Strike Force Charlie s-3

by Mack Maloney

On and on: This guy retired from advanced designs at Boeing. This guy from the Jet Propulsion Lab. This guy former Air America.

  Then the spokesman patted Gallant on the shoulder.

  “So don’t worry, my friend,” he said. “We did a good job on your chopper. In fact, ‘our mutual friend’ thought you’d appreciate the concept.”

  The concept? Ryder thought. Yes — something was beginning to sink in between his ears. When the ghost team was first assembled, they’d been given a very plain-looking, very rusty containership as their ride to war. But the floating hulk actually had billions of dollars of high-tech, top-secret combat and eavesdropping equipment hidden onboard.

  Now they had this old helicopter. It looked ancient, harmless even, on the outside. But inside it was packing a punch. And it could fly fast and quiet. And it could see and hear for miles and do many other things as well.

  “How?” was all Ryder could say now.

  “You really don’t have to know ‘how,’” the elderly man told him. “The real question is ‘why?’”

  Again, the ghosts were puzzled for a moment.

  “We have something for you,” the old guy said. “Might explain some of it.”

  The Doughnut Boys gathered around the ghosts. This was the first time the team members really got a good look at them. They were big and short, tall and skinny. Bald, glasses, red noses. But they were clearly not just mechanics but rather aeronautical geniuses with resumes listing employers from NASA to the Lockheed Skunkworks.

  “We really shouldn’t go into too much detail with each other,” the head Doughnut said. “True, we’re all from deep security environments. But once you’ve ‘gone underground’ it’s best not to know too much about what your friends are doing. But we can tell you this: we know where you are going and what you have to do.

  “And we just wanted to say thank you. For what you’ve done before. At Hormuz. At Singapore. In the Philippines. We wanted you to know we appreciate it.”

  He had something in his hands. It was in a simple paper bag. He reached in and came out with a crude but crisply folded flag, at least six feet long. It had 13 red and white stripes like a typical American flag, but instead of the field of stars there was a picture of a coiled snake, with the words “Don’t Tread On Me — Ever Again” embroidered underneath it.

  “My only son was killed in the Pentagon on September Eleventh,” the old guy went on. “He was helping rescue his office mates when he died. The wife of a man he saved sewed this together for me, stayed up for two days and two nights doing it, for his memorial service. I know it’s not the prettiest flag in creation, but it meant a lot to us then, and it means a lot to me now.”

  He retrieved a handkerchief, wiped his eyes once, and then blew his nose.

  “This is a great country,” he went on. “But only because its people are great. It’s a brave and fair and moral and honest country, too — but only because a great majority of its people are. This country is not about its politicians or its corporate presidents or its movie stars or its nutty generals. It’s about the guys fighting in Iraq because they feel it’s the right thing to do. It’s about the guys dying in Afghanistan trying to find the rest of those pukes. It’s those cops and firemen who died that day in New York City. It’s about those people who crashed that plane in Pennsylvania so it wouldn’t hit the White House. The world has gone crazy, but that doesn’t mean this country has to be pulled down with it. At times like this, it’s up to us to step up to the plate and try to fix things.”

  He looked back down at the flag.

  “I’ve been holding on to this for a special occasion,” he went on, fighting off another sniff. “And now that I know about you guys, and what you’ve done and who you really are, well … will you take it with you?”

  Ryder and Gallant were speechless. All the ghosts were. Their sad, miserable, aching backs suddenly straightened a bit. The wind had come back to their sails. Ryder shook the guy’s hand.

  “Sure we will, pops,” he said softly, taking possession of the flag and handling it with reverence. “It will be our honor ….”

  * * *

  It was time to go.

  It seemed to Ryder that between their two visits to Cape Lonely he’d been living atop the cliff for weeks. Added up, though, they’d only been at the base a few hours combined.

  There were a few more items Finch had for them that were loaded aboard. A cardboard box full of uniforms to replace the ones Finch had given them when they first landed. These opened the box and saw that these were newer, even darker versions of the uniforms the original team members had worn during their heyday in the Persian Gulf. They even had the unit’s patch sewn into the right-hand shoulder. It showed an image of the World Trade Center towers, with the Stars and Stripes behind it, the letters NYPD and FDNY floating above it, and the group’s motto, We Will Never Forget, floating below.

  They also loaded aboard a box containing several dozen MREs — Meals Ready to Eat, the contemporary version of the old GI C rations. Finch handed them another paper bag, this one containing nine standard American flags, each one about three feet long. “You’ll be needing these types of flags as well,” Finch told them with a wink.

  Then came aboard the strangest piece of cargo of all: a huge battery-powered freezer. Inside were three dozen tiny dead pigs, flash frozen to the point that they almost looked like cuddly toys. There was also several packages of bacon in the cooler.

  “Now, don’t go eating any of that stuff,” Finch joked with them again. “That wouldn’t be kosher ….”

  As they were loading on a half-dozen more laptops for Bates to use, Ryder climbed back up to the copter’s flight deck and spent about five minutes alone, checking on the aircraft’s primary systems. Their improvised flight computer was keeping everything up and on-line. All of his cockpit lights were green. All of his power modes were in the red. They could leave at any time now.

  But when Ryder looked back down into the cargo bay he was surprised to find everyone was gone. He climbed out of the copter but again found the area around the Sky Horse deserted. He was just starting to wonder what other weird thing could possibly happen when he heard a voice coming from the air station’s Loran building. Loran was a worldwide communication net that was maintained for the U.S. military by the Coast Guard in many locations around the world. Like one big electromagnetic antenna, the building itself seemed to be crackling with energy. Ryder could see flashlight beams inside.

  He walked over to the igloo-shaped building, opened the door, and found the rest of the team huddled within. Finch was with them, as were the Doughnut Boys. They were all smiling, ear to ear.

  What was going on here?

  As soon as he appeared, Fox said to him, “I know we’re in a hurry. But man, we had to see this. Check it out.”

  Everyone extinguished their flashlights and now all Ryder could see was Eddie Finch. He was holding a halogen lightbulb in his hand — but it was not attached to anything. He was simply holding it. Yet it was glowing, very brightly.

  “Can you believe it?” someone asked Ryder. “These Loran places have so much juice running through them, you don’t even have to screw the lightbulbs in ….”

  Ryder just stared at Finch as the retired Coast Guardsman held the lit bulb under his bearded chin like a Halloween prank. He looked like something from a horror flick.

  “Damn,” was all Ryder could say.

  It was one of the strangest things he’d ever seen.

  Chapter 9

  Near Campo, Kentucky The next night

  The mysterious noise came just after midnight.

  It wasn’t an explosion exactly, even though it was loud enough to wake dozens of people in and around the small town of Campo, Kentucky. Some would later say it sounded more like fireworks or old Civil War cannons going off. Some even thought it was an earthquake. The rumbling was so intense, a few people were thrown from their beds.

  The one thing everyone agreed on was that the
disturbance had originated from the top of Mount Winslow, the 2,500-foot peak that dominated Campo’s skyline to the north.

  Campo had no full-time police force. There were only 250 people in the town, and the state police barracks was just 22 miles away, down nearby Route 41. In cases like this, unexpected emergencies and such, the town’s plumber, a man named Bo Tuttle, became the temporary sheriff. His brother Zoomer and his cousin Hep became his deputies.

  All three men lived near the base of the mountain. They, too, were roused by the strange commotion. Their homes were barraged with phone calls, neighbors wanting to know what was going on. The men didn’t bother to answer their phones, though. Within minutes of being shaken from bed, the three men were in Tuttle’s improvised patrol car, actually his Chevy Tahoe, and climbing up the south face of Mount Winslow.

  There were only three things of any value at the top of the mountain: a cell-phone tower erected a year before by Southern Bell, an amateur weather station operated by the local 4-H group, and an automated radar relay dish used by the control tower at Louisville International Airport, 18 miles away.

  The road up to the summit was gravel mixed with oil to harden it. It had rained fiercely the day before though, and the gravel was still loose. Still the 10-minute ride to the top went smoothly; in fact, all three men were able to gulp down a cup of coffee from a thermos Hep’s wife had prepared before his hasty departure.

  The three men were fairly sure they knew what had happened up on Winslow. The Southern Bell tower had collapsed. The wind had been blowing hard all day, along with the heavy rains, and more than once people in town claimed they could see the cell-phone tower swaying mightily in the strong breeze.

  “That’s why my cell phone ain’t working,” Zoomer had reasoned during their ascent.

  But when they arrived at the peak, the cell tower was still standing. So, too, the 4-H weather station and the airport radar dish.

  What they found next to the radar dish, though, would haunt the three men for a very long time.

  * * *

  There were four bodies in all.

  Two had been shot, at close range, through the head — and not by a peashooter, either. Two others had been chopped to pieces. Arms, legs, pieces of fingers and toes. Cousin Hep was a butcher, but at first sight of this he vomited up everything he’d eaten in the past 24 hours. Bo and Zoomer, too, nearly went into shock. The sight was incomprehensible.

  The grisly discovery was even more baffling as the four dead men were already lying in a grave. A shallow pit, 10 feet by 10 feet, had been dug close to the radar station. All four had been dumped into it.

  But still, this was not the strangest thing. Because also thrown into the pit were four tiny pigs, their throats cut, their blood dripping all over the corpses and mixing with their own.

  The three temporary lawmen tried to make some sense of it all, but none was forthcoming. Four dead bodies, already in a grave, with pigs’ guts splashed all over them? It just didn’t seem real. The wind was really howling up here, too, adding greatly to the weirdness around them. For years the townspeople thought the top of the mountain was haunted. Maybe they were right.

  All three men wanted to jump in the Tahoe and get the hell off the peak, but to their credit, they stood their ground. They would have to rely on their basic police training to get them through. Tuttle told the other two to search the rest of the summit; it was a flattened top no more than 1,000 square feet in all. Zoomer found some camping equipment and four bloodstained sleeping bags. Meanwhile Hep was able to snag a couple of pieces of paper that had blown into some bramble bushes on the southern side of the big hill.

  And it got even weirder here: Two of the pieces of paper had notes scribbled on them — but they weren’t written in English. Hep had done almost a year at nearby Clarksburg Community College; he was the most educated of the three. He guessed the writing was Hindu or something from the subcontinent. He was close. It was actually Arabic, written in code.

  From what the three men could make out, the sheet with the most writing contained instructions of some kind, the words being accompanied by crude drawings. But the drawings made as little sense as the words. They seemed to be showing the user how to fly something. But what? Their best guess was something along the lines of a radio-controlled model airplane or maybe a large amateur rocket.

  They returned to the bodies. Bo was the senior man. It was up to him to climb down into the grave to look for any identification, this as Hep tried again and again to get his cell phone working. Bo gingerly eased himself into the pit. The smell down here was putrid, the gore overwhelming. He vowed never to watch another horror movie again. The dead men looked like foreigners, and there was no doubt at least two had been killed in a ritualistic way. But where did the pigs come in? And what had caused the loud noise in the first place?

  Bo knew it wouldn’t be wise to contaminate the crime scene and, on that excuse, decided that he would check for ID on only one of the bodies. He selected one of the gunshot victims, a small dark man wearing only his underwear and a torn suit coat. In the inside right-hand coat pocket Bo found not a wallet but two Immigration Department green cards. Both gave the name “Abdul Moisi.” One identified him as a “soccer player” from Bali.

  “Didn’t a bunch of foreigners play a soccer game over in Oxville yesterday?” Bo yelled up to Hep and Zoomer. “I thought someone said they saw their bus pass through town.”

  But neither man heard him. The wind was blowing too hard.

  The other green card identified the dead man as a “student.” Bo looked at the card and then at the body. Bo was 30. The dead man looked at least five years older than him, maybe more.

  “What the hell kind of student were you?” he said out loud.

  * * *

  Hep helped Bo out of the pit just as he finally got his cell phone to work. He’d reached Bob’s Gas Station in town — Bob was a notorious insomniac and Hep knew he would answer his phone. Bo told Bob what had happened, and he promised to drive out to the highway and flag down the state trooper who would be coming by in the next 10 minutes or so. Then Bo instructed Bob to call over to Clarksburg and ask one of the doctors at the poor people’s clinic to somehow get out to the top of Mount Winslow. Bo then said all three of them would wait at the murder scene until the state trooper arrived.

  Bo was about to hang up when Bob stopped him. The station owner had a piece of news for him.

  As he was probably the only person awake in Campo when the big noise was first heard, Bob told Tuttle he’d run outside his station within seconds and was astonished to see a helicopter coming down the side of the mountain, heading right for him. It was making very little noise, but it went right by the gas station, flying very low. So low, in fact, Bob was able to read the words painted on its fuselage: United States Coast Guard.

  “Coast Guard?” Bo bellowed. “We’re about a thousand miles away from the nearest ocean.”

  But Bob insisted that’s what he saw. What’s more, he said he had observed several men riding in the back of the copter. They were dressed like soldiers and looking out the side window as the aircraft zoomed by. Two of them waved to him. One gave the two-finger V-for-Victory sign.

  Then they were gone.

  Bo finally hung up, wondering if Bob was drinking again. If not, his information only added to the gruesome puzzle they’d just found at the top of the formerly peaceful mountain.

  That’s when Hep came up beside Bo and tugged on his sleeve. He didn’t say anything. Between the wind and the gore, all three of them were having trouble talking now. Hep simply pointed, straight up, to the top of the Southern Bell cell tower, rising 250 feet above the peak.

  Bo had to squint to see what Hep was pointing at. But then, yes — he saw it, too. A small flag was flying from the top of the cell tower. All stars and stripes, it was an American flag.

  Bo scratched his head.

  “I don’t recall ever seeing that up there before,” he said.

>   Chicago that night

  The first thing Chicago police detective Mike Robinson saw when he pulled up in front of the North Street mosque was small American flag up on its roof, flapping mightily in the breeze.

  This was very odd.

  “What’s that doing up there?” he wondered aloud as he squealed to a stop in front of the alleged holy place. This part of Chicago was close to some particularly notorious housing projects and hard by the approach path to O’Hare Airport. It was a neighborhood filled with crack dens and flophouses. There was at least a couple murders here every night.

  Strange place for a flag ….

  The mosque had opened here about two years before, in a building given free of charge to a Muslim group by the city in return for a promise to renovate it, as part of an overall neighborhood beautification project. No renovation happened, of course, but the mosque remained.

  And it was a mosque in name only. The structure was far from the magnificent architecture of Muslim holy places found in the Middle East. This was a building in a slum, made of rotten wood and crumbling brick, with burned-out shells of buildings on either side of it.

  Robinson ran this district’s anticrime unit. His six detectives were called to the mosque on a weekly, if not daily, basis, mostly looking for merchandise stolen from a shopping mall nearby. At any given time, between six and eight people were known to be living in the building. The size of the actual congregation was unknown.

  Robinson was here checking a report of shots fired inside the mosque. Two patrol cars roared up behind him. Four uniformed cops jumped out, already wearing their SWAT helmets and body armor and carrying M16s, adapted police rifles.

  Robinson put on his own bulletproof vest and had a quick conversation with the four cops. There was no one else on the sidewalks or anywhere within sight of the mosque. This, too, was strange. True, this block was a free-fire zone on most nights. But there were always a few people out on the streets, on the corners or in the alleys, even on the warmest of nights, which this was. But right now, the streets around them were empty.