Strike Force Alpha

by Mack Maloney

  Zangrelli fired again. He caught the second man as he was trying to scramble through the bathroom. With half his back blown away, the man collapsed into the tub, dragging the shower curtain down with him.

  Just one left now…

  But this guy they needed alive.

  Hunn checked his watch. They’d been inside the penthouse for two minutes—an eternity by the measurement of these things. And now it was getting hard to see with the wind whipping fiercely and paper flying in every direction. Still he silently ordered his men to split up. He and Zangrelli went through the bathroom; the shotgun men took the slighter longer route through a small hidden kitchen.

  They trapped the last man in the master bedroom, the four Delta troopers converging on him from two different directions. They turned on their combat lights and directed them at the man, who was cowering in the corner, near the edge of a very unkempt bed. He was certainly not dressed as most hard-core Al Qaeda members usually were. He was wearing a white dress shirt, black pants, and highly polished shoes. He was clean-shaven, another rarity for the jihad gang. And his complexion was not as dark as some of the mooks Hunn and his men had come up against in the past. For want of a better word, this guy seemed almost sophisticated.

  Christ, Hunn thought. Did we even hit the right place?

  Zangrelli started speaking to the man in Arabic. He was explaining there was only one way he was getting out of here alive and that was as their prisoner. Zangrelli was a tough kid from Brooklyn, a young Sylvester Stallone look-alike. But he had a way about him, so just about anyone would feel him a kindred spirit. The man in the corner was frightened but indicated he knew what Zangrelli was trying to say. He actually straightened up a bit.

  A surreal moment ensued: the four huge soldiers, looking like space invaders weighted down with their high-tech gear, standing in the lavish bedroom, the swirl of paper nearly blinding them, the slight, terrified man in the corner staring back at them.

  Zangrelli kept on talking. They just wanted to ask him some questions, they would promise not to harm him, and they were sorry his friends had to die—all lies, of course, but comforting nevertheless. Yet just as it appeared that Zangrelli’s words were getting through, the man calmly reached into his pocket and came out with a pistol, the same nickel-plated type his comrades had died with. The Pumpers immediately raised their weapons, but Hunn held up his hand, telling his men to hold their fire.

  The man never pointed the gun at them. Instead he put it against his own head.

  “I do not want to live for what is about to happen,” he said in perfect English.

  Then he pulled the trigger.

  The bullet went through his left ear and came out his right eye, striking the bedroom wall beyond. He stood there for a moment looking at the Americans. He mouthed just one more word: Crazy…

  Then he collapsed, dead before he hit the floor.

  “God damn, what’s with these guys!” Hunn roared. Once again their chance to extract information from a living, breathing mook had been thwarted.

  Zangrelli reached down and checked the guy’s pulse. He was already cold. “They just know what’s coming, Sarge,” he said darkly. “Nothing more to it than that….”

  The four troopers just stood there, frozen in the moment. The bizarre whirlwind continued swirling around them, scraps of paper blowing wildly, a blizzard on a cool Persian night. Then Hunn nodded to Zangrelli and they made their way back to the large bedroom, the one where the big picture window had been blown out. It took both of them using all their strength to push its door closed, the wind was that intense. But as soon as the minitornado was confined, the storm of paper in all the other rooms settled down.

  That’s when someone finally hit the lights.

  There was blood everywhere. And many more mountains of dirty dishes than they first realized. And the piles of dirty laundry stretched from one end of the penthouse to the other. But the troopers could see no huge guns. No test tubes full of germs or spores. No nuclear bombs. And certainly no one who looked like a top mutt in Al Qaeda.

  Zangrelli checked the KIAs. The two dead men in the hallway were light-skinned Somalis. They had Muslim Brotherhood symbols tattooed on their forearms.

  “We didn’t kill enough of those assholes that night?” Hunn asked.

  “Missed by two, I guess,” Zangrelli replied.

  More surprising were the other bodies scattered around the suite. They looked like no more than four dead waiters, each one in white shirt, black pants, high-polished shoes.

  “Did these guys even fire back?” one of the Pumpers asked.

  No one replied.

  Zangrelli patted one body; it was clean except for a newspaper clipping detailing the weather in the Persian Gulf and a photograph made bloody from the fighting. The newspaper had been printed in Algeria. The photograph was of Abdul Abu Qatad.

  “Isn’t he the guy we wasted in the wedding hall?” Zangrelli asked Hunn.

  “No, it’s his brother,” Hunn replied, studying the photo. “The guy whose son we had tap-dancing from the ceiling. Both of those assholes used Algerians as their moneymen. And that’s who these guys were. Their dogs….”

  Zangrelli couldn’t believe it. “Damn, I knew they were like one big family,” he said. “But who would have guessed this Qatad guy would come back to haunt us?”

  Hunn checked his watch again. Just three minutes, 10 seconds had passed since he first kicked in the door. The sirens were growing outside. More of them. He could also sense heightened activity on the streets below and more noises coming from the bottom floors of the hotel itself. Whatever else they had to do, they would be wise to do it quick.

  But what had they stumbled upon here, if anything?

  They finally turned their attention to all the paper scattered around the suite. Hundreds of sheets were still tacked to the walls, moving like wash in a gentle breeze. Hunn pulled down a handful and scanned them.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said suddenly. “Take a look at this shit….”

  The troopers did as told. A couple examined pieces of paper that had now settled to the floor; others took more sheets off the wall. Every sheet was the same: a computer printout with lines of letters and numbers, all arranged in the same format, all bearing the same kind of information.

  It was that information that was so baffling.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Zangrelli said after reading over a dozen sheets. “Does it?”

  Hunn shook his head, then pulled out his sat phone and quickly dialed the ship.

  “The brass ain’t going to believe this,” he said.

  Aboard Ocean Voyager

  “Airline tickets?” Martinez was saying into the phone a moment later. “Are you sure, Sergeant?”

  The team leaders were still in Murphy’s cabin, still tossing the place. They’d been anxiously awaiting this call, though, so much so, Martinez grabbed the phone before the end of the first ring.

  The Delta officer listened for a few moments, his face screwed up into first an expression of almost amusement, then disbelief.

  Then he asked Hunn, “Any chance you’re making a mistake?”

  But Hunn was obviously convincing Martinez that what he was reporting was accurate.

  Finally the Delta officer asked: “How long can you hold that position?…Can you make it ten minutes, please?…And stay by the phone.”

  Martinez hung up and turned back to the rest of them.

  “There were no weapons or explosives in the hotel,” he told them soberly. “No germs. No nukes. No Big Cheese. Just six guys—now deceased.”

  “What did they find then?” Phelan asked him. “Did you say tickets?”

  “Airline tickets—or more accurately, airline ticket receipts,” Martinez replied, the quizzical expression never leaving his face. “The kind of E-ticket you can buy off the Internet these days. There are thousands of them over there. For hundreds of flights, all over the world. All of them expired. All of
them worthless.

  “What the fuck is that about?” Curry asked, bewildered.

  “The screwup with the airlines,” Ryder said suddenly. “The thing that’s been all over the news. Those mooks must have been the ones who hacked into the airlines’ computers and kept booking reservations over and over again.

  The rest of them just collapsed into their seats. “Man, that’s got to be it,” Gallant said.

  “But what’s it have to do with the Next Big Thing?” Curry asked. “Or is there any link at all?”

  Martinez just shook his head. “The info about that hotel was on the CD-ROM,” he said, still baffled. “There must be some connection….”

  Phelan said: “But is the Next Big Thing just a plot to screw up the airlines? Make so many reservations that all their tickets become worthless?”

  “They’ve boasted about going after economic targets before,” Gallant offered. “And the airlines are a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Between screwing up the ticket computers and calling in bomb threats, they’ve really put the whammy on them.”

  But Martinez waved these suggestions away. “Look, the airlines were fucked up long before any of this happened,” he pointed out. “Plus, the CD-ROM clearly shows a bunch of guys ready to die. And I don’t think they meant from airline food.”

  “Then why the room full of useless tickets?” Phelan asked.

  Silence descended on the cabin. The wind outside was beginning to howl again. The five men were tired. Nerves were frayed, their supply of brainpower dwindling. Once again, they were facing another brick wall, another mountain to climb.

  “Well, maybe not all of them are blanks,” Ryder finally said, out of the blue. “Maybe in the pile somewhere there are some that still can be used.”

  “Used by who, though?” Gallant asked. “And why?”

  Ryder shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “But it might be interesting to find out.”

  Martinez thought about this for exactly two seconds. Then called Hunn back.

  “Are you sure all of those receipts are for tickets on old overbooked flights?” he asked the Delta soldier. “Any chance some haven’t expired yet?”

  There was a silence from the other end of the phone. It lasted 10 long seconds. Then: “It might take us a while to check that,” Hunn replied. “I mean, this place is knee-deep, wall-to-wall. And I think we finally woke up the neighbors.”

  “Well, you’ve still got to do it, Sergeant,” Martinez told him. “And I mean toot-sweet.”

  The lobby of the Royal Dubai was in chaos.

  Most of the building’s lights had gone out. All of its electronic equipment, its computers, elevators, fire alarms, and telephones, had gone dead, too.

  In the midst of this, the Dubai state police had arrived on the scene, alerted by nearby residents who first reported a helicopter had crashed onto the roof of the hotel. Fire apparatus had also surrounded the building.

  Inside, the confusion turned to panic as guests came streaming down the staircases, many still in their night-clothes, wailing that the building had been taken over by the terrorists and that they were shooting all the maids.

  Two miles away, the military district commander of Dubai City received a call from the police. On their suggestion, he ordered his one and only aircraft into the air to report on the unfolding situation. It was a sparkling new PAH-1 Tiger Euro-copter delivered to the Emirates not a week before. The French-built copter was on par with the dangerous U.S. Army Apache gunship. It carried a slew of high-tech weapons, many of which the two-man crew actually knew how to use by now.

  It was this helicopter that the Delta troops on the hotel roof saw approaching just about the same time Hunn was hanging up from his last conversation with Martinez.

  This was big trouble. There were only ten Delta troops on the entire mission, including the two amateur pilots. Six of those troopers, Hunn and company, were down below, herding up to a dozen of the hotel’s maids into the penthouse. Two more troopers were watching the hallway that led from the roof to the door of the suite. That left just two on top of the roof itself, guarding the battered, stripped-down, unarmed Blackhawk helicopter.

  As soon as they heard the Tiger gunship coming, the roof men called down to the two soldiers guarding the hallway and told them to get up top immediately. They had no way to contact Hunn and no time to do it. Whatever was going to happen with the powerful Dubai military chopper, it seemed it would be these four men who would face it.

  The Tiger was brimming with machine guns and cannons. A 30-second barrage could produce enough firepower to shave an entire floor off the top of the Royal Dubai building. The same kind of fusillade would reduce the old Eight Ball chopper to a pile of metallic dust, taking the four troopers along with it and effectively stranding the rest of the squad in very hostile territory one floor below.

  Thus the dire situation for the Delta operators. There would be no rescue force coming to get them this night. No Harriers, no Torch ship, no cavalry riding in at the last moment to save the day. In many ways, the Delta troops were the cavalry. And tonight, they were on their own.

  It was in the midst of this precarious situation that Corporal Zangrelli suddenly arrived on the roof. He’d been sent up by Hunn to retrieve binding tape from the Eight Ball and, not finding the two Delta guards in the hallway, double-timed it to the top. He came on the scene just as the Tiger was turning toward the hotel. It was still about two thousand feet out, but moving in a very aggressive manner.

  Zangrelli quickly took stock of the situation and what he and the others had on hand to defend themselves. It was not very much. They didn’t have any of the heavy weaponry the Eight Ball use to carry—again the weight factor had taken precedence. No shoulder-fired SAMs, no RPGs. Each man had just his M16 rifle and nothing more. They didn’t even have the big .50-caliber gun Zangrelli had used in clearing the penthouse. He’d left it below with the Pumpers.

  So it would be five men on top of a roof, with rifles, against an attack helicopter that ranked up there with the Apache and the Hind. Very bad odds.

  “What should we do, Corporal?” one of his men asked him.

  Zangrelli thought a moment and then replied: “Get the flag from under the backseat….”

  The pilots of the Tiger gunship had been on the radio with their base from the moment they’d taken off.

  Their commander had no idea what was happening at the Royal Dubai—and neither did the pilots. The military station was getting reports second-and third-hand from the managers of the hotel, from the state police, even from the fire department. Yet no two stories matched. The hotel employees were insisting that armed men were running wild through the hotel, massacring the cleaning staff and shooting guests at random. The police thought a robbery, possibly even a jewel heist, was happening, as all the activity seemed to be centered on the hotel’s penthouse. Yet the fire department claimed they could smell gasoline in the lobby—and that terrorists were about to turn the building into a towering inferno.

  The only thing that everyone agreed on was that whatever was happening, the perpetrators had arrived by helicopter and that aircraft was still sitting on the hotel’s roof.

  The Tiger gunship pilots reported that, indeed, a helicopter was visible on the northeast corner, partially hidden in the glare of the building’s summit lights. For this reason, the Tiger pilots couldn’t get a solid ID on its type, but that really didn’t matter. Their commander wanted to justify his base getting such a powerhouse of a gunship. This would be the perfect opportunity to do so.

  So he ordered his men to go in shooting.

  The pilots began punching commands into their weapons computer, deciding to use the nose cannon, at least on the first pass. The Royal Dubai hotel was a valuable piece of real estate and they weren’t in the business of doing any property damage. However, the aiming system on the cannon was so precise, they were confident they could take out the stationary helicopter without turning the 10-story luxury resort into a 9-st
ory one.

  With their weapons set, they reconfirmed the fire order with their commander. Once again, he told them to proceed. The pilots were both anxious and excited; this would be the first time their new multimillion-dollar aircraft would fire its weapons in anger. They didn’t want anything to go wrong.

  They were about a half-mile south of the building when they rolled in for their attack. Their weapons computer had locked onto the helicopter on the roof and would open up automatically at 400 feet out. The pilots could see people on the roof, hastily moving around, but they were of no consequence now. They had their orders to fire and fire they would.

  But at about seven hundred feet out, the pilots saw something else—and suddenly they weren’t so keen on firing anymore. It was a frightening and incomprehensible sight. It also answered the question of just who had landed on top of the hotel and why they were causing such a ruckus.

  What the Tiger pilots found themselves looking at was five soldiers, standing right on the edge of the hotel roof, weapons raised and pointing at their incoming chopper. They were lined up in a forward combat position, straight and true, almost like a firing squad. Behind them, draped on the mysterious black helicopter, was a huge American flag.