by Mack Maloney
He stopped in a great whoosh of dirty water, and Ryder and Atlas quickly climbed aboard. Where did Martinez find the boat? How was he able to start it up and get it going so quickly? There was no time to ask and at the moment it didn’t matter. In seconds they were in hot pursuit of the disappearing crate.
Now it was water flying, tracers disappearing into the night. Ryder was shooting wildly, but what was he shooting at? He didn’t know. He was confused. Things were happening fast, yet they were unfolding like a dream.
Martinez was driving the boat like a madman. Atlas was firing his M16 wildly as well. Ryder flipped his night-vision goggles down again. He was surprised they still worked after being soaked. The boat was a dilapidated 12-footer, its engine sputtering and laying down an unintentional smoke screen behind them. They roared out of the inlet and were nearly blinded by the lights of Manila now. The brightness above just made for more darkness below, turning the water especially black. Now they couldn’t see anything more than 20 feet in front of them. Atlas was still propped up against the windshield, though, firing round after round into the murk. Occasionally they caught a brief glimpse of the crate and the pontoon raft bouncing in the waves. It didn’t seem to be moving any faster than they were. How could it stay ahead of them for so long? It didn’t make sense.
Martinez gunned the motorboat’s engine, but instead of responding it began coughing badly. Ryder looked back at it. Not only was it smoking heavily, but licks of flames were shooting from under the outboard cover. No doubt it was going to crap out in a matter of seconds. Doomed again….
That’s when he heard Atlas shout: “There they are!”
Ryder was back at the windshield in a flash, M16 up, night scope leveled. Atlas was really cranked—cranked and angry. He had a right to be a little nuts, though. To his mind, anyone who came within the sights of his rifle at that moment was just as bad as the person who had pushed the button that launched the SAM that killed the guys in the tanker and shot him down that night. He took it all very personally.
“See them!” he was yelling in Ryder’s ear. And suddenly Ryder saw what Atlas saw.
In the green glow of night vision about a half-mile ahead was what at first looked to be nothing more than a diving platform, something that might be found floating in the old swimming hole back home, just a lot bigger. There were six more scuba divers standing on top of it. They had an electric winch, and with it were reeling in the crate and its pontoon float. Ryder had seen one of these things before. It was an SLP-I, for surface loading platform, inflatable. It was a kind of temporary docking place used by waterborne special ops soldiers to tie up small raiding boats, store fuel, set up communications. SLPs had been used a lot in the Persian Gulf over the years, especially during the secret war against Iran.
The crate was quickly up on this platform and indeed frogmen were unloading the Stingers within. Other people on the inflatable platform were in the process of stacking the weapons. The speedboat was only about 1,200 feet away by this time, but then the engine really started chugging. At the worst possible moment, they began slowing down.
“Son of a bitch!” Ryder and Atlas screamed in unison.
The engine died completely a few seconds later. They were still 1,000 feet away from the floating platform and their forward momentum carried them another 100 feet or so. But then they stopped for good. Atlas went nuts. He pushed a new clip into his M16, sighted through the night scope, and let loose another volley. Meanwhile Ryder and Martinez were looking at the engine to see if anything could be done.
Suddenly Atlas cried out: “Jesus Christmas! I got one of the bastards.”
Ryder leaped back up to the front of the motorboat. He didn’t need his night scope to see that indeed, Atlas had shot one of the men on the platform and he had fallen into the water. He was struggling even as he was caught in a current pushing him away from the float and toward the motorboat. He appeared to be gravely wounded. Atlas was not satisfied, though. He kept firing at the man, sending ripples of bullets all around him. Soon enough the man stopped struggling. Then he stopped moving altogether.
Atlas was quickly hanging over the side; Ryder was right beside him. Together they reached down and grabbed the body. They had pulled him halfway into the boat…when suddenly Atlas let out a chilling scream.
“This is fucking impossible!” he cried.
He looked at Ryder as if he’d seen a ghost, which in a way he had. The body was that of Atlas’s former flight partner, the guy they called Teddy Ballgame.
At that moment, before Atlas could utter one more word of exclamation, Ryder felt the motor boat suddenly rising below his feet. One moment they were on the surface of the water; the next they were 15 feet above it. Then 20, then 25.
What was happening? All of them grabbed for something to hold on to, startled for their lives. Somehow Ryder was able to look down and see a large black mass had surfaced right below them. It had come up so sharply, it was carrying them up with it.
The first thought through his head—crazy, as he knew it could be his last—was: Is this a fucking whale?
The motorboat was shattered by the impact from below. Ryder, Atlas, and Martinez were thrown into the air; it was like they were weightless. The boat’s motor blew apart, sending burning gasoline everywhere. In his last conscious memory, as he was falling into the water surrounded by flaming debris, Ryder saw that this was not some great black whale sent by the devil to kill them.
It was a submarine.
A big one.
The Kai found them the next morning, floating 20 miles out in the South China Sea.
Ryder, Martinez, and Atlas were all clinging to the coffin-shaped packing crate, barely alive. Their encounter with the huge submarine had nearly killed them. The discarded crate was the only piece of debris large enough to save their lives; it had floated right up to them in the hell that followed the sub’s sudden appearance. As they drifted away, half-drowned, they saw the weapons being loaded into the sub by men in dark naval uniforms. Once done, the divers on the floating platform climbed onto the sub themselves. Then it disappeared, vanishing beneath the waves.
Ryder remembered little after that. He’d been hit on the head by something after crashing back down into the water. He barely recalled Martinez pulling him up to the top of the crate. But then sometime during the long night he’d pulled Martinez back up after he’d fallen over.
Throughout this, Atlas just held on, blank look on his face, never quite recovering from finding his ex-partner floating in the water, torn apart by his bullets. Why would Teddy be in league with the people stealing the missiles? How could he possibly be involved? There was no way to tell. But now Atlas had the same haunted look in his eyes as Martinez.
The sun had just come up when the Kai appeared overhead. Ryder had emerged from his haziness by this time. The big flying boat was a welcome sight as it orbited them once before coming in for a landing.
The coffin-shaped crate rode the swells over to it, and soon helping hands were pulling the three men aboard. Ryder went first, glad to get off the crate. But both Atlas and Martinez seemed reluctant to go. Finally they, too, were hauled aboard the big Kai. The empty box, their strange lifeboat, was then allowed to drift away.
It was only when the plane’s door was closed and Ryder’s eyes adjusted to the faint light inside the Kai’s cabin that he saw the other members of the American team were aboard. Both the group who’d pursued the F-10 cargo plane and those who’d chased down the smuggling ship the Sea Demon.
But the Americans were not flying the plane. The people at the controls were members of the Japanese Maritime Forces, its original owners. The Americans were sitting in rows inside the cargo compartment. All of them were in handcuffs.
Watching over them were several squads of heavily armed, rock-jawed Green Berets. Standing on the flight deck above everyone else, dressed in brand-new, never-been-worn combat camos, was General James Rushton, presidential advisor for special operations.
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He did not look happy.
Chapter 19
Somewhere in the Pacific
Six hours later
Ozzi’s stomach was tied in knots. His palms were sweating. His eyes were burning. He was tired and nervous and aching all over. To make matters worse, everything around him was swaying with the movement of the sea.
He was sitting inside a small, damp, dimly lit compartment. It was painted entirely in U.S. Navy gray and was just big enough for a desk and four chairs. The tiny room reminded him of his office back at the Pentagon. Oh, to be crammed inside that little cubbyhole right now, he thought. That would be heaven. He’d never leave it again. But the way things looked, he seemed destined to spend time in a space even smaller than his dear old cube, one surrounded by metal bars and razor wire.
It was the height of irony that the American team was now being held aboard the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the same ship the original 9/11 unit had saved almost two months before. The supercarrier had rotated out of the Persian Gulf earlier that week and was on its way to a new station off the coast of North Korea when it was diverted to the Philippine Sea. After picking up Ryder, Martinez, and Atlas, the Kai had flown east, toward the Pacific and the hastily arranged rendezvous with the carrier. Once the big flying boat landed next to the Lincoln, the entire 9/11 unit, plus the SEALs, the SDS guys, Atlas, and the two DSA officers, were transferred to the carrier via rescue rafts. Curiously, Atlas was immediately flown off the ship, destination unknown. The remaining detainees were put in isolated cabins scattered throughout the huge ship. These cabins were then designated as “temporary brigs” and made off-limits to the rest of the crew.
As it turned out, a quadruple whammy had been in play all along. While the two American teams were off doing their various things, General Rushton had organized yet another special ops team to track them down; this one was made up entirely of Green Berets. Their tip-off? When the Kai contingent turned over the prisoners they’d rescued from the Aboos to a passing cruise ship, the freed hostages went directly to the U.S. embassy in Manila to spin their tale of the mysterious American unit that had saved their lives and was still out there, skulking around in a Japanese flying boat. Rushton and his search-and-arrest team left the United States soon afterward.
They’d arrived in Manila about the same time the Ocean Voyager was intercepting the Sea Demon. Traveling in a top-secret KC-135 surveillance plane known as Compass Point, they’d followed both the Ocean Voyager’s activities plus the Kai’s forcing-down of the F-10 cargo plane by using an NRO real-time TV satellite, the kind of eye in the sky that could count the number of buttons on your shirt. Both the Kai team and the crew of Ocean Voyager were contacted by the Compass Point plane and told to surrender. Navy jets flying in the area gave them little choice but to comply.
The containership and the flying boat were seized soon after that.
The cabin Ozzi was sitting in now was located on the middle deck of the Lincoln, a space used by the ship’s chaplain to hear confessions. Directly across the desk from him were two special prosecutors attached to the National Security Council. Both were civilians; both were wearing suitcoats and ties. They’d accompanied Rushton on the quick trip over from Washington, apparently forgetting to pack their tropic-wear in the haste. Rushton himself was sitting in the corner off to Ozzi’s left, arms folded, bulldog face in place. The tightly pressed creases on his new camouflage suit had yet to show any signs of relaxing. Ozzi could smell his cheap cologne from across the room.
The men from the NSC did all the talking at first. They were here to compile evidence for a criminal case against the rogue team. They told Ozzi up front that the main 9/11 guys, the SEALs, the State Department guards, and Major Fox had already been interrogated—everyone had been grilled but him. Last in line again, Ozzi thought. It took them nearly 15 minutes just to read him the charges facing those involved in the Manila affair. The list was a long one: disobeying direct orders, destruction of government property, desertion, breaking into government-restricted cyberspace, all on top of dozens of national security violations. Adding to the misery, the prosecutors told Ozzi he was facing additional charges, including issuing false orders and aiding and abetting the unlawful release of the Gitmo Four. Their conclusion: he was looking at more than 500 years in jail.
While Ozzi couldn’t deny that he and the others had broken a number of military laws, he also told the prosecutors that to a man, the entire team felt it had been in the country’s best interests to do so. But the NSC men reminded him, just as Fox had so long ago, that while tales of rogue military units made for good bedtime novels, they just weren’t tolerated in the real world. They couldn’t be. And so it had come to this again: just like after Hormuz, the heroes had been turned into villains.
“We’ve already gone over everything the others told us,” one prosecutor said to him now. “From the B-2 crash, to looking for these supposed missiles, to killing this Kazeel guy, double crosses and triple crosses and shell games and the like. The same story, over and over. But we have to be straight with you. We have a hard time believing any of it. And so will a jury.”
The room started spinning for Ozzi at that moment. Sweat began dripping off his upper lip.
“But I lived through it,” he told them. “Or half of it anyway. And I trust the people who lived through the other half. Believe me, I…”
But the second NSC guy held up his hand and cut him off.
“Lieutenant, if I can be blunt here for a moment, the things that you people claim you did are simply preposterous. I mean, breaking up mudfights in whorehouses? Impersonating Chechen bodyguards? Flying all over Southwest Asia in a news chopper? Tracing this imaginary weapons cache by tracking a mute eunuch? You maintain this entire scheme hinged on the actions of an idiot, for Christ’s sake! We found the guy just where you said you left him, half-dead in that hangar. He can’t talk, he’s barely alive, and on his best day he couldn’t add two and two and come out with four. Yet you make it seem like he was the ringleader, a major player in this supposed Stinger deal.”
“But he was,” Ozzi insisted. “We were all sure of it….”
The first NSC man spoke again: “Then there’s the way you all say it came to a head. That your half of this mystery team crashed in on these supposed missile smugglers in the hangar, and then another bunch of smugglers, who were part of the Philippine National Police no less, crashed in on you?”
“But that’s the way it happened,” Ozzi pleaded. “Until…well, until the other half of the nine-eleven team busted in on them, and…”
He began painfully stumbling over his own words. Suddenly they felt very foolish coming off his lips. He had to agree with the NSC guys. The whole thing did sound crazy…not to mention that had the two teams hung around the hangar long enough, Rushton’s Green Berets would have busted in on them.
The first NSC man went on.
“You must have known none of this would check out. Your boss, Major Fox, was sent out on a simple recovery mission to look for two missing aircraft—and suddenly he falls off the map. Meanwhile you write out false orders to get some very sensitive detainees released—then you all meet up in Manila. Then all this nonsense takes place, and that’s when the bullshit really starts to fly. You have to admit, it sounds like a plot from a bad paperback novel.”
Ozzi just stared back at him. Something was beginning to smell here, and it wasn’t just Rushton’s Old Spice.
“OK then,” Ozzi finally challenged them. “What do you think happened? What do you think we’ve been doing out here all this time?”
That’s when Rushton rose from his seat, straightened his camo suit, and spoke for the first time. “Frankly,” he began in his trademark smug tone, “all the evidence indicates that you and your merry band were indeed involved in a smuggling operation. But it was a drug smuggling operation. One that went horribly awry.”
Ozzi couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Drugs? Are you crazy?”
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nbsp; Rushton just shrugged. “Not likely,” he said, casually examining his finely manicured fingernails. “Look at the evidence. You admit having contact with this Buddha-statue man, don’t you? He was a known drug smuggler, until you people killed him, that is. This woodworker—same thing, well-known by the National Police for his involvement in illegal operations, specifically making shipping crates for hiding heroin.
“That cargo plane you forced down—again, people steeped in the Southeast Asian heroin trade. And the freighter your friends stopped? It’s considered the Queen Mary of smuggling ships around here. Plus, you admit flying to Pakistan and Afghanistan—only the poppy capitals of the world. I mean, just connect the dots: it was a large drug deal gone bad. And apparently you fellows wound up on the wrong end of the stick. You should have picked your companions more carefully out here. There’s a lot of very disreputable people in this part of the world.”
Ozzi wanted to go right over the desk and throttle Rushton—just beat him to a pulp. The sight of someone else’s blood flowing did not bother him anymore, not after spending the last 10 days with the Gitmo crew. But it was evident now that the odorous general was playing some kind of game here, maybe for the benefit of the NSC men, but maybe not. Certainly Rushton had known about Fox’s mission to find the B-2 spy bomber, as well as his plans to ask for help from the original 9/11 team members. How? Because Fox had cleared both missions with Rushton first—he would have never been able to leave Washington if he hadn’t. And certainly it had been Rushton who’d set up the UPX connection between Fox and the people who he’d been talking to throughout the long night on Fuggu—before being so suddenly cut off and set adrift, that is. How else would Fox have had enough juice to call in cruise missile strikes the next morning?
And what about the bomber itself? What was it really doing flying over the Bangtang Channel that night? What was it carrying in its bomb bay? And why was it so important that all evidence of its crash site be eliminated, and then those people who’d seen it up-close be suddenly turn into nonpersons? Ozzi knew of only two people who could answer those questions. One was Atlas—and he was long gone by now. The other was his apparently traitorous partner, the guy called Teddy Ballgame. And he was dead.
