by Mack Maloney
Gallant chimed in: “I agree. We can’t go to the CIA. You know how much Murph distrusted them. And with their history of fucking things up…I mean, they’ve had some hits here and there, but in your own experience with Delta, have you ever known the CIA to do anything right, or quick, the first time?”
Martinez thought a moment but then had to shake his head no. “If Murphy was right about one thing,” he finally admitted, “he was right about that.”
Phelan went on: “And how would you call them anyway? I don’t think you can just dial them up on the shortwave. And even if we flagged down the nearest Navy ship, it would still take hours for this to go up the chain of command—and then more time wasted bouncing it over to Langley.”
“We’ve got to be the ones to snatch this monkey Jamaal,” Gallant said. “We’re the only people anywhere near up to speed on this thing. And it’s our last shot at doing something good—God, something that will mean something.”
“But this isn’t what Murphy intended,” Martinez came back at him. “We were started as an integral component—one part of a process. But now all our support is gone. We’re lifeless. We are as OTB as the Torch ship.”
“I disagree,” Curry said strongly. “I think this is exactly what Murph would want us to do. He put us together tough, so we’d stay tough. And damn it, if we’ve got to go, let’s at least go kicking and screaming.”
“But we’re stuck here!” Martinez fired back. “Aboard this ship. With no fuel! We just barely made it back from ‘Ajman. We can’t go out again….”
“Fucking gas,” Ryder cursed. “Always the problem. Unless…”
“Unless?” Curry asked.
“Unless,” Ryder said, “we go back to the well just one more time.”
Bahrain
Marty Noonan was exhausted.
He’d flown double-ups for the past two days; that was four 10-hour missions in just 48 hours. Every muscle from his brain to his butt was aching now as he climbed down from his KC-10 refueler, post mission number four. In the last two days, they’d gassed up everything from F-15E Strike Eagles and F-117 Stealth fighters to entire squadrons of A-10 Thunderbolts and National Guard F-16s. At times, it seemed as if the big refueler was getting as tired as its crew. There was one benefit, though: after all this flying, his Bahraini copilot had finally perfected the art of making a great pot of coffee. This was good, because Noonan had certainly needed his share of caffeine in the past two days.
As grueling as they were, the double-ups had become more or less routine. All U.S. military units in the Gulf were on heightened alert these days, with any number of local trouble spots having the potential to pop at any time. Noonan’s refueling squadron was tasked with saturating a specific area with tankers, whether it be the airspace above the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passageway all U.S. Navy ships had to sail through in order to enter the Persian Gulf, or the waters off the Gulf’s upper coast for operations inside Iraq, or even a bit to the east, for a secret bombing mission or two inside Iran. The idea was that if trouble happened in any of those areas, U.S. fighters would not have to go far to gas up.
The last mission had been so long, though, Noonan didn’t even have the strength to crawl to the officers’ club. He went directly to his billet instead, drained the last two cans in his Budweiser reserve, then collapsed on his bunk even before he could untie his flight boots. He was asleep inside a minute.
Being a pilot, he rarely dreamed. But this dark night, almost immediately, visions of people dressed in black and dancing around his bed made their way into his subconscious. They were prodding him, gently, not to hurt him but to get his attention. And they were asking him questions, asking him for help. Asking for something…
Suddenly he awoke with a start—and found he wasn’t dreaming at all. There were a half-dozen figures standing around his bunk, all dressed in black, all lugging heavy weapons and wearing ski masks to cover their faces.
He just sat up and shook his head.
“Oh God,” he moaned. “Not you guys again….”
The village of El-Qaez sat directly south of Riyadh, a 20-minute drive along Al-Sultan Highway.
El-Qaez was quaint, if anything in the Middle East could ever be described that way. It was several dozen clusters of high-priced whitewashed brick houses, not palaces but sizable, most of them, surrounded by palm trees and small artificial oases and water springs. There was a certain amount of nostalgia running through the place. It had been designed 20 years before to look like a village that might have been here in the desert for centuries, if not longer. At least it seemed that way from the air. The closer one got, though, the more hints of modern life appeared. The most blatant were the abundant satellite dishes sticking out of the sand and the fleets of Mercedes and Jaguars that roamed the streets of the tiny village.
This was a place where midlevel Saudi oil executives lived. One family, the el-Habini clan, resided at the end of a cul-de-sac that wrapped around a clump of recently planted palm trees.
It was now six in the evening. The sun was going down and the heat of the day was finally drifting away. There were 13 people inside the el-Habini household. They’d just sat down to their evening meal of lamb guts in yogurt when a tremendous explosion shook their house. A palm tree came crashing through the huge picture window an instant later. Every other window on the bottom floor was blown out by the concussion. Suddenly smoke and flames were everywhere.
Before the family could move, five armed men burst through the front door. They fired their weapons into the ceiling, causing pieces of plaster and glass to crash down onto the dinner table. The children screamed. The family’s grandmother fainted dead away. This was a nightmare come to life. The armed men were wearing an unmistakable stars-and-stripes patch on their shoulders. Without a doubt, they were the Crazy Americans.
Each soldier was holding a photograph of a young man and shouting out in Arabic: “Where is Jamaal? Which one is Jamaal?”
Jamaal el-Habini was off in a flash. He scrambled over the dinner table, pushing his family members out of the way, and tried to go out the nearest window. One of the huge soldiers caught him by the shirt collar before he made it halfway through the glass-free opening. He was dragged back into the room and stood up against the wall. Two other soldiers compared his face with that in the photo taken from the CD-ROM. It was a match. They both kicked him in the stomach. He doubled over and hit the floor hard.
Now more soldiers entered the house, shouting and waving weapons. They began kicking over furniture, knocking things off the walls. They were screaming in Arabic: “Give us your Korans!” Yet the women were pleading with them, saying they weren’t that religious; they had no Korans. Still the soldiers kept trashing the place.
As all this was going on, a jet fighter streaked low over the house, once again shaking it to its foundation. A fire was raging outside. The clump of palm trees in the middle of the cul-de-sac had been blown away, courtesy of a daisy cutter bomb dropped by the jet. This had cleared an area large enough for a single black helicopter to land outside. That aircraft was now sitting in the crater left by the bomb, its rotors still spinning, a thin perimeter of soldiers in place around it. Frightened neighbors were peeking out their windows, but anyone who lingered too long had his home sprayed with gunfire. Much shouting and crying could be heard throughout the neighborhood.
Not a minute after charging inside the house, the soldiers came back out. They were dragging with them not only Jamaal but also two of his brothers. All three were bound and blindfolded and thrown into the helicopter. The aircraft started to lift off even as the last of the black-uniformed troops were jumping onboard. Some were still firing their weapons.
The jet fighter roared overhead a third time, its mechanical scream only adding to the chaos.
Finally the copter rose in earnest, clearing the house and going straight up until it disappeared completely.
The snatch-and-grab raid had lasted less than 90 seconds.
&nbs
p; Ten minutes later, the Eight Ball Blackhawk was cruising 12,000 feet above the darkened Persian Gulf.
The Eight Ball was no longer a gunship. All of its weaponry had been removed to reduce weight and make it more fuel-efficient. Its interior had been cored out, too. No more extra seats, no more redundant communications sets. The aircraft was now just a fuselage with a rotor on top and some huge shoulder tanks, filled with Noonan’s fuel, hanging off the sides. It even had Delta guys at the controls, saving the weight of dragging the two Air Force pilots along.
Sergeant Dave Hunn was crouched in the back of the copter, next to the three Saudi youths. They were still bound by the hands but were no longer blindfolded. Jamaal was the oldest. The other two were about seventeen and fifteen. Hunn knew he didn’t have much time; the Spooks back on Ocean Voyager expected the terrorists to make their move as early as daybreak the next morning. That meant they had less than 10 hours to stop the Next Big Thing.
Hunn turned to the first teenager. He was the youngest. Hunn didn’t bother to ask if the boy spoke English. He knew they all did.
He got right in the kid’s face.
“We know what you guys are up to!” Hunn screamed in his ear. “You, Jamaal, and your other brother.”
The kid shook his head no. He was absolutely terrified.
Hunn grabbed him by the shirt collar.
“Why don’t you have a Koran in your house?” he demanded to know.
The kid just shook his head wildly again. Indeed, no holy books were found in the el-Habini household; in itself, Hunn found that suspicious.
“Tell me the codes!” he screamed at the kid. “If not…” He drew an imaginary knife across his throat.
The boy grew more frightened but became defiant as well. He tried to spit at Hunn, but the wind in the cabin was so strong, the spittle blew back into his face. Still, Hunn became enraged. He picked the boy up by his shoulders and threw him out the open door.
Then Hunn grabbed the second teenager and repeated his demands: “What are the codes? Where are your Korans?” This kid was trembling, too, but he just kept shaking his head. Either he was being antagonistic or he didn’t know anything. It didn’t matter. A mighty kick from Hunn’s boot and he followed his brother out the door.
Then Hunn turned to Jamaal. He’d already wet himself.
“OK, my friend,” Hunn said, moving him a little closer to the open doorway. “It’s time for you to talk….”
But Jamaal knew talk or not, he was already dead. He decided to take matters into his own hands. He broke free of Hunn’s grasp and scrambled for the open doorway himself. He screamed, but his cry was lost in the high winds. Hunn lunged after him; two other Delta troopers did as well. But he was already halfway out the opening. Hunn managed to grab hold of his pant leg. It started to rip. Hunn tried to hold on tight, a very hard thing to do, as gravity and forward motion were battling him. The Delta guys flying the copter quickly reduced their airspeed, but this just caused the aircraft to start bucking all over the sky. Other troopers jumped in now, trying to keep Jamaal from going out the door, but it was just too much. Jamaal’s pant leg finally ripped in two. Hunn made one last grab, clutching at the boy’s sneaker. It came off—but Jamaal kept going. He fell, screaming, to the Persian Gulf two miles below.
“God damn it!” Hunn cursed, holding Jamaal’s Air Jordan in his hand. “You little muthafucker!”
The other troopers couldn’t believe it. Hunn had freaked again—and that meant they’d just come a very long way for nothing. Hunn was fuming. He collapsed in the corner of the cabin and started punching himself in the head. What the hell had he been thinking? He should have taken all measures to keep Jamaal alive.
But then he looked down at the sports shoe and noticed something. There was a square compartment cut out of the inside of the sneaker. Tucked snugly inside this hole was something wrapped in wax paper. A bomb? Hunn thought. Al Qaeda had used shoe bombs before. But he didn’t think so. He took out his knife and pried the object free. He unwrapped the wax paper.
Inside was a tiny, abridged copy of the Koran, Arabic on one side, English on the other.
The name of the hill was Saal-el-Qazell.
The Blackhawk had landed here with a mighty thump 10 minutes after the terrorist Jamaal and his two brothers went out the open door. Though the Delta guys could fly copters themselves, they didn’t quite have the touch of the Air Force pilots. Thus the less than gentle landing.
The hill was about one hundred miles southeast of Riyadh; the people onboard could see the Gulf coast from here. They’d set down for the same reason the copter was now just a skeleton of its previous self: to save gas. Noonan had come through with 1,000 gallons, but he’d made it crystal clear that the bar was closed after that. That’s why only one of the Harriers had accompanied the stripped-down gunship on the Jamaal raid. That’s why the fighter had carried only one bomb—and that’s why it had already returned to the ship.
Not so the Blackhawk.
Hunn had put his men in a defensive perimeter around the aircraft. The hill was extremely isolated. Night was closing in and he was confident no one would see them up here. He had with him one of the few working sat phones the team still possessed; it had a dying battery and its scrambler was barely functioning. He was to use it only in an emergency or to report any bombshell information as a result of the Jamaal raid. Or to tell the ship they were coming back empty-handed.
All he had, though, was Jamaal’s holy book, the abridged Koran. Did it contain anything that could help them at this late hour? Hunn would have to find out, quick.
He was sitting in the rear of the helicopter, holding the tiny copy of the Koran in front of him. It was about one hundred pages long and made out of paper so thin, one could almost see through it. Even its cover was made of thin paper.
He studied the book closely. Unlike most dog-eared Korans found in the hands of true believers, this one’s pages had been hardly turned. Hunn thought this odd. If this was in Jamaal’s possession, in such a secreted place, it seemed logical that it was one of the coded Korans Delta had been told to look for. But how could Hunn break the code sitting way the hell out here?
He tried an old counterspy trick. He held the book, pages up, about twelve inches above the helicopter’s floor and then let it drop. He was hoping the book would fall open to a certain page, indicating a place its owner had concentrated on. But no such luck. Hunn did his experiment a half-dozen times. Each time the book fell open to a different page.
A few frustrating minutes passed. Hunn’s mood grew darker. He called his first corporal, the guy named Zangrelli, back to the copter. They discussed every method they knew about spies and codes. But nothing seemed to click. The Koran was small, on thin paper, and hardly used. There seemed to be nothing else special about it. Hunn became further agitated. Something big was going down very soon, and due to his actions the one chance they had to prevent it was probably gone. He’d fucked up, big-time.
He lit up a rare cigarette and continued thumbing through the small book. Before Delta left the ship, Bates had provided them with many of the phrases Kazeel had recited over and over on the CD. Hunn began rereading a section where one of these phrases had been found. Exhaling a lungful of smoke, he noticed something. Some of the smoke seemed to be passing right through the page.
He tried it again. He blew a mouthful of smoke at the page—and some leaked out the other side.
“Fucking, hey!” he exploded.
He repeated the procedure for Corporal Zangrelli. Sure enough, they could see tiny wisps of smoke leaking out on the other side of the page.
Hunn turned on his flashlight and held the page in question up against its lens. Tiny shafts of light came streaming through.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he swore softly.
He immediately called the ship. Martinez got on the line and Hunn explained what he had found.
“Pinpricks,” the Delta officer told him. “I haven’t heard of that one in
a long time.”
It was an old spy trick. Tiny holes had been punched above some of the letters in the words contained in the phrases Kazeel had spoken. The holes were apparent only when the page was held up to the light. They were just about impossible to see otherwise.
“The phrases Kazeel speaks at the beginning of the CD-ROM tell the mook where to look in the Koran,” Martinez explained to Hunn. “When he finds the pinholes, he matches the letters below them to form new words. Those words probably lead to the codes that open the rest of the CD.”
But they didn’t have time for the copter to fly back to the Ocean Voyager with the information. Hunn would have to recite for those back on the ship every letter he could find with a pinprick punched above it. He went through the whole book and found more than two dozen such letters above the phrases Kazeel had spoken on the CD. It took more than an hour, this as the stars came out and the desert hill became extremely cold. Toward the end, the cell phone began seriously losing power. And because Ocean Voyager was actually moving away from them, the reception became weaker with each passing minute. But finally they were done.
Hunn then asked Martinez what he and his men should do next.
The Delta officer replied with just two words: “Sit tight.”
White Room #2, aboard Ocean Voyager
Gil Bates lost no time putting his Spooks to work crunching the information sent by Hunn.
They were all familiar with the pinprick spy technique; it went clear back to the Middle Ages. But they knew it was not as simple as the Delta guys hoped. Frequently the pinprick technique was used as a double code, and that was the case here. The letters found designated in Jamaal’s Koran did not automatically form the encryption words. That would have been too easy. Instead the letters formed what amounted to a huge Islamic anagram, 30 characters long. The real magic words were hidden inside this jumble. It was now up to the Spooks to find them out.
