Strike Force Charlie s-3

by Mack Maloney

  So here he was, just short of arming himself, waiting for the minutes to tick away before the Big Event — the really big event — was to happen. The anticipation was killing him. That’s why when the telephone on his desk started ringing he nearly flew out of his chair and took cover on the floor. The damn ring was so loud! And as he’d been using mostly cell phones lately, it had been a while since he’d heard this landline come to life.

  He recovered somewhat and checked the caller ID. The call was coming from the phone on the secretary’s desk right outside his office door.

  Rushton hesitated a moment, wondering what new hell this might be. Finally, though, he picked it up only because he wanted the ringing to stop.

  “What is it?” he snapped into the phone.

  “There’s a young lady out here who insists on seeing you,” a voice answered. It was one of his bodyguards.

  “Who is she?” Rushton wanted to know. “How did she get in?”

  “She won’t give us her name,” the bodyguard said. “But she is showing us an ID badge — security level eight.”

  Rushton thought a moment. That was the highest security classification he knew of, at least when it came to agencies and departments working with the NSC.

  “Well, who is she with?” he asked. “Who does she work for?”

  “The DSA,” was the reply.

  * * *

  Li walked into the office a few seconds later. She’d been rudely frisked, twice, but that made no difference. She’d left her firearm at home.

  She was carrying only her laptop and had dressed in her most attractive business suit, hoping for once her looks would work for her.

  Even in his state, Rushton’s eyes went wide when he first saw her. He tried to turn on the charm, bowing slightly and shaking her hand. That was his first mistake.

  “I don’t seem to recall ever meeting you before,” he began. “Miss …?”

  “Mary Li Cho,” she replied, showing him her DSA badge.

  He studied it for a moment. “I didn’t think there was anyone left down at DSA,” he said cautiously, indicating that she should have a seat.

  But Li remained standing.

  “I’m the last one, at least here in D.C., sir,” she replied.

  Rushton sat on the edge of his desk. He was taken with her — anyone would be. But any mention of the DSA made him understandably nervous.

  “I’m a bit busy,” he said. “And these are strange times, as I’m sure you know. But you were able to get in, past my little army out there, so I assume this must be important. Especially on the Fourth of July.”

  “It is important, General,” she told him. “I’ve uncovered information on the people who are trying to kill you.”

  Rushton’s face dropped a mile. He was stunned, but just for a moment. He recovered quickly and asked, “And how did you do that?”

  Li lifted her laptop cover. “It was all on here,” she replied. “My job at DSA was traffic coordinator. I saw everything going in and out. I still do, though I’ve been working at home. I began receiving some very strange e-mails lately. It took me a while to sort them out — but I believe now that I have. And frankly, I’m very disturbed by what I’ve seen.”

  Rushton still couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Well, please, then,” he said, “show me ….”

  Li set up her laptop and immediately opened both the “Fast Ball” and “Slow Curve” files. Rushton was shocked upon seeing them. Of course, he was familiar with the information contained in both, but he didn’t let her know that. Where the files came from he had no idea. But in a way, he was impressed that she had this sort of bombshell information in her possession.

  But there was more. She showed him a file that was almost a minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow account of the ghosts’ activities since the day they’d escaped from Cuba: Their landing at Cape Lonely, their sneaking into her house. The split team heading out west to track down the first bus terrorists, the east side crew chasing Ramosa and finally Rushton himself. She told him everything about the night he was almost shot at the Oak House, plus how the west side team knew about Denver, the bus on the Texas highway, and the second bus at the air show.

  She gave him names, times, dates, locations. She made clear the connection between Fox and Ozzi and the rest of the team. She essentially told him everything she knew about the rogues — and that was a lot.

  Rushton collapsed into his seat after he heard it all. All this running around, with bodyguards, armored limos, his family in the line of fire — and here, before him, in the figure of this beautiful Asian-American girl were all the answers he’d been seeking.

  “So you were pretending to be in thick with them?” he asked her. “Gathering information on them all this time?”

  She nodded. “That was my job,” she said. “That’s what I’m paid to do.”

  Rushton was impressed. “And do you know the location of these assassins?”

  “I do,” Li replied.

  “And you can lead me to them?”

  “I can,” she answered without hesitation.

  Rushton reached for the phone, intent on calling his security detail on the other side of the door. But Li suddenly put her hand on his and stopped him.

  “You don’t want to do that, General,” she said. “Because I have one more file to show you. Something else I intercepted.”

  She finally sat down and drew her chair closer to him. “Is it wise to be talking here?” she asked him.

  Rushton thought a moment and then replied, “Yes — I think so.”

  Li took a deep breath. “All this goes back to when these people escaped from Guantanamo, do you agree?”

  Rushton nodded blankly.

  “And I believe it’s still a mystery just how they were able to pull it off,” she went on. “I mean, it was quite an escape — but obviously they must have had inside help.”

  “Again, I agree,” Rushton said.

  She displayed another file on her laptop. “I couldn’t get much information on who might have helped them switch themselves for the Iranian prisoners,” she told him boldly. “Even my former colleagues were tight-lipped about that. But I did come up with something very interesting concerning the airplane that carried them out.”

  Rushton’s brow furrowed deeply. “The airplane?” he asked. “It came from Iran. It was being piloted by people from the Iranian military. I know that for a fact.”

  Li nodded and smiled, just a bit.

  “This is true,” she said. “But I was able to trace it back even further than that.”

  Rushton shook his head. He wasn’t following her.

  “Did you know that the airplane in question was actually leased to the Iranian military?” she asked him.

  Rushton thought a moment and shrugged. “Not an unusual situation,” he replied. “Many governments around the world lease aircraft for their military. It’s cheaper that way. Even our own Air Force is leasing tanker planes from Boeing. Or at least they’re trying to.”

  “Exactly,” Li said. “But I found out just who the Iranians leased this particular airplane from.”

  She began banging on the laptop again. As Rushton watched intently, she displayed a list of company and corporation names. There were many addresses, contact numbers, and so on, all of them related in some way to the Iranian Transall cargo plane.

  Finally she got to the bottom of the list — to the name of the real entity that had leased the plane to the Iranians.

  She turned the laptop screen around so Rushton could see it.

  It read: “Global Security, Inc.”

  The same people who’d been serving as his bodyguards for the past month. The same people who were just outside his door.

  Rushton froze solid, his face draining of color as he weighed the implications of this.

  “My God,” he breathed. “Are you sure?”

  Li nodded slowly. “It’s my job to be …” she replied. “I’ll stake my life on it. They
never mentioned this to you, I assume?”

  Rushton numbly shook his head no. He’d gone completely pale. Li said: “General, if they supplied the plane and never told you, I don’t think it’s too great a leap to assume they were somehow connected to the rogue team’s escape. And, that there are probably many other things they’re not telling you.”

  In a weird kind of way, it made sense to Rushton. All this security, yet someone gets close enough to almost take a shot at him. All his attempts to stop the rogues, yet they’d beaten him to the punch every time. He remembered that old, worn-out phrase: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.

  Suddenly it seemed meant just for him.

  He began to say something, but Li stopped him by pressing her finger against his lips.

  She leaned in to him and whispered, “General … we’ve got to get you out of here … now.”

  * * *

  The door to Rushton’s secret office opened a minute later.

  The six bodyguards in the outer hallway snapped to — sort of. Most times they saw Rushton only for the time it took to escort him from the office door to the open elevator, where he would disappear, usually in the care of his aides or plainclothes Secret Service men, or their fellow bodyguards.

  This time was different. The woman who had gone in to see him a few minutes before now came out with him — on his arm.

  Rushton looked weird, or weirder than usual. He was smiling broadly, though his face was very pale. He was carrying his own laptop, too, a first. The woman, however, looked as gorgeous as she did when she first went in.

  “Leaving just for a few,” the general told them, giving no indication that he wanted them to form a phalanx around him as they had so many times in the past week. “Be right back ….”

  But the head bodyguard stopped him.

  “General?” he said sternly. “If you have no other protection, we have to go with you, at least two of us. That’s what it says in the contract ….”

  Rushton looked at the man for a very long time, then glanced at Li.

  “Do you really think I need any more protection than this?” he asked with a wink.

  The security man did not smile. But it made no difference. The elevator had arrived by this time. Rushton and Li quickly stepped inside it and were gone.

  The bodyguard called down to the lobby to pass the word to his men down there that Rushton was on the move.

  But the general never reached the lobby. Instead he and Li got off at the second floor and took the stairs down to the basement. A side door led them out to Pennsylvania Avenue. Li’s car was parked nearby.

  As soon as he walked out into the waning light, Rushton became distraught. He felt very exposed after so long being surrounded by bodyguards. People on the street who recognized him stopped and pointed at him. He tried to turn around and go back, but Li calmed him down, assuring him this was the right thing to do, that he was finally in good hands. At last, they reached her car.

  She let him in, locking the door behind him, then went around to the driver’s side and got in herself. She turned the key and the Toyota’s engine roared to life.

  “Where to now?” he asked her, nearly in tears.

  Li just looked at him and smiled. “Do you like haunted houses, General?”

  Rushton didn’t know what to say. That’s when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around to see a fist coming right at him.

  “Hi, General,” Ozzi said, delivering a crushing blow to Rushton’s nose. “Remember me?”

  * * *

  When Rushton woke up again, he really did believe he was in a haunted house.

  Through barely slits in his eyes he could see he was in a room that was full of cobwebs and covered with dust, with weird light pouring through dirty cracked windows. Even in his first few seconds of hazy consciousness he could hear the old house creaking, the wind running through its rafters, the moaning of spirits just one room away.

  Then he heard the telltale sound of someone typing.

  He finally opened his eyes fully to see the beautiful Asian woman sitting across the room, at a very messy desk that was covered with wires and cables and pieces of doughnuts. His hands and feet were tied with bedsheets. And on the walls all around him different-sized pictures of the same image, one that he’d seen just once before: the crude drawing of the Nellis attack as depicted on the coffee-stained napkin.

  He also saw two dark figures staring down at him. One was the man who’d sucker-punched him in the car, knocking him cold until this moment. He was such a little man in stature, Rushton was almost embarrassed that such a blow from him would put him out. Next to him, covered in bandages, was a huge individual who looked like he ate young children for breakfast. And indeed Rushton slowly recognized both of them. They’d been part of the rogue unit he’d rounded up in the Philippines not two months ago.

  And that’s when he knew for sure that he’d been had ….

  Rushton just couldn’t believe it. All the planning, all the details attended to, the dreams of power and glory. All gone because, like many aspirants before him, he’d been stupid enough to fall for a story from a beautiful woman.

  He reached up and felt blood all over his face, especially on his lips and nose. Then suddenly there was a boot on his stomach.

  “You made this job easy for us, General,” the large man was saying now. “We were running all over the city trying to find a way to pop you. Now, we can just do it here, all warm and cozy like ….”

  Rushton could barely speak; he had no doubts these two would kill him, right here, in cold blood.

  “You people are crazy, you know,” he said suddenly, surprised the words came out of his mouth. “It’s people like you that made me do what I did.”

  The boot felt heavier on his gut. “Save your breath, General. You’re going to need it.”

  Meanwhile, Li was pounding nonstop on the computer — Rushton’s computer. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  “Dear God,” she kept saying, over and over. “I just don’t believe this ….”

  It was all in there, everything Rushton had been up to in the last few months, weakly hidden by security walls that Li broke down routinely now. And it was bombshell information, something that could shake the U.S. government to its foundations.

  But the strange thing was, it actually had little to do with Al Qaeda, Stinger missiles, or Greyhound buses.

  It had more to do with Rushton’s secret lunches and the traffic jams in Washington for the past week and why the Army was hiding in alleyways and jets were constantly flying overhead.

  She read it all, then she got up and spat in Rushton’s face.

  “What kind of monster are you?” she hissed at him. “Are you just insane or power-hungry? Or both?”

  Rushton was almost too dazed to talk.

  “I don’t know,” he finally blurted out, as if all the air had suddenly gone out of him. “I just don’t know ….”

  Ozzi stared at her. He’d never seen her act like this before.

  “What is it?” he asked. “We knew he was tied into this thing from the beginning. What else could it be?’

  She just pointed to the laptop. “You’ll have to read it yourself.”

  Ozzi and Hunn sat down at the old desk and did just that.

  The story that emerged was indeed chilling. It was the last file — the one simply marked “May 1–7”—that proved to be the real smoking gun. It was the same file they’d found in Palm Tree’s PDA surrounded by so many security walls, they couldn’t bust into it. But here it was now. Notes, memos, letters, e-mails. All of it, in plain English.

  Sure, Rushton had been in cahoots with the terrorists, as well as the French intelligence services. He was the one who’d arranged for the Stinger missiles to get into the hands of Al Qaeda; he was the one who’d cleared the way, with an assist from the DGSE, for them to be spirited into the United States via the port of LA without a security search. H
e’d made sure no one was looking for the Greyhound buses by scaring the hell out of the entire country with false reports about WMD bombs soon to explode somewhere in the United States. He was the one who denied that terrorists were roaming around the country, taking shots at airliners, and that a rogue team of special ops people was chasing after them, trying to prevent disaster.

  He did all these things — but it wasn’t for money or revenge or some other crazy reason. He did them as a diversion.

  For a coup d’état …

  An overthrow of the American government.

  Once again, it was the oldest trick in the book. Get everyone looking in one direction, while you plan something in the other. Cause havoc inside the Beltway and out, then gather together the real power brokers in Washington and basically say to them: See what is happening? The people who attended his secret lunches, the people who smoked fat cigars at the Oak House. Convince them that America had changed way too much since 9/11—or that it hadn’t changed enough. Whisper that typical politicians were too weak to deal with a changing world. Portray the President as a misguided intellectual boob. Stir the pot with a few select military commanders who had the same ideas and have them call their troops into the streets for a week, just enough until people in D.C. got used to seeing them — then strike! Tie up every key intersection in the district. Surround the White House and the Capitol with troops. Knock the networks off the air. Then seize power … and change the world.

  Would it have worked? No way. Rushton’s plan read like a bad movie script. But would America be weakened just by the attempt? In the minds of the people? Of the world? Of the financial markets?

  Absolutely ….