Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (47 page)

 
          
“You
have a base right on the Egyptian-Libyan border that’s secure from Zuwayy and
his troops?”

 
          
“I
didn’t until today,” Sanusi said with a chuckle. “Min
fadlak.
Let’s go.”

 
         
They
hadn’t moved far before alarms started going off in the Tin Man battle armor.
“Radiation warning, Muck,” Hal Briggs reported.

 
          
“How
convenient—radiation detectors in that armor,” Sanusi said to Briggs. “You must
tell me all about that system. My men and I might be in the market for a few dozen.”
He turned to Patrick. “The Libyans are broadcasting that the Zionists set off
an American nuclear device at Jaghbub,” he said, “to kill Zuwayy. Did you have
such a device?”

 
          
“You
know we didn’t,” Patrick replied.

 
          
Sanusi
just smiled. “But all of
Libya
and most of the world believe this is so,”
Sanusi said. “It’ll make
Libya
’s next move easier to justify.”

 
          
“The
invasion of
Egypt
?”

 
          
“Well,
I think that’s pretty obvious,” Sanusi said. “The question for you is: What’s
the objective?”

 
          
“You
said it yourself: oil.”

 
          
“
Libya
has oil. Lots of it.”

 
          
“Then
Libya
either wants more, or it wants to control
what it doesn’t have—or destroy it.”

 
          
Sanusi
smiled. “I think I know where you belong now, Mr. McLanahan—or is it General
McLanahan? It’s still not out here in the desert, though.”

 
          
Soon
the effects of the electromagnetic pulse in the atmosphere from the explosion
at Mersa Matruh were subsiding, and shortly after that, they started receiving
position data. “We’re only twenty miles from Jaghbub,” Patrick pointed out.

 
          
“Correct.”

 
          
“The
radiation levels are getting higher,” Briggs said. “They’ll reach danger levels
soon.”

 
          
‘The
radiation levels are high enough to affect normal radio communications,” Sanusi
said. “If a Libyan patrol doesn’t have radiation detectors—and by now, all of
them do—the disruption of radio communications would get their attention.”
Patrick wondered why Sanusi would bother to offer that unusual detail.

 
          
By
the time they were within five miles of Jaghbub, the radiation levels had
reached danger levels. From here they could see the base—and there was no doubt
that the base had suffered a tremendous attack. The sand was scorched black,
like the ruins of Mersa Matruh; armored vehicles, buildings, helicopters, and
all sorts of objects, most unidentifiable, lay bent and smoldering. Bodies,
charred black and burned almost to the skeleton, could be seen scattered
everywhere, along with the carcasses of vultures and other desert scavengers
who tried to feed off them. The Libyans had erected signs on every road and
path, warning in Arabic and English to stay away from the area because of
deadly radiation. Obviously many Libyans had ignored the warning, because they
could see abandoned Libyans armored vehicles everywhere—they imagined they were
filled with the bloated, rotting corpses of radiation- poisoned soldiers.

 
          
“My
ancestral home,” Sanusi said, “or at least what remains of it after Qadhafi and
Zuwayy desecrated and perverted it.”

 
          
“I’m
sorry it’s been destroyed,” Patrick said.

 
          
“You
should be—you did most of it, at least to the base,” Sanusi said. He smiled,
nodded, then added, “Nah, don’t be sorry. The base was an abomination to the
spirit of my ancestors. They created a place of worship and a place of learning
here—Qaddafi and Zuwayy turned it into an armed fortress and a den of sin. You
only did what I’ve wanted the power to do—flatten it. Come on.”

 
          
“You’re
going
there
?”

 
          
“Of
course,” Sanusi said. Some of his men dismounted to examine the new armored
vehicles; shots rang out, indicating that some half-dead soldiers were being
dispatched by Sanusi’s men. But then, to Patrick’s surprise, the soldiers
started up the vehicle and drove it off—not away from the base, but
toward
it!

 
          
“Patrick...”

 
          
“It’s
okay—I get it now,” Patrick said, Muhammad Sanusi just smiled and nodded as
they continued on.

 
          
As
they got closer to the carnage that was once the holy Islamic town of
Jaghbub
, the details became clearer: Some of the
corpses were real, but most of them were faked plaster or wooden mannequins.
Some of the armored vehicles had been destroyed not from a nuclear blast but by
regular antitank or RPG rounds or by the Wolverine cruise missile’s
Sensor-Fuzed Weapon rounds blowing through the weaker upper hull. The blackness
surrounding the base was dark sand, gravel, or charcoal, not the vaporized
remains of buildings. “You
faked
a
nuclear blast here?” Hal Briggs asked incredulously.

 
          
“It
wasn’t hard to do after what you guys did here,” Sanusi said. “The base had
been pretty much evacuated by morning—we cleaned up a few security patrols,
captured a bunch of good equipment, blew up several thousand pounds of high
explosives and ammunition for realism, and used the dead and destroyed vehicles
to create the look of a decimated base.”

 
          
“And
the radiation . .. ?”

 
          
“Some
captured medical radioisotopes, scattered along the roads and paths. Not enough
to be picked up by a radiation-detecting aircraft or satellite, but plenty to
be picked up by ground-based sensors. You don’t need much if you got the rumor
mill going properly—start spreading rumors by radio and teletype that there’s
been a nuclear detonation in the desert, and bad news travels real fast.”

           
“So all the messages and reports
about an American nuclear attack ... ?”

 
          
“Provided
by us,” Sanusi said. “Complete with pictures, eyewitness accounts, sensor data,
even some soldiers suffering radiation sickness. Combined with what’s happened
at Mersa Matruh, folks will believe anything now.”

 
          
“Eventually
the army will send in troops to secure this base,” Chris Wohl said. “You can’t
fool them forever.”

           
“We’ll be out of here before they
get brave enough to send someone with more brains, Sergeant,” Sanusi said. “But
I think the action will be starting elsewhere, and they’ll hold off on
investigating Jaghbub for a while.”

           
“Why do you think that?”

           
“Because I’ll be the one starting
the action,” Sanusi said with a smile. “And now, with your help, we’ll make an
even bigger splash.”

 
          
They
drove out to the flight line, where the burned-out hulks of several helicopters
and one large jet, about the size of a Boeing 727, sat. The runway was lined
with dozens of bomb craters—there didn’t appear to be more than one or two
hundred feet of usable pavement any- where. But Patrick already figured that
Sanusi and his men were masters at concealment and camouflage. “Okay, Your
Majesty—how did you do it?”

 
          
“A
little sand, a little wood— it won’t stand up to closer scrutiny, but visually,
they look real enough,” Sanusi replied. “A couple men can sweep them off to the
side in a few minutes, and it takes less than an hour to put them all back in.”
He stopped his Humvee. “Your attack destroyed most of the buildings and
facilities aboveground, but not all of them—and best of all, the POL storage is
intact.”

 
          
“It
is?”

 
          
“The
army put most of the petroleum storage underground, so your big explosive
didn’t destroy it,” Sanusi explained. “The fuel farm your bombs blew up were
the old tanks. The underground tanks were topped off, too— there’s probably one
hundred thousand gallons of jet fuel down there, ready to go. Maybe more. All
his weapons are underground, too—bombs, missiles, rockets, guns, rifles, and
ammunition from seven-millimeter to fifty-seven-millimeter. I would need a
thousand men to help me haul it all away.” He looked at Patrick. “And I’ll
trade it all for some help.”

 
          
“What
do you want us to do?”

 
          
“Stop
Zuwayy and whoever’s behind this sudden military buildup of his,” Sanusi said.
“Zuwayy’s got something up his sleeve, and he’s getting some big-time financing
to do it. I’m only irritating him right now—but you could really put the hurt
on him. I assume that because you were still in the vicinity of the base, you
didn’t use all your resources here—I’m convinced you can destroy any base, any
military site, in
Libya
or
Egypt
.”

 
          
Just
then, Patrick heard, “Tin Man, this is Headbanger.”

           
“Go ahead, Headbanger.”

           
“Thank God we got you, sir,” George
“Zero” Tanaka, the pilot aboard the EB-52 Megafortress bomber, said. “We were
just about to bug out for an emergency landing strip. What’s your situation?”

 
          
“We’re
secure,” Patrick reported. “What’s your status?”

           
“We’re a few minutes past bingo for
the secondary recover base,” Tanaka said. Patrick knew that the secondary
recovery base for the EB-52 was an isolated abandoned air base near Vol’vata,
in the extreme southern tip of Israel—no support, no fuel, just a relatively
safe piece of concrete on which to set a two-hundred-thousand-pound plane and
wait for help. It was also their last planned emergency recovery base—any other
emergency strips they might use from here on out would be in
Egypt
,
Libya
,
Sudan
, or
Algeria
—or they would ditch in the
Mediterranean Sea
or
Red Sea
. “We lost our tanker support. Got any
instructions for us?”

 
          
The
question, Patrick thought, was rather moot now. Patrick knew he shouldn’t trust
anyone, especially a Libyan, but Muhammad as-Sanusi was different—or so he
hoped.

 
          
“Yes,
I have instructions,” Patrick said. “Get a fix on my location—you’ll find a
seven-thousand-foot concrete airstrip here. We have fuel, possibly weapons,
some support equipment.”

 
          
There
were a few moments of silence as the Megafortress crew plotted his location;
then: “Ahh ... verify this location, sir?” Tanaka asked.

 
          
“The
location is accurate:
Jaghbub
,
Libya
.”

 
          
“And
you are secure?”

 
          
“Affirmative.”

 
          
“Then
you wouldn’t mind telling me the nickname of the base where we launched from.”

 
          
Their
conversation was on a secure satellite link, but Patrick was still pleased that
the Megafortress crew thought of a code phrase to use that only a few folks
would know; plus, by saying a nickname, if Patrick was under duress, he could
make up any name without arousing suspicion. “Hooterville,” Patrick replied,
giving the nickname the B-52 crews once used for Blytheville Air Force Base in
rural northeastern
Arkansas
.