“Sixty seconds, Muck,” Briggs radioed.

Patrick glanced to the northwest, following the datalink- generated cues displayed in his electronic visor. The Sky Masters EB-52 was right on time, coming in at medium altitude—now that the Wolverines had destroyed all of the area defenses, it could climb higher to stay away from the surviving optically guided antiaircraft artillery units still operating.

“I am going to destroy your military base, Zuwayy,” Patrick said in his computer-synthesized voice. A microphone was picking up Zuwayy’s voice, broadcasting it via satellite back to Mersa Matruh, where it was instantly translated by computer; Patrick’s voice was similarly translated from English to Arabic the same way. “You will watch it all burn. And then I am going to destroy you.”

“Whoever you are, I have powerful friends, and I have money,” Zuwayy said. “Spare my life, and I’ll pay you. Ten million dollars. A hundred million dollars. You don’t have to kill me. We can make a deal.”

This last statement intrigued Patrick. “Who are your friends?”

“Powerful international arms merchant and black marketers,” Zuwayy said. “Let me go and I’ll tell you everything.”

‘Talk or you die.”

“Thirty seconds, Patrick. You’ve got heavy armored vehicles on their way to you. Best way out is to the east. Move it.”

“Talk!” Patrick shouted. “This is your last chance.”

“He is a Russian,” Zuwayy shouted. “He has access to nuclear weapons, missiles, aircraft, oil, anything you want. Just let me live and it’s all yours.”

It couldn’t be, Patrick thought. It was impossible. The Turks convicted him of murder and crimes against the state. He got the death penalty—and in Turkey, there was no appeal process. He was supposed to have been executed months ago....

“Ten TG, Muck,” Briggs warned him. “Find a place in the shade and hold on.”

Eight miles to the north, the EB-52 Megafortress opened the aft portion of its bomb bay doors, and one by one four bombs dropped from a rotary launcher exactly twelve seconds apart. These were GBU-28F JDAMs, or joint direct attack munitions—two-thousand-pound gravity bombs guided by satellite navigation signals that could glide as far as ten miles and still hit their targets with great accuracy. But instead of simple high-explosive warheads, these bombs were fuel-air explosives—the most devastating non-nuclear weapon devised. At a precise altitude above the ground, the bombs split open, releasing a large cloud of vapor. The vapor mixed with oxygen in the air to form a highly explosive gas. At the right moment, three small incendiary bomblets ejected into the gas cloud were ignited.

The resulting explosion of each JDAM was equivalent to a hundred tons of TNT, creating a fireball a half-mile in diameter and a shock wave that crushed everything aboveground for a mile in every direction. Spaced exactly two miles apart, the four fuel-air explosive bombs created a blinding wall of fire over the Jaghbub airfield. Detonated on the mostly uninhabited West side of the airfield, the fireballs themselves did relatively little damage—but the tremendous overpressure caused by the explosion overturned vehicles, blew out windows, burned wooden buildings, and scorched the sand black all across the reservation, right to the walls of the Green Palace and the Great Mosque where Patrick stood with his captive.