Chapter 69
FOR a quarter of a second, Yossi stared at his heads-up display as his brain tried to process what he’d just heard.
Abort.
Grover had just given the order to abort the strike.
His eyes snapped to his sensor display.
Four seconds.
With the smooth, silky precision that came from hours of practice, Yossi deactivated the computer’s auto hold feature and dragged the targeting crosshairs from the truck toward the open desert north of the road.
There was no way to recall the free-falling bombs, and shutting off the laser meant Yossi would cede control over where his ordnance would impact to inertia and luck.
This would not do.
He’d pickled the bombs.
Until they impacted, they were his responsibility.
Keying the radio, Yossi reflexively acknowledged the abort command, but his attention was on the ticking clock and the still-moving green crosshairs.
Danger close for a thousand-pound bomb was six hundred meters.
In order to keep the shock wave and lethal shards of razor-sharp bomb casing from impacting the vehicle, he needed the point of impact to be at least six hundred meters away.
Though he wanted to slide the targeting crosshairs as quickly north as the sensor could pan, Yossi didn’t.
If he moved the laser too quickly, the seeker head on the bomb’s nose would lose the spot.
If that happened, the bomb’s guidance system was programmed to steer the final heading all the way into impact.
In this scenario, the ordnance would most likely still hit the convoy.
With the calm steady motions of a heart surgeon sealing off a bleeding artery, Yossi kept tracking the impact point, and by extension the laser spot, north.
Then the countdown timer reached zero.