Strike Force Delta (2 page)

It was late afternoon now, and a very earthly activity was taking place. Twelve men wearing sun-bright orange jumpsuits and armed with extremely sharp sticks were picking up litter along the road. They were prisoners, inmates of the Las Vegas County Jail performing community service for the state.

The trash along the highway was a predictable mix of beer cans, soda bottles, condoms, and fast-food wrappers. A stretch van had carried the prisoners here; most were awaiting the outcomes of their trials or trying to raise bail. Four county deputies sat inside the air-conditioned vehicle, watching their charges in comfort, protected from the 100-plus-degree temperatures outside.

The dozen prisoners went about their duty slowly, trying to stay as cool as possible in the stifling dry heat. At some point a plain Ford four-door sedan came ambling along, smoke pouring out from under its hood. It rolled to a stop across from where the deputies' van was parked, the only other vehicle on the straight-as-hell stretch of highway.

At just about the same moment, the air around the prisoners and the deputies began to shake. It was a strange sensation. The sky was clear; visibility was 100 percent—yet it seemed like everything around them was moving. Everything except the ground below.

This was not an earthquake.

It was something else. . . .

All work picking up litter stopped. The deputies shut off the AC unit, thinking it was the source of the strange vibration. But it wasn't. The shaking only increased. It was now rocking the van violently from side to side.

Then just as suddenly, the sun seemed to blink out. A shadow fell across the prisoners, the deputies' van, and the disabled car. That's when everyone just looked up. What they saw at first appeared like a huge bird of prey coming down at them. In the next instant, it looked more like one of the alien spacecraft the highway
was famous for. In the moment after that, these two visions combined to make something else: a very top-secret aircraft. It was called a V-32CX Super-Osprey. An aircraft the size of a small airliner, with the ability to land vertically, it was all black and sinister looking. An almost-ghostly beautiful Asian woman could be seen peering down from the aircraft's open side door.

Five of the prisoners looked up at the bizarre aircraft and immediately threw down their litter pickers. One of them yelled over the commotion: “Our ride is here!”

They began running across the desert toward the strange aircraft, which was now landing about one hundred feet away. The deputies were stunned—so were the other prisoners. They couldn't fathom what was happening. It took the lawmen a few precious seconds to get their asses in gear, and by that time it was too late to stop the fleeing prisoners. The deputies burst out of the van, but all they could do was restrain the rest of the litter crew from running out to the strange aircraft as well.

One deputy finally got on his radio—but that's when the two passengers from the disabled car suddenly appeared in their midst. They were not simple civilians, now that the deputies had their first good look at them. They were large individuals, muscular, tight jawed, with piercing eyes, casually dressed. Government types—the deputies could tell.

One of the two men fanned out a wad of cash. Thousand-dollar bills. Twenty of them. He passed half the bills to the four deputies, while his comrade passed the rest to the prisoners, this as the strange aircraft, having taken in the five prisoners, left quickly, going
straight up, turning, then disappearing at astonishing speed over the eastern horizon.

“Government business,” one of the men said to the deputies calmly. “No one here saw a thing.”

The strange aircraft flew into the night, heading east, in radio silence, its cross section showing up on radar screens below as nothing more than a bird, if at all.

It was refueled in flight twice, once over Colorado, again over Illinois, both times by Air Force KC-10 Extenders. The weather grew worse as it flew on, first rain and then thick fog. By the time it reached the East Coast, nothing else was flying. Big or small, every airport along the Atlantic seaboard was socked in.

The aircraft's destination was a very isolated cliff located several hundred feet above the ocean, surrounded by nothing but beach and thick forests. The nearest road, the nearest house, the nearest living soul to this place were many miles away.

There was a single airstrip up here. On one side of this runway were five huge aircraft hangars, all in severe disrepair and abandoned long ago. On the other side were the cliff and then the sea beyond. This place was once a bustling Coast Guard air station; in years past large maritime patrol craft would land here to be serviced. But the base had been decommissioned for nearly two decades, and the weeds and the corrosive salt air had overtaken it since.

It was at this desolate location, appropriately called Cape Lonely, that the futuristic aircraft finally landed.

There was a one-man welcoming committee on hand waiting for it.

He was Eddie Finch. An ex–Coast Guard NCO now in his sixties, he'd been assigned to Cape Lonely Air Station during his active career. Now he was like a ghost here, still haunting what might very well be a haunted place.

He was out on the runway pulling weeds when the strange aircraft arrived. He'd been told, by a close friend, that the airstrip, little used in the past decade, would be needed tonight, that a single aircraft would be coming in to land.

Like those before him, Finch felt the strange airplane's arrival before he heard it, then heard it before he saw it. The air around him started moving; his ears started ringing. Then the most god-awful-looking thing came straight down, out of the thick fog, landing like something from outer space. It took Finch a moment, but then he knew exactly what it was and who it was carrying. But still he was upset.

“If I knew it could land like that,” he grumbled, “I wouldn't have been out here all night, pulling these damn weeds.”

The weird airplane never turned off its engines. Its side door opened and the five men in orange prisoner suits tumbled out.

They greeted Finch warmly. He looked like a thin Santa Claus and was a grandfatherly type. The five men held great respect for him. They crowded around him.

“How much time do we have?” one of them asked the elderly man. “Enough for a cup of coffee?”

The old man just shook his head. “Not this time. You're moving again right away.”

He motioned over to the edge of the cliff. A smile came to his wrinkled snow-bearded face.

“Want to see something?” he asked them.

At that, the thick fog miraculously parted—suddenly they could see beyond the edge of the cliff to the coastline and the ocean below. Floating about five hundred feet offshore was an extremely rusty containership.

The five men let out a hoot. For them, this might have been the most beautiful sight in the world.

No sooner were the words out of Finch's mouth when another sound enveloped the cliff. This racket was a little more familiar. Horizontal rotor blades turning in the mist and wind. Powerful engines on another powerful machine. It came out of the fog a moment later.

It was a helicopter. But again, not an ordinary one.

It looked mostly like a UH-60 Blackhawk, the mainstay of the U.S. military's helicopter forces. It was dull black, charcoal almost. This was because it was layered in Stealth paint.

It was about one-third bigger than the typical Blackhawk, though, and it was very wide. It could carry nearly a dozen more people than a standard UH-60 and many more weapons, too. This one was festooned with heavy machine guns, Gatling guns, grenade launchers, missile launchers, the works. In many ways, it was a flying tank.

Add in its sound-dampened engines, its suites of high-tech navigation and communications gear, its night-flying capabilities, and the fact that, again, it was covered in the technology of Stealth, no surprise its nickname was the Superhawk.

“It's only because that thing,” the old man was telling them, pointing back to the futuristic transport, “is too big to land on the ship that they had to send this up for
you. But I understand you'll appreciate the ride itself. For sentimental reasons.”

“Amen to that,” one of the five men replied.

As the five ex-prisoners quickly made their way to the copter, its side door opened and three men stepped out. Two were crewmen of the aircraft; the third man looked sick. His eyes were downcast, his hands shaking slightly. He'd been a darkly handsome individual at one time—but his face had fallen, his eyes had sunken in, and his lips seemed permanently sealed by worry and anxiety. The five men tried to talk to him, but he was oblivious to their presence.

Finch took the ailing man by the arm and led him away from the copter. “Take good care of him,” one of the guys in the orange suits said. “He's important to us.”

His new charge now standing a safe distance away, Finch returned to the helicopter and handed the prisoners a bag he'd been keeping under his jacket. It contained a dozen doughnuts. The men looked in the bag and laughed. It was an inside joke.

They all shook hands and the prisoners climbed into the helicopter. But suddenly they heard a voice calling out over the twin noises being made by the futuristic transport and the Superhawk.

“There's one more!”

That's when a sixth person stepped out of the top-secret VTOL aircraft. Dressed all in white, long black hair blowing behind her like some Asian goddess, she was beyond beautiful.

Her name was Mary Li Cho.

Everything just stopped. All the noise and the wind and the sound of the sea below. Just stopped . . . as she seemed to glide across the field separating the two aircraft,
the futuristic plane taking off behind her. Finch focused in on her and whispered to the five men in orange: “Is
that
her?”

They all nodded.

“That's
her
,” they confirmed.

They made way for her and she climbed aboard the Superhawk first, followed by the five men and their doughnuts. They all turned and saluted Finch, even the Asian beauty. He saluted back.

The copter gunned its engines, causing a huge downwash of air and exhaust. Finch stepped back, his hat flying off into the breeze—but he didn't care. This was more exciting than anything he'd experienced in his twenty-five-plus years with the Coast Guard.

It pays to have friends in high places
, he thought.

He watched as the helicopter seemed to fall right off the side of the cliff, descending to the rusty ship below. The copter landed on the ship's middeck not a minute later—and promptly disappeared, another trick in its arsenal.

The ship was already moving when the helicopter set down. It had pulled anchor and was now halfway into a 180-degree turn, pointing its stern east, out to sea.

Back up on the cliff, Finch watched as the containership completed its turn and then, with a roar of power that sounded like a handful of jet engines, which was not far from the truth, the ship soon shot ahead at incredible speed, nearly 40 knots in just two minutes, and quickly disappeared over the darkened horizon.

Finch stood there for a long time, the downcast man silently joining him at his side.

Finally, Finch whispered to himself: “Good luck, guys—I'll keep the coffee warm for you.”

The containership's name was the
Ocean Voyager
. Eight hundred feet long, 105 feet wide, and 60 feet from the top of the mast to the bottom of its cargo bay, it weighed thirty-thousand tons empty. It was square and rusty and at least a dozen paint jobs behind the curve. When it was originally built back in the early 1980s, on a good day it could barely make 15 knots.

The ship was ugly—and that might have been its best asset. Its deck was a jungle of tie-offs and ropes and winches and chains and a million other things to trip over. The deck was also crowded with containers, in some places stacked three or four high. Most of them were as rusty as the ship. Lashed together with creaky bars and hinges, they looked like a bunch of railroad cars that had somehow become lost at sea. In other words, the vessel appeared no different from any other of the hundreds of containerships plying the world's oceans.

But the
Ocean Voyager
was not really a containership. It was a warship, powerful and unlike any other.

If it had an official description, it would be Air-Land Assault Ship/Special. But no one privy to its existence ever called it that. It was based on a British concept, born of low defense budgets back in the 1970s, in which the Royal Navy would deploy the Harrier jump jets on converted containerships, thus negating the need to build new, expensive aircraft carriers.

The
Ocean Voyager
was that dream come true in spades. It began with two elevators that had been installed just forward of the ship's recessed deckhouse. The same size and type used on the U.S. Navy's super-carriers, they were powerful enough to lift forty-thousand pounds from the bowels of the ship up to the deck. These elevators served as movable launch and recovery pads for aircraft flying from the vessel. And they were well hidden. When they weren't in use, six containers were slid on top of the elevators, preventing them from being seen from above.

The elevators served the small airborne strike force that was hidden below decks. The first time this very secret undercover vessel saw action was a year before, in the Mediterranean and then in the Persian Gulf. For that, its maiden voyage as a combat vessel, it had carried two of the supersecret Superhawk helicopters and a pair of AV-8s, the U.S. Marine version of the famous Harrier jump jet.

Now, there were four Superhawks on the ship, in addition to one surviving jump jet. The helicopters were all new, just off the assembly line. A platoon of Marine Corps air mechanics serviced these aircraft in the ship's crowded belowdecks hangar. Spare parts and ammunition for the aircraft were stored nearby in—what else?—seaborne containers. Just about everything the
ship needed to stay at sea and do its thing was hidden in plain sight inside the containers lashed to its deck.