Strike Force Alpha (28 page)

Aboard
Ocean Voyager
, inside White Room #2

The Spooks were almost the heroes.

Because they’d cracked the CD-ROM’s second level, and found the reference to the Royal Dubai, the American combat team had uncovered the sea of mysterious ticket receipts. Now the Delta guys were riding on the same planes as the
jihad
types, using their skills at impersonation and surveillance, following them to their connection points, dressed as women, in a sea of women.

But what would happen when the 10 planes reached those diverse destinations?

No one knew. There was still a piece of the puzzle missing: that elusive last part of the terrorists’ plan. Would it be another all-out attack on America? Would it be a mass destruction of airliners over the Atlantic? Or the start of an incomprehensible nuclear disaster?

The targets and the timetable, that’s all that mattered now. If the Spooks were able to find out those last two secrets and get word to the Delta guys, they would have thwarted the biggest terrorist attack since 9/11 and beyond. The answer, they hoped, lay inside the third and last level of the CD-ROM.

The trouble was, the Spooks couldn’t get in.

The problem was simple. The encryption code to open the third level was actually double-sealed. It required
two
entries to get in, not just one. This meant the Spooks had to decipher two code phrases to break into it.

Getting the first of these two code phrases had been easy. Using the remaining clothesline letters, the Spooks found the key words
follow not desire
soon after punching through the second level. Bates recognized the phrase from a passage in the Koran that went:
Follow not desire, lest it lead you from the path.

But even though he’d entered in these three words, the third level did not open. Instead, three more blank fields appeared.

That’s when they realized it was a double seal.

“We’re screwed,” Bates said when it became obvious. He spoke for all of them. They had one last, unexpected barrier to crack, yet Jamaal’s Koran could not help them anymore. The pinpricked letters had run out. They’d used them all up.

“The final code must have been given to the mooks verbally,” Bates reasoned with his men as their dank compartment grew even colder. “It’s probably a very common phrase they use among themselves, something that no one would mistake or get wrong. Like one of us saying, ‘Go for it,’ or, ‘Whole nine yards.’ Their last wall of security, the best of all, was the spoken word, the bastards. I’m sure the plan was to use it if the mission described on the rest of the CD-ROM ever got to the point of execution.”

“But how the hell are we going to get it now?” one of Bates’ men asked. “We got no more letters, no more mooks. No more time.”

“That’s why we’re screwed,” Bates replied.

Almost the heroes. History didn’t recognize such things.

They had excuses. Despite their earlier success, decoding was not really the Spooks’ expertise. Bates and his team were geniuses at tracking people and things, but not so in divining codes. The NSA, CIA, DIA, every U.S. intelligence agency, had people who lived, breathed, and slept decoding. It was an art as much as a science, one so intense, some of its top practitioners in the past had chosen suicide once they realized their best work had been done.

But it just wasn’t the Spooks’ thing.

This didn’t mean they’d stopped trying. Just the opposite; they’d been beating their brains out for nearly two hours, taking turns sitting at the computer, trying to conjure up words from the ethers that might do the trick. The mood in the compartment was tense but weary. It had been that way ever since they made their unsettling discovery. There were doubts in here, too, creeping up on them, hanging by the edges. As smart as they were, as a group, the Spooks were also fairly neurotic. What if they
were
able to punch through the last barrier somehow, but instead of finding targets and timetables, they just found more useless backfill? What if the CD-ROM really wasn’t the final mission briefing disk they’d convinced the combat team that it was?

What if they’d unwittingly sent the Delta guys on a fool’s mission….

All this was hitting Bates particularly hard. He already had the bank bombing weighing on his soul, his mortal sin of hubris and youth. Now the fate of the Delta team was in there, too. How bad was it for him? Since about 0800 hours, Bates imagined he could hear the nautical clock up in Murphy’s cabin ticking…ticking…ticking away…like the telltale heart, even though it was at the opposite end of the boat.

Was there no better way to remind him that time was running out?

It was 0930 hours when Bates took his turn at the old battered keyboard again. White Room #2 was very dark now, with only one lightbulb working, and it just barely. It was also getting very claustrophobic inside.

His men had entered almost 500 different three-word combinations in the past two hours, none of which came close to breaking the last seal. Wild guesses, educated ones, random typing—everything was tried. Phrases contained on the same pages as the pinpricked letters were attempted, to no avail. The Spooks had even hung up the original 30 character sheets again, thinking that another phrase might be found by rearranging the old letters. A good idea. But it didn’t work.

So the keyboard was back on Bates’s lap now, as his guys collapsed into other seats nearby. He started typing, plugging in the most likely favorites again, just in case he messed them up somehow the first hundred times:
Allah is Truth, Praise to Allah
,
God is Great
. Nothing hit.

Just three words…

None the same as before.

Then an odd thought came to him. Maybe they were going about this the wrong way. He had three blank fields staring back at him. With the previous two barriers he had filled in all three encrypt words first, then hit the enter button—and the level popped open. But what if he came up with just the
first
word of the secret phrase? He would know it was right because if it fit, it would remain in the blank field when he hit the enter button. If it was wrong, it would simply disappear.

Wouldn’t it be easier going for just one word at a time?

He began typing in single words at random, hoping to fill just the first blank. He tried:
You, I, We, They
…. Nothing happened. Each one went
poof
as soon as he hit enter. He tried
Life, Death, Live, Die
. Again, he got
bupkis
.

He took suggestions from his tired band of tweebs.
Get, Give, Don’t, Will, Last, First
—all good Islamic words, just not the right ones.

A call from Martinez broke their concentration. It was a short, clipped conversation, the fifth one in the last hour. The Delta boss was reminding Bates that some of his men had been airborne for more than an hour and learning what was inside the third level was getting more critical with every minute. And Bates told Martinez the same thing he’d been telling him for the past hour: that he thought they were getting close. They were worlds apart, but just by listening to the background noise, or lack of it, during the phone call, Bates knew the tension up in the CQ was just as thick as it was down here at the bottom.

Thankfully, Bates’s cell phone finally died at the end of the call. At least they wouldn’t have that distraction any longer.

The search continued.

When, How, Never, Try….

Nothing.

For, If, And, We….

Again, all good words. But each one disappeared as soon as Bates hit the enter key.

Then he started to type in
Believe,
but suddenly—

“Wait!” he heard himself say.

Something made him stop at the first two letters. He didn’t know what. His guys looked at him strangely. He rarely talked to himself.

“Try it like that,” he said, aloud again. “Just try ‘Be’”

He hit the enter key. The word remained in the first blank!

Whoops went up around the cold, dark room. Almost by mistake, they’d discovered the first word was “be….”

Now the team gathered around the old PC, energized yet again.

Be something something.

Bates began typing madly. He started plugging in combinations like
Be Brave Today, Be Holy Today, Be with Heaven, Be Holy Forever.

Nothing worked.
Be Strong Today. Be Strong Forever. Be with God. Be with Allah.

Nothing….

Bates banged his head against the computer screen. It didn’t even hurt. He checked the time. It was now 9:45. His hands had begun to shake. His stomach was in knots. The ticking in his head grew louder.

Just two more words….

He looked off into space, glasses pushed up to his forehead. His guys were shouting out suggestions, but Bates remained in his trance.
Think outside the box,
he told himself.
Beyond the envelope…Think laterally.

Then a strange notion came to him.

What would Bobby Murphy’s guess be if he were here? The enigmatic leader had spent many hours down in the White Rooms with them, tracking the mooks, expounding on his theories of life, and just plain talking. He’d said so many things about the terrorists, about their
jihad
organization, about Al Qaeda. The way they ran their people. The way they ran their organization. Their faults, their idiosyncrasies. Murphy was an expert on them. He once claimed he could
smell
a terrorist if he was close enough. Knowing what he knew, what would Murphy think the magic phrase was?

That’s when it hit Bates like a lightning bolt on the back of the head. He typed in:
Be Frugal Always.

The last section opened immediately.

He let out a scream that sounded as if it had come from someone else’s mouth. His men were beside themselves. Not just high fives all around this time, but there was backslapping and even embracing, this from a group of guys who, as individuals, had a hard time shaking someone else’s hand.

Bates jumped from his seat, intent on dashing up to the CQ to tell the combat guys the good news. The
whole team
wanted to go with him. But then logic prevailed. Wouldn’t it make more sense to find out what was
inside
the third level before making the long run upstairs?

Bates contained himself. The others did as well. They all sat back down and waited.

The third level took a very long time to download, nearly 10 minutes. But when it did, it was Abdul Kazeel’s dirty face that appeared on the screen once again. A chorus of boos from the Spooks. He began speaking in Arabic, as more corny Muslim special effects swirled around him, just like the first level.

Bates felt some small measure of relief. At least they weren’t staring at seven miles of Arabic text again.

He began taking down everything Kazeel said for translation, writing furiously, word for word…until the third sentence. That’s when Kazeel started talking very strangely, about how
every
Muslim was really a martyr and how, at
any
time, God could call on them to give their lives for the cause.

Bates just stopped writing. His hand froze on the pen; the pen froze on the paper.

What Kazeel was saying began to sink in.

“Damn,” he breathed.

They had made a terrible mistake.

Kazeel was laying out the final part of the plan—and at last, the Spooks had their bombshell. The el-Habazz cell, 19 members of which were now aboard 10 separate Arab airliners,
were not
proceeding to Europe or anywhere else in order to hijack American planes to throw at a target.

They were going to use the planes they were already on….

“They’re going to kill
their own people,
” Bates said out loud, just astonished.

They’d been fooled. By the perfect end-around play. While everyone was expecting Al Qaeda to jump through hoops to take over a large number of American planes, they were simply going to use Arab airliners instead. “Planes already under our control,” was how Kazeel put it.
That
had been the secret all along. The Habazz gang wouldn’t be flying into Paradise alone. They would be taking hundreds of their fellow Muslims with them, whether they wanted to go or not. The entire operation of buying up tickets, calling in bomb threats, disrupting the world’s air transportation system, had all been part of a brilliant ruse, a misdirection, intended for nothing more than to get everyone looking one way while the terrorists were looking the other.

Bates felt sick to his stomach. The Delta guys were on those planes….

But what was the target? Most of the planes that left Bahrain were medium-range models. None could fly as far as the United States on their own. Bates zipped past all of Kazeel’s commentary to a section that plainly said:
Our One Pure Goal in God
.

The Spooks all watched in horror as an image, labeled “The Target,” slowly downloaded….