There would be no extra ammunition.

Strike fast. Strike hard. Achieve the objective. Or die trying.

Nineteen kilometers.

Eighteen.

Seventeen.

Sixteen.

The top of a building appeared. The pilot pulled back on his stick and the whole complex popped into sight. Targeting displays came alive. Red rectangles converged on anti-missile cannons, on electronic-destroying microwave beams, on anti-personnel guns, on a rooftop radar installation.

RADAR WARNING flashed on the cockpit glass as the site’s radar lit them up.

BEEEEEEEEP. A tone indicated they were being targeted.

The pilot fired.

Four cylindrical launcher pods – two on each wing – came alive with fire. Each launcher let loose a spiraling barrage of the cigar-wide micromissiles, as tubes packed within each pod let loose in succession, milliseconds apart.

In a quarter of a second the plane put a hundred and twenty tiny, lethal, all-too-smart missiles into the air, racing ahead of the plane at eight Gs, spreading out, zigging and zagging to make themselves more difficult targets to stop.

The small base responded instantly. Lasers came alive, flicked from missile to missile, seeking to confuse them, knock them off course, destroy them. Projectile launchers fired a screen of millimeter-scale debris at the flight paths of the missiles to cause collisions. Proximity-alarmed Gatling guns came alive, projected the course and direction of the missiles, fired a spray of hot lead bullets, hundreds per second, at the locations where the incoming ordinance would be.

Lasers struck missiles at twelve kilometers east of the facility. Explosions lit up the night. Missiles burst into flame, veered off course, detonated their warheads prematurely, set off their neighbors.

Almost a hundred kept coming, accelerating as the lasers ate away at them.

Gatling gun rounds first hit them at three kilometers east. Missile engines burst apart. Fuel exploded into air. Explosions sent nearby missiles tumbling, set off further explosions.

More than fifty missiles kept coming; more Gatling gun rounds, more explosions, as close as half a klick away.

Thirty missiles hit the screen of defensive particles a hundred meters from the eastern edge of the complex. Missile warheads and guidance systems ripped themselves apart. Explosions were deafening now. Shrapnel kept moving forward after missiles were destroyed, slamming into buildings, into equipment, into personnel.

Metal rain and explosive detonation blinded radar, blinded thermal imagers.

And in the moment of blindness, the second aircraft slid smoothly over the horizon to the west, and unleashed its own barrage.

They came in hot after destroying the base’s defenses. There were still humans down there. Armed adversaries.

At one kilometer out the pilots of both planes rotated their wingtip jet engines nearly skyward, brought them in on hover, noses of both planes angled slightly down, thirty-millimeter cannons ready to fire on anything moving on the ground.

Tao pointed. “That’s the building,” he said, pointing at the two story structure as they came within a hundred meters of it. “Flush it.”

“Roger,” the pilot said. “Opening up.”