“The attack will commence with a flight of three Wolverine cruise missiles, launched from over the Med,” Patrick continued. “They will spread out and perform a coordinated multiaxis attack on the air defenses north of the city of Benina. Each Wolverine will attack three air defense sites with cluster munitions, followed by ‘suicide’ attacks on the air traffic control radar site, the northern security headquarters here, and the southern security headquarters, here.

“The main attack will follow thirty seconds later—a flight of three more Wolverine cruise missiles. They will use a flight path cleared for them by the preceding Wolverine suppression attacks, but they will be programmed to divert if necessary to avoid any air defense sites missed or pop-up threats not targeted by the first flight.” He switched slides to a close-up of a small cluster of buildings on the northeast side of the large two-runway airfield. “This is the Benina Command Center, headquarters of Libya’s Eastern Joint Operations Center and Eastern Air Defense Sector. The heart of the facility is two stories underground, protected by twelve-inch reinforced concrete on each floor.

“Each Wolverine will carry two different warheads: a deep-target penetrating warhead using a rocket-propelled one-thousand-pound warhead, followed by a one- thousand-pound thermium nitrate high-explosive warhead. Each Wolverine will travel a different flight path but will be programmed to hit the same spot; each missile will perform a pop-up push-over maneuver to drive the first warhead down through the roof to the subfloors, followed by the thermium detonation. The weapons should have no problems going through each level to the command center level, even if they put armor in we don’t know about.

“As you know, the thermium warhead has the explosive power of five tons of TNT,” Patrick went on, “so if the FlightHawk can determine if the target has been destroyed, we may divert the other Wolverines, probably the third one, to a secondary target, which is the military communications facility at Benina. If we need a tertiary target, we’ll switch to the combination petroleum-fired power plant and desalination plant just east of Benghazi—that should turn out the lights and shut off the taps in Benghazi for quite some time.”

Patrick displayed another map, this one of northwestern Egypt. Hal Briggs noted that Patrick’s briefing was cool, calm, professional, and well under control. He had seen Patrick give countless reports and briefings over the fourteen years he had known him, and despite everything that had happened to him and everything they were facing now, he seemed like the same emotionless all-business guy he’d always known. Yet in a way, this mission was much different: Although Patrick planned this mission as a strike against a very-high-value military target, Hal reminded himself, it was still a punitive strike—Patrick was simply lashing out at the Libyans. That was not like him at all.