Once the battle had been joined, Hassim had found himself unprepared for the stupendous noise of it all. He had been involved in countless firefights and attacks, but somehow this was so much more … pervasive. The air shook with frequent explosions that seemed to be spreading with ferocious speed from his right, where Shahim and his team of one hundred men had started their branch of the perimeter attack. Hassim had wondered at what was causing those great explosions, but had pressed on toward his objective, eventually coming up on the garrison protecting the armory. After a brief firefight in which his poorly armed and poorly trained troops were clearly loosing ground, the defenders had been flanked by Shahim and his one hundred fighters.

For his part, Shahim Al-Khazar had not waited long for the one hundred men that had come with him on his run around the perimeter. Sprinting ahead of them, he had taken out the Pakistani soldiers in his path with machine efficiency, cutting through their skulls with his laser as he ran in his long loop around the inside of the lower part of the perimeter fences. He was firing the rifles he carried in each hand as well, shooting into the fuel tanks of jeeps and trucks to detonate the petrol and diesel they contained. It was mostly for effect, but that effect was a wave of quick death surging through the base.

Shahim’s aerial view told him where each of his teams were. It also told him where the Pakistanis were. He could see the Pakistani troops gathering around the armory and the much larger force taking up positions around the silos in the predefined defensive stances he had described to his cohorts earlier that night. He could also see that Hassim was pinned down by one of the groups defending the armory. Dakar, for his part, was continuing his fight north, around the perimeter closer to the silos, but he was still well outside the ranks of the three thousand soldiers now guarding those precious nuclear missiles.

Amidst the destruction, he spotted seven of the army’s new Al-Khalid battle tanks sitting in a yard a few hundred yards up ahead. He knew that three others were already on the move around the base, and even now converging on the silos to support their defense.