Paige slammed it as hard as she could.
Pike felt a thud reverberate through the airframe as the bomb-bay doors locked open. Felt the sudden increase in drag as the slipstream passing under the plane churned and whirled through the complex interior geometry of the bay. He knew that in another second he’d feel the most dramatic change of all: the instant loss of nearly five thousand pounds of weight. The GBU–28 was a heavy son of a bitch, though only a small fraction of its mass was explosive. Well over four thousand of its pounds were just dumb, solid steel. For good reason.
Pike’s hand was already on the bomb release when everything changed. One instant the desert floor was bare and lifeless. The next, it burst open at half a dozen places, long, rectangular sections of ground being heaved aside from below. Pike had the crazed impression of casket lids coming up through the topsoil of a cemetery.
Half a second later he understood what he was seeing—a reality many times worse than a graveyard come to life.
Kill everything.
That was what the red button did. It deployed every weapon concealed in the desert and gave the system a universal, exceptionless command: target and engage any moving object within range.
Travis had already turned his eyes from Paige back to the wall screens. The bomber had come so much closer in the past five seconds it seemed surreal. Its apparent distance before must’ve been a trick of camera perspectives and shimmer.
Now, as the aircraft continued to swell on screen, Travis saw that its bomb doors were wide open. Even as he noticed, he felt the building shudder, and on every television in the room, multiple rocket-exhaust trails raced up out of the ground toward the plane.
Pike spent the last second of his life numb. He didn’t feel what his hand was doing on the bomb release, if anything. Didn’t bother to reach for the electronic countermeasures switch either—it probably wouldn’t have saved him even if there’d been time to use it.
He found his brain doing exactly two things at once—each half acting on its own, he imagined. The left half recognized the flight profile and outlines of the Patriot missiles that had come up out of the desert to meet him. His eyes went to the one that would reach him first, its RF seeker head having apparently locked onto the B–52’s nose. He tried to remember the trigger distance for a Patriot’s proximity fuze. Five meters? Ten? Did it matter? The thing was closing toward him at more than twice the speed of sound, and its warhead was a two-hundred-pound frag bomb. Like a hand grenade the size of a keg.
The right half of his brain was looking elsewhere, and more frantically. It was struggling to grab the last image he’d had of his daughter, as he’d left the house the night before. She’d been sitting in the leather recliner beside the couch, in a big purple T-shirt. Bangs in her eyes. She’d looked at him and said what she always said when he left for the base.
Careful.
It meant good-bye, but it meant a lot more the way she said it—high and soft, her eyebrows arched. It meant I love you. It also meant If anything happens to you, I’m always going to love you. He knew it meant all those things. He wasn’t imagining any of it.
Careful.
That word, in his daughter’s voice, was Dennis Pike’s last thought.
Travis saw the first distinct explosion maybe a fourth of a second before the next. The leading Patriot detonated almost nose-to-nose with the bomber, reducing everything forward of the wings to a particle cloud—which the plane instantly outran. The second Patriot, coming from the aircraft’s left, exploded just beneath the port-side wing, which at once became a sheet of flame. An instant later the starboard wing, the only intact lifting surface, pitched upward, hauling the entire plane high and left in a roll.
And revealing, like a curtain drawn aside with a flourish, a bomb that’d been freed from the bay less than a second earlier.
Travis heard sharp breaths sucked in around him.
The loosed weapon, so close now that it was visible from multiple camera angles, was long and sleek like a missile, but it didn’t fly like one. It had no propulsion of its own. It simply arced forward in a smooth line, gently falling away from the climbing trajectory the plane had held. The bomb’s tip dropped to level and then gradually angled downward. Travis could see that by the time it hit the surface, its nose would be pointing straight down, and though he’d never seen one before, he knew exactly what kind of bomb it was.
A bunker buster.