Strike Force Delta

by Mack Maloney

  The five men let out a hoot. For them, this might have been the most beautiful sight in the world.

  No sooner were the words out of Finch’s mouth when another sound enveloped the cliff. This racket was a little more familiar. Horizontal rotor blades turning in the mist and wind. Powerful engines on another powerful machine. It came out of the fog a moment later.

  It was a helicopter. But again, not an ordinary one.

  It looked mostly like a UH-60 Blackhawk, the mainstay of the U.S. military’s helicopter forces. It was dull black, charcoal almost. This was because it was layered in Stealth paint.

  It was about one-third bigger than the typical Blackhawk, though, and it was very wide. It could carry nearly a dozen more people than a standard UH-60 and many more weapons, too. This one was festooned with heavy machine guns, Gatling guns, grenade launchers, missile launchers, the works. In many ways, it was a flying tank.

  Add in its sound-dampened engines, its suites of high-tech navigation and communications gear, its night-flying capabilities, and the fact that, again, it was covered in the technology of Stealth, no surprise its nickname was the Superhawk.

  “It’s only because that thing,” the old man was telling them, pointing back to the futuristic transport, “is too big to land on the ship that they had to send this up for you. But I understand you’ll appreciate the ride itself. For sentimental reasons.”

  “Amen to that,” one of the five men replied.

  As the five ex-prisoners quickly made their way to the copter, its side door opened and three men stepped out. Two were crewmen of the aircraft; the third man looked sick. His eyes were downcast, his hands shaking slightly. He’d been a darkly handsome individual at one time—but his face had fallen, his eyes had sunken in, and his lips seemed permanently sealed by worry and anxiety. The five men tried to talk to him, but he was oblivious to their presence.

  Finch took the ailing man by the arm and led him away from the copter. “Take good care of him,” one of the guys in the orange suits said. “He’s important to us.”

  His new charge now standing a safe distance away, Finch returned to the helicopter and handed the prisoners a bag he’d been keeping under his jacket. It contained a dozen doughnuts. The men looked in the bag and laughed. It was an inside joke.

  They all shook hands and the prisoners climbed into the helicopter. But suddenly they heard a voice calling out over the twin noises being made by the futuristic transport and the Superhawk.

  “There’s one more!”

  That’s when a sixth person stepped out of the top-secret VTOL aircraft. Dressed all in white, long black hair blowing behind her like some Asian goddess, she was beyond beautiful.

  Her name was Mary Li Cho.

  Everything just stopped. All the noise and the wind and the sound of the sea below. Just stopped . . . as she seemed to glide across the field separating the two aircraft, the futuristic plane taking off behind her. Finch focused in on her and whispered to the five men in orange: “Is that her?”

  They all nodded.

  “That’s her,” they confirmed.

  They made way for her and she climbed aboard the Superhawk first, followed by the five men and their doughnuts. They all turned and saluted Finch, even the Asian beauty. He saluted back.

  The copter gunned its engines, causing a huge downwash of air and exhaust. Finch stepped back, his hat flying off into the breeze—but he didn’t care. This was more exciting than anything he’d experienced in his twenty-five-plus years with the Coast Guard.

  It pays to have friends in high places, he thought.

  He watched as the helicopter seemed to fall right off the side of the cliff, descending to the rusty ship below. The copter landed on the ship’s middeck not a minute later—and promptly disappeared, another trick in its arsenal.

  The ship was already moving when the helicopter set down. It had pulled anchor and was now halfway into a 180-degree turn, pointing its stern east, out to sea.

  Back up on the cliff, Finch watched as the containership completed its turn and then, with a roar of power that sounded like a handful of jet engines, which was not far from the truth, the ship soon shot ahead at incredible speed, nearly 40 knots in just two minutes, and quickly disappeared over the darkened horizon.

  Finch stood there for a long time, the downcast man silently joining him at his side.

  Finally, Finch whispered to himself: “Good luck, guys—I’ll keep the coffee warm for you.”

  Chapter 3

  The containership’s name was the Ocean Voyager. Eight hundred feet long, 105 feet wide, and 60 feet from the top of the mast to the bottom of its cargo bay, it weighed thirty-thousand tons empty. It was square and rusty and at least a dozen paint jobs behind the curve. When it was originally built back in the early 1980s, on a good day it could barely make 15 knots.

  The ship was ugly—and that might have been its best asset. Its deck was a jungle of tie-offs and ropes and winches and chains and a million other things to trip over. The deck was also crowded with containers, in some places stacked three or four high. Most of them were as rusty as the ship. Lashed together with creaky bars and hinges, they looked like a bunch of railroad cars that had somehow become lost at sea. In other words, the vessel appeared no different from any other of the hundreds of containerships plying the world’s oceans.

  But the Ocean Voyager was not really a containership. It was a warship, powerful and unlike any other.

  If it had an official description, it would be Air-Land Assault Ship/Special. But no one privy to its existence ever called it that. It was based on a British concept, born of low defense budgets back in the 1970s, in which the Royal Navy would deploy the Harrier jump jets on converted containerships, thus negating the need to build new, expensive aircraft carriers.

  The Ocean Voyager was that dream come true in spades. It began with two elevators that had been installed just forward of the ship’s recessed deckhouse. The same size and type used on the U.S. Navy’s super-carriers, they were powerful enough to lift forty-thousand pounds from the bowels of the ship up to the deck. These elevators served as movable launch and recovery pads for aircraft flying from the vessel. And they were well hidden. When they weren’t in use, six containers were slid on top of the elevators, preventing them from being seen from above.

  The elevators served the small airborne strike force that was hidden below decks. The first time this very secret undercover vessel saw action was a year before, in the Mediterranean and then in the Persian Gulf. For that, its maiden voyage as a combat vessel, it had carried two of the supersecret Superhawk helicopters and a pair of AV-8s, the U.S. Marine version of the famous Harrier jump jet.

  Now, there were four Superhawks on the ship, in addition to one surviving jump jet. The helicopters were all new, just off the assembly line. A platoon of Marine Corps air mechanics serviced these aircraft in the ship’s crowded belowdecks hangar. Spare parts and ammunition for the aircraft were stored nearby in—what else?—seaborne containers. Just about everything the ship needed to stay at sea and do its thing was hidden in plain sight inside the containers lashed to its deck.

  But the ship’s assets only began with the planes of its tiny air force and the highly trained special ops troops who flew them. There was a section toward the front of the ship, on the bottom level, that was crammed with five white oversize containers. Inside these nearly antiseptic compartments could be found some of the most sophisticated spy equipment known to man.

  Nicknamed the White Rooms, these containers held tons of eavesdropping and satellite tracking gear. The people who worked in these containers—the Spooks—could tap into Echelon, the National Security Agency’s ultrasecret satellite system. This meant that just like several dozen NSA sites around the world, the ship could intercept just about any phone call made, E-mail sent, fax transmitted, anywhere on earth, then read, copy, and even alter it without the sender or receiver ever knowing a thing.

  The white containers als
o housed dirty tricks sections where just about anything needed in the spy game could be produced, duplicated, or counterfeited. Weapons could also be made down here—anything from a germ bomb to a small nuclear device.

  So the Ocean Voyager packed a punch. High-tech aircraft, a small army of high-tech warriors, a huge snooping capability—and its own weapons factory—it was all powered by four gas turbine engines, the very same powerplants that drove the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. The Ocean Voyager could move through the water like nothing else its size.

  But whose ship was this? Who built it? Paid for it? Who was able to get all these weapons and spy gear, airplanes, and people on board—to sail off and do what was considered the dirtiest work in all of the dark world of secret operations?

  There was no easy answer to any of those questions except the first one. The ship did not belong to the U.S. Navy or the Marines or any branch of the U.S. military. Nor the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, or any other U.S. intelligence Agency. The most accurate answer was that it belonged to the people of the United States of America. The crew served the country’s citizens directly.

  Its purpose? To track down anyone involved in the planning, funding, or implementation of the attacks of September 11th and punish them severely. Simple as that. Invading countries? Regime building? Humanitarian missions? These weren’t on the minds of the people who ran the ship. Its reason for being was to haunt Al Qaeda, to use the terrorists’ tactics on the terrorists themselves, to fight down and dirty, no holds barred against the Islamic fanatics—and God help anyone who got in the way.

  The people on board were already well-known in the underworld of the Middle East, in that nether region where the terrorists made their money, sold their drugs, and plotted their missions of mass murder. These killers for Allah considered the regular U.S. military to be big and lumbering, a giant easily heard from thousands of miles away, long before it made any move against them. But these same terrorists knew the people on Ocean Voyager to be something quite different. To the terrorists, they were bad spirits, the bane of their existence, demons who slipped in with the night, a razor blade knife in hand. They’d already killed a number of Al Qaeda’s shadowy leadership, and they’d already disrupted several major Al Qaeda operations. Just the speaking their name was enough to send chills up the spine of any Al Qaeda member, assuming such vermin had spines.

  For those in the United States who knew of them, the people who crewed this ship were usually referred to as The Ghosts. To the Muslim terrorists who feared them so much, they were known as the Crazy Americans.

  And at the moment, just about all of them were drunk.

  The most impressive place on the Ocean Voyager was the Captain’s Room. Located at the top of the stern-mounted control house, it was a large multiwindowed cabin, done smartly in mahogany and steel. It featured a library, a wet bar, a galley, and a very ornate wooden table, which allowed those sitting at it to look out, with an unobstructed view, to the ocean beyond.

  The room also contained many high-tech items. Huge TV screens, satellite readouts, radar-imaging systems. Just like the Spooks’ rooms downstairs, it looked more like something out of NASA than something out at sea.

  In this room now, just an hour after the ship’s hasty departure from Cape Lonely, the members of the mysterious special ops group had gathered. There was plenty of cold beer and liquor to be had and plenty to eat. Out the window were the softly rolling sea and a bright full moon. Overhead, the stars glowed like jewels.

  This was a reunion of sorts. The Ghosts were an assorted cast of characters. They numbered more than 100 now; when the unit first sailed a year ago, the number was barely more than half that. This was another strange thing about them: other special ops groups who’d come into contact with the Ghosts along the way, some even sent out to track them down and arrest them, had wound up joining them instead.

  The original team—or at least the officers—all had one thing in common: Each had lost a family member or a loved one on September 11th or to some previous terrorist act. They were all veterans of special operations, too, but with this extra incentive: These secret warriors became the type of operatives whose skills were complemented by a deep-seated desire for revenge, a way to pay back Al Qaeda for bringing so much misery and destruction to their lives and the country that day.

  The core of the original group had been made up of about two dozen Delta Force soldiers, two fighter pilots, and several copter drivers. Their extended family included the guy who actually sailed the ship—a veteran Navy captain named Wayne Bingham known to everyone as Bingo—and his crew of 35. Since that time the Ghosts had been joined by a dozen or so members of the very hush-hush State Department Security unit, nearly a dozen SEALs—again a team that was originally sent out to apprehend the Ghosts—and three members of the Defense Security Agency, another deep-secret Pentagon unit, which, among other things, specialized in rooting out terrorists within the ranks of the U.S. military.

  Almost everyone here now in the Captain’s Room was wearing an orange prison suit, another part of the odd chapter of where the unit members had been in the past few weeks. The five men who’d been picked up in Las Vegas were on hand; they’d been arrested for trespassing on government property, ironically after preventing a terrorist attack on nearby Nellis Air Force Base. But many of the others were attired in bright prison wear as well. Up until 24 hours ago, they’d been prisoners, too. Their jail was the holding facility at Guantánamo Bay, the place where the U.S. military kept prisoners captured in the various wars against Islam. All of the Ghosts were Americans, though, and the secret unit’s activities had been heroic and had saved tens of thousands of innocent lives. But the truth was, they’d also rubbed so many in D.C. the wrong way that at one point the entire unit had been secretly locked up at Gitmo.

  But now they were all free again; that’s why it was a kind of class reunion. Some of these guys hadn’t seen one another in a long time. So the beer flowed and there was laughter and handshakes. A baseball team, reuniting in spring training after winning the World Series in the fall, was like this.

  Most of these men were chiseled, huge, and muscular, especially those of the group who were ex–Delta Force. The SEALs and the SDS guys, too, were all pumped—shaved heads, tattoos, and sunglasses at night. They all looked the part—in fact, they looked like extras for a movie being made about special operations. Even the beautiful Asian girl, Li, seemed right out of central casting.

  The unlikely-looking host of the party was sitting at the far end of the table, speaking with a few of the senior members of the unit, drinking Jack Daniel’s straight. He was a little man, barely five-four, sixtyish, with a completely ordinary face, red complexion, and enormous jug-handle ears.

  His name was Bobby Murphy. He was the brains behind the outfit.

  The story of Bobby Murphy actually began with a terrorist incident back in 1972. The Summer Olympics were held in Munich that year. Midway through the competition, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped a dozen Israeli athletes, held them hostage, and eventually killed them all. German authorities allowed most of the terrorists to escape. About two dozen in all, they scattered themselves to the four corners of the earth.

  Shortly afterward, the Israeli government created a secret unit whose sole aim was to hunt down and kill every one of these terrorists. It took them more than 15 years, but the secret unit eventually got every one of the Munich Massacre killers, shooting each one between the eyes, but not before telling him who they were and why he was being whacked. It was crude, it was immoral, and it was highly illegal. But it sent a message to the Palestinian terrorists: If you screw with Israel, we’re going to get you, no matter how long it takes. You will never spend another peaceful night. You will always be looking over your shoulder. Eventually, we will find you, and we’ll kill you, and it won’t be pretty.

  That’s what Bobby Murphy wanted to do for America after September 11th. He wanted to send a message to Al Qaeda: Y
ou have done this to us and you have succeeded. You might try something as big or even bigger on us and succeed again as well. But whatever the case, we’re coming to get you. No matter how long it takes, we’ll hunt you down, we’ll find you, we’ll kill you, and it won’t be pretty. Considering the mass murder that had happened on 9/11, Murphy didn’t think anything less than this sort of campaign would do. And eventually he found a few people along the way who agreed.

  But who was he to have such grand designs? His own past was so shady, even Murphy himself wasn’t sure of every twist and turn he’d made.

  He was a spy—that everyone was sure of. He’d worked for every intelligence Agency in the United States—CIA, DIA, NSA, NRO—his career of 20 years had been an alphabet soup of bag jobs and undercover missions.

  Or at least, that was his story. No one in the special unit knew for sure, and at this point there was no real need for asking. Murphy was such a regular guy and an authentic patriot, anyone in the group would take a bullet for him. And one thing was for certain: Murphy knew a lot of people in the U.S. intelligence community. But as he’d told all the team on more than one occasion, this was not the same thing as having a lot of friends there.

  Shortly after 9/11, Murphy approached the highest officials of the CIA with his bold concept. He felt that the country needed a boost, a shot in the arm to get out of the gloom and depression that had followed the events that dark day. He reminded the CIA of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor, when a handful of small bombers dumped a small amount of bombs on Tokyo. The damage was slight, but the propaganda and morale victory was enormous. Murphy wanted to do the same thing—reach out and put the hurt on someone, anyone, connected with 9/11 and do it right away, to alleviate the hopelessness that seemed to have seeped into the country after the attacks.

  The CIA turned down his idea. Too dangerous, they said. Too much career risk if things went wrong. No matter what the mission, the Agency would not get on board. Undeterred, Murphy went to all the military’s intelligence services—the DIA, Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, Naval Intelligence. All of them turned him down, too, for the same reason: too much risk to their own asses. But, Murphy had asked them: Isn’t the fact that three thousand Americans were murdered in cold blood enough to justify any risk? Apparently not, was the answer he got everywhere.