Weapons of choice

McClintock acknowledged her order, and his jet climbed away on a precipitous curve. He was normally a talker. A terrible bullshitter actually, in her experience. But he'd stayed well within mission parameters today. Llewelen hadn't heard a peep out of him. He took up a slot five thousand meters above her.

Her heart beat faster and her breathing deepened as she swept along the southern coast of New Guinea. No radar facilities painted the fighter. No air traffic controllers challenged her. The island rushed past her at twice the speed of sound. She switched on her belly-cams to capture the mission on video.

A ping in her ear and the sudden appearance of targeting data on the HUD confirmed the fact that her Terrain Following Radar had matched the mission-specific holomap copied from the Clinton's database to the topography of the coastal ranges beneath her. Eighty years might be a hell of a jump to make in human terms, but mountains don't change at all in that sort of time. The Raptor's navigational processors recognized the landscape and suggested a course for the pilot to follow. A series of blue circles appeared on her HUD, curving up and away over the shoreline and over toward the soaring spine of the island. Llewelen eased the joystick over until the small arrowhead icon representing her F-22 floated into the center of the nearest blue circle. She punched a series of buttons to lock in the new course.

Mangrove swamps, primordial jungle, river plains, and razor grass swept beneath her wings in a frenzied blur. Foothills approached at an insane velocity. She steered the Raptor into the vivid green slash of a long valley that snaked up into the sky. Photon streams poured down from multiple nodes along the belly of the jet fighter, feeding data about the terrain to her processors. The Raptor felt its way up the range like a blind man running his fingers over a face.

A chime sounded in Llewelen's ear, and her HUD lit up with targeting data. The most important was a red box hovering in virtual space a few miles in front of her. She was only vaguely aware of the world outside her cockpit. She knew that sheer mountain walls ripped by out there at twice the speed of sound, but she stayed fixated on the targeting data.

The box suddenly inflated and filled the HUD. A loud pinging filled her head and two two-hundred-kilogram land-attack penetrators dropped away from the hard points under her wings as she peeled off. Seeker heads on the missiles strobed wildly, painting the mountain with a rudimentary form of laser radar. They recognized the terrain features that had been loaded into their chips. They roared away, up and over the edge of the plateau, before spearing directly into the Nuku. The penetrators sliced through the skin of the ship and drilled down two meters into the Saruwaged Ranges before detonating.

A pair of titanic blast waves of rippled out from the mist-shrouded plateau, atomizing the Indonesian warship and every Japanese soldier working on her.

"Jeez, Stiffy," Llewelen said to her wingman, "you really don't see that sort of thing every day."

They watched the recorded footage from the Raptor's belly-cam for the third time. A Sony digital projecter threw the image up onto a screen in Roosevelt's suite at the Ambassador Hotel. After the first run-through, Kolhammer watched the others rather than the video, which had arrived as a compressed, encrypted burst from Hawaii. Like the audience in a V3D theater, they swayed from one side to the other as the Raptor weaved through the winding valley on its way to take out the Nuku.

He wondered if any of the Indonesians were alive when the missiles hit home. If so, it was a pity, but Halabi had made the right call. The target had to be hit.

At least nobody in this room would disagree with that. Marshall, Eisenhower, King, and the British ambassador Lord Halifax had all joined Roosevelt for a private briefing on the raid and the implications of the ship's discovery by Japan. Kolhammer shut off the projection as the attack ended for the third time.

A moment's silence descended before Lord Halifax spoke up.

"I wish we'd had some of those Raptor thingies last year, when Hitler was bombing us silly."

"That was very impressive, Admiral," said Roosevelt. "Destroying that ship in four hours."

"And it was a British captain who ran the show, was that right?" asked Halifax. "The PM will want to know about that."

Kolhammer nodded. "Captain Halabi is acting force commander in my absence. She did good. But if we'd had satellite cover we could have killed that target inside twenty minutes. And the Japanese have probably made off with a good haul, anyway. I'm sorry, Mr. President. It's a complication for you."

King spoke up from the couch across the room. "And for you, Kolhammer. Even if you could get back home before, you couldn't go now. Not with the Japs having grabbed Christ-only-knows-what sort of weapons off that ship."