Page 3 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight
“There are no civilians in Idlib, Captain,” Grechko said. “Only Al-Nusra bandits, the women who breed them, and thechildren who become either bandits or breeders. This is a war of demographics. We must fight accordingly.”
This wasn’t the war Walib had volunteered to fight. He never imagined the terrible weapons under his command would be used to slaughter innocents.
But if he disobeyed Grechko’s order, the Russian would pull his nine-millimeter Grach pistol out of its holster and splatter his brains against the BMP’s steel hull, and simply order one of Walib’s lieutenants in the other vehicles to fire.
Nothing would be accomplished except that Walib would be dead in exchange for a few minutes of respite for the doomed civilians.
He hated himself. He hated this war.
But he hated dying needlessly even more.
“Just checking the spin on the number-eleven gyro,” Walib said. A convenient lie. “Good to go.”
“Then you’re free to launch. Proceed at once.” Grechko’s drooping bulldog eyes narrowed.
“Yes, sir.” Walib flipped the safety cap on the launch button and jabbed it before he could change his mind.
Instantly, the French-designed, solid-fuel motors on the 122-millimeter rockets fired. The roar was terrifying, like the shout of God himself, even inside the idling command vehicle. Each half second, another nine-and-a-half-foot-long missile screamed out of its tube. A full-throated chorus of death.
Thirty-five seconds later, all 420 missiles had launched, lofting nearly fifteen tons of thermobaric munitions into the air. The TOS-2 master fire-control computer coordinated the launch timing and trajectories so that all of the warheads arrived on target simultaneously, avoiding warhead fratricide and increasing the explosive effects.
Grechko stared greedily at his monitor displaying a live video feed from the Israeli-designed Forpost-M aerial drone circling high over Idlib, which also provided the laser guidance beam for the missiles.
“Any second now,” Grechko said, grinning. “Time to burn out those cockroaches.”
But Walib didn’t want to see it. He was already outside, barking orders to his men, who were scrambling to prep for rapid “shoot and scoot” redeployment, the only defense against counter-battery fire, real or imagined.
Walib marched through the billowing clouds of exhaust and debris still swirling in the air, rage and shame welling in his eyes.
Lieutenant Dzhabrailov stood outside the command vehicle, studying the Syrian captain with keen interest.
IDLIB, SYRIA
The laser-guided TOS-2 Starfire rockets struck inside a kill box two hundred eighty meters square—about eight densely populated city blocks. A much tighter pattern was possible with the new guidance system, but it would have resulted in far fewer casualties.
The cascade of crashing warheads released clouds of combustible fuel mixed with finely powdered aluminum, PETN high-explosive, and ethylene oxide gas into the open streets. The incendiary clouds also penetrated through the cracks and crevices of nearly every mosque, apartment building, and shop in the eight-block area. Basements, attics, kitchens, toilets, and bedrooms filled with the toxic mixture in nanoseconds, leaving nowhere to hide.
Timed scatter charges of conventional explosives within the warheads detonated next, igniting the explosive fog into a blazing plasma cloud. The few people standing outside and nearest to the points of impact were instantly incinerated.
They were the lucky ones.
The shock wave produced by the explosion caused the first surge of destruction, producing thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch—enough to crush the hull of a World War II submarine. Those who weren’t initially killed by the striking force of the overpressure waves suffered terribly. Limbs were torn away or broken; alveoli and bronchioles ruptured in the lungs; emboli formed in coronary and cerebral arteries; bowels perforated; inner ear structures were crushed; eyes were ripped from their sockets.
The crushing force of the expanding overpressure waves smashed walls, broke windows, shattered doors. The city itself became a form of shrapnel, hurling shards of burning brick, glass, wood, and iron through the fiery winds, lacerating soft tissues and exposed flesh.
Yet this still wasn’t the worst of it.
The powdered aluminum in the expanding plasma cloud slowed its burn rate, resulting in the total consumption of the atmospheric oxygen. This created both a massive vacuum and a fireball of nearly 3,000 degrees Celsius—twice the melting point of steel. But it was the vacuum that caused the most destruction.
The buildings and other structures still standing held no protections against the fast-forming negative pressure, equal to its opposite in energy and violence, generating fiery, hurricane-force winds. Shrieking survivors were crushed beneath tons of crumbling debris, buried alive in basements, crucified onshattered timbers, impaled on twisted metal. Anyone still alive in the rubble spent their last few minutes suffocating to death, gasping like carp for oxygen that no longer existed.
There were no more laughing children in the streets.
The last of the thermobaric munitions burned out just as the explosions of gas mains, petrol tanks, and other urban flammables began, stoking the burning rubble and the still-living bodies beneath into an inferno of unquenchable fire.
Within seconds, thousands had died, and thousands more suffered. Within a few hours, many of the wounded survivors would perish as well.
It was the explosive equivalent of a tactical nuclear device, but entirely conventional, and perfectly legal, according to international treaties.
