Strike Force Alpha

by Mack Maloney

  Murphy was sitting at the head of the long table. Everyone was drinking coffee. He waved the pilots into the two seats next to him.

  “Like I was saying,” Murphy went on. “We know the mooks have a great organization. They are run like a corporation. It’s not just one guy—or even a group of guys. It’s a thing unto itself.

  “Now this is what I’ve been thinking about all night. How can you really hurt a gang like that? You can’t bomb them all. You’d have to know where they all are to do that. But according to the CIA, it’s been impossible to infiltrate them. So how do you deliver a sucker punch to them? Something that’s going to hurt them on another level?”

  He held his finger up in the air. “I’ll tell you how. You interfere with their money. You affect their cash flow. Sure, they have a great organization—but they’ve got a huge payroll, too. And if there was some way to squeeze them on that, who knows what would happen? Think of it. If Yasif in Jersey City doesn’t get paid, all of a sudden driving that cab and living in a slum doesn’t look so good anymore. His enthusiasm might waver. He might want to go home. Not good for morale. Not good for the corporation as a whole.”

  He pulled a map from his briefcase. It showed the city of Abu Dhabi, the largest of the states comprising the United Arab Emirates. It was about fifty miles down the coast from ‘Ajman, the scene of the team’s most recent big raid.

  “Abu Dhabi is the federal capital of the UAE,” Murphy told them. “It’s an important place. The UAE parliament buildings are here. Federal ministries, religious institutions, foreign embassies, state broadcasting facilities, and most of the UAE’s oil companies. So it’s an affluent place, too.”

  They studied the photo map. The streets downtown ran in precise geometric patterns. They were either perfectly straight or beautifully curved. The buildings, too, soaring and futuristic. This was not the Rats’ Nest, Ryder thought. This was an ultramodern city.

  In the middle of the map, on what could only be called the main drag, Murphy had marked a building with an X.

  “The terrorists do a lot of things in cash,” he went on. “They have to. They have a payroll to meet, just like everyone else, but it’s not like they can send some of their guys a paycheck every week. They use couriers and they use Barrat, that informal banking thing they have going. But the guy at the front end still has to have cash handed to him. Especially when he is dealing directly with Al Qaeda. So, they have places where they have lots of cash sitting around, waiting to be tapped.”

  He pointed to the building with the X on it. “That’s one of them.”

  “What is it?” Phelan asked.

  “The Abu Dhabi National Bank,” Murphy replied. “1001 Sayeeb Street. Sixteen stories high. Built 1999. I happen to know the mooks have twelve million dollars in cash locked in its vault right now. The bank employees are under orders not to touch it. Not to even look at it. Twelve million…that’s about a quarter-year’s operating expenses for these jihad guys. A big chunk of their liquid capital is in that bank.”

  “Sooo,” Phelan said. “What do you want us to do? Rob it?”

  “No,” Murphy replied simply. “I want you to bomb it.”

  For the next half hour, Ryder and Phelan drank coffee and worked up the details of a typical night mission.

  There was nothing complicated about it: Get the ship as close as possible to the Emirates’ coastline and lay a path for ingress to the target. As for the dropping of ordnance, the bank’s vault was on the first floor of the building. A glassed-in lobby made up the exterior of this first story. The pilots figured they would each be able to drop a pair of 500-pound bombs on the target. The first two would be blockbuster iron bombs. They would go down through the second floor, explode inside the bank, and, it was hoped at least one of them would reveal the vault. If this happened and the pilots could flash a laser on the vault, they could send two guided munitions right into it on their next pass. If these munitions were made of high-penetration high explosives, the money inside the vault would burn to a crisp. And the timing? They could fly the job now and be back on the ship before sunrise.

  Murphy loved the plan. “I don’t even know what thinking out of the box means,” he admitted. “But if this is it…then you guys are geniuses.”

  They went around the table. Martinez gave it a thumbs-up. Bingo, Gallant, and Curry did, too.

  That’s when Bates, the top Spook, spoke up.

  “It’s cool,” he said. “But how would you like to make this hit, let’s say, ten times more effective?”

  Everyone looked up at him. “Ten times more effective?” Murphy said. “How?”

  “By making a real impression on them,” Bates replied, not quite smugly, but close. “I know a little about how things work in the Gulf, especially in the Emirates. I studied Islamic business philosophy back in school.”

  “High school?” Phelan asked innocently.

  Bates pretended not to hear him. He pointed to the big X on the map. “Now you can go in and bomb that bank in the middle of the night. And yes, if their twelve million goes up in smoke, well, clearly, that’s good sucker punch. But…”

  “But what?” Murphy said.

  “But what if we hit it in the daytime?” Bates asked.

  Murphy was surprised. They all were.

  “The daytime?” Murphy asked. “Really?”

  “Bomb it at noontime and go in loud,” Bates said emphatically. “Make it messy and you’ll spook the hell out of them. These aren’t the people of Berlin or Stalingrad or London we’re talking about here. They might be ninety-nine-point-nine percent for the jihad, but they really don’t want to get their robes dirty. They’re living too good of a life down there—all while keeping twelve million of the Head Mook’s money warm. Now, you do this thing in the daytime and make a mess, believe me, the entire bank will go under; Shit, the entire block will go under. And a lot of oil-money people will be very upset that a place like this was actually hit. Just like hitting the World Trade Center. Knocking down a building is not very good for business.”

  Bates turned to the Harrier pilots. “How much ordnance can you guys carry?”

  “Enough…why?”

  “Then increase your bomb load. Instead of carrying two five-hundred-pounders, try carrying two two-thousand-pound bombs each. You will definitely burn the money that way, but you might leave a big hole in the ground, too.” Bates’s voice suddenly cracked with emotion, very unlike him. His mother had been killed in the Lockerbie bombing when he was just six years old. So he’d lost someone, too. “I say, give them a Ground Zero to look at every day.”

  Murphy thought a moment, then turned to Martinez. He was the operations guy. The Delta boss just shrugged. “A sixteen-story building? Downtown Abu Dhabi? Noontime? You’ll make a mess, our biggest by far, no doubt about that. But you’ll have a body count, too.”

  Murphy drained his cup of coffee, thought a long time, then snapped his briefcase closed.

  “That’s why we’re here,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  Ten hours later

  Downtown Abu Dhabi was extra crowded this morning.

  A large street festival was in progress, a celebration for the governor’s daughter who’d recently announced her impending motherhood. Sayeeb Avenue was the focal point for this event. The expansive concourse in front of the National Bank was jammed with vendors and outdoor stands selling food, tea, and candy. Musicians walked the sidewalks nearby. Magicians and storytellers entertained the children. Thousands were on the streets this day. Normally there would have been just hundreds.

  A group of European missionaries was visiting Abu Dhabi today as well. Many were members of the German Green Party, here at the invitation of the UAE parliament. There were seventeen women on the tour, plus a tour guide and a translator. The missionaries were among the guests of honor at the motherhood festival. Two were carrying video cameras.

  At noontime, the people in the streets were serenaded by the clanging of bells a
nd the sounds of flutes. The height of the celebration had arrived. One of the German tourists turned her video camera up toward the Clock Tower, an 80-foot structure that soared above the near-spotless city. Through her viewfinder she saw a flock of white doves explode out of the tower, as if startled by something. Then a terrifying black form filled her frame. What was that? It was moving so fast, she could not tell. Then came the noise. It was horrendous, earsplitting. Then a second black shape crossed her eyepiece,

  On the videotape, someone asks: “What is happening?”

  “They are Luftkriegers,” the woman holding the camera was heard to reply. Jet fighters. She’d grown up in Bavaria in the 1970s. She was familiar with the sound of warplanes screaming over the countryside.

  But these two had come out of nowhere. They were flying so low, so fast, and making so much noise, hundreds of windows were breaking throughout the city. A slew of car alarms along Sayeeb Avenue went off, triggered by the racket. The people at the festival watched as the pair of black jets climbed in perfect unison, turned over on their wings—and began heading right for the downtown.

  Many in the street instinctively ran for cover. This was definitely not part of the celebration. The German woman with the camera held firm though. Somehow she kept the pair of aircraft in view as they passed back over the Clock Tower and flew right down the center of the avenue. The planes were no more than 100 feet off the ground and the wave of approaching noise they were creating was just tremendous. On the tape, someone could be heard screaming in German: “They are going to bomb us!”

  The frightened crowd became a frantic mob. People, running in all directions. The woman with the camera was knocked over in the stampede. She fell on her back but kept the camera pointing straight up. The videotape told the tale from there. By pure chance, it caught the flight of the first 2,000-pound bomb as it passed over Sayeeb Avenue and slammed right into the enormous, two-story front door of the crowded bank. The bomb exploded on impact. On the tape the building seemed to rise a foot in the air before coming back down. Every window in the 16-story structure was instantly blown out.

  The tape then caught a second huge bomb slamming into the building just a few feet above the first. There was a gush of fire, blinding the lens for a moment. Then three people ran in front of the camera; they were engulfed in flame. They disappeared just in time for the camera to catch sight of the two planes, out over the water, but turning again. They were coming back.

  There came now much static and the images of people’s feet running past the camera. Some were burned and shoeless. Others were covered to the ankles in blood. The two planes were suddenly over them again. The German woman tried to get to her own feet, camera still running, and caught the third 2,000-pound bomb coming in. It landed almost exactly where the first one did but kept right on going. It punctured the center of the massive vault and then exploded. The shock wave was so violent this time, the camera was blown from the woman’s hands. It landed with a crash—but did not break. It was made in America. The woman was somehow able to pick it up, and in the confusion now she, too, was running. The tape showed that she was on the tail end of a huge crowd of people fleeing for their lives, some looking back, though not believing what they were seeing.

  Then came the sound of the fourth bomb hitting the target. The laser-guided munition went through the top of the fractured bank vault like a bullet through a tin can, blowing up only after it had embedded itself in the building’s foundation.

  This was the biggest explosion of all. The ground began shaking and would not stop. The German woman fell again. This time, she stayed down. Either by accident or design, she turned the camera back toward the bank just in time to see the 16-story structure start to collapse. It went over to the north, away from the woman’s position, but the smoke and dust were horrible and suffocating. The tape showed the rubble of the bank was fully involved in smoke and flames, as was the wide concourse in front of it. There were bodies burning everywhere. One of the jets rocketed through the smoke and screamed away. The second jet was right on its tail. The German woman somehow used her zoom lens and caught, in full view, something that was painted on the side of the second departing jet.

  It was an American flag.

  The woman could be heard screaming in thick English: “American bastards! Murderers!”

  Then the tape ran out.

  Ryder and Phelan were circling above Ocean Voyager twenty minutes later.

  The ship was only a few miles off the coast of Abu Dhabi, still moving south. They got lucky, as the vessel had sailed right into an adequate security zone, allowing both jump jets to land with no problems.

  The airplanes were quickly brought below and all evidence of their retrieval covered over. Ryder and Phelan went down with the pancakes and then headed for their makeshift ready room, an unused cabin next to the crews’ galley. They shook hands—a postflight first. Things had gone that well. They talked extensively, one-on-one, about the mission, another first. It was just as a flight leader and wingman should be. The adrenaline was still pumping in both of them. Neither had done anything like this before. They’d flown the job flawlessly, and they’d returned in one piece. It would take a while for this buzz to go away.

  They changed quickly and went up to the combat center, knowing this was where the rest of the team would be. But instead of the expected case of beer and congratulations all round, they walked into a dry room, with some very startled faces hidden in the dark.

  No one spoke. Martinez just clicked a remote and CNN blinked on a nearby TV screen. The first thing Ryder saw was his own jet passing above the burning bank back in Abu Dhabi, Phelan’s jet right on his tail. A female reporter was halfway into a Breaking News Report on the bombing. The German missionary had been killed, the newswoman reported breathlessly, but her camera had been found and immediately turned over to the local TV station, who immediately sent it to the Al Jazzier Arab TV network as a raw feed. Al Jazzier had it on the air even before the Harriers were back on the ship. CNN had picked up the footage from there. And this was not the dark, shaky camera work confiscated after the Sea Princess incident. This was clear and focused and disturbing. The damage was incredible. The noise. The fire. The carnage, appalling. And now it was being broadcast all over the world.

  Ryder fell into the nearest seat. Phelan did, too.

  “Wow,” the young Navy pilot breathed. “We’re on TV….”

  Chapter 19

  The Ocean Voyager left the Persian Gulf the next morning.

  They ran two hours out into the Indian Ocean and then began a series of slow 360s that kept them near the shipping lanes but not actually inside them. If a patrol plane, from any country, went overhead, the prewritten script would have Bingo and his crew claim they were doing rudder repairs.

  Bobby Murphy had ordered the withdrawal from the Gulf. Things had changed a bit for his modern-day crusaders. Up until now, the American media had all but ignored the strike team’s activities. (It seemed like Murphy had friends everywhere.) Most of the videotapes from the Sea Princess had proved as persuasive as UFO footage. Shaky, fuzzy, and shot at night, the best ones had been confiscated as soon as the cruise ship reached Israel. For the most part, the actions in Sicily, Somalia, and the western Saudi desert had been reported as “isolated terrorist acts” for which no one had claimed responsibility. Murphy couldn’t have planned it better. By chutzpah, skill, and good luck, the team had become part of the Middle East’s murky underworld of terrorists and spies, mooks and Spooks. It was a place where no one knew exactly who was doing what to whom or why. Chaos, unreported, but just under the radar.

  The titanic destruction in Abu Dhabi proved too much for the media to ignore, though. High-level friends or not, the footage shot by the German tourist had been playing on TVs around the globe nonstop. Enhanced and digitized, the bombing could be seen graphically clear, as could the two American-marked fighters carrying out the strike. More than 1,200 were dead.

  Officiall
y the Pentagon was investigating, but they had no idea what was going on. Neither did the CIA, the DIA, et al. The State Department reminded everybody that more than the British and Americans flew the Harrier. But no one could come up with a plausible explanation why the Indian Navy would want to bomb a bank in Abu Dubai and do so disguised as Americans.

  So, the team had made headlines—and now half the world would be looking for them. The heat clearly on, Murphy decided to move to cooler waters for a while.

  But the Harriers still needed gas. So on the third night following the bank bombing, Ryder and Phelan climbed into their jump jets again and took off for 20 Angels.

  The night was clear over the water, a crescent moon just coming up between the mountains of faraway Pakistan. It was a beautiful time to fly, something that Ryder had not been able to appreciate of late. The stars were ablaze above them, and that bullshit about being able to reach out and touch the face of God almost seemed possible at the moment.

  They reached 20,000 feet, on time, and at the right vertical plane.

  Trouble was, the tanker wasn’t there.

  This had never happened before. The refuelers were always on time and in the right place. Ryder didn’t have to call over to Phelan. The two were in sync by now. The young wingman banked right and Ryder banked left. They went looking for their gas truck.

  In the past all the pilots knew about the refueling missions was that they could be flown by any number of U.S. tanker assets cruising the area. All had been classified as training missions, meaning the refuelers were getting practice in filling up Harrier jets. Tankers could fly great distances; the Harriers could be gassing up over the Red Sea from a tanker that was based in Germany. Someone waiting over the Indian Ocean might have come from nearby Diego Garcia. Or as far away as Guam.

  But wherever tonight’s fuel hound was flying from, he’d missed his duly appointed round.