Meanwhile, Wohl knocked twice on the rear bulkhead. Behind the pressurized cabin was the unpressurized baggage compartment, which in Patrick's plane was normally mostly filled with an auxiliary fuel tank. But gloved fingers popped the false steel cover off, and two Night Stalkers emerged from the space normally occupied by the fuel tank. They were clothed in heavy winter-weight flight suits, jackets, boots, hats, and gloves, and each had a green oxygen bottle and mask. They, too, took a few moments to stretch and get their limbs going again, then donned FM commlinks and readied automatic pistols. "Cargo One is up," one of them reported.
"Stand by," Wohl said. "One guard in sight. Pop your hatch and get ready." The Night Stalkers unlatched the baggage compartment door as quietly as they could but did not open it.
Meanwhile, Briggs made his way to the split clamshell entry hatch, unlatched it with a twist of its handle, opened the top half just an inch or two, then unlatched and lowered the lower half. He hoped the guard couldn't see the open lower half from where he was sitting. Briggs stepped out and then lowered the upper half of the door all the way. "Let's go, Sarge-"
"Freeze!" he heard. "Hands where I can see them! Now!" The lone guard had seen the hatch open and had quickly sneaked around the Aerostar, his rifle lowered.
Briggs shot his hands up in the air. The guard braced his rifle against his right hip, then pulled his walkie-talkie from his web belt and keyed the mike button: "Unit Three to Control.. "
"Cargo! Out now! Hard!" Wohl whispered into his commlink.
The lead Night Stalker in the baggage compartment threw himself out the baggage compartment, landing about five feet in front of the startled FBI agent. The agent pulled the trigger on his rifle. The single round missed the Night Stalker by a few inches, then ricocheted off the side of the Aerostar, missing Briggs's head by scant inches as well.
The second Night Stalker inside the baggage compartment aimed and fired his weapon. Tiny crystalline darts about the size of a short golfer's pencil hit the FBI agent. The darts instantly exploded into a fine dust that penetrated the agent's black fatigues. The agent had just enoflgh time to realize that he was hit before the nerve agent in the dust completely immobilized his entire voluntary nervous system and he collapsed to the concrete hangar floor.
Briggs, Wohl, and the two Night Stalkers quickly split up, taking separate exits into the building. They were gone before any other FBI agents had responded.
Special Agent Norwalk was in the middle of a sip of coffee when he heard the shot, and he nearly dumped the coffee on himself. "What the hell…?"
"Don't worry-that's just the cavalry showing up," Patrick said matter-of-factly. Norwalk was reaching for his service pistol when Patrick touched a hidden switch on his desk, then covered his eyes with his arm and tightly closed his eyes just as the room lights went out and an immense flash of light completely blinded the two FBI agents. The room lights then came back to normal. Patrick was able to simply walk over and disarm both men by plucking their weapons from their hands-the sudden flash of light disoriented them so badly that they could hardly tell up from down. Norwalk was shouting for help as he bumped and caromed off the furniture; the other agent couldn't stay on his feet any longer and finally slumped to the floor.
Briggs and Wohl rushed into the office moments later. Briggs looked at the two writhing on the floor. "There's the last two. All present or accounted for," he said, then shot both with the crystal nerve darts. "I think the guy out in the hangar shot your plane."
"Bastard. He'll pay for that," Patrick deadpanned. "Let's go."
Within minutes, Patrick started up the DC-10's auxiliary power unit and powered it up while one of the Night Stalkers drove one of the company jet fuel trucks over to the DC-10. After Patrick directed him on how to use the DC-10's single-point refueling system, he went up to the cockpit and started getting ready for their flight out of the country. Meanwhile, Briggs and Wohl loaded up as many sets of the Tin Man battle armor, the powered exoskeletons, the electromagnetic rail guns, and as much ammunition, spare battery packs, tools, and as many other devices as they could carry in the DC-10. In less than twenty minutes, they had completely refueled the DC-10, loaded it up, and were all on board.
"All that cargo space, and no weapons aboard," Briggs said as he looked down the cavernous cargo area. They had enough cargo space and payload to carry two Megafortresses' worth of air-launched weapons-but they had no time to get any out from the storage bunkers. "Too bad."
"We got the fuel, the battle armor, and the rail gunsthat'll do for now," Patrick said. "The nerve agent will wear off in another thirty minutes-we need to be long gone before they wake up."
"Unfortunately, we weren't able to bring many weapons with us," Patrick said to Sayyid Muhammad ibn al-Hasan as-Sanusi. They were back in the big aircraft hangars at Jaghbub's military airfield, supervising the refueling of all the planes. One of the Megafortresses had to abort while over the Atlantic; in addition, all of the EB-1C Megafortress Two aircraft had been returned to their Air National Guard unit. Their remaining force: two EB-52 Megafortress flying battleships and two AL-52 Dragon airborne laser aircraft, Dragon One and Two, with Dragon Two carrying its untested plasma laser on board. "But I would sure like to take another look at your weapon storage areas, Your Highness."
"I think we may be able to help you there," Sanusi said. Patrick hadn't had time to explore it yet, but the underground warehouses here supposedly held a lot of the latest military hardware. Some of it could be adapted for the Megafortress-if they had time to load it, mate it, program the weapons for release by the computers, and perhaps test them.
Patrick was amazed at the assortment of weapons they found in the weapon-storage bunkers a few minutes later. Zuwayy had collected a large and very impressive arsenal of Russian air-launched weapons: the BetAB- series of antirunway penetration bombs, the largest of which could create a three-foot-deep crater the size of a football field in twenty inches of concrete; a large variety of KAB- series laser-guided bombs, resembling copies of the American Paveway series, ranging from five-hundred- to well over three-thousand-pounders; almost the entire range of air-toair missiles, from the tiny R-60 heat-seeker to the massive R-33 long-range radar-guided missile with nearly a hundred-mile range; and a good selection of air-to-surface missiles, including the Kh-27 antiradar missile, the Kh-29 laser-guided missile, and the Kh-15 long-range attack missile, a copy of the AGM-69A Short-Range Attack Missile, except these had only three-hundred-pound high-explosive warheads, not nuclear ones.
"Can you use any of them, my friend?" Sanusi asked.
"I think so," Patrick replied with a grin. "All of the weapons have the Russian-standard two-hundred-andfifty-millimeter suspension lug spacing, so we need to get busy resetting all of the squibs on the bomb racks to accommodate them. Fortunately, our engineers in Nevada had thought of the real possibility of using pirated Russian-bloc weapons in the field, so it should be easy to do the conversion in the field. And most of the weapons are in surprisingly good shape-others look brand new, as if they just came right 'out of the box.' "
The Libyan weapons were hauled out of storage bunkers near the air base with block and tackle, makeshift trailersmost of the vehicles on the base had been destroyed by the fuel-air weapon attacks by the Megafortress days earlierand pure old-fashioned muscle work. The weapons were dragged, pulled, or manhandled across the runway and to the largest and most undamaged hangar on the field, on which a large canvas tent had to be erected to hide the Megafortresses' protruding tails, which had to remain outside the hangar. Muhammad as-Sanusi's men had devised a bomb-loading "jammer" out of an engine jack for the larger weapons; the smaller weapons were simply carried into position by however many men it took to do the job. Once they were loaded, it was simple to get them ready for releasethe Megafortress's attack computer already had ballistics information for every possible air-launched weapon in existence, even Russian ones, so it was just a matter of telling the computer which weapon was on which station.