Strike Force Alpha

by Mack Maloney

  But now the five soldiers were suddenly standing in front of her, and it was registering that they were much too large to be Arab. Or Israeli. And they were holding huge guns.

  “Whatdoyouwant?” she asked them finally, in English.

  The soldier closest to her raised his weapon. Delta had never been greeted quite like that before, and this trooper didn’t like it. A three-bullet barrage would blow her apart; she was that small.

  Someone’s little sister, he supposed. Totally clueless….

  A tense moment passed. Then he lowered his weapon and said: “We are here to take all of your CDs….”

  “Take them? As in steal them?” she asked.

  “Let’s just say we are going to move them from one place to another,” was the reply. “As a favor, for the guy who used to work here.”

  For some reason, this made sense to her. “For Uncle Jazeer, you mean?”

  The soldier nodded wearily. “Exactly.”

  She went back to her magazine.

  “Be my guest,” she said.

  Aboard Ocean Voyager

  Abu Jazeer had a total of 721 used CDs in the back of his store.

  They were all now sitting inside the container compartment once known as White Room #2, most of them in two gigantic stacks, swaying precariously with the rolling of the ship. There was several million dollars’ worth of audio enhancement gear nearby, gadgets that could decipher the smallest of sound patterns or clear static from a line or tell which part of the world a cell-phone call was being placed from. But the strike team leaders were interested in just one device down here at the moment. It was a battered old computer with a cracked keyboard and a balky sound system attached.

  Phelan was sitting in front of this PC now, loading one used CD into it after another, looking for a needle in a haystack of pins. It didn’t help that all of Jazeer’s inventory was illegal, songs burned onto blank CDs and then sold as “used.” Many were packed into unmarked paper or cardboard sleeves rather than jewel boxes. And those that were marked had been done so incorrectly, with the cover sleeve not matching what was inside.

  In other words, the only way to find out which one wasn’t a music CD was to load each of them into the computer, activate the CD-ROM drive, and hope that one would start downloading information, instead of just blaring out some bad foreign music.

  So far, it had been nothing but bad music.

  In the two hours since returning to the ship, Phelan had fed more than 300 CDs into the elderly HP 900E computer, with no luck. Contemplating at least another two hours with 400 disks to go, the team leaders were becoming restless. They’d slipped back into the Gulf just as another foul weather front appeared. A rainstorm was brewing outside, making the interior of the dreary compartment damp and uncomfortable. The adrenalin high of so swiftly confiscating the load of CDs was now dissipating with each roll of the ship.

  It didn’t help that they’d received some bad news about ninety minutes into the process. It came from one of the Marine techs who’d hiked all the way down to the bottom of the boat to tell them the Torch copter was no longer be able to fly. While the marathon flight to Qartoom had taken its toll, the last mission to ‘Ajman had been a backbreaker, he said. The copter’s avionics were already ragged. Now its engines were shot and beyond repair, due to a lack of spare parts. The Marines had drained the last few precious drops of fuel from its tanks and the Torch was now considered OTB—off the books. Inactive. Dead. It was an inglorious end for the great aerial troop truck.

  By the third hour, the team members began wandering away. Curry and Gallant left after nothing had been found in the first 400 CDs. The little bleats of music were horrible and loud, and after a while they all had earaches. Martinez eventually retired, too. Too exhausted to be the contrarian now, before he left the Delta officer gave Phelan a fatherly pat on the back, as if to say: Nice try, son. Outside, the storm grew worse.

  Only Ryder remained with Phelan, handing him a new CD as the one before it went spinning across the room, to splinter against the far wall. The floor of the previously antiseptic White Room #2 was now thick with pieces of shiny, broken plastic.

  Shortly after the fifth hour of this began, Phelan stopped for a moment, rubbed his tired eyes, and let out a long, troubled breath.

  “We’re screwed,” he said wearily. “If Zoobu had stashed the CD-ROM in with all this crap, the chances are we would have found it by now.”

  “Well, it was worth a shot,” Ryder told him; his spirits, too, had begun to fade. “And it’s what Murphy would have wanted us to do, right?”

  But Phelan just shook his head. The emotional roller coaster was clearly having the biggest effect on him. “What am I ever going to tell my mom?” he said quietly.

  Finally it came down to the last 100 CDs. They’d all been taken from a bin marked: FRENCH ROCK AND ROLL.

  “If Zoobu really wanted to hide it,” Ryder said smartly, “this would have been the place.”

  Phelan put in the first CD. Awful music. The second—and the music was even worse. The third went beyond the description of bad. Then he came to a CD whose paper sleeve was marked BLACK TUESDAY in French. Phelan numbly fed it into the computer.

  Suddenly the screen popped to life.

  The two pilots couldn’t believe it. An electronically distorted image slowly came into focus on the monitor. It was a man’s face. He was an Arab, with three missing teeth, a pop eye, and a crooked turban. He was smiling but looked treacherous.

  Phelan clenched his fists in triumph.

  “Either he’s a French rock star,” the young pilot said excitedly, “or we just caught us a fish.”

  Inside five minutes, the rest of the team had rushed back to White Room #2. A new energy had blown into the compartment.

  They all studied the picture on the screen. It was Martinez who recognized the dirty face first.

  “Damn,” he said. “That’s Abdul Kazeel….”

  “Friend of yours?” Phelan asked dryly.

  But Martinez remained dead serious. “He’s only the top operations guy left in Al Qaeda. Next to Khalid Shaikh, he did most of the down-and-dirty planning for Nine-Eleven. Christ, he handed ticket money to Muhammad Atta himself.”

  “Jackpot…” Phelan declared.

  “Let’s hope so,” Martinez replied.

  Phelan quickly gave his seat to Gil Bates. Summoned from above, the young Spook Boss knew his way around a computer better than anyone else onboard. He thought he recognized the type of CD-ROM they’d found.

  “This does look like a final briefing disk,” he told them. “I’ve seen a few of them before. The mooks started using CD-ROMS right after Nine-Eleven for security reasons, especially when something big was about to happen.”

  He began banging away on the keyboard. “They set them up just like computer games,” he explained. “This one’s probably divided into a number of different levels. That’s how they usually put these things together.”

  They all watched the first level play out. Just as Bates predicted, it served as the disk’s introduction and like a computer game, opened automatically. The initial images were highly visual, the screen filling with weird Islamic effects, lines of text, and nonstop dissolves of jihad members, all backed by discordant Middle Eastern music.

  “It looks like a bad religious program,” Gallant said. “Something they show on cable at two in the morning.”

  “You haven’t seen much Arab TV,” Bates told him, his eyes never leaving the screen. “This kind of stuff passes for prime-time programming over here.”

  The visuals of the jihad fighters were handled not unlike the introduction of a computer-game sports team. Each terrorist was given about ten seconds of face time, with his photograph displayed prominently on one part of the screen and a video cut-in of him speaking taking up the other.

  Kazeel meanwhile served as narrator for this first level. Babbling on and on, his voice was laid over a still photo of himself dressed in full camo battle fa
tigues which kept dissolving from one corner of the screen to the other. A total of 22 jihad types were shown. The last pair had their faces completely tiled out, an extraordinary security procedure, Bates said.

  “Whatever the mooks are planning next,” the Spook Boss concluded, “these are the guys who are going to do it.”

  But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than the first level ended and the CD froze in place.

  “Shit…what happened?” Martinez cried.

  Bates began banging on the keyboard again, but the visuals would not budge.

  “I was afraid of this,” he said, pointing to three blank fields that had appeared at the bottom of the screen. “We need to enter encryption codes into those three boxes in order to get into the next level. Codes we do not have.”

  With those words, all that new energy went right out of the room again.

  “Isn’t there a way you can figure them out?” Martinez asked Bates sternly. “You’re supposed to be the whiz kid.

  “Sure I can—if you give me a couple weeks,” Bates replied. “But short of that…”

  “God damn it,” Ryder said. “You said this is like a computer game. Don’t you have any clues at all? Something that might crack the codes?”

  But Bates just shook his head. “The mooks really know what they’re doing when it comes to encryption. It’s like a challenge to them. Hacking into the Pentagon is a breeze compared to what they can put up.”

  A groan went through the compartment. Once again, they were back to zero.

  Bates rebooted the PC and went back to the beginning of the CD-ROM. Kazeel’s dark face soon filled the screen again. In between introducing the martyrs-to-be, Kazeel seemed to be reading from cue cards out of camera range. The team members all listened closely, but Kazeel’s words, in Arabic, made little sense, even to those in the room who spoke the language. They sounded like disassociated religious phrases, repeated over and over.

  “What the hell is he talking about?” Martinez finally asked.

  Bates just shrugged again. “I have no idea….”

  But then came a phrase that outlined the proper way a Muslim man could kill his unfaithful wife.

  “Now that’s from the Koran,” Bates declared, cleaning up the audio a bit. “And that could mean everything he’s saying might be, too. That could actually help us.”

  “What do you mean?” Martinez asked.

  “This Kazeel might be speaking in Koranic code,” Bates replied. “Let’s say each mook already had a specially prepared copy of the Koran before he received his CD. They might have a system in place that when they hear these repetitive phrases from Kazeel, they will make some kind of sense to them—and lead somehow to the encryption codes needed to open up the rest of the CD-ROM. That way, should the CD itself fall into the wrong hands, the mooks still have a measure of security in place.”

  “So what you’re saying is,” Martinez asked, “the Koran is actually their codebook?”

  Bates nodded. “They might be using it that way. Possibly even as a double-code book.”

  “So this disk doesn’t do us any good then?” Ryder said.

  “Not unless we get one of their Korans,” Bates replied. “And how we do that I don’t know. But whatever we do, we have to hurry….”

  “Why so?” Martinez asked.

  Bates finally took his eyes off the screen. “When I first joined the NSA, my group did a case study on Nine-Eleven,” he explained. “We concentrated on communications NSA had intercepted from the mooks in the days just before the towers were hit. We learned that the most important element in their entire plan was the timetable. The mooks were slaves to it. I mean, they scheduled things right down to the very last minute. Now the final communiqué from the top came less than a week before the hijackings took place. This was their one last briefing before they went off to do the deed. I’ll bet this CD contains the same thing. The final details. Their marching orders, so to speak. That’s why they went so heavy on the security.

  “Now if we can get into the next levels, and I’m guessing there are two more, then I’ll bet we’ll see all their operational stuff: hours, dates, meeting locations, targets, the works. We might even see details for any misdirection they are planning.”

  “That would be more than enough to head off this thing, for sure,” Phelan said. “Whatever it is….”

  “Correct…but remember this,” Bates went on. “This CD is already more than a week old. And they wouldn’t let it go floating around out there for very long if they didn’t have to.”

  “In other words?” Martinez asked him.

  Bates just shrugged. “I think whatever they are planning is going to happen very soon, like in the next twenty-four hours. I’d stake my career on it.”

  Total silence. The team leaders became frozen to their spots. Suddenly it felt very cold inside the container—cold and dirty and gloomy.

  “Twenty-four hours?” Phelan finally said. “Murphy thought we had a couple weeks to work with. But this thing is happening like right now….”

  “And we still don’t have a clue as to what they’re planning to do,” Ryder moaned. “Or where. Or how.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Curry said. “We’re in our own little fucking world out here. We used to be so plugged in—but now, we hardly know what time it is.”

  Martinez collapsed into a nearby seat. His face had turned pale. He knew this had been a bad idea from the beginning. “Any idea how many mooks were on the distribution for this disk?” he asked Bates wearily.

  Bates just shook his head again. “There’s no way of telling. Could be thirty. Could be fifty. It was distributed on a strict need-to-know basis, I’m sure. But at this late juncture, they’re all pretty much gone to ground by now anyway. They button up very tight right before they run an operation.”

  The ship started rolling again. The lights overhead began to flicker, a common problem of late. Bates thought a moment, then added, “But maybe…”

  He started pounding furiously on the keyboard again. The images on the CD were passing across the screen in fast motion, but somehow Bates’s trained eye was able to sort out order from the confusion. He stopped at the visual of each martyr-to-be, studying the screen before moving on. Finally he brought the CD to a halt on the picture of a young terrorist in the process of saying his last prayers. He was Martyr Number 12. The guy looked no more than 18 years old. He was sitting cross-legged with a cloth wrapped around his head, a Kalashnikov in his hands, and two vacant eyes peering out at the world.

  “Look at this guy,” Bates said. “He might be a minor player, because he only gets about seven seconds of screen time in total. But check this out….”

  He started moving the CD forward in slow motion. The young terrorist was seen banging a Koran against his chest. There were documents floating by his head, courtesy of a very cheesy special effects machine, making it look as if he were sitting on a cloud. Most of these documents were handwritten, farewell letters to his family, not unusual, as Al Qaeda fighters frequently left behind substantial messages to be used for propaganda purposes once they were dead.

  “Look, right there,” Bates said, freezing the screen again. “See it?”

  The others gathered closer around. Bates was pointing to one document that was hovering over the young terrorist’s shoulder. It was not a letter.

  “It’s a birth certificate,” Bates said. “The mooks have been known to stick them onto their visuals sometimes, especially with new members, as a way to prove the jihad fighter is an authentic Muslim. This guy’s name is Jamaal Muhammad el-Habini.”

  “Yeah, so?” Phelan said. “There’s probably a million guys named that around here.”

  “But look at this,” Bates replied. He was pointing to the certificate’s stylistic printing. It was nearly washed out in the bad video production. But when he enhanced this part of the image several times, the third line of the birth certificate became clear enough to read.

  “Wh
at is that?” Ryder asked Bates.

  “Believe it or not,” the Spook replied, “I think that’s his address….”

  “Damn…really?” Martinez exclaimed.

  “Where does he live?” Phelan asked.

  “Where else?” Bates answered. “Saudi Arabia. A place called El-Qaez. I think that’s somewhere south of Riyadh.”

  “What makes you think this is current, though?” Curry asked him. “He’s probably moved a bunch of times since his birth certificate was written.”

  But Bates shook his head. “These guys don’t go out and get bachelor pads once they reach eighteen years old,” he said. “They stay in the nest until they either get married or get killed. At the very least, I’ll bet his family still lives there.”

  “Well, we gotta go get this guy,” Gallant said with renewed urgency. “He might hold the key to a lot of this.”

  But then Martinez spoke up. “After that excursion back to ‘Ajman, we don’t have enough gas to fire up a grill,” he said. “Or sure as hell not enough to go up to Riyadh….”

  “But we just can’t sit on this,” Curry insisted. “Especially now that we know a clock is ticking here….”

  But Martinez was still shaking his head. “Look, we’re tapped out. We did what we could, but we’re at the end of the line. Last chapter. End of story. We can’t do any more about this. It’s time to give it to someone who can.”

  “What are you saying?” Curry asked him.

  Martinez just shrugged. “I don’t see any alternative but to contact Langley somehow and tell them everything.”

  The rest of the team let out another collective groan. Langley, Virginia, was the headquarters of the CIA—and those three letters were a four-letter word on the Ocean Voyager.

  Phelan was especially upset. “God, the CIA…they’ll take weeks to follow up on this,” he said. “And that’s even if they choose to believe us. Which they won’t. We’re blacker than black, remember? Look what happened to Murphy. If we call them, it’s more likely they’ll arrest us first than listen to us. And by the time they do hear us out, it will probably be too late.”