Strike Force Alpha (17 page)

But the kid was shaking his head no.

“No, sir—that power spike was
caused
by everything downstairs shutting off at once. The sudden drop in power sent a volt-wash through the ship. When that happens, it’s usually a—”

Murphy raised his hand, gently interrupting the young technician. He got the point.

“Can’t you boot it all back up?” he asked him simply.

But the kid never stopping shaking his head. “When I say shut down, I mean everything has ceased transmitting from the other end,” he told Murphy soberly. “We didn’t kill it ourselves. Someone on the other end did.”

This news landed like a 2,000-pound bomb. Murphy just stared back at the kid as it began to slowly sink in. The tanker. The phones. The nav/comm gear. The TVs. Now this. A domino effect. Like someone flipping a switch….

“OK, son,” Murphy said, his voice very low. “You can get going.”

The kid disappeared. Outside, the wind had started to blow a little louder.

They sat there in silence for nearly a minute. Finally Ryder pulled up a chair next to Murphy.

“Can I ask you something, off-the-record?”

Murphy was still dazed. “Sure….”

“Did someone up top get pissed over the bank job?”

“Yeah, like super–pissed off?” Phelan added.

Murphy started to say something but stopped. He took a deep breath and then it seemed like all the air went right out of him.

“It wasn’t as popular back home as I thought it was going to be,” he finally admitted.

“But I thought there really
wasn’t
anyone who could get pissed at us officially,” Ryder said. “No oversight. No limits.”

Murphy just held up his hands. “That only leaves the very large world of ‘unofficially,’” he said. “Nothing is foolproof. Not even this.”

He nodded toward the dead TVs. “It didn’t help that they were showing the video twenty-four/seven. The media can really call the tune these days, once they sink their teeth into something.”

There came another uncomfortable silence as Murphy looked sadly around the room. Things were starting to fall into place for all of them. Like a championship football game, the momentum had flipped. Just like that.

“How bad do you think it is?” Ryder finally asked him.

Murphy took off his glasses and leaned way back in his chair. He had been keeping up a brave face after all. “I got a message from my ‘friends’ back in the states earlier today,” he said. “On the secure E-mail site. They say we’ve been put on life support. They suggested we stay in place and not do a blessed thing.”

He looked around the dim room again. “I’ve yet to reply to them—but they said the plug could be pulled at any time. Looks like they were right.”

The ship shuddered once, making even the emergency lights blink.

Murphy’s voice almost broke. “That’s how it always goes, isn’t it? You do the job too well, and the people back home wet their pants.”

He studied his glasses. At the moment, he could have been a druggist or a dry-cleaning guy. Murphy just did not exude “spyness.”

“You guys have been out here what, six weeks now?” he went on. “Well, I’ve been working on this baby
for years
. And now, just when things are getting interesting, they go south on us. Damn….”

Ryder couldn’t argue with him. He’d been involved in many black ops in his time, though never one quite as bizarre as this. By their very nature, some secret missions had very short half-lives. Some never got off the ground at all. And Murphy was right. The quick pull usually was a result of someone inside the Beltway having kittens because things were looking a little untidy.

But this was different. Most black ops come and go.
This one
started as a quest, a journey, one man’s uphill battle. Sleepless nights. Endlessly banging on closed doors. A parched voice crying in the wilderness. A thousand days of hard work. It was all right there on Murphy’s face now, along with the realization that it was probably slipping away, all in a matter of seconds.

“Well, we gave it a shot, I suppose,” the little man said, symbolically closing his briefcase. “I hope someday the survivors of everyone killed on Nine-Eleven will know that at least.”

Another silence. The ship rolled again.

Ryder tried to be philosophical. “It’s not like we didn’t accomplish anything out here,” he said. “We could sail away tomorrow and they’d
still
be looking over their shoulders for us this time next year. We made that much of an impact, in a very short time. All because of you.”

But Murphy was shaking his head no.

“And what happens when the mooks fly off to do the Next Big Thing?” he asked sternly. “And we could have been here to prevent it? I hate to tell you that no one back in the states has any idea what is about to happen. They don’t want to hear it. They’re still fighting about whose office is bigger and who’s got the nicest window and who will have the biggest staff. Just like last time, the signals are all around them, but they can’t see the forest for the trees. Do you know the Homeland Threat Warning is still stuck on yellow? They refuse to raise it up to orange. Why? Because it affects the stock market. It’s bad for business. Not that it matters. People are so sick of the false alarms, they don’t take anything seriously anymore. But
I know
something is about to happen. Anyone with half a brain and access to the information we have—or used to have—would reach the same conclusion.”

He wiped his tired eyes.

“But if we’re just going to get put out to dry…”

He let the words hang in the air. He’d said it himself just a few days before:
Every enterprise reaches its peak.
Those words were echoing inside Ryder’s empty beer can now. Had Murphy really peaked so soon?

“I knew it would make you guys stronger, you know,” he told them suddenly. He was wearing a weak but sly smile, barely visible in the dank light. “All of you, stronger.”

“What’s that?” Ryder asked him.

“Putting you together but telling you not to talk,” Murphy said. “If you haven’t figured out by now, that was a little test of mine.”

“Well, it didn’t work,” Ryder said. “We’ve been blabbing like old ladies for weeks.”

“As I knew you would,” Murphy said. “But I also knew that it would show me something if you did: that working together was more important than any asinine order to keep your traps shut. Yes, I set you up like a cell. I did just about everything the mooks do, including getting people whose families have been personally involved, shall we say? But unlike them, we had human hearts beating inside our cell. Sure, you broke the rules. But whether you know it or not, doing so turned you into something that you weren’t before.”

“A conspiracy of dunces, you mean?” Ryder asked.

“Nope,” Murphy said. “It made you whole. It brought you together, to find common ground on your own. No holy book was needed here. All we needed to be was Americans. And Americans have souls. That’s what I thought was most important. That’s all I ever wanted. That’s all I thought we’d ever need.”

Murphy got to his feet, a little unsteadily, and walked over to the large picture window. His eyes had watered up. Hands clasped behind him, he stared out at the dark, troubled water below.

Ryder got another beer. He, too, needed some time in the dark. Phelan appeared to be deep in thought for a few moments as well. But then he slipped into Murphy’s chair and started examining the pile of stuff in front of it. The young pilot had been unusually quiet for a while. That was about to change.

“You were going to run another operation soon?” he asked Murphy.

“I was thinking of it,” Murphy called over his shoulder. “A pipe dream for sure….”

“And now, you’re KO’ing it—and you’re just going to wait for the ax to fall?”

Murphy replied: “That’s seems to be the only option.”

Phelan took a long swig of his beer.

“It’s been my experience,” he said, suddenly sounding like he was three times his age, “that in times like this, people get pissed off very quickly. Call it stress or whatever. But I also know that crap like this sometimes goes away just as quickly, and eventually ceases to exist altogether. I think Buddha said it best: ‘Just because it’s bad doesn’t mean it can’t also be temporary.’”

Murphy turned and looked across the room at him. “What are you saying?”

Phelan picked up the photo and pointed to the fruit warehouse. “I’m saying run it anyway.”

Ryder froze midsip on his beer. Murphy looked at Phelan strangely.

“Run what?” he asked him.

“The plan you were working on,” Phelan replied. “This next mission. Do it anyway—and screw the people who are turning up the heat. You might even go down in the history books if you do.”

Murphy was very puzzled. So was Ryder. Suddenly Phelan was back to being all mouth.

“Explain, please,” Murphy asked him.

Phelan took another long swig of beer. “Didn’t you ever take military history?”

Murphy shook his head, but then said: “Sure….”

“Down through the ages,” Phelan went on, “many commanders have won great battles, pulled off incredible victories, turned the tides of entire wars, all while they were under strict orders not to do anything. It’s true. And you know how most of them got away with it?”

Murphy shook his head no.

Phelan lowered his voice a little. “They always said, ‘I didn’t get the message in time.’”

“Really?” Murphy asked.

“I can list at least ten examples off the top of my head…” Phelan replied. “Maybe more.”

Murphy raised his hands as if to indicate the dim lights, the dead computers, the rolling ship, their suddenly isolated condition. “But how can I say I missed all this?” he asked. “This is a message, loud and clear.”

Phelan smiled slyly. “But who says they know that?” he replied. “Did you reply to the E-mail they sent?”

Again Murphy shook his head no.

Phelan never stopped smiling. “Well, until you tell them otherwise, as far as they’re concerned, everything here could be
status quo
.”

Murphy looked over at Ryder, as if to ask:
What do you think of this?
But the senior pilot just shrugged. Nothing Phelan said surprised him anymore.

“Do you believe this next mission would hurt the mooks badly?” Phelan asked Murphy directly.

“Yes,” was the firm response.

“And do you think it will zap a few of the people who were involved in Nine-Eleven?”

“Absolutely it will….”

“And could it even help prevent the Next Big Thing?”

“Prevent or certainly delay it,” was the reply.

“Then just do your thing, Mr. Murphy,” Phelan told him. “And when they ask, just tell them it all got lost in the translation. You didn’t know what they meant. ‘I didn’t get the message in time.’”

Silence. Then Phelan added: “I mean, what do you have to lose? They can’t kill you twice.”

Murphy took off his cap and pushed back his thinning hair. He stood up straight again. Then he smiled and all but sprinted back to the table. The pep talk from the unlikeliest source had fired new energy into him. Just like that.

“Shouldn’t argue with history, I guess,” he said with a wink in Ryder’s direction. The lights dimmed again. The ship rolled heavily to port. “Though I think we shouldn’t waste any more time, either….”

Phelan pointed to the picture of the big warehouse. “Now, you want us to blow up this building, I assume?”

“Not exactly,” Murphy said. “I think I’ve got an even better idea.”

“Tell us then,” Phelan said.

But now Murphy hesitated. He looked down at the notes he’d been taking and seemed to consider them for a while. He turned serious again.

He said: “Look, whatever we do, I want you to realize that from now on I’m the guy out front. I didn’t get the message—it was screwed up in translation, OK, fine. But if it goes wrong, I’m the one who gets the blindfold and the last smoke. No one else.”

Ryder was finishing his third beer. Or was it his fourth?

“What are you talking about?” he asked Murphy.

“What I’m saying is, you might not want to know very much about this next one,” he replied, indicating his pile of notes. “That way, I’ll be the only one in position to take the heat.”

He looked up at the two pilots. “In fact, I’m going to ask you guys to do just one thing,” he said.

He pointed to the map of Qartoom, to the roof of the warehouse itself.

“Just get me here, in one piece. I’ll do the rest….”

Ryder and Phelan sat down with pen and paper.

Both had planned air missions before, of course, but not one quite like this. Murphy wanted to go to Qartoom sometime within the next 48 hours—anything after that he thought would lose them the very last of their momentum. But the warehouse was nearly 500 miles away and there was not enough time to turn the ship around and simply sail there. Thus the need for an air operation. But it would not be an easy one.

The mission called for a helicopter. But someone would have to fly it across Saudi Arabia, across the Red Sea, up along the Suez coast, and then over to Libya. After that, it would have to sneak under the Libyans’ noses, find a secure location near the target, if not right on top of it, put at least two men on the ground, then wait for them to return. Then they would have to fly all the way back to the ship again.

It would be more than 2,500 miles, round-trip. A long way to go in a rotary craft.

Ryder explained this to Murphy. Details upon details, five pages scribbled in his bad handwriting. It would involve complex flying, multiple fuel-ups, prepositionings of fuel, and total reliance on their stealthiness. And still, much would be left up to the fates.

But at the end of the briefing, Murphy had only one question:
Where are we going to get the gas?

Ryder stood up and stretched. Phelan yawned loudly, too. It was the longest time they’d spent with Murphy, one-on-one, since the funny little guy arrived on the boat. Despite the intrigue and all the conflicting emotions, it was just about impossible to dislike him.

“Murph, if you
really
want to do this,” Ryder told him, “we can get you the gas.”