“What if the trigger gets activated by a concussion or even by our shock beams?”

“I don’t know,” Patrick said. “Try not to hit the warhead with your beams. But there would have to be no pressure or acceleration safeties and pretty unstable triggers that then happen to work perfectly to produce a yield. Don’t worry about it. Expose your missiles with a heat source as best you can so the FlightHawk can drop on them, and let’s get out of here.”

Several seconds later, Patrick saw another explosion, this time farther north. “Hot damn, that works good!” Briggs crowed. “I’m liking this!”

Patrick started running for the perimeter fence, then hit his boots’jump-jets. A shot of compressed air propelled him twenty feet into the sky and almost a hundred feet forward. When he landed, he jogged forward while scanning the area with his helmet-mounted sensors. Libyan soldiers were pointing in his direction. He had to run several yards until the accumulators built up enough pressure, then propelled himself with ease over the perimeter fence. His sensors and self-protection weapons worked automatically—any soldiers within thirty feet were knocked unconscious by a bolt of energy strong enough to start a jet aircraft.

Two more jumps and six blocks later, Patrick was at the southernmost garbage pit. It was exactly as Chris Wohl described it: a strong net, steel or even Kevlar, with enough real trash piled atop it to hide a huge wide truck carrying a large rocket. One step inside the pit revealed a second transporter about fifty yards away. He immediately found the fuel filler port and set the first SS-12 afire just as Wohl and Briggs did, and the TEL’s right rear wheels blew apart, sending the SS-12 rocket rolling right off its launch rail. In a few seconds it was going to be covered in burning diesel fuel—he hoped the nuclear warhead would just melt away and not cook off. He had no idea how sophisticated the Russians’ nuclear warhead safety mechanisms were, or how well the Libyans had maintained them, so he had to assume that the explosive material surrounding the nuclear core would explode and scatter radioactive debris everywhere. He wanted to be off the base before any of them did just that.

Patrick quickly attacked the other two SS-12 launcher vehicles. Now there were explosions everywhere, mostly in the north where Hal Briggs was creating havoc. He turned just as his battle armor’s defensive weapon downed another Libyan soldier that had run out from an underground shelter, an AK-47 raised and ready to fire. “Base, status of the FlightHawk?”

“Inbound sixty seconds, coming in hot,” Wendy McLanahan responded. “FlightHawk One has good imagery of all three garbage pits and good downlink to FlightHawk Two. You guys can bug out anytime. I took the liberty of calling for the Hammer too.” The “Hammer” was the CV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft. Accompanied by another tilt-rotor aircraft acting as an aerial refueling tanker, the Pave Hammer had flown them in across Egypt from the S.S. Catherine the Great in the Mediterranean Sea and had been waiting for them about a hundred miles to the south in the Sahara Desert.