The rest got the idea, and they all hunkered down as deep as they could in the still-warm trench, while Burke stood up with a silly smirk plastered across his face, where no one could hope to see it. Above them, the two armed carnivore recon drones orbited lazily at over thirteen thousand meters, the target below them nothing more than a mere spec to the human eye. But it wasn’t a human eye that they relied on, so the two weapons of war could see with crystal clarity as their systems blinked to life and they prepared to launch.

Power fed into the GBU-98s from the drones, charging the superconducting capacitance coils that encircled each weapon’s interior until the telltale LEDs all went green. Then the four weapons, two to a drone, fell free of their shackles.

Four fins snapped out a quarter second after release, pulling the rear ends of the weapons up until their noses pointed at the desired location, the relatively small rocket motors whined, and the bombs leapt to life.

Downward they rushed, entering terminal attack mode only three seconds after they were released, their onboard computers making final adjustments in the last instant before the point of no return, activating the weapon’s terminal program.

Designed late in the so-called terror wars, the GBU-98 carried a payload sufficient to destroy any bunker ever built, assuming it could penetrate it. That problem, in particular, had been a plague on the forces of the so-called civilized nations early in the terror wars, because many of their targets were effectively proofed against even nuclear attacks by a simple insulating layer of earth.

Initial designs had depended on an earth-penetrating steel casing to get the weapon deep enough before detonation.

The GBU-98s used that in addition to a more…refined approach.

The powerful, though short-lived, lasers built into the nose cones of each weapon whined to life as the weapons went terminal, cutting into the ground where they were aimed like an industrial drill, opening the door, so to speak.

And then it was done. The lasers burned out under the powerful energy pulse released through them, and the weapons slammed into the ground right through the holes they had cut and kept on boring down on pure kinetic power until they blew through into the caverns below and came to a sudden, jarring stop.

The earth under them heaved, throwing the men in the trench into the air from the sheer force of it. Savoy and Mehn had been expecting something along those lines and landed easily, but the others just slammed back down to the ground as four pillars of fire rose up from the strike zones and huge gouts of flames and dust erupted from the Drasin tunnels.

Burke dropped back into the trench, whistling happily over the network as he threw himself over three of the locals. “Incoming!”

Mehn and Savoy followed his example, covering as many of the locals as they could with their armor as dirt and debris rained down around them and a stiff wind whistled over their heads. There wasn’t as much of it as one might expect, since the vast majority of the blast had been directed downward by the shaped detonations of the GBU-98s.