target: downtown Dubai. He then turned to a control panel in the middle of the console. A flat screen display about 20 centimetres across had been positioned where car stereos or sat navs were usually situated. He touched the screen and it lit up to show the PTP, the Personal Tracking System. This was a very distant cousin of an advanced radar receiver. The PTP used an uplink to a hacked Russian satellite network that was ordinarily employed by the Kremlin. It provided Azrael with an early warning system should anyone decide to stick their nose into his affairs.
Jumping from the vehicle, Azrael strode around to the back door, opened it and stared down at two steel boxes taking up the space inside. The Collector was the most advanced missile launcher in the world. It had been developed in a private lab on Trista da Cunha, approximately 2500 kilometres west of South Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. There, a team of researchers had spent three years and almost 200 million euros of the Four Horsemen’s money designing a range of new weapons that would not be rivalled by legal weapons builders for at least a decade.
The Collector was the pride and joy of the designers on Trista da Cunha. Conventional rocket launchers came in two flavours. The simplest were solo-operated bazooka-style devices, with a range of up to 1000 metres. Such weapons could seriously damage a tank. The other type was a Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS. These babies were transported on trucks. They had a vastly greater range than the sort of device a single soldier might operate and one of them could destroy a building from 15 kilometres away. But no one had yet developed a launcher with the power of a truck-based launch pad and the versatility of a bazooka. No one, that is, until a group of eggheads working on a speck of land in the South Atlantic had been funded to the tune of 200 mill.
The Collector had a range of 40 kilometres and fitted into two steel boxes. Azrael pulled the first box along the back of the Land Cruiser, levering it to the desert floor. He then tugged at the second box and settled it beside the first. Opening both lids, he lifted out a dozen steel-carbon alloy tubes. Next he removed three concertinaed lattices made from a titanium silicon composite 20 times stronger than steel and weighing just 6 per cent of its metal equivalent. Lastly, Azrael extracted a collection of aluminium boxes, each containing electronic components.
He had spent a week on Trista da Cunha learning everything there was to know about the Collector and he had achieved a personal-best construction time of 6 minutes 13 seconds, from opening the box lids to having the launcher ready to go. Today the construction took a fraction longer thanks to the intense heat and the sand and dust getting in the way.
Six minutes 24 seconds after prising open the first box, he surveyed his handiwork. The Collector stood just 2 metres high. The superlightweight structure of the platform com- bined with its remarkable strength meant that it could hold two 3-metre-long launch tubes, each encasing a Scourge missile. The Scourge was almost as large as a Patriot 3 used by armies around the world and requiring a truck-sized launch platform. It could deliver a relatively small warhead but one with an explosive power equivalent to 450 kilograms of TNT – a destructive force comparable to a cruise missile. Travelling at a fraction over 1000 kilometres per hour, the Scourge would reach its designated target from Azrael’s location in approximately 128 seconds, a little over 2 minutes.
Azrael had just pulled himself into the driver’s seat of the Land Cruiser to complete the set-up procedure and had switched on the car battery to power the telemetry and guidance initiators, when he heard a burst of noise coming from the PTP. He glanced over and saw the screen light up with red lettering. ‘ALERT. ALERT. SATELLITE TRACKING HAS LOCKED ONTO APPROACHING UNIDENTIFIED GROUND VEHICLE. ALERT.
Jumping from the vehicle, Azrael strode around to the back door, opened it and stared down at two steel boxes taking up the space inside. The Collector was the most advanced missile launcher in the world. It had been developed in a private lab on Trista da Cunha, approximately 2500 kilometres west of South Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. There, a team of researchers had spent three years and almost 200 million euros of the Four Horsemen’s money designing a range of new weapons that would not be rivalled by legal weapons builders for at least a decade.
The Collector was the pride and joy of the designers on Trista da Cunha. Conventional rocket launchers came in two flavours. The simplest were solo-operated bazooka-style devices, with a range of up to 1000 metres. Such weapons could seriously damage a tank. The other type was a Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS. These babies were transported on trucks. They had a vastly greater range than the sort of device a single soldier might operate and one of them could destroy a building from 15 kilometres away. But no one had yet developed a launcher with the power of a truck-based launch pad and the versatility of a bazooka. No one, that is, until a group of eggheads working on a speck of land in the South Atlantic had been funded to the tune of 200 mill.
The Collector had a range of 40 kilometres and fitted into two steel boxes. Azrael pulled the first box along the back of the Land Cruiser, levering it to the desert floor. He then tugged at the second box and settled it beside the first. Opening both lids, he lifted out a dozen steel-carbon alloy tubes. Next he removed three concertinaed lattices made from a titanium silicon composite 20 times stronger than steel and weighing just 6 per cent of its metal equivalent. Lastly, Azrael extracted a collection of aluminium boxes, each containing electronic components.
He had spent a week on Trista da Cunha learning everything there was to know about the Collector and he had achieved a personal-best construction time of 6 minutes 13 seconds, from opening the box lids to having the launcher ready to go. Today the construction took a fraction longer thanks to the intense heat and the sand and dust getting in the way.
Six minutes 24 seconds after prising open the first box, he surveyed his handiwork. The Collector stood just 2 metres high. The superlightweight structure of the platform com- bined with its remarkable strength meant that it could hold two 3-metre-long launch tubes, each encasing a Scourge missile. The Scourge was almost as large as a Patriot 3 used by armies around the world and requiring a truck-sized launch platform. It could deliver a relatively small warhead but one with an explosive power equivalent to 450 kilograms of TNT – a destructive force comparable to a cruise missile. Travelling at a fraction over 1000 kilometres per hour, the Scourge would reach its designated target from Azrael’s location in approximately 128 seconds, a little over 2 minutes.
Azrael had just pulled himself into the driver’s seat of the Land Cruiser to complete the set-up procedure and had switched on the car battery to power the telemetry and guidance initiators, when he heard a burst of noise coming from the PTP. He glanced over and saw the screen light up with red lettering. ‘ALERT. ALERT. SATELLITE TRACKING HAS LOCKED ONTO APPROACHING UNIDENTIFIED GROUND VEHICLE. ALERT.
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