Strike Force Alpha

by Mack Maloney

  Zoobu growled lowly but then reached into his robes, farther down from where he kept his switchblade, to his credit card collection. He pulled it out, thirty cards in all held together by a rubber band. He selected an American Express Platinum card and handed it to Jazeer.

  Jazeer studied it for a moment. “This, too, is ‘clean,’ I hope?”

  Zoobu replied: “It was stolen in Brussels this morning.”

  That was good enough for Jazeer. He started the electronic transaction but then happened to look over Zoobu’s shoulder to see a rather amazing sight: a helicopter was landing in the middle of the marketplace.

  Now this was strange. It was not unusual to see helicopters flying over the bazaar. There was a military police base about twenty miles to the south in Dubai—and they had just bought a new copter. But to have a helicopter land in the middle of the square?

  The next few seconds went by very slowly. The helicopter was black and there were soldiers in black uniforms hanging all over it. The helicopter was not making any noise. This was very odd. And there was another one hovering just above it. It wasn’t making any noise, either.

  Then one of the soldiers hanging out of the side of the helicopter jumped out and Jazeer clearly saw the patch on his left shoulder. It was an American flag.

  That’s when it hit….

  “Praise Allah!” Jazeer cried. “No!”

  The Crazy Americans were here….

  The people in the square scattered, hundreds of them, all with great haste and in every direction. They didn’t need a CNN News Alert to know what was happening here. The grapevine in the Middle East was quicker than anything Marconi or Bell ever imagined. They had heard about the Crazy Americans. They knew of the people they’d plucked from their beds in the middle of the night and killed horribly. They knew about their car bombs, their itching powder, and the grenading of the bus. Unlike their cousins in Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen—pick a place—the people of ‘Ajman did not want to be an audience for this.

  That’s why the square was virtually empty just seconds after the helicopter finally set down. The rest of the soldiers bounded out of it and began running right for Jazeer’s store.

  Zoobu was waking up from a stupor as well, even though only a few seconds had gone by. He saw the chopper; he saw the huge soldiers with the patch containing the Stars and Stripes and the outline of the Twin Towers. That’s when he knew beyond all doubt that these people were after him.

  Jazeer saw Zoobu take a CD from his pocket and try to snap it in two—but, for whatever reason, he was not able to do so. He even tried biting it in two, but this did not work, either. CD still in hand, Zoobu screamed and then ran up the store’s main aisle. Jazeer lost sight of him behind the racks of the used CD department.

  The American soldiers arrived a moment later. Jazeer fell backward against the display holding his phone cards and lottery tickets. The soldiers seemed unreal to him. They were enormous. Their weapons, their helmets, their body armor. They looked right out of Star Wars, at least the black-and-white version. Oddly, two were carrying hatchets.

  Six of them ran in. Two went into a defensive crouch, weapons up, right in front of his counter. The other four went down the main aisle, moving very quickly, splitting up, looking to surround the hapless Zoobu. They quickly cornered him near a huge stack of CDs. Jazeer heard some shouting and then the sound of metal viciously cutting flesh. Once, twice, five times. Ten. Twenty. Fifty…It went on for the longest time. Jazeer could hear Zoobu’s body flopping about the loose boards at the rear of the store. The man’s screams, terrifying. Meanwhile the second helicopter flashed overhead again, this time much lower. It looked like a battle tank in the air. Above it two fighter jets that seemed to have the ability to hang in the air were doing just that, hovering ever higher above the scene.

  Finally all was quiet at the back of the store. The American soldiers started exiting. The helicopter outside was kicking up a cloud of dust now. It was hard to see inside the store. The first two soliders departed; then two more ran by Jazeer. They were carrying Zoobu’s butchered body in an unzipped body bag.

  Another soldier rushed by. He was yelling something into his radio. He didn’t even look in Jazeer’s direction. Just one more, Jazeer thought. Just one more has to leave before they can get on their helicopters and fly away.

  But the last guy out stopped right in front of him. There was a very disturbed look in his eyes.

  He studied Jazeer for a moment and then looked at the copter waiting outside. The rest of his colleagues were already loaded onto the aircraft.

  “You speak English?” the American soldier yelled at Jazeer, trying to be heard above the commotion.

  Foolishly, Jazeer nodded yes.

  “You knew this guy, Zoobu?” the soldier yelled at him.

  “He was a customer!” Jazeer yelled back.

  Suddenly the soldier’s muzzle was pointed at Jazeer’s throat. There was a bayonet on the end of it. The blade still had Zoobu’s blood on it and now it was pricking Jazeer’s skin as well, the second sharp object against his throat in less than two minutes.

  “You know who he was buying those phones for?”

  Jazeer had his hands up; they were flailing. He shook his head no—a lie.

  “No?” the soldier screamed at him.

  “No! No!” Jazeer was yelling back, even though tears were now running down his cheeks. Zoobu was not as crazy as this American.

  Two of the soldier’s colleagues jumped off the copter and ran up to him. Using urgent hand signals, they were telling him that they had to leave.

  But he was ignoring them.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” the soldier bellowed at Jazeer instead.

  Finally Jazeer had to scream. This man was going to kill him anyway. He could not die telling a lie.

  “Yes!” he cried. “I knew….”

  He could see the man’s finger begin to squeeze the trigger. The other soldiers were still shouting at him, but he was not paying attention. Jazeer was expecting a bullet to his brain at any moment, his last breath nigh. But then the soldier screamed at him again. “Hands out front!”

  Jazeer immediately laid his hands on the counter. He thought the soldier was going to handcuff him. He opened his eyes just in time to see the ax coming down. It severed his hand just below the wrist. He saw blood; he saw pieces of bone. It just didn’t register in his brain that these things belonged to him. Before he could leap away in pain, the soldier grabbed his left hand, forced it down, and proceeded to chop it off, too. Blood gushing again, the pieces of bone actually made a noise hitting the wall behind him.

  Jazeer collapsed in shock. The soldier stood over him and in perfect Arabic hissed: “If you have no hands, you will be of no further use to Al Qaeda!”

  Then the soldier threw a handful of playing cards on top of Jazeer and left.

  One card fell next to where Jazeer’s head had hit the floor. He could see it perfectly, through fading eyes. It was a photo of the New York Twin Towers, with the message WE WILL NEVER FORGET printed beneath it.

  Below that, scratched in pen, was written: Dave Hunn, Queens, New York, was here.

  That night

  The twenty-four prized horses were released into the corral to the beat of castanets and skin drums. Two trainers with whips began running the horses around in a clockwise motion. There was much snorting and crying coming from the Arabian champions, each as white as snow. As the taped percussion rose, the horses were made to run even faster.

  All this was to the delight of six people sitting in the luxurious viewing box overhanging the huge yet virtually empty equestrian arena. This was the immediate al-Said Shaeen family. Two sons, an uncle, a mother, a grandmother, and a young daughter. Sitting in the middle was a seventh person, the family’s patriarch. The man named Farouk. He was not so happy.

  It was a rare occasion when the running of his prized horses could not cheer him up. It was usually the highlight of his week. But Farouk just could not
enjoy it today, even as the trainers whipped the horses harder and they began to run at breakneck speed, butting and biting one another in a mad dash to stay ahead. Farouk was worried about his patron, Prince Ali. He’d been acting very irrational, more so than usual. The indiscretion over in Bahrain had been cleaned up, as the others had been, but these things were getting harder to do and more expensive all the time. Ali had also been missing office work at Pan Arabic in the past few days, putting valuable deals on hold. Worse, he’d been seen meeting with a known Al Qaeda minister right in the offices of Pan Arabic itself, a very dangerous thing to do. How many eyes were about, trying to link Pan Arabic and the Saudi establishment with high officials of the jihad organizations? This kind of behavior frightened Farouk, and it frightened Ali’s other associates, too. They had many things going on. They had many secrets to keep.

  The horses ran faster and faster and Farouk’s daughter was yipping with delight. One horse fell in the scramble and broke its hind leg. The family cheered. The trainers were delighted, too. But Farouk hardly noticed.

  His thoughts were still far away.

  An hour later, they were all back in his summer palace outside Riyadh, Farouk in his own bedroom, his current wife in hers.

  Farouk was tired, so he would forgo fucking one of his Filipino servants this night. He lit a cigarette and walked out to his balcony instead. The streetlights of Riyadh burned before him. What a dull place…. He felt a breeze at the back of his neck. Must have left the door open, he thought. He finished his cigarette and threw the butt off the balcony. His cleanup crew would dispose of it in the morning.

  He walked back to his bed, took off his satin robe, and climbed in. No TV tonight, either, he thought, tying a rubber band around his long chin whiskers. He would just go to sleep.

  He laid his head on the thin pillow and thought about his horses. When one stumbles and falls and breaks a leg, it was no big deal. True, the animal would have to be destroyed, but he could always buy another one. Plus, he believed it made his other horses that much more competitive—hungrier to stay alive. More than a few of his other steeds were getting old, though. It might be time to actually sell some of them off. Of course, he would not sell the one named Al Sayet. It was his favorite, a huge white Arabian king, a direct descendant from the Prophet Muhammad’s own herd. The rest could die tomorrow, but if Sayet survived, Farouk would consider himself a lucky man, favored by Allah.

  He drifted off to sleep but was awakened after a while by the sensation of a warm fluid leaking under his body. Still groggy, he reached under his thigh and found something slightly sticky. He brought the substance to his nose and took a sniff. Had he peed the bed again?

  No, the scent was not familiar. He reached up, turned on the bed lamp, looked at his fingers, and realized they were smeared with blood.

  He threw the covers from him. His legs and rump were covered with blood. Farouk was horrified. He turned over and saw a pool of blood had gathered in the center of his huge water bed. It was leaking out from beneath a lump of blankets on the other side, nearly six feet away. Trembling, Farouk reached over and pulled back the rest of the bedclothes.

  It was not the head of his favorite horse—as he had feared.

  It was worse.

  It was the butchered body of his great-grandnephew, Abdul Zoobu.

  Sticking out of his pockets were dozens of playing cards bearing the likeness of the World Trade Center towers.

  Stuffed into his mouth was a bloody American flag.

  Chapter 17

  Aboard Ocean Voyager

  Martinez found Murphy at the front of the ship, near the bow, sitting on a folding chair, staring up at the night sky. They were heading south again.

  “Everyone OK?” Murphy asked him, eyes never leaving the stars.

  Martinez lit a cigarette. “Message was delivered. They all came back in one piece.”

  Murphy let out a sigh. “We get lucky again,” he said. “That’s good news.”

  It was midnight. The successful raid to the marketplace and the follow-up trip to Riyadh had wrapped an hour ago. And it was all good news. The team had flown two missions over two separate countries, without anyone challenging them, following them, or even trying to track them on radar. Postmission satellite photos of both targets showed no military or police presence at either site. This could only mean one thing: the team’s reputation was so widespread, the local authorities had become just as fearful of them as the populace. Like the Algerian government and the Holy Islamic Party of God, what the Crazy Americans left in their wake could be so horrible, no one wanted to search for the culprits too aggressively. Not when they knew it could be their throat next to be slit….

  So the team had finally hit its stride. They were operating with virtual impunity, shaking up a lot of mooks, nailing some supporting characters of 9/11—and still no one knew where they were coming from. Murphy should have been doing handstands by now. But as Martinez found him, he did not seem too happy. While the team was out doing its thing, Murphy had been down in the White Rooms, sitting among the young Spooks, staring at the NSA read-out screens and reading the latest chatter picked up between the jihad groups. It had not been a wasted exercise, but what he’d uncovered was a little deflating.

  “The plan for the mooks’ Next Big Thing is already floating around on a CD-ROM,” he told Martinez now. “We just got a third-party confirmation of it a few hours ago. It’s being distributed, very secretly, to their network as we speak.”

  “Just as you thought,” Martinez said. “That’s good to know.”

  Murphy wiped his tired eyes. “Maybe not,” he said. “That’s probably what those Saudi troops were doing the night we snatched the five guys for the pig cutting. They were delivery boys.”

  “So?” Martinez asked.

  “So if we had just waited a little longer we might have been able to turn up one of these CDs.”

  Martinez leaned against the railing, blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke and thought for a moment. “We’re not mind readers, Murph,” he finally said. “From the sounds of it, there was no way we could have known about the CD coming that night. Shit, the five mooks probably didn’t even know it themselves until the last minute.”

  Murphy’s eyes were still glued on the Big Dipper. “Yeah, but then we knock off this mook today in the electronics store. He was one of the guys distributing the CDs. He might have had one on him when we spotted him. If only we had been a bit more subtle. Damn….”

  Martinez took another long drag of his cigarette. “No one is perfect. And besides, we’re not out here to be subtle. The guys down below have so many mooks under surveillance, another one of them will crack soon. It’s inevitable. And when he does, we’ll be right on him….”

  Murphy just shook his head. “Yeah, but this Next Big Thing they’re planning is getting real close—I can feel it. I’m talking two weeks. Maybe less. If we keep knocking these guys off one or two at a time, we could be old men before it amounts to anything.”

  He lowered his eyes to stare out on the black waves of the Gulf. “They know we are out here. And, sure, by now they know what it is we do. But they are still running faster than we are, and they’re a tough bunch to slow down once they get going. So we’ve got to hit them again, right away, and make it somewhere they’re not expecting it. It’s got to be a real sucker punch, too. Something that will knock them off-balance, throw them off-schedule, and maybe give us more time to divine what they are up to.”

  “But what happens then?” Martinez asked. “Suppose we find out the whens and wheres of this ‘Next Big Thing.’ Are we telling anyone?”

  Murphy finally looked over at him. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “If you knew about Nine-Eleven one hour before it began, what would you do? Tell the CIA? Or try to stop it yourself with the guys we’ve got on this boat?”

  It was a tough question, especially for someone so by-the-book as Martinez. “I really don’t know,” he finally answered. “Wha
t would you do?”

  But strangely Murphy wasn’t listening anymore. His eyes had taken on a very faraway look. Suddenly, he sat straight up in his chair and clapped his hands.

  Inspiration had struck.

  “How soon can the jump jets go out again?” he asked Martinez urgently.

  The Delta officer thought a moment. “They’ve got enough gas onboard to fly one mission—if it’s relatively close.”

  “Are the pilots awake?”

  “Probably not….”

  “Wake them up then,” Murphy said. “And get everyone connected to air ops in my quarters in thirty minutes.”

  Ryder was in a Chinese restaurant, cleaning the fish tank. Maureen was waving to him from the corner. The waiter had a quick conversation with her, then walked over to Ryder and said, in Maureen’s voice: “Murphy wants us topside.”

  Ryder shook himself awake. Phelan was hanging over him.

  “They want us,” the young pilot was saying. “In Murphy’s quarters. Now.”

  Ryder’s fingers were numb. The ship had been rocking again and he’d been holding on to his bunk, very tightly, in his sleep.

  He looked at his watch. It was 1:00 A.M. Christ, they’d just got back from the last mission two hours ago. He’d been asleep for less than 30 minutes.

  Phelan was dressed and ready to go. The beach boy seemed even more eager than usual. Ryder hated such enthusiasm at this time of night.

  He got up, splashed some water on his face, and popped a pep pill. “What do they want us for?”

  “All Martinez said was that Murphy wants to talk to us and he’s really pumped.”

  Ryder yawned fiercely.

  “Good for him,” he said.

  They climbed up top, past the darkened “breakfast” deck, to Murphy’s quarters.

  They found Murphy, Martinez, and Bingo inside, along with the chopper boys, Curry and Gallant. Gil Bates, the White Room whiz kid, was also on hand. His Hawaiian shirt seemed brighter than the sun to Ryder’s bleary eyes.