want the money, all of it. She’s crying in there, begging them not to hurt her anymore.”
“Take it easy, we knew this would happen and so did she. I don’t like this any more than you do but you know very well what’s going on. Half the reason why they’re doing it is to find out if the situation is a set-up, they’re assuming that what they’re doing will make us come charging in to rescue her. We’ve got a fisting party ready, if it looks like they’re going to finish her off, we’ll go in, but otherwise we stay put.”
The specialist continued listening, promising himself that, one day, he would teach those thugs why men fear the dark. “OK, she’s given them the money, they’re counting it. One of them’s telling the old girl that she fell down the steps. If she goes to the police, they’ll come back and kill her. Describing how they’ll kill her. They’re leaving now, the bastards. That bitch in the bank, she fingers the victims. She picks out the middle-aged and older ladies, probably gets them talking and finds out when they’ll be alone in the house. Then she passes the information to her friends, lets them know when the women are on their own, unprotected. A man might come to the door with a gun and start shooting so they wait until their victims are by themselves. It’s times like this I start to think the Teas might be right. They keep telling us we can have a disarmed society or we can have a free society but we can’t have both.”
The three bandits left the Tuntoya house, slipping away into the darkness. What they didn’t see were the trackers following them. That wasn’t surprising, the trackers were Maoris from New Zealand. When the Maori scout team had arrived, the Australians had dismissed most of the stories about their tracking skills as legend or gross exaggeration. After seeing them work at first hand, the consensus was that they could follow a fart in a thunderstorm. That was still not doing them justice.
The watchers relaxed. After a while, a local boy came down the street, a pot in his hand. His mother, Dahlia’s sister, had borrowed the cooking pot from Dahlia earlier that day and now he had been sent to return it. He went to the house and saw the door was open. Cautiously, he went in - and the watchers didn’t need listening equipment to hear his scream. He ran out into the street, crying and screaming for help. A couple of neighbors ran out to see what was happening. The boy took a few minutes to make himself understood but then the adults went to the Tuntoya house. They also came out in a hurry. Wives were called to comfort the victim and a servant was sent off to get help from the hospital. An ambulance arrived and Dahlia Tuntoya was brought out on a stretcher.
As she was being loaded into the back of the vehicle, the doctor took his stethoscope from around his neck and folded it away in a pocket. Shane and the surveillance team relaxed a little, that was the agreed signal that Dahlia hadn’t been seriously injured. People were crowding around the ambulance, curious to see what had befallen their neighbor. In the noise and confusion of the street, another bandit slipped away. He’d stayed behind after the robbery, to see what happened and make sure nobody followed his fellow bandits. He’d never seen the trackers, and he never saw the pair that were following him.
Aviano Italian Air Force Base, Italy
It didn’t sound convincing, perhaps sincerity would help. Sophia had told him that, in show business, sincerity was everything, if you could fake that, whatever else you had to do was easy. So, try again with sincerity Major Kozlowski thought.
“Look guys, it really is a very simple system and it will save us all a lot of heartache.”
Eddie Korrina looked mutinous. “The old system worked fine. Why did the ying-yangs in Washington go and have to change everything? Means we’re going to have to learn the whole lot now. We’ve got better things to do.”
Kozlowski realized that the “better things” included Eddie’s Italian girlfriend. He didn’t have a chance to cut in, Xav Dravar was a lot more than just mutinous. “I heard that prize deadhead McNorman got the system changed because he screwed up in a Cabinet meeting and assumed a lot of things with different designations were really different bits of kit. Why should we have to bail him out?”
Time to seize the initiative Kozlowski thought. “Look GUYS. It’s a simple system. We’ll be using it, the Navy will be using it, the Army will as well. All the missiles are in a single number series. The prefix describes the type of missile it is. First letter is the launch platform. A for an aircraft, U for a submarine, M for the ground and R for a ship.”
“Why didn’t they make it S for a ship? Damned ying-yangs.”
“Don’t know. Its R. Second letter tells you where it goes. I is an air target, it stands for Intercept. G is a ground target. G for ground, told you it was logical. Then the third one tells us whether its guided or not, M for guided, R for unguided. Missile and Rocket. So, what used to be our GAR-8 has changed to Air-launched Intercept Missile number nine or A1M-9. Our GAR-9s are now the A1M-47. The GAR-12s are now AIM-7. Don’t ask me how they got in this order, the Falcon NORAD uses is the AIM-4. The air-to-surface version of the GAR-9 has become the AGM-76. Our nuclear Bullpups are now AGM-I2D, the ones with conventional warheads are AGM-12C. Clear?”
His crewmen nodded reluctantly. Kozlowski breathed a sigh of relief, that question about R for ships had been too close. What he knew, but wasn’t supposed to, was that S was indeed included in the system. S meant Space-launched. An SGM, a space-to-ground missile, and a SIM, a space-to-air missile, were already being developed. Time to get the guys thinking about something else. “The G mission code also covers our anti-radar missiles. So they are now the AGM-45. A Tiger Team will be coming out soon to change the displays in the aircraft over, it’ll only take an hour or so. So we’ve got to get used to the new names fast.
Missile Base Aldabaran, North of Gaza, Palestine Satrapy, The Caliphate
The trucks were huge, six wheels each side, two under the cab for steering, four spaced out under the large cylinder that seemed to be precariously perched on the back of the truck. The convoy had been offloaded from a Chipanese merchant ship at Al Zubayr in Iraq Province, then driven overland all the way to Gaza. There were six of the big cylinder trucks, followed by a whole line of other vehicles. Command trucks, radio trucks, engineer trucks, reload trucks, the infantry guard units. The commander from the Caliphate curled his lips at those, they were men from Model’s force. Janissaries, they were nothing more than Janissaries. The problem was they were orders of magnitude more capable than any other troops the Caliphate had.
The battery positions had already been dug out. Six positions for the cylinder trucks, the missile launchers. Each had a single missile in its launcher. They were new, and it was claimed, deadly. They were launched by a short catapult built into the cylinder and by rocket boosters. Then, the turbojet would take over and boost them to just over supersonic speed. They could reach out to over 300 kilometers and had their own radar homing system.
These missiles, the ones the Caliphate had bought, had 2,000 kilogram explosive warheads, a shaped charge behind the main fuel tank of the missile. When it hit its target the warhead would blast a hole deep into the enemy ship and fill that crater with blazing rocket fuel.
Long-range anti-ship missiles were hardly new but the problem was targeting. Over the horizon, there was no way to know precisely where an enemy ship formation was. The new missiles were partly a solution to that. Each missile had its own search radar but also sent a copy of the radar picture it could see back to the battery command post. The missiles would be launched in a fan, covering a wide arc. Once one missile spotted the enemy, the others could be sent course corrections that would take it to its target. There was another advantage to that plan, the missiles would approach their target over a wide arc, complicating the defenses job of shooting them all down.