Strike Force Delta (6 page)

“It's a little bit of both,” he explained. “Murphy had someone put it together, slapped a lot of Stealth paint on it. Boosted the engine a bit. Flew good—at one time.”

She studied the plane's battered condition. “It's a real disaster now, isn't it? Can it still fly?” she asked, innocently running her hand along the wing.

“I guess we're going to find out,” Ryder replied.

Another silence. The Marines had gone back to work. The boat was rocking wildly. She looked around the deck and half-sighed.

“I'd heard a lot about this ship before I came aboard,” she said. “But never did I think I'd actually ride on it someday. It was more like something from a sci-fi book. I just wish I knew where everything was.”

Ryder saw his opening and pounced. “You mean you haven't been given the tour yet?” he asked her.

She smiled and shook her head. “Is that an invitation?”

Another zing.

“You bet,” he replied.

They started at the back of the ship. Ryder showed her the stern-mounted helipad where he'd crashed his jump
jet months before. He brought her up to the wheelhouse deck where during their first voyage Bingo's guys would make pancake breakfasts for the crew on the huge, very low-tech grill located here.

Next stop was the ship's bridge, where Bingo's guys ran the bizarre high-speed container vessel. Navigation, propulsion, steering, the gear up here was on par with that on the U.S. Navy's most advanced warships—Bobby Murphy had made it so. Then they visited the Combat Room, the windowless compartment behind the bridge. As well, much of the equipment here—the air defensive suite, the myriad radar trackers, the satellite com gear—was of the same type as that found aboard the Navy's supercarriers.

He brought her below to the engine room where the four GE-404 turbines were spinning with the noise and power of a quartet of jet fighters. Then they went to the White Rooms, where the Spooks lorded over hundreds of flat-screen monitors, banks of radio receivers, and computer screens, all in order to tap into Echelon, the NSA supersecret satellite network that was the ultimate in twenty-first-century eavesdropping.

Throughout it all, Li, being Li, asked dozens of questions. How, why, when, who. Ryder did his best to answer as many as he could, and for those he didn't know the answer to he simply made things up, thinking it might be fun to apologize to her later.

Finally they arrived in the ship's mess; both needed coffee. It was a huge compartment, painted black for some reason, with all its portholes blocked with canvas, also painted black. Though it was past one in the morning, many tables had people at them. All conversation stopped when Li walked in of course. Ryder steered her
toward the coffee station, passing a table where Curry, the unit's other senior pilot, was sitting with some of the Spooks. At this point, Ryder's boots were barely touching the deck. As he and Li exchanged greetings with them and kept on going, Ryder heard Curry stage-whisper:
“You lucky bastard. . . .”
Ryder gave him a covert thumbs-up in reply.

Ryder and Li got two coffees to go and walked up to the bow of the ship. Here it really was like sitting on the front of a speedboat. The ship was moving so fast, through high seas, it was throwing up large amounts of a spray while leaving a gigantic wake behind. Yet the full moon was up and the stars were out and it was an amazingly clear night above.

They sat on a chain locker box and watched the show.

“Can I ask you a question, colonel?” she said after a few minutes. “Another one, I mean. . . .”

“Absolutely. . . .”

“That poor man they took off at Cape Lonely. Who was he?”

Martinez. The original unit's operations officer. An Army colonel and a member of Delta Force, he'd been a genius at getting the unit's aircraft, soldiers, and intelligence people moving in sync. His was a sad case, though. Shortly before the attack on Hormuz, the Ghosts had tracked down a group of terrorists who were planning to hijack up to 10 airliners as part of a bigger plan. The Ghosts knew when the terrorists were showing up at the airport; they knew when the terrorists were going to board their flights. They just didn't know where the terrorists were all going next.

At the time, it was thought the terrorists were flying on
to Europe, where they would take connecting flights to America—and it would be
these
airplanes they would hijack and use to crash into targets inside the United States. Theorizing the terrorists had confederates waiting for them at European airports and wanting to catch them too, Martinez made the decision to follow the terrorists instead of taking them down immediately. The titanic battle at Hormuz was the result, as the target all along was the Navy's supercarrier the USS
Abraham Lincoln
, entering the Persian Gulf that very morning, and the airplanes used were the ones the terrorists first boarded. Luckily, none of the hijacked aircraft reached the intended target—but hundreds still died. Martinez was never the same after that.

Ryder told Li the story as concisely as he could. She stared up at him throughout, her face very serious, drinking in every word.

“Martinez was a good guy,” Ryder concluded. “But there's no way he could go on this mission. I just hope they get him back to his family, before it's really too late.”

Li thought about this for a while, then just smiled again. “Thanks,” she said. “I'd heard of him—and I know you all respected him. But I wasn't sure what the full story was, and I didn't know anyone I could ask, without making a fool of myself. Well, except you.” She laughed because her words had come out so funny.

He smiled, too. “Is there a compliment in there, somewhere?” he asked her.

Here they sat, dodging the spray and looking up at the moon and stars. The minutes turned into an hour. And as always, she was full of questions. It took some prodding, but Ryder finally told her about his adventures
as a top-secret test pilot years before he joined the Ghosts. Flying missions deep inside Area 51, participating in bizarre war games, doing things so way-out, even he didn't believe some of them had happened.

He regaled her with tales of the team's exploits not just at Hormuz but in the Philippines, too—those heroic days before they wound up hiding in the attic of her house. He spoke sincerely of how the twin foundations of the team were its patriotism and the shared loss of loved ones. He told her how cool it was that the team was not affiliated with any of the country's military services, that they served the people of the United States directly, and that despite his career in the Air Force he wouldn't have it any other way now.

On these subjects, Li mostly listened, enthralled and, strangely, a bit envious. She had helped the Ghosts immensely in ending the threat of the Al Qaeda missile teams inside the United States—and she had done so at great personal risk. But it was obvious that she still didn't consider herself a member of the team. Not yet anyway. . . .

They wound up talking about many things, except the upcoming mission and Murphy's plan to assault the impregnable fortress of
Casa Diablo
. It was all pleasant and comfortable and exciting. And so,
so
different for him.

During all this, they were consciously inching closer to each other. At times Li would tap his knee to make a point. His body would reverberate at her touch. Ryder felt like he was back in high school, on a date with the most beautiful girl in math class. Again, this was a monumental step for him. His heart still felt like a stone, the same cruel weight he'd carried around since the day his wife died. But now, with this gorgeous girl so close, it
was like he was in another place, on another world, where the gravity wasn't so bad. When a particularly huge wave of spray came up over the bow, she went right up against him to escape getting doused—and this time, she stayed.

“I had something else I wanted to ask you,” she said, her hand suddenly touching his.

Ryder went numb, but in a good way. “Sure, anything,” he blurted out.

She opened her mouth—she was about to say the words—when suddenly every bell and whistle—and Klaxon and siren—on the ship went off at once.

Captain Bingo's deep voice came over the intercom. “Condition Blue. All hands to battle stations. Unidentified aircraft incoming. . . .”

Ryder and Li were stunned.

“Battle stations?” she gasped. “Where the heck is
my
battle station?”

It was a helicopter. It popped up on the Combat Room's air defense screen at exactly 0200 hours. Just 20 miles out, it was flying low and fast, coming out of the northeast and heading right for the ship.

This was very strange. At the moment, the
Ocean Voyager
was almost in the mid-Atlantic. The nearest land, in either direction, was hundreds of miles away. So where had this helicopter come from? It had to be from another ship. But it didn't seem lost. To the contrary, on first spotting the blip Bingham had altered the ship's course, going to a due south heading—and the incoming aircraft adjusted its flight path as well. There was little doubt that whatever this thing was, it was intent on coming right at them.

So the bigger question was: How did anyone know the
Ocean Voyager
was even out here?

Within a minute of the alarm being sounded, the top deck of the containership was crawling with armed crewmen. They'd drilled for such things in the past. Each man was carrying either an M16 rifle or an M-60 machine gun. The members of the primary strike team—the Delta guys, the SDS, and the SEALs—took up key positions around the ship, including the helipad and at the highest part of the wheelhouse. The ship's crew, the sailors who actually made the vessel run, then scattered themselves among the jungle of containers on the open cargo deck. They, too, were armed with M16s.

But their weapons were mere popguns compared to what the
Ocean Voyager
was really packing.

There were two red containers on the port side of the ship, two more along starboard. Another was located up on the bow, a sixth down at the stern. These containers were specially built to drop their sides at the touch of a button. Inside each were two CIWS guns—high-tech Gatling guns that were able to spit out an incredible six hundred rounds
a second
. Their function was to fill the sky with thousands of lead projectiles on the idea that at least some of them would hit anything coming in at the ship. To get caught in the barrage of one of these guns was to face a nasty death by perforation.

And the crew had been through this sort of thing before. During the ship's first cruise, a helicopter suddenly appeared, landed on the ship—and the people onboard took Murphy away, in handcuffs, under arrest, throwing the team into chaos. Just how their diminutive leader was able to get out of that tight jam he never told them. But the Ghosts really didn't want it to happen again. Nor
did they want this helicopter to be an attack helicopter, as some were known to carry very deadly long-range antiship missiles. It wouldn't take more than one or two of this type to put the
Ocean Voyager
on the bottom, with all hands going down with it.

So everyone involved was very anxious as they hunkered down at their positions, weapons ready, waiting. A few tense minutes went by—then, suddenly, another announcement was made over the ship's PA system. This one was as surprising as the first. In his deep booming tones, Bingham told the crew that the helicopter had contacted the ship and that it was displaying no hostile intent.

In fact, the people in the ship's Combat Room had picked up the copter's IFF signal and from it determined that not only did the copter not belong to a potential enemy, but it was actually a part of the
Servizio Pontificio Aereo
—the Vatican City's Papal Air Service.

This news went through the ship like wildfire.

The Pope was coming to see Murphy. . . .

The copter came in a few minutes later, and much to the disappointment of the ship's crew, it was not
Il Papa
dropping in to hear confession. The copter was an all-black Bell Textron, a military version, with no visible national markings, and certainly too sinister for anyone from Vatican City to be flying in.

The copter's IFF signal had been a clever fake to get close to the ship without being blown out of the sky. This could mean only one thing: The aircraft's true owner was the CIA.

It set down on the rickety helipad hanging off the ass end of the ship. Two men in civilian clothes climbed out, leaving the pilot with the motor running.

Murphy was on the landing platform, waiting for them. Having already had a brief radio conversation with them, he knew who they were. There were no handshakes, though. Murphy simply gave Bingham a signal up on the bridge and the ship's whistle was blown three times. The dozens of armed men hidden around the upper decks showed themselves and were told to stand easy at their stations. Again, while not friends exactly, the visitors weren't enemies. Not typical ones, anyway.

Murphy wordlessly escorted the pair up toward the Captain's Room. No one who saw him pass liked the look on his face.

Faster than the speed of light, another rumor went through the ship: These people were here either to stop the rescue mission or to take Murphy away.

Or both.

Murphy fought to stay cordial. It was hard to do.

He led the two men into the Captain's Room and invited them to sit at the big table. One agent was older, midfifties, red faced, with coal-black eyes, a real veteran of the Agency. The other was midtwenties, moussed hair, wide-rim glasses. An egghead.

Murphy offered them coffee, beer, or a drink of something stronger. They declined. Taking a beer himself, Murphy settled into a chair across from them. The big room suddenly seemed empty with just the three of them in it.

The two had a matter of importance to discuss with Murphy, they said. As a preamble, they tossed out various code words and names of high-placed CIA officials
to convince Murphy they were who they said they were. There was no doubt, either, that they were well aware of the Ghost Team and what they had done in the past year. The two men were able to recite details of some of the team's more famous exploits, spitting out information that only someone deep on the inside would know.