int Speed was 490 knots.
,~:: “.Going up,” Jolly reported. He nudged the Intruder back up ||6Q five hundred feet, the minimum distance required for arming ‘;4» Mark 82 General Purpose bomb.
*’Gettin’ close,” Chucker reported. “Your pickle is hot.” Jolly closed his thumb over the release switch, his eye on the targeting pipper on his VDI. The Intruder could be set to jirelease its weapons load by computer, but in a case like this, ijphen the target was strung out over a large area and of Unknown composition, Jolly preferred to release manually. A purging, exultant excitement gripped him. Any second
Suddenly, the empty desert below was transformed into a Mghtmare out of the Los Angeles Freeway. Trucks, half-tracks, troop carriers, and tanks were crowded on the road or parked |«tongside. Ahead, the girders of a bridge stretched above the ittanks of the Nara River.
“Gold Strike, Five-double-oh!” Jolly cried. ‘ ‘Bombs
‘.’• The A-6 Intruder could carry a maximum ordnance load of • 15,000 pounds—in this case thirty 500-lb Mark 82 GP bombs. ; It never failed to amaze Jolly that, during World War II, the p|: immortal B-17 had carried a maximum bomb load of only ‘”^.njSOO pounds . . . and that was only for extremely short-r|”-: range missions. Typical mission ordnance loads for the old VJFlying Fortress were only 4000 pounds, less than a third of ^t.wbat the Intruder carried.
; And the A-6 Intruder could place its high-explosive eggs Isfewtth far greater precision than the B-17 ever could, and from an jjp$ltitude of only a few hundred feet.
m^- Thirty quarter-ton bombs spilled away from the Intruder’s ^midpoints, a spray of deadly, finned cigars triggered to release |^ln five groups of six along an elongated footprint across the & center of the convoy. The retarder fins on each were designed | to hold the bomb back just long enough to allow the A-6 to ^escape the fragments.
306
Keith Douglass
The bridge flashed below the A-6 as Jolly pulled back on the stick. There was heavy congestion on the bridge itself, probably brought on by a breakdown or a traffic accident that had held up the whole column. He almost imagined he could hear the honking of horns, the curses of the drivers. . . .
The detonations were like the flashes of a string of Chinese firecrackers, but silent … at least at first. Then the sound caught up with the speeding Intruder, an avalanche of raw, searing, booming noise, thunderclap upon thunderclap rolling across the desert on shock waves that rippled out from the blasts, driving walls of swirling sand before them. Jolly watched the display in his rearview mirror, thirty blasts in the space of less than two seconds. Black smoke, boiling orange fireballs rising like deadly trees, a pall of burning clouds spreading across the desert in a suffocating blanket.
And the explosions continued. White streamers curled out from the epicenter of destruction, flares like Roman candles. An ammunition truck had been hit … and the explosion added to the devastation that was hurling entire trucks, flaming and tumbling end for end, into the sky.
“My God,” Jolly said, awe softening his voice. “My God …”
“Gold Strike Leader, this is Five-one-one. God, Jolly, what are you doing up there? Looks like you just trashed the whole Indian army.”
“Uh . . . rog, Coot.” He felt none of the earlier urge to banter. “Save your load for the bridge. It’s . . . easy pickings.”
“Copy that. Jolly. Thanks. Oh, God look at them burnl”
With the drag from the bomb load gone, die A-6 was racing now at almost 600 knots. Antiaircraft fire, scattered and ineffective, was reaching toward him from various sites among the marshes and canals that marked the western edge of the desert. A pair of ZSU-23s that had already crossed the river swung quad-mounted cannons toward the sky and stabbed at them as they hurtled past overhead.
“We’re outa here, Chucker,” he said. The elation he’d felt before was gone. “Job’s over. Let’s go home.”
The Intruder banked left, heading south once more.
ARMAGEDDON MODE
307
1235 bows, 26 March Tomcat 200
Tombstone broke left, bleeding speed with his air brakes until his F-I4’s computer brought the swing wings forward. At less ; than two hundred fifty knots, he held the turn, left wing pointed at the blur of golden sand below, right wing pointed at the heavens.