Strike Force Delta s-4

by Mack Maloney

  But again, now it got serious. As in most special operations, getting there was usually half the battle. But the strike team was in place, and by all indications few people knew they were there.

  So, the question was: What should they do next, in this, their last mission?

  * * *

  To this end, Murphy’s fabulous cabin had been turned into a war room.

  Scattered across his ornate table were mountains of books, some as high as the peaks around the Obo ridge, or so it seemed. Murphy was almost lost under them. They covered a number of topics. One book was devoted to the art of kidnapping. Another appropriately subtitled A Cold Hell on Earth, detailed the nineteenth-century history of Afghanistan. Still another book contained a collection of secret reports resulting from U.S. actions in Somalia back in 1993, specifically October 3rd. The day that would always be remembered by two just words: Blackhawk Down.

  Another book detailed the vicious World War Two battle of Iwo Jima. The famous picture of the handful of Marines raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi graced its cover. Still another book was called simply Unsuccessful Coups in Africa.

  This was research. Between making all those phone calls and breaking all those national security laws, Murphy had been reading, knowing they needed at least a ghost of a plan if the strike team ever did make it to their destination. He was looking for something, anything, that could help them if they ever got to phase two.

  And at this moment, just as they were beginning their transit of the Suez Canal, heading for the Persian Gulf, that search for a little piece of magic was still continuing. Frustratingly so.

  Not that Murphy’s resolve was faltering. If anything, he was just as inflamed about avenging Li’s death as was Ryder. And their journey across the Med, stealing the things they needed along the way, had been nothing short of brilliant — and blessed by good luck. But now that they were in place, more than once Murphy had considered the situation and caught himself murmuring, “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into.”

  The purpose of the mission was simple: to kill Jabal Ben-Wabi, aka the Patch. The problem was, Jabal Ben-Wabi was in Khrash and there were about fifteen thousand Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in there with him. While these people, all of them hard-core terrorists, were not there at his service exactly — after all, they were there on R and R — they would no doubt come to his aid en masse should the Patch need them to.

  So how were the Ghosts going to get him?

  After all his reading and meditating and consulting with Bingo and the Spooks and even Johnny Jackson of Delta Thunder, Murphy had, at least, come to one conclusion: If they wanted to first find, then kill Jabal Ben-Wabi, there were only three options available to them. The trouble was, two of them were impossible.

  Option one was to have someone inside the city kidnap Ben-Wabi and deliver him to them. Murphy dismissed this idea right away. Kidnapping was a cottage industry in Afghanistan and had been for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And a real pro could probably do the job. But Murphy had worked the spy game for years — or at least he told people he had. Any arranged kidnapping meant first getting to the top of the Patch’s security ring and then finding the right person to not only bribe but also trust enough to actually do the job. Thievery was also big in Afghanistan. It was just as likely that anyone they engaged to snatch the Patch would take the money and run as it was that he’d complete the job. Besides, grooming reliable confederates would take weeks, if not months. The team didn’t have that kind of the time.

  Then option two: the smash-and-grab. Sending in the strike team in the dead of night and snatching Jabal themselves. Ironically, the way the team was made up, i.e., chopper-borne special ops guys, this was a mission that would have seemed right up their alley. They’d even done a few since they started terrorizing the Muslim world.

  The problem here was that over a place like Khrash such a plan could quickly turn into Blackhawk Down, the Sequel. What they were facing was not rousting some chump from his family’s home in the middle of the desert. This was trying to grab someone in a city hosting a convention of mooks, each one carrying either an AK-47 or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Flying over Khrash would be as dangerous as flying over Detroit on New Year’s Eve — or Baghdad in January of 1991. If they were spotted, guaranteed there would be a lot of fire and lead coming up to meet them.

  Add to this what they would actually have to do. No matter how good you were at airborne special operations, something remained constant: Helicopters always had to slow down to let their troops off. And when copters weren’t moving, they were very vulnerable. What made Mogadishu such a disaster was that the Skinnies discovered RPGs could take down helicopters, something simple gunfire couldn’t always do. Kill the copters and whoever they’d just dropped off was surrounded and trapped. End of story. End of sequel.

  Besides, the Ghosts had no idea where the Patch was and, again, knew no one inside the city who could give them a clue. And it wasn’t like they could go rooftop to rooftop or door to door looking for him. So while a lightning strike operation was actually the team’s forte, in this case it had potential disaster written all over it.

  There was only one last alternative to consider then. The third option. The final option. But it was so outlandish and, frankly, suicidal that on this dark night, heading into the Suez Canal, Murphy didn’t want to even whisper its name, never mind write it down. His psyche couldn’t take it.

  Besides, three things had to be done before he could even think about developing a real plan based on this final idea: The Ghosts would have to get some solid recon, down-and-dirty stuff they just couldn’t glean by stealing NSA satellite photos. They would also have to make some new friends quick — or maybe contact some old ones — in hopes that they might buy into the cause.

  But for a plan based on the final option to have any chance of working, the first thing they had to do was the strangest thing of all.

  They had to let the mooks in Khrash know that the Crazy Americans were coming — and just pray that at least some of them were afraid of Ghosts.

  One hour later

  Over northwest Afghanistan

  The weird airplane known as Psyclops was preparing to head back to base when everything changed.

  It was 0530 hours, the typical end to a typical mission. The sun was coming up; the crew was exhausted, the big airplane almost low on gas. Because the light inside Psyclops was so eerily subdued, shades of red and blue emanating from the dozens of VDT screens being the only illumination, the crew felt caught inside an endless night, even in the daytime. Nothing was bright inside the Psyclops—except the so-called White Screen. This little-used piece of equipment was located at the far end of the cabin. When it came on, the interior of the plane lit up like high noon.

  And that’s what happened just as the big plane began its turn off mission orbit. One moment, the cabin was dark; the next, a bright white light washed through it. The large TV monitor at the rear of the plane had suddenly come alive.

  This was highly unusual. The airplane carried dozens of radios, set to dozens of wave lengths. AM, FM, Ultra-FM, Ultra-AM, shortwave, long wave, burst wave, scramble wave — it was a Marconi wet dream with wings. It also contained what amounted to a small TV studio, capable of receiving and transmitting broadcasts on UHF and VHF and via satellite.

  But the White Screen was something entirely different. It was a highly secret first-tier broadcast channel that had the ability to block out every other TV channel within a five-hundred-mile radius of the plane’s location. The channel was reserved for one thing only: when the President of the United States wanted to address the people whose TV sets had been commandeered below.

  Now it had clicked on. A blinking amber light, right in the middle of the pilots’ control board, indicated a message was coming through.

  “What the hell is this?” the copilot, Clancy, asked. “There’s nothing like this scheduled tonight — is there?”

  The plane�
�s CO, Captain Dow, checked their mission log. “No freaking way,” he said. “We’d get at least a week’s notice on something like this.”

  Dow turned the plane over to Clancy, then followed the rest of his crew back to the TV area. The White Screen was a 55-inch HD TV set, surrounded by a myriad of buttons and dials. At the moment, it was filled with snow static. The number 30 had appeared in the upper right-hand corner. It began counting down: 29… 28… 27…

  This meant a broadcast was soon to begin. At 10 seconds, a blue bulb on the set itself blinked on. This was a voice communications channel; it allowed the crew to talk to people on the other end of the connection. Dow pushed the button below the blue light and opened the channel, at the same time flipping another switch that would allow the entire crew to hear.

  Finally the countdown reached zero and the screen cleared. The image of a man sitting behind an ornate mahogany desk came into view.

  But this was not the President. This was a little man with a red nose and huge ears. He began speaking in a southern drawl, listing a number of passwords and code sequences to let the crew know that he was indeed someone with a very high security clearance. He also apologized for “not being the President” but added this was a matter whose urgency would be evident in the near future. All this took about thirty seconds, but Dow and the DJs were quickly convinced that the little man was higher than God on the country’s security clearance ladder.

  Finally, Dow just asked him: “What can we do for you?”

  The man hesitated, but just for a moment. Then he said: “I need you boys to go off your flight plan. Some people require your help.”

  “Do you mean a rescue operation?” Dow asked him, still amazed this was happening on the White Screen.

  “No — not really,” was the reply. “Just some fellow Americans who need your expertise — and quick.”

  It was strange, because the little man looked no more special than a next-door neighbor or the guy who ran the hardware store. Yet his voice, his mannerisms, the way he came across, even in a few spoken words, made you want to trust him.

  Dow looked over at the rest of the crew; they all just shrugged. He decided to take the hard line. After all, this might be some kind of security drill. Or a trick by the Iranians or someone.

  “We have our orders,” Dow said. “And we can’t break them for any reason.”

  But then came a surprise. The little man paused again but then said: “Well, I’m truly sorry, boys. But like it or not, I think you’ve just been drafted.”

  With that, the strange broadcast abruptly ended.

  A moment later the plane’s little-used air defense suite began whining. Located up in the cockpit, it was indicating that an unidentified aircraft was streaking toward the ship. Suddenly a pair of navigation lights appeared off the plane’s left wing. An instant later, a second pair of lights appeared off its right wing.

  “Who the fuck are these guys?” Clancy exclaimed.

  The rest of the crew rushed to the windows. Though it was still hard to see in the waning darkness, it was clear two very strange airplanes had come up on them. They looked dented, ragged, patched up. Real shit boxes with wings. But they were loaded with weapons and were very sinister looking.

  “Are those F-14s?” someone finally cried out.

  “If they are,” came the reply, “they’re the worst-kept F-14s I’ve ever seen.”

  The planes weren’t carrying any military insignia. In fact, they weren’t carrying insignia at all. Just blotches of black paint where the country markings usually would be.

  Very strange.

  Suddenly the big fighters began blinking their navigation lights. In the universal language of flight, this meant one thing: “Follow us — or else… ”

  Dow hurried back up to the cockpit and took over the plane again. He told Clancy to open the emergency radio channel back to their home base. Clancy did so but found the signal was being blocked with interference. A quick check of all their communication options revealed the same thing. They’d suddenly been struck dumb.

  They rode along in this tense formation for about thirty seconds. The two ragged F-14s drifted even closer to the big EC-130; soon they were dangerously close. There was no way the EC-130 could outrun them. And fighting them was out of the question.

  Dow looked over at Clancy, who just shrugged.

  “Anyone want to argue with these guys?” Dow asked the crew.

  A chorus of, “No!” came back in reply.

  Dow almost laughed. He’d had a premonition that he and his crew would be seeing some kind of action soon — but he sure hadn’t expected anything as weird as this.

  Finally he just blinked the big plane’s navigation lights three times in reply.

  “OK, guys,” he said. “Lead on….”

  Chapter 12

  All the tales about Khrash were true. Everything that was bad about the Muslim religion could be found here. Hate schools. Bomb-making schools. Weapons schools. Schools for young terrorists. This was a place where women were used for just two things: rape and servitude. A place where children were molested, then disposed of like soiled tissues. A place where torture chambers and opium factories could be found inside the city mosques.

  That was a lot of wickedness to fit inside just 1.4 square miles. Sometimes it seemed Khrash was bulging at the seams with evil.

  Just about everything within the city limits was built of clay and stone, although a few taller apartment buildings in the center of town were constructed of steel and cement. The Farāh River bordered the city on the south, then cut around it up to the north. There was just one major road leading in and out of the place. Highway 212 went through the middle of the city, turned west, and went over the Habeeb Bridge. From there it narrowed into a mountain pass that led up and into Iran.

  Like many cities in Afghanistan, Khrash had a front gate. It was 22 feet high, made of wood and scrap metal. It anchored a wall, made of similar materials, that encompassed about two-thirds of the city, known as the Old Quarter. The rest of Khrash, the newer areas, was made up of blocks of warehouses, repair barns, and scattered housing. All of it was surrounded by wadis, manmade trenches that doubled as sanitation ditches and public latrines.

  The main gate was guarded by members of the city’s religious police. They manned two machine-gun posts atop the gate itself, as well as an ancient but still effective 75mm cannon left over from the days of the Soviet occupation.

  There were 12 guards on duty this foggy early morning; all of them were on edge. There’d been some unseen tension in the city the day before, and this bad vibe had not diminished with the coming of night. Plus, most of them had spent hours the previous day searching Khrash for videotape cassettes. Old ones, new ones, anything that could be used. Their Chief needed a videotape badly. Incredibly, though, there were none to be found.

  Electricity was usually at a premium in Khrash, so at night huge bonfires were built in metal pots located atop the city gate. Even on the darkest, dreariest nights, the light from these fires could be seen for miles. They lit a good portion of Highway 212 as it came up and over the nearby hill and into the city.

  It was on this bumpy, potholed highway that the guards first saw the stumbling, bleeding ghost.

  Or at least that’s what he looked like. He came out of nowhere, naked, moaning loudly, leaving a trail of blood in his wake.

  The guards almost shot him — that was their first reaction. But because there was the slightest chance this thing was invoking the mercy of Allah and the Great Mullah — demons had souls, too — to shoot someone under those circumstances could bring horrible bad luck. So the guards held off, and instead two were ordered off the wall to meet the phantasm before it reached the gate.

  These two men did so, but only reluctantly. Carrying their weapons, cocked and ready, they went out the gate and approached the figure as he closed within one hundred feet of the city.

  Again, it was a foggy, dark morning, and so it took a few m
oments for the guards to realize that this was not just a man, bloody and near death; it was actually someone they knew. One finally shone his flashlight in his eyes; only then did they realize it was the kardiss named Harbosi.

  The guards stopped dead in their tracks. There was something very wrong here. Unclothed, Harbosi was smeared with blood. His hands were heavily bandaged and those bandages, too, were soaked through with blood. Blood was also gushing from his mouth. Most disturbing, though, a bloody bag had been tied around his neck.

  What had happened to him?

  The two guards finally stopped Harbosi and ordered him to raise his hands. But he had no hands to raise. They’d been cut off. Then the man opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. His tongue has been cut out as well.

  All he had was the bag, and a note, written in ink on his chest, that read: Take Me to the Chief.

  * * *

  The guards knew where to find him.

  The Chief lived in a palatial apartment on the bottom floor of one of the Holy Towers. Located in the city’s center, this was where most of Khrash’s privileged officials lived, especially higher-ups in the religious police. At 11 stories each, the two towers were among the tallest buildings in the city, and that included the trio of minarets.

  Carrying Harbosi in the back of their pickup truck, the two guards pulled up to the Chief’s door and knocked for five long minutes before they heard some kind of movement inside. The door finally opened and a teenage boy stumbled out onto the street. He looked almost as bad as Harbosi. Beaten up, bloody, certainly dazed. The guards simply pushed him on his way — they knew of the Chief’s sexual peccadilloes. They all had them. This was not the reason they were here to see him.

  The Chief himself came to the door. He was in his fifties, a large, terrifying man with a bald head and scars running along both cheeks. Nobody really knew where the Chief came from. He wasn’t too sure himself. There were some indications, though, that he was from Chechnya, the Muslim republic in Central Asia that was once part of the old Soviet Union.