by Mack Maloney
Four seconds.
As it turned out, they wouldn’t have to….
Three seconds.
One armed man, undetected in the distractions around him, came up behind the terrorist and put a pistol to his head. He pulled the trigger and the terrorist’s skull was blown apart. He never knew what hit him, dead before he hit the floor.
Two seconds….
The man with the pistol hastily reached down and began pulling wires out of the block of plastique.
One second.
Zero….
There was one loud pop! as the last electrical wire was yanked from the explosive pack. The noise scared the hell out of everyone…but nothing happened except one long fizzle.
The bomb did not go off. The hostages were safe.
The crisis was over.
The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.
The Situation Room was overflowing with brass.
Four-star generals, full admirals, a few colonels — this was the top of the Pentagon’s food chain. The bunkerlike room, buried deep inside the venerable building, was used only in emergencies. A long conference table dominated its center. A huge wide-screen TV hung on one wall. The lighting was subdued. The room was built to hold about thirty people at the most. Twice that number were crowded inside now.
All eyes were transfixed by the images on the big-screen TV. Like the rest of the world, the Pentagon officers were watching the astonishing events in Singapore unfold, stunned by what they were seeing. After the terrorists’ sudden demise, all of the TV news copters circling the Tonka Tower had moved in closer. The drama was now being shot from four different angles.
The soldiers in the black uniforms came back out onto the hotel balcony where the bright yellow copter was still balancing itself on the edge of the narrow railing. Seconds before, the rescue team had been seen ushering the children and the surviving adults away from the broken windows in the Top Room and into the hallway, where they would be safer. Then the soldiers collected all the terrorists’ unused explosive packs and loaded them onto their helicopter. They took all of the terrorists’ weapons, too.
As this booty was being lifted onto the copter, one of the soldiers took down the terrorists’ banner and ripped it in two; both pieces were taken away by the high wind. The soldier then took out a banner of his own. It was red, white, and blue. A rather crude but unmistakable American flag. He hung it where the terrorists’ pennant had been, leaving no doubt what country the rescuers hailed from. Then with no further ceremony, the rest of the rescue force climbed into the yellow chopper and flew away.
A hush came over the Situation Room. Someone turned down the volume on the TV set. The roomful of military officers remained still, amazed and speechless.
Finally, one spoke up. “Who the hell were those guys?”
The admirals, generals, and colonels all looked at one another but received nothing but shrugs and blank faces in reply.
Standing at the back of the room, apart from the rest, were four officers. All captains, one each from the United States’ four military services, they were intelligence officers. All eyes in the room now turned to them.
The officer who had first spoken up now elaborated his own question. “Those troopers,” he said, nodding back toward the TV. “They were obviously Americans. And obviously very highly trained. But who are they? What special ops group do they belong to?”
The intelligence officers had a quick, hushed conversation. They’d been asking that same question since the drama began.
Finally, one stepped forward. He was Army DIA.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “But we have no idea….”
Chapter 2
The Pentagon, subbasement level
Lieutenant Mikael Ozzi did not see the miraculous rescue at the Tonka Tower.
Stuck in one of the most remote sections of the Pentagon, his office was not wired for cable. It was big enough to accommodate his desk, a chair, and his PC and little else. In fact, before he arrived here, the space had been used to store cleaning supplies, this only because by the Pentagon building codes it wasn’t big enough to be considered a broom closet. Ozzi was sure it was the smallest office in the massive building.
But if the first rule of military intelligence was to stay out of sight, then this tiny room was the ideal place for Ozzi to do his thing. He was part of one of the most secret units in the history of the U.S. military. It was called the Defense Security Agency.
Created by executive order in the wake of September 11th, the DSA’s mission seemed simple enough. It was to “maintain security within the ranks of the U.S. military.” This was a deliberately open-ended phrase, though. The DSA actually played several roles in the post-9/11 world. First, it rooted out any U.S. military personnel who might be terrorist agents in disguise. (It sounded improbable, but the DSA had already caught five such sleeper agents, all of them Saudis, one serving as an instructor at West Point.) The DSA investigated any unresolved disappearances of U.S. military weapons, from bullets to bombers, another growing problem. The agency also watched over the Pentagon’s on-line security systems, its communications networks, even its bank accounts. Any irregularities there might indicate foreign intrigue.
The DSA was so secret, many of the highest officers in the Pentagon had no idea of its existence. Its members wore Army uniforms, but even this was a misdirection. Ozzi was a Navy man, others in the DSA were Air Force, and Marines; only a few were true Army. The agency was practically unknown to the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and the rest of the United States’ intelligence services. It was a secret unit hidden in a sea of secret units.
It was a small operation by necessity. Just a dozen people, three staffed here, in offices found at opposite ends of the Pentagon, the rest undercover overseas. But in this case, size really didn’t matter: small or not, the DSA was really wired in, and when needed, it could get some juice. It could call on any number of U.S. special ops units to do its bidding; it also had access to all intelligence gathered by any other U.S. spy agency. It took its orders directly from the National Security Council and operated under its cover. When the DSA got a mission, they were allowed carte blanche to see it through. Their unofficial motto: “Go Anywhere. Do Anything. Just Don’t Tell Anybody.”
Ozzi was just 25 years old, a graduate of Annapolis near top in his class. He was barely five-five, diminutive in size and frame, with pale skin and premature baldness already setting in. He was a hard worker, frequently staying at his desk past midnight and sometimes not leaving until dawn or later. Service to the country was the hallmark of his well-to-do Baltimore family, descendants of czarist royalty. His father had been CIA for 35 years. His grandfather had served in the OSS. The spy business was in Ozzi’s blood.
He was not exactly a cloak-and-dagger guy, though. His specialty was advanced systems analysis. Most of his work was done poring over data flowing into the Pentagon’s massive computer networks, again looking for anything out of the ordinary. He enjoyed his job, here on the front line of the battle for cyberspace. But often he yearned to leave his four small walls and actually get his hands dirty for a change.
Soon enough, he would have his chance.
* * *
It was shortly after 9:00 P.M. when Major Carlson Fox walked into Ozzi’s office. He was carrying a DVD player and portable TV.
Tall, handsome, rugged — three things Ozzi was not — Fox was Ozzi’s boss and a top operational guy in the DSA. He was in his early fifties, a CIA veteran who’d been lured back to service after the attacks of 9/11. He was married, again unlike Ozzi, had two kids and a nice house in nearby Silver Springs. His wife was gorgeous, a former model. Trouble was, they saw each other only a few minutes a day, so crazy was his work schedule. It was a rare evening that Fox was home before midnight.
He and Ozzi were opposite sides of the same coin. They worked well together because they were both easy-going and were good at keeping secrets. Fox was a down-and-dirty type guy. He had a mind like Sherlo
ck Holmes, was more detective than military officer, which was practically a requirement in the DSA. He was from Alabama and spoke in a drawl.
“Get your nose out of your computer for a moment,” he said to Ozzi. “There’s something you’ve got to see.”
Fox cleared a spot on Ozzi’s desk for the DVD player and TV. The events at the Tonka Tower had already been burned onto a disk and he was here to play that disk for Ozzi. In seconds they were watching a replay of the takeover of the tower and the dramatic rescue of the young hostages. Ozzi was as astonished as the top brass had been just an hour ago, especially by the bravery and cunning of the rescuers.
And he asked the same question everyone asked: “Who are those guys?”
Fox just shrugged. “No one knows.”
Ozzi was confused. “No one knows? How can that be? They’re obviously Americans, obviously some kind of special ops team. They looked like Delta guys to me.”
Fox shook his head. “Sure, they looked good,” he said. “And they’re already heroes around the world. But I checked the special operations active file myself, twice in fact. Then I ran a search through the NSC’s database. Then I checked back with every contact we have here in town. No one knows who this outfit is or who they are working for.”
Ozzi just stared back at the screen. It was playing the events in Singapore again.
“Fascinating,” he murmured. “A special ops unit so secret, no one knows it exists?”
Fox smiled. “I knew you’d like it. The DoD is holding a press conference upstairs in about thirty minutes. They are going to announce that this unit cannot be identified for security reasons. That will sound good, but the truth is, they don’t have a clue who they were, where they came from, where they went.”
“Wild,” Ozzi said, starting the DVD a third time.
“It gets better,” Fox said. “This is actually the second time these guys have shown up.”
Ozzi finally took his eyes from the TV screen. “I think I missed that,” he said.
Fox got up, closed the door, then returned to his seat on the edge of the desk.
“What’s your security clearance these days?” he asked Ozzi.
“Red-Eight,” Ozzi replied. “Same as yours.”
But Fox was shaking his head. “Sorry, I was bumped up to Red-Nine months ago,” he said.
Ozzi was surprised and a little hurt. “And you didn’t tell me?” he asked Fox.
The senior officer just shrugged. “I couldn’t,” he replied. “But it’s a moot point now.”
He reached into his pocket and came out with a DSA security badge. It consisted only of a bar code.
“Congrats,” Fox said. “You’re now a Nine, too.”
Ozzi studied the ID card for a moment. “To what do I owe this honor?”
“To the fact that what I’m about to tell you is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the past one hundred years.”
“That these guys have shown up before?” Ozzi guessed.
Fox just nodded.
“Recently?” Ozzi asked.
Fox nodded again.
Ozzi sat straight up in his seat. “When?” he asked. “Where?”
“They were at Hormuz,” was all Fox had to say.
* * *
What happened in the Strait of Hormuz a little more than a month ago had been nothing less than Islamic terrorists trying to pull off an attack to rival the destruction of 9/11.
Al Qaeda — funded terrorists had hijacked 10 airliners and two military planes and attempted to crash them into the Navy’s supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln as the ship was making the narrow transit through the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway that led into the turbulent waters of the Persian Gulf. The attack, well planned and hyper-violent, ended in failure for the terrorists, though, dealing a major blow to Al Qaeda’s network. Every airliner was either forced to land before it reached the carrier or shot down by the Navy. A bloody day certainly, as the hijacked airliners were all local Arab carriers, carrying hundreds of local Muslims. But the carrier made it through virtually untouched — and the 5,500 U.S. sailors aboard were saved.
The Navy had been heaped in glory with its valiant defense of one of its prized warships, but as was usually the case in great battles, there was more to the story.
“The reason the Navy was so successful in saving their precious carrier,” Fox told Ozzi, “was not entirely due to their defensive procedures or the skill of their pilots. They had some unexpected help. A last-minute piece of intelligence, delivered to them in a very unconventional way, allowed the Navy to know where and when the hijacked Arab airliners were coming, what their flight paths were, and their estimated time of arrival over the carrier. It was really just an aerial massacre after that.”
Ozzi pointed to the screen. “You think these are the guys who tipped them off?” he asked.
Fox nodded. “Not only that,” he said. “But two of them were flying around in Harrier jump jets that day—stealthy Harrier jump jets. Even after all the airliners were shot down, they knew two more planes were out there somewhere. Turned out that two of our own air refueling tankers were taken over by Bahrani fanatics posing as copilots. They came real close to banging both of those planes into the Lincoln. It was only because these two guys in the Harriers brought them down that the Lincoln isn’t sitting at the bottom of Hormuz right now, instead of floating off Iraq.”
Ozzi was stunned. The public knew none of this. And judging by the security level attached to it, few people in the U.S. government or the military knew it, either.
“What does all this mean for us?” he asked Fox.
Fox lowered his voice even further. In this business, you never really knew who might be listening, no matter where you were.
“You know that asshole Rushton?”
Ozzi nodded. General Jim Rushton. Assistant to the President on military special ops. A disturbingly incompetent human being, somehow left over from the Clinton administration, Rushton knew almost nothing about special ops despite his rank, yet was in a position to run roughshod over it.
“While the boys upstairs were watching all this,” Fox explained, “the White House was watching it, too. Rushton was paging me before CNN took its first commercial break. He wants to know the same as everyone else: who are these people, who do they belong to, and how are they able to do these things.”
Fox paused for a moment. The DSA was already running on eight cylinders, juggling many assignments. Another mission would only add to the burden. But Rushton was attached at the hip to the National Security Council. When he spoke, he was acting on the NSC’s behalf. Sort of…
“And he wants to know before anyone else in this building knows,” Fox added. “So, bottom line, it’s up to us to find out who these guys are. Or more specifically, you have to find out….”
Ozzi fought off a smile. Was he really going to get out of his rabbit box?
“A field op, for me? Really?”
“Think you can handle it?”
Now Ozzi just laughed. “You know I can. Where do I start?”
His boss replied: “Go home and pack a bag. I’ve already booked you passage to Gitmo.”
* * *
Two hours later, Ozzi was climbing onto a USAF C-12 aircraft at Andrews Air Force base, just outside Washington.
It was the beginning of a scary, roundabout night for him. The plane took off just before midnight. It flew him south, to Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida, a two-hour journey plagued by heavy turbulence and rain the whole way. Once down at Jax, he was put aboard a Navy C-2 Greyhound transit plane and flown out to the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, lying 200 miles off Miami. This was another bumpy, white-knuckle flight. It ended by banging down on the carrier’s deck just after 3:00 A.M. Ozzi was immediately transferred to an SH-53, the giant naval version of the Army’s CH-53. Ozzi hated helicopters, simply because the first workable one had been designed by a Russian and he didn’t trust any Russian, even though he was a Russian h
imself. This helo especially looked too big, too old, too clumsy to fly.
The SH-53 took him to a spot about twenty-five miles off the southeast coast of Cuba. There it entered the strict air corridor allowed by the Cuban government for the United States to travel to Guantánomo Bay, the unlikely, oddly placed American base found hanging by a nub off the eastern end of the communist island. This flight took about thirty minutes, ending as the chopper set down in the middle of a severe, if local, thunderstorm. This while the sun was just peeking over the horizon.
Ozzi practically fell out of the old copter, the rain lingering just long enough to soak him to the skin. A Navy ensign was waiting for him. There was a flurry of ID checking, which ended with the scanning of the bar code on Ozzi’s new security pass. Then he was put in a Hummer; it left the airstrip with a screech.
They drove up and over a hill or two and through several security checkpoints. Soon enough, up ahead Ozzi could see the detention camp set up for Al Qaeda fighters captured during American combat operations in Afghanistan after 9/11, and more recently other places. Though it was considered bad taste locally to call this place a prison, it was nothing but. A fortress of razor wire and wooden buildings, it looked surreal in the damp early-morning sun.
His vehicle roared past the line of simple plywood barracks, all of them skewered by miles of electrical chain link and barbed wire. He spotted a few small figures wearing bright orange jumpsuits kneeling in a holding pen. Handcuffed and shackled around the ankles, they were no doubt Al Qaeda prisoners. Ozzi could see their faces as they drove by. None looked happy.
He was heading for a barracks built separately from this main compound; indeed, it was nearly a half-mile farther down the road. It was a slightly smaller building, with its own half-dozen rings of razor wire encircling it. While Ozzi had seen small armies of guards watching over the Islamic detainees back at the main compound, the road leading to this barracks was being guarded by three Bradley Fighting Vehicles, each sporting a huge cannon and several machine guns onboard.
