Strike Force Delta (38 page)

The field they were aiming for was only about one thousand feet long. Once a soccer field, before the Taliban took over Afghanistan, it was overgrown with grass and a few small trees. But at least it was flat—somewhat—and some of 1st Delta were still in the area, should the
Psyclops
crew need help getting out of the wreckage. If anyone survived, that is.

The field was in sight just seconds later. The crew of the EC-130 prepared themselves for a very rough landing. Dow did everything he could to slow the plane's airspeed. Full flaps extended, wheels down, nose up. He even tried reversing two of his propellers, nearly impossible to do in midair. But the plane was burning on both wings and he could see the flames creeping closer to the engines. Hard bang-in or not, they had to get down on the ground in a hurry.

Dow yelled for the crew to come forward and strap in as best they could up front. As they looked out the oversize windshield, the soccer field got bigger and bigger the faster they fell. The cabin was quickly filling with
smoke. Their number-one engine was about to burst into flames.

Still Dow and Clancy held the plane steady.

They slammed into the ground a moment later. The first thing that happened was the right-side landing gear carriage collapsed, digging that side of the plane into the hard surface. They went screeching along the field, past Ryder's wrecked F-14, decapitating trees and throwing great furrows of rocks and dirt into the air. The right side dragging actually helped slow them down. Still they skidded the entire one thousand feet before the huge plane finally began slowing. Then came a loud thump—the sound of the left side wheel carriage collapsing as well. It shook the plane from one end to the other. But then, finally, they came to a stop.

The crew stayed frozen in place, jammed as they were up in the flight compartment. None of them quite believed they were still alive. A couple of the DJs checked their pulses, just to make sure.

Then. . . someone just started laughing. It was strange at first, but someone else joined in, and they were joined by a third person and a fourth and before long they were
all
laughing wildly. It was
funny
. They'd made it. They
were
alive. And they had just had the adventure of their lives.

Then someone turned around and looked back into the cabin and saw that it was a total wreck. Transmitters, condensers, computer stations. The White Screen—all smashed, crashed, or starting to sizzle with flames. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of equipment damaged beyond any hope of repair. And they didn't
have to be reminded that they had essentially landed right on top of the mysterious Snowball. That alone cost a couple
billion
dollars.

The crew stopped laughing as they looked at the damage.

Then Clancy said, in perfect deadpan, “Who the fuck is going to pay for all this?”

And the crew went back to laughing again.

That's how the guys from 1st Delta found them when they pried open the doors to the big plane and helped them out. Each man laughing like crazy.

The big plane looked just as bad from the outside as it did within. The fires on both wings had burned themselves out in the crash, but the plane was still a total wreck. The Delta guys led the civilian soldiers away from the smoldering aircraft and got them up the side of the berm where many of the team were now located.

Someone had found some wine in the city and now a couple bottles were passed to the
Psyclops
crew. It was not yet seven in the morning. Still they drank greedily.

Fox's Scramble copter had set down by this time. He'd seen what had just happened in the city square; in fact, he'd taken part in the strange massacre of Iranian soldiers.

He walked over to Dow now and sat beside him. “Would it help if I told you I have a Level Six security clearance?” he asked the National Guard pilot.

“Help how?” Dow replied.

“Help in letting you tell me what the hell went on back there,” Fox said evenly. “I saw that igloo thing
blinking as bright as day when you were flying above that Iranian column. Then I saw those soldiers just stop their trucks and take it. No one in their right mind would just sit there and allow themselves to be killed.”

“So?”

“So—it gets me thinking those Iranian soldiers were suddenly
not
in their right minds . . . and as nuts as it is to say this, I think your plane and that cupcake you were carrying underneath it had something to do with that. Maybe ultrasensitive sound waves, interfering with brain function? Or microwaves that have the ability to short-circuit electric charges in the cerebral cortex?”

Dow just stared straight ahead for a long time, sipping from the breakfast wine bottle. Then he said: “We won here, right, Major?” Dow looked down on the city, with its hundreds of billowing American flags.

“I'd say that, yes. . .”

“And that might not have happened if the Iranian Special Forces hadn't been stopped?”

“Again, true. . .,” Fox acknowledged.

“So the situation was somewhat desperate?”

“For sure,” Fox told him.

Dow took another long swig of wine and relaxed, if just a little.

“Then all I can say is, everything other than that is classified,” Dow told him. “And if you ever bump up another couple steps in the security ratings,
then
maybe I'll be able to answer your question.”

He looked directly at Fox. “Know what I mean?”

Fox nodded slowly, then looked back at the plane wreck and the pieces of the Snowball that were now scattered all over the ground.

“Jesuzz,” he whispered—Dow had essentially answered his question. “Now, that's
damn
scary.”

By nine in the morning, the majority of the Ghost Team had assembled atop the Al Sharim berm.

All three copters were on the ground nearby. Their crews were sacked out in the long grass, trying to catch their first real sleep in nearly a week.

It was finally bright daylight. The city beyond looked surreal, like something from a fantasy war movie or a real-life video game. There were American flags flying everywhere. Atop hundreds of buildings. Big and small, wrecked and intact. Rising above the smoke and the flames. Rippling in the early-morning breeze. One look at all this and there was no doubt who'd won this war.

It was up here, on the grassy hill, where the Ghosts waited for the last of the stragglers to emerge from the city.

They finally came out in twos and threes. Members of the strike team, some of their Zabul allies. More civilians who had somehow managed to survive the hellish night.

And they saw one last miracle up here. A man emerged from the western part of the small city, dragging what looked to be a parachute behind him. Some of the Delta guys ran down to meet him. Incredibly, it was Red Curry.

“Jesuzz,” Fox told Curry once he had been helped up the hill, “you're taking this ghost thing a little too far, don't you think?”

“What do you mean?” Curry asked, already stripped down to his trademark Oakland Raiders T-shirt.

“Didn't you go in when you took the hit for the
Psyclops
plane?” Fox asked him. “That was a pretty big SAM. . . .”

Curry just laughed wearily. “ ‘Go in'?” he asked. “Like take the bullet? Be an instant hero? Not me. That's what ejection seats are for.”

Indeed, he explained, his zero-motion ejection seat was caught in the fireball created by the SAM hit—and he wound up going down in the Farāh River, his chute opening not ten feet before he hit the surface.

“You don't know what cold is,” he concluded, “til you take a swim in that river.”

They waited all morning. By noon, everyone had been accounted for—except for two: Li and Ryder.

And this turned out to be the strangest thing of all, because people had seen the pair after the battle had ceased, so everyone knew they were alive. One of the Blackhawk pilots said they approached him just before dawn, after most of the shooting had stopped and before many people started congregating atop the Al Sharim berm. The copter pilot had set down near the city's main gate to check damage to his aircraft. Ryder and Li were driving what appeared to be the Patch's Range Rover.

They'd asked the copter pilot if he knew how they could get to the part of town where Ryder's F-14 wound up. The copter pilot gave them directions that would allow them to avoid the more devastated parts of the city. The pair thanked him and left in the direction of the crash-landed jet.

The second copter pilot saw them a few minutes later. He flew over them as he was heading for the city square. They seemed to be salvaging something out of Ryder's wrecked fighter, which was very close by. They both
waved and the copter pilot waved back in response, like the first pilot, happy to see that both had made it through the ordeal.

Then, by coincidence, the first copter pilot saw them again, just minutes later, as he, too, was flying west. They were still in the Range Rover, this time driving back into the devastated city.

That was the last anyone saw of them.

It would take a while longer, but the rest of the Ghosts would also learn that day that in addition to Ryder and Li being missing, the $2 million Murphy had given Ryder was missing, too.

The news of the Battle of Khrash soon flashed around the world.

Though the U.S. government at first tried to downplay the event, describing it as a simple skirmish between warring Afghan tribes, once the media jumped on the story it was soon clear that a huge firefight had taken place and that a major blow had been dealt to Al Qaeda. TV images showing American flags fluttering over the corpse-laden terrorist city only confirmed that.

And there was no doubt who had so decisively defeated the terrorists: It had been the Ghost Team, the near-mythical anti-terrorism unit that had been battling the perpetrators of 9/11 while the U.S. administration
was preoccupied with invading oil-rich countries overseas and lining the coffers of its political friends at home. The deeply secret special-ops team's fingerprints were all over the Khrash operation.

So it was strange then, that at the moment of their greatest triumph, true to their name, the Ghosts disappeared.

No victory parades. No medal ceremonies. No press conferences offering praise to Bobby Murphy and his crew. No sooner was the battle over than the mysterious black ops team simply vanished.

And though it tried very hard to find them in the next few weeks, the U.S. government never did figure out where they went.

Not exactly anyway.

Several months later, a tantalizing clue was found.

One night, very late, a stray short-wave radio transmission was picked up by several U.S. listening stations, outposts hidden in some of the most desolated areas of Southwest Asia and the Middle East. From far down the channel, a voice spoke in a very distinctive drawl with a perfectly American timbre. As if caught in the middle of a private conversation, the voice was heard to say:
“My friend Nietzsche once wrote: ‘He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster himself.' ”

That was all that was captured of the transmission before it faded back to static. When analyzed by audio experts from several U.S. intelligence agencies, however, the unanimous conclusion was that the voice belonged to Bobby Murphy.

Several months later, a curious entry found its way into a top-secret briefing paper being prepared for the National Security Council's Terrorism Task Force. It concerned more than a dozen reports of strange Caucasian men spotted during routine undercover surveillance entering and leaving prominent mosques in locations around Europe and the Middle East.

Observed in groups of twos and threes, some of these men looked to have had surgical procedures done recently to their faces; others appeared to have had the pigment in their skins actually darkened. And though all were poorly dressed and generally unclean, they were also seen carrying rolls of American dollars in their pockets. More intriguing, the number of different individuals observed totaled 55, the same number of soldiers thought to be in the Ghost Team.

But these strangers were not infiltrating the mosques to do them harm. This fact was confirmed by informers the United States already had imbedded inside the Muslim temples. Rather, these individuals had been seen taking part in hours of solemn prayer, attending brutally long religious education classes, and participating in intense discussions about the teachings of Allah.

In other words, they were learning to
become
Muslims.

By the time the NSC thought to act on this report and track down the strangers and question them, the 55 men had completed their religious training and had dissolved into the ever-murky world of the Persian Gulf.

If these people
were
the Ghosts, they had disappeared again.
This turn of events only became more baffling when six months to the day after the Battle of Khrash ended, another faint radio signal was heard around the Middle East. Like the one months before, this transmission was ethereal, barely audible from the loneliest end of the shortwave radio dial. And like the first, its point of origin was unknown. It could have come from a transmitter located deep in the mountains of West Pakistan, or a radio house aboard one of thousands of containerships at sea, or a solitary aircraft flying very high over the troubled region.

But it was the same voice, that same drawl as on the first message. And the words were just as enigmatic, if not chilling:

“This problem of Muslim terrorism,”
the voice had said,
“with all the hate and destruction and misery that goes with it is, in the end, a Muslim problem. Even with all its might and resources and manpower and bravery, it just cannot be fixed by Americans
.

“Muslim terrorism can only be fixed by Muslims themselves.”