Strike Force Delta
PART ONE
Saving Thunder
Chapter 1
There was enough plutonium in the suitcase to blow up half of West Africa.
The suitcase was locked in the trunk of the old battered Land Rover, wrapped in lead blankets and duct-taped over and over, more than a hundred times. At the moment, it was leaking only a small amount of radiation.
Six men were riding in the Land Rover. They were all carrying AK-47 assault rifles and machetes. They were members of the Angolan Popular Front, hardened veterans of insurgency and jungle warfare fought over the past few decades against a variety of enemies, including the armed forces of South Africa.
There was another Land Rover driving in front of this one. It was painted white with huge red crosses on its hood and doors—but this vehicle had nothing to do with the International Red Cross. It, too, was filled with armed men. They were mercenaries, many of them ex-members of the British SAS.
The third vehicle in this strange parade was a doubly armored Humvee. Eight men were jammed inside this tanklike truck. They were members of Delta Force, America’s premier Special Forces team. They were the most heavily armed group of the three.
It was midnight. It was raining hard. The three vehicles were speeding along a muddy winding mountain road very close to the border of Nigeria and Cameroon.
The three disparate groups were not compadres—far from it. They were three parts of an exchange team. The plutonium, partially enriched and near weapons grade, was being swapped for 16 pounds of uncut diamonds worth $70 million. Russian-made and in the possession of the Angolans via a very circuitous route, the nuclear material would be disposed of at sea once the insurgents were paid. The diamonds were being provided by Central Bank of Paris; the United Nations had purchased them via a secret bank account. The British mercs had arranged the transaction; they were in for 10 percent. The muscle, needed as insurance that the deal actually got done, was being provided by Delta Force.
The plan was simple, this after months of intense negotiations. The plutonium and its caretakers would drive to a point just over the border into Nigeria where officials from the United Nations’ Non-Proliferation Group would be waiting. They had the diamonds, plus bags full of cash. The Brits would be paid their $7 million, then sent on their way. The plutonium would be surrendered to the UN group and the diamonds would be handed over. Then the Angolans, too, would be allowed to disappear.
From there the material would be taken aboard a French Army helicopter for its trip two hundred miles out to sea to be dropped to its watery grave. The UN group would then combine with the Delta escort and together they would drive to the port city of Oran, where a U.S. Navy cruiser was waiting offshore to take them aboard.
The three vehicles were right on schedule, crossing into Nigeria just a few minutes after midnight. The meeting point was at a border station next to the Okewa Bridge, a place conveniently abandoned by Nigerian troops for the evening. The tiny convoy pulled up to find the UN group already there. Four men wearing blue windbreakers with the letters UN emblazoned on the back were waiting on the porch of a tiny cement block building. They had a strongbox containing the diamonds; they also had the $7 million in cash for the mercs. A French Army Alouette copter was parked nearby, its rotors spinning, its crew looking out on the proceedings anxiously.
The rain had stopped by now and the full moon was coating everything in a pale silver light. Some passwords were successfully exchanged, shouted over the rumbling of the copter’s engines, this as the plainclothes Delta soldiers set up a defense line in front of the border station. The mercs got their payoff first. Ripping the fake Red Cross symbols from their truck, they promptly left, driving back across the bridge and into Cameroon. The Angolans then took the lead suitcase from their trunk and, ever on guard, walked it over to the UN group.
One of the UN representatives was a nuclear physicist. He tore open the duct tape, cut away one layer of the lead blankets, and then took a long, noisy sniff of the suitcase. Like a connoisseur testing his favorite Bordeaux, he gave a dramatic thumbs-up. The Angolan fighters relaxed. The diamonds’ strongbox was turned over to them; they jumped back in their Land Rover and were quickly across the border, too. The UN scientists then put the suitcase aboard the helicopter, and with little ceremony, the aircraft prepared to take off.
That’s when the Al Qaeda fighters showed up.
They came out of the jungle directly behind the helicopter, dressed in black and carrying German assault rifles. Using the copter as cover, they’d been lying in wait, hidden under mats made of flora, sticks, and branches. The first thing they did was brutally gun down the four members of the UN team, shooting each man many times in the head. Then they shot out the engines of the two remaining vehicles, rendering them inoperable. All this happened in a matter of seconds.
A firefight instantly broke out between the Delta soldiers and the Muslim fighters. Their backs to the Okewa River, the Americans pushed their disabled Humvee over on its side and took up firing positions behind it. Though they were heavily armed, it was clear from the start the Delta crew was vastly outnumbered, as more than three dozen Muslim fighters had emerged from the jungle.
Nevertheless, the Americans began spraying the terrorists with M-60 machine-gun fire, grenade launchers, and M16s. Two of the Delta guys were armed with enormous Mossberg shotguns; each time their triggers were pulled the night would light up as bright as day. But by this illumination the Americans could see even more Muslim fighters materializing from the forest. The Americans were mowing them down in the most methodical fashion, but like a horror movie, every time a terrorist went down, two more would take his place. Soon their bodies were piling up in front of the overturned Humvee like cordwood.
The terrorists’ strategy was clear. These guys weren’t really assault soldiers, nor were they Al Qaeda’s version of a special ops team. They were just suicidal mooks with guns, fodder, to be cut down for one reason only: to cause the Americans to run out of ammunition by shooting at them.
It was a steep cliff down to the river; there was no way the Americans could go that way safely. They were cut off from the bridge and were too far from the thick jungle to make a strategic retreat into the overgrowth.
In other words, they were trapped.
The eight men took down more than 50 of the raiders—but finally ran out of ammunition. A vicious close-quarters fight ensued with knives and bayonets, but again the sheer numbers overwhelmed the Americans and soon they had no choice but to give up. Curiously, the terrorists did not kill them—in fact, they took great pains not to kill the Americans. They were the prize, not the plutonium. All eight were quickly taken prisoner.
While all this was going on, the crew of the French Army copter simply watched, offering no help even though their aircraft was heavily armed.
The Americans had their hands tied with electrical wire and were led off into jungle.
Only then did the French military helicopter take off and slowly fly away.
Chapter 2
Somewhere outside Las Vegas
One week later
It was called the Extraterrestrial Highway.
It ran for miles into the Nevada desert, north of Las Vegas, up toward the mysterious towns of Tonopah and Rachael—mysterious because they were relatively close to Groom Lake, the top-secret U.S. military base also known as Area 51.
There was a stretch of this lonely roadway known as the Straight Snake. It ran for nearly 40 miles with barely a curve. At night, cars could be seen pulled over to the side of this road, their occupants looking up into the sky, hoping to spot a UFO or a top-secret U.S. military airplane. Sometimes they saw both.
It was late afternoon now, and a very earthly activity was taking place. Twelve men wearing sun-bright orange jumpsuits and armed with extremely sharp sticks were picking up litter along the road. They were prisoners, inmates of the Las Vegas County Jail performing community service for the state.
The trash along the highway was a predictable mix of beer cans, soda bottles, condoms, and fast-food wrappers. A stretch van had carried the prisoners here; most were awaiting the outcomes of their trials or trying to raise bail. Four county deputies sat inside the air-conditioned vehicle, watching their charges in comfort, protected from the 100-plus-degree temperatures outside.
The dozen prisoners went about their duty slowly, trying to stay as cool as possible in the stifling dry heat. At some point a plain Ford four-door sedan came ambling along, smoke pouring out from under its hood. It rolled to a stop across from where the deputies’ van was parked, the only other vehicle on the straight-as-hell stretch of highway.
At just about the same moment, the air around the prisoners and the deputies began to shake. It was a strange sensation. The sky was clear; visibility was 100 percent—yet it seemed like everything around them was moving. Everything except the ground below.
This was not an earthquake.
It was something else.…
All work picking up litter stopped. The deputies shut off the AC unit, thinking it was the source of the strange vibration. But it wasn’t. The shaking only increased. It was now rocking the van violently from side to side.
Then just as suddenly, the sun seemed to blink out. A shadow fell across the prisoners, the deputies’ van, and the disabled car. That’s when everyone just looked up. What they saw at first appeared like a huge bird of prey coming down at them. In the next instant, it looked more like one of the alien spacecraft the highway was famous for. In the moment after that, these two visions combined to make something else: a very top-secret aircraft. It was called a V-32CX Super-Osprey. An aircraft the size of a small airliner, with the ability to land vertically, it was all black and sinister looking. An almost-ghostly beautiful Asian woman could be seen peering down from the aircraft’s open side door.
Five of the prisoners looked up at the bizarre aircraft and immediately threw down their litter pickers. One of them yelled over the commotion: “Our ride is here!”
They began running across the desert toward the strange aircraft, which was now landing about one hundred feet away. The deputies were stunned—so were the other prisoners. They couldn’t fathom what was happening. It took the lawmen a few precious seconds to get their asses in gear, and by that time it was too late to stop the fleeing prisoners. The deputies burst out of the van, but all they could do was restrain the rest of the litter crew from running out to the strange aircraft as well.
One deputy finally got on his radio—but that’s when the two passengers from the disabled car suddenly appeared in their midst. They were not simple civilians, now that the deputies had their first good look at them. They were large individuals, muscular, tight jawed, with piercing eyes, casually dressed. Government types—the deputies could tell.
One of the two men fanned out a wad of cash. Thousand-dollar bills. Twenty of them. He passed half the bills to the four deputies, while his comrade passed the rest to the prisoners, this as the strange aircraft, having taken in the five prisoners, left quickly, going straight up, turning, then disappearing at astonishing speed over the eastern horizon.
“Government business,” one of the men said to the deputies calmly. “No one here saw a thing.”
The strange aircraft flew into the night, heading east, in radio silence, its cross section showing up on radar screens below as nothing more than a bird, if at all.
It was refueled in flight twice, once over Colorado, again over Illinois, both times by Air Force KC-10 Extenders. The weather grew worse as it flew on, first rain and then thick fog. By the time it reached the East Coast, nothing else was flying. Big or small, every airport along the Atlantic seaboard was socked in.
The aircraft’s destination was a very isolated cliff located several hundred feet above the ocean, surrounded by nothing but beach and thick forests. The nearest road, the nearest house, the nearest living soul to this place were many miles away.
There was a single airstrip up here. On one side of this runway were five huge aircraft hangars, all in severe disrepair and abandoned long ago. On the other side were the cliff and then the sea beyond. This place was once a bustling Coast Guard air station; in years past large maritime patrol craft would land here to be serviced. But the base had been decommissioned for nearly two decades, and the weeds and the corrosive salt air had overtaken it since.
It was at this desolate location, appropriately called Cape Lonely, that the futuristic aircraft finally landed.
There was a one-man welcoming committee on hand waiting for it.
He was Eddie Finch. An ex-Coast Guard NCO now in his sixties, he’d been assigned to Cape Lonely Air Station during his active career. Now he was like a ghost here, still haunting what might very well be a haunted place.
He was out on the runway pulling weeds when the strange aircraft arrived. He’d been told, by a close friend, that the airstrip, little used in the past decade, would be needed tonight, that a single aircraft would be coming in to land.
Like those before him, Finch felt the strange airplane’s arrival before he heard it, then heard it before he saw it. The air around him started moving; his ears started ringing. Then the most god-awful-looking thing came straight down, out of the thick fog, landing like something from outer space. It took Finch a moment, but then he knew exactly what it was and who it was carrying. But still he was upset.
“If I knew it could land like that,” he grumbled, “I wouldn’t have been out here all night, pulling these damn weeds.”
The weird airplane never turned off its engines. Its side door opened and the five men in orange prisoner suits tumbled out.
They greeted Finch warmly. He looked like a thin Santa Claus and was a grandfatherly type. The five men held great respect for him. They crowded around him.
“How much time do we have?” one of them asked the elderly man. “Enough for a cup of coffee?”
The old man just shook his head. “Not this time. You’re moving again right away.”
He motioned over to the edge of the cliff. A smile came to his wrinkled snow-bearded face.
“Want to see something?” he asked them.
At that, the thick fog miraculously parted—suddenly they could see beyond the edge of the cliff to the coastline and the ocean below. Floating about five hundred feet offshore was an extremely rusty containership.
The five men let out a hoot. For them, this might have been the most beautiful sight in the world.
No sooner were the words out of Finch’s mouth when another sound enveloped the cliff. This racket was a little more familiar. Horizontal rotor blades turning in the mist and wind. Powerful engines on another powerful machine. It came out of the fog a moment later.
It was a helicopter. But again, not an ordinary one.
It looked mostly like a UH-60 Blackhawk, the mainstay of the U.S. military’s helicopter forces. It was dull black, charcoal almost. This was because it was layered in Stealth paint.
It was about one-third bigger than the typical Blackhawk, though, and it was very wide. It could carry nearly a dozen more people than a standard UH-60 and many more weapons, too. This one was festooned with heavy machine guns, Gatling guns, grenade launchers, missile launchers, the works. In many ways, it was a flying tank.
Add in its sound-dampened engines, its suites of high-tech navigation and communications gear, its night-flying capabilities, and the fact that, again, it was covered in the technology of Stealth, no surprise its nickname was the Superhawk.
“It’s only because that thing,” the old man was telling them, pointing back to the futuristic transport, “is too big to land on the ship that they had to send this up for you. But I understand you’ll appreciate the ride itself. For sentimental reasons.”
“Amen to that,” one of the five men replied.
As the five ex-prisoners quickly made their way to the copter, its side door opened and three men stepped out. Two were crewmen of the aircraft; the third man looked sick. His eyes were downcast, his hands shaking slightly. He’d been a darkly handsome individual at one time—but his face had fallen, his eyes had sunken in, and his lips seemed permanently sealed by worry and anxiety. The five men tried to talk to him, but he was oblivious to their presence.
Finch took the ailing man by the arm and led him away from the copter. “Take good care of him,” one of the guys in the orange suits said. “He’s important to us.”
His new charge now standing a safe distance away, Finch returned to the helicopter and handed the prisoners a bag he’d been keeping under his jacket. It contained a dozen doughnuts. The men looked in the bag and laughed. It was an inside joke.
They all shook hands and the prisoners climbed into the helicopter. But suddenly they heard a voice calling out over the twin noises being made by the futuristic transport and the Superhawk.
“There’s one more!”
That’s when a sixth person stepped out of the top-secret VTOL aircraft. Dressed all in white, long black hair blowing behind her like some Asian goddess, she was beyond beautiful.
Her name was Mary Li Cho.
Everything just stopped. All the noise and the wind and the sound of the sea below. Just stopped … as she seemed to glide across the field separating the two aircraft, the futuristic plane taking off behind her. Finch focused in on her and whispered to the five men in orange: “Is that her?”
They all nodded.
“That’s her,” they confirmed.
They made way for her and she climbed aboard the Superhawk first, followed by the five men and their doughnuts. They all turned and saluted Finch, even the Asian beauty. He saluted back.
The copter gunned its engines, causing a huge downwash of air and exhaust. Finch stepped back, his hat flying off into the breeze—but he didn’t care. This was more exciting than anything he’d experienced in his twenty-five-plus years with the Coast Guard.
It pays to have friends in high places, he thought.
He watched as the helicopter seemed to fall right off the side of the cliff, descending to the rusty ship below. The copter landed on the ship’s middeck not a minute later—and promptly disappeared, another trick in its arsenal.
The ship was already moving when the helicopter set down. It had pulled anchor and was now halfway into a 180-degree turn, pointing its stern east, out to sea.
Back up on the cliff, Finch watched as the containership completed its turn and then, with a roar of power that sounded like a handful of jet engines, which was not far from the truth, the ship soon shot ahead at incredible speed, nearly 40 knots in just two minutes, and quickly disappeared over the darkened horizon.
Finch stood there for a long time, the downcast man silently joining him at his side.
Finally, Finch whispered to himself: “Good luck, guys—I’ll keep the coffee warm for you.”
Chapter 3
The containership’s name was the Ocean Voyager. Eight hundred feet long, 105 feet wide, and 60 feet from the top of the mast to the bottom of its cargo bay, it weighed thirty-thousand tons empty. It was square and rusty and at least a dozen paint jobs behind the curve. When it was originally built back in the early 1980s, on a good day it could barely make 15 knots.
The ship was ugly—and that might have been its best asset. Its deck was a jungle of tie-offs and ropes and winches and chains and a million other things to trip over. The deck was also crowded with containers, in some places stacked three or four high. Most of them were as rusty as the ship. Lashed together with creaky bars and hinges, they looked like a bunch of railroad cars that had somehow become lost at sea. In other words, the vessel appeared no different from any other of the hundreds of containerships plying the world’s oceans.
But the Ocean Voyager was not really a containership. It was a warship, powerful and unlike any other.
If it had an official description, it would be Air-Land Assault Ship/Special. But no one privy to its existence ever called it that. It was based on a British concept, born of low defense budgets back in the 1970s, in which the Royal Navy would deploy the Harrier jump jets on converted containerships, thus negating the need to build new, expensive aircraft carriers.
The Ocean Voyager was that dream come true in spades. It began with two elevators that had been installed just forward of the ship’s recessed deckhouse. The same size and type used on the U.S. Navy’s supercarriers, they were powerful enough to lift forty-thousand pounds from the bowels of the ship up to the deck. These elevators served as movable launch and recovery pads for aircraft flying from the vessel. And they were well hidden. When they weren’t in use, six containers were slid on top of the elevators, preventing them from being seen from above.
The elevators served the small airborne strike force that was hidden below decks. The first time this very secret undercover vessel saw action was a year before, in the Mediterranean and then in the Persian Gulf. For that, its maiden voyage as a combat vessel, it had carried two of the supersecret Superhawk helicopters and a pair of AV-8s, the U.S. Marine version of the famous Harrier jump jet.
Now, there were four Superhawks on the ship, in addition to one surviving jump jet. The helicopters were all new, just off the assembly line. A platoon of Marine Corps air mechanics serviced these aircraft in the ship’s crowded belowdecks hangar. Spare parts and ammunition for the aircraft were stored nearby in—what else?—seaborne containers. Just about everything the ship needed to stay at sea and do its thing was hidden in plain sight inside the containers lashed to its deck.
But the ship’s assets only began with the planes of its tiny air force and the highly trained special ops troops who flew them. There was a section toward the front of the ship, on the bottom level, that was crammed with five white oversize containers. Inside these nearly antiseptic compartments could be found some of the most sophisticated spy equipment known to man.
Nicknamed the White Rooms, these containers held tons of eavesdropping and satellite tracking gear. The people who worked in these containers—the Spooks—could tap into Echelon, the National Security Agency’s ultrasecret satellite system. This meant that just like several dozen NSA sites around the world, the ship could intercept just about any phone call made, E-mail sent, fax transmitted, anywhere on earth, then read, copy, and even alter it without the sender or receiver ever knowing a thing.
The white containers also housed dirty tricks sections where just about anything needed in the spy game could be produced, duplicated, or counterfeited. Weapons could also be made down here—anything from a germ bomb to a small nuclear device.
So the Ocean Voyager packed a punch. High-tech aircraft, a small army of high-tech warriors, a huge snooping capability—and its own weapons factory—it was all powered by four gas turbine engines, the very same powerplants that drove the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. The Ocean Voyager could move through the water like nothing else its size.
But whose ship was this? Who built it? Paid for it? Who was able to get all these weapons and spy gear, airplanes, and people on board—to sail off and do what was considered the dirtiest work in all of the dark world of secret operations?
There was no easy answer to any of those questions except the first one. The ship did not belong to the U.S. Navy or the Marines or any branch of the U.S. military. Nor the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, or any other U.S. intelligence Agency. The most accurate answer was that it belonged to the people of the United States of America. The crew served the country’s citizens directly.
Its purpose? To track down anyone involved in the planning, funding, or implementation of the attacks of September 11th and punish them severely. Simple as that. Invading countries? Regime building? Humanitarian missions? These weren’t on the minds of the people who ran the ship. Its reason for being was to haunt Al Qaeda, to use the terrorists’ tactics on the terrorists themselves, to fight down and dirty, no holds barred against the Islamic fanatics—and God help anyone who got in the way.
The people on board were already well-known in the underworld of the Middle East, in that nether region where the terrorists made their money, sold their drugs, and plotted their missions of mass murder. These killers for Allah considered the regular U.S. military to be big and lumbering, a giant easily heard from thousands of miles away, long before it made any move against them. But these same terrorists knew the people on Ocean Voyager to be something quite different. To the terrorists, they were bad spirits, the bane of their existence, demons who slipped in with the night, a razor blade knife in hand. They’d already killed a number of Al Qaeda’s shadowy leadership, and they’d already disrupted several major Al Qaeda operations. Just the speaking their name was enough to send chills up the spine of any Al Qaeda member, assuming such vermin had spines.
For those in the United States who knew of them, the people who crewed this ship were usually referred to as The Ghosts. To the Muslim terrorists who feared them so much, they were known as the Crazy Americans.
And at the moment, just about all of them were drunk.
The most impressive place on the Ocean Voyager was the Captain’s Room. Located at the top of the stern-mounted control house, it was a large multiwindowed cabin, done smartly in mahogany and steel. It featured a library, a wet bar, a galley, and a very ornate wooden table, which allowed those sitting at it to look out, with an unobstructed view, to the ocean beyond.
The room also contained many high-tech items. Huge TV screens, satellite readouts, radar-imaging systems. Just like the Spooks’ rooms downstairs, it looked more like something out of NASA than something out at sea.
In this room now, just an hour after the ship’s hasty departure from Cape Lonely, the members of the mysterious special ops group had gathered. There was plenty of cold beer and liquor to be had and plenty to eat. Out the window were the softly rolling sea and a bright full moon. Overhead, the stars glowed like jewels.
This was a reunion of sorts. The Ghosts were an assorted cast of characters. They numbered more than 100 now; when the unit first sailed a year ago, the number was barely more than half that. This was another strange thing about them: other special ops groups who’d come into contact with the Ghosts along the way, some even sent out to track them down and arrest them, had wound up joining them instead.
The original team—or at least the officers—all had one thing in common: Each had lost a family member or a loved one on September 11th or to some previous terrorist act. They were all veterans of special operations, too, but with this extra incentive: These secret warriors became the type of operatives whose skills were complemented by a deep-seated desire for revenge, a way to pay back Al Qaeda for bringing so much misery and destruction to their lives and the country that day.
The core of the original group had been made up of about two dozen Delta Force soldiers, two fighter pilots, and several copter drivers. Their extended family included the guy who actually sailed the ship—a veteran Navy captain named Wayne Bingham known to everyone as Bingo—and his crew of 35. Since that time the Ghosts had been joined by a dozen or so members of the very hush-hush State Department Security unit, nearly a dozen SEALs—again a team that was originally sent out to apprehend the Ghosts—and three members of the Defense Security Agency, another deep-secret Pentagon unit, which, among other things, specialized in rooting out terrorists within the ranks of the U.S. military.
Almost everyone here now in the Captain’s Room was wearing an orange prison suit, another part of the odd chapter of where the unit members had been in the past few weeks. The five men who’d been picked up in Las Vegas were on hand; they’d been arrested for trespassing on government property, ironically after preventing a terrorist attack on nearby Nellis Air Force Base. But many of the others were attired in bright prison wear as well. Up until 24 hours ago, they’d been prisoners, too. Their jail was the holding facility at Guantánamo Bay, the place where the U.S. military kept prisoners captured in the various wars against Islam. All of the Ghosts were Americans, though, and the secret unit’s activities had been heroic and had saved tens of thousands of innocent lives. But the truth was, they’d also rubbed so many in D.C. the wrong way that at one point the entire unit had been secretly locked up at Gitmo.
But now they were all free again; that’s why it was a kind of class reunion. Some of these guys hadn’t seen one another in a long time. So the beer flowed and there was laughter and handshakes. A baseball team, reuniting in spring training after winning the World Series in the fall, was like this.
Most of these men were chiseled, huge, and muscular, especially those of the group who were ex-Delta Force. The SEALs and the SDS guys, too, were all pumped—shaved heads, tattoos, and sunglasses at night. They all looked the part—in fact, they looked like extras for a movie being made about special operations. Even the beautiful Asian girl, Li, seemed right out of central casting.
The unlikely-looking host of the party was sitting at the far end of the table, speaking with a few of the senior members of the unit, drinking Jack Daniel’s straight. He was a little man, barely five-four, sixtyish, with a completely ordinary face, red complexion, and enormous jug-handle ears.
His name was Bobby Murphy. He was the brains behind the outfit.
The story of Bobby Murphy actually began with a terrorist incident back in 1972. The Summer Olympics were held in Munich that year. Midway through the competition, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped a dozen Israeli athletes, held them hostage, and eventually killed them all. German authorities allowed most of the terrorists to escape. About two dozen in all, they scattered themselves to the four corners of the earth.
Shortly afterward, the Israeli government created a secret unit whose sole aim was to hunt down and kill every one of these terrorists. It took them more than 15 years, but the secret unit eventually got every one of the Munich Massacre killers, shooting each one between the eyes, but not before telling him who they were and why he was being whacked. It was crude, it was immoral, and it was highly illegal. But it sent a message to the Palestinian terrorists: If you screw with Israel, we’re going to get you, no matter how long it takes. You will never spend another peaceful night. You will always be looking over your shoulder. Eventually, we will find you, and we’ll kill you, and it won’t be pretty.
That’s what Bobby Murphy wanted to do for America after September 11th. He wanted to send a message to Al Qaeda: You have done this to us and you have succeeded. You might try something as big or even bigger on us and succeed again as well. But whatever the case, we’re coming to get you. No matter how long it takes, we’ll hunt you down, we’ll find you, we’ll kill you, and it won’t be pretty. Considering the mass murder that had happened on 9/11, Murphy didn’t think anything less than this sort of campaign would do. And eventually he found a few people along the way who agreed.
But who was he to have such grand designs? His own past was so shady, even Murphy himself wasn’t sure of every twist and turn he’d made.
He was a spy—that everyone was sure of. He’d worked for every intelligence Agency in the United States—CIA, DIA, NSA, NRO—his career of 20 years had been an alphabet soup of bag jobs and undercover missions.
Or at least, that was his story. No one in the special unit knew for sure, and at this point there was no real need for asking. Murphy was such a regular guy and an authentic patriot, anyone in the group would take a bullet for him. And one thing was for certain: Murphy knew a lot of people in the U.S. intelligence community. But as he’d told all the team on more than one occasion, this was not the same thing as having a lot of friends there.
Shortly after 9/11, Murphy approached the highest officials of the CIA with his bold concept. He felt that the country needed a boost, a shot in the arm to get out of the gloom and depression that had followed the events that dark day. He reminded the CIA of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor, when a handful of small bombers dumped a small amount of bombs on Tokyo. The damage was slight, but the propaganda and morale victory was enormous. Murphy wanted to do the same thing—reach out and put the hurt on someone, anyone, connected with 9/11 and do it right away, to alleviate the hopelessness that seemed to have seeped into the country after the attacks.
The CIA turned down his idea. Too dangerous, they said. Too much career risk if things went wrong. No matter what the mission, the Agency would not get on board. Undeterred, Murphy went to all the military’s intelligence services—the DIA, Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, Naval Intelligence. All of them turned him down, too, for the same reason: too much risk to their own asses. But, Murphy had asked them: Isn’t the fact that three thousand Americans were murdered in cold blood enough to justify any risk? Apparently not, was the answer he got everywhere.
But he did not give up, this funny little man with the thick Texas drawl. Two years, three, of knocking on doors, trying to get meetings. Then finally somehow he got an audience with the President himself. Again, as the story went, at the end of that meeting, with the President reportedly in tears, Murphy was given $1 billion—that’s billion—to do his thing. He was also given assurances of no interference, from anyone. Politicians, the military, no one. He was given carte blanche to take the fight back to the terrorists by playing by the terrorists’ own rules—underhanded, no mercy, no guilt. Very unpleasant stuff.
The Ocean Voyager came from all that—it was the unit’s first base of operations. They’d traveled to the Middle East in it the previous year, hunting down Al Qaeda members like dogs and dispatching them in some of the most painful ways possible. In that time they’d saved the supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln from a suicide attack, rescued several hundred Americans from certain death atop a high-rise in Singapore taken over by Al Qaeda-linked terrorists—and they’d prevented a team of terrorists that had infiltrated the United States with a load of Stinger missiles (with help from people in Washington) from wreaking havoc in America’s skies.
The team’s true-life adventures were things of pulp novels—their accomplishments, their bravery, their ruthlessness. But again, they were also considered by many in D.C. who knew about them to be a rogue team—and this, too, did not sit well with those in power.
And to be fair, not one man in this room could claim to be an angel, to be free of sin. They’d been down in the mud with the terrorists for more than a year now, and it was a dirty place to be. In many ways, the Ghosts were crazy. Some would say they were actually America’s terrorists. But they’d also killed many more Al Qaeda types than the entire U.S. military combined.
Bottom line, the Ghosts got the job done and were getting the job done, and if they ruffled a few feathers—or tons of feathers—along the way it didn’t make any difference. They were people stuck in the grieving process; they refused to accept the fact that their loved ones were really gone for no good reason. They’d also lost team members; good friends had been killed in pursuit of this. This made for a very strong fusing of resentment, revenge, and ruthlessness. Translation: If you were a resident of any Muslim country and you were peaceful and good and not intent on killing every American you could see, fine, the team had no business with you. But if you were a Muslim extremist or a financier of terror or trafficked with Al Qaeda types, even for a nanosecond, you had big reason to be worried.
Just like the Israeli assassins with the Munich terrorists, eventually the Crazy Americans were going to get you.
So their first year had been filled with ups as high as the Himalayas and downs as deep as the Mindanao Trench—these had been Murphy’s very words to them to start this beer fest. But here they were, back together again, freed by his almost scary manipulations of both the Las Vegas court system and the U.S. military.
But their freedom had not come without a price.…
Murphy called the meeting together and now addressed the whole group for the first time. He was no great orator. He was by nature very shy. (He looked more like a teacher or an insurance salesman than a spy.) But it was the way he said the words that got to them. When Murphy spoke, he always had a rapt audience.
Yes, he began, they were all finally free. He was able to get them all off, for the time being, with the powers that be in D.C. Though these things could come back to haunt them as the world turned at the Pentagon, officially now they had all been released—from Cuba, from Vegas—on personal recognizance and into Murphy’s custody, for which Murphy paid a huge bail.
“Let’s put it this way,” the diminutive spy said. “Where we once had a boatload of enemies in Washington, now we have just a few. And while we used to have very few friends there, now we have more than a handful. We are in a better place.”
He took a moment to let this sink in.
“Now, that said,” he went on, “I want to emphasize that just like before, we are not inside their command structure. We don’t take orders from them, and I’ll be damned if we ever will—not after the way they treated us while we were saving their asses at Hormuz and Singapore.”
He paused for a moment. “All that being said,” he began again, “something has come up.…”
A silence descended on the room. The festive, beery atmosphere changed to one of dead seriousness. Again, when Murphy spoke like this, the unit’s members knew it was wise to listen.
“Our ‘new friends’ at the Pentagon have a problem,” Murphy said soberly. “And they would like us to get them off the hook.”
A murmur of discontent went through the room. No one liked the sound of this. The idea of helping the people who were trying to chase the team down just a few weeks ago did not sit well with them.
Murphy sensed this tremor right away. He held up his hand and quieted the grumbling. “I know exactly how you feel,” he said. “But I think we have to help them out, for one simple reason: Because we are still Americans, and some of our brothers are in trouble. Big trouble.”
Murphy hit a button and one wall of the room disappeared, to be replaced by a huge projection screen. It was showing a close-in satellite photo of a clearing in a very dense jungle, a bridge nearby, and a small cement building. Two vehicles were aflame; smoke was obscuring one-third of the image. There were shot-up bodies lying everywhere.
“This picture was taken about a week ago,” Murphy began. “That river is in West Africa; it separates Nigeria and Cameroon. This was the scene of an exchange of enriched plutonium for money involving some British mercs, the UN, and the French military.”
Another groan went through the room. The unit had no love for the French; in fact, they had very strong evidence that the French Secret Services were helping Al Qaeda in their quest against American interests. The bastards.…
“It’s a long story,” Murphy went on, “but the exchange was being chaperoned by a unit from Delta Force. A special team called Delta Thunder.”
Murphy looked around the room and saw a few confused faces. More than a few of those present were past members of Delta Force, America’s premier special ops unit.
“Never heard of ‘Delta Thunder?’” he asked them. “No surprise. It’s a very secret unit within Delta. It’s so classified that even the rest of Delta doesn’t know about it.”
A few people just shook their heads and sipped their beers at this. Black on black, secret upon secret—just how deep did America’s deep operations go? Did anyone really know?
“Because no one knows about these guys is the very reason that we’ve been asked to help them out,” Murphy explained. “They were kidnapped, after this gunfight, by a local Al Qaeda cell. These mooks are undoubtedly torturing them—and we know they have plans for their demise. But because very few people know about these Thunder guys, there’s really no one deep enough to go in after them without blowing their cover.”
He waited a beat, then said: “And that’s why we’re the perfect people to rescue them. Because very few people know about us, either.”
Colonel Ryder Long just sat back in his chair and popped another beer. He could feel the ship moving at tremendous speed beneath him—when those aircraft engines were firing like they were on afterburner, the huge ship rode the waves like a speedboat. But moving fast wasn’t the same as moving smooth. Ryder was an Air Force guy; he was the team’s resident fighter pilot. When he wasn’t flying, he preferred his feet on solid ground.
He’d flown the unit’s first Harrier. (Later he was joined by a second pilot, Gerry Phelan, flying a second Harrier. Phelan was killed during the battle above Hormuz.) Ryder was also the senior officer in the unit, though military protocol was all but dispensed with when it came to everyday life around the Ghosts. He was north of 45 years old, had been a test pilot before this and a kind of special ops fighter pilot before that, with extensive flying in and out of Area 51 in Nevada and the vast stretches of top-secret ranges beyond.
The day of 9/11, he was asleep on his couch in his home in Las Vegas when the first plane hit the first tower in New York. His wife, his beautiful wife, was on that plane, flying back from Boston after an assignment for her news station. She was among the first victims of the Al Qaeda attack. Ryder’s life changed that day. He could fly any plane put in front of him; he was probably one of the best pilots ever and had been involved in many exciting and very deep op missions in his career. But he was nothing without her. She was his life and he just couldn’t comprehend living without her.
He went into a massive funk, alternating between draining bottles and praying. Finally he found himself at rock bottom, in a filthy motel room, looking down the wrong end of his hunting rifle. That’s when the phone rang. It was an old friend from the intelligence biz offering Ryder a chance to get back at the people who had killed his wife. A new unit was starting up to do just that, and did he want to join? Ryder put the gun aside and replied: “Just tell me when and where.”
The other officers of the original team were from the same situation. Red Curry, one of the original copter pilots, had a brother killed that day, a fireman rescuing people in the first tower. Martinez, the unit’s original operations officer, had a daughter killed in the first tower. The leader of the original team’s Delta contingent, a huge monster of a guy named Dave Hunn, had a sister killed in the second tower. She was there on a job interview, one of the youngest victims of the attack. On and on, misery and loss.…
Again, this was their motivation, and this was the genius of Bobby Murphy. Getting them together, getting the money, and bringing the fight right back to the terrorists’ doorstep.
And now, they were getting another mission.
Murphy changed images on the huge screen. Now they were looking at a port city, obviously still somewhere in Africa, a computer-generated image that looked extremely real.
This was Loki Soto. Shoehorned between the already crowded border of Guinea and Sierra Leone, it was an accident of ninetieth-century country making, a leftover forgotten on many maps back then and even some today. It was a port city but a very run-down one, a ramshackle place taking up barely two miles of West Africa’s Atlantic coastline. The harbor facilities were dreadful. Only the rustiest tubs, scows, and tramps came here.
That’s why it was such a strange place for a castle.
Its name was Casa Diablo, literally Devil House, and actually it was an old Portuguese prison shaped like a medieval castle. The jail cells within were made of thick stone; the walls were very high. Murphy explained that during the slave-trade years the place was famous for its torture chambers, a way of getting the unruly human exports in line. That reputation for cruelty was still alive and well there today.
Casa Diablo was about the size of a city block, and there were only two means of access: a huge front door and a smaller one out back. The back door was called Door of Death, because prisoners who were murdered inside the prison were just dumped out back to be disposed of by local animals. The front door came complete with a large wooden gate, a drawbridge, and a moat. Whenever either door was opened, it was heavily guarded.
Murphy showed the team a photo of the prison’s roof. It was crowded with both troops and weapons. And unlike the surroundings, these weapons were very modern. The top of the fortress was crammed with high-tech antiaircraft guns, Chinese made, most of them. A number of two-man SAM teams were also on hand to watch for threats from above. For targets on the ground, high-caliber machine guns covered every corner of the ramparts, giving fields of fire on all the streets surrounding the prison. There was even an artillery piece up here, with a range long enough to reach ships in the harbor, about a half-mile away. In the old days, this would have been called a shore battery.
“This place has the reputation for being impossible to get into,” Murphy told them. “With all the guards, every entrance covered, and all that hardware on top. The whole city and even the port are covered. One wrong move by anybody and these guys start throwing lead. Bush pilots in the area know better than to fly anywhere near this place—someone from here even took a SAM shot at a Boeing 727 cargo plane a couple years ago, just missing it.
“It’s a poorly kept secret that Al Qaeda took over this place just about the same time, two years ago. Loki Soto is an anchor in their so-called ‘Arabs in Africa’ movement. It’s a strange little place where they can sell and buy, ship and take shipment of just about anything, be it weapons, drugs, money, human beings. You name it. There is no big government to come down on them; there’s hardly any government there at all. And certainly none of the surrounding countries want to get on the bad side of the mooks these days. They can’t get their own populations in line, never mind worrying about these Islamic assholes giving them trouble.”
Murphy looked back at those gathered, just shook his head, and said: “This is where the guys from Delta Thunder are being held.”
More murmuring around the room.
Murphy switched images and suddenly they were all looking at a live broadcast of the prison—from a satellite. (He had just tapped into one of the National Security Agency’s most classified more advanced satellites, another talent of his.) They could clearly see many people moving around the roof of the castle. They could also see the weapons, the radars, the radio antennae. And they could see something else, too. A huge concave dish—this was a satellite receiver, a TV linkup, part of a system that could broadcast events happening inside the prison worldwide.
“These guys are equipped like a mini-CNN,” Murphy told them all. “It’s all new gear, just set up. The Al Qaeda bigwigs sent them all this TV stuff for one reason.”
He paused a moment and then said: “They plan to kill the Delta guys … on live TV. They’re going to claim that they’ve been interfering in local African affairs, and thus are being executed for their crimes. They are going to broadcast their executions around to the world, via that new upstart Arab network Al-Qazzaza TV. This will be Al Qaeda’s way of announcing to the world that the jihad is in Africa to stay.”
“Who the hell is behind this?” someone in the group asked. “This is a pretty elaborate setup for the mooks. And we all know that Al Qaeda doesn’t exactly throw its money around. That all looks like expensive stuff. The guns, the TV stuff.”
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