by Mack Maloney
Chapter 11
Ozzi heard a phone ringing just as they were entering the Holland tunnel.
Hunn was driving their van, a six-panel delivery type. They’d rented it earlier that day, maxxing out Li’s Visa card, this after treating themselves to new duds at her local Kmart. They’d made the drive from D.C. to Jersey in about six hours, Hunn doing his best to behave, and keep their speed somewhere below 80 miles an hour. Only guilty people go the speed limit, he’d told Ozzi. But did the New Jersey State Police know that? Ozzi had to wonder.
The phone rang again. Ozzi took the brown paper bag out from under his seat and opened it. There were more than 20 different cell phones inside.
“Damn, I can’t tell which one it is,” he said as Hunn paid the toll.
“We’re getting as bad as the mooks,” Hunn replied. “With the cell phones, I mean. Between us and them, I’m surprised there are any left for other people to buy.”
Hunn’s complaints weren’t helping, but Ozzi knew what he meant. The collection of cell phones was a necessary evil. Despite their brilliant escape from Gitmo, they knew the government would eventually realize they weren’t all dead. When that happened, the Feds would start looking very hard for them, if they weren’t already. The ghosts still had to communicate with one another, though, even if it meant using codes and having only brief conversations. So just like the Islamic terrorists, they’d gobbled up a bunch of cell phones — again, courtesy of Li’s Visa card — got the phone numbers to their colleagues out west and now would use them for only one conversation at a time.
Ozzi heard the ring again, a very annoying digital symphony. He reached into the bag and took out a handful of the cell phones. None were lit up or vibrating. They entered the tunnel. Now Ozzi could hardly see — but that was good. When the phone rang again, he spotted the glow from its screen light at the bottom of the bag. He fished it out and finally answered it.
It was Bates. Calling from somewhere in Minnesota.
“I think the car you sold me is a lemon,” Bates said cryptically.
“How come?” Ozzi replied.
“Because I’ve already changed the oil in it four times—”
“Four times? Wow — is that the only problem you’re having with it?”
“We spilled a lot of fluid the last time. Almost got a speeding ticket, too. But yes, everything else is running OK. We will probably do a fifth oil change in the next couple days, or maybe sooner. What are you up to?”
“We’re on our way to get some help to look for that cup of spilled coffee.”
“You’ve gone Apple picking, you mean?”
“Yes, we will be able to do just that in about three minutes, I’d say ….”
“OK — let us know how that goes. And have you read the newspaper this morning?”
“Just the comics. There was nothing else I was interested in.”
“OK — talk to you ….”
Ozzi hung up, put the phone on the floor, and crushed it with his boot. Then he threw the remains out the window and put the rest of the phones away.
“That’s encouraging, I guess,” he said to Hunn, translating the coded conversation now. “They’ve already found four of the missile teams and greased them.”
“Four — nice!” Hunn whooped, illegally switching lanes inside the tunnel. “I knew those guys would wind up having all the fun.”
“Be careful what you wish for, Sergeant,” Ozzi reminded him. “Sometimes they comes true.”
“Tell you the truth, Lieutenant,” Hunn replied soberly, “I don’t like it when things go so easy. Nothing stays smooth forever. It’s almost like bad luck to have too much good luck, all at once.”
“I hear you,” Ozzi said. “The mooks will have to figure out at some point that we’re on to them. We know they don’t talk to each other at all, beyond ringing their phones when they’re about to do something. But I’m sure they monitor all the important newspapers and watch the TV news. I mean, they expected four planes to be shot down by now. They must know something is wrong.”
“Those assholes can really adapt, though,” Hunn grumbled. “They’re like a virus. They’ll speed up their timetable, or they’ll start skipping around. Or they’ll have their ringmaster dream up something new. If they have a ringmaster, that is — and I’m sure they do. But they’ll do something. That’s why it would be so much easier just to hit the first bus.”
“If only the copter guys could find it,” Ozzi said.
Hunn wildly switched lanes again, not once, but twice, viciously cutting off several different cars.
“Four teams kaput!” he said excitedly again. “Well, this is going to hit the newspapers soon enough. About us and the mooks. I know when we were in the Middle East, Murphy was able to keep some things under wraps in the media, until we got a little crazy, that is. But it might be hard to keep all this out of the public eye for very long.”
Ozzi was surprised. He rarely heard any of the original ghost team members invoke the name of the very mysterious Bobby Murphy.
Hunn went on: “I mean, eventually, people are going to freak out when they realize there’s a little war going on, right inside our own country.”
Ozzi just looked out the window at the dirty tunnel walls. “Yes,” he said. “Freak out they will ….”
They emerged from the tunnel to see Manhattan standing before them like a large gray Oz. Hunn headed across the island, doing battle with the early-evening traffic. He began running red lights and driving very fast through the dense, pedestrian-packed streets of midtown. Ozzi just sat back and said nothing. He knew what Hunn knew: a van not driving like this — that is, like a typical New York City driver — would probably raise more suspicion than one that was.
When in Rome … he thought.
* * *
Speeding over bridges, along crowded expressways and parkways, around detours and traffic jams, they somehow got to Queens in one piece.
It was dark by now. Ozzi had never been in this part of New York City. He was surprised to see trees here and blocks of houses that almost looked like suburbia. There were many people out and about, enjoying a warm early evening. Ozzi had grown up in an exclusive part of Maryland. At the moment, he might as well have been on Mars.
Hunn wound them through the streets as if on autopilot. The huge Delta soldier got more animated with each intersection, each set of traffic lights they passed through. He was getting close to his old neighborhood, Ozzi could tell. He could only imagine the emotions building inside his oversize colleague.
Another set of traffic lights, a few more turns, left and right, then suddenly Hunn slowed down. On the next corner was a storefront with frosted-over windows making it impossible to see all but one dim light inside. The name on the door read: GREATER QUEENS SOCIAL CLUB. They rolled past the building; then Hunn went around the block again. When they drove by this time, the light behind the frosted windows had been turned out.
Hunn went around the block again, but this time he pulled into the dark alley next to the storefront. There was a small garage back here. Its door was open, and a guy almost as big as Hunn was standing beside it. Hunn eased the van into the garage and the man quickly closed the door behind it.
Hunn shut off the engine, then turned to Ozzi.
“If you don’t mind, Lieutenant, let me do the talking, OK?” Hunn asked Ozzi.
Ozzi almost laughed. “Be my guest,” he said.
They got out of the van to find the man waiting for them. He was holding a flashlight up to his face. His features were hard: deep black eyes, very red nose, and oddly, his eyebrows had been recently singed. He smelled of burning wood. He and Hunn just stared at each other for a very long time — so long, Ozzi had a sudden terrible thought: Was this the wrong thing to do? Had they been set up?
But then Hunn and the guy shook hands and even embraced. The awkward moment passed. “Good to see you again, Davey,” the guy said to Hunn. “It’s not the same around here since you’ve been �
�� well, other places.”
Hunn thanked the man, then asked, “Is everything set up?”
The guy just nodded. “Set up and waiting ….”
Then Hunn introduced Ozzi this way: “This guy’s an officer. Everything we say, he has to be in on.”
The huge man studied Ozzi up and down. Ozzi felt like he was looking up a side of a mountain. This guy might have been the whitest person he’d ever met. Ozzi finally shook his hand.
“Sean O’Flaherty,” the man said. “Welcome to Queens.”
* * *
O’Flaherty led them out of the garage, down half the length of the very dark alley, between two abandoned buildings, and back toward the street again. This roundabout route got them to the rear door of the social club.
O‘Flaherty knocked three times, waited a moment, then knocked twice more. The door opened immediately; on the other side was an individual almost as large as O’Flaherty. Hunn and Ozzi hustled inside. They found themselves in a small wood-paneled room. Very dark interior, with a few low lights over a pair of card tables and a Budweiser sign on the wall. It took a moment for Ozzi’s eyes to adjust.
The man who let them in nodded quickly, then disappeared outside. “Keep a good watch out,” O’Flaherty told him as they passed. “We don’t want any surprises tonight.”
There was a small bar in the corner of the wood-paneled room. O‘Flaherty headed right for it. “You guys want a beer?” he asked Hunn and Ozzi, even as he went behind the bar and got them two bottles of Bud. Ozzi accepted his without hesitation and drank it greedily. He’d been needing a drink for some time now. They moved to the rear of the first floor, through a kitchen, and down a set of stairs. Now in the basement, they came to a huge padded door. Again O’Flaherty knocked three times, then twice more. This door opened and inside was another room. This one had no windows; it was all cement blocks.
An old fallout shelter, Ozzi thought correctly.
There was a table set up at one end, with a bunch of folding chairs lined up in front of it. About two dozen individuals were milling about, all as white and huge as Hunn and O’Flaherty. Some of them were dressed casually, but others were wearing denim shirts and yellow utility pants and boots. Most had mustaches or beards. Many wore Fu Manchu facial hair and had heads shaved clean. They looked Irish and Italian mostly, hard-nosed, hard-drinking. Not unlike the cast of a Road Warrior movie.
Which was close.
Actually, they were members of the FDNY — the Fire Department of New York.
* * *
Ozzi would come to think of what transpired in the next two hours as historical, like signing the Declaration of Independence or drafting the Bill of Rights.
It should be said, though, he would drain six more Buds in that time and that may have altered his perceptions a bit. But not by much. What happened in the tiny cement block room in the middle of Queens went beyond civil disobedience, beyond simple defiance of authority. It bordered on sedition. Not quite insurrection — though you never knew how these things would turn out. But it was, no argument, an example of pure, unadulterated American anger and true-blue patriotism.
Strange.
Historical …
In a boozy sort of way.
Hunn knew everyone in the room. He was from a long line of firefighters — his father, uncles, cousins. They immediately fell silent and sat down when Hunn entered. It was obvious they knew he’d come here for a very important reason. And Hunn did not disappoint.
It was outrageous right from the start, for as soon as Hunn took his place at the front of the room he commenced to tell the firefighters everything. About the secret unit. About what they had done at Hormuz and Singapore. About what they’d tried to do in the Philippines. Hunn spoke with amazing eloquence yet in a language his audience could understand. They hardly moved, so rapt were they at his words. Ozzi found himself transfixed as well. Working on his second Bud now, he was hearing parts of the story for the first time, too.
Hunn told the jakes about the Stinger missiles, the two buses, about George Mann and what the reporter had found out before he was murdered. He told them about Palm Tree and about the split-off ghost team that was now in the American Midwest, trying to stop the terrorists before they could knock down any airliners. He told them the ghost team had proof that highly placed people inside the U.S. government knew the Stinger missiles were in the country yet were doing nothing to prevent the chaos the missiles could cause. He told them there was a good chance that TWA Flight 800, which had crashed off Long Island years before, as well as the more recent Flight 587 crash in Queens, not far away from this very neighborhood, were both brought down by Al Qaeda and that the government was covering it up. His point was: the terrorists were back and the threat was much, much greater this time.
It was strange for Ozzi to hear it all, laid out by someone who was there for most of it. He couldn’t imagine the multitude of national security violations they were racking up here. But like Fox said, breaking the law and violating national security were things the team couldn’t worry about. Not anymore.
The firefighters began to ask questions, and it didn’t take long for their mood to turn angry. To a man the jakes agreed the government had not gone after Al Qaeda as hard as it should have. Everyone in the room knew someone who’d been killed on September 11th, friends, relatives, and neighbors. While the U.S. armed forces were fighting in Iraq, it seemed like the real enemy — the terrorists — had been allowed to run wild, expand their numbers, expand their terror. The jakes were also very pissed off at how the government had handled the whole investigation of 9/11. How were dozens of bin Laden’s family members living in America allowed to fly home to Saudi Arabia in the dark days after the attack when every plane in the United States was supposed to be grounded? Why wouldn’t the United States give the families of the 9/11 victims everything they wanted and more? The government was more interested in covering its own ass; that was the consensus.
“Which is why we’re here,” Hunn told the firefighters, finally pausing to take a long swig of beer. “We need your help to fight these Muslim assholes ourselves.”
Hunn cued Ozzi, who was now on his third Bud — or was it his fourth? He staggered to the table and set up his laptop. The wall behind him was painted white. He began flashing images from his computer onto it.
The first one showed the mysterious soiled napkin. Hunn explained that this was their only clue as to what they thought the terrorists’ Big Plan might be — that is, what the second bus was up to. He told them the ghosts had no idea what the drawing meant. They did know it came from a “Drive, Shop ’n Go” store located somewhere in New Jersey, though. The ghost team suspected the drawing was made in one of these places, the coffee stain being the clue, and the imprint of the nickels, as if they were part of the change. The problem was, Hunn explained, that according to a Google search, there were more than 150 “DSG” stores throughout Jersey.
The ghosts suspected that some people helping the terrorists’ missile teams might be connected to these places. They were looking for one individual in particular who might be either working in one of these stores or visiting one frequently.
Hunn nodded and Ozzi put up the next image.
“In other words, we’re looking for this guy,” Hunn said.
The image filled the entire wall. It showed a man in a pen drawing — done by Li — with bad hair, bad skin, an ugly face, and very criminal eyes.
“His name is Ramosa ….”
* * *
Captain Ramosa.
Yeah, Ozzi knew him.
He was the guy whom the ghost team chased all over the Philippines and who got the drop on them not once but twice during the search for the Stinger missiles. He was connected not just to Al Qaeda but, no doubt, to French Intelligence as well. Ramosa’s cover as a terrorist for hire, bloodthirsty and efficient, was a good one: he was a highly placed officer in the Philippine national police.
The ghosts had always suspected t
hat if the missiles ever made their way to the United States, then Ramosa would come here, too. There had to be a key man inside the country, a ringmaster pulling the strings for Al Qaeda’s airliner shoot-down scheme to work. No doubt, Palm Tree had provided support on this side of the Atlantic, too, but he was running back to Paris when the team settled their score with him. But like every good intelligence operative, he had “cutouts,” spy talk for middlemen, the people who did the heavy lifting in the espionage business. Ramosa was already thick into the missile plot. He was up to speed on who and what was involved. He was the natural person to take the reins, to oversee the plan. The one with whom the others — most likely sleeper agents inside the United States, as well as the “soccer players”—would “get their hands dirty together,” as the Muslim saying went. Besides, the ghosts knew Ramosa had found a secret phone number in Manila that would activate these sleepers once the missiles arrived in America. Obviously someone had already used it to awake this small army of fifth columnists.
So, if Ramosa was in the United States, then catching him might give the ghosts a solid lead as to what the napkin drawing was all about, if anything, and perhaps what the second bus was up to. But Ramosa was a very slippery fellow, Hunn explained again. With what they were up against, even if they tipped off the FBI or the New Jersey State Police and somehow convinced them that Ramosa was a dangerous person, there was a chance that the Philippine cutout would get word beforehand and disappear before law enforcement moved in. They couldn’t take that chance.
That’s why the team needed to find Ramosa quickly and quietly. But how could he be found? The ghosts didn’t know exactly. But they had a good guess where to start: at one of Jersey’s 155 “Drive, Shop ’n Go” shops.
“And that’s where you guys come in,” Hunn told them.
* * *
The meeting broke up 30 minutes later. A group of firefighters escorted Hunn and Ozzi upstairs.
As Ozzi was walking back into the dimly lit card room, one of the jakes pulled him over to the bar and bought him one last beer.
