Read Strike Force Charlie Online

Authors: Mack Maloney

Strike Force Charlie (6 page)

Once again, Bates worked his magic and opened it in a snap. But unlike the first attachment,
“Slow Curve”
was not all text. Rather, it also contained images caught by a photophone, along with some audio downloads. Together they
told the strange story of a sports reporter from Los Angeles named George Mann and what had happened to him shortly before his body was found, with two bullets in the head, dumped in a ditch in the desert northeast of Los Angeles.
Stitched together from smaller files Mann had sent by phone to his home computer, the file presented a morbidly disjointed picture of the last hours of the reporter's life. He'd been assigned to cover a Southeast Asian soccer team that had traveled, by boat, to LA and was barnstorming the United States. Mann apparently met their ship at the port of LA but was nearly run down by the team's pair of Greyhound buses, purely by accident, it seems. Mann later caught up with one of those buses in a small California desert town, where his picturephone transmitted images of at least some of the soccer team riding in one of the Greyhound coaches. As it turned out, this bus was also carrying an arsenal of weapons in a secret storage area—an arsenal that included at least 18 Stinger missiles. The file ended abruptly just as a fleeting phone image of the missiles was sent back to Mann's home computer.
As sketchy as the
“Slow Curve”
attachment was, anyone viewing it could only reach one, rather incredible conclusion: These soccer players weren't soccer players at all. They were Al Qaeda terrorists. And they were now inside the United States, carrying at least 18 Stinger missiles with them.
Scary … .
A qualifying paragraph inserted at the end of the file indicated that the bombshell info was
not
obtained by a physical break-in. Rather, an ultrasecret NSA eavesdropping satellite known only as
Keypad
had been used to access Mann's information. This system could zero in on, listen, and secretly record any cell-phone call made by anyone, anywhere in the world, including the United States.
Very scary … .
Whoever it was who intercepted Mann's phone images had also done an analysis of them. They were able to determine at least 18 men were aboard the bus, all of Middle Eastern
descent, all between the ages of 21 and 30. The lone image taken inside the weapons compartment was a blurred shot of the 18 Stinger missiles, attached to their launching mechanisms, hanging on both sides of the storage-room wall. A trail of smoke could also be seen, in shadow, against one of the walls, the result, the analysis said, of two bullets being fired into Mann's head. The sports reporter's cell phone ceased sending data shortly after that.
Who secured the
“Slow Curve”
file? Why was the NSA's
Keypad
satellite intercepting Mann's phone transmissions or was the system routinely monitoring
everyone's
cell phones? How was it that
“Slow Curve,”
as well as
“Fast Ball,”
wound up in Li's e-mail box? And, most important, why hadn't this information raised alarms within the Homeland Security department?
The file did not provide any answers to these questions. But it did contain one last tantalizing piece of information. Shortly before he was killed, Mann had taken a phone-picture of the
faux
soccer team's schedule, a cross-country map of the American South and Midwest showing where they were supposed to play their goodwill games. Was it possible that these sites, Numbered 1 through 9, were the places where the terrorists intended to use the missiles to shoot down U.S. airliners?
The answer was: yes. The analyst confirmed each site was within 12 miles of a major airport and each had ample higher elevations around it, providing the terrorists with perfect hiding places from which to do their murderous work. And there were 9 game sites in all. Eighteen missiles. Two missiles per airport? It seemed logical—and no doubt the first bus was heading to one of those locations right now.
Very, very scary … .
But as unsettling as this information was, it also left one last, very disturbing question: Mann was able to track down one of the buses—and he saw 18 of the missiles aboard it. Yet the ghost team members knew there were at least 36 missiles on the loose and
two
buses involved.
So where were the other missiles?
And where was the other bus?
 
Li Cho was not a patient person.
She remained in the small bedroom far down the hall, her nose pressed against the dirty windowpane, confused, tired, and wishing the rain would stop and the sun would come up and some reason and sanity would arrive to save the day.
But while the first 15 minutes passed with her barely moving a muscle, she couldn't take it anymore after that. She turned to the man stretched out on the bed, the seventh team member. Her unofficial guard. He hadn't said a word since she'd come into the room. She could hardly see him, in fact. As he lay atop the old, ratty mattress, the sooty canopy cut off all but a blurry shadow of him. He might have even been asleep.
But thanks to her cup of Morning Madness, Li was wide awake.
“So, holding someone prisoner in her own home …” she finally said to him. “Is that usually how you guys operate?”
“I'm sleeping,” came the reply, though he sounded totally awake, as if he'd just been lying there all this time, thinking deeply about something.
“Well, can't I talk to you?” she asked. “About all this, I mean. Or do I have to just sit here quietly?”
“Sit. Quietly. Please?”
But there was no chance of that.
“Why you?” she persisted. “Why are
you
the one watching me? Why aren't you with the others?”
“Because I'm not a computer freak,” he answered wearily, his words raspy from cigarettes. “And the legitimate brains have to figure out some information that just came our way.”
“Oh, really?” she asked. It was rough, but she actually liked the sound of his voice. “And what if what you're looking for isn't there?”
A sigh. Was he growing annoyed with her already?
“If it isn't there,” he replied, “then we should all just head back down to Gitmo, so they can lock us up again … .”
Li laughed, wishing she could see his face better.
“What is it that you do, then?” she asked him. “If computers aren't your thing?”
“I fly airplanes.”
“Oh … were you flying the plane that supposedly crashed off Cuba?”
A pause. “For someone who is supposed to be sitting quietly, you're asking a lot of questions … .”
“That used to be my job,” she said. “But never mind that. How did you do it? Fake the plane crash, I mean … .”
He yawned. A flash of lightning outside.
“Sorry,” he said. “Top-secret.”
She stamped her foot.
“Everyone
keeps saying that around here … .”
“Well,
that
should tell you something,” he replied. “It's just another way of saying ‘please shut up.'”
Li was hurt, a little. She kept probing, though. “I understand now why all my lightbulbs were missing,” she said. “And my soap and thumbtacks. And all my Jell-O, I guess. You used them to build the bomb that killed that French guy, right?”
“He deserved a lot worse than just getting his head blown off,” he answered.
“So I've heard,” she whispered coyly. “But I have to ask you: why did you clean my place, too? I've never seen it so tidy. That scared me more than anything.”
She thought she saw his shoulders shrug.
“One of my colleagues spilled a box of Jell-O all over your floor,” he told her. “Yellow Jell-O—and it went everywhere. We knew we had to clean it up, at least a little bit. But once we started … well, let's just say it turned into a project.”
Li almost laughed again. There was a hint of good-natured humor oozing out of him.
She switched gears. “So, how'd a pilot get caught up in
all this? I thought you flyboys were supposed to be smart.”
“Top-secret,” he moaned.
“But I'm level eight security,” she said. “You can tell me just about anything.”
“Can—but won't,” he replied in shorthand.
She thought another moment. “These files your friends out there are opening. I know one's an interrogation. It names names, I assume?”
“Probably … .”
“And might you be one of those names?”
A pause. Then: “Top-secret.”
“Oh, so your name is in there then?”
Silence.
“Because when I read that file I'll want to know which one is you,” she added awkwardly. “You know, just to keep everybody straight.”
“Who says you're ever going to read it?” he shot back.
She didn't reply. Another silence in the room, this one for about fifteen seconds.
Then he surprised her by saying, “I'm the only Air Force three-star in there. Ryder Long.”
“A colonel?” she asked. “Really?”
“Really—or at least I used to be. It's a little hard to tell these days.”
She smiled again. This guy had shown more personality in these two minutes than Nash had in two months.
“My father's a colonel—in the Marines,” she said. “But I'll bet he's not quite as old as you.”
He might have chuckled for a moment. “Thanks for nothing,” he said.
Another silence. More rain on the window. Another flash of lightning outside.
“And are you married, Colonel?” she asked, her words floating up into the dark.
She saw him shift uneasily on the bed.
“Used to be …” he replied.
“And were you happy?”
“Used to be …” he said again.
Silence—at least 30 seconds of it.
“And do you miss her?” Li finally whispered.
The shadow on the bed let out a long, sad breath.
“Sorry,” he said. “Top-secret … .”
When dawn finally came, the rain had stopped and the fog had gone away. But all was still not right with the world. Ryder Long could feel it in his bones.
He hadn't slept a wink, not unusual, as he rarely slept anymore. Sleeping meant dreams, and his dreams were haunted by memories. They could be so painful, sometimes it was just better to stay awake.
He eased himself off the bed now, just as the first bit of sunlight peeked through the dirty window. His boots made only a minimum of noise when they touched the creaky floor. He'd spent a lot of time in this room off and on in the past few nights; he was getting good at working the planks by now. He was, after all, a ghost. He glanced out the window and groaned. The sky above was bright, bright red.
“I knew it,”
he whispered.
Red skies in the morning were never a good sign.
He moved across the floor to the other, much larger, much dirtier window. Here he found Li, head down on the massive sill, finally sound asleep. He leaned over for no better reason than to get a good look at her up close, his first, really, since coming here.
“Wow!
…” he exclaimed, much too loudly. She really was gorgeous.
Ryder was tempted to lift her head and put a pillow under it—others in the team had moved her before without waking her. But it wasn't in him to disturb such a sleeping beauty. He moved silently across the room instead, going out the door with the skill of a cat burglar.
He stepped out into the hallway, wondering if there was any semblance of breakfast in the offing. One sniff of the same old musty air told him no. He wandered down the hall and stuck his head into the master bedroom. Here he found the rest of the team. They were no longer gathered around the computer like a den of Cub Scouts on steroids, though. Just the opposite. The place looked like a bomb had hit it, with bodies scattered everywhere.
Ozzi was lying half off the bed, just staring up at the ceiling. Fox was slumped in a corner, head down on his knees. Gallant was beside him, hands together, as if in prayer. Even Hunn and Puglisi looked wiped out. Their wet clothes still drying in front of a dangerously old-looking space heater, they were sitting close by the window, in their underwear, their M15 weapons at ready, should anyone come down the reservoir extension road.
But it was Bates who looked the worst. Eyes red, jaw clenched. Punked hair more out of control than usual. Still sitting in front of the computer, only he turned around to look at Ryder.
“What's the matter with you guys?” the pilot asked the whiz kid.
Bates just shook his head. “You missed a long night. That and the fact that we just found out we might have bitten off more than we can chew in this whole thing.”
“Just give me the highlights,” Ryder told him.
Bates ran his hands through his hair and took a deep breath, trying to stay awake. “You know that personal organizer Hunn and Pugs took off the French guy?” he asked Ryder.
“Yeah, sure, the PDA,” Ryder said back. “Aren't you supposed to be trying to break into it? I mean, that's one of the reasons we're up here … .”
Bates just nodded. “Well, I cracked it, all right,” he said. “It took me four freaking hours. But what we saw when I did …”
Ryder studied the kid for a moment. He'd known him since way before the Hormuz Incident. Like Ryder, Bates was one of the original members of the rogue team. And despite their varied backgrounds and ages, because of all they'd gone through together the original guys were as tight as brothers by now.
But Ryder had never seen Bates look like this. What could he have seen inside the PDA that would twist him up so?
“Show me,” Ryder finally told him. “Show me what you found.”
Bates sat Ryder down in front of Li's laptop and pointed to the
“Fast Ball”
and
“Slow Curve”
files.
“Get a load of these first,” Bates told him. “You'll need the info to appreciate what comes next.”
Ryder read the files quickly. The interrogations. The top-secret classifications. The story of Georgie Mann. At the end of them, though, Ryder actually felt relieved, especially by what he'd seen on
“Fast Ball.”
“Well, at least we've got something on record that says we warned those assholes about the missiles being smuggled into the U.S.,” he said. “It's just too bad this poor bastard Mann had to take two in the hat to prove we were right”
Bates almost laughed. “All that's just the beginning, Colonel,” he said. “The water gets a lot deeper from here on in”
Using his own laptop now, Bates showed Ryder how he had hooked up Palm Tree's PDA to what he called a drain line. It was a gadget that was able to literally suck information out of the DGSE agent's device.
Bates went on: “The problem was, his little PDA turned out to be loaded with memory chips. Hundreds of them. They added up to almost a gig. And they were able to hold tons of stuff.”
“Seems like overkill,” Ryder said, as if he knew what Bates was talking about, which he didn't.
“It was,” Bates replied. “But that was the whole idea. He filled most of his memory up with totally useless crap. Stuff like the entire French dictionary. And the four phone books of Paris. The individual results of every person ever to race in the Tour de France. On and on and on … .”
“All this was camouflage?” Ryder asked.
“Exactly,” Bates replied. “Hiding the real stuff by putting tons of nonsense in front of it. On top of it. All around it. And then he set up so many security codes protecting these files, even the most hopped-up cyberfreak would give up trying to break through.”
“But you succeeded, right?” Ryder asked.
“It was like peeling back the layers of the mother of all onions,” Bates replied. “That and lots of typing. And retyping. But yeah, I finally got through, to the stuff that asshole was hiding in there. And this is what I found … .”
He showed Ryder the first attachment he'd come upon after getting through all the security diversions. It was marked, in English, “Travel Plans.”
“I was immediately suspicious of this,” Bates explained, “because it contains nearly a hundred megs of data. That's much more than a normal person would have in a file labeled ‘Travel Plans.'”
And Bates was right. The file didn't contain travel plans. In fact, all Ryder saw was reams of numbers with names beside them.
“The numbers represent payments going in and out of a bunch of Swiss bank accounts,” Bates explained. “The names are the beneficiaries of these transactions. Look at this one: ‘Monsieur A. L. Zeke.'”
Ryder laughed out loud. Even he knew this was a very lame anagram for
Kazeel,
as in Abdul Kazeel, top Al Qaeda mook and a victim of the rogue team's brutal justice not long ago.
Bates ran down the length of the file. More numbers, more fake names, more transaction confirmations. It was all moving too fast for Ryder. But Bates explained that by connecting all the dots he was able to determine that Palm Tree and, by
association, the French government not only transferred funds to Al Qaeda for the Stinger missile purchases but also had arranged for the missiles' shipment out of the Philippines, as well as their smuggling into the United States, including an inspection-free port of entry in LA.
It was dramatic stuff, but truthfully, Ryder wasn't surprised by any of it. They'd all come to know that Palm Tree had blood on his hands. That's why the team had popped him.
Bates then showed Ryder another file, one that traced another money trail that proved Palm Tree and Kazeel had paid for the Stinger missiles first and then their launchers. This confirmed another suspicion held by the ghosts, that the weapons had actually been bought in two separate purchases. The launchers they knew came from an Iraqi arms dealer named Bahzi; he, too, was later whacked by the ghost team. But where did the missiles themselves come from? Or more important, how was such a large number procured for the terrorists, via Palm Tree?
“Remember now, these are American-made weapons,” Bates told Ryder. “And I might be wrong, but I think that while the launchers can last awhile, the missiles only work well if they are up-to-date. Those missiles in the Mann photo look to be the latest model. And believe me, the Pentagon keeps close tabs on where they all are. Am I right, Major Fox?”
Still slumped in the corner, Fox replied in a mumble, “That was one of our main jobs at DSA: keep track of all weapons, big or small. For thirty-six brand-new Stingers to suddenly go missing, without a trace, means that French asshole must have had some help inside the U.S. military.
Deep
inside.”
Ryder just shook his head. They had all discussed such a possibility before, so again, it was no surprise. “But who?” he asked now. “Who in Higher Authority would have gotten in bed with these guys?”
“You really want to know?” Bates asked him cryptically.
Before Ryder could reply, the whiz kid began banging on his keyboard again, retrieving yet another bonanza: a list of Palm Tree's phone calls for the past two months.
Ryder was surprised. “What were they doing in his personal organizer? I thought these spy types didn't like to leave evidence of who they've been talking to … .”
Bates smiled grimly. “Usually they don't,” he said. “And for sure, I just assumed this guy would be like the mooks. You know, shedding cell phones on an hourly basis? But believe it or not, he used the PDA to dial for him.”
Ryder was stumped. “Why?”
Bates just shrugged. “Too lazy to dial it himself, I guess,” he said. “Or maybe he
wanted
to keep track of who he was calling, thinking that no one would ever get into his pants like this. But it was an amazingly stupid thing to do, because no matter how many cell phones he used, the PDA kept track of all his calls.”
Bates showed Ryder the long list he'd recovered. It looked just like a phone bill, details of who was called and for how long they talked. There were lots of phone calls to car rental agencies and restaurants.
“But look at this number,” Bates told him, pointing to the screen. “This is where it gets really weird.”
There was indeed a certain number—011-333-0001—that had been dialed several times over the past few weeks but had been cut off before it ever made a connection, almost as if every time the caller thought better of what he was doing. Or was sending some kind of signal.
That the number had the area exchange 011 was the surprising thing. Bates explained that when he worked at the NSA, before he joined the rogue team, he was told many tip-top-secret things. Like that area code 011 was a secret phone exchange used exclusively by the White House. And that the next three numbers—333—were used for secure phones in the White House offices reserved for the National Security Council. And that the last four numbers—0001—indicated that this particular phone was the first in a line of many.
“So, ponder this,” Bates concluded. “Why would a French intelligence agent, one with a very dirty past, and obviously out to fuck over the U.S., have the number for someone in the NSC office at the White House?”
Ryder just shrugged. “These numbers have to be closely held secrets, right?”
Bates replied, “Are they ever. My boss at the NSA used to keep them in a nuclear blast
proof safe.
That's
how secret they were. No one I know would have been stupid enough to let one out in such an unsecured location as a cell phone or a personal organizer. In fact, you're supposed to keep them in your head.”
“Well, then who the hell was this French asshole calling at the White House?” Ryder asked.
Bates smiled grimly again. Then he handed Ryder a clean cell phone and said, “See for yourself.”
Ryder understood right away. They had done this type of thing before. He punched in the number.
A woman answered.

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