Strike Force Alpha

by Mack Maloney

  If only he could.

  When he looked back down again, the ship and sailors were gone. There was nothing below but the sea. He hastily went to full-power ascent throttle, but instead of going up, he was going down. He hit the water, full force. The sea rushed into his cockpit, soaking him. He tried to unfasten his safety harness, but the snaps had rusted shut already. He was trapped.

  And sinking like a stone….

  He woke with a start.

  He sat up too quickly, cracking his skull on the bunk overhead. His heart was pounding. He was drenched in sweat. Where the hell am I? He wiped his eyes and looked around…. Slowly the surroundings fell into place. The tiny gray room. The double-tiered bunk. The metal bars holding canvas over the only window. Oh Christ yeah, I know where I am. Not a prison cell. It was his billet, aboard the containership Ocean Voyager.

  The ship suddenly lurched to starboard. He grabbed the sides of his bunk and held on. He was Col. Ryder Long, U.S. Air Force. He didn’t like ships. Especially this one. It was big and square and built to be overloaded. Nothing but bull rings and lashing bars held everything in place. If the sea got the least bit choppy and all that weight began moving back and forth, the ship would start to roll.

  And it was rolling now.

  He fumbled for his watch, hanging off the bunk post, staring at it through bleary eyes. 0730 hours? He’d been asleep for 90 minutes? It felt more like 90 seconds. He fell back on his sweaty bedsheets. He’d dreamed about his wife again. She came to him almost every night, popping up somewhere, always smiling, and always in the same red dress. For the life of him, he could not recall ever seeing her wear it before. That was always strange….

  He waited, lying still. Maybe the ship would settle down again. Maybe he could even go back to sleep. Just five more minutes, he thought. Just let me close my eyes for five more minutes. But then the ship’s foghorn went off, loud enough to wake the dead. And the ship pitched back to starboard, knocking his shaving kit off the sink. The foghorn went off again. Something clanged loudly overhead. Then the ship rolled back to the left. That was it. He gave up. He crawled off the bunk and finally got to his feet.

  The sink in the corner was rusty and gross. Still he drew some water from the faucet and splashed it on his face. It did no good. He began a slow, tortuous ritual of cracking bones and unknotting muscles. His back was a mess, his fingers and wrists always stiff. Common complaints of a Harrier pilot; it was not the easiest plane to fly, and he wasn’t a kid anymore. But at least last night’s mission had been a success. The mystery men at the bottom of Ocean Voyager had been tracking the Genoa-based terrorist cell for weeks, listening to their chatter, following their money, knowing they were planning to attack a large floating target sometime soon. The snooping paid off. The plot was uncovered, the timetable revealed. Nine terrorists KIA, four thousand people saved, mostly Americans. Not bad for a few hours’ work. Ryder’s only regret: he’d didn’t have a chance to pop a couple of the mooks himself this time. But that was OK. There’d be more to come.

  The ship moved again; he leaned against the wall for support. He ran his hands over his graying close-cropped hair. This was how most mornings started out these days. Thinking about Maureen, cursing his aching muscles, seasick, and wishing he’d been deeper into the body count the night before. Not exactly a bowl of cornflakes and the sports pages.

  He climbed into his overalls and sneakers and made his way up to the deck, three levels above. It was foggy and the sea was choppier than he had thought it would be. Negotiating an obstacle course of ropes and steel cable, he reached the outer railing at midships. Where the hell were they now? Still in the Aegean? The western Med? Or heading back toward the Suez? He couldn’t tell, and at that moment, he really didn’t care. He lit a cigarette and took a long first drag. The ship’s foghorn blew again, perfectly synched as he exhaled. He would never forget the scene last night. The passengers on the back of the cruise liner, cheering and waving, old people pumping their fists. That took some of the pain away.

  Another drag and it began to rain. The ship rolled to port. He fished two amphetamine pills from his pocket and swallowed them dry. They were supposed to help with seasickness, but he always felt like he could use about ten more. The ship fell to starboard and then back to port again. It began raining harder. He was getting soaked. He power-puffed the Marlboro, then flicked the butt overboard.

  So much for breakfast, he thought.

  If homeliness and rust were the perfect disguise, the Ocean Voyager would have been invisible.

  It looked like a typical containership. Eight hundred feet long, 105 feet wide, with a 60-foot drop from the top deck to the bottom of the cargo bay, it weighed 30,000 tons. When it was first built by Maersk back in 1981, its top speed was barely 15 knots.

  There had been no need for glamour in the ship’s original design and its builders had stuck to the plan. The deck was a nightmare of winches and tie-offs and thick rope strung tight everywhere. There were dozens of things to trip over, crack a knee on, or get crushed by, especially up near the bow. The recessed deckhouse offered a great view…of the smokestacks, the ladders, and the railings and, of course, all those containers on deck. They stretched out in front of an observer like a railroad yard somehow lost at sea.

  Flat and boxy and dirt-dog ugly, the ship looked no different from hundreds of container carriers plying the world’s oceans; dozens could be found at any time in the Mediterranean, or the Indian Ocean or the Persian Gulf.

  But Ocean Voyager was not a containership. Not really.

  Officially, it was an Air-Land Assault Ship/Special.

  A warship. In disguise.

  It was the British who first came up with the idea of launching jet aircraft from a containership.

  During an era of drastic defense cuts in the 1970s, the Royal Navy thought about putting heavy-load platforms onto ordinary containerships from which their VTOL Harrier jump jets could operate. It was considered a cheap alternative to building a new generation of aircraft carriers.

  The Ocean Voyager took the Brits’ idea further. Much further. Two elevators, of the same type used on U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, had been installed side by side in front of the deckhouse. They could move a load of several dozen tons up from the cargo bay to the deck or vice versa. They were, in essence, movable launch and recovery pads and had more than enough muscle to handle a fighter jet or a couple helicopters. When the elevators were not in use, six empty containers were rolled on top of them, hiding them from prying eyes.

  And this was how the people on this ship had been able to pull off the string of deadly counterterrorist attacks in Lebanon, Somalia, the Aegean, and Yemen. The raids had all originated from here, a moving, floating air base with the perfect disguise. No one knew where they had come from and no one knew where they went, because the Harrier jump jet and the two Blackhawk helicopters and all of the raiders they had carried to battle were hidden in the bottom of this innocuous-looking ship.

  But Ocean Voyager’s assets did not end with its tiny air force and assault team. The ship also had its own naval warfare section, a huge internal logistic operation, and an intelligence station unrivaled anywhere on the globe. It could both track and attack terrorists, almost at a whim, and in complete secrecy. The team onboard had been set up to be totally self-sufficient, able to run missions on its own, independent of any oversight, and unencumbered by international law. In many ways, it was not unlike a “cell.”

  Concealed inside the containers on deck were the things that could sustain such an operation. A full deck, meaning about two hundred containers, could support the jump jet, the rotary craft, and the small army of assault soldiers onboard for 45 days without need of resupply—except for the aviation gas. The containers were painted as if they belonged to different shipping companies, such as Sealift, BDT, and Ocean Transport of Britain, to maintain the ruse. They seemed to be stacked in no particular order on the deck, but actually each was in place by means of a strict pr
iority. A color coding system on the access door determined what was within. An orange stripe meant aircraft support: spare parts, control change-outs, tires, spare engines. Blue meant ammunition. Green was electronics. Yellow meant general support, the things needed to keep the ship itself running. White meant human support: drinking water, food, soap, T-paper, the essentials of life at sea.

  There were also eight containers with red stripes on their doors. Two were bolted down at the front of the ship, two more were on each side at midships, and two more were located aft. These crates did not contain food or ammo or a spare mouse for someone’s computer down below. Inside these containers were CIWS guns, modern, remote-controlled Gatling guns, fierce weapons that could spit out 600 rounds a second. With the ability to drop the sides of their containers at any time, these guns were on hand to prevent the ship from being hit by an antiship missile or anything else unfriendly, if its disguise should fail someday.

  The ship was extremely high-tech. It had a Combat Control Center sunk into the first level of the deckhouse that would rival any found on a modern warship. Everything, from the CIWS guns, to the over-the-horizon radar, to its hidden satellite dishes, was run from here. The ship’s controls were all automated; they, too, had come from a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. Its original Mitsu engines had been torn out and replaced by four GE F110-400 gas turbines, the same engines that powered the Navy’s F-14 Tomcat fighter. If they ever had to push it, these powerhouses could get the ship up to an astounding 40 knots or more.

  It was at the bottom of the ship though, on the keel level, that the real treasures could be found. This was the heart of the listening station, four interconnected compartments known as the White Rooms. The crew called the people who worked down here Spooks. The compartments—air-conditioned, environmentally controlled, and virtually dirt and dust–free—were crammed with some of the most sophisticated eavesdropping equipment ever conceived. In the space of three 12-by-36-foot containers were devices that allowed the Spooks to intercept just about any E-mail sent over the Internet, and just about any fax, telegram, or wire cable, too. Satellite-relay stations in one container could tap into the National Security Agency’s ultrasecret Echelon system, meaning just about any telephone call made anywhere around the globe could be tracked, recorded, listened in on, or even altered. The containers also housed facilities where CDs, hard drives, official documents, photographs, videos, and DVDs could be manufactured or counterfeited. Fake TV news reports could be broadcast from here, pirate radio programs created, newspapers and magazines replicated.

  There was also a Dirty Tricks section where just about anything from superitching powder to a nuclear warhead could be conjured up.

  It was in one of these rooms that the bombs used to level the Rats’ Nest had been built.

  Whose idea was all this?

  No one was really sure. When the ship first set sail for the Middle East two months before, the 43 people onboard had been told to keep the chatter among themselves to a minimum. This was not such an unusual request in the world of supersecret ops, where most people operated on a need-to-know basis only. Everyone onboard had done a good job keeping his mouth shut. Of course it was a relatively easy thing to do. There was no recreation room onboard, no TV room, no game hall. The only common meeting area was the forward mess, and it was huge. The crew ate in shifts, and usually everyone sat at his own table. Between this and the long hours of training and doing mission preps, there really wasn’t much opportunity for interaction or information exchange.

  This did not mean, however, that there were no rumors onboard. Military ships floated on scuttlebutt, and just about everyone aboard Ocean Voyager was military to some degree. And everyone was familiar with the name of at least one person behind the mystery ship, and maybe the only one. That name was “Bobby Murphy.”

  How did they know this name? Because it was plastered just about everywhere on the ship. It was hard not to turn a corner, come to a bulkhead, or work on a piece of equipment anywhere onboard without seeing Bobby Murphy Approved scrawled in yellow chalk somewhere near it. From the bow to the stern, from the top of the deckhouse to the floor of the keel, anything that had been installed, refurbished, repainted, or rewired during the ship’s transformation from hulk to secret warship had been given a stamp of approval by Bobby Murphy.

  But who was he?

  The Ocean Voyager’s commanding officer was a Navy captain named Wayne Bingham, “Captain Bingo” to everyone onboard. Bingo’s CO had actually met Murphy shortly before the ship sailed from Newport News, Virginia, the site of its secret refitting. It had been a brief encounter, but the CO had told Bingo a few details of the chat. This was where the scuttlebutt began. A whisper here, a chance meeting there, and things get passed along, even on a ship full of sealed pie holes. After a few weeks at sea, the story of Bobby Murphy had been retold so many times, some variations bestowed an almost mythical nature on the man. He was a genius. He was insane. He possessed “a beautiful mind.” He was a drunk. He was a highly paid government clairvoyant. He didn’t exist.

  The most often repeated story had Bingo’s CO first asking Murphy just who he worked for. CIA? NSA? DIA? NIO? Murphy claimed he didn’t know himself. He indicated that he’d spent time in all of these agencies, the DIA being his most recent. But, he also claimed, he’d been shuffled around so many times between them, due to his status as “a spy, par excellence,” apparently sometimes he didn’t know exactly who he was working for.

  He knew a lot of people in Washington but quickly added that, in his case, this was not the same as having a lot of friends there. He claimed to have been called into secret trials to give testimony relating to the Middle East and Muslim terrorists, and indeed, Murphy was supposedly a walking encyclopedia on terrorist groups, and especially on the ways of Al Qaeda. Murphy had also bragged about having many friends in other countries’ intelligence agencies, especially the European ones.

  Though he’d claimed he was married, he admitted he wasn’t sure where his wife was these days. She was not as in love with the spy game as he. He claimed to have a cadre of beautiful, highly paid prostitutes in place around the world, women he used to get what he could not get by other means. Supposedly a dozen of these beauties were working for him in the United States alone.

  But how did the whole Ocean Voyager concept come about? It was another murky story, one with holes big enough to sail a battleship through. The most accepted version went like this: After the September 11th attacks, Murphy spent days browbeating his bosses at the DIA to do something—anything—to strike back at Al Qaeda. The DIA turned him down: they gathered intelligence; they didn’t run operations, which he knew was a lie. He then went to the CIA and pleaded with them to let him plan a mission similar to Jimmy Doolittle’s raid over Tokyo in the dark early days of World War II, something that would lift the morale of all Americans in the wake of 9/11. The CIA sat squarely on their thumbs for weeks, then months; no one wanted to take responsibility for OK’ing such a plan, no matter what form it might take. Murphy then went to Naval Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, even the National Security Agency. All of them turned him down for the same reasons: too much risk and the fear of insulting both Arabs and allies around the world.

  Time passed, but Murphy could not be deterred. He finally prevailed, so the story went, when by sheer pluck he managed to get a sit-down with the President himself. What he told the Chief Executive during the course of their 30-minute meeting was apparently known only to the President and Murphy himself. One account said Murphy promised to hunt down and eliminate every Al Qaeda operative connected to the attacks on 9/11, whether they be foot soldiers or financiers—and grease any other bad guys he found in between. Whatever the case, by the time he walked out of the Oval Office, Murphy had been given a blank check to essentially do his thing.

  The assurances to keep it ultrasecret were all there, too: The President promised absolutely no oversight, no justifications, no receipts. No micromanaging from
Washington, no reports to be filed, no debriefings needed. Murphy had been given access to whatever military resources he wanted. He had a lengthy shopping list. The 18 helicopter troops came from Delta Force, America’s best-trained, most secret special operations group. The Blackhawk pilots were from Air Force Special Ops, the best at driving copters in and out of tight spaces. The ship itself was run by a company of handpicked U.S. Navy sailors, each one given the highest security clearance possible. A Marine Air maintenance squad took care of the aircraft hidden below. Murphy claimed that he’d personally selected every person for the secret unit himself sight unseen and as proof rattled off for Bingo’s CO the names of just about every soul who would eventually come onboard.

  Murphy got everything he asked for and more—and as a result this was no ordinary secret ops team. There were no uniforms. No IDs. All orders were given verbally. Nothing was ever written down. The ship never took a call or a radio message from Washington or any U.S. government agency. They never spoke with the Pentagon. They communicated, only when they had to, with a top-secret NSA computer site, located in a typical house in a typical suburban neighborhood somewhere in New Jersey known as Blueberry Park. The only way information could be sent and received from this location was via a porn site chat room on the Internet.

  So the operation wasn’t being run by the generals or the admirals or any U.S. intelligence agency or even by the White House itself. It wasn’t being run by anybody. Again, this meant the team would not encounter any red tape when planning or executing an operation. It would be under no constitutional restrictions as to what it could do, when or where, or to whom. That was the beauty of Murphy’s idea. The unit was self-contained. On its own. And so hush-hush, even the President himself didn’t know all the details, if any at all.