Strike Force Bravo (12 page)

Fox had stationed himself atop a pile of rocks nearby, about fifty feet away from the two pilots. He hadn't said anything to anybody since interrogating the Aboo commander. It was now about 0500 hours and the DSA officer was again whispering into his communicator. A few minutes later, Ryder and Gallant heard a somewhat familiar whooshing sound. Off to their right, a couple miles south of them, a Tomahawk missile was approaching, flying very low over the jungle. Ryder and Gallant watched the weapon streak by and explode directly above the remains of the Aboo main camp. The detonation was so bright and so symmetrical, it looked like a movie special effect. The camp had been in bad shape when the team left it. It was just a black scar on the side of the mountain now.

No sooner had the flames from this explosion dissipated than they heard Fox whispering into his phone again. Sure enough, a few moments later another Tomahawk arrived.

“There must be a sub laying offshore,” Gallant reasoned. “Judging by the time it takes for him to make the call and then for them to show up.”

Ryder touched fists with him. “Yeah, good guess,” he said.

The second Tomahawk streaked by, headed for the Aboos' other mountain base, the place where the SAM had been launched. It plowed into the hilltop, exploding with such power, the resulting landslide buried the remains of the SAM camp forever. Two more Tommies showed up right on its tail. They were headed for the ghost beach where the spy bomber lay. They circled the area once, then peeled off and dived into the B-2.

One would have probably sufficed. A ton of high explosives tended to punch a pretty big hole in the ground. Two of them had the ability to create a small moonscape. Sure enough, when the flames and smoke lifted, Ryder and Gallant could see there was nothing left inside the impact area. No plant life. No water.

And of course, no sign remaining of the top-secret bomber.

 

An hour went by. Dawn came and the heat of the day arrived. The team stayed up on the summit, under the rubber trees, so cool and giving with their shade. Ryder and Gallant remained out on the ledge, though, smoking cigarettes. Everyone was waiting for Fox to tell them what to do next.

But the DSA officer had moved even farther away from them by now. In fact, he was standing on top of the highest rock at the highest point of the mountain. A very exposed position, but as it turned out, he was up there more as an antenna than an unintentional target.

Something was wrong. Fox had been trying to raise somebody, anybody, on his UPX device ever since the last two Tomahawks creamed the B-2F. But strangely, none of his calls were going through. Or if they were, he was not getting any bounce-backs. It wasn't a problem with the UPX; it was working fine. The problem was on the other end. Fox had been yapping into the device almost nonstop the whole night, keeping those listening informed on practically every step the team had made.

But now, ever since all the evidence of the small war had been wiped out by the Tomahawk missiles, no one was returning his calls.

 

Noon came and went.

The heat grew. Fox had still yet to hear from anyone and was getting increasingly agitated as the hours passed. A call to the two SDS men left with the Kai two miles down the coast confirmed that the airplane was all right, but that no orders or any messages at all had come through the flying boat's communications suite. Everyone on top of the mountain thought that once they'd rested they'd simply march back down the beach to where the Kai lay hidden, get onboard, and take off. But Fox was still in charge. And while he was waiting for someone to contact him the others had no choice but to wait as well.

The DSA officer remained up on the high rocks, in the blistering heat, throughout the early afternoon. He was no longer standing, though, and he was no longer on the phone. He was just sitting up there and staring out at the water. He didn't say anything to the pilots sitting nearby in all that time. In fact, the only person he'd talked to was the guy named Atlas, who they now knew had been the pilot of the B-2. Their conversation, held atop the burning summit, had been brief, sharp almost, with Atlas saying very little and answering most of Fox's questions by emphatically shaking his head.

Ryder and Gallant stayed on the edge of the cliff, watching all this happen even as they were beginning to finally mind the heat. The afternoon wore on; the weather cooled. Fox stayed in place, though, his UPX maddeningly silent. Just as Ryder and Gallant were lighting up their last cigarettes, a very unexpected visitor came up behind them. He fell to the seat of his pants next to Ryder.

It was Martinez, their troubled colleague. He sat there for a long time, silently looking out on the black spot of ground where the B-2F had met its end—twice.

Finally he turned to Ryder and Gallant and for what seemed like the first time since the events back in the Strait of Hormuz actually spoke to them.

“All is not right here,” he told them, his eyes reviving a bit of their former fire. “You guys know that, don't you?”

“What do you mean?” Ryder finally replied, shocked to hear his voice again.

“Just think about it,” Martinez said, keeping his words low. “This whole thing started when someone sent that B-2 someplace, right? A training mission, did they say?”

Ryder and Gallant both nodded.

“Well, if that was true,” Martinez said, “why the hell were they doing an aerial refueling in sight of land? And in someone else's airspace at that? Some ‘training mission.' Don't you think?”

Ryder shrugged. It was true, most refuelings were done way out over water if possible, especially training missions. It was just safer that way. But this did not mean some weren't done over land as well. Plus…

“‘Training missions' are always a cover for covert stuff,” Ryder said. “It's the most convenient lie.”

“Exactly,”
Martinez said, with a slightly disturbing smile. “So, let's assume it wasn't a real training mission.”

He looked back to where the SAM site had been. A thin pall of smoke was still rising above it.

“OK now, what about these Aboo guys?” Martinez went on. “
They
were in the right neighborhood, weren't they? Shooting wildly up into the sky, just as our planes were going overhead. And do you really believe they got that old SAM on their own?”

Then he turned back to where the B-2 had been.

“And why didn't the people who sent us here just bomb that thing when they first spotted it? If they were going to destroy it anyway, why did they have us go through all this first? Why wait? I'll tell you why: because they had to find out something first. You saw how Fox acted when he finally made it to the bomb bay. What the hell was he looking for if it wasn't a nuclear bomb? And besides, that bomb bay, it had been cored out—I saw it myself. There was no way that plane could have been carrying a bomb anyway! It had to be carrying something else.”

Ryder and Gallant puffed their Marlboros and thought about what Martinez had to say. Having the SAM on the island. Having the Aboos looking after it. Having someone fire it at just the right time to knock down the KC-10
and
force the B-2F to crash-land. Maybe they had all seemed like unlucky accidents before, coincidental in the middle of this crazy night. But strung all together like this, in the light of day, maybe coincidence wasn't the only explanation.

Maybe the SAM had been meant to down the B-2 after all.

“But how could the Aboos know the B-2 was coming?” Ryder asked him. “That plane was so special, any mission it was flying would have to be highly classified. They're out here eating bugs and pissing in the stream, for God's sake. They're the bottom of the food chain. Even Kazeel couldn't get information like that.”

“It
had
to be a lucky shot,” Gallant said. “They were going for an airliner and missed…big-time.”

But Martinez just shook his head. “It was no lucky shot,” he insisted. “I don't know how, but they
knew
what they were shooting at. And they must of known it would be the two planes hooked up. Sure, a SAM like that couldn't take down a B-2, because it runs on radar and the bomber is a stealth. But if they knew the B-2 would be hooked up when it was going overhead, then if you hit the tanker…”

He let his words trail off. He was almost ranting, yet he was also making some sense, in a disturbing kind of way.

He turned and pointed up to Fox, still stationed atop the pile of rocks, still staring out to sea, still waiting for a callback.

“And I'll tell you one more thing,” Martinez said grimly. “See that guy up there, waiting for his phone to ring? Well, it ain't going to ring. Take it from me: A very dirty job has just been done and now someone is seriously messing with his head. And now he's stuck out here, too. Just like the rest of us….”

Manila
Two days later

Sheik Kazeel had never laughed so hard in his life. Tears were rolling down his face. His sides ached. He could barely catch his breath. He was usually as joyless as a man could be, an occupational hazard of being the world's first “superterrorist.” But at the moment, he could hardly contain himself.

He was sitting in the back room of the Impatient Parrot brothel in downtown Manila. This part of the Philippine capital was known as the Combat Zone. A throwback to the days of the Vietnam War, it was a six-block area heavily populated with strip clubs, saloons, dance halls, and whorehouses. These days the streets were crowded not with US soldiers on R and R but sex tourists, from Europe and Japan, who were looking for a little bit of the strange. They'd come to the right place. It was a Saturday night and the Zone was rocking. There was plenty of strange going around.

The Impatient Parrot would have seemed an unlikely place to find the shadowy Kazeel. He was a devout Muslim. He prayed the required five times a day and never went anywhere without his copy of the Koran. Alcohol, drugs, slatternly women, young girls? Just about everything the Prophet Muhammad had warned all Islam to avoid was on display at the Parrot. Kazeel was then sitting in a defiled place, and to do so was considered unholy. He was also a senior member of Al Qaeda. Being spotted in a whorehouse might not please the Saudi fundamentalist
mullahs
who were still the backbone of Al Qaeda's financial network.

So why was he here then?

And why was he laughing?

 

That Kazeel planned the attack on the USS
Abraham Lincoln
was known around the world. That he also helped plan the attacks of 9/11 was also common knowledge. It was for these reasons that the Department of Homeland Security, imprudently, as it turned out, proclaimed him the world's first superterrorist. That's how Kazeel's blurred photo wound up on the cover of
Time.

That the plan to sink the
Lincoln
had failed miserably was also known to the world, of course. But in the twin Byzantine cultures of
jihad
terrorism and international notoriety, Kazeel's standing had not diminished a bit, despite handing the Americans a huge victory that day. That he even attempted the attack was enough to please his fans in the Saudi palaces, the casbah, and the Islamic religious schools through the Middle East where hatred of all things American made for most of the curriculum.

Kazeel's street rep aside, though, the failure of the
Lincoln
attack, as well as the events at the Tonka Tower, were hardly good news for worldwide Islamic terrorism. Both had succeeded only in draining away much of the momentum Al Qaeda had generated after the attacks of September 11th and since. And this holy war against the United States was all about momentum. Al Qaeda's aim was to put fear into the hearts of all Americans and keep it there, permanently. They did this by being brutal, unrelenting, and evasive. But in less than 40 days the terrorist network had been thrown on the defensive, not once but twice. It had been made to look inept. Funds flowing into Islamic charities, Al Qaeda's lifeblood, were slowing. Huge chunks of money from the House of Saud or Syria or Iran were not so forthcoming as they had been. Many of Al Qaeda's members were still on the run, trying to stay one step ahead of the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan. Many were in jail. Many more had been killed. Despite Kazeel's newfound celebrity, the Al Qaeda movement itself seemed in danger of running out of gas.

For these reasons, the next attack against America
had
to be big and it
had
to be a success.

That's
why Kazeel was in Manila.

 

In his own toothless, pop-eyed way, Kazeel loved irony.

The United States was now sitting in Iraq. The oil was finally beginning to flow and at least some of the Iraqi people were beginning to get happy. In many ways, the American dream was coming true half a world away. Plus, the military victory against Baghdad, for all its faults, had made the United States more
respected
in the Arab world, whether through fear or admiration.

But while Gulf War II had turned some old adversaries into friends, it had also produced the reverse effect. It had created some new, unexpected enemies for America. Friends who were now foes. One of them, the most powerful, had decided it was in their country's interests to take the United States down a peg or two.

To say this new enemy was well-placed in the global community was a huge understatement. Indeed, they were entrenched in both world history and current affairs, in diplomatic parlance, a “real player.”

And now, for reasons that were beyond Kazeel's reckoning, they were willing to help Al Qaeda in operations against the United States. Very secretly, of course.

War made strange bedfellows; politics did too. And, frankly, Kazeel's new
ashaab judus
, his “newfound friends,” were only a little less repugnant than the Americans themselves. But he was in no position to be choosy. After the events at Hormuz and in Singapore, he would take all the help he could get. And he was already getting a lot of it.

Because of this strange new alliance, Kazeel now owned the contents of the downed B-2F's cargo bay—and it was hardly a shipment of American Tourister luggage. The thirty-six cases contained launchers for Stinger missiles, the ubiquitous shoulder-fired, American-made antiaircraft weapon favored by armies and insurgents alike.

Stingers were one of Al Qaeda's most cherished weapons, almost custom-made for their needs. When matched with their missiles, they were light to carry, just 22 pounds, and compact, at five feet and change. They were simple to operate: just aim, fire, and forget. The heat-seeking missile carried a two-pound fused warhead designed to explode on contact. It could fly as high as 2 miles, and had a range of five. It also hit its target going 1,500 miles per hour. Put it all together and it was more than powerful enough to bring down a helicopter. Or a jet fighter.

Or even an airliner.

Just how his
judus
was able to get the launchers into the belly of the B-2F, and then arrange for the spy bomber to crash-land on Fuggu Island, Kazeel had no idea. In many ways, he didn't want to know. When he and the
judus
agreed, quoting an old Arabic phrase, “to get their hands dirty together,” it was also understood that for security reasons, both sides would only know what they had to know, and nothing more. The Aboos were involved, as was an almost-antique Soviet-made SAM—but beyond that, Kazeel was blissful in his ignorance of how his new friends came by the precious launchers.

“High-level connections,” was how he reasoned it out.

There really was no other explanation.

 

Kazeel was a dark-skinned Arab. He was thin and perpetually dirty. However, if he dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a Hawaiian shirt, he became indistinguishable from the thousands of Filipino men walking around Manila. Not that it made any difference. He'd been assured by his new patrons that he could also move around the city with virtual impunity, that the local authorities had been paid off to leave him alone. Another indication how powerful the
judus
could be.

Kazeel had flown in three nights before, using a fake Egyptian passport again supplied by the
judus
. He was met at the airport by the
judus
' Manila contact, a balding, rotund, 50-ish Filipino hoodlum named Marcos. They left the airport in a limousine; they even did lunch. On the third day, Kazeel was taken to see the launchers; they were hidden in a bunker on a small island outside Manila Bay. Kazeel had been whisked there in a multimillion-dollar yacht. The bunker was in a deep chamber bored into the side of a small mountain. It was guarded by uniformed members of the Philippine national police. The launchers, still sealed in their carrying cases, were piled in three stacks inside. The cases were muddied and some were dented, but all had survived the impact of the B-2F's crash landing, as they had been made of a material similar to that used in commerical aircraft crash-proof black boxes.

Marcos told him the cache of missile launchers was still “very hot” though, and could not stay in the bunker for very long. The plan would be to move them around continuously until they could be shipped to their final destination.

Visiting the bunker was like walking into a bank vault for Kazeel. In the past, Al Qaeda had been hard-pressed to find even a handful of Stinger launchers at any one time. Now that he was working with the
judus
, these kinds of weapons could be had almost readily.

All Kazeel had to do now was get three dozen missiles to mate with the launchers and the next big assault on America would be one step closer to reality.

 

The viewing in the bunker had been complete by early afternoon. When the yacht docked back in Manila, Marcos asked if he could join Kazeel for dinner. Normally Kazeel would have told him a flat no. But in this new world of his, he surmised the contact wasn't doing this because he longed for Kazeel's company, but rather that his
judus
wanted someone to keep an eye on him while he was in town. And Kazeel
was
learning to become flexible. So he accepted Marcos' request.

Kazeel spent the rest of the day holed up in his five-star hotel. Around 6
P.M
., Kazeel received a message from Marcos. He was on his way up. Dinner was eaten in Kazeel's suite, during which Kazeel lectured the hoodlum on the fruits of Islam, his one condition for agreeing to meet. The conversation after that was trite. Marcos quickly grew bored. It was so obvious he was here just to keep tabs on Kazeel, it was almost painful.

But then room service arrived and a bottle of post meal wine was offered, courtesy of the house. Kazeel rarely drank alcohol, as it ran counter to Muhammad's laws. But for whatever reason, he didn't feel very Muslim tonight. He'd had a very stressful past couple months, trying to get the world to stand on its head for Allah. He deserved a little respite. So he agreed to just one.

That one glass quickly led to another however; Marcos fancied himself a wine connoisseur and he was also a lush. Soon the first bottle of wine was gone, and room service brought two more. They were drained as well. Then Marcos ordered some liquor Kazeel had never heard of. They drank it in little glasses poured right from the bottle. Kazeel was soon very drunk. That's when Marcos revealed that in addition to working for the
judus
, he was also the owner of a brothel, downtown. In the Combat Zone.

That
was how Kazeel found himself here now, in the back room of the Impatient Parrot, cackling hysterically, not unlike a jackal.

 

What was making Kazeel laugh so hard was the two girls sloshing around in the mud pit in front of him.

They were young and topless and they were wrestling each other ferociously. A dozen well-heeled Filipino businessmen were sitting around the pit. They'd made a corral of metal folding chairs and were occasionally flipping U.S. half-dollar coins into the mud as tips for the two young combatants. Kazeel and the Parrot's owner sat in padded seats at either end of the squared ring. The back room was small and grimy. A giant plate glass window, covered in thick black paint and pictures of some rather sick pornography, made up one of its walls. Brick and perforated bamboo sticks made up the other three. The room was filled with tobacco, marijuana, and opium smoke. The floor was a half-inch deep with spilled beer. The stink of sweat was almost overwhelming.

For the most part, the other men sitting around the pit were silent, intense. Not unlike a pride of lions getting ready for the kill. The two girls would be made available to all after this slop match. If the crude pictures on the black wall were any indication, a rough outing was guaranteed for both.

But Kazeel's delight was not coming from anticipation of sex. Having been taught from an early age to hate women, he was virtually sexless. Yet he was finding it highly amusing to watch the two girls roll around in mud, slapping each other, pulling hair, ripping off what was left of their clothes, groping at their privates.

The others in the room saw the mud fight as a prelude to nocturnal depravity. Kazeel saw it as slapstick.

 

There were four security men watching over him; they'd been supplied by Marcos. Kazeel's
shuka
—Arabic slang for assistant or companion—was standing close by as well. He was Abdul Abu Uni, a nickname, of course, and a cruel one. Abdul was a eunuch, mutilated by an uncle at the age of two. Keeping such a thing hidden in an Arab community was impossible. People had been calling him Uni most of his life.

A dead ringer for the American ad icon Mr. Clean, right down to the huge gold ring in his left earlobe, Uni was six-foot-two, wide and strong, with a powerful face and gigantic hands. He was fanatically loyal to Kazeel. He was also a functional idiot, with an IQ of less than 75. They'd been a couple for nearly 10 years. While the superterrorist had traveled alone in the weeks before the
Lincoln
attack, back when he was less well known, these days Uni went everywhere with him. He could usually be found standing at Kazeel's left shoulder, arms folded, a perpetual scowl in place.

But even Uni was laughing now. The two girls rolling around in the mud, the hair pulling, the ripped clothes. He shared the same humor as his boss. He thought the whole thing was hilarious.

Until the bullets started flying.

 

The brothel's four security men had been arrayed around the room in a protective box, one for each corner. Standing back in the shadows, they couldn't see anything but the back of a lot of heads.

Kazeel had just downed another glass of Stoli when he noticed one of these guards suddenly disappear behind the row of Filipino businessmen. One second the man was there; the next he was gone.