“Jesus, it’s big.”
“Yeah.”
Although neither man knew it, the Tarmiya industrial complex contained 381 buildings and covered an area of ten miles by ten miles.
“Listed?”
“Nope.”
“Going down anyway. Randy, cover my ass.”
“Got it,” came over the air from his wingman.
Walker dropped his Eagle clean down to ten thousand feet.
The industrial spread was huge. In the center was one enormous building, the size of a covered sports stadium.
“Going in.”
“Don, it’s nontarget.”
Dropping to eight thousand feet, Walker activated his laser-guidance system and lined up on the vast factory below and in front of him. His head-up display ran off the distance as it shortened and gave him a seconds-to-fire reading. As the latter hit zero, he released his bombs, keeping his nose still on the approaching target.
The laser-sniffer in the nose of the two bombs was the PAVEWAY system. Under his fuselage was the guidance module, called LANTIRN. The LANTIRN threw an invisible infrared beam at the target, where the beam rebounded to form a sort of funnel-shaped electronic basket pointing back toward him.
The PAVEWAY nose cones sensed this basket, entered it, and followed the funnel down and inward until they impacted precisely where the beam was aimed.
Both bombs did their job. They blew up under the lip of the roof of the factory. Seeing them explode, Don Walker hauled back, lifted the nose of the Eagle, and powered it back to twenty-five thousand feet.
An hour later, he and his wingman, after another refuel in midair, were back at Al Kharz.
Before he lifted his nose, Walker had seen the blinding flash of the two explosions and the great column of smoke that had arisen, and he had caught a glimpse of the dust cloud that would follow the bombing.
What he did not see was that those two bombs tore out one end of the factory, lifting a large section of roof up into the air like the sail of a ship at sea.
Nor did he observe that the strong desert wind that morning—the same one that had created the dust storm to blot out the Scud site—did the rest. It tore the roof off the factory, peeling it back like the lid of a sardine can, as sheets of roofing steel flew lethally in all directions.
Back at base, Don Walker, like every other pilot, was extensively debriefed. It was a tiresome process for weary pilots, but it had to be done. In charge was the squadron intelligence officer, Major Beth Kroger.
No one pretended the gorilla had been a success, but every pilot had taken out his secondary target, except one. Their hotshot weapons officer had flunked his secondary target and picked a tertiary one at random.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Kroger asked.
“Because it was huge and looked important.”
“It wasn’t even on the Tasking Order,” she complained. She logged the target he had chosen, its exact location and description, and his own bomb-damage report and filed it for the attention of TACC—the Tactical Air Control Center, which shared the basement of CENTAF beneath the Saudi Air Force headquarters with the Black Hole analysts in Riyadh.
“If this turns out to be a water-bottling plant or a baby-food factory, they’re gonna can your ass,” she warned Walker.
“You know, Beth, you’re beautif
ul when you’re angry,” he teased her.
Beth Kroger was a good career officer. If she was going to be flirted with, she preferred colonels and up. As the three of those on the base were seriously married, Al Kharz was turning out to be a pain.
“You’re out of line, Captain ,” she told him, and went off to file her report.
Walker sighed and went off to his cot to rest. She was right, though. If he had just totaled the world’s biggest orphanage, General Horner would personally have his captain’s bars for toothpicks. As it happened, they never did tell Don Walker just what he had hit that morning. But it was not an orphanage.