Strike Force Charlie s-3

by Mack Maloney

  Fox took her hands in his. She was on the verge of tears, and maybe so was he.

  “I know it will be hard for you to get your head around this,” he said. “I have a hard time believing it myself — and I lived it. But OK, yes, we managed to get out of Gitmo. And yes, we whacked the French guy. And he did deserve it. But that’s all we can tell you. Not because we don’t want you to know everything — but because if you did know, it would mean serious trouble for you down the line, guaranteed.”

  “But Major,” she said soberly. “This can’t be part of any DSA operation. You’ve broken some serious laws and certainly some national security edicts ….”

  Fox just shook his head sadly. “We can’t be concerned about those sorts of things, Li,” he said. “Not anymore. It’s gone way beyond the DSA ….”

  Silence … except for the rain thumping on the roof of the old house.

  “You won’t tell me how you got out of Guantanamo?” she asked them.

  “We can’t …” Fox replied.

  “Or how you got mixed up with the ‘special prisoners’ down there?”

  “I’m sorry, Li ….”

  She took her hands back from Fox and folded her arms across her chest. “OK, then — were you planning on living in my attic forever?”

  Both men rolled their eyes.

  “We knew we’d have to tell you eventually,” Ozzi tried to explain to her. “We just stayed quiet while you were here, and waited for you to go to work in the morning. But, I have to tell you, we didn’t think you’d be coming back tonight. I mean, of all nights …”

  Li took another moment trying to make some sense of this. Then it hit: they knew about her and Nash, and about her unused overnight bag.

  “Damn! You’ve been tapping my phone, too?”

  Neither man replied. They just hung their heads. Guilty …. A very uncomfortable moment ensued. Li studied them by the dancing light of the candle. They looked so different, especially Fox. Unshaven, tired, eyes sunken in, he wasn’t the sunny person who’d left on his last mission just a few weeks ago.

  “Have you called your wife?” she asked him coolly.

  It was like Li plunged a knife into his chest. Fox’s face dropped a mile.

  “No … I haven’t,” he replied softly. “I can’t. Just like with you, this is simply too dangerous to involve her.”

  There was a tap on the door. Li’s tea was here. Fox got up to retrieve it, disappearing for a moment into the shadows.

  “Well, that should show you how serious this is,” Ozzi told her now, his voice low. They both knew how much Fox adored his wife. “And like the major said, we can’t tell you everything, because then you’ll wind up in front of a firing squad, just like we’re going to. We’re doing this to protect you.”

  He lowered his voice even further. “But I can tell you this: Someone in Higher Authority made the Major a real fall guy while we were away. He cleaned up a big mess for them — and then they cut him off completely. Iced him, right out in the cold. And then they arrested him. So before you rip his heart out, just realize that of all of us, he got screwed the most.”

  Now Li studied Ozzi. He was a different person, too. He’d always looked like nothing more than a nice, slightly overage college student to her. The person sitting here now seemed old before his time. He’d seen terrible things, done terrible things. Li could tell.

  Fox returned from the dark and very gently placed the warm cup of Morning Madness in Li’s hands. Rain was now splattering against the bedroom windows.

  “But why did you come here at all then?” she asked them. “Especially if you’re so afraid of involving me in anything. I mean, once they figure out you’re not dead, this will be the first place they’ll look ….”

  Fox and Ozzi nervously glanced at each other. “Well, we’re not staying that long,” Fox told her. “And besides, you have something of ours. Something we need ….”

  “Something of yours? What?”

  Fox held up his other hand to reveal he was carrying Li’s laptop.

  “Can you get on-line up here?” he asked her. “Because we have to get into your e-mail right away.”

  * * *

  They set up her laptop on the creaky vanity near the window, running a long modem wire to a telephone port on the first floor. Li opened her e-mail as instructed, more confused than ever. And just like every day for the last three weeks, the first entry contained two files: “Fast Ball” and “Slow Curve.”

  “That’s what we need,” Fox told her simply.

  “These files?” she exclaimed. “I thought they had something to do with you two. Someone’s been trying to send them to me for weeks. But I was never able to open them … at least not all the way.”

  Fox and Ozzi froze. “What do you mean?” Fox asked. “‘Not all the way?’”

  “I mean I was able to get in through a few cracks,” she replied. “I know one file seems to be an interrogation and the other has something to do with a sportswriter.”

  Then she turned and looked directly at Ozzi. “You weren’t the only hacker in the office.”

  “Someone we’re working with has been sending these files to your address,” Fox told her, his tired voice now betraying some aggravation. “So when this day came we’d be able to finally get to them. But you weren’t supposed to see any part of them.”

  Li just shrugged. “I had time on my hands. Once you two were gone …”

  Outside came the rumble of two more fighter jets flying high overhead. Fox and Ozzi just looked at each other again, as if to say, Now what?

  Here Li saw her opening. Exactly who were these people hiding in her house? And what were they really here for? She had to get to the bottom of it, one way or another, because that’s just the way she was.

  “You see, I know a lot,” she told them boldly. “And that means you’ll either have to tell me everything … or you’ll have to kill me. Because if you don’t, as soon as you leave I’m heading right for Pentagon CID.”

  * * *

  Fox and Ozzi put Li in another bedroom, this one at the other end of the second-floor hallway. They would just have to deal with her later. A member of the shadow group had retreated to this room in hopes of getting some sleep. Failing that, he agreed to keep an eye on her.

  The two DSA officers then hurried back to the master suite, calling the remainder of the team in with them. On cue, the storm outside doubled in intensity. Lightning flashes could be seen coming from every direction, with thunder booming off in the distance. Or was that the fighter jets circling over D.C. again?

  The group gathered anxiously around Li’s laptop. They were, in fact, the infamous “ghosts,” the people who had pulled off the miracle at Hormuz and the rescue at Singapore. Or a handful of them, anyway. The actual rogue team numbered more than 50. Marines, Delta guys, SEALs, Navy sailors, Air Force pilots, State Department bodyguards — the rest of them were still back in Gitmo, still behind bars. The individuals here had been handpicked to escape, selected because each had a skill requisite for the very nasty business they knew lay ahead. Fox and Ozzi, for instance, were plugged into the military’s internal security apparatus; that’s where their talents lay. Two Delta Force guys, Dave Hunn and Sal Puglisi, were also at hand. At six-three, 240 pounds, Hunn provided the muscle. Nearly as big, Puglisi was the bomb maker. It was these two who’d taken out Palm Tree and then swum across the Potomac Reservoir to evade any pursuit. That’s why both were still soaking wet.

  Ron Gallant, a USAF pilot and dead ringer for Clark Kent, right down to the goofy eyewear, was here as well. He’d flown one of the team’s Blackhawk helicopters back before the Hormuz Incident when the ghosts were prowling around the Persian Gulf using an undercover containership as their floating base. Though he cut his teeth on helos, Gallant could fly just about anything these days. That’s why he was here.

  The youngest of the small group was Gil Bates. Tall, thin, goateed, with punked hair, and barely 22 years old, Bates had been
an employee of the super-secret National Security Agency for almost four years before getting involved with the rogue team. A graduate of MIT at 17—in Advanced Military C(3) Theory, no less — he was a superhacker, someone who could break into just about any computer and any computer file, no matter how many security barriers had been placed around it. When he was on, it was almost magical what he could do.

  He was sitting in front of Li’s laptop now. He’d downloaded her most recent e-mails, they being the mysterious “Fast Ball” and “Slow Curve” files. Both were important to every man here, in more ways than one. They believed one contained information that would prove there had been no legitimate reason for locking them up in Gitmo. More important, though, the other might hold evidence of a very grave threat against the United States — one that nobody seemed to be doing anything about.

  But how did they know this? How did the team have any more than a guess as to what might be on the two files? And who was sending them in the first place? In all cases, the answer was: “Top-secret ….”

  Bates opened the file called “Fast Ball” first. Breaking into it was child’s play for him, quickly solving the security code that had prevented Li or anyone else from reading all of it. And, just as she’d suspected, it was a transcript of an interrogation, one carried out by “senior U.S. military officials,” aboard an unnamed U.S. warship in the South Pacific just a few weeks before. Its entire contents were marked: AUTHORIZED EYES ONLY.

  The men gathered around the computer laughed at seeing this. Why? Because they were the people being grilled in the interrogation, they and their still-incarcerated ghostly colleagues down in Gitmo. Their grand inquisition had been conducted a few weeks after the Singapore Incident, and after the team had been rounded up by the U.S. military in the Philippines and whisked aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, ironically the same warship they’d saved weeks before at Hormuz. This would be the first time the team members would see the official document produced as a result of that interrogation. They all read it silently now, looking over Bates’s shoulder.

  In an odd, roundabout way, the transcript chronicled just about everything the rogue team had been doing in the last six months. Their heroics, their secret battles, their over-the-top derring-do. Within the endless pages of Q was the true story of Hormuz, how the original team, assembled nearly a year before to track down those responsible for 9/11, had stalked the Al Qaeda hijackers the morning of the planned attack, finally breaking their code and alerting the Navy that trouble was coming. So, too, the rescue at Singapore, where on prime-time TV the team saved thousands of innocent people before disappearing just as quickly as they came.

  The document read like the stuff of movies and best sellers, but far from braggadocio, the team members’ tales were told in terms of bravery and sacrifice, especially by their comrades who’d died during the Hormuz operation.

  And while it might have seemed to the world’s eye that the rogue team had vanished after the incident in Singapore, the interrogation document showed, in their own words, that just the opposite was true. They’d never stopped their secret war against Al Qaeda. In fact, shortly after the Tonka Tower rescue the ghosts began not one but two operations against the terrorist organization. One involved a handful of ghosts hunting down and brutally assassinating Abdul Kazeel, the man who’d helped mastermind both 9/11 and the Hormuz attack. The second mission had other team members looking for a wayward shipment of American-made Stinger missiles, surface-to-air weapons highly prized by the Islamic terrorists. The ghosts eventually tracked the missiles to an Al Qaeda-linked cell in Manila, but that’s when the U.S. military finally caught up with them, arresting the team en masse just minutes before they could seize the weapons cache. After that, the transcript clearly showed all of the team members insisting not only that the missiles, 36 in all, had been paid for and delivered to Al Qaeda by none other than the DGSE agent Palm Tree but also that the weapons were heading to America, to be used by other terrorists to shoot down U.S. airliners.

  And therein lay the first problem. Certainly three dozen Stinger missiles on the loose inside the United States could wreck havoc in the skies above the homeland. But instead of pursuing crucial leads given to them by the team members, their inquisitors went in the other direction: they tried mightily to get the ghosts to change their stories, to turn on one another, and, most important, to tell the military authorities just who put the team together in the first place.

  This was someone’s ploy to dissolve the team once and for all. But it didn’t work. None of the ghosts fell for it. While those questioned gave explicit answers, no one spilled his guts. No one gave details about who organized them or who managed to get them a containership filled with the latest in combat gear and snooping systems or who had the guts to gather together such an elite group of war fighters in the first place, all of whom had lost loved ones to Islamic terrorism in the recent past. In other words, the team members had no problem telling their inquisitors what they had done at Hormuz and Singapore. They just didn’t tell them how.

  So, too, did every man stay true to the group. Their interrogators even went so far as to suggest that the team was actually involved in moving illegal drugs when they were caught in Manila and not trying to find the Stinger missiles. It was total bullshit, of course, but if just one team member agreed to change his story and follow this script, then, it was promised, he would be set free and given a million dollars in cold cash, not a bad payoff for about an hour’s work.

  But again, not one of them took the bait. Not one of them even remotely flipped on his friends. These guys weren’t just patriots. They were loyal, too.

  By the end of it, their inquisitors were stumped as to what to do.

  So they threw them all in jail.

  * * *

  Where were the Stinger missiles now? No one knew. But there were some clues. And they were contained in the second cryptic e-mail, the one called “Slow Curve.”

  Once again, Bates worked his magic and opened it in a snap. But unlike the first attachment, “Slow Curve” was not all text. Rather, it also contained images caught by a photophone, along with some audio downloads. Together they told the strange story of a sports reporter from Los Angeles named George Mann and what had happened to him shortly before his body was found, with two bullets in the head, dumped in a ditch in the desert northeast of Los Angeles.

  Stitched together from smaller files Mann had sent by phone to his home computer, the file presented a morbidly disjointed picture of the last hours of the reporter’s life. He’d been assigned to cover a Southeast Asian soccer team that had traveled, by boat, to LA and was barnstorming the United States. Mann apparently met their ship at the port of LA but was nearly run down by the team’s pair of Greyhound buses, purely by accident, it seems. Mann later caught up with one of those buses in a small California desert town, where his picturephone transmitted images of at least some of the soccer team riding in one of the Greyhound coaches. As it turned out, this bus was also carrying an arsenal of weapons in a secret storage area — an arsenal that included at least 18 Stinger missiles. The file ended abruptly just as a fleeting phone image of the missiles was sent back to Mann’s home computer.

  As sketchy as the “Slow Curve” attachment was, anyone viewing it could only reach one, rather incredible conclusion: These soccer players weren’t soccer players at all. They were Al Qaeda terrorists. And they were now inside the United States, carrying at least 18 Stinger missiles with them.

  Scary ….

  A qualifying paragraph inserted at the end of the file indicated that the bombshell info was not obtained by a physical break-in. Rather, an ultrasecret NSA eavesdropping satellite known only as Keypad had been used to access Mann’s information. This system could zero in on, listen, and secretly record any cell-phone call made by anyone, anywhere in the world, including the United States.

  Very scary ….

  Whoever it was who intercepted Mann’s phone images had also
done an analysis of them. They were able to determine at least 18 men were aboard the bus, all of Middle Eastern descent, all between the ages of 21 and 30. The lone image taken inside the weapons compartment was a blurred shot of the 18 Stinger missiles, attached to their launching mechanisms, hanging on both sides of the storage-room wall. A trail of smoke could also be seen, in shadow, against one of the walls, the result, the analysis said, of two bullets being fired into Mann’s head. The sports reporter’s cell phone ceased sending data shortly after that.

  Who secured the “Slow Curve” file? Why was the NSA’s Keypad satellite intercepting Mann’s phone transmissions or was the system routinely monitoring everyone’s cell phones? How was it that “Slow Curve,” as well as “Fast Ball,” wound up in Li’s e-mail box? And, most important, why hadn’t this information raised alarms within the Homeland Security department?

  The file did not provide any answers to these questions. But it did contain one last tantalizing piece of information. Shortly before he was killed, Mann had taken a phone-picture of the faux soccer team’s schedule, a cross-country map of the American South and Midwest showing where they were supposed to play their goodwill games. Was it possible that these sites, Numbered 1 through 9, were the places where the terrorists intended to use the missiles to shoot down U.S. airliners?

  The answer was: yes. The analyst confirmed each site was within 12 miles of a major airport and each had ample higher elevations around it, providing the terrorists with perfect hiding places from which to do their murderous work. And there were 9 game sites in all. Eighteen missiles. Two missiles per airport? It seemed logical — and no doubt the first bus was heading to one of those locations right now.

  Very, very scary ….

  But as unsettling as this information was, it also left one last, very disturbing question: Mann was able to track down one of the buses — and he saw 18 of the missiles aboard it. Yet the ghost team members knew there were at least 36 missiles on the loose and two buses involved.