Strike Force Charlie (18 page)

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Authors: Mack Maloney

BOOK: Strike Force Charlie
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“OK, he's on his way,” the photographer announced. “Places, everybody.”
The door opened a moment later and Rushton walked in. He did not look like the same man who'd left his office just a minute before. He was smiling, jovial. With press cameras flashing, he embraced the photographer warmly, though he
hardly knew the man. Then Rushton hugged his wife for far too long, smearing her makeup and leaving her embarrassed and confused. Then each of his children received a kiss, whether they liked it or not—and the older ones certainly did not. On cue, the small crowd of Rushton's civilian aides on hand gave him a round of applause.
Again, there were about a dozen members of the press in the room. They'd been given the opportunity to photograph the general while he was being photographed. But they'd all heard the whispers of what was coming up in his interview with the
Washington Times
and that the quixotic NSC officer had become somewhat of a loose cannon lately. These were the reasons they were here.
They began shouting questions at him, but Rushton, never losing his smile, held up his hands to his ears, pretending he could not hear them. Then he took his seat in the middle of the photo set, plopping down with a smile. At last, the photographer was ready to begin snapping. But then he hesitated. A presidential seal about the size of a dinner plate was hanging on the wall behind the family. It was showing up in the frame. The photographer signaled one of the security men and through pantomime indicated the problem.
The security man crept forward and whispered in Rushton's ear. The general turned, looked at the seal—but then thought for a very long moment. Finally he nodded and the security man quickly removed the seal. But for those who witnessed it, it was that long hesitation on Rushton's part that stood out in their minds.
The photographer urged the family to relax and look pleasant, a very tall order for Rushton's older children, who looked like they would have preferred to be anywhere else but here. Finally, everyone appeared as relaxed as they were going to get. The photographer snapped the first picture, just one of many, as he knew it would be wise to take at least a few dozen.
But that's not what Rushton had in mind. No sooner had everyone's eyes adjusted to the first strobe flash, than the general quickly got to his feet and smoothed the wrinkles
out of his uniform. His smile long gone, he signaled his security men. One opened a side door. The others took up their positions around the rotund officer.
Then, with the press shouting more questions to him and without so much as a nod to his family, Rushton hastily left the room.
With more security men clearing the way for him, Rushton took another elevator to the top floor of the building.
Here he met the two Army lieutenants again. They were standing at the door to the building's elaborate, if somewhat cloistered, function room. From the looks of it, no one had gone in or out of the main door for a while.
But looks could be deceiving. The general was throwing a private affair here today; indeed, the aides had referred to it for weeks as the “secret lunch.”
They knew that the guests had been coming in not by the front door but clandestinely through a rear basement entrance to the EOB, this while most of the Washington early-morning press corps were down on the second floor watching Rushton's kids compete to see who could be the brattiest. Up a service elevator, cleaned and made spiffy for the occasion, the guests filed into the function room through the kitchen, which had been cleared of all help before they arrived.
So, on the other side of the door now were no fewer than a dozen senators, from both parties, a number of influential higher-ups from several government agencies, including the FBI and Homeland Security, three Supreme Court judges and their clerks, as well as the base commanders of just about every military installation within 50 miles of Washington, D.C.
The general approached the two lieutenants, whose job now was to keep anyone from going through the function room's main door.
“Can you two handle this?” Rushton asked them as he was being whisked by.
The two junior officers assured him that they could. Rushton stopped and said to them, “Make sure of it. If there
are any screwups, you will not want to know what will happen to you.”
With that, Rushton's security people got him on the move again. He went down the hall, turned right, into the kitchen. Ten seconds later, the two lieutenants heard the function room behind them erupt into spirited applause. Rushton had just entered the room.
Both men relaxed, but only a little. They had no idea just how long they would be out here, guarding this door, while looking as if they weren't guarding it.
“All those heavy hitters in there,” one said. “How he was able to keep something like this under wraps in this town for so long I'll never know.”
The other lieutenant just shook his head.
“I don't
want
to know,” he said.
New York firefighters Mike Santoro and Mark Kelly had both been injured on 9/11. They'd just come on duty that horrible day when word reached their firehouse in midtown Manhattan that the first plane had hit the towers. Fifteen minutes later, both men were on the scene. They saw the horror firsthand. The flames, the smoke, people jumping to their deaths rather than be burned alive. Twenty firefighters in their company, including Santoro, Kelly, and their lieutenant, started walking up the stairs, heading for the top of the first tower. They met the initial wave of injured coming down around the thirty-third floor. With the stairwells filling with smoke and the electricity starting to fail, the lieutenant told Santoro and Kelly to lead the most seriously injured out to ambulances. Santoro carried one man down the three dozen sets of stairs.
Then the second plane hit the second tower. Now back out on the street, both Santoro and Kelly were struck by falling debris and wound up riding in the same ambulance as the people they'd just rescued. They never saw anyone else in their fire company again. Eighteen close friends killed, trying to save others.
Santoro and Kelly were now sitting in Kelly's Ford Ranger, drinking coffee and eating junk food. They were parked in a
Drive, Shop 'n Go store in East Newark, New Jersey, not far from the Garden State Parkway. Though this was a very run-down neighborhood, the area surrounding the store was somewhat wooded, trees planted to shield those traveling the Parkway from having to see the likes of East Newark.
Santoro and Kelly been sitting here almost all day; it was now 8:00 P.M. Just like several dozen other firefighters, parked at other DSGs throughout upper Jersey, this was how they'd chosen to spend one of their well-deserved days off. Defending the homeland. Helping again. To their wives and friends, though, they were off fishing.
But it had been a long day, especially listening to news radio, which was reporting that a high administration official was now expecting a terrorist nuke to go off just about anytime and because of bureaucratic bungling, Pentagon in-fighting, and, most surprising, inaction from the White House there was really nothing anyone could do about it.
It was getting dark. They'd just drained their fifth coffee each when a white Chevy pulled into the store's parking lot. The car looked innocuous. It was beat up, dented, with a faded inspection sticker and a temporary license plate hanging off the back. Typical transportation in this part of the Garden State.
A man climbed out. He was slight, dark-skinned, wearing a T-shirt and baggy jeans. A ball cap was pulled low over his brow. The driver walked right by their big Ford, and both firefighters saw him close up. He had an oily face, with bad skin and eyes right out of a cell block. They secretly snapped a picture of him with their photophone, then compared it with the sketch of Ramosa given to them by the ghosts.
“I'll give that one an ‘eight,'” Santoro said wearily. “And that will make six ‘eights,' two ‘nines,' two ‘sevens,' and thirteen ‘five.'”
Kelly groaned and opened another package of Ring-Dings.
Their spirit was willing, and they were proud to help the ghost team. And at the meeting that night at the Queens Social Club the massive surveillance plan proposed by the outlaws seemed to have made sense: many eyes looking for one
person believed to frequent at least one of the DSG stores.
The problem was, in this section of Jersey, a description of someone with dark skin, a bad complexion, oily hair, and penitentiary eyes matched just about every male walking into one of the convenience stores.
And a few of the women as well.
 
Sean O‘Flaherty also had faith in the system he'd helped the ghost team set up. True, it was all based on a hunch, not unknown in intelligence work, that this character Ramosa was somehow connected to the DSG napkin. As Hunn and Ozzi explained to O'Flaherty, while hunches were based on intuition, there was also some reality to the situation. They wouldn't have linked Ramosa with the mysterious drawing had it been scribbled on a doily from Tiffany's or the back of a menu from a famous Manhattan eatery. While maybe not so in his native Philippines, Ramosa would stand out like a sore thumb in one of those places. But in a DSG along the Parkway in East Newark? He'd fit right in.
Couple this with the common knowledge that many Al Qaeda sleeper agents had been caught or tracked to Jersey since 9/11 and even before and that at least some of these stores were operated by people born not in the United States but in the Middle East … well, the search for Ramosa at the Drive, Shop 'n Gos seemed to make sense.
The firefighters from Queens were the key, though—the manpower they needed to pull it off. The plan was for pairs of jakes to stake out as many DSG stores as they could and simply take pictures with picturephones of anyone who might look like Ramosa.
But what they never expected was that in East Newark
many
people fit the cutout's description. This particular day, the jakes had three dozen DSG stores covered. Unexpectedly, instead of stumbling upon one mark, he being Ramosa, they came up with more than a hundred possible suspects, each one captured on the firefighters' photophones.
As per the plan, they'd been sending these photos to O‘Flaherty since early that afternoon. And O'Flaherty, sitting at his
young daughter's computer, was soon overloaded with pictures of people who looked a lot like Ramosa but not one that perfectly hit the mark. So many were coming in, at the rate his daughter's memory files were filling up with the phone-photos O'Flaherty was concerned the computer would freeze up—and they'd be sunk.
It went on like this for hours. O'Flaherty sitting in a too-small chair in a bedroom overwhelming in pink and blue, posters of pop singers and movie stars staring back at him. By 9:00 P.M., they'd still yet to score. He was ready to hang it up and call the troops home. They'd given it a shot, they'd tried their best to help the ghosts, but had come up empty.
Then … a stroke of intuition. Or brilliance, Or just plain luck. But suddenly O'Flaherty hit upon a way to sort out this digital Tower of Babel.
More than 140 photos had popped onto his daughter's computer. And indeed, many of these people could somewhat match the description of the guy they were looking for.
That's when it hit O'Flaherty. Sure they all looked alike, but out of the 140, could 2 or 3 pictures or more be of the
same
guy?
It took O'Flaherty a while to separate and categorize just who sent which picture from what DSG—but then bingo! He spotted one character, sloppy dress, bad skin, Mets cap pulled down low over his eyes, going into the Parkway DSG. He looked pretty much like the illustration. The same guy also showed up at the DSG on Park Street around 8:10 P.M. Then, 15 minutes later, he was at another Drive, Shop 'n Go on Wooster Boulevard. Then, another team caught him walking into the Drive, Shop 'n Go near what used to be the Green Hill projects. Fifteen minutes after that, there he was again, at a store near the center of Newark itself.
O'Flaherty had been in a Drive, Shop 'n Go before. As their name implied, they were little more than junk food heavens and a place to gas up. Why would one person visit five in less than an hour?
Especially someone who fit the description of the guy they were looking for best?
O'Flaherty checked it, rechecked, and checked it still again. But each time he came to the same conclusion: same guy going into a handful of DSG stores in less than an hour.
That's when he made the call.
“We think we've tagged him,” he said into the disposable cell phone. “How quick can you guys get back up here?”
 
Ahmeen Dujabi had worked at the Drive, Shop 'n Go in East Newark for nearly a year.
An emigrant from Lebanon, he had no valid passport, no visa, no green card, nor any other kind of legal immigration documentation. Nevertheless, Dujabi had been promoted to night manager at the Drive, Shop 'n Go just three months into his tenure. He was making nearly $50,000 a year in salary now. With another $25,000 in overtime, a lot of money for someone who didn't have to pay taxes, he was wealthier than 90 percent of the people who walked through the front door.
There were risks, though. Dujabi had been robbed 14 times in those 10 months, shot at twice, hit once, and he'd also been stabbed. It got to the point where he could spot a robber as soon as one came in. They had that certain look about them.
However, he never expected to see two soldiers in ski masks walk through the door.
It was just after midnight. Both men were heavily armed. Dujabi saw one M16 clone and a large-caliber rifle, a gun that could literally blow him away. The two men were also wearing body armor and strange, somewhat dated helmets. And one of them was gigantic.
They strolled in very casually, but their guns were up in Dujabi's face in an instant. He knew these were no ordinary criminals.
“You speak English?” the large masked man asked Dujabi.
The clerk was so stunned at their strange appearance, he couldn't talk.
“You speak the language?” the large one screamed at him again, putting the barrel of his gun right between Dujabi's eyes.
Again Dujabi tried to say something but couldn't. He began nodding furiously instead.
“Are you …
Immigration
?” Dujabi heard words finally spill out of his mouth.
Suddenly the big man's gun was making a dent in his brow.
“Why? You got a problem there,
sa-hib?”
Dujabi clamped his mouth shut and opened the cash register drawer. He took out several hundred dollars in small bills and pushed them across the counter at the two armed men.
But the gun muzzle just went deeper into his forehead.
“We don't want your filthy money,” the large man said, throwing it back into Dujabi's face.
In a flash Dujabi was looking at a crude pencil drawing of a man with bad hair, bad skin, and very criminal eyes.
His own eyes went wide open … .
“So?” the large man said. “He's a friend of yours?”
Dujabi tried pushing the money on the two men again. But this was an act of desperation; he suddenly knew who these two men were. News traveled faster on the Al Qaeda network than on the U.S. media sometimes. Dujabi had already heard about what was happening out west. Could these people be the Crazy Americans, too?
“You
know
him?” the big man thundered at Dujabi again.
But Dujabi was now too petrified to move.
At this point, the smaller of the two masked men vaulted over the counter and, bypassing the cash register and the money safe, went directly to the small bank of video monitors, the heart of the store's TV surveillance system. It was hooked up to an elderly but still-functioning videotaping machine that handled huge cassettes good for 24 hours or more. The masked man unplugged the player, grinding its megat-ape to a halt. He then took two previously filled tapes from the bottom shelf and, with the machine under his arm, went over the counter again.
Still the large man had his gun on Dujabi's brow.
“Where's your green card?” he screamed at Dujabi again.
“Where the fuck are you from?”
Now the smaller of the two armed men tried to tug the larger one away. “Let's go,” he said calmly.
But the large man would not move. “He knows this guy!” he was screaming now, shoving the drawing of Ramosa into the clerk's mouth. “He probably knows a lot of things!”
“We got what we want,” the smaller man said. “Time to go.”
But the large man would not budge. “One bullet and we've got one less asshole in this country,” the man said.
“Our
country … .”
Meanwhile the smaller man's attention had been sidetracked by a case full of cell phones just below the cash register. He broke the glass with the butt of his rifle and took a dozen of the disposable phones stuffing them into his pockets.
Dujabi was distracted by this for a moment. When he looked back at the large man, he saw him pulling his rifle's trigger.
The blast was so bright, it burned right through the retina in Dujabi's left eye. He was rendered half-blind in an instant. The bullet, not fired into his skull but beside his ear, made him half-deaf as well, the concussion bursting his eardrum. Then the butt of the huge rifle hit him in the jaw, breaking it. He went down like a sack of bricks, fracturing his elbow on the hard cement floor. Then the large man picked up the cash register and threw it at Dujabi's head, cracking two vertebrae in his upper back. He began losing consciousness.
But still the large man's voice was ringing in his good ear. “Consider yourself the luckiest mook in the world,” he said.
The last thing Dujabi heard before he passed out, though, was a strangely reassuring sound: that of a police siren, pulling into the store's parking lot.

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