Strike Force Delta s-4

by Mack Maloney

  “So how are we going to go in and get Delta Thunder then?” someone else asked.

  Murphy drained his drink. “How are we going to do it, you ask?” he said, revealing a rare smile. “Just like this… ”

  * * *

  Ryder headed below as soon as the meeting in the Captain’s Room wrapped up. There were things down here he had to attend to.

  He took the stairs, all six levels, a steep descent to the ship’s so-called service deck. It was a dank, cavernous place, illuminated mostly by blue halogen lights to cut down on any heat spikes that might leak to the decks above. Such things could tip a spy satellite or maritime recon plane that all was not kosher in the containership’s cargo hold.

  It seemed like years, and not just a couple months, since Ryder had been down here in the belly of the beast. He was always surprised how cramped it was. The Ocean Voyager was a huge vessel, but its cargo bay was permanently crammed with the necessities of its strange mission. Potable water, dry food, fuel, bombs, a million other things that couldn’t be kept safely in containers up on top would end up down here. The White Rooms also took up space, as did the engine suite, which had to be big enough to fit the four jet-engine turbines and all the gear needed to turn the ship’s quartet of propulsion screws. Add to this all the clutter that just came along with the interior of a containership: overhead beams, webs of wires, bulkheads, ladders, and pipes everywhere. It was as crowded down here as it was up on deck.

  Ryder made his way through this maze now, heading to the hangar section. It was located about two-thirds of the way down the hold, next to the pair of powerful aircraft elevators. This was probably the most crowded place on the ship. As it was, the team’s two original Superhawk helicopters barely fit inside this allotted area. Now they had four of the exotic choppers, and the new pumped-up version had an extra-long tail, a bulbous nose, and, again, was as wide as a truck. Finally reaching the hangar area, Ryder was amazed at how skillfully the Marine air mechanics had jammed the four copters into their postage stamp — size space.

  But shoehorned in between the new helicopters was another unusual aircraft. Droopy wings, strange nose, high tail, very weird exhaust tubes. It was an AV-8 Harrier, Ryder’s jump jet, the American version of the famous British VTOL fighter.

  Trouble was, his Harrier was a mess. It hadn’t flown since the hellish battle above Hormuz. In fact, Ryder had crash-landed it aboard the containership at the conclusion of the deadly melee. At one time, this Harrier had been a very cool aircraft. Its engine was extremely powerful, and its wings were longer and stronger, meaning they could carry more and heavier bombs. The gun pod attached to the fuselage was not the typical 30mm weapon but a monstrous 50mm cannon. But now, due to the extensive battle damage he had incurred at Hormuz, the jump jet looked like nothing more than a pair of wings hanging off a bucket of bolts.

  It was close to midnight. They were traveling so fast, they would be close to the coast of Africa in just two days, an incredibly swift voyage. The team would be going into action soon after that, and Ryder hadn’t even sat in the battered jet since his crash landing, never mind taking it airborne. It was important that he check it out now and get to be one with his airplane again.

  He rubbed his hand along its fuselage like an owner stroking his ill thoroughbred. The small army of Marine mechanics was working feverishly on the copters nearby, getting them ready for the rescue mission. The Marine sergeant spotted Ryder and walked over. The Marine explained that as soon as they were allowed back on the ship his guys had done their best to put the Harrier back together. It had been close to a total wreck, so there was only so much they could do. The airframe and engine were sound and the electronic guts had been stitched back together, so the plane was flyable. But how long it would stay that way the gunny couldn’t say.

  Ryder thanked him and climbed into the cockpit. The view up here was only worse. There were so many weld patches on the upper wings and frame, they almost formed a weird kind of camouflage design. There were also hundreds of dents everywhere, big and small, plus the canopy was cracked in several places. He wondered if the plane would look any better up top in the sunlight, instead of in the gloomy blue light down here below. But then, quite possibly, it might look worse.

  Ryder spent the next 10 minutes doing diagnostic checks on his cockpit gear. The jarheads were right. All indications were that the primary systems needed for flight — engine, control surfaces, landing gear, flight computers, life support, and so on — could still perform. But to what capacity he would only know once he was airborne. He hoped everything would last at least long enough for him to fly the upcoming mission.

  Suddenly it got very quiet in the hangar area. All noise stopped; the rivet guns, the oil pumps, the external power generators, everything fell silent. Ryder could not see through the forest of copters, but it was obvious the Marine air mechanics had been distracted and all work had come to a halt. Ryder had a hunch why.

  Li Cho walked into the hangar area a moment later.

  She was dressed entirely in green camo, baseball cap included. Everything was tied back, everything was buttoned down, but she still looked stunning. Ryder had never seen camos worn quite like this. He couldn’t imagine her ever going into combat. Yet…

  He and she hadn’t really talked much since he’d been sprung from his litter-picking duties in Nevada the day before. The flight east in the Osprey had been whirlwind, as was their transfer over to the spy ship. In those few times they did speak, it had been cordial, all business.

  But they had a history. Two months before, when it was learned that the Al Qaeda missile team had stolen into the United States, a handful of Ghosts had made a spectacular escape from their prison in Gitmo and were soon on the trail of the terrorists. This group included Ryder, plus Li’s colleagues from the Defense Security Agency, the guys named Ozzi and Fox. The escapees needed a place of operations in the D.C. area and they needed a place to hide. As Li was the third member of the tiny DSA unit, they wound up hiding in her house just over the border in Virginia.

  During this time, she and Ryder had had an occasion to be alone, and in a sweet and unexpected moment she almost got him to talk about his deceased wife, something even his closest friends would never attempt to do. Awkward though it was, it had been a turning point of sorts for him. It was the first time since his wife’s death that he’d let his guard down and opened up, if just a little. He felt like a bit of sunlight had finally broken through to warm his ice-cold heart, at least for a little while. And it was all thanks to Li.

  That’s when she started creeping into his everyday thoughts, popping up at the most unusual times. This, too, was a big change for him. Not only had he pined for his wife every day since her death; he’d dreamed about her almost every night as well, sometimes for hours, sometimes just a few minutes. But now, in his always-troubled dreams, when in the past his wife would make an ethereal appearance, tapping him on the shoulder or calling out to him from a distance, Ryder would turn to find it was Li instead.

  Along with her colleagues Fox and Ozzi, she’d jumped over to Murphy’s team from the Defense Security Agency, essentially going AWOL for the greater good. And besides being drop-dead gorgeous, she was a brilliant military analyst, educated at Georgetown in counterterrorism. She was also very friendly with the rest of the Ghosts. She made for an unlikely one of the boys, yet she never had any problems conversing with any of them — all except for Ryder. With him she was always a bit cautious and shy, while still aware of the connection they’d made at her house that night. He took her reticence as a good thing. It meant she was thinking about him and that’s why she was so on guard. He knew this because he was the same way with her — awkward and nervous, simply because he was always thinking about her.

  But, of course, Li was so beautiful, he was sure everyone else on the boat was thinking about her, too.

  She didn’t just walk by the hangar area. Instead she turned and started walking toward his plane. Jesuzz…,
he thought. Here she comes….

  Ryder was out of the cockpit quicker than if he’d hit the ejection seat. He landed on the deck, feetfirst, right in front of her.

  “Colonel? Am I disturbing you?” she asked with a nervous smile.

  He tried to stay cool. “Not at all… ”

  She was carrying a large plastic bag. “You didn’t get your new uniform yet, did you?”

  Ryder was still in his prison garb. “Not unless orange is the new color this year.”

  She handed the bag to him. “Mr. Murphy asked if I could bring this down to you. He thought it was a good way for me to start finding my way around the ship.”

  All right, Bobby, Ryder thought. He dug into the bag and came out with a new flight suit. It was all black, with many utility pockets, places for ammo, radios, thing like that. It had the team’s patch on its right shoulder. It showed the Twin Towers, with an American flag billowing behind them and the letters NYPD and FDNY floating in the background. Below was the team’s motto: We Will Never Forget. Ryder always felt a lump in his throat when he looked at the patch.

  “Nice threads,” he said. “But where’s yours?”

  She shrugged. “He never mentioned one for me. And I’m not even sure I should wear one. Being so new here.”

  “Well, I don’t know if there is a hard and fast rule…,” he said, sputtering, running out of gas.

  Suddenly she was out of things to say — and so was he. But he didn’t want her to leave.

  “What do you think of my ride?” he asked in some desperation.

  She turned to the Harrier. “Is this the McDonnell Douglas version?” she asked. “Or is it the Brit-built?”

  Ryder felt a zing go through him. A girl who knew the difference between a GR-8 and an AV-8? Now, that was sexy…

  “It’s a little bit of both,” he explained. “Murphy had someone put it together, slapped a lot of Stealth paint on it. Boosted the engine a bit. Flew good — at one time.”

  She studied the plane’s battered condition. “It’s a real disaster now, isn’t it? Can it still fly?” she asked, innocently running her hand along the wing.

  “I guess we’re going to find out,” Ryder replied.

  Another silence. The Marines had gone back to work. The boat was rocking wildly. She looked around the deck and half-sighed.

  “I’d heard a lot about this ship before I came aboard,” she said. “But never did I think I’d actually ride on it someday. It was more like something from a sci-fi book. I just wish I knew where everything was.”

  Ryder saw his opening and pounced. “You mean you haven’t been given the tour yet?” he asked her.

  She smiled and shook her head. “Is that an invitation?”

  Another zing.

  “You bet,” he replied.

  * * *

  They started at the back of the ship. Ryder showed her the stern-mounted helipad where he’d crashed his jump jet months before. He brought her up to the wheelhouse deck where during their first voyage Bingo’s guys would make pancake breakfasts for the crew on the huge, very low-tech grill located here.

  Next stop was the ship’s bridge, where Bingo’s guys ran the bizarre high-speed container vessel. Navigation, propulsion, steering, the gear up here was on par with that on the U.S. Navy’s most advanced warships — Bobby Murphy had made it so. Then they visited the Combat Room, the windowless compartment behind the bridge. As well, much of the equipment here — the air defensive suite, the myriad radar trackers, the satellite com gear — was of the same type as that found aboard the Navy’s supercarriers.

  He brought her below to the engine room where the four GE-404 turbines were spinning with the noise and power of a quartet of jet fighters. Then they went to the White Rooms, where the Spooks lorded over hundreds of flat-screen monitors, banks of radio receivers, and computer screens, all in order to tap into Echelon, the NSA supersecret satellite network that was the ultimate in twenty-first-century eavesdropping.

  Throughout it all, Li, being Li, asked dozens of questions. How, why, when, who. Ryder did his best to answer as many as he could, and for those he didn’t know the answer to he simply made things up, thinking it might be fun to apologize to her later.

  Finally they arrived in the ship’s mess; both needed coffee. It was a huge compartment, painted black for some reason, with all its portholes blocked with canvas, also painted black. Though it was past one in the morning, many tables had people at them. All conversation stopped when Li walked in of course. Ryder steered her toward the coffee station, passing a table where Curry, the unit’s other senior pilot, was sitting with some of the Spooks. At this point, Ryder’s boots were barely touching the deck. As he and Li exchanged greetings with them and kept on going, Ryder heard Curry stage-whisper: “You lucky bastard… ” Ryder gave him a covert thumbs-up in reply.

  Ryder and Li got two coffees to go and walked up to the bow of the ship. Here it really was like sitting on the front of a speedboat. The ship was moving so fast, through high seas, it was throwing up large amounts of a spray while leaving a gigantic wake behind. Yet the full moon was up and the stars were out and it was an amazingly clear night above.

  They sat on a chain locker box and watched the show.

  “Can I ask you a question, colonel?” she said after a few minutes. “Another one, I mean… ”

  “Absolutely… ”

  “That poor man they took off at Cape Lonely. Who was he?”

  Martinez. The original unit’s operations officer. An Army colonel and a member of Delta Force, he’d been a genius at getting the unit’s aircraft, soldiers, and intelligence people moving in sync. His was a sad case, though. Shortly before the attack on Hormuz, the Ghosts had tracked down a group of terrorists who were planning to hijack up to 10 airliners as part of a bigger plan. The Ghosts knew when the terrorists were showing up at the airport; they knew when the terrorists were going to board their flights. They just didn’t know where the terrorists were all going next.

  At the time, it was thought the terrorists were flying on to Europe, where they would take connecting flights to America — and it would be these airplanes they would hijack and use to crash into targets inside the United States. Theorizing the terrorists had confederates waiting for them at European airports and wanting to catch them too, Martinez made the decision to follow the terrorists instead of taking them down immediately. The titanic battle at Hormuz was the result, as the target all along was the Navy’s supercarrier the USS Abraham Lincoln, entering the Persian Gulf that very morning, and the airplanes used were the ones the terrorists first boarded. Luckily, none of the hijacked aircraft reached the intended target — but hundreds still died. Martinez was never the same after that.

  Ryder told Li the story as concisely as he could. She stared up at him throughout, her face very serious, drinking in every word.

  “Martinez was a good guy,” Ryder concluded. “But there’s no way he could go on this mission. I just hope they get him back to his family, before it’s really too late.”

  Li thought about this for a while, then just smiled again. “Thanks,” she said. “I’d heard of him — and I know you all respected him. But I wasn’t sure what the full story was, and I didn’t know anyone I could ask, without making a fool of myself. Well, except you.” She laughed because her words had come out so funny.

  He smiled, too. “Is there a compliment in there, somewhere?” he asked her.

  Here they sat, dodging the spray and looking up at the moon and stars. The minutes turned into an hour. And as always, she was full of questions. It took some prodding, but Ryder finally told her about his adventures as a top-secret test pilot years before he joined the Ghosts. Flying missions deep inside Area 51, participating in bizarre war games, doing things so way-out, even he didn’t believe some of them had happened.

  He regaled her with tales of the team’s exploits not just at Hormuz but in the Philippines, too — those heroic days before they wound up hiding in the attic
of her house. He spoke sincerely of how the twin foundations of the team were its patriotism and the shared loss of loved ones. He told her how cool it was that the team was not affiliated with any of the country’s military services, that they served the people of the United States directly, and that despite his career in the Air Force he wouldn’t have it any other way now.

  On these subjects, Li mostly listened, enthralled and, strangely, a bit envious. She had helped the Ghosts immensely in ending the threat of the Al Qaeda missile teams inside the United States — and she had done so at great personal risk. But it was obvious that she still didn’t consider herself a member of the team. Not yet anyway…

  They wound up talking about many things, except the upcoming mission and Murphy’s plan to assault the impregnable fortress of Casa Diablo. It was all pleasant and comfortable and exciting. And so,so different for him.

  During all this, they were consciously inching closer to each other. At times Li would tap his knee to make a point. His body would reverberate at her touch. Ryder felt like he was back in high school, on a date with the most beautiful girl in math class. Again, this was a monumental step for him. His heart still felt like a stone, the same cruel weight he’d carried around since the day his wife died. But now, with this gorgeous girl so close, it was like he was in another place, on another world, where the gravity wasn’t so bad. When a particularly huge wave of spray came up over the bow, she went right up against him to escape getting doused — and this time, she stayed.

  “I had something else I wanted to ask you,” she said, her hand suddenly touching his.