Strike Force Delta (7 page)

Still there was tension in the room. Murphy despised the CIA. Didn't trust them, didn't respect them. Because of their ineffectiveness and bumbling in the days leading up to the attacks of 9/11, Murphy blamed them almost as much as he blamed Al Qaeda for what happened.

Furthermore, he was extremely pissed that the Agency found him way out here in the first place. But more out of curiosity than anything, he wanted to hear what they had to say.

“We know you guys are going after Delta Thunder,” the younger of the two agents began. “And we know that Delta Thunder is being held by guys loyal to the Diamond Prince.”

Murphy just sipped his beer. “Go on. . . .”

“And we see much wisdom in this,” the young agent continued. “But we've got another operation going—a parallel mission, if you like, only bigger. Smacking his guys around in Africa is one thing. But we want to go after the Diamond Prince himself. We know there's no way he's shacking up in that prison. We can't imagine him ever dirtying himself by stepping foot for very long on the Dark Continent.

“In fact, at the moment, he's in Brussels. And he will soon fly down to the Riviera. From there he is going to Cairo—and then he is going home, back to Saudi Arabia. He's traveling with a small army of bodyguards
right now—but when he gets back on his own turf, he lets down a bit. It will be a delicate operation. But we think there's a good chance we can get him when this happens.”

Murphy was still doing his best to keep his temper in check. He smelled a rat here.

“Well, you boys seem to have all the bases covered,” he said in his thick drawl. “You know where he is. You know where he's going. You know when he'll get there. Why did you come all the way out here, in the middle of the night, just to tell me what you've been up to?”

“Because we need your help in corralling this guy,” Agent Mousse Hair said. “Your people can do special things. Things other people can't or won't do. We'd like to tap into that expertise.”

Murphy smiled darkly. “Oh? You want us to bomb his ass?” he asked them. “You want us to go in and tear his palace apart—and take him out piece by piece? Because that's the sort of thing that we do. We are not subtle. We are not delicate. You're smart guys—you've proved that. But you guys should know our methods of operation.”

The younger agent almost laughed. “When we say we need your help,” he replied, “we don't mean that we need you and your entire little army. We just need someone who's traveling with you, the perfect person to pull off what we have in mind.”

Murphy looked at them both. This was a curveball. He thought these guys were here to co-op the Ghost Team and incorporate them into their operation—leaving Delta Thunder to hang. But that didn't seem to be the case.

“So, you're not here to put the
kibosh
on our rescue mission?” he asked them.

“Not at all,” the young agent said. “Those Thunder
guys are valuable people. And again, we're all for bloodying the Diamond Prince's nose and losing those assholes in that prison—if you can figure out a way to get in there and do it. But what we got in mind will take him out of the picture completely.”

Murphy couldn't argue with their intentions. It was dealing with the Agency—the people who'd turned him down years before. That's what was turning his stomach into knots.

“Sounds promising—but I'd rather keep my team together,” Murphy finally replied. It was his way of telling them no. “We're pretty tight here. Don't want to upset that chemistry. I hope you understand.”

Murphy then stood up, indicating the meeting was over. But both agents remained seated. The mood suddenly turned dark.

The older agent spoke for the first time. “We don't have much time,” he began, his voice rough from years of cigarettes and booze. He was obviously the Bad Cop of the pair. “So I'll put it to you this way: Either deal with us, or we blow the whistle on you. The rescue mission—and your whole little traveling circus.”

Murphy felt his face flush. “You guys must be misinformed,” he replied evenly. “I've got everything you see here signed off by everyone including the Joint Chiefs. Closed books.
Carte blanche
.”

The older agent began to growl. “You might have made a deal with
the Pentagon
to get your people released from their various incarcerations,” he said through gritted teeth. “But no such deal has been made with us. And you know how things are these days. Intelligence trumps the military brass. And that means all your asses could still be in the fire with one word from us.”

Murphy almost went over the table at them. “You flew a long way out here to threaten me,” he spit back at them.

The younger agent just removed his glasses and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Look, just make a deal with us,” he said.

To which the older guy boomed: “Or we blow the whistle on you—and you're
all
back in jail. . . .”

Murphy was furious. But he was smart enough to keep his cool. He took a beat and calmed down. Maybe he was approaching this from the wrong direction.

He asked: “Who is it that you need?”

As he said this, Murphy was sure he knew the answer: These guys were here to ask for Ryder. His flying skills were well-known throughout the black ops community.

But the CIA agents had a surprise for him.

“The person we want,” the young agent said, “is Mary Li Cho.”

It was Bingo who told all this to Ryder. He found the fighter pilot still at his battle station, next to the portside CIWS container, part of a crew that would activate the awesome weapon should it be needed.

Bingo pulled Ryder aside, told him what the CIA guys wanted, and also told him that Murphy had passed the request on to Li. The bad news was, she'd agreed to go along with it.

Ryder was furious. He rushed back to where the CIA copter was still waiting. By this time, Li was already packed and on the helipad.

She was standing on the edge of the landing platform, the black helicopter's downwash making her long hair flow wildly behind her. The noise from the copter was deafening. Murphy was at her side, in a very animated
conversation with her. Fox and Ozzi, her two fellow DSA agents, were also there.

Ryder went right up to Murphy. “Please tell me what's happening,” he shouted over the roar of the copter.

Murphy gave it to him straight. The agents' request—and their threat to fold up the strike team if they didn't play along.

“I thought they wanted
you
,” Murphy told the pilot. “When they asked for Li, I was sure we'd be able to wiggle our way out of it. They might want her, but they could never take her against her will. They would sleep with the fishes if they did.”

“So what happened then?” Ryder demanded to know.

Murphy just shook his head. “She
wants
to go. They won't tell us what their plan is exactly, but she feels it's her duty to help them. Plus, she knows it will preserve the team. And no one can talk her out of it.”

But that didn't mean Ryder wasn't going to try.

Fox and Ozzi saw him coming and backed off the helipad, hoping Ryder could succeed where they had obviously failed.

Now it was just Ryder and Li on the helipad, yelling over the noise of the helicopter.

“This is a
very bad
idea,” Ryder said to her while the two CIA agents waited anxiously inside the copter. “This Diamond Prince guy is dangerous. He controls a lot of armed people. He has access to lots of weapons and deals with his enemies without mercy.”

“I know all that,” she replied.

“And these guys?” Ryder said, pointing to the pair of waiting CIA agents. “They're as bad as the mooks. Murphy doesn't trust them. I don't trust them.
No one
trusts them.”

Li just shook her head. “I know that, too,” she said. “And everything about it seems wrong. But how can I say no? This is my job, as a citizen of my country. I can neutralize one of the big fish of Al Qaeda. One of the people who was instrumental in pulling off 9/11. Plus the team will be allowed to stay together. Isn't that what we were just talking about? How important all this is?”

Ryder couldn't believe this was happening. It was like a bad dream come true. Not an hour ago, they'd been sitting on the nose of the ship, getting wet and falling for each other. Now she was standing here, bags packed, getting ready to leave him.

He looked deep into her eyes and she was looking right back at him. Tears were forming. “Besides,” she said. “This way I can earn my stripes. To get my uniform. My patch.”

She reached over and touched the side of his face for a moment. Her hand was cold and trembling.

Then she climbed aboard the copter and it took off, just like that.

The last Ryder saw of her, she was looking out the side window, waving good-bye.

The prison ran on gasoline. Two generators, powered by a pair of old Ford truck engines, provided electricity for the old fort. These engines ran 24 hours a day and were notoriously inefficient. Spark plugs were always fouling, gaskets blowing, oil leaking. Two prison guards were assigned around-the-clock just to keep them going. The surrounding city of Loki Soto had no infrastructure, no power grid. Without the engines turning, there would be no electricity to light the lights, warm the ovens, or run the torture devices.

The Ford engines were incredible gas-guzzlers. They had to have their fuel tanks refilled every two days. This meant four hundred gallons of gasoline had to be delivered to the prison, by tank truck, every 48 hours.

This was a downside for the terrorist named Shaheen Faheeb. He was the commandant of the prison, a close associate of the Diamond Prince, and an experienced jihadist. Osama bin Laden himself had approved Faheeb for the prison job.

Born poor in Saudi Arabia and just 30 years old, Faheeb was one of Al Qaeda's top operatives in West Africa. No surprise, he was a ruthless, sadistic individual, someone who had directed suicide bombings in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and post-Saddam Iraq and had gleefully blown up women and children on his own, all in the name of Allah, of course. Faheeb was also an expert at security, with an eye to perception. He knew that this prison ran as much on its reputation for being impregnable as it did on its 12-foot-thick walls. Impossible to break into. Impossible to break out of. Impossible to bomb. It was his job to maintain that reputation.

Trouble was, Faheeb hated the smell of gasoline. He'd grown up near the great refining fields in northeast Saudi Arabia, and when he was a child his nose was always filled with the stink of gas. That was one reason he liked it here in Africa. All he could smell here was the jungle and the fish and the sea.

Except every other day when the fuel truck rumbled up to the prison's front gate and he had to supervise its scheduled delivery of a couple hundred gallons of gas.

And today was a delivery day.

Faheeb had awoken late this morning, hungover after drinking too much elephant wine the night before. As he stumbled out of his quarters into the bright hot African sun, he imagined he could already smell the odor of gasoline even though the truck was probably still down on the docks getting filled for the trip up to the prison.

He made his way down to the guards' meal hall, where a huge kettle of tea was steaming away as usual. There was no food available yet; the food delivery
would be concurrent with the fuel's arrival. But Faheeb wasn't hungry anyway, not yet. What he headed for was the hookah pipe that sat next to the teakettle and, like it, was always smoking away.

There was a mixture of tobacco and hashish in its bowl and Faheeb took two deep gulps, enough to chase his hangover away. Feeling better, he stepped over two guards who were lying in the middle of the kitchen floor, praying in the general direction of Mecca, and headed downstairs.

He found his way to the bottom level of the five-story prison, soon arriving at his master sergeant's post. The man jumped to his feet and greeted Faheeb with a deep bow. Faheeb replied with a hard slap to the man's face. This was his way of asking the sergeant a question: How are our guests? The Delta soldiers? Are they still alive?

The sergeant covered his head and began yipping. “
Yes! Yes!
” They had survived the night, despite the repeated torture sessions.

“And everything is on videotape?” Faheeb bellowed.

“Recorded in color,” the sergeant replied in Arabic.

Faheeb slapped him again, but this time less hard, almost affectionately.

“Good dog,” Faheeb told him. “You get to eat and sleep and breathe, for at least one more day.”

Faheeb started off again for the front entrance, and this time his nostrils did detect the faint stink of gasoline.

The fuel truck was near.

The front of the prison was just 20 feet from the edge of the town. The local Africans were wise enough to stay clear of the area at this time, on this day—everyone knew when the gasoline truck made its delivery. The
prison's guards were known to drink heavily while on duty. They also had itchy trigger fingers. The tension that could arise when the fuel truck arrived made these two things a bad combination. So every other day when the gas truck arrived from the docks a half-mile away, the streets were usually empty.

It got a bit tricky security-wise on delivery day. This was really the only instance when outsiders were allowed into the otherwise impregnable fortress; that's why Faheeb always had two days' worth of food delivered at the same time. It was also why he made a habit of intimidating the fuel-truck drivers whenever they appeared. Inside these walls should be last place anyone would want to be. Faheeb also insisted that the same drivers never appear twice. He didn't want anyone getting too good a look around in here. Especially with the eight new “inmates” the prison had taken in recently.