Strike Force Alpha

by Mack Maloney

  The man in the Walgreens didn’t tell him much more than that. He provided him with the itinerary and it called for Santos to pack the required items and be ready for a car pickup at 10 o’clock this day.

  Again, he was to say nothing to anyone.

  It was two minutes to ten.

  Santos took a long look around the house. The kitchen walls needed painting. The lawn needed a good weeding. Ginny’s car needed a wax. No problem. He would do all these things when he came back home.

  The car pulled up at precisely 10 o’clock. Santos wasn’t sure why, but for some reason he’d been expecting a limousine. What he got instead was a cut-rate five-year-old Chevy Impala, obviously a vehicle from a federal government car pool.

  But Ginny wasn’t back yet. She was about twenty minutes overdue. Edict or not, he just couldn’t leave without explaining a little of this to her. Without saying good-bye.

  Two men in bad suits walked up to his porch and pushed his doorbell. It didn’t work; he’d fix that when he got home, too.

  He opened the door; they flashed IDs that might have said Air Force Intelligence—or might have been library cards.

  “Ready to go, Colonel?” one asked.

  Santos straightened up. It was good to hear it again.

  Before he could reply, though, the second man grabbed his bags and started for the car.

  “There’s a screwup with our airline tickets,” the first guy said. “The whole Midwest system went down. We have to hurry to rebook.”

  Santos didn’t know what he was talking about, and at the moment, he didn’t care.

  “I have to at least leave a note for my wife,” Santos told the man directly. “Something just to tell her I’m OK.”

  But just then, Ginny pulled into the driveway. She saw the men, the car, and the packed bags. The men looked like police officers. Santos met her halfway across the lawn.

  “Tom? What’s going on?”

  He suddenly found it hard to speak.

  “I have to go away, just for a while,” he told her.

  “Go away? Go away where?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s a government thing. Something they want me to do.”

  Ginny looked at him like never before. Her eyes said it all. She thought he was losing his mind.

  “Tom—you can’t go anywhere,” she said. “You’re sick—”

  He held up his hand, cutting her off. “Correction,” he said. “I used to be sick….”

  She was frightened now. “Tom, let’s go in the house, please.”

  But he leaned forward, kissed her quickly, and started to walk away. She dropped her grocery bundle. The contents spilled out on the grass. Santos climbed into the backseat of the car with the second man and began to drive away.

  Ginny was just one breath away from hysterics. She looked down at her feet and saw Tom’s prescription, just refilled. She picked it up and screamed after him: “Your medication!”

  He rolled down the window, waved, and yelled back: “I don’t need it. Not anymore!”

  Chapter 9

  Persian Gulf Region

  The next day

  The six Gulfstream jets arrived, one at a time, at the private airfield outside Manama, the capital of Bahrain.

  The island nation off the coast of Saudi Arabia was the most liberal of the Gulf states. It wasn’t Sodom or Gomorrah, but there were nightclubs here and some sold liquor and beer. There were women here, too, women who didn’t keep the faces covered and would share a drink or two, with the right person.

  There were many private clubs on the island as well, and these were even more risqué. One was the destination of the passengers in the six private jets. The club was located close to the airport, convenient, as most guests flew in from other places. It was built of plastic and mortar; its design was that of a huge futuristic Bedouin tent. The gaming tables were on the first floor; the women were on the second. Few of them had ever seen a burka. In fact, none were Arab. They were Eastern European. And they were all beautiful. They accepted money or chips, for favors.

  The six jets parked at the far end of the field; they’d taken the same flight path from Riyadh. Two F-15 fighters from the Saudi Royal Air Force had escorted them right down to the runway. The skies above the Gulf could be dangerous, especially at night, so the six travelers welcomed the airborne bodyguard. And the protection did not end there. The two fighters would remain on alert, ready to scramble, whenever the six men decided to return.

  This was Prince Ali Muhammad al-Saud’s gang, he of the 116-room palace back in Riyadh. His close friend Farouk was there, as was Khalis Abu, his twenty-second brother-in-law. The three other men were board members of the Pan Arabic Oil Exchange, Ali’s $4 million a day business. Like the Prince, they were all involved in the financing of jihad operations. Farouk and Khalis Abu had hand-carried funds to various cell members in the past; the Prince’s colleagues at Pan Arabic had helped in laundering charity money as well. (Indeed, some jihad groups called Pan Arabic “the diamond mine.”) The six men flew to this place once a week, usually on Saturday night. But they never all flew in the same plane together, or even in one another’s airplanes. They didn’t trust one another enough for that….

  Once landed, a separate limo picked up each man and transported him the half-mile to the club. The six were all wearing their best flowing-robe ensembles. Ali, as always, was dressed entirely in white. Finally gathered in one place, they were ushered through a side entrance and brought up to a suite on the second floor.

  This place was gigantic, with huge curved windows, very low Aladdin-style lights, and gold fixtures everywhere. Many satin pillows were strewn about the floor. A dozen servants were stationed at various places around the room, Filipinos all of them. A case of champagne was waiting on ice. The six men rolled out their prayer mats and, led by Prince Ali, quickly recited their evening prayers, even though they were several hours too late and none of them had the faintest idea whether they were facing Mecca or not. This done, the club manager was signaled. He clapped his hands softly and a side door to the room opened. A line of girls appeared. Clad in negligees and bathing suits, they were paraded before the six men as they lounged on their pillows and drank Dom Perignon. Every girl was blond and busty. They were mostly German and Czech, with a few Russians thrown in. There were 30 in all. The oldest one was 20.

  Each man picked two, except the Prince, who took three. The rest were dismissed. Those girls selected were led to another room and told to wait.

  The men got around to ordering their late-night dinner. All six chose the beef l’orange with french fries, and chocolate cake for dessert. Then they gathered their pillows together and had a serious conversation.

  They were worried. The mysterious, and undoubtably U.S. unit had struck again, breaking up the Sea Princess operation, killing every member of the Genoa cell, and then bombing the Party of God headquarters—all in just 48 hours. And this just days after the attacks in Lebanon and Somalia and the assassination of their rotund Yemeni brother, Hamini Musheed.

  “The Crazy Americans are not going away,” Farouk began. “And this could be very bad for us. They have got under my skin. I think about them constantly.”

  “They knew exactly when our friends in Genoa were going to hit the liner,” Khalis Abu, the-brother-in-law, said. “You might say they just got lucky. But I ask you, have you ever known the Americans to be that lucky?”

  The others shook their heads no.

  “I tell you, brothers, they are listening in on us,” Khalis went on. “From our lips to their ears….”

  Ali raised his hand, as if to slap him across his face.

  “No!” the prince screamed. “They would not dare. We are too important for that. I am too important for that….”

  But Farouk persisted. “What if they do have us bugged, my brother? Our homes. Our jets. This place. This room?”

  Again Prince Ali tried to wave their concerns away, but not quite as dramatically.
The Algerian Party of God had nothing to do with his activities; he couldn’t have cared less about them. But he had sent money to the Genoa cell just days before it was wiped out. The plan to sink the cruise ship had been in the works for months, in absolute secrecy, but somehow the Americans had sniffed it out. The attack on the Sicilian villa was even more disturbing. Its location had been so secret, even the Prince was never told where it was. The dark humor of dropping the raft loaded with explosives on the house was also unsettling.

  Stranger still, the attempt on the cruise ship had received scant coverage in the media, as had all of the recent American actions. Fox called it “a failed attempt at terrorism by amateurs.” CNN didn’t cover it at all. This was so perverse. It was as if the news networks were intentionally downplaying the kind of events they usually trumpeted. This was as baffling to the Prince as the shadowy U.S. strike team itself.

  He knew many people in the U.S. military; he met with them frequently at receptions and diplomatic gatherings. He’d talked to several at a luncheon earlier this day. As subtly as possible, he’d brought up the subject of the recent incidents. Each U.S. officer he spoke to seemed to draw a blank on the subject; a couple said they’d get back to him. Were they as much in the dark as he was? Or were they setting him up?

  All this only made him worry more—and when Ali worried, he tended to drink heavily. If he drank too much, he would get angry and sloppy—and drink more. Sometimes this behavior would lead to the dark areas of his ancestors, to violence and blackouts, the curse of many with blood on their hands.

  After that, just about anything could happen.

  The night passed with lots of food and more champagne—and no further talk about the recent troubles. Prince Ali ate a lion’s share of beef l’orange and french fries. But anytime he began enjoying himself, his thoughts went back to the Crazy Americans. Who were they? What were they going to do next? Would they ever really come knocking at his door? It was too much worry—as a result, he’d consumed two bottles of champagne and a dozen shots of sake along with his meal. The alcohol did not dull his uneasiness, though, and neither did the food. Ali was not by nature a strong individual.

  Around midnight, five of the men retreated to their individual suites along with the female companions they’d selected for the evening. The Prince had been the last to retire. Those who’d seen him remembered he was in a foul mood when he finally staggered to his private chambers just before 1:00 A.M. Noises were heard coming from the room about a half hour later, not all of them pleasant. The sky grew particularly dark at this moment, and the winds began blowing fiercely.

  By 2:00 A.M., though, everything was quiet again.

  The Prince was the first of the six to leave the next morning. He encountered a floor manager as he was going out the back door. Ali told the man to take care of the mess in his private bedroom. The manager went to the suite and found two of the three girls who had spent the night with the Prince cowering in the corner of the bathroom, crying and in shock. On the king-size bed lay the third girl. She’d been beaten to death.

  The manager just shook his head.

  “Not again…” he whispered.

  Chapter 10

  Aboard Ocean Voyager

  “It’s fruit….”

  Ryder leaned over the technician’s shoulder and studied the blue-tinted TV screen. It looked a little fuzzy without his reading glasses.

  “Fruit?” he asked. “Are you sure?”

  “One hundred percent…. Looks like lemons, oranges. Watermelons….”

  Ryder was at the bottom of Ocean Voyager, inside one of the White Rooms. It wasn’t so much a room as a long, narrow chamber, the same size as the containers up on deck. Inside was definitely white, though, and spotless. It looked like the control room of a TV studio or something at Cape Canaveral. There were dozens of video monitors hanging off the walls and ceiling. Jammed in between them were banks of shortwave radios, satellite receivers, fiber-optic lines, faxes, and computer screens. Most of the TV monitors and PC screens were displaying not satellite imagery or IR read-outs but pornography. Streaming videos, Web sites, chat lines, Triple-X rated, all of it.

  There were ten guys working inside the White Room. They looked like high school students, all lab coats and glasses. On first coming aboard the ship, Ryder had been told not to insult this group by asking if they were CIA. They were actually employees of the NSA, America’s largest, most secret intelligence agency. Their primary job was to eavesdrop on the terrorists and then try to locate them on a map. How good were these kids and their listening equipment? They could hook a suspected terrorist by the simple act of his turning on his pager. Once he was tagged, they could electronically tap his phone, intercept his E-mail, even hear messages on his answering machine. The trick was to connect what they were hearing to a warm body and then get a location so the Delta guys could go and grease the bad guys. Down here they called it Spooks versus Mooks.

  And all that porn? Just like Bobby Murphy, the terrorists used Internet porn sites to communicate. They spoke on dirty chat lines and porn-based bulletin boards, and through erotic-picture newsgroups. Some of the most sensitive gear inside the White Rooms allowed the Spooks to monitor up to 1,000 of these sites, around-the-clock.

  But this was not porn Ryder was looking at. In front of him was a 3-D photo analysis computer. The guy working the machine for him was Gil Bates, Head Spook, the top man down here in the White Rooms. He was tall and reedy, with tiny eyeglasses, spiked hair, a goatee, and earrings in both lobes. He’d been a child prodigy, earning a Ph.D. in Military (C-3) Theory from MIT at age 16. The government recruiters swooped in right away. By 18, he was a senior systems analyst for the NSA. He was now just 20 and had nine other eggheads working under him. He was supremely confident in his abilities but had a reputation for being a bit of a wiseass. He also had a thing for extremely bright Hawaiian shirts.

  Displayed on the screen was a digitized version of one of the photos Ryder had taken over the Med the night before. It showed three of the seven ships he’d spotted in convoy formation during the encounter with the Arab warplanes. The Spooks had developed his film, run it through a computer enhancer, and then fed it into this 3-D imaging machine. Bates’s conclusion: Yes, the ships seemed to be following one another in a convoy. However, the crates on their decks and in their holds contained nothing more than fruit. In fact, that’s how all of the crates were marked.

  “But how do you know that they aren’t just fruit crates with weapons or explosives inside?” Ryder asked him.

  Bates shrugged. He was so young he made the Delta guys look like retirees.

  “Materials used in weapons or explosives give off a heat signature completely different from organic matter,” he explained, slowly, so Ryder’s prehistoric brain could absorb what he was saying. “Even from belowdecks, we’d get a whiff of it. Now, we can’t get a real heat read off your photo, of course. But we are able to have the enhancer break down the spectro-magnetic image. Then, for every color in the spectrum we can assign—”

  Ryder cut him off. “OK, Einstein, I believe you.”

  This was a disappointment. Ryder had convinced himself the Arab aircraft were, for some reason, riding protection for the line of cargo ships. But if the ships were only hauling fruit, what would the point be?

  “Tell me this then,” he asked Bates. “Why were those ships sailing the way they were? All in a line….”

  “There’d just been a squall through the area,” Bates replied. “Small ships like to sail within sight of each other in bad weather. Safety in numbers….”

  “But seven ships? All in a row? How big was this squall?”

  Bates clicked his mouse button. A weather map showing the area the night before popped onto the screen. Another click and Ryder could see what looked like a microscopic hurricane about sixty miles off Tunisia. He scratched his graying head. He hadn’t seen any bad weather up there last night.

  “OK, I give up,” he said finally. “B
ut can you keep all this on a file or something? You know, hang on to it for me?”

  Bates clicked his mouse again and said: “Forever and ever, sir….”

  Ryder left the White Rooms and began the long climb back up top.

  He’d really thought he’d had something, with the ships and the two planes from two different countries—a movement of weapons or the like. But he had to concede that just because it looked funny didn’t necessarily mean that it was. Sometimes his gut could be wrong, he supposed, though in all those black ops he’d been involved in years ago he really couldn’t remember his gut being wrong about anything.

  Maybe it was another sign of age. Maybe he was losing his touch.

  He reached the seven deck—just five more to go—when his cell phone rang. It was Martinez.

  “Find your little buddy and meet me on the fantail,” the Delta boss told him. “There’s something I’ve got to show you.”

  Ryder hung up and trudged up the next three levels. Something seemed different, though, when he reached the upper decks. He could hear a lot of activity on the ship. Voices, carrying down the passageways. People shouting. People laughing. And was that someone singing? This was very strange. Usually the ship was as quiet as a convent.

  Phelan’s cabin was just four doors down from his own. They’d still not had a substantive conversation since the young pilot came aboard. After the bizarre encounter the night before, both Harriers were recovered and brought below, even before their engines were turned off. Martinez met them in the ready room and did a so-called ship’s debrief, a verbal report of actions taken by the team, the details of which would never meet a pen or paper.