Strike Force Bravo

by Mack Maloney

  Or at least that was the case until about a month ago.

  Sitting to his right was the Navy officer Wayne Bingham. Everyone called him Captain Bingo. He was nearly as old as Ryder, with a graying beard and enormous eyeglasses. Bingo had a dry wit about him, a window to his street smarts. He’d commanded cruisers, destroyers, and even some small secret ships during his Navy career. These days he was the captain of this, the unit’s spy ship, the Ocean Voyager. He’d shown great skill in the six weeks the team secretly operated in and out of the Persian Gulf.

  Sitting next to Bingo was Ron Gallant, the Air Force Special Operations chopper pilot. It had been his partner, Red Curry, who’d crashed his beefed-up Blackhawk aboard the Lincoln, the tide-turning act that led to the successful defense of the carrier. Gallant looked exactly like Clark Kent right down to the specs. He was a sort of brilliant muscle man who was also a great helo driver.

  Next to him was the Delta CO, Martinez. Those were his guys who’d so expertly got the drop on the Team 99 SEALs. But he didn’t even look in the game at this point. Martinez had been the most emotionally damaged from the events in the Persian Gulf, and especially during the battle of Hormuz. Just why was a long story. The short version was this: the terrorists who hijacked the planes meant to be used against the Lincoln had been under surveillance by Martinez’s guys earlier on the morning of the attack. In fact, one Delta guy trailed each pair of hijackers, thinking they were on their way to hijack American planes in Europe. That’s why there was a Delta guy on each of the hijacked planes when they took off that fateful morning. But at the time, no one ever dreamed the hijackers would use Arab airlines filled with Arab citizens in their bid to sink the carrier.

  Had Martinez ordered his men to take down the mooks before they ever got on those airplanes, the nightmarish events later in the day might have been avoided. Hundreds would still be alive; there was no question about that. So now Martinez was faced with a life of “If only.” If only he’d stopped the hijackers before they got on those planes. If only he’d listened to some of the others, who’d advocated shooting the hijackers as soon as they’d been spotted at the airport.

  If only…

  Never very talkative anyway, the Delta officer with the Latino movie star looks had barely spoken a word since the events in Hormuz. He’d withdrawn, become vacant. A victim of combat stress.

  Despite their show of bravura, Ryder, Bingo, and Gallant were in almost as bad shape as Martinez. This last month had not been a pleasant one, floating around out on the sea, living on rationed food and water. No money, no cigarettes, no beer. They were trying to get back to the states, quietly. But the unexpected and very impromptu rescue mission in Singapore had kicked the shit out of that plan. And them…

  With all this in mind, and after listening to Fox describe the highly unusual circumstances as to why he was here, Ryder raised his hand like a kid in school. Fox finally saw him, waving from the back of the room.

  “Yes, a question?”

  Ryder stood up and half-shouted: “What does this have to do with us, Major? Personally, I’d rather be arrested….”

  Laughter went through the room. Fox indicated that everyone could relax; then he walked to the back of the hall and casually took a seat across from the four rogue officers. He produced a fresh pack of Marlboros and offered them around. By time he got the pack back, it was empty.

  As the four men and the Vietnamese girl lit up, Fox remembered the bio on Ryder. Test pilot. Black ops veteran. Did some time inside the military’s top-secret Nevada Special Weapons Testing Range, the place known in the biz as War Heaven. That gave them at least one thing in common.

  “I understand you’ve been to ‘the desert’?” Fox asked him, his voice low, using the unofficial name for the ultra-high-tech weapons range. “What did you think of the place?”

  “It was like a bad episode of The X-Files,” Ryder replied.

  Fox chuckled. “Exactly….” War Heaven specialized in advanced psychological warfare training as well.

  He pulled out a small loose-leaf binder. Inside were the notes Ozzi had taken down at Gitmo. Fox had read them over many times in the past 48 hours. He could almost recite them by heart.

  He looked up at the four men and then just told them bluntly: “Unlike Lt. Barney and his friends, I know who you people are. And I know what you’ve been up to out here. I know about the food poisoning. I know about the bank you bombed. I know what you did over Hormuz.”

  Ryder, Gallant, and Bingo shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Only Martinez remained still.

  “Now, I came out here for a reason,” Fox went on. “But it’s probably not the reason you think. I don’t expect you to answer any questions that might compromise national security. What you were all doing to a month ago…well, by some people’s clocks, that’s already ancient history. It is by mine. What we have to talk about is this thing that’s happening right now, just a few hundred miles away.”

  But the four men just weren’t interested. Especially Ryder.

  Still, Fox went on: “Look, we obviously have a big security problem here. And if it isn’t attended to quickly, it’s gonna unravel and then all hell breaks loose, guaranteed. It’s a situation where the insertion of veteran special ops people is vital.”

  “But if you arrest us first,” Ryder told him, “you have to fly us right home. We couldn’t get involved in this little sideshow of yours if we were in custody, right?”

  Fox did not reply. Unlike the SEALs, he wasn’t here to arrest Ryder or any of the other members of the secret unit. Just the opposite.

  “Let me show you something,” he said. He pointed back to the laptop map still projecting on the wall, indicating the larger landmass of Luzon, just south of the three islands. “Much of the uninhabited real estate north of Manila is controlled by Abu Sabas, a new Philippine chapter of Al Qaeda. Bin Laden’s guys have been pumping money, intelligence, and know-how into this part of the world for the past several years. And it’s been getting results. Now here’s where it might become a little more interesting for you.”

  Remote click to the next image. It was a photograph of a very ugly jihad terrorist. Pop eye, scarred face, bad teeth, and crooked turban.

  Ryder, Bingham, and Gallant sat straight up in their seats. Only Martinez remained as he was. A picture of this man was probably the only thing that could have got their attention like this.

  The picture was of Sheikh Abdul al-Ahari Kazeel. He was not only one of the top planners of 9/11; he was the chief architect of the attack on the Lincoln, as well. He was also one of the last big Al Qaeda types the mystery unit had been seeking to whack.

  “I understand this guy is a friend of yours,” Fox said to them dryly.

  “He’s the number-one mook we want pushing up daises, if that’s what you mean,” Gallant replied.

  “Did you know they’re calling him a ‘superterrorist’ these days?” Fox went on.

  “Who is?” Ryder wanted to know.

  Fox shrugged. “Time? Newsweek? The Washington Post? CNN….”

  “He fucks up the Lincoln attack,” Gallant said testily. “He fucks up in Singapore. And they christen him a ‘superterrorist’?”

  “The world’s first superterrorist,” Fox added casually. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what the kids call ‘failing up,’” Bingham said in disgust. “The guy’s a mass murderer and what happens? They turn him into a celebrity.”

  Fox almost smiled. “Well, now that I’ve caught your attention,” he said. “I have another news flash for you. The CIA says Kazeel arrived in the Philippines forty-eight hours ago. And they think he might have been near the crash zone shortly before the B-2 went down. Maybe it’s a coincidence; maybe it’s not.”

  All four men were sitting up straight now, even Martinez. It sounded corny, but Fox was cleverly making them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

  “Interested now?” Fox asked them.

  Gallant power-puffed his Marl
boro and crushed it out on the table. “We might be,” he said.

  “Well, let me sweeten the pot just a bit more,” Fox went on. “Off-the-record, I appreciate what you guys did, in Singapore, at Hormuz, and before. If I had had the chance, I would have been right there with you.”

  He nodded back toward the SEALs. “But obviously, some people aren’t such big fans of yours. The guy who sent those fish heads after you, especially. He’d like to see you in jail—or worse. Now, he happens to be my boss, too. So when this B-2 thing came up, I convinced him to send me out here, carrying an offer for you.

  “This is both a search and a rescue mission. I want to find those planes and their crews and the reason they went down. Trouble is, these Abu Sabas characters can be very tough customers if you catch them on a bad day. Bottom line: You guys are good at rescues. You know how to get your hands dirty. And obviously, you know how to keep your mouths shut. Help us out here and maybe you find your guy Kazeel in the bargain.”

  The four men stared back at him. There would be a lot of satisfaction in catching Kazeel. Many in the mystery team held him directly responsible for the deaths of their loved ones. Wheels were turning now….

  “But what about when it’s over?” Gallant finally asked him. “What about us getting back to the states in one piece?”

  Fox was a bit more careful here. “When it’s over,” he said, “we can see about getting you all back home again—with no questions asked.”

  “All of us?” Ryder asked him. “Bingo’s crew? And our guys you already have in custody?”

  “I’ll give you my word that I’ll do my best,” Fox replied sincerely. “But I’ll tell you this: If we turn up aces on this B-2 thing, it will go a long way in convincing my boss to give you a pass.”

  A few moments of silence went by. Finally Bingham just mumbled, “That’s all we really want. To get home, without someone trying to send us to Leavenworth.”

  Fox smiled wearily. “That’s just what I needed to hear. In fact, that’s the best thing I’ve heard in the past two days.”

  But then he checked his notes again and saw there was one more item he had to discuss. He turned to Ryder and Gallant, the two pilots. “I’ve got to make sure of just one more thing—and it will sound strange,” he said.

  “Stranger than all this?” Ryder asked him.

  “Maybe,” Fox replied. “I’ve been led to believe you two guys can fly just about anything with wings; is that true?”

  Ryder and Gallant just nodded.

  Fox then asked: “Would that include a seaplane?”

  Minutes later, Ryder, Gallant, and Fox climbed up to the deck of the creaking spy ship and headed for the bow.

  The air tasted fresh; the ocean sounds were close by. It was Ryder’s first time up from below in a while and he couldn’t stop taking in deep breaths. Even the unbearable heat seemed soothing somehow.

  They had to maneuver themselves around the web of steel cable and lashing bars that kept the dozens of railroad car-size containers in place. Walking around the loading deck had never been a favorite of Ryder’s; there were many things on which to crack a kneecap up here. He wasn’t big on ships anyway. He was an Air Force guy and felt if you’re not flying, your boots should be firmly on the ground. Even now, in the relatively shallow water, he could feel the deck rolling beneath his feet.

  About halfway to the bow, they came upon a container whose front doors were wide open. A six-foot piece of something was sticking out between them. It was as heavily camouflaged as the green ceiling above covered with nets and pieces of fauna. Ryder and Gallant tried to steer Fox away from the container, but there was nothing doing there. The DSA officer practically ran up to it.

  He peeled away the camo to find something metallic beneath. Metallic—and yellow. He pulled back another clump of palm fronds and discovered that what he was looking at was the tail of a helicopter. A very, very yellow helicopter.

  The Sing-One News helicopter.

  “So it was you guys,” Fox said, as if he’d finally become convinced of the team’s alleged exploits. “Damn, I’m impressed.”

  “We can’t answer any questions about that, either, Major,” Gallant quickly told him, pushing his Metropolis-issue glasses back up on his nose not once but twice in the course of the sentence.

  “And I’m not asking you any,” Fox said. He really was impressed. Again, it was his business to know the bible on every U.S. special operations group in existence, both past and present. They were all good, and indeed, they were all special. But he didn’t know of one who could have pulled off what the supersecret team did at the Tonka Tower, never mind over Hormuz.

  Fox ran his hand along the length of the hidden helicopter. “Or maybe I could ask just a few?” he quickly amended himself.

  Ryder and Gallant began to walk away. “I know how you did the rescue mission!” Fox called after them. “The whole world does. It was on TV. But my question is, Why did you do it? How did you know it was going to happen? What gave you the wherewithal to get the chopper and arrive there so quickly?”

  But the two pilots never replied. They just kept on walking.

  When Fox reached the bow, Ryder and Gallant were hanging over the front railing, mouths agog.

  This was pretty much the reaction Fox had been expecting.

  “Well?” he asked them dryly. “What do you think of her?”

  Floating on the calm sea about two hundred feet off the bow was one of the ugliest airplanes Ryder had ever seen. It looked about a mile long and a mile wide. In reality it was roughly the size of a 727 airliner. It had a high wing sitting atop its fuselage. Its cockpit windows looked like a pair of yellow eyes staring out from the plane’s long, bulbous black nose. It had four huge engines, arrayed across the wing, with a small pontoon at each end. The tail sat unnaturally high, not unlike that of a C-5 Galaxy.

  Ryder heard himself groan. This was no seaplane. It was a boat—a flying boat.

  “This is the pooch you were asking us about?” he said to Fox.

  “‘Pooch’?” Fox replied with feigned insult. “Colonel, this airplane features the best in Japanese engineering and manufacturing. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces have been flying these things for more than fifteen years. It’s also just about the only flying boat operating today. It can fly almost anywhere in the Pacific, get to islands that have no runways, pick up people who are sick or whose ships are sinking. Hundreds owe their lives to this aircraft.”

  Ryder just shook his head. “And this is how we’re going where we’re going?”

  Fox nodded.

  “And you expect us to fly it?”

  “Can you?” Fox asked them.

  Ryder and Gallant contemplated the huge aerial boat again. There was an old saying in aeronautics: If it looks good, it flies good. But the reverse was also true. Just looking at the airplane, Ryder knew it would be a bitch to fly.

  “Fifteen years old, you say?” he asked Fox. “Does it have flight computers onboard? Pilot assistance? Fly-by-wire, things like that?”

  “You bet,” was the reply. “The guys who flew it here tell me it handles like a dream.”

  Ryder and Gallant just looked at each other. The guys who flew it here?

  “If they loved it so much, where are they now?” Ryder asked Fox looking around. “And why can’t they be the drivers?”

  Fox readjusted his wraparound sunglasses. “Number one, even though they are on the CIA’s payroll, they don’t have the security clearances that you guys do,” he said. “Number two, they have an idea where we are going…and, well, they wanted no part of it. So they’re on their way up to Saigon as we speak.”

  Sure enough, Ryder and Gallant could see a small motor launch north of them, two people onboard, waving furiously but moving away from them as fast as they could. In the movies, this was the part where one of the men on the boat would yell out: “So long, suckers!”

  “So you really were counting on us to get everyone out of here in this thi
ng?” Ryder asked him. “That was a leap of faith.”

  “Your friends in Gitmo assured us you could do it,” Fox told him. “So did your service résumé.”

  Ryder threw his expended cigarette over the side. He could fly anything; he knew that. Ditto for Gallant. Though he was a chopper pilot, he knew his way around big planes, too. But this monster?

  “You say this thing is Japanese military?” he asked Fox.

  The man nodded. “Self-Defense Forces, right. It’s called a ‘Kai.’”

  The plane was unmarked—or more accurately, the huge red ball of the Japanese national insignia had been painted over, hastily.

  “If this belongs to the Japanese Navy, what are you guys doing with it?”

  Without missing a beat, Fox replied: “We stole it….”

  Ryder and Gallant looked at each other again and did a simultaneous eye roll. “Stole it?” Ryder asked.

  “Well, it’s a game we play,” Fox said, as if these things were routine. “They know we’ve got it. They’re just not trying too hard to find it.”

  It took just 10 minutes to get the composite team loaded aboard the enormous Kai flying boat.

  The eight Delta guys sat up front, just behind the crew compartment. The half-dozen Team 99 SEALs, still sulking, were huddled at the opposite end of the compartment. In between were the State Department Security guards, 10 in all, yet to be seen without their sunglasses. These guys were as top-secret as the DSA itself. Tough and very, very quiet. Facing straight ahead, they resembled automatons.

  Ryder and Gallant settled into the pilots’ seats. Fox hadn’t misled them here at least; the control panel was highly automated, just the way they liked it. There were extensive microprocessing assist units and everything was indeed fly-by-wire. This meant tiny computers actually flew the airplane by responding to the movements of the pilots on the controls and not through cables or wires. The flight panel looked as good as anything found inside a modern airliner.