by Mack Maloney
Martinez was up on the bridge, lording over the launch operation. He’d spent all day planning the night’s mission, working on intelligence from the White Room Spooks. Now it was time to watch it fly. Below him, the two enormous elevators lifted the pair of Harriers to the deck. Ryder and Phelan were already strapped in, their engines running. The Marine air techs ran one last check of the jump jets’ external systems; everything looked good. Ryder got his thumbs-up. He hit his throttle and was off. Running without any lights, he vanished into the night. Phelan followed him seconds later.
As the two jets climbed to meet the refueling plane, the elevators went back down and retrieved the pair of helicopters. Their engines were turning, too. The team did not fly ordinary Blackhawks; some people called them “Superhawks.” They were not as streamlined as a typical UH-60, being eight feet longer and six feet wider. But every sharp angle on the fuselage had been stretched out and every edge smoothed over, like on a Stealth fighter. Their paint job was basic nonreflective black, the same as a stealth plane, too. Any heat sources, especially around the engines, had been dampened off by thick metal cowlings. Most important the specially adapted engines helped keep the choppers’ noise down near zero. Even now, Martinez could barely hear them.
The helicopters’ call names were Eight Ball and Torch. Eight Ball was the gunship. It carried eight big weapons. A GE minigun was sticking out of its nose. Twin five-inch rocket tubes were mounted on either side of the cockpit. Twin .50-caliber machine guns were located at both doors in the open-air bay. Secured to a slot and pivot on the right side of the bay was a Mark-19 40mm grenade launcher. Essentially a machine gun for throwing grenades, it could fire 60 explosive rounds a minute, earning it the nickname Grass Cutter. The helicopter’s extra-heavy-lift turbo engines helped get all this, plus the crew of five, into the air.
The Torch ship was dedicated to carrying the Delta guys. It could hold up to 16 troops, fully equipped, plus its own flight crew, though many of the Delta operatives could fly the aerial troop truck in a pinch. There was a single .50-caliber machine gun at each door of the Torch and, like the Eight Ball, it had rocket launchers set up on rails on either side of the belly. Each aircraft also carried a large American flag, folded under its front seat for display at appropriate times.
Once the helicopters were properly heated up, a line of Delta troopers appeared from a nearby hatch. They hurried across the pancake, in single file and climbed aboard the Torch ship with practiced haste. The Marine techs were holding green fluorescent glow sticks to help light the way. The lights gave the proceedings an eerie feel. Once Delta was in place, the Marine techs loaded the strange cargo the Torch chopper would also be carrying this night: four metal cages, each holding a twenty-pound pig.
Another radar sweep confirmed no other ships had wandered into their security zone. The helicopters could launch. Up on the forward bridge, Martinez asked for a GPS check. Bingo’s nav guys came back with a good read. They were where they were supposed to be. A phone call from Ryder confirmed the jump jets had successfully hooked up for gas. Martinez put his fingernails to his teeth and went through an imaginary list. This mission had a high probability of being a nasty affair. Had he crossed every t? Dotted every i? He was sending out 27 guys who might not come back if he fucked up anywhere along the way.
He touched his daughter’s picture and did a gut check. The feeling came back as OK.
He gave the deck officer two thumbs-up.
The helicopters took off.
U.S. Army Sergeant Dave Hunn was riding in the jump seat of the Torch ship. There were two squads in the Delta package, eight operators each. Hunn was the squad leader of the first team. He was six-three, 225, a large individual, with less than 2 percent body fat. He looked more Marine than Army. A jughead, with a chiseled chin, beady eyes, and a low brow. He was sporting a goatee and deep tan.
He was wearing the standard Delta ops uniform: a Nomex flight suit, a black Fritz helmet with headphones and a sat-cell phone attached, a pair of shatter-proof goggles, armored shorts to protect his groin, GORE-TEX boots, and a Kevlar vest.
He was carrying an M16A2-CAR-15 specialized assault rifle, the black ops version of the standard M16. It had a collapsible stock, a shorter barrel, held a 30-round magazine, and was equipped with a silencer. The rifle could also carry an M203 40mm grenade launcher under its barrel and any number of special ops gadgets on the top, from low-light and thermal-imaging systems to laser pointers.
Everyone in the squad was equipped with one. Hunn’s team also worked with bayonets attached to their weapons. Few things could demoralize an enemy faster than to see nine inches of razor steel coming at them.
Hunn was from Queens, one of eight kids. He’d been a member of Delta for four years. He’d started out as a “door kicker,” typical of someone good at hand-to-hand combat. He’d gradually advanced to Squad God. Seven guys took orders from him. He was the team’s demolition expert, its backup medic, and its interrogator. He also spoke fluent Arabic.
His youngest sister had been on a job interview at the Twin Towers on 9/11. The last time anyone saw her, she was getting on the express elevator to the top floor of the North Tower, going up to see the view before sitting down with her prospective employer. She’d just turned 18 years old.
She was among the youngest victims that day. Hunn lost it when he found out. A sweet little kid who wanted to be a professional dancer gone, her body never found. The Army put him into a precautionary five-day psychological awareness group the day after the attacks, this instead of allowing him to go home. Hunn told the shrinks all the right things, though. It was a huge blow, he said, but life must go on. “Are you sure?” the shrinks asked. “Positive,” he told them. Truth was, he wanted nothing less than blood to avenge his sister’s death. Whose blood? Anyone from the Middle East would do. He didn’t tell this to the shrinks, of course. Somehow he felt they knew. They let him out two days early.
Time went on, and it was tough. But then he was given the opportunity to volunteer for this unorthodox program. It promised few regs, lots of action, and no PC bullshit. The two civilians in bad suits who came down to see him that warm night at Fort Bragg couldn’t have been more blunt. “Want to kill some sand monkeys?” they’d asked him.
Hunn jumped at the chance.
Hunn tightened his seat belt as the Blackhawk rose into the night. The pigs squealed on takeoff but then settled back down again. Being the end guy, Hunn had a great view. He watched the strange containership fall below as the copter began to climb. There was no moon this night and the deep water of the Red Sea looked particularly black.
Up to 1,000 feet and well clear of the ship, the helicopter made a long, slow bank to the east and headed for the coastline of Saudi Arabia, barely visible on the horizon. Hunn watched Ocean Voyager disappear behind them. It looked like it vanished into thin air. A nice trick.
He glanced down the bench. Each of his men was as bulked up as he. In addition to the unit weapon, two were carrying muzzle-mounted grenade launchers. Two more were lugging a half-sized TOW missile unit. Two others were loaded down with field sacks full of incendiary grenades and taser stun guns. One was packing a Mossberg automatic shotgun. They were all wearing the same patch on their right shoulder. It showed a silhouette of the World Trade Towers, with the letters NYPD and FDNY printed above them and an American flag behind. Below was the team’s motto: WE WILL NEVER FORGET….
Hunn slipped a pep pill into his mouth and let it dissolve slowly. One of the pigs let out a plaintive cry. Even though the helicopter’s engines were quiet enough to have a conversation inside the cabin, no one spoke a word during the ride in.
The village of Ubal-Sharif was located along a wadi, at the base of the Hejaz mountains, thirty miles south of Yambu. Only 200 people lived here. But many farmers from outlying areas frequented the village, as its marketplace was the largest in this part of Saudi Arabia. On Mondays, there could be as many as 3,000 people in town. Today was Monday.
Two were playing runes. Another was watching an American dance show on an ancient TV. A fourth was cleaning his Kalashnikov assault rifle. The fifth was trying to get his cell phone to work. They were surrounded by boxes of fruit and extension cords, all feeding into the lone electrical socket.
The five men were members of Al-Habazz Jihad, a Saudi terrorist group considered among the most fanatical within Al Qaeda. Members of Al-Habazz carried the money for the 9/11 attacks out of banks in the Middle East and to banks in Europe. They also bought all the tickets for the 9/11 hijackers when they first flew to the United States. The group had a reputation for being smart, loyal, and ruthless.
In intelligence terms, these five men were “cutouts” for Al-Habazz, go-betweens that acted as the group’s conduit to the bin Laden hierarchy. Cutouts were very valuable cogs in the jihad machine. They handled money, weapons, information. They provided martyrs. They were also responsible for keeping smaller cells in line, especially when it came to funding their operations. Al Qaeda was notoriously tightfisted.
They had gathered here to await copies of a CD-ROM being sent to them directly from Al Qaeda’s provisional HQ. The CD held plans for what some people called the Next Big Thing, a huge operation that promised to dwarf 9/11 and anything since. Talk of this impending attack had been making the rounds for almost two years. Now its time was very near. Al-Habazz had already been told that it would have a major role to play in the mission. They would be among a select few to see exactly what Al Qaeda planned to do next.
The man with the cell phone finally got it to work. The others gave him a fake round of cheers. He quickly dialed the number of another cell phone in the United Arab Emirates. His call was answered by another cutout, a man he’d never met. The man told him, in code, that the CD had been sent out that morning by armed courier and should arrive at any minute. They were to study the CD and then instruct their cell members accordingly. The five were also warned not cause any kind of disruption for the next few weeks. Planning for the big operation was at a critical phase, and no one at the top wanted anyone at the bottom screwing things up. The man with the cell phone said he understood and hung up.
Then he turned to his colleagues and said: “The day of falling sparrows is almost upon us….”
Dave Hunn burst through the apartment door a moment later.
He came in firing, silencer in place, tracer rounds going off everywhere. One round shattered the room’s only lightbulb, plunging the apartment into darkness. Hunn threw his body into the two men playing runes, slamming them to the floor. This cleared the way for the rest of his squad to flood in.
The man with the Kalashnikov turned it toward him—foolishly, because it was not loaded. He got the butt of Hunn’s rifle in the mouth. Teeth went flying in the dark. Hunn’s number-two man, Corporal Zangrelli, pulled his stun gun and tasered the man in front of the TV to the point where he began convulsing. By the time Hunn reached the man with the telephone, the entire squad was inside the room. They began viciously beating and stunning the terrorists. All five were soon writhing on the floor.
The duct tape came out and a binding process began. The five men were being made prisoners and this suddenly frightened them. They had heard about this mysterious American unit with the Twin Towers shoulder patch, heard what they did to just about any Arab who crossed their paths. The man with the cell phone was especially terrified. He knew they were all going to die soon, at the hands of either their captors or their employers. They’d screwed up royally.
Each man was taped across his mouth and then bound with his hands behind his back. The Delta guys then tossed the apartment, finding a treasure of fake IDs, passports, and credit cards. The search was complete in two minutes, with an absolute minimum of noise.
Hunn took out his sat-cell phone and hit the flash button twice. He heard the slight whirring of both Superhawks passing over the top of the apartment building. The choppers had been waiting at their landing site about a half-mile outside the village. They were now moving in for the pickup. Hunn was expecting to hear two return clicks in his earphones, the signal from the pilots that the way was clear for the squad to extract itself and the prisoners they’d come to get.
Instead, Gallant came on the phone. Trouble was approaching.
“You got a deuce-and-a-half truck, nearing in your location,” Gallant reported. “It’s a military vehicle. Approximately two dozen mooks hanging off the back. They are armed.”
“Damn it,” Hunn cursed. “Who the hell are they?”
He could almost hear the copter pilot shrug. “I don’t know,” Gallant replied. “The Saudi Army maybe?”
“Do those guys even have a fucking army?” Hunn cursed again.
“They do now,” Gallant said. “Because a pair of APCs just came over the hill, too. They’ll be at your location in about thirty seconds.”
Christ… Hunn thought. A party….
He signaled his men to deep freeze; do not move a muscle. Two Squad was up on the roof. He hoped they were smart enough to freeze, too.
He moved over to the window and calmly closed the shutters, hiding the recent damage inside. He left a crack to see through and immediately spotted the Torch ship. It was hovering, quietly, in the shadows a block away. The Eight Ball was close by. Hunn looked up the street. A moment later, the Army truck rumbled into view, the two APCs right behind it.
The sky was brightening; sunrise was about twenty minutes away. Not the best time of day for a gunfight. Hunn looked back at the leader of the five mooks. He’d gone nearly white when he heard the small Army detachment was heading their way. Hunn’s intuition kicked in. These troops were coming here not as enemies to the five terrorists but as friends. That’s what his gut was telling him. Whatever the case, there was no way the Delta team could be caught here like this. As with the pilots over the Med the other night, anyone they encountered out here was an “unfriendly.”
The troop truck drove up to the house and screeched to a stop. It belonged to the Saudi National Guard. An officer climbed off the truck, checked his watch, and then walked up to the front door. Hidden in a secret pocket in his hat were five CD-ROMs. He knocked three times, paused, and knocked twice more. The prearranged signal.
When the door opened, he found himself staring at the muzzle of Hunn’s 16A2-CAR-15, clicked to its shotgun mode. The officer put his hands to his face. Hunn pulled the trigger.
The man’s skull blew apart, hat and all. He fell backward into the street. At the same moment, the TOW team on the roof fired a missile into the middle of the troop truck. It went up like a can of gas. The soldiers began jumping or falling off, some on fire, some not. Two Team started mowing them down.
The APCs arrived. They came to a halt about a half-block away. One crew believed the gunfire that had blown up the truck had come not from above but from farther down the street. They opened up with tracer fire that went whipping right by the apartment where the Americans were holed up.
The crew of the second APC wasn’t so dumb. They turned their weapons directly on the small apartment and opened fire. Instantly the apartment’s walls were blown away by huge 5.61 cannon shells.
Hunn yelled for his crew to hit the deck, but they needed no prompting. The window exploded in a blast of glass and dust. Suddenly Hunn was looking directly into the street. He could see the burning truck and the smoldering bodies of the soldiers blown out of the back of it. The APC firing on them was just 30 yards away. There were so many tracers coming from its muzzle, it looked like it was throwing pure flame. The first APC was turning toward him as well. He could hear Two Squad above him on the roof, despe
rately scrambling for cover.
This was not good….
Then came an earsplitting roar, and suddenly the first APC just wasn’t there anymore. One of the Harriers had come out of the night and laid a laser-guided bomb right down its turret. A storm of shrapnel hit the apartment house a heartbeat later. The Delta troops flattened themselves further into the floor, certain the whole building was going to come down on top of them.
The second Harrier appeared. It walked a cannon barrage up one side of the second APC and down the other, splitting the APC in two. It blew up a moment later. Once again, the building was hit by a wave of flaming jagged metal this as the jump jet vanished into the murk.
Hunn had seen enough. On his order, the team got up and went out the back door, dragging their prisoners behind them.
By this time the tiny village had been shaken from its sleep. People ran into the streets, crying and panicking. They had no idea what was going on. At the same moment, people from outlying areas were materializing out of the morning fog, pulling wagons full of vegetables and cloth to the marketplace.
Hunn’s men poured out into a narrow courtyard separating the apartment from the next building. The last two guys threw three incendiary “joysticks” behind them. The first floor of the apartment house exploded in flames. Hunn bit down on a pep pill, then fired two more grenades into the building, lobbing a third into the doorway on the opposite side of the courtyard, for good measure. The simultaneous explosions were so powerful they ruptured the cement beneath their feet.
Hunn kept his guys moving. The Torch ship was hovering above him. Looking up through the narrow space between buildings, he saw it had its fast ropes already extended and the rooftop squad already aboard.
His first two guys reached the street. The Torch ship floated over their heads. They secured the fast ropes, and then the five prisoners were hurried out. They were quickly tied onto individual ropes and hoisted up. A barrage of gunfire back near the burning apartment building distracted Hunn. He fired a grenade in the direction of the gunshots; it went off with an extra-loud bang!