Strike Force Alpha (22 page)

“Correct…but remember this,” Bates went on. “This CD is already more than a week old. And they wouldn’t let it go floating around out there for very long if they didn’t have to.”

“In other words?” Martinez asked him.

Bates just shrugged. “I think whatever they are planning is going to happen very soon, like in the next twenty-four hours. I’d stake my career on it.”

Total silence. The team leaders became frozen to their spots. Suddenly it felt very cold inside the container—cold and dirty and gloomy.

“Twenty-four hours?”
Phelan finally said. “Murphy thought we had a couple weeks to work with. But this thing is happening like
right now….
”

“And we still don’t have a clue as to what they’re planning to do,” Ryder moaned. “Or where. Or how.”

“That’s the trouble,” Curry said. “We’re in our own little fucking world out here. We used to be so plugged in—but now, we hardly know what time it is.”

Martinez collapsed into a nearby seat. His face had turned pale. He knew this had been a bad idea from the beginning. “Any idea how many mooks were on the distribution for this disk?” he asked Bates wearily.

Bates just shook his head again. “There’s no way of telling. Could be thirty. Could be fifty. It was distributed on a strict need-to-know basis, I’m sure. But at this late juncture, they’re all pretty much gone to ground by now anyway. They button up very tight right before they run an operation.”

The ship started rolling again. The lights overhead began to flicker, a common problem of late. Bates thought a moment, then added, “But maybe…”

He started pounding furiously on the keyboard again. The images on the CD were passing across the screen in fast motion, but somehow Bates’s trained eye was able to sort out order from the confusion. He stopped at the visual of each martyr-to-be, studying the screen before moving on. Finally he brought the CD to a halt on the picture of a young terrorist in the process of saying his last prayers. He was Martyr Number 12. The guy looked no more than 18 years old. He was sitting cross-legged with a cloth wrapped around his head, a Kalashnikov in his hands, and two vacant eyes peering out at the world.

“Look at this guy,” Bates said. “He might be a minor player, because he only gets about seven seconds of screen time in total. But check this out….”

He started moving the CD forward in slow motion. The young terrorist was seen banging a Koran against his chest. There were documents floating by his head, courtesy of a very cheesy special effects machine, making it look as if he were sitting on a cloud. Most of these documents were handwritten, farewell letters to his family, not unusual, as Al Qaeda fighters frequently left behind substantial messages to be used for propaganda purposes once they were dead.

“Look, right there,” Bates said, freezing the screen again. “See it?”

The others gathered closer around. Bates was pointing to one document that was hovering over the young terrorist’s shoulder. It was not a letter.

“It’s a birth certificate,” Bates said. “The mooks have been known to stick them onto their visuals sometimes, especially with new members, as a way to prove the
jihad
fighter is an authentic Muslim. This guy’s name is Jamaal Muhammad el-Habini.”

“Yeah, so?” Phelan said. “There’s probably a million guys named that around here.”

“But look at this,” Bates replied. He was pointing to the certificate’s stylistic printing. It was nearly washed out in the bad video production. But when he enhanced this part of the image several times, the third line of the birth certificate became clear enough to read.

“What is that?” Ryder asked Bates.

“Believe it or not,” the Spook replied, “I think that’s his address….”

“Damn…really?” Martinez exclaimed.

“Where does he live?” Phelan asked.

“Where else?” Bates answered. “Saudi Arabia. A place called El-Qaez. I think that’s somewhere south of Riyadh.”

“What makes you think this is current, though?” Curry asked him. “He’s probably moved a bunch of times since his birth certificate was written.”

But Bates shook his head. “These guys don’t go out and get bachelor pads once they reach eighteen years old,” he said. “They stay in the nest until they either get married or get killed. At the very least, I’ll bet his family still lives there.”

“Well, we gotta go get this guy,” Gallant said with renewed urgency. “He might hold the key to a lot of this.”

But then Martinez spoke up. “After that excursion back to ‘Ajman, we don’t have enough gas to fire up a grill,” he said. “Or sure as hell not enough to go up to Riyadh….”

“But we just can’t sit on this,” Curry insisted. “Especially now that we know a clock is ticking here….”

But Martinez was still shaking his head. “Look, we’re tapped out. We did what we could, but we’re at the end of the line. Last chapter. End of story. We can’t do any more about this. It’s time to give it to someone who can.”

“What are you saying?” Curry asked him.

Martinez just shrugged. “I don’t see any alternative but to contact Langley somehow and tell them everything.”

The rest of the team let out another collective groan. Langley, Virginia, was the headquarters of the CIA—and those three letters were a four-letter word on the
Ocean Voyager
.

Phelan was especially upset. “God, the CIA…they’ll take
weeks
to follow up on this,” he said. “And that’s even if they choose to believe us. Which they won’t. We’re blacker than black, remember? Look what happened to Murphy. If we call them, it’s more likely they’ll arrest us first than listen to us. And by the time they do hear us out, it will probably be too late.”

Gallant chimed in: “I agree. We can’t go to the CIA. You know how much Murph distrusted them. And with their history of fucking things up…I mean, they’ve had some hits here and there, but in your own experience with Delta, have you ever known the CIA to do
anything
right, or quick, the first time?”

Martinez thought a moment but then had to shake his head no. “If Murphy was right about one thing,” he finally admitted, “he was right about that.”

Phelan went on: “And how would you call them anyway? I don’t think you can just dial them up on the shortwave. And even if we flagged down the nearest Navy ship, it would still take hours for this to go up the chain of command—and then more time wasted bouncing it over to Langley.”

“
We’ve
got to be the ones to snatch this monkey Jamaal,” Gallant said. “We’re the only people anywhere near up to speed on this thing. And it’s our last shot at doing something good—God, something that will mean something.”

“But this
isn’t
what Murphy intended,” Martinez came back at him. “We were started as an integral component—one part of a process. But now all our support is gone. We’re lifeless. We are as OTB as the
Torch
ship.”

“I disagree,” Curry said strongly. “I think this is
exactly
what Murph would want us to do. He put us together tough, so we’d stay tough. And damn it, if we’ve got to go, let’s at least go kicking and screaming.”

“But we’re stuck here!” Martinez fired back. “Aboard this ship. With no fuel! We just barely made it back from ‘Ajman. We
can’t
go out again….”

“Fucking gas,” Ryder cursed. “Always the problem. Unless…”

“Unless?” Curry asked.

“Unless,” Ryder said, “we go back to the well just one more time.”

Bahrain

Marty Noonan was exhausted.

He’d flown double-ups for the past two days; that was four 10-hour missions in just 48 hours. Every muscle from his brain to his butt was aching now as he climbed down from his KC-10 refueler, post mission number four. In the last two days, they’d gassed up everything from F-15E Strike Eagles and F-117 Stealth fighters to entire squadrons of A-10 Thunderbolts and National Guard F-16s. At times, it seemed as if the big refueler was getting as tired as its crew. There was one benefit, though: after all this flying, his Bahraini copilot had finally perfected the art of making a great pot of coffee. This was good, because Noonan had certainly needed his share of caffeine in the past two days.

As grueling as they were, the double-ups had become more or less routine. All U.S. military units in the Gulf were on heightened alert these days, with any number of local trouble spots having the potential to pop at any time. Noonan’s refueling squadron was tasked with saturating a specific area with tankers, whether it be the airspace above the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passageway all U.S. Navy ships had to sail through in order to enter the Persian Gulf, or the waters off the Gulf’s upper coast for operations inside Iraq, or even a bit to the east, for a secret bombing mission or two inside Iran. The idea was that if trouble happened in any of those areas, U.S. fighters would not have to go far to gas up.

The last mission had been so long, though, Noonan didn’t even have the strength to crawl to the officers’ club. He went directly to his billet instead, drained the last two cans in his Budweiser reserve, then collapsed on his bunk even before he could untie his flight boots. He was asleep inside a minute.

Being a pilot, he rarely dreamed. But this dark night, almost immediately, visions of people dressed in black and dancing around his bed made their way into his subconscious. They were prodding him, gently, not to hurt him but to get his attention. And they were asking him questions, asking him for help. Asking for something…

Suddenly he awoke with a start—and found he wasn’t dreaming at all. There were a half-dozen figures standing around his bunk, all dressed in black, all lugging heavy weapons and wearing ski masks to cover their faces.

He just sat up and shook his head.

“Oh God,” he moaned. “Not you guys again….”

The village of El-Qaez sat directly south of Riyadh, a 20-minute drive along Al-Sultan Highway.

El-Qaez was quaint, if anything in the Middle East could ever be described that way. It was several dozen clusters of high-priced whitewashed brick houses, not palaces but sizable, most of them, surrounded by palm trees and small artificial oases and water springs. There was a certain amount of nostalgia running through the place. It had been designed 20 years before to look like a village that might have been here in the desert for centuries, if not longer. At least it seemed that way from the air. The closer one got, though, the more hints of modern life appeared. The most blatant were the abundant satellite dishes sticking out of the sand and the fleets of Mercedes and Jaguars that roamed the streets of the tiny village.

This was a place where midlevel Saudi oil executives lived. One family, the el-Habini clan, resided at the end of a
cul-de-sac
that wrapped around a clump of recently planted palm trees.

It was now six in the evening. The sun was going down and the heat of the day was finally drifting away. There were 13 people inside the el-Habini household. They’d just sat down to their evening meal of lamb guts in yogurt when a tremendous explosion shook their house. A palm tree came crashing through the huge picture window an instant later. Every other window on the bottom floor was blown out by the concussion. Suddenly smoke and flames were everywhere.

Before the family could move, five armed men burst through the front door. They fired their weapons into the ceiling, causing pieces of plaster and glass to crash down onto the dinner table. The children screamed. The family’s grandmother fainted dead away. This was a nightmare come to life. The armed men were wearing an unmistakable stars-and-stripes patch on their shoulders. Without a doubt, they were the Crazy Americans.

Each soldier was holding a photograph of a young man and shouting out in Arabic:
“Where is Jamaal? Which one is Jamaal?”

Jamaal el-Habini was off in a flash. He scrambled over the dinner table, pushing his family members out of the way, and tried to go out the nearest window. One of the huge soldiers caught him by the shirt collar before he made it halfway through the glass-free opening. He was dragged back into the room and stood up against the wall. Two other soldiers compared his face with that in the photo taken from the CD-ROM. It was a match. They both kicked him in the stomach. He doubled over and hit the floor hard.

Now more soldiers entered the house, shouting and waving weapons. They began kicking over furniture, knocking things off the walls. They were screaming in Arabic: “Give us your Korans!” Yet the women were pleading with them, saying they weren’t
that
religious; they had no Korans. Still the soldiers kept trashing the place.

As all this was going on, a jet fighter streaked low over the house, once again shaking it to its foundation. A fire was raging outside. The clump of palm trees in the middle of the
cul-de-sac
had been blown away, courtesy of a daisy cutter bomb dropped by the jet. This had cleared an area large enough for a single black helicopter to land outside. That aircraft was now sitting in the crater left by the bomb, its rotors still spinning, a thin perimeter of soldiers in place around it. Frightened neighbors were peeking out their windows, but anyone who lingered too long had his home sprayed with gunfire. Much shouting and crying could be heard throughout the neighborhood.

Not a minute after charging inside the house, the soldiers came back out. They were dragging with them not only Jamaal but also two of his brothers. All three were bound and blindfolded and thrown into the helicopter. The aircraft started to lift off even as the last of the black-uniformed troops were jumping onboard. Some were still firing their weapons.

The jet fighter roared overhead a third time, its mechanical scream only adding to the chaos.

Finally the copter rose in earnest, clearing the house and going straight up until it disappeared completely.

The snatch-and-grab raid had lasted less than 90 seconds.

Ten minutes later, the
Eight Ball
Blackhawk was cruising 12,000 feet above the darkened Persian Gulf.