Strike Force Charlie s-3

by Mack Maloney

  What was his connection to all this?

  Plenty ….

  It was Rushton who’d sent Fox on his last mission, which was to track down the rogue team right after their dramatic rescue in Singapore. He’d dispatched Fox not to bring the rogues back to justice, however, but to enlist their aid in locating a downed B-2 bomber that, they would all come to suspect, was somehow tied up in the Stinger missile deal, too. In fact, the Stealth plane might have been carrying the missiles themselves, a frightening prospect that would mean the Stingers had come directly from America and then been handed to the terrorists. At the very least the weapons might have spent some time in the cargo bay of the specially adapted B-2F bomber.

  And indeed, the rogue team found the missing B-2 crashed on a very isolated island off the northern coast of the Philippines. But when they did, Rushton first ordered Fox to inspect its bomb bay and, after finding it empty, told him to pinpoint the billion-dollar bomber’s exact location — so it could be destroyed by a massive cruise missile attack. Tellingly, after this was done Rushton cut off all communication with Fox, leaving him stranded with most of the rogue team on the very small practically prehistoric Filipino island. Very unusual behavior, for sure.

  But that was not the end of Rushton’s involvement. Hardly. It was Rushton and a jackboot unit of Green Berets who stopped the rogue team in their tracks just before they were able to catch up with the shipment of Stingers leaving Manila. It was Rushton who took the team into custody, whisking them aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and locking them up in separate brigs like a bunch of convicted felons. It was Rushton who led the interrogations spelled out in the file called “Fast Ball.” It was Rushton who tried so hard to get the members of the team to flip. And failing that, it was Rushton who sent them all to Gitmo, vowing that none of them would ever set foot in the United States again.

  After all that, the team couldn’t help but suspect him of somehow being mixed up in the Stinger affair. But now they had a definite link between him and the agent Palm Tree. This smoking gun was still red-hot.

  And again, Ryder thought this was a good thing. Certainly it was clear from everything he’d seen that the terrorists had managed to buy the missiles and get them into the U.S. with some high-level help. But if the terrorists and their missiles were riding around in Greyhound buses, well, all the government had to do was put out an APB for law enforcement everywhere to simply stop and search every Greyhound bus, wherever they may be. Or better yet, the government could order the Greyhound company to simply freeze all its buses in place, just as all airline flights were frozen in the hours and days after 9/11. All it would take was a few calls from the NSC, via the Homeland Security department, and the terrorists’ buses could be found in no time. Heroes again, the ghosts could then explain their own outlaw situation to someone higher up and stop this life on the run before it even started.

  Simple, right?

  “Wrong,” Bates told him, even before Ryder could blurt it all out. “Take a look at this ….”

  Going even deeper into Palm Tree’s hidden files, Bates retrieved a very top-secret NSC operations memo, something that Rushton had obviously turned over to the French spy. In this memo Rushton stated that “only cognizant threats to homeland security identified by me will be given priority for any follow-up discussion or investigation.” His rationale was that the country’s intelligence services were barraged with rumors and tips about pending terrorist actions in the country every day, many of which were dead ends. This was a massive case of overload, and Rushton had taken it upon himself to sort it out by determining which threats were real and which were not. Only he would decide which threats were important enough to be looked into. Only he would direct the response if a terrorist attack should happen inside the United States. And in fact, these orders were written under a so-called national security directive, something that was just one step below an executive order from the President himself.

  As if to prove the point, Rushton ended the top-secret memo by saying: “All threats involving ground transport vehicles, including cars, trucks, and buses, will be given low priority for the time being.”

  “This is fucking treason!” Ryder roared. “This guy is setting it up so the mooks can do just about anything they want.”

  “Exactly,” Bates replied soberly.

  Ryder looked around the room again. The rest of the team had stayed nearly silent the entire time he’d been here. Now he knew why. Rushton was in this thing up to his beady eyeballs. Not only had he laid out the perfect conditions for the terrorists to move about the country freely, at least for a few days, to do their dirty work, but he’d also rigged it so even when airliners started getting shot down he would be in a position to steer any investigations in other directions, away from what the terrorists were really up to.

  “This guy has suddenly become a very powerful person,” Bates said. “And in doing so he’s covered all the angles. And his actions are so outrageous, it would take days, weeks, or even longer for us, or anyone, to convince people that all of this is real. And by that time, it will be too late. I mean, who is going to believe one of the top military officers in the country is in league with the terrorists? Especially if it’s us — outlaws ourselves — who are the first to blow the whistle on him? They’ll lock us up again and it will be months before we could even get a peep out. Just the fact that we have this information irreversibly taints it.”

  He paused. The room suddenly grew dark. Outside, the sky had turned deep bloodred.

  “You know, something like this could never have happened in this country ten years ago,” Bates said, his voice low. “Or even five years. But with 9/11, and everything’s that’s happened since, abuses of the Patriot Act, the CIA and the FBI running around with their heads cut off, Iraq … shit, a guy like Rushton was able to come out of nowhere and fill a vacuum. And this is the result.”

  Ryder just shook his head. What a fucking mess ….

  “But why is he doing it?” he asked. “Why is he committing such high treason against the country?”

  Bates just shrugged. “It’s usually money, Colonel,” he said. “Though, for some reason, I think this guy has motives even deeper than that. He’s not just powerful. He’s arrogant. And downright evil. But he’s not a fool. How we could wish he was. If he was willing to do all this back and forth with the asshole Frenchman, that tells me he’ll stop at nothing to see his agenda through, whatever it may be. And that will include finding us once he realizes we’re not all dead. God, he could send the entire 82nd Airborne after us and no one would blink an eye.”

  “In other words,” Ozzi moaned, suddenly coming to life nearby, “we’re screwed.”

  Fox, too, was suddenly back among the living. He got to his feet, walked over to the computer, and, without asking, took a cigarette from Ryder’s dwindling pack.

  “Now show him the really bad news,” Fox told Bates.

  Ryder slumped farther into his seat. “There’s more?” he moaned.

  Fox lit his purloined butt and let out a long stream of smoke.

  “Oh yeah,” he said drily. “A lot more ….”

  * * *

  The rest of the team grudgingly revived themselves at this point. Gallant retreated downstairs to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee from the last of Li’s Maxwell House. There weren’t enough clean cups, though. So they had to drink the coffee out of milk glasses.

  Bates meanwhile never stopped typing, noisily slurping his liquid caffeine as he retrieved yet another of Palm Tree’s hidden files. This one, particularly large, was titled “Family Photos.”

  “Here’s our next very real screwy thing,” Bates announced.

  It, too, was chock-full of what seemed to be useless data taking up space. Still sitting beside Bates, sipping his own glass of coffee, Ryder watched a parade of Palm Tree’s “family” pass by in the form of JPEG photos. Mum-mère. Pa-pa. Mon frère. Mon sœur. Dozens of kids and aunts and uncles, big noses, dirty faces, rotte
n teeth, most likely none of them even remotely related to the DGSE agent. But why was Bates forcing Ryder to endure this gallery of Gauls, flipping by at a rate of about five a second? He was about to ask when Bates alerted him to a series of photos coming up that depicted an old lady visiting the island of Capri. Dozens of these images were soon flipping by, moving faster than a slide projector on speed.

  “What is this?” Ryder finally demanded to know. “He took pictures of someone’s grandma at the beach. What’s the big deal?”

  “Just watch,” Bates told him, manipulating the keyboard to get the images to move even faster. Suddenly one white blotch appeared among the flipping photos. It went by so quickly, Ryder hardly noticed it. But Bates had caught it. Now he isolated it.

  “Check it out,” he told Ryder.

  It was not a photo, but what was it? Ryder had to study the image for a few seconds before he realized he was looking at a photo of a napkin, one with a very crude drawing scribbled on it. The napkin had a large brown coffee stain in its upper right-hand corner, along with, oddly enough, the impression of two coins, embedded beneath the stain.

  With all the artistry of a six-year-old, the drawing appeared to show a collection of things in flight, both big and small, traveling over what might have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people but, tellingly, no buildings. Because of the large stain and the imprint of the coins, though, it was difficult to count just how many of these flying things were being depicted. There may have been at least a dozen. But what were they flying over?

  Groggy from his night of nonsleep, Ryder still failed to see the relevance of the image. “OK, so when he took Grandma’s picture at the beach in Capri, he bought her something, an expensive espresso, no doubt. This is her napkin. And she scribbled on it. So what?”

  But Bates just shook his head. “No,” he insisted. “This is a very special thing. Think about it. It has to be. That French bastard wouldn’t have stuck it in the middle of this humongous file and then surrounded it with a galaxy of security stuff if it wasn’t important, right? I mean, he was hiding it in a place that if anyone actually got in, they’d get so sick of looking at two hundred images of toothless Granny there, they’d probably give up and move on.”

  Ryder thought about all that for a moment, then nodded. He had to agree.

  “Now, see that logo on the napkin?” Bates asked him. “It’s in English. It’s from a place called Drive, Shop ’n Go.”

  He began pounding on a second laptop nearby doing a Google search under that name. The information that popped up indicated that “Drive, Shop ’n Go” was a chain of 7-Eleven-type stores located throughout the eastern part of New Jersey.

  “And those two coins?” Bates asked, manipulating the screen to zoom in on that part of the napkin. “They’re nickels, see?”

  Again Ryder had to agree. Clearly the coinage was American.

  “OK, so first of all, we know this napkin isn’t from Capri but from somewhere in Jersey,” Bates said.

  Ryder nodded again. He tried to study the drawing in this new light, but it was hard to do. The most primitive caveman art put this thing to shame.

  “Well, if those winged things in the air are supposed to be airplanes,” Ryder said, “then it’s a drawing of an extra-busy airport.”

  But again Bates was shaking his head. “There isn’t an airport in the world that would have that many airplanes in the air over it at the same time,” he said. “Plus look: they’re all going in the same direction.”

  “Well, maybe it’s a bunch of crude time lapses, you know?” Ryder said. “Showing a bunch of airplanes in the process of taking off and landing, but at different time intervals.”

  But Bates wasn’t buying that. Neither were the rest of the team now gathered back around them.

  The disturbing thing was, in the lowest part of the right-hand corner, below the worst of the coffee smudge, there was another crude drawing that, when Bates was able to zoom in on it, showed what appeared to be a Greyhound coach with a series of more or less straight lines coming up from it, heading toward the overcrowded sky.

  “That’s got to be a bus,” Bates said, pointing to its boxy appearance and its three wheels per side. It also showed many windows and a big windshield, as well as a hole in its roof. No one could disagree with him. Though still childlike, this drawing was the most identifiable scribble on the napkin. Bates also showed him that there was some writing in the upper right-hand corner of the napkin, but that it was almost totally obscured by the massive coffee stain and the imprint of the two nickels.

  Ryder just shook his head. “Well, it’s got to be a mass attack on a busy airport,” he said. “O’Hare or someplace. What else could it be?”

  “But assuming this might be the second bus,” Bates said, “why stage a mass attack at one airport while your mook brothers are driving around the country setting up separate attacks on as many as nine different airports?”

  He was right. It didn’t make sense — and it left them all scratching their heads. Everyone present was fairly sure that the drawing had something to do with the mysterious second bus.

  But the images in the air remained very puzzling.

  * * *

  They drained the rest of the coffee and sat there in near silence, trying to comprehend all that Bates had uncovered.

  Finally Hunn began to speak.

  “We’ve got to start talking about this,” he said. “The more we avoid it, the more time we lose ….”

  “So talk about it then,” Gallant told him testily.

  “OK,” Hunn began again. “Look at all the shit this Rushton guy’s been doing. There’s no freaking way those missiles accidentally fell into the hands of the mooks. Rushton was behind it — all these files prove it. And that means he had to be paid off, somehow, someway. Or he’s got something else up his sleeve ….”

  Hunn was a good soldier. Brave, loyal, and smart. But he also had anger issues. They all did. He had already done a number on many of the Al Qaeda operatives they’d been able to track down, a small hatchet being his weapon of choice. At this point, though, he was ready to invade France.

  “And don’t forget,” he went on. “This asshole general went to great lengths to prevent us from stopping those missiles from getting into the U.S. — and he had us locked away indefinitely to boot. He’s not just some stupid ass trying to get out of his own way. He’s in thick with the French and the mooks, one way or another.”

  Everyone nodded solemnly. They knew what was coming next.

  “So, are we going to do what we said we were going to do when we got up here?” Hunn asked.

  A long silence. The team had given up a long time ago on the niceties of conflict. Rules of war, Geneva Convention — all that crap. They moved in a new world, a place where things happened as fast as the bings and bangs of the Internet or the speed at which a picture could be flashed around the world. Close to the speed of light. Instantaneous. That’s what their world was — and that’s what they had to be, too. They didn’t have time for long-drawn-out investigations, or trying to explain themselves, or committees being formed, or going the standard route and allowing the FBI to fuck things up.

  They had come up here for many reasons, but two of them stood out: The elimination of Palm Tree, ending his little dance once and for all. And now Rushton ….

  “But we’ve got several problems going here,” Fox reminded them. “Sure, we’ve probably got the goods on Rushton. But all that means is that no one in the government is going to start looking for those buses anytime soon. And, even if we could, there’s no way we could show all this to someone higher up and convince him that it’s all true in time before those assholes out there start shooting down airliners. That shit might start happening less than a day from now.”

  “It’s just like at Hormuz,” Gallant groaned; he’d been there, so he knew of what he spoke. “Once again, we’re the only ones who know what’s really going on. We’re the only ones that are in a position
to stop it.”

  They all hung their heads. They’d been expecting this — or something like it. But that didn’t make it any easier.

  The buses were out there; they had missiles in them. And if the government wasn’t going to stop them, then it was up to the ghost team to. Again, they had planned for this eventuality. But it still took a while for it to finally sink in.

  “But not only do we have to find the two buses,” Ozzi said, “and deal with Rushton. We have to figure out that other thing.”

  Ryder looked at the rest of them. They were staring back at him with sunken, tired eyes. They all looked miserable — and, he supposed, so did he.

  “What ‘other thing’?” he asked. “Are you telling me, there’s more?”

  No one said a word. So Ryder just turned back to Bates, who nodded grimly.

  “There is,” he finally revealed. “And this one is almost impossible to figure out, more so than the napkin.”

  Once again, he started banging on his keyboard.

  “I went as deep as I could go into Palm Tree’s memory banks,” he went on. “And just when I thought I was at the end, I got stopped at one last file Rushton sent him. It has the absolutely tightest security regime I’ve ever encountered surrounding it.”

  Ryder saw the file icon pop up on Bates’s screen.

  “This file was given even higher priority and therefore more protection than even his most obvious correspondence with Palm Tree,” Bates went on. “And notice how it’s marked: ‘For Immediate Action.’ Yet it’s labeled ‘May 1 through 7.’”

  Sure enough, the icon’s label seemed to indicate something having to do with the first seven days in May.

  Ryder shook his head wearily. “But it’s June,” he said.

  Bates just shrugged. “I know,” he said. “Makes it even more screwy, doesn’t it?”

  “Can’t you get anything out of them?” Ryder asked, looking at the frozen screen that represented the dead end Bates had run into.