Strike Force Alpha

by Mack Maloney

  When this was over, Phelan went directly to his cabin, as did Ryder—only to fall into another troubled sleep, with another visit from Maureen, this time casually saying hello to him as she passed by in the rain with a bunch of Arab kids in tow, many wearing bandages, a harbinger, Ryder was sure, of many bad dreams to come. Phelan had not been out of his room since. So after 24 hours, Ryder had not talked anything but business with the young pilot, and it had been very little of that. Orders or not, this was very unusual. Even on the most secret of missions, a pilot and his wingman were supposed to be tight. Like the way two cops on the beat were tight.

  Or at least that’s the way it used to be.

  He reached Phelan’s cabin and knocked twice. No reply. He tried again. Still, nothing. Ryder toed the door open and peered inside. Phelan was lying on his bunk, amid a pile of CDs, headphones on, writing a letter. A strange way to pass the time, Ryder thought. There was no way to mail anything off the ship.

  The young pilot finally saw him. He took off his headgear and Ryder told him they were wanted up on the tail. Phelan asked what it was about. Ryder said he didn’t have a clue. Phelan quietly put his letter away, closed his CD player, and grabbed his hat. While he waited, Ryder’s eyes floated down to a framed picture Phelan had attached to his cabin wall. It was a photo of a beautiful woman, blond, sweet eyes, shy smile, great body, taken on a beach somewhere.

  Unconsciously Ryder said: “Nice rack. Is this your girlfriend?”

  Phelan looked at Ryder, then at the photo, and then back at Ryder again. He was clearly appalled.

  “Dude,” he said. “That’s my mother….”

  They walked up to the fantail in silence.

  It was almost sunset. The horizon was bright orange; the sun looked like an ember, falling into the water. A great abundance of cumulus was scattered around, making the sky almost heavenly. They were heading east again. Back toward the Suez.

  Martinez was leaning against the rail, puffing on his cigar. He was smiling, for a change. It was odd that the Delta boss wanted to meet them up on deck, and especially at this time of day. Team business was usually conducted in the morning, down in the ship’s combat planning room.

  There were no salutes as the two pilots approached. Ryder simply asked him: “What’s up?”

  Martinez gave them both the once-over. “Can you two keep your mouths shut?”

  “Of course,” Ryder told him.

  “I’ve done nothing but,” Phelan added.

  Martinez never stopped smiling. “OK—but this is really top-secret, right?”

  He was standing over a metal grate. It covered a steel tub sunk about three feet into the deck. This was the aft line locker. It was used to store extra bull rings and rope, the products of the spiderweb crisscrossing the cargo deck.

  Martinez lifted the grate with his foot. There was no rope or rings inside. Instead the tub was filled with ice and cans of Budweiser.

  “Wow!” Phelan cried.

  Ryder was caught speechless. He hadn’t had a beer in nearly three months. “There’s been beer onboard?” he finally exploded. “All this time?”

  It really was a beautiful sight. Ice cold. The red-and-white cans gleaming in the glorious sunset.

  “Where did it come from, Colonel?” Phelan asked anxiously.

  “The Spooks,” Martinez replied. “They found it this morning at the back of one of their supply containers.”

  Ryder did a quick count. He could see at least four dozen cans chilling down. There were 42 people on the boat. That was one can per man, with a few left over….

  But Martinez saw what he was doing and just shook his head. “They found more than a hundred cases,” he revealed. “All of them wrapped in long-term cool-paks.”

  “Wow…” Phelan said again, this time in a whisper.

  “The Spooks gave a bunch to the Marines,” Martinez went on, proudly, like a miner who’d just struck gold. “And the Marines gave a bunch to me.”

  From behind them came the unmistakable sound of one of the ship’s forklifts. The propane-fired engines gave off a very distinctive hiss. One was heading in their direction along the rail, carrying two men and a metal toolbox on its fork. This box was also filled with beer; two cases, still wrapped in cool-paks. Riding on the little truck were Red Curry and Ron Gallant, the U.S. Air Force Special Operations pilots. They were the guys who drove the Blackhawks. Both were captains.

  Curry was an odd duck. He was from Staten Island, real New York Giants country, yet he was a die-hard fan of the Oakland Raiders, a team located a continent away. He was never seen without his black-and-silver ball cap and matching T-shirt, appropriate, as he had the face of a linebacker. He was early thirties, married, with three kids, rugged, and stocky. He always seemed on the verge of throwing a punch at somebody, anybody. The last angry man syndrome.

  Gallant on the other hand was real cool. He looked like he’d fallen off a brochure for the Air Force Academy. Tall, rock-jawed, clean-cut, blemish-free. Except for the throw-back 1950s-style glasses, he was a real Clark Kent type, as restrained as Curry was volatile. He had an air of hipster sophistication, too. His hero was Miles Davis, not Al Davis.

  They made for an odd couple. Yet both had been brilliant so far in handling of the team’s helicopters.

  They screeched to a halt in front of Ryder, Phelan, and Martinez. They looked into the rope tub and saw the stash of Bud and ice.

  “You guys, too?” Curry asked.

  “And ours is colder than yours,” Martinez replied with an amusing puff of cigar smoke. “And we got more of it. So, lucky us.”

  “Colonel, the whole ship is floating,” Gallant told him. “Your guys are jammed into the forward anchor chamber with about ten cases of this stuff. And the Marines are down in their locker room with even more. The Spooks spread it around to everyone.”

  On cue, they heard a burst of laughter from the front of the ship. Then a blast of awful music from down below.

  Gallant turned to Ryder and said: “The Marines are really into their Metallica.”

  “Who?” Ryder asked.

  Phelan spoke up. “Excuse me, but moving around all this beer—is it really authorized?”

  The Air Force pilots laughed at him. So did Martinez.

  “What makes you think anything we’re doing out here is authorized?” Curry asked him. “Shit, man, if we were any blacker we’d be picking cotton.”

  Again, from the forward decks came the sound of many voices raised in laughter. And more music was blasting from below. The ship itself seemed to be rocking, most unusual.

  “But what about ‘the order’?” Phelan insisted. “About not fraternizing with each other. This won’t help that situation.”

  It was a quandary. They had all this beer; it was found in one of their supply containers. But did that mean they could actually drink it?

  “What else would it be here for?” Gallant reasoned. “It isn’t like we’re going to drop it on the mooks.”

  “And it ain’t poison, because half the ship would be dead by now,” Curry added. “Besides, you can’t plant a couple thousand cans of Bud onboard and not expect people to drink it. And you’d be crazy to think they won’t blab about anything while they’re doing it.”

  “I’ve always thought the ‘no-talking thing’ might be a test,” Martinez revealed. “They told us to stay quiet just to see how long we could keep it up.”

  Ryder caught himself licking his lips. He’d heard enough.

  “Well, if it’s a test,” he declared, “then I just flunked.”

  With that, he reached down, grabbed a Bud, popped it open, and took a long, noisy swig. It was his first beer in a hundred days. It seemed more like a hundred years. It went down like spring water from the Fountain of Youth.

  That was it. The rest of them grabbed their own cans from the tub—they were colder—and opened up. Curry meanwhile dumped his beer into Martinez’s ice.

  They didn’t toast; they didn’t know one anothe
r well enough for that. But they did drain their cans with the precision of a drill team. Caught in the brilliant orange of the sunset, for a moment, they looked like actors in a beer commercial. No sooner had they finished their first than each man grabbed a second.

  Curry was already loose. “I always thought it was a POW thing,” he said, with a burp. “They didn’t want us talking to each other because if any of us got captured and they tortured us, we wouldn’t know anything. They can’t beat out of us something we don’t know.”

  The other four just stared back at him.

  “Thanks for that assessment, sunshine,” Martinez said dryly. “Let’s make you the morale officer.”

  “It is strange,” Gallant said. “All this beer, hidden way back in the container—almost as if Murphy didn’t want us to find it until now….”

  “Or at least until our training was complete,” Curry said. “He didn’t want us shit-faced in the middle of the South Atlantic.”

  “A wise man then…” Ryder said, adding: “We should have looked for it earlier.”

  They all finished their second beers in record time. Martinez passed everyone a third.

  “Do we ever get to meet this Murphy guy?” Curry wondered, opening his with a whoosh. “I have a few questions I want to ask him.”

  Martinez relit his cigar. “How do we know he even exists?” he said mysteriously. “Bingo’s CO might have been full of shit. Or he might have been ordered to intentionally mislead us. Now, I see Murphy’s name on a lot of stuff. And I’ve e-mailed and been in secure chat rooms with him. But is he a real guy? I have not seen anything I could call definitive proof.”

  The rest of them opened their new cans of beer. Someone changed the subject…and they began to talk. About everything. Sports, the military, women, the military, and sports again. The predictable arc of men their age and profession.

  The conversation continued into dusk and then early evening. As the sun finally sank and the stars came out, the ship maintained its party mood. Music, laughter, people talking.

  The mountain of beer slowly got chipped away.

  Sometime after 9:00 P.M., Gallant asked Curry what seemed to be a simple question: “How did they contact you to join up?”

  They’d burned their way through a case of beer by this time and were already deep into a second. Ryder let the others talk. He spent much of the time looking up at the stars and imagining they were moving into elaborate celestial formations over his head.

  “They called me in the middle of the night,” Curry replied. “I’ll never forget it. It was the day they found my brother.”

  “Found him?” Martinez asked. “Found him where?”

  “In the rubble of the World Trade Center,” Curry replied simply. “He was a lieutenant in FDNY. He was one of the first guys to go in. He just never came out.” He raised his beer to the sky. “For you, Jamie….”

  “But wait a minute,” Gallant stopped him in midsip. “Your brother was killed on Nine-Eleven?”

  Curry nodded.

  “We’ve been flying together six weeks—why didn’t you ever tell me that?” Gallant asked him sternly.

  “Because we weren’t supposed to talk to each other, remember?” Curry answered. “Besides, what’s the big deal?”

  Gallant’s reply was totally unexpected.

  “Because my brother was killed that day, too,” he said. “He was a commodities trader. He worked in the North Tower.”

  Martinez dropped his half-finished beer. The can rolled away, spurting foam all over the deck. He ripped the badge from over his shirt pocket. The one with the picture of the pretty girl inside. He held it up for them to see.

  “This is my daughter,” he said, his voice filling with emotion. “She was on the plane that hit the Pentagon!”

  Absolute stunned silence from the others.

  How strange was this?

  Ryder quickly told them of Maureen’s death. But this left them even more perplexed.

  They turned to Phelan. “My dad was killed aboard the Cole,” he said quietly. “He was a CPO, a fill-in…on the ship for less than a week.”

  Phelan angrily whipped his beer can off the end of the boat. It seemed to fly for a mile before it hit the water.

  “They told me he was getting coffee when it happened,” he said. “A lousy cup of coffee….”

  They all just stared at one another, dumbfounded.

  “We’ve all lost someone to the mooks?” Gallant asked with no little astonishment. “Could that be? Really?”

  Each man repeated his story. Each confirmed that he’d lost someone close because of Al Qaeda.

  “This is giving me the creeps,” Curry said. “Unless it’s some weird coincidence.”

  “It’s no coincidence,” Martinez said. “Someone wanted to get a bunch of psychologically pissed off guys together, guys who wouldn’t sneeze at some of the stuff they want us to do. And we’re it.”

  “Man, someone did a good job picking out us Indians,” Curry said.

  Gallant replied: “Yeah, someone named ‘Bobby Murphy.’”

  Another hour passed—and another case was drained.

  There was music coming from several different locations now. Ryder was too old to recognize any of it.

  They talked about Murphy, but it was all just speculation. They talked about the missions they’d run, especially the one in the Rats’ Nest, their nastiest affair so far. They talked about the mooks they’d greased and the bombs they dropped.

  Then, inevitably, the conversation came back to the ones they’d lost. Curry barely made it through a story about him and his brother skipping school one day and seeing the Mets and catching a foul ball and getting on TV and making the Sports at Five—and getting caught red-handed by their parents. Gallant told a moving account of his brother’s last minutes and how he saved dozens of people in the North Tower by forcing open an elevator door, loading it with handicapped employees—and then going back for more.

  Martinez spoke of his daughter and her school play; the last time he’d seen her she was onstage, dressed as an angel. Phelan talked, a little, about a car he and his dad rebuilt. Whether it was the beer or not, the young pilot was the most affected of them all. Ryder retold an abbreviated version of his own personal hell—their house, her garden, he and his gun in the motel room. He skipped over the part about his peculiar dreams.

  He was literally speaking the last word of his last sentence when the bright moon suddenly broke through the clouds right over their heads. The sky above them had turned from deep black to deep red. Suddenly an eerie glow came over them.

  It stayed for only an instant; then it disappeared. What the hell was that? Do they have Saint Elmo’s Fire in the Med? Ryder thought. Or was it just that someone up on the deckhouse was fooling around with the ship’s searchlight and had locked them in its intense beam for a drunken moment or two?

  He couldn’t tell. But then just as suddenly, Martinez stuck his right hand out, fist balled, and held it there, strong and steady, in front of them. Way off in the distance, thunder crashed. Lightning lit up a faraway cloud. Phelan was the first to catch on. He touched Martinez’s fist with his own, tapping it twice and leaving it on top of his. Then Curry joined in, two taps, then adding his fist to the pile. Gallant followed.

  Ryder completed the ritual by laying his fist on top of them all. Then they all drained their beers with their free hands and quite spontaneously let out a great, “Whoop!,” something between an Apache war cry and a drunken coyote call. Then they exchanged high fives all round.

  Then Ryder asked: “What does this mean exactly?” He was really lit. They all were.

  “It means we are now familia,” Martinez said, in an exaggerated Latin accent. “Brothers. We now fight as one….”

  “We’re family, all right!” Curry yelled. “Family—as in the Mafia….”

  He tapped each one of them twice on the head, draining yet another beer at the same time.

  “Yeah, we’re
the new Mafia, baby…” he went on. “And those ragheads better watch out for us….”

  The Marines played their Metallica; the Delta guys played poker. The Spooks watched real porno. And the officers on the fantail just talked. Around 2:00 A.M., the Navy guys fired up their grills and started making everyone a very early breakfast.

  Just before dawn, they collected all the empty beer cans around the ship and threw them overboard, more than 300 in all. Divided roughly among 42 people, that was more than a six-pack each.

  When the sun came up, it was a new day aboard Ocean Voyager. The ship had a new vibe. The top-secret team was now a close-knit one as well. The sound of people talking was now heard throughout the ship, up on the deck, in the passageways, even way down below. Many conversations, endless and nonstop, all rolled into one. Phelan turned out to be especially loquacious. A case would be made that from this point on, he never really shut up.

  As for the order that the team members refrain from too much fraternization during the mission…

  That went overboard with the cans.

  Chapter 11

  The ship entered the Suez Canal and traveled all night.

  It was Ocean Voyager’s third passage in two weeks. They were in radio contact with various people connected with the canal, many employed by the Egyptian government. Most of these communications were handled by Captain Bingo. He’d perfected a nondefinable Middle Eastern accent. The aim was to blend in as one of many. They stayed clear of military ships, paid attention, and followed procedures. And people left them alone.

  They reached the Red Sea by sunrise and sailed all that day. When the sun went down again, Ocean Voyager was off the west coast of Saudi Arabia, near the city of Yambu. Mecca, the holy Islamic capital, was a hundred miles to the south.

  At 11:30 P.M., a radar sweep of their area indicated there were no ships or aircraft within 20 miles of them. Their window of opportunity was opened. A new mission began.