One might believe the bombardier missed his target, because the gravity weapons detonated a thousand feet in the air, producing nothing more than a loud BANG! and a puff of sand below. The explosion was repeated sixty-three times in the space of six minutes, ten weapons per minute, as the Libyan bomber sowed its deadly seeds. Curious soldiers below looked up when they heard the explosions, and they jumped and felt the sudden gush of air and a little bit of pressure in their ears—nothing more severe than a slammed door or a slug of mud popping out of a new well. But there was very little heat unless the explosion was directly overhead, no trace of vapor or liquid, and no shrapnel or caltrops. Before most folks realized it, the noisemakers were gone. They could have been fireworks, except these fireworks were in the morning, which didn't make sense at all.

It still didn’t make sense later that day—even when the soldiers started dying in massive, horrendous numbers.

The ones directly under the airbursts were first, complaining of headaches that increased in intensity quickly, eventually causing loss of eyesight and loss of equilibrium. Hours later, they were coughing up blood. By the time they were able to get off work later that day, they were usually unable to take themselves to the infirmary. Many of them died in their beds or in their living rooms, surrounded by their puzzled comrades and worried corpsmen. The ones that were as far as one mile away from the bursts didn’t start having symptoms until the next day, but their fate was the same—crushing headaches leading to blindness, loss of balance eventually leading to incapacitation, and sudden loss of blood leading to hemorrhage and death within eight hours.

The soldiers in bunkers and even chemical weapon-resistant shelters were not spared—even those in underground storage areas and shielded command centers could not escape. Eventually the deadly neutron and gamma radiation from the sixty-four neutron bombs detonated over Salimah, unrestricted by the uranium outer shell as in regular fission weapons, claimed over twelve thousand lives . ..

. .. without harming one piece of oil-drilling equipment, spilling one drop of crude oil, or ruining one piece of precious military hardware.

CHAPTER 9

NAVAL AMPHIBIOUS BASE CORONADO,
 CORONADO, CALIFORNIA
 DAYS LATER

Patrick detested running, but it was the only aerobic exercise he cared for, and he knew he’d probably blow up like a “bunker-buster” bomb if he didn’t do it. When he was in town he usually jogged the short distance from his condo on Coronado Island, across the bay from San Diego, to the base gym at the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. This time, however, he had Bradley with him, so he drove. It took longer to go down to the garage, strap Bradley in, and pull out onto busy Silver Strand Highway than it did to get to the base.