Strike Force Delta (3 page)

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.