Strike Force Bravo

by Mack Maloney

  “This is like a bad ride at Disneyland,” one member said.

  They started moving again and finally reached the ship’s bridge. It was empty. They climbed up to the next deck, to the captain’s quarters. It was surprisingly ornate, but it, too, was vacant.

  They went back down the ladder, moving very carefully in the dark. They heard the eerie groaning noise again. But this time, no one wanted to stop and wonder what the hell it was. They just kept on moving. Down another series of ladders, they found themselves one level below the cargo deck. Here they stumbled into a cabin that in normal circumstances might have acted as the ship’s bursar office. But the cabin was not filled with file cabinets and adding machines. Rather, it was stuffed with surface combat equipment that looked as sophisticated as any found on the U.S. Navy’s most advanced warships. Air defense radar, high-end communications sets, a huge 3-D combat display. There was at least a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of high-tech gear down here. What was it doing on this very old, very rusty containership?

  They went down to the next level. The noises started up all around them again. The clanging of chains became almost deafening. They came upon a very dark, very dour, very dirty mess hall. Its walls were painted black; its portholes had been covered over with tarpaulin also painted black. The ship groaned again. The SEALs stopped in their tracks again; this time they couldn’t help it. The noise was very unnerving.

  They slowly moved into the mess hall. One man unlashed his combat light and played it around the darkened room. They were startled to see the Vietnamese woman again. She was sitting at a table at the far end of the room, up in its darkest corner. There was a plate of food in front of her. She was calmly eating a steak.

  Sitting next to her were four men, all Caucasian. They looked ghostly in the very dim light. They were looking back at the SEALs without the slightest bit of surprise. The SEAL squad leader pulled out his Palm Pilot. It flashed four pictures for him. They were the service-record mug shots of the four men. A Navy officer named Bingham, an Army colonel named Martinez, an Air Force chopper pilot named Gallant, and another USAF officer, a colonel named Ryder Long.

  These were four of the people the SEALs had been sent here to find.

  Without lowering his weapon, the SEAL squad leader addressed them: “Gentlemen, it is my duty to inform you that you are wanted for questioning by U.S. military authorities. It is in your best interests to come with us peacefully.”

  The men just stared back at him. The Vietnamese woman continued eating her steak.

  The SEAL team leader took a step closer; his team did as well. He repeated his message. The men still seemed unfazed.

  Then the ship groaned again. The SEALs jumped in unison. The four men almost laughed.

  The SEAL squad leader was growing both anxious and angry. He raised his weapon to eye level. His men did as well.

  “Look…” he said forcefully. “I’m not in the business of shooting other Americans, but you’ve got to know who we are and why they sent us to get you. If you resist in any way, I can’t guarantee your safety.”

  Finally one of the men spoke. It was the Navy officer. He said: “Nor can we yours….”

  At that moment, the huge hatch leading into the mess slammed shut, sealing them in. Now dark figures began to emerge from the gloom. They were more heavily armed than the SEALs and they, too, had their weapons raised. And there were at least eight of them.

  Team 99 was trapped. That had never happened before.

  Their captors were wearing uniforms, special ops uniforms. Black, not camos, like them. Their weapons were M16/15s, the specialized variation of the M16 combat rifle. Their helmets were oversize and came with night-vision goggles already attached. Every guy seemed enormous in size and breadth.

  The SEAL squad leader was the first to realize just who these people were.

  “Delta Force…” he breathed. The words had trouble coming off his tongue.

  Dead silence. No one moved. The SEALs were still holding their guns on the men sitting at the table; the Delta guys had their guns on the SEALs. Blue-on-blue. That’s what they called it when different Americans units wound up firing on each other. But these were always friendly-fire accidents, mistakes made in the heat of combat. This was a little different.

  Keeping one eye on the four men at the table, the SEAL squad leader took a closer look at the uniforms on the Delta guys. They were very unusually decorated. Their shoulder patches showed the silhouettes of the New York City Twin Towers backed by the Stars and Stripes, with the acronyms NYPD and FDNY floating on either side. They hardly seemed military-issue. The four men at the table were wearing them, too.

  The SEAL squad leader finally started talking: “OK, everyone stay cool. We’re all brothers here.” He glanced at the woman who was still calmly eating her steak dinner. “Or at least most of us are.”

  “You can be as cool as you want,” Bingham the Navy officer, told him. “Just turn your asses around and go back to where you came from.”

  Some of the Delta guys laughed.

  “But we can’t do that,” the SEAL leader said. “They’re expecting us to bring you back.”

  Bingham leaned forward, allowing the captain’s bars on his shoulder to glint in the bare light. “What’s your name, son?” he asked the squad leader.

  The SEAL stumbled a bit. “Lieutenant Barney. First name Charles, sir….”

  “From where, Charlie?”

  “Philadelphia, sir….”

  Bingham sat back again. “Well, when you get back home, you can grab a cheese steak sandwich on me. OK? Bye….”

  “But, sir…we have our orders,” the squad leader told him.

  “We have our orders, too,” Bingham said. “Want to know what they are?”

  “Sure….”

  “That no one knows who we are, or where we are—at all costs.”

  As he was saying this, each of the Delta guys took a step forward, tightening the ring around the SEALs.

  “You guys are nuts,” the squad leader replied harshly, breaking the protocol. “You really think I think you’ll shoot us?”

  “You were going to shoot us,” Bingham reminded him.

  The Delta guys came in closer. The SEALs cocked their weapons and the tension ratcheted up another notch. One wrong move now and a lot of the people in the room would be dead.

  “We have our orders,” Barney, the squad leader, said again. A bead of sweat was making its way down his nose. His arms and back were soaked with perspiration. He looked at the Delta guy closest to him again. The man wasn’t sweating at all.

  “And we have ours,” Bingham repeated, his voice very low. “And you’ve got five seconds, starting now, to lower your weapons. Four seconds…three…”

  Each SEAL remained in place. They had to. They were Team 99; there was no way they could back down to these freaks.

  “Two…”

  The Delta guys flicked on their laser aiming devices. Now each SEAL had a tiny red dot dancing between his eyes.

  “One.”

  There was a loud pop! An instant later, a great white flash filled the hall. Its light was blinding. An instant after that, the huge door that had been slammed shut behind the SEALs was blown into a million pieces. The flames and smoke were intense, just for a moment. Then, more armed men began streaming into the room. They were not military, or at least they were not in uniforms. They were all wearing flak vests, sunglasses, ball caps, and jeans. They moved with frightening swiftness, taking up positions around the Delta guys.

  Just like that, the circumstances inside the mess hall had changed again.

  The new arrivals aimed their weapons at the Delta soldiers, who still had their guns trained on the SEALs, who had never taken their guns off the four men sitting at the table. The four looked more than mildly surprised at the sudden appearance of the civilian gunmen.

  Finally, someone yelled: “Who the fuck are you guys?”

  That’s when one more person walked into th
e mess hall. He took off his helmet and calmly brushed back his unruly hair.

  It was Major Fox of the DSA. A long way from home.

  He waved his red ID badge over his head.

  “I am from the Defense Security Agency,” he announced to the mystified crowd of soldiers. “Anyone here ever heard of us?”

  His question was met with blank stares all round.

  “I didn’t think so. OK, all you have to know for now is that I’m in charge here. And as my first order, I want everyone to lower his weapon.”

  Fox put his helmet back on and took a paper bag from his pocket.

  Then he collapsed into the nearest chair and said: “There’s something very important we’ve all got to talk about.”

  Fox was exhausted.

  The last time his feet had stayed on the ground was 20 hours ago, back at Andrews, in the middle of a downpour, another of his wife’s peanut butter sandwiches packed inside a tiny brown bag.

  From there an aerial odyssey began, carrying him, in the back of a C-17 Globemaster cargo jet, to Luke Air Force Base in Utah, where he was transferred to an S-3 Viking naval bomber, which brought him to Guam, with three aerial refuelings to kill the boredom over the Pacific. From Guam it was a chopper trip over to Oki Jima, for a quick walk around, then back by chopper to Guam, then back on the S-3 for a flight down to the carrier USS Roosevelt. From there, another copter, a bigger one, an elderly Sea Knight, brought him to an isolated island a hundred miles off the eastern coast of Taiwan. It was an old CIA base. Here he met for the first time the small army of gunmen who broke in with him. They were SDS—State Department Security. Usually charged with protecting U.S. officials both at home and abroad, they did side missions as well at the bequest of the NSC. Fox had worked with them before. They were arguably the toughest if least-known special ops force around. From this little island they were all put aboard the ugliest airplane ever built—and now he was here. In Vietnam.

  And he was very tired.

  And very hungry.

  So Fox unwrapped his wife’s sandwich and finally took a monstrous bite. It was strange: Despite his initial command, no one had lowered his weapon. But upon seeing him take that first bite of his sandwich, it was like a spell was broken. All rifles went down a notch. Another bite, as Fox was ravenous, and people seemed to relax a little more. Bite three, weapons were lowered all the way to the deck. Bite four, and the sandwich was gone—and everyone was breathing normally again. Fox laughed. His wife did make a great Skippy sandwich.

  Of course, it was the SEALs who began squawking first. Squad Leader Barney took two giant steps forward and lined himself up in front of Fox.

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” he began, still with a sweaty nose and upper lip. “But I believe my orders supersede yours….”

  Fox took a long swig from his field canteen, stood up, and stretched. Then he addressed the SEAL.

  “You want to make trouble here, Mr. Barney?”

  “No, sir….”

  “Then why are you standing in front of me?”

  Barney cleared his throat and said again: “I believe my orders supersede yours, sir.”

  “You do? Well, I have two words for you, Mister Barney….”

  “Sir?”

  “‘General Rushton.’”

  Barney began to respond but stopped himself. He and Fox inhabited the same underworld of Washington and spies. Barney knew who General Rushton was. He was the man who’d sent Team 99 on this mission. But even though they were out here doing his bidding, Barney would never utter his name lightly. That would be sinful. In fact, few people would speak his name unless they were authorized to do so.

  “And, Mr. Barney, General Rushton says you and your men now belong to me,” Fox went on, each word hitting Barney like a body blow. “Capeesh?”

  To his credit, Barney handled it with grace. He knew when he was being outjuiced. He saluted sharply and said: “Capeesh, sir…yes, sir….” Then he took two giant steps backward and returned to his original position.

  Fox scanned the rest of the room, palms up, arms outstretched, as if to say, Anyone else want to bitch to me? There were no takers.

  “OK then,” he said. “Let’s get jiggy with this thing.”

  He directed the SDS men to arrange the mess tables into a semicircle. All the SEALs, all the Delta guys, and most of the SDS guards sat down. The four men sitting in the back didn’t move, though. Neither did Ky Li. They remained where they were.

  Fox had a laptop that could project images onto the wall. Even against the black paint, these pictures were crisp and clear. There was no need to douse the lights in the mess; it was already dark as a dungeon. Fox activated his remote and put up the first image.

  It showed a typical B-2 Stealth bomber.

  “I don’t have to tell anyone what this is,” he began.

  He showed a second image. It was of a B-2F spy bomber. It looked a little bigger, a little newer. The image had the word CLASSIFIED stamped across it.

  “This is just another version of the B-2, except it’s a spy plane and, as you can see, highly classified,” Fox went on. “They call it a B-2F.”

  His next graphic was a satellite image of Oki Jima, the secret base off Guam.

  “That B-2F took off from here on a ‘routine’ flight just over twenty-four hours ago. A training mission was how it was logged. This plane is now missing.”

  He let that information sink in a moment, then put up the next image. It showed a sat photo of the Bangtang Channel, with its three tiny islands.

  “The aircraft’s last known position was on a refueling track above these three specks, north of the Philippines’ big island of Luzon. For those of you who flunked geography, that’s about 1000 miles east of here. Communications were lost with the B-2 soon after it hooked up for the refueling. The KC-10 Extender never came back, either. Because they were flying the mission mostly in radio silence, it took a while to determine that both were missing.”

  The next image showed a close-up of the Bangtang Channel.

  “These are the islands of Calayan, Fuggu and Dalu Pree. If the B-2 went down, in one piece or not, over dry land, it is probably on one of these postage stamps. If not, it’s under the water nearby. But the Navy has had two subs combing the channel’s seabed for the past twelve hours or so. They’ve found nothing so far.”

  Next image. A split screen showing both the B-2 spy bomber and the KC-10 refueler in better days.

  “Higher Authority has no idea what happened to either of these planes,” Fox went on. “An accident of some kind? A midair collision? No one knows. However, it is very important that these planes are found and the fate of their crews determined quickly. That goes especially for the B-2, for a variety of reasons but mostly because it’s an advanced model that’s not suppose to exist.

  “The problem is, no one in that part of the world knows what’s going on—and it has to stay that way. I’m talking specifically about the Philippine government. Don’t get me wrong. They are still allies of our country—or at least they were this morning. But the current Filipino administration and especially the national police add up to a security nightmare. Nothing can be kept a secret for more than two hours inside the presidential palace, and the national cops just cannot be trusted. They’ll have every mook within five thousand miles looking in on us if they find out. So, any search and rescue has to be done not just quickly, but very quietly.”

  Fox paused a moment. He wished he had another sandwich.

  “Now how we all wound up here like this is a moot point,” he began again. “But it’s also serendipity. Look around. Can you see what we’ve got here? Delta, SEALs, SDS guys, plus two pilots, a ship’s captain. We all know our business. But more importantly, we are now the closest special ops force of any kind to the crash zone. We can be on the job in a matter of hours. It will take another team at least a day to get up to speed.”

  He let those words hang in the air for a moment. He’d been on some screwy missions
before, but this one was already the screwiest.

  Finally someone in the mess said: “So?”

  “So,” Fox replied. “The President’s men want us—all of us—to go find those two planes.”

  At 46, Ryder Long was nearly the elder statesman of this group.

  He was sitting next to the girl eating the steak, but at the moment he was craving a peanut butter sandwich. He suspected most of the people in the mess hall were.

  Technically Ryder was a colonel in the USAF Reserves, but that was just a formality. He’d spent the last 20 years flying secret aircraft for people like Boeing and Northrup while doing the occasional black op for the Pentagon. It was not just a good life; it was a great one. Then came September 11th—and that’s when everything changed. Returning from a job assignment in Boston, his wife was on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center towers. No last second phone calls, no chance to say good-bye. In an instant, his world turned upside down.

  Weeks of black hell followed, caused by crushing sadness, whiskey anger, and the psychic need for closure that he knew would never come. Holed up in a crappy Las Vegas motel, he was one breath away from eating his gun.

  But then his telephone rang. Salvation was on the other end. Like the others in Bobby Murphy’s mystery unit, he’d been given the opportunity to hit back at the people responsible for what happened that day. Like everyone else, he jumped at the chance. That’s what they’d been doing in the Persian Gulf the day the carrier Lincoln was attacked. That’s why their unit patch showed the silhouette of the Twin Towers. No matter what else happened in that crazy part of the world—the war in Iraq, the death or capture of the top mutts of Al Qaeda—the unit had the job of hunting down every last mook connected with 9/11 and whacking him.