Strike Force Charlie s-3

by Mack Maloney

  They both smiled darkly. “We got Ramosa,” Ozzi told her wearily.

  “Got him good,” Hunn added.

  And this time she did hug them. Both of them. She was that happy. Finally some good news. Ramosa was scum — as bad as Palm Tree. And she knew the prime mission of the team was to eliminate anyone connected with the various Al Qaeda schemes against America. Now they could add one more number to that tally.

  But Ozzi couldn’t stop smiling. “And better yet,” he said, “we got this.”

  He held up Ramosa’s laptop. Li knew what it was right away.

  “He was reading that damn thing the whole way home,” Hunn said. “And it’s a gold mine. Times, dates, people involved. And lots of stuff on the first bus ….”

  “The first bus?” Li asked excitedly. This was unexpected. One other reason for going after Ramosa was that they suspected he had dope on the second bus.

  “But we got nothing from him on the napkin,” Ozzi said. “He wouldn’t give anything up — just laughed at us when we asked.”

  Now Li smiled and hugged them again.

  “Well, then I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said. “Take a look at this …”

  But no sooner were the words out of her mouth than they all heard a noise outside. A disturbing noise. Tires on gravel. Someone was approaching.

  “Damn,” she swore softly. “I knew it was too much good news at once.”

  To her credit, Li knew exactly what to do. As soon as Fox had decided to make her part of the team, the first thing she did was download a document, from a secure CIA site, called “How to Run a Safe House.”

  And one of the basic principles was if anything happened unexpectedly — like someone coming to the door — the right thing to do was just answer the door normally. Not scramble madly around the house turning off lights. Or try to sneak the “houseguests” out another door. Just act naturally.

  So they did not panic. Li got up from her chair, shut off the movie, dimmed the light slightly, then looked out the window. Maybe it was just their imaginations, she thought.

  It wasn’t.

  Two sets of headlights were coming up the reservoir extension road.

  In all her time here in the haunted house, never had she seen even one car come up that road, never mind two. This was trouble. She could smell it.

  “OK, just be cool,” Ozzi told her. “We’ll be right here. If there’s any shooting, just please duck and stay out of the way.”

  As if to emphasize that, both men checked the ammunition in their weapons. Then Hunn and Ozzi immediately disappeared into the bedroom’s shadows.

  Li took a deep breath and settled herself. She made her way out of the room, down the stairs, and to the back door. She cracked the door, just a little, but still the fog rolled in. A little more … but then she saw something that made no sense. Now there was only one set of headlights, and strangely enough, they were turning around and heading back down the road, away from the house.

  Mystined — as if she needed any more mystery in her life at the moment — she opened the back door a bit more and peeked out.

  Amazingly, she found herself staring out at a very unexpected sight. She laughed out loud.

  It was her car.

  Her little beat-up Toyota.

  The last she’d seen it, the five ghosts were driving away in it, heading back down to Cape Lonely. Never did she think she’d see it again. Yet here it was ….

  Something was odd here, though. It was her car; there was no doubt about that. But where was the rust? The bent fender? The cracked windshield?

  She came down off the porch carefully, making sure no one was around. Once she was reasonably sure she was alone, she walked out to the car and inspected it thoroughly.

  She couldn’t believe it. New interior. New radio. Nice, smooth body. Even a new set of tires. It was still warm from being dropped off, and even the engine smelled new.

  But how did this happen? How could this be?

  She opened the passenger’s door and found a baffling explanation. On the seat was a note that read: We thought you might need this back.

  It was stapled to a bag of doughnuts.

  Chapter 16

  It was cold up here.

  Wherever here was.

  They were in the mountains of … well, someplace. Lots of trees. Lots of ferns and thick vegetation. A falling mist gave everything a weird sheen. Off in the distance, the sound of the wind and the cries of animals. Or at least they sounded like animals.

  They were somewhere in the Midwest, maybe on the western fringes or very close by. But if a million in cash was put in front of Ryder, he still wouldn’t have been able to say exactly what state they were in. Maybe Missouri. Maybe Arkansas. He just didn’t know. And he never bothered to ask.

  The stars overhead were shining brilliantly through the scattered patches of cloud. There was a lake in front of them and a lush field of tall grass behind. This was where the copter was now. It seemed in repose, hidden in the shadow of some gigantic pine trees, its rotor blades drooping, most of its systems finally shut down. The Sky Horse taking a well-earned nap.

  It was almost a beautiful scene. There was just one problem: they couldn’t get a good TV or radio signal up here. The gadget left for them at the floatplane refueling island was the electronic equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. It was a combination radio and TV, flashlight, strobe light, heat lamp, panic buzzer, compass, and clock. But Puglisi had been screwing around with it ever since they’d landed and he’d been unable to pick up anything more than a lot of static.

  They’d been encamped here, laying low, for the past 36 hours. This was not so much because they wanted to but more because the mooks had not made any moves, either. Bates had stayed glued to his Eyeball Machine the whole time; he got even less sleep than Ryder. And Bates had become very adept at reading the nuances of the monster he’d built. He routinely listened in on all the U.S. intelligence services, trying to ferret out any information having to do with suspected terrorist teams moving about the country. But truth was, there was actually very little data coming in on that topic. Most of the intell reports bouncing around Washington had to do with the TV coverage concerning rumors that some kind of WMD was going to be detonated soon, possibly within the U.S. capital itself, this and the government’s continued denial that a rogue special ops unit was hunting down terrorists inside the United States, despite so much evidence to the contrary.

  Bates also continued tapping into the computers of the Greyhound Bus Company itself. He was still looking for anything — a tip, a clue, a strange report from another driver or just people on the U.S. highways, any mention of a Greyhound bus acting unusually. But nothing had come out of this, either. As far as Bates could tell, the company was still blissfully unaware that someone was sneaking around the country in two of its buses.

  Most troubling, though, was that the next Al Qaeda missile team had been so quiet. The ghost team knew the general area where the soccer team was supposed to play but also feared that after the five unsuccessful attacks the remaining terrorist cells had readapted themselves and might be operating with even greater autonomy. There was a chance they’d been told not to have any further communication, no more phone rings, nothing. This would be a disaster for the ghost team. There were at least four more missile teams out there, somewhere. How could the ghost team find them if they stopped talking to one another?

  Time seemed to be running out, and with it some of the copter team’s spirit. It was hard to simply put the brakes on, to let the adrenaline stop pumping. That’s when things like sleep and memories and the need to eat properly began to sneak up on you. And the team didn’t need any of that right now.

  But they were haunted by that one question: what if the mook phones never rang again?

  * * *

  It was now about 4.00 A.M. central time. They were drinking coffee around a fire when Bates finally climbed out of the helicopter, taking a rare break. He had Finch’s flag
with him. It was no longer pristine and neatly folded. It was now battered, wrinkled, and embedded with dust and grime. They had hung it on the inside of the copter’s interior wall, where fumes and oil and all kinds of things were in the air. The flag had got dirty quickly.

  Without saying a word, he passed the flag to Fox. He held it briefly in his hands, then began folding and unfolding it, nervous play, almost unconscious. Then he passed it over to Ryder.

  Ryder held it to his face and thought of his wife. Then came the vision of all those killed on 9/11. The people on the first two planes. All the cops and firefighters who went into the towers and never came out. The people at the Pentagon. The people who fought with the terrorists on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. A lump came to his throat — this always happened. His eyes, already tired and bleary, misted up nevertheless. This was why they were out here, outlaws in their own country. They were fighting for the memory of Al Qaeda’s innocent victims, fulfilling the mission that Bobby Murphy had sent them out on so long ago. See it to the end, Ryder thought now. No matter what happens, just see it to the end.

  “Let’s get a little more luck out of this thing,” he said softly. The team had come to think of the old Revolutionary War flag as their good-luck piece, responsible for their not acquiring more than a scratch in their little undeclared war.

  Puglisi put the TV/radio away and took his time with the flag. Only Gallant, stretched out nearby and asleep, missed out.

  Uncertain if the little ceremony had raised the spirits of the ghosts, Bates took the flag back.

  But it was strange — because the moment it went back into his hands, they heard a phone ringing ….

  * * *

  It wasn’t a mook phone. It was Ozzi. And he couldn’t talk very long because he didn’t have any code words with which to pass on some crucial information.

  So Bates just listened very carefully, the rest of the team gathered round him.

  First item, ghost team east had captured and liquidated Captain Ramosa. This news was greeted with a grim cheer. One problem solved, one less hump in the world, Ryder thought.

  And while the D.C. people were still going through Ramosa’s captured laptop, they were already able to say that it contained just as much revealing information as Palm Tree’s PDA. Another cheer.

  But Ozzi and the others had come across a very special piece of information for the copter troops. It was a message, just recently entered into Ramosa’s E-mail system, that said the first bus was going to make contact with a sleeper agent somewhere along a highway in the Texas panhandle area, 36 hours from now.

  This excited the copter team greatly. Hitting the bus itself would save them from tracking down the rest of the missile teams one at a time.

  But the D.C. crew had come across some more disturbing intelligence: that another missile team was going to attack an airplane at Denver International Airport later that very morning.

  This was a problem. Getting a shot at the bus was a huge opportunity. But the copter squad would have to stop the Denver attack, too.

  Trouble was, Denver was at least 400 miles away from their current position, wherever that was.

  “Can you do both things in time?” Ozzi asked Bates desperately.

  Even in the darkness, the others saw Bates’s face turn pale.

  “I guess we have to try,” he finally replied.

  Chapter 17

  Near Denver

  Abdul Ahmed Ashmani had never been camping before. Though he was from Saudi Arabia and his extended family included much Bedouin blood, he’d never even slept in a tent, never mind tried to live in one.

  But that’s what he’d been doing, he and three others — two guys named Muhammad Abu and his cousin Azi. They’d been staying in two tents on the edge of the Whispering Falls campgrounds for the past two days.

  The tents were very small, made of thin plastic and cord, and though easy to set up, they had a tendency to collapse if the wind blew too hard. And due to the campsite’s location, the wind seemed to be blowing hard just about all of the time.

  This was not Ashmani’s climate, not his pleasure, not his country. He’d gained entry to the United States three years before the 9/11 attacks, paying a French-speaking tour guide to allow him aboard a ferry leaving Quebec for Portland, Maine, without having to show a passport. The bribe was just $100. He worked as a cabdriver in Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, before eventually moving west to Buffalo and finally to the large Arab enclave of Detroit.

  Here he lay hiding among a sympathetic population, avoiding U.S. government sweeps following 9/11, working as a busboy, a waiter, and a used-car salesmen. Two weeks ago, he was contacted by an Al Qaeda operative posing as a U.S. correspondent for Al-Jazeera TV. His orders were for Ashmani to move farther west, to this campground, and hook up with his fellow operators. Many rides on many Greyhound buses followed. When he arrived in the nearby town of Horseshoe, he was as surprised as anyone to find his cousin Azi waiting at the bus stop to pick him up.

  The two missiles were here, two launchers, too. They had both arrived with the two Muhammads, the soccer players, on schedule, with no problems. There was a reason this particular campsite was so windy. It was practically on the edge of a mountain so high, when winter came thousands of people would go skiing here. But it also presented a clear view of the vast lower Colorado plains. And a few miles away, just slightly to the southeast of them, and about a thousand feet below, was Denver International Airport.

  Big airliners took off and landed here all day and night, every hour, every minute, or so it seemed. The afternoon of his first day here, Ashmani sat on the edge of the cliff and counted the planes taking off. In two hours, nearly 50 aircraft of all shapes and sizes took flight — and that did not take into account just as many landings. Ashmani was amazed. He’d spent eight hours once in Mecca Airport waiting for the only flight of the day to land …. But 50 takeoffs in two hours? Where the hell were all these Americans going?

  One of these planes would be the team’s primary target; if they had time and opportunity, they would try for two. Exactly which airplane they would choose to shoot down first had been left to the fates. They had a fresh cell phone hidden in the Muhammads’ tent. When it rang, they were to set up the missile and then shoot it at the biggest airplane to take off inside the next 10 minutes.

  At least this was the plan. Other teams, like them a combination of sleepers inserted into the United States years before and “soccer players,” had not been so lucky in trying to hit their airliners. Ashmani’s team had been led to believe, again by their original orders, that by the time they got to shoot at their targets at least five planes would have been shot down already. Yet there had been nothing about anything like that in the American media.

  Ashmani knew America was a very screwy place. Its people were also highly unpredictable. For their own security reasons, none of the sleeper/hit teams had had any contact with one another before moving forward. They communicated solely by ringing various cell phones. So neither he nor anyone else in his team had any idea why the previous attempted shoot-downs had failed.

  But the rumor that an American special ops team might be knocking off the other cells had been a source of worry. Footage of just such a team had been shown all over American TV for the past three days, along with strident denials by the U.S. government that such a team was on the loose. Of most concern to Ashmani’s cell was that these vigilantes, if they existed, might actually be the Crazy Americans, the scourge of every Muslim from Algeria to the Philippines. It was a frightening thought, as no one wanted to deal with them, promises of martyrdom or not.

  Allah be praised, after all this Ashmani just wanted to shoot the damn missiles and get the hell home.

  * * *

  It was now almost 8:00 A.M., local time.

  The four men had just finished their morning tea when Ashmani heard an odd beeping noise, electronic and muffled.

  He didn’t know what it was at first. He wa
s sitting close to their raging campfire, the crackling wood distorting the sound at first. But then Azi stood up, nearly tripped over the campfire, and scrambled toward his tent. He looked both excited and frightened. That’s when it hit Ashmani.

  It was the phone. It was ringing.

  Their orders …

  Finally ….

  “It is the signal,” Azi confirmed. “It is time to shoot ….”

  The two Muhammads went into action. One of them threw Ashmani his watch. Ashmani was the timekeeper. He noted the time on the fake Rolex. Eight-o-five A.M. It was a Saturday. People traveling early for the weekend. A full airliner. A big airliner.

  A fat target.

  Ashmani felt his heart start pumping rapidly. Real timing was called for here.

  The two Muhammads finally joined them. They were the soccer players and thus the weapons experts. They soon had the first missile married to its launcher. Azi ran down the road to a preappointed spot from which he could see most of the eastern end of the campground and its main road as well. He whistled three times, loud and shrill. Everything was clear.

  Ashmani double-checked the missile, another of his duties. The sighting device was turned on. The battery indicator showed a substantial charge. The weapon needed a few minutes to heat up. The two Muhammads took up a position right behind his tent and just 10 feet from the edge of the cliff. A small green steel barrier, similar to a guardrail on a highway, was located here, driven into the rock. It made for a perfect aiming spot.

  Once they were set, Ashmani rushed back to his tent and grabbed his laptop. He’d downloaded many regular flight schedules for the airport below. Their orders were to shoot down the biggest plane possible. Only the big airline companies flew the very big planes — except for the odd charter or cargo plane. Ashmani ran his finger down the list for this morning, this date: United. American. Delta. Each had at least one plane departing within the next 15 minutes. Perfect ….

  He took out his binoculars, returned to the guardrail, and trained them on the airport below. There were five main runways; they crisscrossed one another at fifty-degree angles. Because the wind was always blowing from the west here, those planes taking off left from the runway nearest to them and frequently flew right over the campground itself.