Strike Force Charlie s-3

by Mack Maloney

  He just pointed out to the field; the crowd — now about twenty people, most very drunk — couldn’t get much out of him. So they all walked out to the rain-soaked field, this as lightning began flashing off to the west.

  But there was nothing there. The field was empty; the trees that lined it on one side — and just about the only trees of any height in the county — were blowing mightily in the wind. There certainly was no soccer team out here, foreign or not.

  Just as the men were beginning to think this was a prank played on them by the wives, for surely they had all gathered at someone’s house to drink and talk as well, Joey led them to one of the trees about halfway down the field. He pointed up.

  The crowd looked — and saw a dead body caught in the branches. Or at least it looked like a body.

  At this point some of the drunker men believed this was still a joke. The figure in the tree, high up at about twenty feet, was wearing a soccer uniform and was covered in blood. But it looked more like a dummy that some of the schoolkids had stuffed earlier, as a way to taunt the foreigners.

  But two men, sober ones, climbed the tree and they confirmed the ghastly truth: this was a body, and it was indeed wearing a soccer uniform. The man appeared to have been beaten to death, at the very least. But most bizarre, there was what looked to be a handful of bacon — yes, bacon—stuffed down the crotch of his shorts. A small American flag was stuffed into his mouth.

  Still, many in the crowd below didn’t believe it was real.

  On their lips was the same question, asked over and over:

  “How the hell did he get up there?”

  Chapter 10

  Minnesota

  It was called Lost View Lake and the name was appropriate. It was two miles long and a half mile wide, and an underground spring pumping warm water from its bottom almost always gave it a dense layer of fog on its top. This was especially true near the lake’s center, where the fog was frequently its thickest.

  The strange mist was present in the morning hours, sometimes not burning off until noon, even in the warmest days of summer. It would return at dusk and linger again until the next day. For this reason, local boaters and fishermen avoided the rectangular lake, preferring to use one of the hundreds of others in the region for their recreation. There were no cottages on the lake, no hunting lodges, no tour boats. No people around at all. It was the perfect place to hide.

  This is where the Sky Horse found itself this morning. Floating on its inflatable pontoons, all systems shut down, the five members of the ghost team trying to get some much-needed sleep but failing miserably at it, especially Ryder.

  He was uncomfortably jammed in between the two pilots’ seats up on the flight deck. The others were flopped about in the cargo bay below. All the access doors and windows were shut tight. But still, some of Lost View Lake’s mysterious mist was seeping in.

  “Are you sure none of those mooks we whacked had any cigarettes on them?” Ryder called down to the others now.

  Only Puglisi stirred. “They did and we smoked them already,” he called back up to Ryder sleepily.

  Ryder checked his own dilapidated pack of Marlboros. He had exactly two whole and three partially smoked cigarettes left. Under normal circumstances, that would have lasted him about an hour this early in the morning. That is, if he’d had a couple cups of coffee available to him. Which he didn’t.

  He tried to stretch out his legs; with the light of morning, it would be impossible to keep trying for any substantial sleep. He knew it was unhealthy and that lack of winks would catch up with him sooner or later. But he wasn’t totally unhappy that he hadn’t caught any more than a nap or two since the team left Cape Lonely. With his psyche turned inside out, going to sleep risked an even greater possibility of unwanted dreams these past few days. It was bad enough that his late wife haunted just about every moment of his sleep time; when he closed his eyes now, he saw flashes of hatchets and huge .50-caliber rounds tearing into dark flesh, and tiny dead pigs, having their throats cut. He could hear the pleas of those soccer players who were about to have their bodies filleted, the choking sounds of their comrades having their mouths stuffed with bacon. For a Muslim to be buried with a pig was the ultimate disgrace. It would prevent said Muslim from ever entering heaven. So far, the tiny flash-frozen pigs had suited that purpose for the victims the team had been able to throw into a grave. Those they couldn’t bury, well, stuffing their mouths full of bacon would have to do.

  Yes, this was a nasty business he was engaged in. He knew it. They all knew it, coming in. But it was nasty because it had to be. Brutal and nasty and painful and disgusting was the only language the Muslim fanatics understood, because that’s exactly the way they conducted themselves. This was what the ghost team was all about. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, American style. Their mission out here in Middle America was long-winded but apt: If the terrorists believed that killing Americans and dying in the act would get them a ticket into heaven, with 77 virgins waiting for them — if they died without disgrace, that is — then it was up to the ghosts to at least make sure that, in addition to stopping them before they fired their Stinger missiles, they indeed must die in disgrace, as a warning to future terrorists that if the ghosts caught you, there would be no virgins waiting for you at the Pearly Gates. There would be no Pearly Gates. That’s why all the pork products. That’s why all the new fodder for his frequently disturbing dreams.

  “And just for the record,” Ryder moaned now, “we don’t have anything that could be called ‘extra’ coffee?”

  “One cup a day,” Puglisi replied rotely. He’d been given the job of lording over their scant provisions. “You can have it now, or tonight.”

  Ryder yawned. Coffee would be better later in the day, when he really needed it. Master Chief Eddie Finch’s Care packages had been well intentioned. They were indeed stuffed with MRE field rations. (Food was not a problem — and if it ever was, well, they could always eat the frozen pigs, right?) But giving them just one jar of instant coffee was an astronomical miscalculation. With this crew, it was gone the first night.

  And no cigarettes at all? That was almost inhuman with this group of smokestacks. Even Bates was smoking now.

  * * *

  Ryder surprised himself by actually dozing off — but only for a minute or so.

  He was woken again by the sound of the William Tell Overture — in digital burps and bleats. In other words, a cell phone was ringing.

  All five team members were up, awake, and alert in a second. Ryder jumped down to the cargo bay. Gallant started the copter’s generators running. Fox and Puglisi unsheathed their weapons and ammo. Bates, though, was especially animated. One side of the copter’s interior wall suddenly lit up with a barrage of colors. Green, yellow, blue, red. Laptops were hanging all over the wall, their screens flashing madly, keyboards dropping as if on cue, modem wires going everywhere. This was Bates’s monster. He called it his Eyeball Machine. Built with giddy determination from a care package full of Radio Shack components and, as it turned out, some stolen NSA software, no one else on the copter had a prayer of understanding what it was exactly. They weren’t sure Bates understood it himself. But they all knew what it could do. It could find the Al Qaeda missile teams up to an hour before they were ready to strike.

  It had taken Bates about two hours to put it together, maybe another three or four to get it working right. It was the stolen NSA software that did all the work. Very top-secret stuff that Bates didn’t even realize was inside the care package until he opened it. Who put it in there? Who would have been in a position to steal it in the first place? No one even asked the question. The team had stopped thinking about such things long ago.

  Ryder had asked Bates how the Eyeball worked right after the Campo Raid. Bates had looked back at him like he was from the Stone Age.

  “Do you really want to know?” Bates had asked him back.

  “Sure,” Ryder told him, reminding him he’d flown X-planes for t
wenty years; he wasn’t such a rube to new technology.

  “OK, do you know what a Tee-Voh is?” Bates then asked him. When Ryder shook his head no, Bates just let out a sigh.

  He knew this was going to take a while.

  * * *

  As Bates explained it then, the popular TIVO device had the ability to continuously search for TV programs on its owner’s cable system, pulling in shows that its memory chips knew the owner had a preference for. Bates’s machine worked on the same concept, except his preferences were to track down the Al Qaeda missile teams, and instead of scanning a TV cable system, his rig was continuously scanning all of the information-gathering computers belonging to the CIA, the FBI, the NRO, just about every U.S. intelligence agency in the alphabet soup of acronyms, including the NSA itself — and doing so quietly, of course. Again, the top-secret software did most of the work, worming its way into those agencies’ systems, revealing everything and leaving no tracks behind. And because much of the data flowing into those systems was in real time — satellite photos, wiretaps, intercepted Net communications — the information bouncing back to the 50-year-old chopper, floating in the middle of the foggy lake, was pretty much instantaneous. For many hours of the day, the ghosts were more plugged in than 99 percent of the intelligence officials in Washington.

  As such, Bates’s monster could do many things. But it was most effective in intercepting and then tracking cell-phone calls. Of course, this was relatively easy to do if you happened to hold the cell phone the call was being made to. That’s why above the monster included a gallery of just that: cell phones. All different shapes, all different colors and sizes. Two dozen in all, with 24 different “rings,” these had belonged to the 12 terrorists they’d iced in the past 72 hours. Each mook had been carrying two cell phones on his person when the ghosts attacked. It was the first thing the ghosts looked for, before dispatching their unfortunate adversaries. The more cell phones they had, the closer they got to sniffing out the other “soccer players.”

  The ghosts also knew how the underground Stinger cell worked; it worked the same as all Al Qaeda cells worked. The individual missile teams were broken down into subcells. They had no contact with one another once they’d been dropped off by the team bus at the place they were supposed to shoot down their target airliner. Only when they were in place in their snipers’ nest would they make a call to another subcell, not talking, simply letting it ring. A call coming in on that particular phone meant the team was established and ready to proceed. It was the twenty-first century version of simple tom-tom communication.

  As they had taken all these phones from the terrorists, when one of them rang it meant another terrorist missile team was slithering into position. Simple as that. Hearing that noise inside the Sky Horse, though, was the equivalent of hearing an air-raid siren going off.

  And this was where the NSA software really came in handy. It could tap into the ultrasecret Keypad satellite. This was the spy system in the sky that could trace any cell-phone call in the world and put a location to it. So, once the missile team made the establishing call, it was like they were putting a target on their backs. And as the ghosts had the team’s schedule taken from the George Mann file, with each site marked 1 through 9, they knew approximately where the terrorists were going to strike next.

  (Bates’s machine could do many other things as well, which meant that he was getting even less sleep than Ryder. When Bates wasn’t trying to track down the different missile squads, he was on the Internet nonstop, tapping into all kinds of things, in an effort to find the buses themselves. He routinely hacked into the Greyhound company’s corporate computers, trying to pick up a clue on the missing vehicles. He also monitored state police computers, highway department computers, even those set up in tollbooths along the highways of the Midwest, hoping to catch any stray report of a Greyhound bus “acting funny.” But the mooks had the advantage here. They could move day or night and not attract any undue attention. On the other hand the ghosts had to be very judicious in when and how they flew. They couldn’t give up precious flying in the dead of night to try to look for either bus; the time they used for that would probably allow one of the missile teams to get a clear shot at an airliner. So while they’d be able to catch the missile teams before they had a chance to act, they’d yet to catch up with the bus that was dropping the teams off. They were always just about a day behind.)

  The team members crowded around the display of cell phones now.

  Bates got the monster working. Jamming a pair of headphones down over his head, he started pounding on his keyboard like a madman, all while the cell phone continued to ring. The others heard a storm of bleeps and clicks; then Bates reached over and finally turned the blinking cell phone to talk, in effect answering it. The other team members froze. The person on the other end quickly hung up, as he was supposed to. Bates typed some more, assaulting the keys at near light speed. Not two seconds later, he went thumbs-up. A colorful graph suddenly appeared on his main laptop screen. The others knew what this meant: Bates had been able to trace the call. They clenched their fists in silent triumph.

  He began typing again. Now his main laptop graphic split in two — one was registering the residue of the call’s electrical pattern. Each one was unique. The other side of the graphic was showing a GPS screen. A flashing “pong” circle began moving down from the upper left-hand corner. It got smaller and smaller. They watched this screen closely until the circle stopped flashing. Only then did Bates reach over and finally push the phone to off.

  Then he turned to the others and said, “Just as we thought. They’re close by ….”

  * * *

  They’d hit a home run with Campo. The flight over to Kentucky had been swift, low, and adventure-free. It was hard for the team members to think this way, because they were around it all the time, but the typical person on the ground, looking up, was not an expert on aircraft types. People saw a jet airliner — not a Boeing 737. They saw a military jet — not an F-15 or an F-16. They saw a helicopter — not a UH-60 or a CH-56. Or a half-century-old S-58 Sky Horse.

  So the team members were able to make the initial trip with little ruckus. According to the Mann schedule, Campo was stop number 1 for the Hello Soccer club. It was rough terrain and because it was not far from Louisville Airport, planes flying in the area were either descending for landings or still climbing in their takeoffs. In either configuration, they were slow, their pilots were distracted, and the planes were without much maneuverability at all — in other words, extremely vulnerable to a hit by a Stinger missile. So, thinking that the terrorists would head for the highest point in the Campo area had the ghosts locked in on Mount Winslow from the beginning.

  Chicago had been a different matter. It was the second site on the soccer team’s schedule, yet it called for the Sky Horse to fly into the heart of a vast urban area without anyone knowing exactly who they were. While seeing a Coast Guard helicopter in the skies above the Windy City was not all that unusual, the team had to contend with the fact that they would have to pass in and out of three major radar nets, essentially as an unidentified aircraft. They got around this just as they used to get around various checkpoints when sailing in the containership during their first undercover mission: they simply and boldly lied to any air traffic control person who contacted them, claiming they were a training flight from the nearby military facility on the Great Lakes and while identifying themselves as Coast Guard never mentioning exactly what kind of CG craft they were riding in.

  The overworked air traffic control guys at O’Hare, their hands full with the busiest airport in the world, let the team fly because they knew what to say and how to say it. Fox did the talking, as his authoritative yet smooth southern voice seemed to be the most convincing.

  And apparently a helicopter landing atop a crack house disguised as a mosque was not much of an event in that part of the toddling town. The team members could clearly see people in their tenements or hanging i
n alleys as they flashed overhead. Because there were no graves this time, they’d resorted to the bacon instead. In all, the operation took less than 10 minutes, including the 2 minutes it took for them to find a place to set up the flag. It had been smooth all the way.

  Nebraska, though, had been a mess. They rode in fine, everyone in position. But due to bad weather starting out, they’d arrived a little late. That’s why it turned into such a tussle with the mooks at the peak of the Big Rock.

  Taking one of the terrorists with them had been a last-minute decision. They thought he would give them some information on where the team bus was heading next and how it was getting there. But either the mook was particularly clever or he misunderstood their demands. He took them up to Saint Helena, where the team was supposed to play its next match. But the bus wasn’t there. The terrorist went out the door at 5,000 feet, courtesy of Puglisi. The team could still hear his screams all the way down.

  Messy — but in the end, the result of the Nebraska action was the same as the two previous ones. Four dead mooks, another two missiles confiscated and destroyed. Another bloody message left for anyone who cared to look for it.

  * * *

  Now it was the next morning — and they were at it again.

  Two minutes after they zeroed in on the latest cell-phone signal, the helicopter’s engines were started and its rotor was spinning. Ryder was behind the aircraft’s main controls; Gallant was turning on its makeshift laptop weapons system. Fox and Puglisi were sitting at the two cargo door guns. Bates was still glued in front of the cell-phone display.

  They were getting good at this now.

  Minneapolis Airport was 22 miles south of Lost View Lake. Bates’s information said that the person who had dialed the cell phone was inside a quarter-mile area about a mile north of the airport. But a topographic map called up on one of the flight-control laptops showed no naturally elevated locations around the airport, places the terrorists would be drawn to. However, there was an amusement park in the general vicinity. The locator ring was practically burning a hole in it on the GPS map.