Strike Force Alpha (21 page)

So he turned to Ryder. The pilot had spent most of the discussion wedged into a corner, counting the cigarettes he had left in his pack and planning how he could make them last, because there were no more to be had aboard ship. Suddenly he was aware that the rest of the team were looking at him. Sad eyes, needing guidance as bad as he needed an extra pack of smokes.

“Well, what do you think,
Colonel
?” Martinez asked him, emphasizing his rank for the first time ever. “After all, you are the
senior
member here.”

Ryder could only offer a weary shrug. He
was
getting too old for this.

“I don’t think any of us will look good in stripes,” he said.

‘Ajman, United Arab Emirates

The Burjuman marketplace was nearly empty.

The huge open-air bazaar, hard on the edge of ‘Ajman City, hadn’t seen a crowd since the day the Crazy Americans came and killed the terrorist named Zoobu.

The underwear and the computers, the boom boxes and the shamrocks, now seemed glued to the shelves, slowly becoming encased in the fine desert sand. The huge Coke and Pepsi signs still hung high overhead, dominating the marketplace, but there was no one to provide shade for anymore. Many of the makeshift shops had folded up their tents, literally, and moved on.

Jazeer’s electronics shop was still here, though only because he was still in the hospital, recovering from his hideous wounds. His sister’s 12-year-old daughter was now minding the store, but she did not have near the enthusiasm of Jazeer. She spent her days sitting next to the cash register, her tiny body in an adolescent slouch, reading American comic books and ‘N Sync fan magazines and barely acknowledging anyone who came in.

She was also rather dull upstairs, so when the black helicopter landed in the middle of the square a few minutes before her 10:00
P.M.
closing time, she barely looked up from the interview with Justin T. Even when the five huge soldiers stepped off the chopper and began walking in her direction, she remained unfazed. She had heard something about a helicopter crashing into the square last week—was that how Uncle Jazeer got hurt?—but then someone had told her the Jews had been the cause of it, and she forgot all about it soon afterward.

But now the five soldiers were suddenly standing in front of her, and it was registering that they were much too large to be Arab. Or Israeli. And they were holding huge guns.

“Whatdoyouwant?”
she asked them finally, in English.

The soldier closest to her raised his weapon. Delta had never been greeted quite like that before, and this trooper didn’t like it. A three-bullet barrage would blow her apart; she was that small.

Someone’s little sister,
he supposed.
Totally clueless….

A tense moment passed. Then he lowered his weapon and said: “We are here to take all of your CDs….”

“Take them? As in steal them?” she asked.

“Let’s just say we are going to move them from one place to another,” was the reply. “As a favor, for the guy who used to work here.”

For some reason, this made sense to her. “For Uncle Jazeer, you mean?”

The soldier nodded wearily. “Exactly.”

She went back to her magazine.

“Be my guest,” she said.

Aboard
Ocean Voyager

Abu Jazeer had a total of 721 used CDs in the back of his store.

They were all now sitting inside the container compartment once known as White Room #2, most of them in two gigantic stacks, swaying precariously with the rolling of the ship. There was several million dollars’ worth of audio enhancement gear nearby, gadgets that could decipher the smallest of sound patterns or clear static from a line or tell which part of the world a cell-phone call was being placed from. But the strike team leaders were interested in just one device down here at the moment. It was a battered old computer with a cracked keyboard and a balky sound system attached.

Phelan was sitting in front of this PC now, loading one used CD into it after another, looking for a needle in a haystack of pins. It didn’t help that all of Jazeer’s inventory was illegal, songs burned onto blank CDs and then sold as “used.” Many were packed into unmarked paper or cardboard sleeves rather than jewel boxes. And those that
were
marked had been done so incorrectly, with the cover sleeve not matching what was inside.

In other words, the only way to find out which one wasn’t a music CD was to load each of them into the computer, activate the CD-ROM drive, and hope that one would start downloading information, instead of just blaring out some bad foreign music.

So far, it had been nothing but bad music.

In the two hours since returning to the ship, Phelan had fed more than 300 CDs into the elderly HP 900E computer, with no luck. Contemplating at least another two hours with 400 disks to go, the team leaders were becoming restless. They’d slipped back into the Gulf just as another foul weather front appeared. A rainstorm was brewing outside, making the interior of the dreary compartment damp and uncomfortable. The adrenalin high of so swiftly confiscating the load of CDs was now dissipating with each roll of the ship.

It didn’t help that they’d received some bad news about ninety minutes into the process. It came from one of the Marine techs who’d hiked all the way down to the bottom of the boat to tell them the
Torch
copter was no longer be able to fly. While the marathon flight to Qartoom had taken its toll, the last mission to ‘Ajman had been a backbreaker, he said. The copter’s avionics were already ragged. Now its engines were shot and beyond repair, due to a lack of spare parts. The Marines had drained the last few precious drops of fuel from its tanks and the
Torch
was now considered OTB—off the books. Inactive.
Dead
. It was an inglorious end for the great aerial troop truck.

By the third hour, the team members began wandering away. Curry and Gallant left after nothing had been found in the first 400 CDs. The little bleats of music were horrible and loud, and after a while they all had earaches. Martinez eventually retired, too. Too exhausted to be the contrarian now, before he left the Delta officer gave Phelan a fatherly pat on the back, as if to say:
Nice try, son.
Outside, the storm grew worse.

Only Ryder remained with Phelan, handing him a new CD as the one before it went spinning across the room, to splinter against the far wall. The floor of the previously antiseptic White Room #2 was now thick with pieces of shiny, broken plastic.

Shortly after the fifth hour of this began, Phelan stopped for a moment, rubbed his tired eyes, and let out a long, troubled breath.

“We’re screwed,” he said wearily. “If Zoobu had stashed the CD-ROM in with all this crap, the chances are we would have found it by now.”

“Well, it was worth a shot,” Ryder told him; his spirits, too, had begun to fade. “And it’s what Murphy would have wanted us to do, right?”

But Phelan just shook his head. The emotional roller coaster was clearly having the biggest effect on him. “What am I ever going to tell my mom?” he said quietly.

Finally it came down to the last 100 CDs. They’d all been taken from a bin marked:
FRENCH ROCK AND ROLL
.

“If Zoobu
really
wanted to hide it,” Ryder said smartly, “this would have been the place.”

Phelan put in the first CD. Awful music. The second—and the music was even worse. The third went beyond the description of bad. Then he came to a CD whose paper sleeve was marked
BLACK TUESDAY
in French. Phelan numbly fed it into the computer.

Suddenly the screen popped to life.

The two pilots couldn’t believe it. An electronically distorted image slowly came into focus on the monitor. It was a man’s face. He was an Arab, with three missing teeth, a pop eye, and a crooked turban. He was smiling but looked treacherous.

Phelan clenched his fists in triumph.

“Either he’s a French rock star,” the young pilot said excitedly, “or we just caught us a fish.”

Inside five minutes, the rest of the team had rushed back to White Room #2. A new energy had blown into the compartment.

They all studied the picture on the screen. It was Martinez who recognized the dirty face first.

“Damn,” he said. “That’s Abdul Kazeel….”

“Friend of yours?” Phelan asked dryly.

But Martinez remained dead serious. “He’s only the top operations guy left in Al Qaeda. Next to Khalid Shaikh, he did most of the down-and-dirty planning for Nine-Eleven. Christ, he handed ticket money to Muhammad Atta himself.”

“Jackpot…” Phelan declared.

“Let’s hope so,” Martinez replied.

Phelan quickly gave his seat to Gil Bates. Summoned from above, the young Spook Boss knew his way around a computer better than anyone else onboard. He thought he recognized the type of CD-ROM they’d found.

“This
does
look like a final briefing disk,” he told them. “I’ve seen a few of them before. The mooks started using CD-ROMS right after Nine-Eleven for security reasons, especially when something big was about to happen.”

He began banging away on the keyboard. “They set them up just like computer games,” he explained. “This one’s probably divided into a number of different levels. That’s how they usually put these things together.”

They all watched the first level play out. Just as Bates predicted, it served as the disk’s introduction and like a computer game, opened automatically. The initial images were highly visual, the screen filling with weird Islamic effects, lines of text, and nonstop dissolves of
jihad
members, all backed by discordant Middle Eastern music.

“It looks like a bad religious program,” Gallant said. “Something they show on cable at two in the morning.”

“You haven’t seen much Arab TV,” Bates told him, his eyes never leaving the screen. “This kind of stuff passes for prime-time programming over here.”

The visuals of the
jihad
fighters were handled not unlike the introduction of a computer-game sports team. Each terrorist was given about ten seconds of face time, with his photograph displayed prominently on one part of the screen and a video cut-in of him speaking taking up the other.

Kazeel meanwhile served as narrator for this first level. Babbling on and on, his voice was laid over a still photo of himself dressed in full camo battle fatigues which kept dissolving from one corner of the screen to the other. A total of 22
jihad
types were shown. The last pair had their faces completely tiled out, an extraordinary security procedure, Bates said.

“Whatever the mooks are planning next,” the Spook Boss concluded, “these are the guys who are going to do it.”

But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than the first level ended and the CD froze in place.

“Shit…what happened?” Martinez cried.

Bates began banging on the keyboard again, but the visuals would not budge.

“I was afraid of this,” he said, pointing to three blank fields that had appeared at the bottom of the screen. “We need to enter encryption codes into those three boxes in order to get into the next level. Codes we do not have.”

With those words, all that new energy went right out of the room again.

“Isn’t there a way you can figure them out?” Martinez asked Bates sternly. “You’re supposed to be the whiz kid.

“Sure I can—if you give me a couple weeks,” Bates replied. “But short of that…”

“God damn it,” Ryder said. “You said this is like a computer game. Don’t you have any clues at all? Something that might crack the codes?”

But Bates just shook his head. “The mooks really know what they’re doing when it comes to encryption. It’s like a challenge to them. Hacking into the Pentagon is a breeze compared to what they can put up.”

A groan went through the compartment. Once again, they were back to zero.

Bates rebooted the PC and went back to the beginning of the CD-ROM. Kazeel’s dark face soon filled the screen again. In between introducing the martyrs-to-be, Kazeel seemed to be reading from cue cards out of camera range. The team members all listened closely, but Kazeel’s words, in Arabic, made little sense, even to those in the room who spoke the language. They sounded like disassociated religious phrases, repeated over and over.

“What the hell is he talking about?” Martinez finally asked.

Bates just shrugged again. “I have no idea….”

But then came a phrase that outlined the proper way a Muslim man could kill his unfaithful wife.

“Now
that’s
from the Koran,” Bates declared, cleaning up the audio a bit. “And that could mean everything he’s saying might be, too. That could actually help us.”

“What do you mean?” Martinez asked.

“This Kazeel might be speaking in Koranic code,” Bates replied. “Let’s say each mook already had a specially prepared copy of the Koran before he received his CD. They might have a system in place that when they hear these repetitive phrases from Kazeel, they will make some kind of sense to them—and lead somehow to the encryption codes needed to open up the rest of the CD-ROM. That way, should the CD itself fall into the wrong hands, the mooks still have a measure of security in place.”

“So what you’re saying is,” Martinez asked, “the Koran is actually their codebook?”

Bates nodded. “They might be using it that way. Possibly even as a double-code book.”

“So this disk doesn’t do us any good then?” Ryder said.

“Not unless we get one of their Korans,” Bates replied. “And how we do that I don’t know. But whatever we do, we have to hurry….”

“Why so?” Martinez asked.

Bates finally took his eyes off the screen. “When I first joined the NSA, my group did a case study on Nine-Eleven,” he explained. “We concentrated on communications NSA had intercepted from the mooks in the days just before the towers were hit. We learned that the most important element in their entire plan was the timetable. The mooks were slaves to it. I mean, they scheduled things right down to the very last minute. Now the final communiqué from the top came less than a week before the hijackings took place. This was their one last briefing before they went off to do the deed. I’ll bet this CD contains the same thing. The final details. Their marching orders, so to speak. That’s why they went so heavy on the security.

“Now if we can get into the next levels, and I’m guessing there are two more, then I’ll bet we’ll see all their operational stuff: hours, dates, meeting locations, targets, the works. We might even see details for any misdirection they are planning.”

“That would be more than enough to head off this thing, for sure,” Phelan said. “Whatever it is….”