when the feds see what we’re about to do, the heat gets turned up and the reward money for our heads will undoubtedly be more than assholes like Crenshaw could resist. I think Henri was correct — once these attacks are completed, it’ll be time to open up some new sources of hardware. By then, we’ll be the top dogs in the terror-for-hire game. We’ll have the world’s pick of the litter.”