Strike Force Alpha (23 page)

The
Eight Ball
was no longer a gunship. All of its weaponry had been removed to reduce weight and make it more fuel-efficient. Its interior had been cored out, too. No more extra seats, no more redundant communications sets. The aircraft was now just a fuselage with a rotor on top and some huge shoulder tanks, filled with Noonan’s fuel, hanging off the sides. It even had Delta guys at the controls, saving the weight of dragging the two Air Force pilots along.

Sergeant Dave Hunn was crouched in the back of the copter, next to the three Saudi youths. They were still bound by the hands but were no longer blindfolded. Jamaal was the oldest. The other two were about seventeen and fifteen. Hunn knew he didn’t have much time; the Spooks back on
Ocean Voyager
expected the terrorists to make their move as early as daybreak the next morning. That meant they had less than 10 hours to stop the Next Big Thing.

Hunn turned to the first teenager. He was the youngest. Hunn didn’t bother to ask if the boy spoke English. He knew they all did.

He got right in the kid’s face.

“We know what you guys are up to!” Hunn screamed in his ear. “You, Jamaal, and your other brother.”

The kid shook his head no. He was absolutely terrified.

Hunn grabbed him by the shirt collar.

“Why don’t you have a Koran in your house?” he demanded to know.

The kid just shook his head wildly again. Indeed, no holy books were found in the el-Habini household; in itself, Hunn found that suspicious.

“Tell me the codes!” he screamed at the kid. “If not…” He drew an imaginary knife across his throat.

The boy grew more frightened but became defiant as well. He tried to spit at Hunn, but the wind in the cabin was so strong, the spittle blew back into his face. Still, Hunn became enraged. He picked the boy up by his shoulders and threw him out the open door.

Then Hunn grabbed the second teenager and repeated his demands:
“What are the codes? Where are your Korans?”
This kid was trembling, too, but he just kept shaking his head. Either he was being antagonistic or he didn’t know anything. It didn’t matter. A mighty kick from Hunn’s boot and he followed his brother out the door.

Then Hunn turned to Jamaal. He’d already wet himself.

“OK, my friend,” Hunn said, moving him a little closer to the open doorway. “It’s time for you to talk….”

But Jamaal knew talk or not, he was already dead. He decided to take matters into his own hands. He broke free of Hunn’s grasp and scrambled for the open doorway himself. He screamed, but his cry was lost in the high winds. Hunn lunged after him; two other Delta troopers did as well. But he was already halfway out the opening. Hunn managed to grab hold of his pant leg. It started to rip. Hunn tried to hold on tight, a very hard thing to do, as gravity and forward motion were battling him. The Delta guys flying the copter quickly reduced their airspeed, but this just caused the aircraft to start bucking all over the sky. Other troopers jumped in now, trying to keep Jamaal from going out the door, but it was just too much. Jamaal’s pant leg finally ripped in two. Hunn made one last grab, clutching at the boy’s sneaker. It came off—but Jamaal kept going. He fell, screaming, to the Persian Gulf two miles below.

“God damn it!”
Hunn cursed, holding Jamaal’s Air Jordan in his hand.
“You little muthafucker!”

The other troopers couldn’t believe it. Hunn had freaked again—and that meant they’d just come a very long way for nothing. Hunn was fuming. He collapsed in the corner of the cabin and started punching himself in the head.
What the hell had he been thinking?
He should have taken all measures to keep Jamaal alive.

But then he looked down at the sports shoe and noticed something. There was a square compartment cut out of the inside of the sneaker. Tucked snugly inside this hole was something wrapped in wax paper.
A bomb?
Hunn thought. Al Qaeda had used shoe bombs before. But he didn’t think so. He took out his knife and pried the object free. He unwrapped the wax paper.

Inside was a tiny, abridged copy of the Koran, Arabic on one side, English on the other.

The name of the hill was Saal-el-Qazell.

The Blackhawk had landed here with a mighty thump 10 minutes after the terrorist Jamaal and his two brothers went out the open door. Though the Delta guys could fly copters themselves, they didn’t quite have the touch of the Air Force pilots. Thus the less than gentle landing.

The hill was about one hundred miles southeast of Riyadh; the people onboard could see the Gulf coast from here. They’d set down for the same reason the copter was now just a skeleton of its previous self: to save gas. Noonan had come through with 1,000 gallons, but he’d made it crystal clear that the bar was closed after that. That’s why only one of the Harriers had accompanied the stripped-down gunship on the Jamaal raid. That’s why the fighter had carried only one bomb—and that’s why it had already returned to the ship.

Not so the Blackhawk.

Hunn had put his men in a defensive perimeter around the aircraft. The hill was extremely isolated. Night was closing in and he was confident no one would see them up here. He had with him one of the few working sat phones the team still possessed; it had a dying battery and its scrambler was barely functioning. He was to use it only in an emergency or to report any bombshell information as a result of the Jamaal raid. Or to tell the ship they were coming back empty-handed.

All he had, though, was Jamaal’s holy book, the abridged Koran. Did it contain anything that could help them at this late hour? Hunn would have to find out, quick.

He was sitting in the rear of the helicopter, holding the tiny copy of the Koran in front of him. It was about one hundred pages long and made out of paper so thin, one could almost see through it. Even its cover was made of thin paper.

He studied the book closely. Unlike most dog-eared Korans found in the hands of true believers, this one’s pages had been hardly turned. Hunn thought this odd. If this was in Jamaal’s possession, in such a secreted place, it seemed logical that it was one of the coded Korans Delta had been told to look for. But how could Hunn break the code sitting way the hell out here?

He tried an old counterspy trick. He held the book, pages up, about twelve inches above the helicopter’s floor and then let it drop. He was hoping the book would fall open to a certain page, indicating a place its owner had concentrated on. But no such luck. Hunn did his experiment a half-dozen times. Each time the book fell open to a different page.

A few frustrating minutes passed. Hunn’s mood grew darker. He called his first corporal, the guy named Zangrelli, back to the copter. They discussed every method they knew about spies and codes. But nothing seemed to click. The Koran was small, on thin paper, and hardly used. There seemed to be nothing else special about it. Hunn became further agitated. Something big was going down very soon, and due to his actions the one chance they had to prevent it was probably gone. He’d fucked up, big-time.

He lit up a rare cigarette and continued thumbing through the small book. Before Delta left the ship, Bates had provided them with many of the phrases Kazeel had recited over and over on the CD. Hunn began rereading a section where one of these phrases had been found. Exhaling a lungful of smoke, he noticed something. Some of the smoke seemed to be passing right through the page.

He tried it again. He blew a mouthful of smoke at the page—and some leaked out the other side.

“Fucking, hey!” he exploded.

He repeated the procedure for Corporal Zangrelli. Sure enough, they could see tiny wisps of smoke leaking out on the other side of the page.

Hunn turned on his flashlight and held the page in question up against its lens. Tiny shafts of light came streaming through.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he swore softly.

He immediately called the ship. Martinez got on the line and Hunn explained what he had found.

“Pinpricks,” the Delta officer told him. “I haven’t heard of that one in a long time.”

It was an old spy trick. Tiny holes had been punched above some of the letters in the words contained in the phrases Kazeel had spoken. The holes were apparent only when the page was held up to the light. They were just about impossible to see otherwise.

“The phrases Kazeel speaks at the beginning of the CD-ROM tell the mook where to look in the Koran,” Martinez explained to Hunn. “When he finds the pinholes, he matches the letters below them to form new words. Those words probably lead to the codes that open the rest of the CD.”

But they didn’t have time for the copter to fly back to the
Ocean Voyager
with the information. Hunn would have to recite for those back on the ship every letter he could find with a pinprick punched above it. He went through the whole book and found more than two dozen such letters above the phrases Kazeel had spoken on the CD. It took more than an hour, this as the stars came out and the desert hill became extremely cold. Toward the end, the cell phone began seriously losing power. And because
Ocean Voyager
was actually moving away from them, the reception became weaker with each passing minute. But finally they were done.

Hunn then asked Martinez what he and his men should do next.

The Delta officer replied with just two words: “Sit tight.”

White Room #2, aboard
Ocean Voyager

Gil Bates lost no time putting his Spooks to work crunching the information sent by Hunn.

They were all familiar with the pinprick spy technique; it went clear back to the Middle Ages. But they knew it was not as simple as the Delta guys hoped. Frequently the pinprick technique was used as a double code, and that was the case here. The letters found designated in Jamaal’s Koran did not automatically form the encryption words. That would have been too easy. Instead the letters formed what amounted to a huge Islamic anagram, 30 characters long. The real magic words were hidden inside this jumble. It was now up to the Spooks to find them out.

With all of their hot-shit computers disconnected long ago, the Spooks were forced to decipher the long line of letters the old-fashioned way. Bates knew that three words, or, more likely, a three-word phrase, would be needed to open up the second level of the CD-ROM, this because three blank fields had appeared at the end of the first level. He had his guys write each pinpointed Arabic letter on a large sheet of paper, along with its closest English equivalent. They strung a thin piece of rope across the room and these sheets were hung from it by paper clips. When done, they had a line of 30 movable letters in front of them. Now they had to make coherent words from these letters.

They began sliding the letters back and forth, arranging and rearranging them, trying to find which groupings formed actual words. It took a while, as the Arabic to English character translations were not exact, but they finally hit upon the words “many won’t believe,” which Bates recognized as part of a line from the Koran that went: “All will see the sign, but many won’t believe.” When he typed these three words into the three corresponding fields, the next level of the CD-ROM began to open immediately.

A cheer went up in the damp, darkened room. There were high fives all round. But one look at the new screen and suddenly the Spooks weren’t feeling so good anymore. To their dismay, the second level didn’t have any photos, pop-in videos, or elementary special effects. What it contained instead was thousands of lines of Arabic text. Reams of it, totaling more than 700 pages in all.

And the text did not spell out targets or time lines or meeting places and such. Instead, it contained nothing more than a set of maddeningly generic guidelines to be used by the
jihad
operatives who were about to carry out the big mission. Things like what an operative should pack when stowing away on a fishing boat, where to carry his money, and why he should neglect personal hygiene so as “not to raise suspicions.” There were hundreds of instructions on what to do, who to talk to, and when and how. At first, the text seemed to go on forever, with no beginning, no middle, no end. It was saturated with slang and misspellings and had no punctuation marks. In other words, a nightmare of Islamic jabberwocky.

In the intelligence business, this was known as “backfill,” information that was either outdated or irrelevant or both. Maybe the text contained secrets that would have been valuable to the American team days or weeks ago. But with the Next Big Thing just hours away, it was useless now. And the Spooks certainly didn’t have time to plow through all 700 pages, just on the slim hope that a kernel of secondary intelligence might be found within. To them, it was all crap.

But Bates
did
notice something unusual: after a quick scan of the text he discovered it was not really one long document but actually a group of documents, 22 in total, one for each of the 22 martyrs-to-be. For some reason, the documents had all run together, making it look like endless boilerplate. Buried at the end of each document, however, there was also a list of what
not
to do. It consisted of things that each
jihad
operative should avoid: the local police, any military officials, anyone not Muslim, and so on. It also instructed the operatives to avoid big cities, such as Riyadh and Damascus, as much as possible. It told them not to eat in open-air cafés, as their faces might be recognized. It told them not to use any cell phone more than once, as they could be tracked by satellite that way. But while each individual document differed slightly from the rest, each had the same last entry on it, indeed, the very same last sentence. Roughly translated, it told the terrorists “that in order to keep our operation pure, at all costs, avoid having any contact, conversations, business dealings, or other interactions with individuals connected to the Royal Dubai.”

What the hell did this mean?
The Spooks gathered around Bates’s station to discuss it. There seemed to be only one explanation at first: the operatives were being told to avoid contact with anyone connected to the Royal Family of the UAE state of Dubai.