Phoenix Sub Zero

Ahmed operated the button combination lock, unbolted it, and pulled Sihoud in. They passed through an untidy storage area to another door. Ahmed unbolted it and pushed Sihoud into the utility tunnel, a cramped pipe of precast concrete, not even two full meters in diameter, filled with water pipes, electrical conduits, phone cables, sewer pipes, and ventilation ducts. There was barely enough room for a man crouching over to move through the tunnel. Sihoud hurried through it, feeling like a damn fool coward. He reconsidered about twenty meters down the tunnel and pulled on Ahmed’s sleeve. Ahmed stopped and heard Sihoud tell him to stop and return to the command center. It was a terrible place to argue with the general, but that was what he had to do.

* * *

For Javelin Unit One, the next milliseconds passed quickly, the missile’s mission almost complete. The radar-seeker window was crushed by the impact with the mosque courtyard floor, but behind it an armor-piercing shield of uranium protected the Javcalcor and punched through the mosque floor. The kinetic energy of the missile sliced through the lead shielding, then the reinforced concrete. By then most of the unit’s speed was lost, but it kept enough momentum to blitz through the first and second sublevels, through Sihoud’s quarters, and through the overhead of the tactical control center. The weapon’s timer, started at the moment of impact with the courtyard above, correctly predicted the missile’s arrival at the fourth sublevel, and anticipating this, had ignited the fuse ten meters higher while still smashing through the floor of the senior officers’ quarters. The fuse lit off and ignited the intermediate explosive, which began the detonation of the high explosive just as the unit crashed through into the command center.

The ton of Plasticpac high explosives — a patented, secret high-density mix with over eighteen times the explosive power of an equivalent weight of TNT — released its chemical energy, the explosion reaching outward to the consoles and men in the room. The underground command center was walled with more concrete, held in place by packed sand.

The confined explosion smashed the contents of the room against the reinforced walls, the explosion shock-wave a hammer, the concrete sand-braced walls an anvil. The force of it had nowhere to go but up, blowing the ceiling above it upward, rupturing the decks of the levels above.

Javelin Unit One had been the first missile to arrive in the coordinated attack. Although timed for detonation at the same time, the next four missiles arrived late — late on a scale of milliseconds — but the other four explosions added to the destruction of the first, sending the shredded contents of the bunker skyward in a black and orange mushroom cloud of debris mixed with the remains of what milliseconds before had been men.

Five seconds after the impact of Javelin Unit One against the mosque floor there was little left of the command center but airborne debris and the fires and smoke within the pit in the earth where the bunker had once been.

For over two minutes the debris fell out of the sky and rained down on the sand surrounding the smoke-blackened hole, the impacting chunks of concrete and metal making little sound as they hit the sand; or if they did make sounds they were lost in the roaring of the orange mushroom cloud rising several thousand feet over the desert floor.

Jack Morris felt more than saw the detonations of the cruise missiles. At first the ground trembled a bit as the first missile hit the mosque floor. The explosion shook him as it detonated below, the sound at first muffled by the layers of concrete below the earth, but immediately after missiles two through five hit the bunker there was the roaring noise as the force of the explosions burst out of the hole in the ground.

The minaret tower seemed to disintegrate into a thousand fragments and fly slowly off into the night. A misshapen orange mushroom cloud rose several thousand feet overhead, turning the dark moonless night into a harshly lit midafternoon. Morris hugged the sand as the pieces from the explosion began to hit the ground around them, mostly a rain of sand and grit from what had once been concrete. When the debris shower ended, Morris looked up and whistled, his abused ears unable to hear his own exclamation of incredulity.