Strike Force Bravo (29 page)

But there was no way Ozzi was going to bring that up here.

“Look, General,” he began again, his anger building despite efforts to stay cool. “Are you looking for a fall guy here? Is that it? If so, then let it be me. I will take responsibility for
everything
that happened. If you want to pin a drug rap on me, so be it. I'll be glad to sit before an NSC board of inquiry. I'll even welcome a court-martial, if that's what you are trying to cook up.

“But don't pull the Nine-Eleven team down into the gutter with you. How many times do I have to tell you? No matter who sent them out or why, they saved
thousands
of American lives at Hormuz and
thousands more
in Singapore. And because of them, the world is rid of its first superterrorist.
And,
they've probably disrupted Al Qaeda more in the last four months than the entire U.S. intelligence community has in the last four years. It's
just not right
to punish those men after what they've done for our country.”

Rushton opened his mouth—but no words would come out. He stared down at the floor instead, unable to look Ozzi in the eye. The NSC wonks were averting their gaze as well.

Ozzi took this as a sign his words were finally hitting on target.

“All these guys wanted was to get home again,” he said, his voice cracking. “They just wanted to get back to America. To see their families again. To touch American soil again. You're a soldier—or at least you used to be. Don't you at least owe them that?”

Finally Rushton looked up. His face was beet red now, his lips pursed and sinister. But his eyes, they were telling a different story. Puffy, watery—they were oozing guilt.

Yes,
Ozzi thought,
this is a man who is definitely hiding something.

“Nice speech, lieutenant,” Rushton said. “But on the contrary, I consider the whole lot of them security risks. Not to do so would be dereliction of duty on my part. So not only are these men not going home; they will stay in my custody until further notice. And when I return to Washington, I plan to seek a Executive Order barring them from ever entering the United States again.”

Ozzi felt like he'd been hit in the stomach with a hammer. His mind began racing crazily again. A severe beating was too good for Rusthon. He wondered if the NSC men were armed. If he could somehow get a gun from one of them, he could shoot Rushton instead, put a couple bullets right between his beady eyes, then maybe blast his way out of this joint….

But then, strangely, he saw Rushton's face soften a bit. The rotund officer walked past the NSC men and sat on the corner of the desk closest to Ozzi, effectively blocking the prosecutors' view. Up this close, Rushton looked oddly feminine.

“Lieutenant Ozzi,” he began again. “Let's cut the BS and get to the point of your being here. I've reviewed your service record. I know you've done outstanding work for the NSC. And I know you come from a family who have served our country proudly as well. Now, you're facing several lifetimes in jail—and it will be no country club, I assure you. But I believe I can offer you a ray of hope here. A way that you can avoid disgracing your family.”

What the hell is this?
Ozzi thought.

“All you have to do is tell us everything,” Rushton went on. “Fill in some of the holes—like where you all got the crazy notion that there were Stinger launchers being carried by that B-2, and what really happened at Singapore—and then just fall into step with the official report. It will be like a plea bargain. You help us, we help you. I'll make sure you get off.”

That was it. Screw getting a gun. Ozzi decided he was going to kill Rushton with his bare hands right then and there. The mere suggestion that he could be flipped, so easily turned into a rat, filled him with a blood rage. But then, just as he was about to explode out of his chair…he realized something. Suddenly he knew what was
really
going on here. If Rushton was offering
him
a deal, and he was the last guy in line, it could only mean one thing: Everyone before him—Fox, the original 9/11 guys, even the SEALs and the State Department guards—
must
have turned him down. No one had cracked. No one had bought into Rushton's game.

“No other takers, is that it, General?” Ozzi asked him, still fighting mightily to keep his cool.

Rushton let his guard slip and shook his head no. “Not a smart one in the bunch,” he said.

That's when Ozzi finally smiled.
God damn,
he thought.
The whole team is going down together. Including me….

And at last, at that moment, he felt like one of them. One of the team. One of the heroes. A patriot. It had been a long time coming, but when it arrived it was like getting hit by a lightning bolt. Electricity, from his head to his toes. Suddenly, he was on top of the world.

“So?” Rushton asked him. “What do you say, son? Are you willing to take my offer? Are you going to be the only one smart enough to save your own skin?”

Ozzi just leaned back in his chair and relaxed. He wasn't sweating anymore.

“General,” he said proudly. “You can go to hell.”

 

By chance, Ryder and Hunn were put into the same holding cell at the bottom of the
Lincoln.
They were both wearing prisoner suits, bright orange of course.

“How's the chow down at Gitmo?” Ryder asked Hunn dryly. They were sure that's where they were going.

“It sucks,” Hunn replied.

Ryder leaned back against the damp wall, wondering if it would be possible to forget everything that had happened and just go to sleep. But he was hungry, too.

“You didn't sneak a roast beef sandwich in here with you, did you? I'll split it with you, if you did.”

“Nope,” Hunn replied. “But look what I do have….”

He reached deep into the crotch of his prison suit and came up with a cell phone.

“I don't want to know where you've been hiding that,” Ryder told Hunn wearily.

“Don't ask; don't tell,” Hunn said.

Ryder repositioned himself against the wall. His head felt like it was going to burst, he had so many secrets he had to keep.

“Well, maybe we can use it to call out for pizza when we get to jail,” he said to Hunn. “Do they even have pizza in Cuba?”

Hunn laughed in his angry sort of way. “It's not just an ordinary phone, Colonel,” he said. “I took it off that
shuka
mook as I was stuffing the flag into his mouth. You know, just before the shit hit the fan? I figure it's got to be how he was getting his orders.”

Suddenly Ryder was interested again.

“Hit the redial,” he suggested. “See who picks up.”

Hunn thought a moment, then did just that.

 

On the other side of the world, on a messy desk inside a soundproof office on the thirteenth floor of an otherwise nondescript mercantile building, a special red cell phone lit up. Just by habit, the man known to some as the
judus
went to answer it, but then hesitated, his hand hovering over it.

He'd been sitting at this desk now for the last 100 hours, managing the acquisition and shipment of the Stinger missiles to America. Despite some bumps in the road, his plan had worked beautifully. The 36 weapons would be inside the United States within hours, all the diversions and feints having been played to perfection. It was exactly the ending he wanted. So why ruin it?

Answering the ringing phone would probably do just that, he thought. He was exhausted. He needed a cigarette. He needed a drink. But most important, he needed to celebrate, just a little bit. So he let the phone ring until, finally, the person on the other end gave up. Then he picked up the cell phone, erased its memory, and disconnected the battery. Putting the phone between the heel of his shoe and the floor, he crushed it so it could never be used again. The remains he threw into his wastebasket.

He checked his watch. It was early afternoon. Yes, it was time for him to go home. He put all sensitive materials into his office safe. He also shredded a few very incriminating documents and placed them in the burn bag for disposal. Then he turned out the lights and locked the door behind him.

He walked through the outer office. There were several dozen people here, lower in rank than he, lording over computer screens, fax machines, and banks of scramble phones, the typical landscape of a foreign intelligence office. He nodded good-bye to several of them, chatted briefly with a few more. It had been raining for the past four days, they told him, something he could not tell from his windowless office. They all remarked with humor about his staying power and dedication. They told him to go home and get a few days' sleep. He assured them that he would.

He walked to the elevator, passed his ID card through the egress security check, then placed his briefcase up to the document scanner. The machine confirmed that he was not taking any unauthorized security materials home with him. He stepped onto the elevator and rode it down to the small hidden lobby on the first floor. Another security check waited for him here: another X ray of his briefcase and a retina scan. He was cleared for the final time, and went through the unmarked door to the building's real lobby, the one that served the import-export businesses that made up about half the tenants in the unassuming building.

He stepped out onto the street, and took his first deep breath of fresh air in almost five days.

The neon sign from the restaurant next door was crackling slightly, trying to lure him in. It was a chic bistro called The Palm Tree. He'd been there many times before, but the cognac was rarely up to his standards. And a bottle of some very good stuff awaited him at home. That's where he would go.

Normally he would have taken a cab. But the rain had stopped by now, and he knew he had to stretch his tired legs. So he lit a cigarette and started walking.

He liked the way Paris looked after it rained.

Read on for an excerpt from Mack Maloney's next book

SUPERHAWKS: STRIKE FORCE CHARLIE

Coming soon from

St. Martin's Paperbacks

Guantanamo Bay
Cuba

The storm had blown in just after sunset. The rain was coming down in sheets, lightning was crashing. Rolling across the bay, the thunder was horrendous and booming. With visibility down to zero for most of the mid-Caribbean, it was not weather for flying. Yet an unusual cargo plane was sitting on runway number 2, hard on the edge of the U.S. Navy base, its propellers churning the fierce downpour into a driving, violent spray.

Though all of the cargo plane's insignia had been painted over, this aircraft belonged to the Iranian Air Force, an unlikely visitor to this American facility hanging by its fingernails off the eastern end of Cuba. The plane was here as a result of nearly a year of top-secret negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, part of a very hush-hush diplomatic agreement. The U.S. kept several hundred Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan after 9/11 at Guantanamo Bay. Many of these people were not Afghanis; in fact, terrorists from more than two dozen countries were being held in prisons here. Seven of them were citizens of Iran; all seven were also related to someone on the governing board of religious mullahs that ran the troublesome Persian country.

The aim of the secret negotiations between the two arch-enemies was actually very simple. Iran just happened to be holding seven top-echelon Al Qaeda members. None of them were Iranian. The seven Iranian citizens the U.S. was holding were foot soldiers, with friends in high places. The U.S. wanted the so-called Tehran 7 for questioning and prosecution; the mullahs wanted their sons back. It was a prisoner exchange then. Seven-for-seven. An even swap.

The howling storm was a complication no one wanted or foresaw. The two sides had battled each other right down to the last comma on a document so classified, it would be burned and its ashes scattered after the exchange was made. Timing was the most important element. The Tehran 7 were being held at an Iranian border crossing at that moment, ready to be pushed across into US-held Iraq as soon as word of the plane's departure from Gitmo was confirmed. Any delay—be it weather or mechanical—would be a deal breaker; the distrust between the two sides ran that deep.

That's why the cargo plane had to be loaded, had to get into the air and make the all-important confirmation call back to Tehran.

Hurricane or not, it had to take off.

 

Things had to go right on the ground, too. That was why the isolated section of the air base was surrounded by no less than a hundred Marines, backed up by two squads of SEALs watching the waterfront nearby, as well as a sniper unit stationed in the hills above. This small army had been in place for hours, sweating out the brutal heat of the waning day, only to be soaked through now by the driving evening rains.

A stretch van would be transporting the seven Iranian prisoners from Camp X-ray, the main Gitmo holding facility, to the runway. The van was to be escorted by two Marine LAVs, small, heavily armored tank-like vehicles. A U.S. State Department representative would also be accompanying the van, traveling in a separate car. His name was John Apple. His counterpart, a general in the Iranian Air Force, was serving as the co-pilot for the transfer plane.

Once the van reached the runway, Apple and the Iranian general would each count the seven prisoners as they got off the bus, and again as they climbed aboard the plane—this last bit of diplomatic nonsense insisted on by the Iranians. Only after both men were certain that the seven prisoners were safely aboard would the cargo plane would be cleared for take-off.

It was just one of many complicating factors in this anxious exchange that all seven of the Iranian detainees was named Khameni. In fact, five of them had the exact same name: Raset Rasanjan Khameni. To avoid confusion, it was agreed upon early in the negotiations that the detainees would be known simply as K-1 through K-7.

The plane's first destination would be Mexico, but only by necessity. When it touched down at Guantanamo, its fuel tanks were three-quarters empty. It needed gas to get home. The U.S. had steadfastly refused to refuel the plane though, just as the Iranians had steadfastly refused to allow U.S. fuel in their tanks. So, with a nudge from the U.S. the Mexican government agreed to allow the plane to refuel at a tiny military base in the Yucatan before starting its long flight westward. With another fuel stop in Fiji, and a final one in Beijing, the plane was expected to arrive in Tehran thirty-two hours later.

A huge celebration would be waiting for it in the Iranian capital, timed to lead off the government's national nightly news. The seven fighters were expected to be greeted as heroes.

 

The prisoners' van arrived a few minutes late as the rain grew even more torrential and the winds picked up to forty knots. The van pulled up to the back of the waiting airplane. Conversation was nearly impossible around the loading ramp, thanks to the gusting wind, whipped up further by the gyrating turbo-props. The Iranian general was waiting impatiently at the bottom of this ramp. He, too, was soaked through. He'd been nervously watching the line of wary Marines standing very close by. Both sides wanted to get this over with quickly.

Apple and the Iranian general met at the bottom of the cargo ramp. There were no handshakes. They simply stood side by side, ready to count aloud as each detainee stepped off the small bus. Per the agreement, each prisoner was still shackled by hands and feet, had a black mask pulled down over his head, and was barefoot. Each was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit adorned with his ID—K-1, K-2 and so on—painted in large black letters on the back.

Together, Apple and the Iranian general counted off seven men stepping from the van. Two Marines escorted each detainee to the bottom of the ramp where the general would check off a number corresponding to the back of his prisoner uniform. Then the detainee would be allowed to climb up into the plane and be seated. At U.S. insistence, the shackles and hoods would not be removed until the plane was airborne.

The loading process took longer than expected because the detainees came off the van out of order. They were rearranged in their seating by the plane's pilot, and only then did Apple and the Iranian general agree that the exchange was complete.

Again, there were no handshakes. The Iranian general simply climbed up the ramp and closed it himself with a push of a button. Not thirty seconds later, the plane's engines revved up once more, and it started pulling away. Apple gave the Marines a pre-arranged signal; they began to slowly withdraw from the runway. The cargo plane pilots added power, their props screeching in the tempest. There was no conversation with the base's air traffic control tower. The plane immediately went into its take-off roll.

It needed the entire length of the 6,000-foot runway. But somehow, some way, the plane finally went wheels up, and in an explosion of spray and power, slowly climbed into the very stormy night.

 

Apple returned to his living quarters just outside Camp X-Ray, went directly to his kitchen cabinet, and broke out a bottle of cheap Cuban scotch. He poured some over a few melting ice cubes, and with the thunder still crashing outside, drained the contents of his glass in one noisy gulp.

He was three weeks away from retirement. Full pension. House on the Chesapeake. The works. That this pain-in-the-ass deal was finally over made him very happy. All he had to do was phone in a report to his boss in Washington, then he would go to sleep for at least a week. After that, he could start thinking about packing his government bags for good.

He poured himself another healthy drink, then padded into the living room of his glorified hut. He picked up the secure scramble phone, but before he could punch in the first number, he heard a commotion outside. He could see through his picture window that a Humvee had screeched to a halt on his sandy front lawn. Six Marine guards fell out of it; two immediately ran up to his front door. They did not knock, didn't bother to ring his doorbell. They simply burst in, soaking wet, M-16s pointing everywhere. They looked scary.

“What's happened?” Apple demanded of them.

The Marines just grabbed him by the shoulders and carried him out of his hut.

“You've got to come with us!” one of them yelled at him.

 

The ride up to the detainee compound was the most hair-raising episode of Apple's life. The Humvee driver was a kid no more than eighteen years old, and the other Marines were screaming at him the entire way to go faster…faster!…
faster!
The kid followed orders, and drove the winding, muddy, very slippery road like a madman, nearly sending the Humvee hurtling over the cliff several times.

Somehow they made it to the main compound gate. This barrier was open—never a good sign. The Humvee roared right through, drove the length of the barbed-wire encirclement, and down another series of hills to an isolated plywood barracks. This was where the seven guys named Khameni had been kept throughout their incarceration.

There was another gaggle of Marines here, excited, soaked, and scary-looking, too. Conversation had been hopeless in the swift ride down here, the wind and torrential rain did not help it now. The Marines yanked Apple out of the Hummer and into the isolated prisoner barracks.

The interior was dark, only the beams from the Marines' flashlights broke through the fog that had seeped in here. The State Department rep, not used to all this excitement, nearly slipped three steps in. The floor was coated with something very sticky. Another young Marine beside him directed his flashlight at the floor.

“Be careful, sir,” the Marine told Apple.

That's when Apple realized they were both standing in a pool of blood.

More flashlights appeared, and now they lit up the entire room. On the floor in front of him, Apple saw seven bodies lined up in a row. Each one had had his throat cut.

Apple's first thought was that these people were Marine guards—but actually the opposite was true. They were detainees, more specifically, the seven Iranian prisoners named Khameni. It took several long moments for this to sink into Apple's brain. Then, through the blood and rain and wind and chaos around him, it hit like a lightning bolt. He grabbed the young Marine next to him.

“Are these really K-One through Seven?” he asked in astonishment.

The Marine nodded blankly. “We've already ID'd them through photographs,” he said. “Those are them, sir.”

Apple nearly slumped to the floor. He felt like he was suddenly living inside a ghastly dream. What his eyes were telling him simply seemed inconceivable.
How? Why?

Then another thought struck. This one even more troubling than the seven murdered prisoners.

“But if these are the Iranians,” he mumbled. “Who the hell got on that plane?”

 

Mary Li Cho drove to the securest location she could find in a hurry, the top floor of a parking garage three blocks from the MCI Arena. She was the only car parked up here, and the other six levels below were just about empty. She was sure no one would intrude on her. The garage was so high, she could see almost all of Washington from here. The White House. The Lincoln Memorial. The Pentagon. The Potomac. All of them sparkling in the warm evening air.

She speed-dialed Nash's number more than fifty times in the next ten minutes, and each time his phone was busy. She was quickly growing annoyed. What kind of game was he playing here? Why all the mystery and intrigue? She got enough of that at her top-secret job.

It was now 8:45. She tried Nash five more times. Still busy. Seat back, she opened her moon roof and looked up at the stars. But instead, she saw the silhouettes of two fighter jets pass silently overhead. They were F-15s…That was strange. Fighter overflights had not been seen here in D.C. since the days immediately after 9/11. Yet these two were clearly circling the capital. Why?

She tried Nash again. Finally, she heard ringing. He picked up right away.

“It's me,” she said sourly. “Your date.”

“I'm sorry,” he began in a hushed voice. “I'm still at work. And work just got nuts. Are you alone?”

“You're not here,” she shot back. “So I must be, right?”

A short pause.

“I'll make it up to you,” he said. “It's just…”

But she'd heard enough already. He had to work late. OK. No big deal. Certainly no need for a song and dance.

“Just call me then,” she told him coolly. “When you're certain you can get away.”

She started to hang up, but then heard him say, “Wait…”

“Yes?”

“I have something else I have to tell you,” he said. “And it's disturbing news, I'm afraid. Some things that we just got in here, at work, I think you should know about.”

Li felt a chill go through her. This was unexpected.

She asked, “What kind of ‘things'?”

“Absolutely top-secret things,” he replied, his voice low. “NSC things. Are you sure you're in a safe place?”

“I am,” she insisted. “And frankly, you're scaring me.”

“Well, get used to it,” he said. “Because there's some scary shit going on.” Another pause. Then he said, “What do you know about Hormuz and Singapore?”

Nash was referring to a pair of highly classified, highly mysterious incidents that had happened in the past few months.

What occurred at the Strait of Hormuz was nothing less than Al Qaeda trying to pull off an attack to rival 9/11 or anything since. They hijacked ten airliners and two military planes and attempted to crash them into the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln
as it was moving through the narrow Persian Gulf waterway. The attack failed because a last-minute piece of intelligence delivered to the Navy allowed them to know exactly where the hijacked airliners were coming from, what their flight paths were, and their estimated time of arrival over the carrier. The advance warning came from a deeply secret special-ops team that had been skulking around the Persian Gulf for months—or at least, that was the rumor.