by Mack Maloney
Luckily, the half-dozen men had an alternate plan. Ali’s friend Farouk had many connections at the nearby Khalid International Airport. Six months before, he had made arrangements to have a charter airplane on call, 24 hours a day, just in the event of something like this. A lifeboat of sorts. As soon as things started going badly around Hormuz, Farouk called the airport and let it be known he would be needing this plane immediately.
But how would it be able to fly when their Gulfstreams could not? Because Farouk had arranged to lease the aircraft under the guise of a UN agricultural team, one whose main office was just an address, located in a very small town somewhere in New Jersey. This gave the plane a sort of aerial diplomatic immunity. It would be able to leave despite the immediate U.S. tightening on private and commercial flights. Or the worst that could happen was that it would be forced to turn around after taking off.
In any case, they knew the United States would never shoot it down.
So now the six men were on their way to the airport. They were escorted by a squad of Saudi National Guardsmen, soldiers in their employ. Upon reaching Khalid, they were met at a private entrance by Farouk’s personal bodyguards and taken directly to the airplane. It was a refurbished DC-9, owned by the Gulf Air Corporation; it was all white, almost like a real UN plane, except for the distinctive red flaring design of GAC on its tail. The big plane was already warmed up and waiting out on the runway.
The six men climbed aboard and took their seats in the deserted first-class section. They all said a quick prayer and laughed when the airliner took off. The ascent was a bit shaky, but as soon as the airplane reached 10,000 feet it leveled off and the seat belt sign went out. The six men sat back and relaxed for the first time in days.
The plane was luxurious. Farouk had done his job well. There were couches and reclining chairs and a buffet and of course a bar. The six men began to eat and drink and talk about what awaited them in Zurich.
That’s when Prince Ali noticed the airplane appeared to be flying east, almost as if it was heading back to Riyadh, instead of north. He waved his hand at Farouk. His old friend got up and knocked on the flight cabin door. There was no reply. He tried again. Still nothing.
He opened the door and peered in. The first thing he saw was a man slumped over in the copilot’s seat. He was an Arab. He’d been shot twice in the head.
Then at his feet was another man in a Gulf Air uniform. He, too, was dead.
Farouk was so horrified, he couldn’t even cry out. There were two dead men on the floor of the flight compartment. Who the hell was flying the plane? He stepped into the cockpit to see a man behind the controls. Farouk screamed in his ear: “What has happened here? Who are you?”
Finally the man turned around. He seemed to have dark skin, not naturally but heavily tanned. His hair appeared dyed, as did his mustache. On a busy night or in the early-morning darkness he would have easily passed for an Arab. But he was not Arabic. He was an American.
It was Tom Santos.
And he was holding a gun.
“Please return to your seat, sir,” Santos calmly told Farouk. “And enjoy the rest of your flight….”
About 2,000 people worked in the Pan Arabic Oil Exchange building. All of them were men.
The retro-futuristic structure, whitewashed marble, 22 stories, with a postmodern bubble top and faux prayer tower, was among the most prominent in downtown Riyadh.
By myth, its location was a very holy place. Supposedly Muhammad himself had slept near here, when this area was still a desert, and predicted that someday great wealth would come from beneath the sands. It was a charming piece of bullshit and quite untrue. Yet many people in Saudi Arabia believed it as if it came directly from the Koran itself. And that’s why the building was here, in all its gold and splendid glory.
Legitimate people with legitimate jobs worked at Pan Arabic. Its accounting department housed a small army of moneymen, many with MBAs from colleges in America. The company made millions and was worth billions. These accountants were the ones who kept it so.
There were also legitimate oilmen employed here. The trek sweet crude made from ground to gas tank was a long one, and money could be lost or made at every turn. The art of moving vast quantities of oil was practiced at Pan Arabic, day after day, month after month. Geologists, piping experts, supertanker captains, and Ph.D.’s in refining all worked here.
Of the two thousand employees, roughly half handled the actual product itself; the others counted the money. Of that thousand who worked on the money end, more than two-thirds had been involved in some way with helping fund Al Qaeda.
As word spread about the events in Hormuz, it seemed a very dark day for the state of Islam was at hand. Many people in the Pan Arabic Oil Exchange building were not at their desks or planning tables. They were in colleagues’ offices or gathered in one of the building’s six lavish lobbies, watching TV. Al Jazzier News was broadcasting the events in the lower Gulf practically as they were happening. Somehow the Arab TV network had received a piece of video tape, shot from very far away but still showing the height of the attack on the Lincoln.
The footage and the breaking news had just about everyone in the building glued to the TV sets.
That’s why very few people ever saw the airliner coming.
The plane had been spotted by air traffic controllers at Khalid Airport shortly after 10:30 A.M.
It had arrived from the west and began circling the city at an altitude of just 2,000 feet, very low for such a large plane. There were two attempts to contact it from Khalid, but the plane never responded and Khalid never tried contacting it again. The ATC men would later claim that the events unfolding near Hormuz, just a few hundred miles way, combined with the Americans’ sudden imposition of restricted airspace over the entire Gulf, had distracted them. Six of these air traffic controllers would later be arrested and executed by the Saudi government.
For the people inside the Pan Arabic Oil building, it was the noise that arrived first.
Jet engines, roaring from somewhere in the distance, coming from an airliner flying on a morning when there wasn’t supposed to be anything other than the American military in the air.
It circled the building once, a huge white aircraft with a bright red tail and the letters GAC emblazoned on it. Then the plane began a long, slow, deliberate dive, its engines screaming and smoking, not unlike a B-52. The plane hit the building going 540 knots, nearly supersonic, and impacted about two-thirds of the way up the ornate prayer tower. It passed through the main structure, its fully loaded gas tanks exploding somewhere around the thirteenth floor. A massive fireball rained debris and burning fuel onto those unlucky to be caught below. Half the fuselage tore off within the building itself. The other half continued through to a courtyard and into the street beyond.
Everyone on the plane, and everyone in the building, was killed.
Near the Strait of Hormuz
Gallant and Bingo had been out on the fantail of Ocean Voyager for the past 30 minutes, scanning the skies above them while at the same time watching the rush of U.S. Navy warships flooding into the Gulf.
They were anchored off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, trying their best to maintain the cover of a simple cargo ship just staying out of the way. They’d watched the airliners’ foiled attack from about twenty miles off. Even now, they couldn’t believe it had been real.
But that’s not why they were out here. They’d crept as close to the scene of the battle as they could and now they were looking for something. Something, up there, in the smoke and clouds.
Suddenly Bingo cried out: “Damn, here comes one of them!”
A Harrier had appeared almost directly above them, no more than 2,500 feet up. But it was coming down very quickly and making very little noise while doing so. It became obvious the Harrier wasn’t so much trying to land on the ship as it was falling out of the sky. And it was not trying to set down on one of the ship’s two exposed pancakes; they wer
e actually too far away. Rather, it was heading for the ship’s little-used helicopter pad.
“He’s out of gas!” Gallant yelled. The two men immediately dived into a nearby hatch to avoid getting clipped by the falling aircraft.
The Harrier slammed onto the copter pad just a few seconds later. It bounced once, twice, and then almost fell off the platform completely. It came to rest only because its front nose and port outrigger wheel became entangled in the safety netting surrounding the pad. If this hadn’t happened, it would have gone right over the side.
The two men scrambled out of the hatch and raced up to the stricken plane. Its canopy had blown off; its engine was not turning. Gallant had been right; the plane had run out of gas and crashed. Or, in jump jet parlance, it had performed a dead-stick, vertical insertion.
They climbed up onto the wing and found it was Ryder in the cockpit. He was conscious, but just barely. He was drenched in sweat and shaking. His hands were particularly white to the bone. So was his face. He looked terrible.
He somehow managed to take off his helmet and look up at his colleagues. His eyes were red.
“Did Phelan land yet?” was all he could say.
Ten hours later
The sun finally began to sink on this bloody, historic day.
The Harrier, near totaled in its controlled crash, was covered with pieces of canvas now, to keep it better hidden from prying eyes.
Ryder had been patched up by the Navy guys and injected with a large dose of morphine. It was the only way they could get him to sleep. He lay, not moving, on a cot in the sick bay for hours. Maureen did not appear in his dreams this time. In fact, he didn’t dream at all. When he finally woke up, he felt worse than when he landed.
He was in a semi–state of shock. Whether it was exhaustion or the events he’d just lived through or the double whammy of morphine, he felt like he was sleepwalking. Some things made sense to him; other things didn’t. Yet he insisted on being allowed to climb up to the fantail, where he hoped the others would still be.
Here he found Gallant and Bingo, leaning against the greasy rail, continuing their lonely vigil. Martinez was still nowhere to be seen. Ryder would later learn the Delta officer was locked in his cabin, refusing food, refusing to even talk. What would have happened if he had allowed his Delta guys to blast the hijackers while they were still on the ground at el-Salaam Airport? It was a question destined to haunt him for a long time to come.
Gallant and Bingo had the last six-pack of Budweiser on the ship with them, but neither felt like drinking. Ryder joined them at the rail. He was able to give them some scattered details on what had happened over Hormuz, but his mind was elsewhere. As he spoke, he was continuously searching the skies overhead, half-expecting Phelan to appear at any moment, circling the ship for a landing.
Bingo told him two of his guys had gone through Phelan’s cabin, once it appeared certain that the young pilot was not coming back. They’d intended to gather his personal effects but had found his billet practically empty. All his CDs, his music player, his books, clothes, everything was gone, thrown overboard, they supposed. Did this mean Phelan had intended to commit his final act all along? Had he snapped? Or was he just a brave kid who had seen too much? No one knew.
All that remained was his mother’s picture, found hanging on the cabin wall. Bingo now handed the photo to Ryder, who barely looked at it before putting it in his pocket.
Then the ship became ethereally quiet.
“God, was all this worth it?” Gallant asked softly. “Phelan, the Delta guys. Probably Curry, too. All gone….”
“But look what they did,” Bingo replied. “They helped stop the mooks from hitting us big-time. They helped save America—at least for one more day. This thing would have played out a whole lot different if we hadn’t been on the case. Not that it will settle everything. There are still plenty of mooks left out there. Not just in this neighborhood either. I’m talking about Southeast Asia. The Philippines. Indonesia. There’ll be more blood in the water before this thing is finished. But today, this day, we knocked them on their ass. And that’s what we were supposed to do all along.”
More silence. Off in the distance, they heard a sound that might have been made by a jet aircraft approaching. They all froze on the spot. But the noise quickly faded away.
Finally, Gallant asked the question that was still on everyone’s mind: “So, what do we do now? We can’t just float around out here forever. They’re bound to catch up to us sooner or later. And I still don’t think it will be to give us medals.”
“Plus, we’ve run out of just about everything,” Bingo added. “Including fuel for the ship’s engines. We might be able to make a stop somewhere along the way, steal enough gas to sail back to the states. But then what?”
Ryder took a deep breath and finally took his eyes off the sky. Things were making a little bit more sense now.
“Then what?” he asked in reply. “Then we try to find Bobby Murphy.”
The Ocean Voyager left the Gulf two hours later. Passing through the recently reopened Strait of Hormuz, it steered around the large pieces of wreckage still floating in the shallow parts and headed for the Indian Ocean.
A huge fog bank was lying off the coast of Oman, not unusual for this time of year. Fishermen close to the shore saw the containership emerge from the strait. It looked like any one of dozens of vessels that would pass this way on a typical day. They watched it follow a course parallel to the coastline for a few minutes.
Then, very slowly, it turned south and disappeared into the fog.
Three days later
It was a rainy morning in Illinois.
Ginny Santos had risen early, seen her youngest child off to school, and then sat down with the newspaper. Reading over all of the stories about the horror a half a world away, she scanned every page, looking for her husband’s name. It was a game she’d played every day since Tom had left with the men from the government. She told herself that if his name was not to be found anywhere in the newspaper, then it meant he was still alive and that she could sleep and breathe and hope, for at least one more day.
When she did not find his name anywhere, she celebrated with a cup of tea.
Then the mail came.
There was a large envelope, addressed to her, with a postmark Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It was in Tom’s handwriting.
Ginny hurriedly tore it open, and what seemed to be hundreds of letters fell out. They were love letters from Tom, each written on plain white paper. Except one. It was written on yellow stock. It stood out among the rest, as it was supposed to.
It was less than a week old. Ginny read it first.
My dearest Ginny,
These are letters that I’ve written to you since I’ve been away. I intended to give them to you myself, but now that will be impossible because I won’t be coming home after all. In fact, by the time you read this, I will be gone. Please have a good cry, but then a good laugh. And please know I died in the service of our country. Remember the places we’ve been, the things we did. Tell the kids I love them very much and to be proud of the place they live. Thank you for making my life so complete. And if you ever feel sad, just remember that stream in the woods near our house. The one you always said looked like it went on forever. It does. And I’ll be just up around the bend, waiting for you.
Love,
Tom
Attached to the letter was a cashier’s check. It was made out to Ginny. For $10 million.
It was signed by Bobby Murphy.
St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Mack Maloney
Superhawks: Strike Force Alpha
Superhawks: Strike Force Bravo
(Coming soon)
Read on for an excerpt from Mack Maloney’s next book
SUPERHAWKS
STRIKE FORCE BRAVO
COMING SOON FROM
ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS
One Crazy Night
Singapore
The terrori
sts came dressed as waiters.
They arrived at the rear service entrance to the Tonka Tower Hotel at precisely 10:00 A.M. There were eight of them. They unloaded six food carts from their two vehicles. There was no security in this part of the building and the rear door had been left open for them. They rolled the carts up onto the kitchen’s loading platform and simply walked inside.
It was checkout time and the lobby of the enormous hotel was packed. Hundreds were waiting in line; hundreds more were picking up luggage or trying to find cabs. The routine chaos gave the eight terrorists all the cover they would need. They walked right through the lobby, heads down, pushing their carts, and made for the service elevators. Once there, they pushed the button to call the largest of the hotel’s 16 service lifts. It arrived a few seconds later. Loading the carts and themselves aboard, they quickly closed the doors and hit the button to go up.
The Tonka hotel was one of the tallest structures in the world. It was shaped like a futuristic pagoda, with a tower that soared 1,200 feet in the air. There were more than 3,000 rooms here, most of them expensive suites, plus many function areas, shops, and trendy restaurants. The hotel’s grand style and downtown location made it a popular place for foreign businesses, especially American companies, to hold meetings and corporate events. The Singapore government encouraged such things and frequently picked up the tab.