"Nice touch," Clark said approvingly. "Wagner?"
"His dad was a sergeant in the Allgemeine-SS - worked at Sobibor - came over in forty-six, married a local girl and went into the smuggling business, died before anyone caught up with him. Breeding tells," Larson said. "Carlos is a real prick, likes his women with bruises on them. His colleagues aren't all that wild about him, but he's good at what he does."
"Christmas," Mr. Clark observed. The radio made the next sound, five minutes later.
"Bravo Whiskey, this is Zulu X-Ray, over."
"Zulu X- Ray, this is Bravo Whiskey. I read you five-by-five. Over," Larson answered at once. His radio was the sort used by forward air controllers, encrypted UHF.
"Status report, over."
"We are in place. Mission is go. Say again, mission is go."
"Roger, copy, we are go-mission. We are ten minutes out. Start the music."
Larson turned to Clark. "Light her up."
The GLD was already powered up. Mr. Clark flipped the switch from standby to active. The GLD was more fully known as the Ground Laser Designator. Designed for use by soldiers on the battlefield, it projected a focused infrared (hence invisible) laser beam through a complex but rugged series of lenses. Bore-sighted with the laser system was a separate infrared sensor that told the operator where he was aiming - essentially a telescopic sight. "Great Feet" had a fiberglass cargo box over its load area, and Clark trained the crosshairs on one of its small windows, using the fine-adjustment knobs on the tripod with some delicacy. The laser spot appeared as desired, but then he rethought his aiming point and took advantage of the fact that they were slightly higher than their target, respotting his aim on the center of the vehicle's roof. Finally he turned on the videotape recorder that took its feed from the GLD. The big boys in D.C. wanted to count coup on this one.
"Okay," he said quietly. "The target is lit."
"The music is playing, and it sounds just fine," Larson said over the radio.
Cortez was driving up the hill, having already passed a security checkpoint manned by two people drinking beer, he noted disgustedly. The road was about on a par with what he'd grown up with in Cuba, and the going was slow. They'd still blame him for being late, of course.
It was too easy, Jensen thought as he heard the reply. Tooling along at thirty thousand feet, clear night, no flak or missiles to evade. Even a contractor's validation test wasn't this easy.
"I got it," the B/N noted, staring down at his own scope. You can see a very, very long way at thirty thousand feet on a clear night, especially with a multimillion-dollar system doing the looking. Underneath the Intruder, the Target Recognition and Attack Multisensor pod noted the laser dot that was still sixty miles away. It was a modulated beam, of course, and its carrier signal was known to the TRAM. They now had positive identification of the target.
"Zulu X- Ray confirms music sounds just fine," Jensen said over the radio. Over intercom: "Next step."
On the port inboard weapon station, the bomb's seeker head was powered up. It immediately noted the laser dot as well. Inside the aircraft, a computer was keeping track of the aircraft's position, altitude, course, and speed, and the bombardier-navigator programmed in the position of the target to an accuracy of two hundred meters. He could have dialed it in even closer, of course, but didn't need to. The bomb release would be completely automatic, and at this altitude the laser "basket" into which the bomb had to be dropped was miles wide. The computer took note of all these facts and decided to make an optimum drop, right in the most favorable portion of the basket.
Clark's eyes were now fixed to the GLD. He was perched on his elbows, and no part of his body was touching the instrument except for his eyebrow on the rubber cup that protected the eyepiece.
"Any second now," the B/N said.
Jensen kept the Intruder straight and level, heading straight down the electronic path defined by various computer systems aboard. The entire exercise was now out of human hands. On the ejector rack, a signal was received from the computer. Several shotgun shells - that's precisely what was used - fired, driving down the "ejector feet" onto small steel plates on the upper side of the bombcase. The bomb separated cleanly from the aircraft.
The aircraft jerked upward a bit at the loss of just over eleven hundred pounds of weight.
"Breakaway, breakaway," Jensen reported.
There, finally. Cortez saw the wall. His car - he'd have to buy a jeep if he were going to come here very often - was still losing its grip on the gravel, but he'd be through the gate in a moment, and if he remembered right, the road inside the perimeter was paved decently - probably leftover materials from the helipad, he thought.
"On the way," Larson told Clark.
The bomb was still traveling at five hundred knots. Once clear of the aircraft, gravity took over, arcing it down toward the ground. It actually accelerated somewhat in the rarefied air as the seeker head moved fractionally to correct for wind drift. The seeker head was made of fiberglass and looked like a round-nose bullet with some small fins attached. When the laser dot on which it tracked moved out of the center of its field of view, the entire seeker body moved itself and the plastic tail fins in the appropriate direction to bring the dot back where it belonged. It had to fall exactly twenty-two thousand feet, and the microchip brain in the guidance package was trying to hit the target exactly. It had plenty of time to correct for mistakes.
Clark didn't know what to expect, exactly. It had been too long a time since he'd called air strikes in, and he'd forgotten some of the details - when you had to call in air support, you generally didn't have time to notice the small stuff. He found himself wondering if there'd be the whistle - something he never remembered from his war service. He kept his eye on the target, still careful not to touch the GLD lest he screw things up. There were several men standing close to the truck. One lit a cigarette, and it appeared that several were talking about something or other. On the whole, it seemed like this was taking an awfully long time. When it happened, there was not the least warning. Not a whistle, not anything at all.
Cortez felt his front wheels bump upward as they got on solid pavement.
The GBU- 15 laser-guided bomb had a "guaranteed" accuracy of under three meters, but that was under combat conditions, and this was a far easier test of the system. It landed within inches of its target point, striking the top of the truck. Unlike the first test shot, this bomb was impact-fused. Two detonators, one in the nose and one in the tail, were triggered by a computer chip within a microsecond of the instant when the seeker head struck the fiberglass top of the truck. There were mechanical backups to the electronic triggers. Neither proved necessary, but even explosives take time, and the bomb fell an additional thirty inches while the detonation process got underway. The bombcase had barely penetrated the cargo cover when the bomb filler was ignited by both detonators. Things happened more quickly now. The explosive filler was Octol, a very expensive chemical explosive also used to trigger nuclear weapons, with a detonation rate of over eight thousand meters per second. The combustible bombcase vaporized in a few microseconds. Then expanding gas from the explosion hurled fragments of the truck body in all directions -except up - immediately behind which was the rock-hard shock wave. Both the fragments and the shock wave struck the concrete-block walls of the house in well under a thousandth of a second. The effects were predictable. The wall disintegrated, transformed into millions of tiny fragments traveling at bullet speed, with the remainder of the shock wave still behind to attack other parts of the house. The human nervous system simply doesn't work quickly enough for such events, and the people in the conference room never had the first hint that their deaths were underway.