Strike Force Alpha

by Mack Maloney

  Still Kennedy just shrugged and said: “Ain’t no such thing as a bad landing.”

  Sixty miles to the south

  It had been an unusual morning for Jean Rosseau and his partner, André.

  Both Belgians, they worked as helicopter pilots in the massive Shell-France oil fields at Dakka Abbis, Iran. Just a half-mile inland from the shore of Hormuz, these fields were among the largest in the Persian Gulf. They were a little country unto themselves, carved out of the empty Iranian desert, a conglomeration of oil pumps, derricks, open wells, flames burning bright, highways, tank farms, employee towns, and two dozen gigantic man-made lakes containing the millions of gallons of water needed for this particularly arid pumping operation. And everywhere huge pipelines running off in every direction but especially toward the sea.

  The day started with Rosseau’s Bell-Textron X-1 helicopter being grounded due to the movement of a large U.S. naval force through the nearby strait. This was a relatively routine situation these days. Normally Rosseau and André spent their morning hours flying around the outskirts of the Dakka Abbis fields, checking for any leaks in the spiderwork of pipelines. This morning, though, they spent washing the grime from their aircraft.

  Just after 10:00 A.M., they heard a series of huge explosions. At least six of them, right in a row. They were coming not from the oil fields but from the west, out over the Gulf. Soon after, Jean and André saw huge clouds of black smoke rising above the horizon. Their tiny helicopter base was located in one of the most isolated sections of the massive oil field. They tried using their shortwave radio to see if anything was being reported about the explosions but could find nothing.

  Then, about ten minutes after spotting the smoke, they received a cell call from their boss back at the Dakka Abbis field headquarters, some twenty miles away. He was hysterical. Something incomprehensible had happened, he told them. An Arab airliner had been shot down by the American Navy and it had crashed into one of the oil field’s artificial lakes, 16 miles north of their base. The boss ordered them to fly to the crash site immediately.

  Rosseau and André were in the air two minutes later. They were both certain this was some kind of false report, though. What were the chances that a plane would crash into one of their fake lakes when there was nothing but sand everywhere else? But then again, they’d heard the explosions and seen the smoke out over the water. Maybe all that had something to do with all this.

  The Bell was a fast aircraft, and they were coming up on their destination within five minutes. It was Cooling Pool #17, the place where their boss claimed the airliner had come down. But they could see no smoke, no fire, no wreckage. Nothing that would be associated with a plane crash.

  They made one long sweep around the cooling pool just to be sure. It was about a quarter-mile long, 800 feet across, and in some places up to 50 feet deep. To their astonishment, at the very southern end of the lake they spotted pieces of debris coming up to the surface. Suitcases, seats, pieces of the plane itself. And even more amazing, in among that debris there were people.

  Rosseau did not hesitate. He turned the controls over to André and told him to get down as close as possible to the debris field. Meanwhile Rosseau tied a safety belt around his waist. The next thing he knew, he was hanging out of the copter’s right-side doorway.

  Ten feet below him he saw an incredible sight. Floating somehow among the wreckage there was a man who either was bald or had his hair burned away. He was holding in his arms no fewer than six people, survivors, all injured but alive.

  Rosseau couldn’t believe it. There didn’t seem to be any way anyone could have survived this crash. But here before him were at least seven souls. The man was holding one of them up to him.

  Rosseau stepped onto the copter’s strut, this while yelling for André to get lower—lower—lower still! It took several agonizing seconds for the aircraft to get low enough for Rosseau to grab the first person the bald man was passing to him. It was a young girl, maybe six or so. She was crying, bleeding, but quite alive. Rosseau grabbed the child and with one motion lifted her up and into the copter. Rosseau turned back to the water and now the bald man was lifting up an elderly Arab lady to him. Where this man was getting his strength Rosseau simply could not fathom. But if he can do it, then so must I, he thought. He grabbed the woman and with all his strength swung her up into the copter, too.

  He leaned back out and the man had another child now, a young boy, holding him over his head. Rosseau grabbed the child around the shoulders and hauled him into the copter as well.

  But now, a problem. They were close to their weight limit, as the copter was full of fuel and was suddenly carrying three unexpected passengers. It was already beginning to gyrate too much. Rosseau had no choice. He screamed for André to back off. They would have to unload the three survivors on the edge of the pool and then come back for the others.

  By this time a truck full of oil field workers had arrived on the scene. André maneuvered the copter as close as possible to them, and without even setting down Rosseau passed the three survivors out to them.

  Then he screamed for André to return to the pool. But André now had another problem. The copter’s engines were overheating. No rotary craft liked hovering close to the desert’s surface; the heat was too intense. The Bell X-1 was especially temperamental in that regard. But Rosseau screamed at André to just do it.

  And André did. He brought the Bell up and sideways and soon they were over the patch of debris again. To Rosseau’s relief, the bald man was still there and was still holding the three other survivors in his arms. Rosseau screamed again for André to get as close as possible to the water’s surface. Timidly he did so. The spray from the water was even greater now, but Rosseau could not feel it, though it was soaking him. He climbed back out onto the strut and reached out, and the man pushed another person up to him, a middle-aged lady, in Arabic dress, wailing but alive. She landed in the cabin of the copter with a thump.

  Rosseau went back out onto the strut. The bald man was holding up a boy of about thirteen. The kid had some life in him. With just a boost from Rosseau, he climbed into the helicopter himself. The man was now holding just one more person, a girl, 20 years old or so, possibly a stewardess.

  She was badly injured; both her legs were broken. Rosseau had to lean very far out to grab her. The bald man was practically lifting her over his head at this point. Rosseau just couldn’t imagine how he was doing it. By grabbing onto her dress and under one shoulder Rosseau managed to get her halfway into the copter. The kid helped pull her in the rest of the way.

  The copter was now unstable again, but Rosseau was no longer concerned. It was time to rescue the rescuer. He turned back to the water but to his horror saw the bald man was slowly drifting away. And for the first time Rosseau noticed the man was bleeding heavily as well. But Rosseau refused to just let him go. He reached out, twice nearly falling into the deep water himself, but the man just looked up at him, smiled faintly, and shook his head. That’s when Rosseau realized the bald man was wearing a military uniform. An American uniform. He had an American flag patch on his shoulder, with the silhouettes of two tall buildings within. And Rosseau could see a name tag stitched above the man’s left breast pocket. It read: ZANGRELLI.

  Rosseau tried once more to grab onto the man—but it was no use. He looked up at Rosseau one more time and mouthed the word, Thanks….

  Then he slipped below the water for good.

  Saudi Arabia

  At about the same time this was happening, Tom Santos was checking into the Royal Ramada in downtown Riyadh.

  His flight down from London had been extraordinarily quick, another asset of flying the half-filled skies. The cab ride from the airport to the hotel seemed to have broken the sound barrier as well.

  Following instructions he’d received back in Chicago, he registered at the hotel under the fictitious name of Richard Starkey. He discovered that his room had been booked and paid in advance for the past
two months. He went up to the suite, exhausted from his flight and experiencing intense jet lag. It was a nice room, though, much bigger than his digs back in Chicago, with a great view of the Grand Mosque of Riyadh just a few blocks away.

  There was a nondescript civil aviation uniform hanging in the room’s otherwise empty closet. Dark pants, dark jacket, white shirt, dark tie. It had been left there earlier this day. It was still encased in dry cleaners’ plastic and had Santos’s real name written on a slip of paper pinned to the coat hanger. He pulled the uniform out of the plastic and found a letter in the jacket’s inside pocket. It was addressed to him.

  Santos read it—and started to cry. It contained instructions for the final phase of his mission, along with some perspective on this top-secret operation in which he had played just a small part, up until now. It also contained an apology from the guy named Bobby Murphy. The mystery man explained in great detail his unorthodox philosophy of fighting fire with fire and was so persuasive, Santos could not disagree with him, even though it called for him to make an enormous sacrifice.

  The letter fell from his shaking hands. He sat on the edge of the bed, in shock. Finally he knew what was really going on, and that reality was devastating. But he also understood why he’d been chosen and what an important role he was still expected to play. In his note Murphy had told Santos that he could just walk away and no one would ever be the wiser. But he knew he would fulfill his mission, for two simple reasons: Because he was an American. And because it, in the end, was probably the right thing to do.

  The letter also said he would be getting a very important phone call, one that could come at any time. When it happened, Santos was to climb into the uniform and follow the caller’s instructions from there.

  He finally composed himself and felt a strange peace come over him. He took the bottle of yellow pills from his pocket and unceremoniously threw them in the wastebasket. He wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

  Then he climbed up on the bed, kicked off his shoes, and turned on the TV. The cable news stations were going crazy. Something was happening right here in the Persian Gulf. Another terrorism thing—a big one—though none of the newscasters knew exactly what. Santos couldn’t have cared less. He was beyond all that now. He flipped through the channels, finally landing on a “truth is stranger than fiction” show. It looked about thirty years old, was brown and scratchy, and had very bad English subtitles.

  Ironically, the show began with a segment titled: “Can the Dead Walk among Us?”

  Santos just shook his head and actually laughed a little.

  “Yes,” he said to himself. “They sure can….”

  A moment later, the telephone rang.

  Chapter 30

  When Ryder reached the Strait of Hormuz, the scene almost defied description.

  The waters below were churned up with so many ships, going full speed ahead, they looked like they were trailing tidal waves behind them. Thick clouds of smoke stretched almost the length of the strait’s transit channel and at its narrowest point, on either shore as well. At least two Navy ships were on fire and dead in the water. Others were smoking heavily but still under way. Parts of the strait itself were aflame, as pools of aviation fuel were burning fiercely on the surface of the water.

  But it was the airspace above the battle group that was like a vision from a fever dream. The sky was filled with warplanes. The carrier’s F-14s and F-18s certainly—but also F-16s and F-15s, land-based U.S. Air Force fighters that had rushed to the scene. The Air Force planes were circling between 15,000 and 25,000 feet. The Navy guys were way down low, in the thick air around 12,000. The combination, seen by Ryder from 15 miles afar, looked like a kind of weird aerial carousel, its center of gravity being the Abraham Lincoln, that gigantic flat gray object among smaller ones, plowing forward now at 30 knots at least, kicking up the biggest waves in the narrow waters below.

  This was what the U.S. military in the Gulf had been practicing for months: how to protect a carrier in a time of emergency. Saturate the area with warplanes and keep them moving as the carrier moved. It was a gigantic outgrowth of the battle group’s own defensive umbrella really. The support planes were flying its periphery—ECM jammers, small AWACs, communications craft, and even big refueling tankers. And every Navy ship below was broadcasting warnings for all other aircraft in the area to stay away, that a state of war existed. This meant the airspace above the battle group was a free-fire zone. Anything coming near would be fair game.

  Ryder counted the wreckage of at least three big airliners floating in the water as well. He saw more than a few downed U.S. fighters, too, all of them Navy planes. What happened to them? It wasn’t like the airliners were shooting back. They had to be victims of friendly fire.

  Ryder went into an orbit of his own, staying well away from the gigantic moving air screen. He’d expected to find Phelan down here by now, but the sky was so crowded, it was hard to pick out just one plane. Ryder began running through his VHF band radio channels, looking for one that might let him get a message to someone below. He soon came to one channel that nearly blew out his eardrums. It sounded like hundreds of voices speaking at once. Fighter pilots certainly, but all of them very excited.

  Why the sudden anxiety? Another airliner was coming in.

  It was a 737, a small Boeing regional carrier. It was green and white, the colors of Omani Civil Airways. Its original destination had been Malta. It was streaking in low now, around four thousand feet, out of the northeast. There was another flood of excited calls over the radio channel. Then Ryder saw four Navy F-14s break from the pack and pounce. The rest of the circling warplanes expanded their orbits to give the Navy killer squad some room. The F-14s quickly took up positions above and behind the airliner. No air-to-air missiles would be fired here. That’s how some of the Navy planes had been shot down earlier. The Navy had learned that lesson fast, so this would be the work of cannons.

  When the four Tomcats finally opened up, their resulting weapons’ fire looked like a storm of lightning going sideways. The streams of high-explosive shells converged on the target at just about the same time. The airliner’s tail fin was the first to go. Then the engines on its wings. Then the wings themselves. The more hits it took, the slower the 737 flew. The slower it flew, the closer the Navy jets could get to it, to fire into it further. It was eerily methodical. When it came, the airliner’s explosion was tremendous. The smoke was black and hideous. There was only a cloud of ash and small debris left when it cleared, some of it on fire, to rain down on the ships below.

  That’s when Ryder’s cell phone rang.

  It was Phelan.

  He could barely speak. “Man, did you see that?” he asked Ryder, huffing and puffing between deep gulps of oxygen. “I knocked two down myself, I think. And I was in on two more….”

  Ryder was shocked. He almost didn’t recognize Phelan’s voice. The young pilot was excited, certainly. Pumped up and out of breath. But there was something disturbing in his tone, too. Almost maniacal. He had been flying on the periphery of the carrier’s expanded CAP, keeping pace with a couple of ECM Prowlers. Thirty seconds later, he was riding off Ryder’s left wing.

  Ryder quickly briefed Phelan on his encounter with the two airliners over the desert, then asked if he knew how to call the carrier. Phelan gave him the location of the UHF channel being used by the Lincoln’s CIC. Ryder broke in on the frequency and identified himself as being attached to an aerial special operations unit, just as Phelan had done earlier. The guy in the CIC didn’t question Ryder’s credentials. He briefly told him what had happened over the desert. The guy took the report, betraying no emotion, and told Ryder to stand by.

  No sooner had Ryder done this than the VHF band erupted with voices again. At that moment, another 737 flew by him, not 1,500 feet below his right wing. It was painted in strange orange and green swirls, the colors of Arab Bali Airlines. The plane had already started a nosedive toward the carrier.

  With
out a word, Phelan peeled away. He caught up to the falling airliner and, coming at it from a right angle, fired his cannon directly into the cockpit. It exploded in flames. A quick loop and he sent another burst into the airplane’s belly, shooting up either its fuel tank or a whole lot of luggage. At that same moment four Navy jets arrived on the scene, the designated hit squad. They started perforating the airliner with cannons, too. But Phelan was the most voracious.

  The big plane started to spin; vast quantities of smoke began trailing behind it. The Navy backed off when the airplane went into a free fall. But Phelan continued to follow it down. He managed to sever one of its engine roots with his cannon fire. Half the left-side wing broke away. He shot off what was left of the tail wing, too. It disintegrated into hundreds of pieces. All this only made the jet’s death spiral more severe, but Phelan never stopped firing. The massive piece of wreckage hit the water and exploded. But seconds later, Phelan was down on the deck, strafing the remains.

  Ryder felt his stomach do another flip. Phelan’s piloting skills were just astonishing. He was moving faster, turning quicker, and firing more accurately than the Navy’s true fighter jets and pulling beaucoup G-forces in the process.

  But what was happening here? Even now, Phelan was still down on the deck, still firing into the debris. Why the overkill to the nth degree?

  Ryder called him, not on the radio but on the phone. That way he could talk to Phelan without fear of being heard by anyone else.

  “What are you doing?” Ryder asked him sternly. “Are you OK?”

  But Phelan answered him strangely. “I think I got three,” he said, his voice still husky. Then he repeated: “And I was in on another two.”

  “But why are you wasting gas and ammunition?” Ryder asked him. “We’re supposed to be smarter than that.”

  There was a short pause; then Phelan replied angrily, “It’s just like you said. We got to protect our own. That’s what I’m doing. What the hell are you doing?” With that, he hung up.