Strike Force Delta (15 page)

His asking price: a bargain basement $1 million each.

If he ever got it, he would defect immediately and live the rest of his life in very non-Revolutionary style in South America.

Or at least that was the plan.

The planes had been for sale for nearly a month now, and Barji had yet to get any takers. No feelers. No nibbles. Nothing. Again, he was not naive. He knew this thing was fraught with danger. Though Iranian officers had been selling off pieces of the armed forces for years to places like Pakistan, Uzbekistan and other countries, he realized that with each passing day he was closer to being caught by his superiors. Only a very grisly execution would result.

He was asleep at his desk because there was no phone in his living quarters and he wanted to be on hand should a prospective buyer call. So it was strange then that while dreaming of a phone ringing underwater he thought he heard a knock at his door instead. Or was that thunder?

He opened his eyes, expecting to see out the window that yet another lightning storm was making its way across the marshes. What he saw instead was a man, calmly sitting in the chair across the desk from him, holding what looked like a stack of dollar bills in his hand.

This person was dressed all in black, including a black ski mask tucked under his oversize battle helmet. He had his feet up on Barji's desk and was smoking a cigarette.

Barji wiped his eyes. He was so sure he was still asleep, he actually smiled at the phantom, then put his head back down to resume his slumber.

That's when the man slammed his boot down on Barji's desk again, resulting in a loud
thump!

Barji was wide awake now. The man was real.

“What is this?” Barji began blustering in Farsi. “Who are you?”

The man sat up straight. “I'm here to buy your airplanes.”

“What the hell?” Barji coughed, this time in English. “You can't come in here and—”

The man held up his hand and interrupted Barji. “Are they for sale or not?”

Barji's vision cleared to the point where he could now see the patch on the man's right shoulder. Barji recognized it right away. A picture of the Twin Towers with an American flag flying behind, the letters
NYPD
and
FDNY
floating above, and below the words
We Will Never Forget
.

Barji thought his heart would stop right then and there.

The infamous American Ghost Team was here? At Base #3? How was that possible?

At that point, Barji looked out his window again and saw all his men being marched past the headquarters building. Hands in the air, they were being herded along by more gigantic soldiers in ski masks and battle helmets.

Barji turned back to the ghostly figure. He knew well the reputation of these bloodthirsty Americans. They supposedly slaughtered any Muslim who crossed their path.

“You are here . . . to
buy
the airplanes?” he mumbled again.

“That's right. . . .”

Barji was very confused. “But . . .you're the American military.”

The masked man just shrugged. “We're Americans,” he corrected Barji. “Let's just leave it at that. Now, do you want to deal or not? We're in a hurry.”

Barji was still baffled. He didn't know what to say.

“Look, I'm here to make a purchase,” the man insisted. “What do you care who you sell them to?”

But still Barji was having a hard time taking all this in. All he had to do was pick up his phone, hit the red transmit button, and an emergency call that something was wrong at Base #3 would be flashed to Tehran. He might not live for very long after taking such an action, though.

And in reality, the phantom was right. What difference did it make who bought the planes? Russian, Chinese, Indian. . . that's just who Barji had been expecting. But an American's money would be just as good. Better, in fact. . .

But it was still
so weird
.

“And that?” Barji said, pointing to the stack of bills in the man's hand. “Why pay? Why not just take the airplanes?”

The man smiled, his teeth visible through the ski mask. “It's easier to have you cooperate,” he replied simply. “Quieter, too.”

That's when Barji got a sly look in his eye. He had a pistol in his desk drawer. “So what's to prevent me from keeping the money, keeping the airplanes, and shooting you right now?”

The man just shrugged again—then pointed to something over Barji's shoulder. The Iranian officer turned to see five men standing ramrod still and in unearthly silence, not two feet behind him. Each one had an M16 rifle with a bayonet attached pointed at the back of his head. They, too, were wearing the Twin Towers patch.

Barji almost wet his pants. Had they really been back there all along?

These people
are
ghosts
, he thought to himself in terror.

At that, the man in the chair leaned forward and put his hands on Barji's desk. “Now please,” he said, with some exasperation. “Can we get this show on the road?”

Barji could almost feel the sharpened edges of the bayonets touching his skin.

He gulped and then croaked in thick English: “By all means.” The man in the chair relaxed, then stood up. “OK, that's better,” he said, putting the stack back inside his pocket for safekeeping. Then he added: “And, oh yeah, we need some bombs, too.”

Base #3 was a sprawling place. It stretched out over 16 square miles, though a lot of it was underwater most of the time.

There was, however, an auxiliary runway located at the far end of the base, the part closest to the Iraq border. It was almost never used.

This was where Barji and his mysterious visitors were now. The two phantom F-14s had been brought here, by his own men, still under the guns of the strange Americans, pulled with the base's pair of two-ton trucks. Two more trucks were filled with five-hundred-pound bombs. Also on hand were two portable ignition units, equipment necessary to start the planes' engines.

Both of the F-14s were horribly stripped down. Most of their avionics were gone. Certainly all the gizmos associated with the Phoenix missile system were missing. All of the long-range tracking and radar suites—gone. Even their rear seats, where the planes' radar officers
would usually sit, had been ripped out. Their cockpits were as bare-bones as a modern jet fighter could get.

The engines weren't exactly up to snuff, either. Many of the turbine blades had cracks in them, and the compressors were leaking something all over the ground. But when the ignition units were attached, both planes did turn over, and more important, they stayed turning. It took a few minutes, but they finally reached the minimum number of rpms needed for them to get off the ground.

Parked nearby was the trio of very unusual helicopters used by the Americans. There were many soldiers in black moving around now. Some were unloading bombs from the trucks and putting them into the copters' spacious cargo bays. Others were keeping an eye on Barji and his men. Just about all of these soldiers were carrying huge rifles, topped by the razor-sharp bayonets.

This was not how Barji had anticipated his deal would go. But money was money. If he survived this strange transaction, he couldn't imagine himself not being rich, even after paying off his men.

As soon as the F-14s' engines were warmed, a couple figures emerged from the helicopters. They were dressed in black pilot suits but were also carrying sidearms. They walked over to the big fighter planes and checked to make sure both still had their arresting hooks attached. Then they climbed in and, after a few minutes of studying the cockpit instruments, began taxiing for takeoff. Barji crossed his fingers, praying to Allah that the damn airplanes got off the ground.

The two jets moved smartly and, despite the darkness and the bumpy runway, screamed away into the night.
With a little goose from their pilots, they leaped into the air, one right after the other, climbing for altitude.

They went wide out over the marshes and performed a series of loops and spins, barely seen in the waning dark but at extremely low altitude. This display went on for a few minutes before both planes suddenly turned as one and roared over the small group gathered on the auxiliary runway.

But instead of slowing down to land, they kept on going, flying off to the south.

Barji looked back at his buyers, confused again. He was expecting a bullet to his head by this time. Instead, the man who'd originally spoken to him handed him the packet of bills held together by many rubber bands.

“I still don't understand all this,” Barji said. “Why pay us? Why didn't you just shoot us all—and simply take the airplanes?”

Suddenly the American got right in his face. “Listen, asshole,” he growled. “When we start a war with you guys, you'll know it.”

With that, all of the men in black walked back to their helicopters, climbed aboard, and took off. They, too, flew south.

Barji's men all collapsed to the ground and started wailing in prayer, so relieved that the American Ghosts had not butchered them. Only after Barji saw the silhouettes of the helicopters disappear over the horizon did he undo the rubber bands on the stack and start peeling off the bills. There certainly seemed to be enough to add up to $2 million. Would he be a rich man yet? The first thousand-dollar bill looked real . . . but to Barji's dismay, the rest of the pack were fakes, hundreds of pieces of a green-ink Italian newspaper, cut precisely to look
like dollar bills. They blew out of his hands, one at a time, and soon covered the runway.

Then Barji looked closely at the first bill, the only authentic note in the pack. Or so he thought. It, too, was fake, a very clear, photocopy of the front of a real thousand-dollar bill.

The reverse side was blank white paper. On it, written in thick black pen, was one word:
Sucker. . .
.

Abdul Harbosi was having a bad day. He was a low-level Taliban operative, middle forties, unmarried of course, the eleventh son of what once was a prominent Afghani family. He lived in a place called Qimruz Gorge, an almost-forgotten region of western Afghanistan. Made up of tall mountains and barren valleys, the Qimruz straddled the far eastern border of Iran. Only a few mountain passes separated it from the Persian state, and the traffic, such as it was, flowed both ways. Over the years, the tribal inhabitants of the Qimruz considered themselves as much Iranian as they were Afghani. That's how close they were.

Back when the Taliban ran Afghanistan—before the Americans threw them out—Islamic terrorists from all over the region came to the Qimruz because of its proximity to Iran. Supply lines for weapons and money were easy to find here. As it was also a place from which someone being pursued could get inside Iran in a matter of minutes, it was the perfect place for Taliban and Al
Qaeda fighters to come to hide. No surprise, most of the twenty thousand people who lived here were bin Laden sympathizers.

Afghanistan was changing. It was becoming more modern, more democratic, in many of its regions, ever since the Americans arrived. Not so in the Qimruz, though. The old rules still applied here. Women were still required to wear coverings head to toe or risk being stoned to death. The population still had to pay almost 100 percent of their meager incomes in mullah taxes or risk having their homes demolished by the notorious religious police. Anyone caught singing had his or her throat cut. Anyone reading a Western-style book had his or her eyes gouged out. Get caught flying a kite, playing with a toy, or wearing more than three bright colors at once, and you'd find yourself hanging at the wrong end of a noose. No matter what your age was, man or woman, child or elderly, if you stepped out of line and defied the religious authorities, you felt the wrath of Allah big-time.

These harsh rules didn't apply to everyone, though. Those Taliban and Al Qaeda types who'd relocated to the region had the run of the place. They stole the people's food; they raped their daughters. They drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, and were gluttons. They engaged in perverted sex, alone and with others, and they murdered on a whim. They did anything they wanted, and that meant just about everything that was forbidden for the civilian population to do.

There was no real government here. The Qimruz was ruled by a brutal warlord named Kundez Sharif. A veteran mujahideen and essentially a
de facto
king, Sharif was also a multimillionaire, amassing a great fortune
simply because he was sitting astride one of the oldest smuggling routes in the world. Gunrunners, heroin trafficker, or white slaver, everyone paid a price to pass through. Anyone resisting could expect nothing less than a slow, painful death.

Because Sharif was so feared in Kabul and also because his fiefdom was so close to volatile Iran, it was widely assumed that the U.S. military would not come here, at least not anytime soon, to clean out the rat hole. Much work still had to be done in the more populous eastern part of the country. Plus a political A-bomb might result should any fighting between the Americans and Sharif's forces spill over into Iran.

So this was the Qimruz. Protected and patronized, 330 square miles, insulated from the real world, and where a brutal and barbaric religious theocracy still held sway. Cold and rainy almost all the time, it was one of the most unappealing, uncivilized places on earth.

And it held only one real city. Its capital, of sorts.

The name of this city was Khrash.

Even as a low-level Taliban, Abdul Harbosi had enjoyed some of the fruits of what was going on within the Qimruz, especially inside Khrash. He'd raped. He'd killed. He'd stolen. He'd made life miserable for those people not so connected to the mullahs as he.

But he was also a
kardiss
, Afghani slang for flunky. His boss was the chief of police of Khrash, a very powerful man and a lieutenant for the supreme warlord Kundez Sharif himself. When the Chief wanted something, the shit ran downhill. Many times it landed on Harbosi's head.