Strike Force Alpha (15 page)

He laid his head on the thin pillow and thought about his horses. When one stumbles and falls and breaks a leg, it was no big deal. True, the animal would have to be destroyed, but he could always buy another one. Plus, he believed it made his other horses that much more competitive—hungrier to stay alive. More than a few of his other steeds were getting old, though. It might be time to actually sell some of them off. Of course, he would not sell the one named
Al Sayet
. It was his favorite, a huge white Arabian king, a direct descendant from the Prophet Muhammad’s own herd. The rest could die tomorrow, but if
Sayet
survived, Farouk would consider himself a lucky man, favored by Allah.

He drifted off to sleep but was awakened after a while by the sensation of a warm fluid leaking under his body. Still groggy, he reached under his thigh and found something slightly sticky. He brought the substance to his nose and took a sniff. Had he peed the bed again?

No, the scent was not familiar. He reached up, turned on the bed lamp, looked at his fingers, and realized they were smeared with blood.

He threw the covers from him. His legs and rump were covered with blood. Farouk was horrified. He turned over and saw a pool of blood had gathered in the center of his huge water bed. It was leaking out from beneath a lump of blankets on the other side, nearly six feet away. Trembling, Farouk reached over and pulled back the rest of the bedclothes.

It was not the head of his favorite horse—as he had feared.

It was worse.

It was the butchered body of his great-grandnephew, Abdul Zoobu.

Sticking out of his pockets were dozens of playing cards bearing the likeness of the World Trade Center towers.

Stuffed into his mouth was a bloody American flag.

Aboard
Ocean Voyager

Martinez found Murphy at the front of the ship, near the bow, sitting on a folding chair, staring up at the night sky. They were heading south again.

“Everyone OK?” Murphy asked him, eyes never leaving the stars.

Martinez lit a cigarette. “Message was delivered. They all came back in one piece.”

Murphy let out a sigh. “We get lucky again,” he said. “That’s good news.”

It was midnight. The successful raid to the marketplace and the follow-up trip to Riyadh had wrapped an hour ago. And it
was
all good news. The team had flown two missions over two separate countries, without anyone challenging them, following them, or even trying to track them on radar. Postmission satellite photos of both targets showed no military or police presence at either site. This could only mean one thing: the team’s reputation was so widespread, the local authorities had become just as fearful of them as the populace. Like the Algerian government and the Holy Islamic Party of God, what the Crazy Americans left in their wake could be so horrible, no one wanted to search for the culprits too aggressively. Not when they knew it could be their throat next to be slit….

So the team had finally hit its stride. They were operating with virtual impunity, shaking up a lot of mooks, nailing some supporting characters of 9/11—and still no one knew where they were coming from. Murphy should have been doing handstands by now. But as Martinez found him, he did not seem too happy. While the team was out doing its thing, Murphy had been down in the White Rooms, sitting among the young Spooks, staring at the NSA read-out screens and reading the latest chatter picked up between the
jihad
groups. It had not been a wasted exercise, but what he’d uncovered was a little deflating.

“The plan for the mooks’ Next Big Thing is already floating around on a CD-ROM,” he told Martinez now. “We just got a third-party confirmation of it a few hours ago. It’s being distributed, very secretly, to their network as we speak.”

“Just as you thought,” Martinez said. “That’s good to know.”

Murphy wiped his tired eyes. “Maybe not,” he said. “That’s probably what those Saudi troops were doing the night we snatched the five guys for the pig cutting. They were delivery boys.”

“So?” Martinez asked.

“So if we had just waited a little longer we might have been able to turn up one of these CDs.”

Martinez leaned against the railing, blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke and thought for a moment. “We’re not mind readers, Murph,” he finally said. “From the sounds of it, there was no way we could have known about the CD coming that night. Shit, the five mooks probably didn’t even know it themselves until the last minute.”

Murphy’s eyes were still glued on the Big Dipper. “Yeah, but then we knock off this mook today in the electronics store.
He
was one of the guys distributing the CDs. He might have had one on him when we spotted him. If only we had been a bit more subtle. Damn….”

Martinez took another long drag of his cigarette. “No one is perfect. And besides, we’re not out here to be subtle. The guys down below have so many mooks under surveillance, another one of them will crack soon. It’s inevitable. And when he does, we’ll be right on him….”

Murphy just shook his head. “Yeah, but this Next Big Thing they’re planning is getting real close—I can feel it. I’m talking two weeks. Maybe less. If we keep knocking these guys off one or two at a time, we could be old men before it amounts to anything.”

He lowered his eyes to stare out on the black waves of the Gulf. “They know we are out here. And, sure, by now they know what it is we do. But they are still running faster than we are, and they’re a tough bunch to slow down once they get going. So we’ve got to hit them again, right away, and make it somewhere they’re not expecting it. It’s got to be a real sucker punch, too. Something that will knock them off-balance, throw them off-schedule, and maybe give us more time to divine what they are up to.”

“But what happens then?” Martinez asked. “Suppose we find out the whens and wheres of this ‘Next Big Thing.’ Are we telling anyone?”

Murphy finally looked over at him. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “If you knew about Nine-Eleven one hour before it began, what would you do? Tell the CIA? Or try to stop it yourself with the guys we’ve got on this boat?”

It was a tough question, especially for someone so by-the-book as Martinez. “I really don’t know,” he finally answered. “What would you do?”

But strangely Murphy wasn’t listening anymore. His eyes had taken on a very faraway look. Suddenly, he sat straight up in his chair and clapped his hands.

Inspiration had struck.

“How soon can the jump jets go out again?” he asked Martinez urgently.

The Delta officer thought a moment. “They’ve got enough gas onboard to fly one mission—if it’s relatively close.”

“Are the pilots awake?”

“Probably not….”

“Wake them up then,” Murphy said. “And get everyone connected to air ops in my quarters in thirty minutes.”

Ryder was in a Chinese restaurant, cleaning the fish tank. Maureen was waving to him from the corner. The waiter had a quick conversation with her, then walked over to Ryder and said, in Maureen’s voice: “Murphy wants us topside.”

Ryder shook himself awake. Phelan was hanging over him.

“They want us,” the young pilot was saying. “In Murphy’s quarters. Now.”

Ryder’s fingers were numb. The ship had been rocking again and he’d been holding on to his bunk, very tightly, in his sleep.

He looked at his watch. It was 1:00
A.M.
Christ,
they’d just got back from the last mission two hours ago. He’d been asleep for less than 30 minutes.

Phelan was dressed and ready to go. The beach boy seemed even more eager than usual. Ryder hated such enthusiasm at this time of night.

He got up, splashed some water on his face, and popped a pep pill. “What do they want us for?”

“All Martinez said was that Murphy wants to talk to us and he’s really pumped.”

Ryder yawned fiercely.

“Good for him,” he said.

They climbed up top, past the darkened “breakfast” deck, to Murphy’s quarters.

They found Murphy, Martinez, and Bingo inside, along with the chopper boys, Curry and Gallant. Gil Bates, the White Room whiz kid, was also on hand. His Hawaiian shirt seemed brighter than the sun to Ryder’s bleary eyes.

Murphy was sitting at the head of the long table. Everyone was drinking coffee. He waved the pilots into the two seats next to him.

“Like I was saying,” Murphy went on. “We know the mooks have a great organization. They are run like a corporation. It’s not just one guy—or even a group of guys. It’s a thing unto itself.

“Now this is what I’ve been thinking about all night. How can you really hurt a gang like that? You can’t bomb them all. You’d have to know where they all are to do that. But according to the CIA, it’s been impossible to infiltrate them. So how do you deliver a sucker punch to them? Something that’s going to hurt them on another level?”

He held his finger up in the air. “I’ll tell you how. You interfere with their money.
You affect their cash flow
. Sure, they have a great organization—but they’ve got a huge payroll, too. And if there was some way to squeeze them on that, who knows what would happen? Think of it. If Yasif in Jersey City doesn’t get paid, all of a sudden driving that cab and living in a slum doesn’t look so good anymore. His enthusiasm might waver. He might want to go home. Not good for morale. Not good for the corporation as a whole.”

He pulled a map from his briefcase. It showed the city of Abu Dhabi, the largest of the states comprising the United Arab Emirates. It was about fifty miles down the coast from ‘Ajman, the scene of the team’s most recent big raid.

“Abu Dhabi is the federal capital of the UAE,” Murphy told them. “It’s an important place. The UAE parliament buildings are here. Federal ministries, religious institutions, foreign embassies, state broadcasting facilities, and most of the UAE’s oil companies. So it’s an affluent place, too.”

They studied the photo map. The streets downtown ran in precise geometric patterns. They were either perfectly straight or beautifully curved. The buildings, too, soaring and futuristic. This was not the Rats’ Nest, Ryder thought. This was an ultramodern city.

In the middle of the map, on what could only be called the main drag, Murphy had marked a building with an
X
.

“The terrorists do a lot of things in cash,” he went on. “They have to. They have a payroll to meet, just like everyone else, but it’s not like they can send some of their guys a paycheck every week. They use couriers and they use Barrat, that informal banking thing they have going. But the guy at the front end still
has
to have cash handed to him. Especially when he is dealing directly with Al Qaeda. So, they have places where they have lots of cash sitting around, waiting to be tapped.”

He pointed to the building with the
X
on it. “That’s one of them.”

“What is it?” Phelan asked.

“The Abu Dhabi National Bank,” Murphy replied. “1001 Sayeeb Street. Sixteen stories high. Built 1999. I happen to know the mooks have twelve million dollars in cash locked in its vault right now. The bank employees are under orders not to touch it. Not to even look at it. Twelve million…that’s about a quarter-year’s operating expenses for these
jihad
guys. A big chunk of their liquid capital is in that bank.”

“Sooo,” Phelan said. “What do you want us to do? Rob it?”

“No,” Murphy replied simply. “I want you to bomb it.”

For the next half hour, Ryder and Phelan drank coffee and worked up the details of a typical night mission.

There was nothing complicated about it: Get the ship as close as possible to the Emirates’ coastline and lay a path for ingress to the target. As for the dropping of ordnance, the bank’s vault was on the first floor of the building. A glassed-in lobby made up the exterior of this first story. The pilots figured they would each be able to drop a pair of 500-pound bombs on the target. The first two would be blockbuster iron bombs. They would go down through the second floor, explode inside the bank, and, it was hoped at least one of them would reveal the vault. If this happened and the pilots could flash a laser on the vault, they could send two guided munitions right into it on their next pass. If these munitions were made of high-penetration high explosives, the money inside the vault would burn to a crisp. And the timing? They could fly the job now and be back on the ship before sunrise.

Murphy loved the plan. “I don’t even know what thinking out of the box means,” he admitted. “But if this is it…then you guys are geniuses.”

They went around the table. Martinez gave it a thumbs-up. Bingo, Gallant, and Curry did, too.

That’s when Bates, the top Spook, spoke up.

“It’s cool,” he said. “But how would you like to make this hit, let’s say, ten times more effective?”

Everyone looked up at him. “
Ten
times more effective?” Murphy said. “How?”

“By making a
real
impression on them,” Bates replied, not quite smugly, but close. “I know a little about how things work in the Gulf, especially in the Emirates. I studied Islamic business philosophy back in school.”

“High school?” Phelan asked innocently.

Bates pretended not to hear him. He pointed to the big
X
on the map. “Now you can go in and bomb that bank in the middle of the night. And yes, if their twelve million goes up in smoke, well, clearly, that’s good sucker punch. But…”

“But what?” Murphy said.

“But what if we hit it in the daytime?” Bates asked.

Murphy was surprised. They all were.

“The daytime?” Murphy asked. “Really?”

“Bomb it at noontime and go in loud,” Bates said emphatically. “Make it messy and
y
ou’ll spook the hell out of them. These aren’t the people of Berlin or Stalingrad or London we’re talking about here. They might be ninety-nine-point-nine percent for the
jihad,
but they really don’t want to get their robes dirty. They’re living too good of a life down there—all while keeping twelve million of the Head Mook’s money warm. Now, you do this thing in the daytime and make a mess, believe me, the entire bank will go under; Shit, the entire
block
will go under. And a lot of oil-money people will be very upset that a place like this was actually hit. Just like hitting the World Trade Center. Knocking down a building is not very good for business.”

Bates turned to the Harrier pilots. “How much ordnance can you guys carry?”

“Enough…why?”

“Then increase your bomb load. Instead of carrying two five-hundred-pounders, try carrying two
two-thousand-pound
bombs each. You will definitely burn the money that way, but you might leave a big hole in the ground, too.” Bates’s voice suddenly cracked with emotion, very unlike him. His mother had been killed in the Lockerbie bombing when he was just six years old. So he’d lost someone, too. “I say, give
them
a Ground Zero to look at every day.”