Strike Force Delta (4 page)

Just like the Israeli assassins with the Munich terrorists, eventually the Crazy Americans were going to get you.

So their first year had been filled with ups as high as the Himalayas and downs as deep as the Mindanao Trench—these had been Murphy's very words to them to start this beer fest. But here they were, back together again, freed by his almost scary manipulations of both the Las Vegas court system and the U.S. military.

But their freedom had not come without a price. . . .

Murphy called the meeting together and now addressed the whole group for the first time. He was no great orator. He was by nature very shy. (He looked more like a teacher or an insurance salesman than a spy.) But it was the way he said the words that got to them. When Murphy spoke, he always had a rapt audience.

Yes, he began, they were all finally free. He was able to get them all off, for the time being, with the powers that be in D.C. Though these things could come back to haunt them as the world turned at the Pentagon, officially now they had all been released—from Cuba, from Vegas—on personal recognizance and into Murphy's custody, for which Murphy paid a huge bail.

“Let's put it this way,” the diminutive spy said. “Where we once had a boatload of enemies in Washington, now we have just a few. And while we used to have very few friends there, now we have more than a handful. We are in a better place.”

He took a moment to let this sink in.

“Now, that said,” he went on, “I want to emphasize that just like before, we are not inside their command structure.
We don't take orders from them, and I'll be damned if we ever will—not after the way they treated us while we were saving their asses at Hormuz and Singapore.”

He paused for a moment. “All that being said,” he began again, “something has come up. . . .”

A silence descended on the room. The festive, beery atmosphere changed to one of dead seriousness. Again, when Murphy spoke like this, the unit's members knew it was wise to listen.

“Our ‘new friends' at the Pentagon have a problem,” Murphy said soberly. “And they would like us to get them off the hook.”

A murmur of discontent went through the room. No one liked the sound of this. The idea of helping the people who were trying to chase the team down just a few weeks ago did not sit well with them.

Murphy sensed this tremor right away. He held up his hand and quieted the grumbling. “I know exactly how you feel,” he said. “But I think we have to help them out, for one simple reason: Because we are still Americans, and some of our brothers are in trouble. Big trouble.”

Murphy hit a button and one wall of the room disappeared, to be replaced by a huge projection screen. It was showing a close-in satellite photo of a clearing in a very dense jungle, a bridge nearby, and a small cement building. Two vehicles were aflame; smoke was obscuring one-third of the image. There were shot-up bodies lying everywhere.

“This picture was taken about a week ago,” Murphy began. “That river is in West Africa; it separates Nigeria and Cameroon. This was the scene of an exchange of enriched plutonium for money involving some British mercs, the UN, and the French military.”

Another groan went through the room. The unit had
no love for the French; in fact, they had very strong evidence that the French Secret Services were helping Al Qaeda in their quest against American interests. The bastards. . . .

“It's a long story,” Murphy went on, “but the exchange was being chaperoned by a unit from Delta Force. A special team called Delta Thunder.”

Murphy looked around the room and saw a few confused faces. More than a few of those present were past members of Delta Force, America's premier special ops unit.

“Never heard of ‘Delta Thunder?' ” he asked them. “No surprise. It's a very secret unit
within
Delta. It's so classified that even the rest of Delta doesn't know about it.”

A few people just shook their heads and sipped their beers at this. Black on black, secret upon secret—just how deep did America's deep operations go? Did anyone really know?

“Because no one knows about these guys is the very reason that we've been asked to help them out,” Murphy explained. “They were kidnapped, after this gunfight, by a local Al Qaeda cell. These mooks are undoubtedly torturing them—and we know they have plans for their demise. But because very few people know about these Thunder guys, there's really no one deep enough to go in after them without blowing their cover.”

He waited a beat, then said: “And that's why we're the perfect people to rescue them. Because very few people know about us, either.”

Colonel Ryder Long just sat back in his chair and popped another beer. He could feel the ship moving at
tremendous speed beneath him—when those aircraft engines were firing like they were on afterburner, the huge ship rode the waves like a speedboat. But moving fast wasn't the same as moving smooth. Ryder was an Air Force guy; he was the team's resident fighter pilot. When he wasn't flying, he preferred his feet on solid ground.

He'd flown the unit's first Harrier. (Later he was joined by a second pilot, Gerry Phelan, flying a second Harrier. Phelan was killed during the battle above Hormuz.) Ryder was also the senior officer in the unit, though military protocol was all but dispensed with when it came to everyday life around the Ghosts. He was north of 45 years old, had been a test pilot before this and a kind of special ops fighter pilot before that, with extensive flying in and out of Area 51 in Nevada and the vast stretches of top-secret ranges beyond.

The day of 9/11, he was asleep on his couch in his home in Las Vegas when the first plane hit the first tower in New York. His wife, his beautiful wife, was on that plane, flying back from Boston after an assignment for her news station. She was among the first victims of the Al Qaeda attack. Ryder's life changed that day. He could fly any plane put in front of him; he was probably one of the best pilots ever and had been involved in many exciting and very deep op missions in his career. But he was nothing without her. She
was
his life and he just couldn't comprehend living without her.

He went into a massive funk, alternating between draining bottles and praying. Finally he found himself at rock bottom, in a filthy motel room, looking down the wrong end of his hunting rifle. That's when the phone rang. It was an old friend from the intelligence biz offering
Ryder a chance to get back at the people who had killed his wife. A new unit was starting up to do just that, and did he want to join? Ryder put the gun aside and replied: “Just tell me when and where.”

The other officers of the original team were from the same situation. Red Curry, one of the original copter pilots, had a brother killed that day, a fireman rescuing people in the first tower. Martinez, the unit's original operations officer, had a daughter killed in the first tower. The leader of the original team's Delta contingent, a huge monster of a guy named Dave Hunn, had a sister killed in the second tower. She was there on a job interview, one of the youngest victims of the attack. On and on, misery and loss. . . .

Again, this was their motivation, and
this
was the genius of Bobby Murphy. Getting them together, getting the money, and bringing the fight right back to the terrorists' doorstep.

And now, they were getting another mission.

Murphy changed images on the huge screen. Now they were looking at a port city, obviously still somewhere in Africa, a computer-generated image that looked extremely real.

This was Loki Soto. Shoehorned between the already crowded border of Guinea and Sierra Leone, it was an accident of ninetieth-century country making, a leftover forgotten on many maps back then and even some today. It was a port city but a very run-down one, a ramshackle place taking up barely two miles of West Africa's Atlantic coastline. The harbor facilities were dreadful. Only the rustiest tubs, scows, and tramps came here.

That's why it was such a strange place for a castle.

Its name was
Casa Diablo
, literally Devil House, and actually it was an old Portuguese prison shaped like a medieval castle. The jail cells within were made of thick stone; the walls were very high. Murphy explained that during the slave-trade years the place was famous for its torture chambers, a way of getting the unruly human exports in line. That reputation for cruelty was still alive and well there today.

Casa Diablo was about the size of a city block, and there were only two means of access: a huge front door and a smaller one out back. The back door was called Door of Death, because prisoners who were murdered inside the prison were just dumped out back to be disposed of by local animals. The front door came complete with a large wooden gate, a drawbridge, and a moat. Whenever either door was opened, it was heavily guarded.

Murphy showed the team a photo of the prison's roof. It was crowded with both troops and weapons. And unlike the surroundings, these weapons were very modern. The top of the fortress was crammed with high-tech antiaircraft guns, Chinese made, most of them. A number of two-man SAM teams were also on hand to watch for threats from above. For targets on the ground, high-caliber machine guns covered every corner of the ramparts, giving fields of fire on all the streets surrounding the prison. There was even an artillery piece up here, with a range long enough to reach ships in the harbor, about a half-mile away. In the old days, this would have been called a shore battery.

“This place has the reputation for being impossible to get into,” Murphy told them. “With all the guards, every
entrance covered, and all that hardware on top. The whole city and even the port are covered. One wrong move by anybody and these guys start throwing lead. Bush pilots in the area know better than to fly anywhere near this place—someone from here even took a SAM shot at a Boeing 727 cargo plane a couple years ago, just missing it.

“It's a poorly kept secret that Al Qaeda took over this place just about the same time, two years ago. Loki Soto is an anchor in their so-called ‘Arabs in Africa' movement. It's a strange little place where they can sell and buy, ship and take shipment of just about anything, be it weapons, drugs, money, human beings. You name it. There is no big government to come down on them; there's hardly any government there at all. And certainly none of the surrounding countries want to get on the bad side of the mooks these days. They can't get their own populations in line, never mind worrying about these Islamic assholes giving them trouble.”

Murphy looked back at those gathered, just shook his head, and said: “This is where the guys from Delta Thunder are being held.”

More murmuring around the room.

Murphy switched images and suddenly they were all looking at a live broadcast of the prison—from a satellite. (He had just tapped into one of the National Security Agency's most classified more advanced satellites, another talent of his.) They could clearly see many people moving around the roof of the castle. They could also see the weapons, the radars, the radio antennae. And they could see something else, too. A huge concave dish—this was a satellite receiver, a TV linkup, part of a
system that could broadcast events happening inside the prison worldwide.

“These guys are equipped like a mini-CNN,” Murphy told them all. “It's all new gear, just set up. The Al Qaeda bigwigs sent them all this TV stuff for one reason.”

He paused a moment and then said: “They plan to kill the Delta guys . . . on live TV. They're going to claim that they've been interfering in local African affairs, and thus are being executed for their crimes. They are going to broadcast their executions around to the world, via that new upstart Arab network Al-Qazzaza TV. This will be Al Qaeda's way of announcing to the world that the
jihad
is in Africa to stay.”

“Who the hell is behind this?” someone in the group asked. “This is a pretty elaborate setup for the mooks. And we all know that Al Qaeda doesn't exactly throw its money around. That all looks like expensive stuff. The guns, the TV stuff.”

“It is,” Murphy replied. “And whenever we talk about big-ticket Al Qaeda items, we're talking Saudi involvement. The Saudi Royal Family. The Saudi religious police. The Saudi National Guard. Everyone in here is smart enough to know—especially after what we've all gone through—that Al Qaeda does nothing big unless it has the backing of those assholes who run Saudi Arabia, no matter what lengths they go to deny it. And I'm sure I am not alone in saying, for about the millionth time, that those numbskulls in Washington invaded the wrong country a few years ago. Instead of going north out of Kuwait, they should have gone south, and taken care of those ungrateful backstabbing pricks once and for all—but no. Not with all that oil in the
ground. And so we are left with this. And things
like
this.”

He took a moment to calm down. The subject of the duplicitous Saudi Royal Family was always a tough one for Murphy to address. He'd put this group together of members of the armed forces who had lost loved ones that day of 9/11. The Saudis had helped finance the carnage that day. Therefore, the Saudis were his enemies. Simple as that.

“That's why we have to help these Delta Thunder guys,” Murphy finally went on. “They aren't
just
like us. They
are
us. Battling right down there in the dirt and mud and blood, while the brains back in D.C. dine on caviar and crackers for lunch. Again, I know it sounds crazy, but these Thunder guys are
so
classified, the few people who know about them just couldn't figure out who they could send to attempt a rescue—if anyone could figure out how to do one, that is. Between this and the fact that the Thunder guys have a charter of total disavowal by Higher Authority, well . . . I can tell you right now, if we don't go in and get them, no one will.”

He went to another image. “Now to answer your question specifically,” he continued. “There is one person in particular who is pulling the strings here. He is the head of Al Qaeda's newest African cells.”