“I think we may be able to help you there,” Sanusi said. Patrick hadn’t had time to explore it yet, but the underground warehouses here supposedly held a lot of the latest military hardware. Some of it could be adapted for the Megafortress—if they had time to load it, mate it, program the weapons for release by the computers, and perhaps test them.

Patrick was amazed at the assortment of weapons they found in the weapon-storage bunkers a few minutes later. Zuwayy had collected a large and very impressive arsenal of Russian air-launched weapons: the BetAB- series of antirunway penetration bombs, the largest of which could create a three-foot-deep crater the size of a football field in twenty inches of concrete; a large variety of KAB- series laser-guided bombs, resembling copies of the American Paveway series, ranging from five-hundred- to well over three-thousand-pounders; almost the entire range of air-to- air missiles, from the tiny R-60 heat-seeker to the massive R-33 long-range radar-guided missile with nearly a hundred-mile range; and a good selection of air-to-surface missiles, including the Kh-27 antiradar missile, the Kh-29 laser-guided missile, and the Kh-15 long-range attack missile, a copy of the AGM-69A Short-Range Attack Missile, except these had only three-hundred-pound high-explosive warheads, not nuclear ones.

“Can you use any of them, my friend?” Sanusi asked.

“I think so,” Patrick replied with a grin. “All of the weapons have the Russian-standard two-hundred-and- fifty-millimeter suspension lug spacing, so we need to get busy resetting all of the squibs on the bomb racks to accommodate them. Fortunately, our engineers in Nevada had thought of the real possibility of using pirated Russian-bloc weapons in the field, so it should be easy to do the conversion in the field. And most of the weapons are in surprisingly good shape—others look brand new, as if they just came right ‘out of the box.’ ”

The Libyan weapons were hauled out of storage bunkers near the air base with block and tackle, makeshift trailers— most of the vehicles on the base had been destroyed by the fuel-air weapon attacks by the Megafortress days earlier— and pure old-fashioned muscle work. The weapons were dragged, pulled, or manhandled across the runway and to the largest and most undamaged hangar on the field, on which a large canvas tent had to be erected to hide the Megafortresses’ protruding tails, which had to remain outside the hangar. Muhammad as-Sanusi’s men had devised a bomb-loading “jammer” out of an engine jack for the larger weapons; the smaller weapons were simply carried into position by however many men it took to do the job. Once they were loaded, it was simple to get them ready for release— the Megafortress’s attack computer already had ballistics information for every possible air-launched weapon in existence, even Russian ones, so it was just a matter of telling the computer which weapon was on which station.