“Copy. Tiger 2?”
“Copy.”
Easterman waited another fifteen seconds, then shoved the yoke forward, aiming to bring his Raptor down to five thousand feet in a decreasing-radius loop around the warehouse. The next few seconds were the only technically tricky part of the mission. He would be in a steep dive when he dropped the bombs in the Raptor’s bays, to minimize their forward momentum relative to the stationary target below.
The bombs could and would guide themselves after release. But unlike missiles, they didn’t have their own engines, so Easterman had a narrow window for the drop. For this mission, the bombs had been preprogrammed with the location of the warehouse. Unless he retargeted them, the software that controlled them wouldn’t let him release them without what Air Force engineers called a “true path” to the target, a route that didn’t violate the laws of physics. Easterman couldn’t do that math, but his on-board computers could. At the same time, the Raptor couldn’t be fully vertical at release, or else the bombs wouldn’t clear their bays. Ideally, he would have the Raptor in a fifty- to fifty-five-degree dive as he dropped the bombs.
Fortunately for Easterman, air-to-air combat required exactly these sorts of maneuvers, and the F-22A handled them as well as any jet that had ever been built. For the next few seconds, Easterman and the Raptor were in perfect harmony. The plane weighed twenty tons and had a forty-four-foot wingspan, yet it anticipated his moves as nimbly as his four-hundred-pound sportbike. Meanwhile, his ground-facing radar showed the convoy slowing, turning left around the warehouse. Another left and they were in the lot behind the building. Men poured out, glowing on his infrared monitor.
“Sorcerer, we are green. Target acquired. Engaging.”
The two Raptors carried four bombs, four thousand pounds of high explosive in all. The two convoys on the ground below totaled six vehicles, all standard civilian, no armor or blast-resistant windows. They were parked in a lot about one hundred twenty feet long and fifty wide. The laws of physics were brutal and simple. The Pentagon planners who simulated the attack reported odds of 99.2 percent that everyone in the target zone would die, whether they were on the ground or still inside a vehicle. As for the 0.8 percent, you don’t want to be that guy, the lead planner said. Unless you like skin grafts.
Easterman reached for a two-inch-high joystick on the console above his right knee, pushed it up and right like he was switching gears on a manual transmission. The heads-up display inside his helmet flashed yellow. The bomb was armed. Then green. The software agreed that the bomb could hit its preprogrammed target. Easterman thumbed the red button on top of the joystick for two seconds. The Raptor tugged slightly as the right missile bay slid open and a thousand-pound bomb released. Easterman pulled the joystick down and left, pushed the button again. His left missile bay opened. The second bomb dropped out. The plane immediately felt lighter and more agile. He leveled out, swung the Raptor north. The hard part, such as it was, was over.
“Sorcerer, this is Tiger 1. GBUs out.”
“Tiger 2 here,” the second Raptor pilot chimed in. “GBUs out.”
The letters stood for Guided Bomb Unit. Each bomb carried a Global Positioning System receiver and a package of software, gyroscopes, and motion sensors. The gyroscopes and sensors predicted the bomb’s direction in real time. The software controlled motorized fins on the bomb’s tail to guide the bomb to the coordinates preprogrammed into the GPS.
The bombs were shockingly accurate. Ninety-six percent of the time, they landed within ten feet of their target coordinates. Even in crowded cities, they had sharply reduced civilian casualties. Tonight civilians weren’t an issue. No one lived within a quarter mile of the warehouse. A bomb dropped from an aircraft in level flight required eighteen seconds to fall five thousand feet. But these bombs had a head start, because the Raptor had released them in a dive. Easterman dropped them almost exactly as Ayoub and Habibi realized the trap. They had seven seconds of warning.
Theoretically, the men on the ground might have survived if they had reacted immediately. A fit man could sprint as far as fifty meters in seven seconds, enough under ideal circumstances to escape the worst of the blast wave. But in the real world almost no one had the situational awareness to take off at a full run with no warning. And the bigger the group, the more time required for the warning to spread and men to get out of each other’s way.
Ayoub had time to hear a high whistle, and then another and another. The men around him looked at one another, processed the danger, scattered, running in every direction, a starburst pattern, an uncanny echo of the blast wave that was about to hit. Ayoub made for the lemon grove, hoping somehow that he’d find safety in the burned stumps—
As they’d been programmed to do, the bombs landed in a one-hundred-twenty-degree arc centered on the back door of the warehouse. The Pentagon’s simulators had predicted that configuration would produce maximum lethality. It did. Four superheated overpressure waves tore through the parking lot, each moving faster than the speed of sound, powerful enough to tear through metal and glass, hot enough to incinerate anything they touched. Seventeen of the eighteen men in the parking lot died instantly, twelve cut into pieces barely recognizable as human. Ayoub ran farther and faster than anyone else. The blast picked him up, tore the skin off his back, threw him twenty-five feet. For just a moment, he thought he’d survived. He might have, too, if not for a freakish bit of bad luck. He landed headfirst on a stump and cracked his neck. A million buzzing honeybees filled his brain and then, Inshallah—
Easterman wished he could check the damage for himself. But the briefers at Incirlik had said in no uncertain terms they wanted the Raptors out of Lebanese airspace as soon as possible after the mission was done. So he and Tiger 2 set a course northwest at twenty-five thousand feet, Mach 0.98. No sonic booms tonight, please.
The after-action survey came from the Avenger. The drone descended to two thousand feet, below the cloud layer, for a brief live feed of the carnage below. Its cameras picked up only six bodies, but the fact that the others had vanished didn’t surprise anyone. Five of the six vehicles in the convoy were pulverized past recognition, and the back half of the warehouse had collapsed. After two quick passes over the site, the drone pulled back to five thousand feet and made another loop, this one wider. Anyone who had escaped would have to be on foot or hiding inside the warehouse, leaving an obvious signature on radar or the infrared cameras. But the Avenger found nothing. The analysts and drone pilot agreed. Eighteen enemy killed in action, no wounded, no survivors, no friendly casualties. Success.
The President didn’t watch the mission. He was eating dinner with his wife and kids. He wanted the illusion of normalcy for at least a few minutes. The White House chef seemed to have caught his mood. Tonight’s meal was spaghetti and meatballs with a simple tossed salad.
The President was just tucking into his second meatball when his steward stepped into the dining room, phone in hand. “Sir. I have Ms. Green.”
“Donna.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir.”
“I asked you to.” He had told her to call as soon as the bombs hit.
“It’s done. We count eighteen red KIA. Including Ayoub and Habibi. No survivors.”
“Anything I need to worry about?”
“No, sir. The Raptors are en route to Incirlik.”