Strike Force Alpha

by Mack Maloney

  When he turned back, he saw the five Arab men had been pulled into the Torch ship, even as its door gunner was firing furiously at someone or something farther up the block.

  Hunn yelled into his microphone: “Mooks out! Everyone else—let’s go!”

  Hunn’s pep pill kicked in at that moment. The noise and the confusion suddenly doubled. He was still in the courtyard and pieces of debris from the apartment explosion were falling on his head. Fire and dust were everywhere. He could hardly breathe. Was this anything like the day the towers crashed? Could it be about one-millionth the horror? He began screaming. A door opened off to his right. A middle-aged man, holding either a gun or a cane, emerged. Hunn emptied a half a clip into him.

  Another explosion went off to his left. Hunn screamed again, firing his weapon into the flames and smoke. The Eight Ball gunship came overhead, minigun going nonstop. The squad’s incendiary guys were now off the ground, with the Big Fifty guys just latching onto the ropes.

  Hunn’s whole squad had made it up. Now it was his turn. He slid out onto the main street; the fast rope was just ten feet away. He was about to latch on when he heard a screech. An old, broken-down bus had pulled up not 15 feet behind him. The driver’s face showed pure fright—he couldn’t believe he’d just blundered into the gun battle. Hunn could see the bus was loaded with Arab men. But were they civilians or more terrorist types?

  He didn’t wait to find out. He fired two grenades into the vehicle. They went through the windshield and exploded halfway up the aisle. Then he began spraying the bus mercilessly with his rifle on full auto. Someone began yelling in his headphones. It sounded like: “Everyone is out! Time to go!” Hunn kept firing. The bus burst into flames, filling the morning air with screams. “Right now! We got to go!”

  Hunn never stopped shooting. Even as he connected to the fast rope, he was raking the bus from one end to the other.

  And as he was being lifted out, he was firing at it still.

  Al Fujayrah, United Arab Emirates

  The next night

  The FedEx truck pulled up to the green stucco house on the edge of the village Al-Ruyah.

  The driver was also the village’s plumber, so he knew the people who lived here. They had no problem accepting a package from him.

  It was an overnight envelope, containing a videotape and nothing else. The owner of the house plugged the tape into his VCR. About thirty seconds into it, he realized this was something he did not want to see. He jumped in his Fiat and drove at full speed to the nearby city of Jubai. Here he had a hasty conversation with the chief of police. The chief took possession of the tape and ordered the man, his first cousin, never to speak a word of this, or he’d be relieved of his tongue.

  The chief then drove 20 miles to another small village, this one near the coast. He knocked on the door of a man named Abdul Zoobu. Zoobu was high-up Al Qaeda. He was the man who had spoken by cell phone with the Al-Habazz go-betweens the previous day, just seconds before Hunn and his Delta guys dropped in.

  Zoobu knew the police chief. The chief knew what Zoobu did for a living. The chief handed him the videotape; Zoobu handed him a hundred-dollar bill. But first, he drew it across his throat. The message was clear….

  The chief departed and Zoobu put the tape into his VCR. He was more mystified than anything. He communicated with the terror network three or four times a day, using a different cell phone each time. This tape had not come to him from them. It had reached him by way of a too-roundabout route; plus he would have been told to expect something.

  The tape began with a minute of static. But slowly came a close-up shot of his associate in Saudi Arabia, the man with the cell phone. His mouth was sealed with duct tape. His hands were tied behind him. The camera moved to the left and showed another of the Al-Habazz cutouts crouched next to the first. He, too, was bound with tape and gagged.

  The camera pulled back to reveal the three other cutouts, also tied up, crouched beside them. They were on the edge of a high cliff. It was daybreak. Several pillars of smoke could be seen rising in the dawn’s early light, across the desert a few miles away.

  Next to the men were four small pigs, each in a metal cage. They were squealing loudly and seemed as terrified as the Saudi prisoners.

  The camera zoomed in again and focused on the face of the oldest of the group, the man who’d been cleaning the Kalashnikov. A wanted poster showing his picture was thrust into the camera frame. It gave a long list of his crimes and in large print identified him as a friend of Al Qaeda. The camera lingered on him for a long moment and then—pop! pop! Two buttons of blood suddenly formed on his brow, one right between his eyes. He fell backward out of camera range. Zoobu was shocked. Someone had just pumped two bullets into the man’s head.

  The camera became shaky but then settled on the youngest man in the group, one of the runes players. A wanted poster detailing his offenses came into view, then again, two loud pops—and the younger man joined the older, dying and bleeding on the ground. Two more of the men were executed in the same gruesome manner.

  The camera shut off for a moment. When the tape resumed, some time had passed. A large hole had been dug in the soft earth of the cliff. The four dead terrorists had been thrown into it. The pigs’ squealing became most unnerving. Four American soldiers then walked into the frame, faces covered, bayonets in hand. They were each holding one of the pigs. One by one, they proceeded to cut the pigs’ throats in the most disturbing fashion. Bleeding profusely, the pigs were thrown into the grave with the four dead terrorists.

  Zoobu nearly threw up. Burying a pig with a Muslim was a sign of infinite disgrace. According to the Koran, it guaranteed that man would never see Paradise. This grisly segment ended with the sound of two more loud pops.

  When the next scene began it showed the only prisoner not yet buried. Zoobu’s cell-phone friend.

  His body lay crumpled near the now–covered over unmarked grave, two bullet holes in his forehead. His cell phone had been stuffed into his mouth—sideways. Flies were already landing on his body.

  “Praise Allah,” Zoobu whispered. “But these Americans have gone crazy….”

  But for him, the worst was yet to come. Just before the tape ran out, one of the American soldiers wrote something on a piece of paper and held it up to the lens.

  This time Zoobu did throw up.

  The message read: You’re next….

  Chapter 12

  One week later

  The storm clouds began building west of the Persian Gulf just after dawn.

  Dark cumulus forming high over the desert—unusual weather for this time of year. A cold, hard rain was coming, though. Ready to soak the Empty Quarter, the dry plains at Al Haditha, to cover Riyadh, and then to play havoc on the waters off Arabia itself. A monsoon of sorts. In the desert.

  Strange….

  Already it had been a morning of whispers around the Gulf. Distressing words, pressed lips to ear, rumors in the shopping malls and the casbahs. Something bad was blowing in, from the west, the traditional direction of poor luck. Strange things spotted in the early-morning sky and then again at noon. The waters of the Gulf were beginning to stir.

  The sound of thunder, off in the distance.

  But getting closer.

  Jet fighters from Oman and Muscat had scrambled several times during the day. Unidentified aircraft had been spotted flying over their borders and above the Gulf. An air-raid siren went off in Bahrain. The lights blinked in Dubai. Reports came in of ships off the coast vanishing in the morning fog and of Maydays from vessels that weren’t really there.

  What was going on? That’s what all the whispering was about. No one was sure. It was known throughout the region that a large U.S. Navy battle group was on its way to the Gulf. A 22-ship armada led by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was coming to beef up the already-mighty Fifth Fleet. This was not unusual, though. The Gulf was all but an American lake these days. But some people thought the false alerts might
be connected with the battle group’s imminent arrival. Its airplanes and secret weapons, being sent out in advance.

  The truth was, the battle group wouldn’t be in the Gulf for another week.

  The dark clouds were still pouring out of the desert by midnight, covering the Gulf by 1:00 A.M. The heaviest overcast was across the upper regions, above eastern Saudi Arabia and the countries of Bahrain and Qatar.

  Out of this murk, two Harrier ghost jets arose. It was Ryder and Phelan. They’d been responsible for at least some of the anxiousness across the region this day. The skies were a bit more crowded here than above the Med or the Red Sea. Even the slickest flying couldn’t hide you completely, not from the naked eye. But their sudden appearance made it official. A bad wind had blown in.

  The Ocean Voyager was now in the Persian Gulf.

  Ryder and Phelan were up here looking for gas.

  It had been four days since they’d flown a refuel mission; bad weather and bad positioning had caused three aborts. The reserve of jet fuel on the ship was so low now, the Harriers barely had the gas to take off and get some more. The next few nights were going to be busy. This fill-up was critical.

  They got airborne just after midnight at a point east of Qatar. Their windows of opportunity to land and take off were squeezed dramatically in the traffic-clogged Persian waterway. They’d sat in their jets belowdecks for nearly an hour, waiting for a half-dozen supertankers to pass Ocean Voyager, all of them heading south for Hormuz. When it came time for them to take off, they had to do it inside a 90-second time frame. This included starting engines and being hauled up to the deck. Test piloting was not as exciting as this.

  They saw the KC-10 Extender break through the thick clouds. It was hard to miss, huge and silver, this one with the emblem of Pegasus—the Mobil Oil flying horse—painted in red on its tail fin. Even though the tankers were always from different squadrons and different bases, they were always on time and in the right place. In fact, this one had waited up here for them. Another touch of Murphy’s magic.

  The jump jets moved in quickly to hook up. Ryder went first, then waited as Phelan got pumped. The winds were bad, flying along the edges of the thick clouds. The hookups were shaky. But nothing they couldn’t handle.

  The glitch came when they phoned down to the ship to say they were coming back. The ship replied that they could not be cleared for landing.

  A fleet of fishing boats had wandered into the 20-mile security zone. Martinez thought the fishermen were out of Qatar, but it made no difference. Just about every fishing boat in the Gulf carried a cheap video camera these days. Why? Because certain intelligence services around the Arabian Rim bought videos showing the movement of U.S. warships or anything else suspicious. Usually the local fishermen were gathering more than nets.

  What all this meant was the two Harriers couldn’t land back on the ship until either the fishermen cleared out or Bingo decided to turn the ship 180 degrees and head south again. (The waters north of their current position were like an LA traffic jam.) But with the fuel situation not being good, the Harriers couldn’t fly around burning up precious gas, waiting for all this to happen. And another refueling mission couldn’t be scheduled for at least 24 hours.

  “So what’s Plan B?” Ryder asked Martinez.

  “Stay by the phone,” Martinez replied.

  A minute went by. Ryder’s phone beeped. It was Martinez again. He was on the scrambler. So was Phelan.

  “Bahrain,” Martinez told them.

  “What about it?” Ryder asked.

  “You have to land there—at the same base your tanker calls home. Catch up with him and follow him down. You’re about ten minutes away.”

  Ryder and Phelan couldn’t believe it. They asked Martinez to repeat the order even though their sat cells were being drained in the full-scrambler mode. “You want us to land—in an Arab country—where someone can see us?” Phelan asked him incredulously.

  “That tanker is out of a very high-security zone on the northern tip of the country,” Martinez came back. “And Bahrain is a friend of the U.S. And they run black ops out of this place all the time. It will be OK….”

  But Ryder disagreed. He thought they were taking a big risk and said so. “We’re not just a couple of typical Harriers floating around up here,” he told Martinez. “We look different. We fly different. We might not even show up on their radar screens. Someone is going to know something is up.”

  “Who got the authorization for this?” Phelan wanted to know.

  “I got it straight off the screen from Murphy himself,” was the Delta officer’s no-nonsense reply. “That good enough for you? Now get going—he’s already contacted them for you….”

  Still Ryder was feeling uneasy. “But what should we tell them we’re doing there? Shouldn’t we have a cover story or something?”

  “Murphy said make one up,” Martinez replied.

  “‘Make one up’? Like what?”

  “Like you’re ferrying those planes to Diego Garcia….” Both ends were losing their scramble functions now.

  “And we are landing at this base, even though we just got filled up?” Ryder fired back.

  “Look, it’s an Air Force base,” Martinez said firmly. “No one will care what the hell you’re doing there….”

  With that, he hung up.

  After a few seconds, Phelan called over to Ryder.

  “That guy’s a regular James Bond,” he said.

  They set down 10 minutes later, one behind the other, coming in for a conventional landing but using only half the runway.

  The airfield might have been a secret place, but that didn’t necessarily mean there was anything secret here. It was really just a tanker farm out in the middle of nowhere. Dozens of huge KC-10 Extenders, KC-135s, and even a few naval-designed A-6 buddy ships, wearing USAF insignia, were parked here, a strange sight. Bahrain was such a tiny country, it would have seemed impossible to be so isolated. Yet there weren’t any other humans within 50 miles of the place.

  Ryder and Phelan steered their jump jets past the maze of refuelers, all the way to the end of the base. A beat-up Jeep was waiting here to meet them. The pilots followed it to a pair of hardstands far away from the rows of tankers. As soon as they stopped, the vehicle disappeared. A strange thought went through Ryder’s mind: Maybe that was Murphy himself behind the wheel of the Jeep. He seemed to be everywhere else.

  Ryder and Phelan shut down and popped their canopies simultaneously.

  “How’s your pee bag?” Ryder yelled over to Phelan.

  “I missed it completely!” Phelan yelled back.

  A ground crew appeared out of nowhere and began to chock off both jump jets. The mechanics all seemed to be Arab.

  Phelan squirmed in his seat. “Are they authorized to do this?”

  Before Ryder could answer, two USAF techs walked out of the dark and gave the pilots a lazy thumbs-up.

  The message was clear: It was OK to have the locals around the airplanes.

  The pilots climbed down and had a brief conversation with the American ground crew. These were specially refitted Harriers and they were transiting to Diego Garcia after a refueling training mission, Ryder tried to explain—but Martinez had been right. The air mechanics couldn’t have cared less.

  “If you can find us, then it you’re OK to be here,” one told Ryder. He pointed to the badge over his left breast pocket. It was colored red. High-security clearance.

  “Capeesh?” the guy asked him.

  Ryder just nodded back. “Yeah, capeesh.…”

  The mechanics started to walk away, leaving the two Harrier pilots standing alone in the middle of the huge parking area. Ryder estimated they had at least two hours to kill before Martinez gave them the OK to return. He sure didn’t want to do it waiting way the hell out here.

  Ryder called out to the mechanics: “Where do you guys go on your lunch break?”

  The mechanics both pointed to a particularly dreary part of th
e base.

  “Just walk that way,” one said. “It will be the first thing you bump into in the dark.”

  The base club was called the OFF-1.

  Ryder and Phelan found it after a 20-minute walk along the edge of the enormous shadowy base. It was an old Quonset hut, painted black and set back near some enormous sand dunes. There was a sign on the front door that read: “Due to restrictions against alcohol in the Muslim religion, we’re not really here.”

  Ryder and Phelan walked in. It wasn’t exactly the bar at the Ritz. It was a long metal rail with a Formica top, a few tables and chairs, and a broken karaoke machine. There were fewer than a dozen people inside.

  They took seats at the table farthest away from the front door and right next to the bar. An E-5 airman was slinging drinks.

  “What do you serve here?” Phelan asked him.

  “Beer,” the bartender replied.

  “What kind of beer?”

  “Cold beer. Wet beer….”

  They ordered two beers. It turned out to be real crappy Spanish stuff, making them long for their Made in America Bud. Ryder vowed to limit himself to just a couple pops, three tops. He would be back up flying soon enough.

  They drank quietly. More people came in but ignored them completely, which was good. But then Phelan spotted a slight commotion at the other end of the bar. Two Arab men were waving at them. Both were wearing USA T-shirts, blue jeans, and New York Yankee caps turned backward.

  “I think your fan club tracked you down,” Phelan said to Ryder.

  The two men made their way across the bar and were soon standing right behind them. The Arabs could barely contain their excitement.

  At that moment, a USAF pilot walked in. He ordered a beer, wandered over, and had a brief chat with the two Arabs. Then he approached Ryder and Phelan.