Strike Force Alpha

by Mack Maloney

Ryder and Phelan searched the skies for nearly 30 minutes, but the tanker never showed up. They couldn’t wait around any longer; they didn’t have the gas.

  Reluctantly, they headed back down to the ship.

  They landed and the planes were taken below. The Marine techs told Ryder and Phelan that Martinez was waiting for them back on the aft railing. They should see him right away.

  The pilots found the Delta boss on the ass end of the ship, gazing out on the wake. There was not a beer in sight.

  They told him what happened up top. Martinez didn’t seem very surprised, but he was obviously troubled by the news.

  “While you were gone, a few of the screens up on the bridge blinked off,” he told them quietly. “A few more in the combat room went dark, too. Communications and navigation stuff mostly, but the discreet line to the U.S. Middle East Security Command also went down—and that’s like our lifeblood. Bingo’s guys are trying like hell to get it back, but so far, it’s been no dice. It doesn’t look to have been caused at our end, either. It seems that the other end just stopped transmitting to us. Like someone flipped a switch and everything getting fed to us just went away.”

  Ryder felt his heart hit his feet. The Ocean Voyager was secretly wired into the same networks U.S. Navy ships used for navigation and communications. This included advanced GPS, SeaSatComm, the Navy’s global weather system, the works. Without these things, they were just another ship plowing through the water, with little more than a shortwave radio and reports from the local maritime weather service. Ryder had assumed the tanker no-show was a screwup on the part of the refueling corps. But now, with the ship’s nav/comm gear shutting down, too, could there be a connection?

  “You’re the Delta God,” he said to Martinez. “What do you think is happening here?”

  Martinez hesitated a moment. He was very good at being evasive; that’s what his by-the-book training had taught him to do. But he was also an emotional guy, hot-blooded. Sometimes, when asked a direct question, he couldn’t help but answer it straight.

  “Maybe someone is trying to tell us something,” he finally said. “No tanker. No nav/comm support. Some of the sat phones are blinking out, too. We made a lot of noise the other day. Who knows what the bounce-back will be.”

  “We made too much noise, you mean?” Ryder asked.

  Martinez just shrugged and lit his cigar.

  “But is that possible?” Phelan wondered. “I thought bigger was better?”

  “I did, too,” Martinez said. “But one thing I’ve learned in this business: the rules can change at any time—and usually it’s the boots on the ground that are the last to know. Besides, just about anything is possible with Murphy and the guys who helped set him up. I mean, we’re deeper than deep. Blacker than black. We’re not supposed to exist. I don’t think being on CNN is exactly what they had in mind.”

  Just then Gallant came walking along the rail.

  “Precisely the people I’m looking for,” the copter pilot said to Ryder and Phelan. “Murphy wants to see you two. Up in the CQ, chop-chop.”

  “Just us?” Phelan asked him.

  “Just you.”

  Ryder didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Were you just up there?” he asked Gallant, nodding toward the bridge house where Murphy’s quarters were located. “What’s he doing? Sitting in the dark?”

  Gallant laughed. “Actually, he’s going over a computer file of yours.”

  “A file of mine?” Ryder asked, surprised. “Which one?”

  Gallant winked at Martinez and Phelan.

  “Everyone calls it ‘The Fruit File’…” he said.

  Ryder and Phelan walked up to Murphy’s cabin and knocked twice.

  Murphy yelled for them to come in. Ryder opened the door to see that Gallant had been right. The cabin was hardly dark. In fact, every available light inside was blazing at maximum intensity. There was no funeral atmosphere here.

  The long dining table was covered with maps, charts, credit card read-outs, cell phone logs, and many, many satellite photos. Murphy was nearly lost behind this mountain of data. He was hunched over one of his six laptops, drinking a huge cup of coffee. He was wearing a ball cap that had DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS embroidered across the bill. Three small TVs, all tuned to CNN, were just an arm’s reach away. Each was replaying footage of the Abu Dubai incident. Different angles, different enhancements, slow-motion, stop-motion, all it needed now was its own music score. Ryder tried to ignore it. He’d seen the video a hundred times already, and even though he was in it and it was now the center of a huge international controversy, he’d grown tired of it a long time ago. Phelan, however, couldn’t wait for a chance to see it again.

  Murphy waved them in and pointed in the direction of his bar. At least there’s beer up here, Ryder thought. He and Phelan each took a Bud and joined Murphy at the table. The funny little man was looking at a pile of jpg photos through a huge magnifying glass.

  Ryder felt compelled to tell him the bad news first. He recounted the aerial tanker’s no-show and their unsuccessful search for it. Murphy listened, patiently. But he was more concerned with studying the photographs in front of him.

  “I’ll look into it,” he said offhandedly.

  Ryder glanced over at Phelan, who just shrugged. “You also heard that some of the nav/comm gear shut down?” Ryder told Murphy quietly. “Some of the sat phones are blinking out, too.”

  Murphy never took his eye from the magnifying glass. “Stuff happens,” he said. “Especially when you’re far out to sea.”

  Ryder finally leaned over and looked at the photographs that had so captured Murphy’s interest. Just as Gallant had hinted, they were the pictures Ryder had taken of the “convoy ships” that night over the Med, the ones carrying all that fruit.

  “I wish I’d known about these earlier,” Murphy said, sounding more enthusiastic than ever. “This is really dynamite stuff!”

  Ryder was puzzled. Of all the things going on, why was Murphy so hyper about his so-called Fruit File?

  “The Spooks told me it was just a bunch of ships, carrying lemons and grapes,” he told Murphy. “What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s lemons and grapes, all right,” Murphy replied. “But want a guess whose fruit it is?”

  “Chiquita Banana’s?” Phelan replied.

  “How about the Head Mooks themselves?” Murphy shot back.

  “You’re kidding,” Ryder said.

  “They’re into peddling fruit?” Phelan asked.

  Murphy flashed a smile. “I couldn’t make something like that up—it’s too good,” he said. He unloaded his briefcase onto the desk. It contained more enhanced photos from the Fruit File.

  “I had some of ‘Norman’ Bates’ guys downstairs zoom in on the names of those convoy ships,” Murphy said. “They could only raise two—but that’s all I needed. I tracked them to this place.”

  He showed them a satellite image of a city in Libya called Qartoom. In the eastern part of the country, right on the coast, it boasted a large harbor with vessels of all sizes tied up at the extensive docks. Murphy pointed to a huge structure next to a loading pier. It was a cargo transfer facility, very modern, with roll on, roll off capability and many heavy-lift cranes. It alone took up about a third of the harbor.

  “This is the shipping terminal for an outfit called ‘Heavenly Fruits,’” Murphy explained. “Al Qaeda owns it; they are its sole investors. The Big Cheese started it as a corporation a few years back, one of his thirty-three legitimate companies. Most of them are small and slimy. But three of them are huge: A construction firm in the Sudan. A shipping company in Italy. And this place. Now, I know the Libyans are supposed to be our ‘friends’ these days, but any idea how much fruit they roll out of there in a week?”

  Ryder studied the photo. It showed a lot of activity around the warehouse and sea terminal. There was a ship being loaded that was nearly as large as the Ocean Voyager. Many smaller cargo ships were lurking arou
nd as well.

  “A couple dozen tons?” he offered.

  “Try four thousand tons,” Murphy told them. “Lemons. Grapes. Oranges. Watermelons—who knew mooks liked watermelon? That place works twenty-four hours a day, shipping fruit all over the Middle East. And only to Muslim countries, or at least that’s the first stop. It’s expensive stuff, too, for fruit, that is.”

  But Ryder was still a couple steps behind him. It showed.

  “Don’t you get it?” Murphy asked him. “What you saw that night were some of their fruit ships, in a convoy, with at least two Arab flyboys providing air cover. That shows you how valuable this business is to them and their organization. In fact, Heavenly Fruits generates a good chunk of the fifty million they need to keep the whole jihad thing up and running. Those grapes are more precious to them these days than a hundred ships loaded with weapons. No wonder they’re protecting it on the high seas. Guns and bombs they have. It’s money that they need the most.”

  Murphy sat back and took a sip of his coffee. Ryder and Phelan drained their beers and grabbed two more.

  “Looking at your photos got me thinking,” Murphy went on. “We took care of twelve million of their cash the other day. That was a real shot to the ribs. Now here’s a way we can hit them with another punch, an even bigger one, right out of the blue. They’ll never see it coming!”

  But just as those words came out of Murphy’s mouth, the three TVs next to him blinked off. Then all of his six computers shut down.

  A moment later, the lights went off.

  They sat there in the dark for the longest time, not talking, not moving. The ship started rolling; the wind outside was kicking up again.

  “Well, this is weird,” Murphy finally drawled.

  The emergency lights blinked on a moment later. Now the room was extremely dim and dreary. Murphy picked up his intership phone, intent on calling the bridge. But the phone was dead.

  Then came a knock at the CQ door. Murphy yelled, “Come!” and the person hurried in. It was one of Bates’s guys, a very young-looking Spook. He’d obviously run all the way up from the bottom of the ship.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he said, breathlessly attempting a weak salute. “But we’ve just lost almost everything down in the White Rooms. Everything coming in from Echelon is gone. Everything coming in from Central Command is too. We even lost a lot of our Internet sites.”

  Murphy was stunned. Ryder and Phelan, too.

  “Well, son, we just had a power outage,” Murphy said to him. “Are you saying everything kicked off because of that?”

  But the kid was shaking his head no.

  “No, sir—that power spike was caused by everything downstairs shutting off at once. The sudden drop in power sent a volt-wash through the ship. When that happens, it’s usually a—”

  Murphy raised his hand, gently interrupting the young technician. He got the point.

  “Can’t you boot it all back up?” he asked him simply.

  But the kid never stopping shaking his head. “When I say shut down, I mean everything has ceased transmitting from the other end,” he told Murphy soberly. “We didn’t kill it ourselves. Someone on the other end did.”

  This news landed like a 2,000-pound bomb. Murphy just stared back at the kid as it began to slowly sink in. The tanker. The phones. The nav/comm gear. The TVs. Now this. A domino effect. Like someone flipping a switch….

  “OK, son,” Murphy said, his voice very low. “You can get going.”

  The kid disappeared. Outside, the wind had started to blow a little louder.

  They sat there in silence for nearly a minute. Finally Ryder pulled up a chair next to Murphy.

  “Can I ask you something, off-the-record?”

  Murphy was still dazed. “Sure….”

  “Did someone up top get pissed over the bank job?”

  “Yeah, like super–pissed off?” Phelan added.

  Murphy started to say something but stopped. He took a deep breath and then it seemed like all the air went right out of him.

  “It wasn’t as popular back home as I thought it was going to be,” he finally admitted.

  “But I thought there really wasn’t anyone who could get pissed at us officially,” Ryder said. “No oversight. No limits.”

  Murphy just held up his hands. “That only leaves the very large world of ‘unofficially,’” he said. “Nothing is foolproof. Not even this.”

  He nodded toward the dead TVs. “It didn’t help that they were showing the video twenty-four/seven. The media can really call the tune these days, once they sink their teeth into something.”

  There came another uncomfortable silence as Murphy looked sadly around the room. Things were starting to fall into place for all of them. Like a championship football game, the momentum had flipped. Just like that.

  “How bad do you think it is?” Ryder finally asked him.

  Murphy took off his glasses and leaned way back in his chair. He had been keeping up a brave face after all. “I got a message from my ‘friends’ back in the states earlier today,” he said. “On the secure E-mail site. They say we’ve been put on life support. They suggested we stay in place and not do a blessed thing.”

  He looked around the dim room again. “I’ve yet to reply to them—but they said the plug could be pulled at any time. Looks like they were right.”

  The ship shuddered once, making even the emergency lights blink.

  Murphy’s voice almost broke. “That’s how it always goes, isn’t it? You do the job too well, and the people back home wet their pants.”

  He studied his glasses. At the moment, he could have been a druggist or a dry-cleaning guy. Murphy just did not exude “spyness.”

  “You guys have been out here what, six weeks now?” he went on. “Well, I’ve been working on this baby for years. And now, just when things are getting interesting, they go south on us. Damn….”

  Ryder couldn’t argue with him. He’d been involved in many black ops in his time, though never one quite as bizarre as this. By their very nature, some secret missions had very short half-lives. Some never got off the ground at all. And Murphy was right. The quick pull usually was a result of someone inside the Beltway having kittens because things were looking a little untidy.

  But this was different. Most black ops come and go. This one started as a quest, a journey, one man’s uphill battle. Sleepless nights. Endlessly banging on closed doors. A parched voice crying in the wilderness. A thousand days of hard work. It was all right there on Murphy’s face now, along with the realization that it was probably slipping away, all in a matter of seconds.

  “Well, we gave it a shot, I suppose,” the little man said, symbolically closing his briefcase. “I hope someday the survivors of everyone killed on Nine-Eleven will know that at least.”

  Another silence. The ship rolled again.

  Ryder tried to be philosophical. “It’s not like we didn’t accomplish anything out here,” he said. “We could sail away tomorrow and they’d still be looking over their shoulders for us this time next year. We made that much of an impact, in a very short time. All because of you.”

  But Murphy was shaking his head no.

  “And what happens when the mooks fly off to do the Next Big Thing?” he asked sternly. “And we could have been here to prevent it? I hate to tell you that no one back in the states has any idea what is about to happen. They don’t want to hear it. They’re still fighting about whose office is bigger and who’s got the nicest window and who will have the biggest staff. Just like last time, the signals are all around them, but they can’t see the forest for the trees. Do you know the Homeland Threat Warning is still stuck on yellow? They refuse to raise it up to orange. Why? Because it affects the stock market. It’s bad for business. Not that it matters. People are so sick of the false alarms, they don’t take anything seriously anymore. But I know something is about to happen. Anyone with half a brain and access to the information we have—or used to have—would
reach the same conclusion.”

  He wiped his tired eyes.

  “But if we’re just going to get put out to dry…”

  He let the words hang in the air. He’d said it himself just a few days before: Every enterprise reaches its peak. Those words were echoing inside Ryder’s empty beer can now. Had Murphy really peaked so soon?

  “I knew it would make you guys stronger, you know,” he told them suddenly. He was wearing a weak but sly smile, barely visible in the dank light. “All of you, stronger.”

  “What’s that?” Ryder asked him.

  “Putting you together but telling you not to talk,” Murphy said. “If you haven’t figured out by now, that was a little test of mine.”

  “Well, it didn’t work,” Ryder said. “We’ve been blabbing like old ladies for weeks.”

  “As I knew you would,” Murphy said. “But I also knew that it would show me something if you did: that working together was more important than any asinine order to keep your traps shut. Yes, I set you up like a cell. I did just about everything the mooks do, including getting people whose families have been personally involved, shall we say? But unlike them, we had human hearts beating inside our cell. Sure, you broke the rules. But whether you know it or not, doing so turned you into something that you weren’t before.”

  “A conspiracy of dunces, you mean?” Ryder asked.

  “Nope,” Murphy said. “It made you whole. It brought you together, to find common ground on your own. No holy book was needed here. All we needed to be was Americans. And Americans have souls. That’s what I thought was most important. That’s all I ever wanted. That’s all I thought we’d ever need.”

  Murphy got to his feet, a little unsteadily, and walked over to the large picture window. His eyes had watered up. Hands clasped behind him, he stared out at the dark, troubled water below.

  Ryder got another beer. He, too, needed some time in the dark. Phelan appeared to be deep in thought for a few moments as well. But then he slipped into Murphy’s chair and started examining the pile of stuff in front of it. The young pilot had been unusually quiet for a while. That was about to change.