by Mack Maloney
The signal from Echelon finally completed the endless downloading. Bates immediately made a backup copy and then ended the connection to Echelon. Then he took a deep breath — and pushed the video to play.
The first image was the Al-Qazzaza TV station identification slide. Then it switched to two news anchors jabbering about what was to come. Both men seemed positively orgasmic in announcing that a new execution video had been received.
There was a burst of static and electronic snow. This cleared up in a few seconds, and then Li’s image came on the screen. Bates gulped hard; he hit the pause button. These beheadings were always brutal, gory stuff. His hands began to shake. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to handle this.
The ship began rocking sideways; they were in the Gulf and it was a rainy, windy afternoon and the water was getting rough. The sudden lurch brought Bates back to reality. He studied the frozen frame. Li was kneeling before a large handmade black and green flag with Islamic scribbling all over it. There were people kneeling on either side of her. Bates recognized them as Filipino laborers kidnapped by an Al Qaeda group in Iraq in the last two weeks. Standing directly behind them were five men in black uniforms, wearing black ski masks. One was holding an enormous razor-sharp machete.
The tape was very grainy, the sound almost indecipherable, but Bates knew what was going on. The man with the knife was reading from a prepared statement. He was saying each person in front of him had been convicted of crimes against Islam and that he was about to carry out their death sentence, all in Allah’s name, of course.
The man with the knife folded his statement, then went to his right. He grabbed the first Filipino laborer and began chopping at the man’s exposed neck. The victim screamed so loud, it blotted out all other sound being picked up by the camera’s microphone. He struggled fiercely but to no avail, as his hands were tied behind his back. The blood came first in spurts, then in a gush as tendons, cartilage, and bones were destroyed by the heavy-bladed knife. When the machete hit the man’s jugular, the blood began spraying out of him like water from a garden hose. The victim continued fighting, but life was draining out of him. Finally, with one last chop, his head was severed. In a grisly coda, the man’s body continued struggling for a few more seconds before it finally went limp. The blood and the gore were massive. Some of it fell on Li.
There was an abrupt stop in the tape, more static, more electronic snow. When the image returned, the man in the mask was reciting another statement. Li had been moved closer to the center and was now shoulder to shoulder with the remaining Filipino. She was blindfolded, as was he, but Bates believed he could see a look of determination, not fear, on her face. At least he thought it best to remember her that way.
His statement concluded, the executioner raised his knife again and with one forceful blow hit not Li but the other Filipino square on the jugular. The man was surprised; he hardly moved as the blade went through the first half of his neck. The executioner withdrew the machete, then, holding the man’s head steady, swung again and completed the job. It had happened so strangely and quickly, the man who’d done the cutting held the man’s head up and started laughing through his ski mask. The look on the dead man’s face was a mixture of horror and complete, absolute surprise. Again, the gore was unbelievable.
The tape stopped again. When it started a third time, Li alone was sitting before the five men in ski masks. The man started reading his statement. They were the same words every time, so Bates knew it would take exactly 23 seconds for the man to recite them — and then the killing would be done.
This was the moment of truth for the young Bates. He was just a supergeek employed to be a spy. He wasn’t blood-and-guts like Ryder and Curry were and Gallant and Phelan used to be, before they died. Bates had fought this war against Al Qaeda from a place so devoid of all of that, they called it the White Room.
But this — what he was about to see? This wasn’t going to be so clean. This was going to be rough.
But in a strange way, he felt he owed it to Li to watch it. He knew that after being introduced by Al-Qazzaza, the tape would be shown on TVs all around the globe and downloaded on people’s computers and e-mailed everywhere to be laughed at in the slums of Karachi and Delhi and a hundred other places. For her spirit to be defiled like that, Bates thought it would help somehow if a friend saw it first.
The seconds counted down. The executioner was more than halfway through his spiel. He began pulling the machete from his waistband. The men on either side of him braced themselves for what they knew was about to come.
Ten seconds…
Bates’s finger hovered over the pause button. Could he do it?
Seven seconds…
The guy was folding the paper; he knew the last few sentences by heart.
Five seconds…
He raised the machete over Li’s neck.
Four seconds…
Bates nearly hit the stop button, he so didn’t want to see this, but he knew he had to.
Three seconds…
Sorry, Li….
Two…
One…
* * *
Bobby Murphy was standing at the big window in his cabin, looking out on the dark blue water of the nighttime Persian Gulf. He was praying. For Li. For himself. For all of them. For the whole goddamn world and all the disheartened souls out there, the victims in this war, which Murphy felt would claim more lives than all of the other American wars combined — that it would be the first real nuclear war if Al Qaeda wasn’t stopped.
He was praying and extremely bummed out, feeling his soul in his shoes, when suddenly the door to his cabin burst open and Gil Bates, their top Spook, rushed in.
Though Murphy had seen him excitable in the past, he’d never seen Bates quite like this.
He was crying, almost hysterically — and in that first instant this was such a shock to Murphy, because he knew Bates had been downstairs watching the execution tape and he was sure that the young genius had lost his mind. What he’d seen had been that horrible.
But the strange thing was, Bates was also laughing, just as hysterically. And these two things were coming in waves. Murphy thought he was looking into the eyes of a madman — and in a way, he was.
The young Spook reached the other end of the table and nearly collapsed. He was holding a disk.
“Put this in,” he was saying to Murphy between catching his breath — he’d run up 10 levels to get here.
Murphy just stared at him. He really didn’t want to watch Li’s murder. His body language alone was screaming that. But Bates was insisting.
Murphy finally relented. He took the disk, put it in his laptop, and started it running.
Bates was beside him by this time. He reached over Murphy’s hand and fast-forwarded through the two grisly slayings of the hapless Filipino workers.
Bates stopped the video just as the executioner was hovering over Li, the machete already out of his waistband.
“You have to see this!” Bates insisted.
Bates put it in slow motion. Murphy watched, horrified, as the knife was raised over Li’s head, as the executioner began his swing down — and then suddenly a burst of static, followed by a series of scratch lines across the screen.
Then among the electronic snow Murphy could see the ghostly figures of the five men again. The tape became jumpy, and still full of static. But it was clear enough to see the men were discussing something; they seemed stumped by something. The knife was now back at the man’s side, and Li was still unhurt.
More static — then the men changed positions abruptly. It was as if they were starting the execution all over again. But then more static, more scratch lines, and more fuzzy scenes of the men, once again discussing something, being stumped by something.
The very last scene showed the man with the knife literally throwing up his hands in frustration.
Then the video finally ended for good.
Murphy just turned to Bates. The young Sp
ook was now laughing more than he was crying but still doing a lot of both.
“Don’t you get it?” he asked Murphy excitedly. “All that static and scratching things at the end is them twisting it backward and going over it, again and again. Three times total. There were trying to get some use out of the last few inches of it. But they couldn’t, because there’s not enough of it.”
“Enough of what?” Murphy finally asked him.
Now Bates was just laughing. He was happy. “Video-tape,” he replied simply, boisterously. “They ran out of videotape… ”
Murphy just stared back at him. He had to let this sink in. “They ran out of tape?” he asked, looking back at the blank screen.
“Yes,” Bates replied. “They’re rewinding it, thinking they can tape over it — but they can’t, not without erasing the tape of the Filipino guys getting it. But you can’t rewind cassettes by hand like that.”
Murphy just shook his head. “They ran out of videotape?” he repeated Bates’s words back to him.
Murphy was suddenly a ball of motion. He started punching numbers into his laptop. He quickly retrieved a short report they’d received from Obo Field in the minutes following the strike team’s arrival. The Delta guys had caught a mook looking down at them. He was a messenger of some sort from Khrash, and they had sent him back minus his hands as a message to the people inside the city. But before they cut him up, this flunky had told them that he was out in the wilderness looking for videotapes. Murphy had thought this was very strange at the time.
But then he began typing madly again. He stopped on a file they’d dragged down just the day before. It was the details of an Israeli hit team that had killed a wellknown terrorist courier, someone who was thought to be heading for Khrash. Usually a guy like this might be carrying terrorist money or bombs or bomb parts. But as it turned out, the dead man was carrying just one thing: videotapes.
Murphy just looked up at Bates.
“Goddamn,” he swore. “Could this mean what I think it could mean?”
“I think it might,” Bates replied.
Murphy had his yellow phone up in a flash.
“We’ve got to call Obo right now!”
Obo Field
The yellow cell phone rang twice before one of the Marine mechanics answered it.
The Marine recognized Murphy’s voice right away. But the Big Boss sounded extremely excited and anxious, not typical for the little man from Texas.
He was almost yelling into the phone. “Can you stop them? Can you?”
The Marine was confused. “Stop who, sir?”
“The guys!” Murphy yelled in reply. “The strike team. Can you stop them? We have some very important information. Something they have to know before they level that place and kill everyone in it.”
But the Marine just found himself shaking his head no. “Sorry, sir,” he told Murphy. “But they left a long time ago.”
* * *
No sooner had Murphy hung up when the two Marines heard the sound of an aircraft approaching. They grabbed their weapons, but by this time the aircraft was already coming in for a landing. It was the so-called Scramble copter, the team’s third Blackhawk, coming back to pick up the last of the ammunition — and the two Marines. This meant another aspect of the plan was about to take place. Which must have meant things were going well in the battle.
Fox was riding in the back of the Scramble chopper. He’d been surfing the air currents above Khrash ever since the attack began. The copter had been providing air support for Hunn’s attack team mostly, though between Hunn’s own highly destructive tendencies and the follow-up troops of friendly Zabul fighters, there really wasn’t much the Scramble ship had to do except watch as the wave of American flags whipping in the breeze got larger and larger, sweeping east to west across the midsection of the city.
It was clear to Fox early on that it wasn’t really a battle he was watching below him. It was something else. A grand hoax. A ruse on the already panicking defenders of Khrash and their R and R guests. The smartest thing the Ghosts could have done was send the message early on that the Crazy Americans were in town. That alone obviously put the dirty little city on edge. Add in the surprise attacks on the mosques, the middle of the night “miniinvasion,” and all the psych-out stuff the Psyclops plane could blanket the city with — no, it wasn’t a battle, at least not yet.
But whatever it was, now they were back at Obo to start Round Two.
“Frankly, sir,” one of the mechanics told Fox as he climbed off the copter, “we never thought we’d see you again.”
Then the mechanics told Fox about the call they’d just received from Murphy.
Fox couldn’t believe it….
“Li’s alive?” he asked them over and over.
“That’s what Murphy thinks,” was their reply. “Something to do with videotapes, the bad guys not having them.”
By this time the copter crew had loaded all the bombs and ammo on board and they’d filled the tanks with the last bit of gas. Then Fox told the two Marines to jump aboard and the Scramble ship took off.
The Marines were extremely happy to get out of the Obo for good. That is, until they traveled up and over the mountains and saw the fires of the city of Khrash on the horizon. They were lighting up the night for miles around.
That’s when one Marine leaned over to the other and said to him drily: “And we didn’t want to miss this?”
As for Fox, he got Murphy on the yellow phone and had him repeat the news about Li. And it was great news — except they didn’t really know if she was still alive, and if she was, they didn’t know where she was at the moment, other than she was most likely in the city that they were in the process of severely fucking up.
Fox went pale at the thought of this. Was there a chance she’d survived because the mooks had run out of videotape only to be killed in the Ghosts’ unorthodox attack?
And if that had happened, who the hell was ever going to tell Ryder?
* * *
The trouble was, Fox and the Scramble copter had another mission to fulfill.
Murphy’s plan called for an airborne assault on the center of the city if by the 50-minute mark everything was still going well for the Ghosts. The Scramble copter was to lead that assault. Fox was to be the CO.
The idea was to attempt a thrust at the heart of Khrash, a direct attack on the building that Murphy and the Spooks believed was the headquarters of the city’s notorious religious police. They had deemed it both a military and a morale-busting target. To that end, all of the team’s air assets were to head for the center of the city at exactly the 50-minute mark and provide cover for what was to come.
The target was the Holy Towers buildings, the tallest structures in Khrash.
* * *
When the Scramble copter arrived over the target, the two other Blackhawk copters were already waiting for it. Ryder’s F-14 was also in the vicinity, while Curry stayed out west, continuing to attack anything that moved over the Habeeb Bridge toward Iran. He’d been very busy doing this for the past 15 minutes, as indeed the trickle of fighters trying to escape had turned into a torrent, just as the Ghosts had hoped.
The pair of Blackhawks and Ryder’s F-14 each performed several strafing runs up and down the designated building, preparing the way for the Scramble copter to land on the roof, this while the Psyclops plane cruised farther overhead, still blaring the deafening sounds of battle to the ground below. More than once, as Fox saw Ryder’s F-14 streak back and forth, he wondered how the hell, in the heat of this miniwar, they could get a message to him about Li. Of them all, this guy had the most right to know. But because of the lack of any communications among the Ghosts — their gravest weakness — there was no way Fox could think of to do it.
And again, he had to concentrate on the matter at hand.
The pilot of the Scramble copter waited for the other air assets to exit the area; then he slammed the Blackhawk down on top of one of the two Holy Tow
ers. The troopers on board quickly jumped out to take on any opposition, but the rooftop was empty, except for the five dead mooks shot earlier by one of the other Blackhawks.
This was perfect for the Scramble crew. As the Delta troopers set up a defensive perimeter around the rooftop, Fox and the two Marine mechanics started working on the real reason they’d come here.
They unfurled another American flag, this one also given to them by the crew of the Psyclops plane. Unlike the other flags being thrown up on every building the Ghosts captured, this one was huge, six feet by ten feet. They had brought a staff with them. Now hooking the flag to the staff, they carried it to the southern edge of the tower’s roof. By this time the Delta operators had gathered around them. On cue, several of these operators started shooting off flare guns — because they were on the highest buildings in the city, there was no doubt most people below, friend and foe alike, could see the sudden pyrotechnic display.
In fact, the display was so high and so bright, Fox and the others on the roof heard a distinct quieting of gunfire below. Knowing they’d gotten a lot of people’s attention, they raised the huge flag up over the 11-story Holy Towers buildings for all to see.
It wasn’t quite the flag raising over Iwo Jima — but it was damn close. And the intent was the same. The message: The battle continued, but American troops had made it this far. They could almost hear their comrades cheering down in the streets.
The hail of enemy gunfire came at them just a second later.
Fox first became aware of it when two bullets went zinging by his right ear. Suddenly the air was filled with enemy rounds, impacting on the roof, off the scramble copter, and even the flag staff itself.
