Strike Force Alpha (3 page)

Genoa

The buses had been arriving at the dock all morning.

Eighteen tour groups, flying in from all over Europe and the United States, were pouring off the airport buses and climbing aboard the
Sea Princess,
one of the newest cruise ships in the Mediterranean.

At 1,100 feet long, the
Sea Princess
was also one of the largest. It had 15 passenger decks, 1,700 cabins, 12 restaurants, four swimming pools, four health clubs, four casinos, a movie theater, a golf range, a skeet range, two nightclubs, two dozen bars, and a bowling alley. It could carry nearly 3,400 passengers.

By noon, the ship was 80 percent full. The passenger list was almost exclusively American, with many elderly Jewish couples onboard. It was soon learned that a plane carrying French tourists had been mysteriously delayed at Orly. They would not be boarding the
Sea Princess
in Genoa after all. Still, including the crew, there was nearly 4,000 people onboard.

The cruise liner went out with the tide around 1:00
P.M.
Its itinerary included a sail of the Aegean lower islands, a stop in Cyprus, and then on to Israel.

As it left the harbor, two seagoing yachts began shadowing it. One was riding very low in the water.

The
Sea Princess
traveled down the coast of Italy, making a comfortable 18 knots. It passed through the straits of Medina during the night and was in the Ionian Sea by morning. The pair of sea yachts was still tailing it, staying about a mile behind. When the ship stopped at the Greek port of Corfu around noon, the yachts stopped, too. Some of the crew noticed them at this point but failed to inform the captain. When the liner pulled anchor later that day, the pair of yachts left as well.

Night fell again. At 11:45
P.M.
, the liner was about twelve miles off the coast of Greece, heading for the straits of Kithira. It entered the narrow passage shortly before midnight, slowing to five knots, a necessity in shallow water. At this point, the yachts were spotted again; they were now just 500 feet off the stern.

Finally the captain was notified. He was furious upon learning the yachts had been detected earlier, but he hadn’t been told. Now he wasn’t sure what do to do. In the old days, yachts would occasionally tail cruise liners, thinking they would lead them to the best spots in the Med. But this hadn’t happened to the veteran captain in years, and certainly not in this new era of terrorism.

A small panic swept the ship. Word of the mysterious yachts spread quickly. Many passengers moved to the stern, gathering on three tiers of lower aft railings. Many brought their video cameras; some were equipped with low-light lenses. Through them, the passengers could clearly see activity on the two yachts, now riding just 200 feet away. The vessels had been lashed together and men in ski masks could be seen loading boxes wrapped in electrical wire and tape onto a small rubber raft that was hanging off the back of one of the yachts.

Once loaded, the rubber raft was put off the yacht, with two men in ski masks aboard, its outboard motor already turning. It hit the water with a splash, churning up a geyser of spray and smoke. The raft circled the two yachts once and then turned toward the cruise ship.

Passengers started screaming. It was obvious the rubber boat was filled with explosives and those driving it intended to ram the cruise ship. Some ran for the lifeboats. Others fled to their cabins. But many remained on the aft railing, simply stunned. Some continued videotaping the scene.

The captain hastily tried to increase speed, hard to do for such a large ship. He turned to starboard; the nearest land was still eight miles away. His communications officer was frantically sending out messages saying the cruise liner ship had an “extraordinary emergency” and needed assistance immediately. Meanwhile, up on the front promenade deck, with no one noticing, some members of the crew were trying to lower themselves into lifeboats.

The raft began to circle the
Sea Princess
. Keeping up with the liner’s course change, it was clearly building speed. A Klaxon went off aboard the ship. Too late, the call went out for all passengers to don their life vests. Then the captain ordered all lights doused. He was hoping to make it difficult for the men in the raft to see their target, but this was sheer desperation. It would be very hard to miss such a large ship. The sudden blackout only caused more panic among the passengers.

The rubber boat circled one more time. Then with a growl from its engine, it began heading right for the middle of the cruise liner.

But suddenly there came another terrific roar, mechanical and powerful. A jet fighter flew out of the night an instant later. It was painted black and had a long spit of flame trailing behind it. Flying very low, it went by the ship and then rocketed over the speeding rubber boat at tremendous speed, not 15 feet above the water. Whether by fright or confusion, this caused the two men on the suicide boat to kill their engine. Big mistake. Momentum carried them forward another 50 feet or so before they went dead in the water. Then the jet fighter appeared again. This time it was hovering right above them.

Few people on the cruise ship realized they were looking at a Harrier jump jet. It seemed able to do impossible things. But while the strange plane was attracting so much attention, almost no one noticed that another aircraft, this one a black helicopter, had emerged from the darkness and had slipped down next to the rubber boat. A sniper with a night scope was hanging out of the helicopter’s side door. He raised his weapon at the two masked men and pulled his trigger twice. Two perfect head shots. Two dead terrorists. Both toppled overboard.

Now another helicopter appeared. It, too, was painted black and was virtually without noise. Three soldiers rappelled down ropes to the rubber boat below. They worked quickly, hooking up a trio of hoist lines and connecting them to a pull cable beneath the helicopter. The men on the boat then gave the pilots a thumbs-up and the helicopter lifted the rubber boat out of the water, explosives and all. The helicopter lurched forward and disappeared back into the night. The Harrier vanished as well.

The first copter now turned its attention to the two yachts. It positioned itself parallel to the vessels, flying about one hundred feet off their starboard. The yachts were no longer tied together, but neither had they diverted from their straight-ahead course. Shadows aboard both vessels could be seen scrambling for their radio equipment. Others were pointing, but not firing, assault rifles at the silent black aircraft. The helicopter was waiting for something….

This went on for about a minute, the final act in the drama unfolding for the passengers still crowded onto the cruise ship’s rear decks. The yachts never attempted to get away. The helicopter simply kept pace with them.

What the cruise passengers didn’t know was that a communications expert aboard the helicopter was listening in on radio traffic coming from the yachts. Both yachts were sending out frantic messages, in English and Arabic, detailing what had just happened. Shrill voices in the night, they were screaming into their radios that the attack on the
Sea Princess
had been thwarted by two helicopters and a fighter jet. The men on the yachts were desperate. They were requesting that somebody, somewhere, give them new instructions immediately:
“What should we do? Withdraw? Surrender? Ram the cruise liner ourselves?”

Finally the radio expert aboard the helicopter gave a signal to his pilots. Just as long as the men on the yachts got word back to their superiors that the attack had been stopped by the trio of aircraft, that’s all the terrorists’ leaders had to know.

The helicopter increased power and turned 90 degrees. It was soon facing the first yacht. The men onboard knew they were trapped. They had no defense against the helicopter’s huge gun and no place to seek cover. So they stood there, feet frozen to the deck, unable to move. The helicopter’s minigun opened up on them from just 100 feet away, engulfing the yacht in a vivid orange glow. The three men were simply blown away. Still, the helicopter kept firing. Its cannon shells eventually found the yacht’s fuel tank, causing an explosion so powerful the boat was thrown into the air. When it came back down, it was in thousands of tiny pieces.

The second yacht had killed its engines by this time. The men aboard knew what was to come, knew it was senseless to run. Illuminated by a powerful light beamed from the cruise liner’s mast, the three men tore off their ski masks—they were Arabs—and, one after another, dived overboard. The helicopter fired three rockets into the yacht and it went up in three simultaneous explosions. The helicopter flew through the wreckage cloud and, using its own powerful searchlight, found the three terrorists in the water. It came down to just about sea level, almost as if it were going to rescue the floundering men. But the helicopter crew was not in the business of showing mercy. The marksman with the night-scope rifle took up his position again. The pleas from the terrorists could be heard all the way back on the
Sea Princess,
but they were in vain.

One by one the man with the rifle picked them off. The cruise ship passengers cheered as each one was hit. It took five shots in all, as one man tried his best to stay underwater. But soon enough, he was shot, too.

The only noise now was the incredibly soft whirring of the helicopter’s rotor blades. The incident seemed to play out over a lifetime for those who witnessed it. Yet it took only two minutes from beginning to end.

The cruise passengers were awestruck. They had been saved at the last possible moment from certain death—but by whom? Certainly not the Greek military. When the spotlight on the ship’s mast finally caught the American flag emblazoned on the side of the helicopter, they had their answer. One man on the aft railing let out a great cheer. Then came another. And another.

In seconds, all of the passengers on the lower railings were cheering. Hundreds of seniors, pumping their fists in the air. Then those on the upper railings began cheering, too. Soon the entire ship was chanting:
“USA! USA!”

The helicopter went over the top of the ship, fast and low. The cheering grew. The Harrier reappeared and roared over seconds later. The cheering got even louder.

In fact, the passengers were
still
cheering 30 minutes later when a Greek patrol boat finally arrived to escort them to the nearest port.

In all the excitement, few noticed the rusty containership
Ocean Voyager
passing close by in the night.

The Harrier put itself into hover mode. Automatically…no buttons pushed, no levers thrown. All was ready for landing. The ship below was pitching wildly, the wind and rain growing fierce. But he was lining up his approach just right. And he was feeling good. The cannon on his airplane was empty. All his missiles had been fired, too. He’d played the Wings of Death game again last night and had loved every second of it. He was descending now, a large platform of gleaming metal his landing place. It was surrounded by a perfect circle of sailors, wearing dress blue uniforms and holding incandescent flares above their heads. They were not getting wet, though. The wind didn’t seem to be blowing on them. He eased the Harrier down farther. Twenty feet to go. The sea spray grew vicious, but his descent was unnaturally smooth. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. At 15 feet his headphones exploded with chatter. Something
was
wrong. He was supposed to be doing this in total radio silence, but the voices in his head were shouting,
Look at the front of the ship! Someone is standing up there!
It was the absolute worst thing to do, but he took his eyes off the controls and looked to the bow. And there she was…on the railing so far away, smiling and dry, wearing the same red dress, beckoning him to join her.

If only he could.

When he looked back down again, the ship and sailors were gone. There was nothing below but the sea. He hastily went to full-power ascent throttle, but instead of going up, he was going down. He hit the water, full force. The sea rushed into his cockpit, soaking him. He tried to unfasten his safety harness, but the snaps had rusted shut already. He was trapped.

And sinking like a stone….

He woke with a start.

He sat up too quickly, cracking his skull on the bunk overhead. His heart was pounding. He was drenched in sweat.
Where the hell am I?
He wiped his eyes and looked around…. Slowly the surroundings fell into place. The tiny gray room. The double-tiered bunk. The metal bars holding canvas over the only window.
Oh Christ yeah, I know where I am.
Not a prison cell. It was his billet, aboard the containership
Ocean Voyager
.

The ship suddenly lurched to starboard. He grabbed the sides of his bunk and held on. He was Col. Ryder Long, U.S. Air Force. He didn’t like ships. Especially this one. It was big and square and built to be overloaded. Nothing but bull rings and lashing bars held everything in place. If the sea got the least bit choppy and all that weight began moving back and forth, the ship would start to roll.

And it was rolling now.

He fumbled for his watch, hanging off the bunk post, staring at it through bleary eyes. 0730 hours? He’d been asleep for 90 minutes? It felt more like 90 seconds. He fell back on his sweaty bedsheets. He’d dreamed about his wife again. She came to him almost every night, popping up somewhere, always smiling, and always in the same red dress. For the life of him, he could not recall ever seeing her wear it before.
That was always strange….

He waited, lying still. Maybe the ship would settle down again. Maybe he could even go back to sleep.
Just five more minutes,
he thought.
Just let me close my eyes for five more minutes.
But then the ship’s foghorn went off, loud enough to wake the dead. And the ship pitched back to starboard, knocking his shaving kit off the sink. The foghorn went off again. Something clanged loudly overhead. Then the ship rolled back to the left. That was it. He gave up. He crawled off the bunk and finally got to his feet.

The sink in the corner was rusty and gross. Still he drew some water from the faucet and splashed it on his face. It did no good. He began a slow, tortuous ritual of cracking bones and unknotting muscles. His back was a mess, his fingers and wrists always stiff. Common complaints of a Harrier pilot; it was not the easiest plane to fly, and he wasn’t a kid anymore. But at least last night’s mission had been a success. The mystery men at the bottom of
Ocean Voyager
had been tracking the Genoa-based terrorist cell for weeks, listening to their chatter, following their money, knowing they were planning to attack a large floating target sometime soon. The snooping paid off. The plot was uncovered, the timetable revealed. Nine terrorists KIA, four thousand people saved, mostly Americans. Not bad for a few hours’ work. Ryder’s only regret: he’d didn’t have a chance to pop a couple of the mooks himself this time. But that was OK. There’d be more to come.

The ship moved again; he leaned against the wall for support. He ran his hands over his graying close-cropped hair. This was how most mornings started out these days. Thinking about Maureen, cursing his aching muscles, seasick, and wishing he’d been deeper into the body count the night before. Not exactly a bowl of cornflakes and the sports pages.

He climbed into his overalls and sneakers and made his way up to the deck, three levels above. It was foggy and the sea was choppier than he had thought it would be. Negotiating an obstacle course of ropes and steel cable, he reached the outer railing at midships. Where the hell were they now? Still in the Aegean? The western Med? Or heading back toward the Suez? He couldn’t tell, and at that moment, he really didn’t care. He lit a cigarette and took a long first drag. The ship’s foghorn blew again, perfectly synched as he exhaled. He would never forget the scene last night. The passengers on the back of the cruise liner, cheering and waving, old people pumping their fists. That took some of the pain away.

Another drag and it began to rain. The ship rolled to port. He fished two amphetamine pills from his pocket and swallowed them dry. They were supposed to help with seasickness, but he always felt like he could use about ten more. The ship fell to starboard and then back to port again. It began raining harder. He was getting soaked. He power-puffed the Marlboro, then flicked the butt overboard.

So much for breakfast,
he thought.

If homeliness and rust were the perfect disguise, the
Ocean Voyager
would have been invisible.

It looked like a typical containership. Eight hundred feet long, 105 feet wide, with a 60-foot drop from the top deck to the bottom of the cargo bay, it weighed 30,000 tons. When it was first built by Maersk back in 1981, its top speed was barely 15 knots.

There had been no need for glamour in the ship’s original design and its builders had stuck to the plan. The deck was a nightmare of winches and tie-offs and thick rope strung tight everywhere. There were dozens of things to trip over, crack a knee on, or get crushed by, especially up near the bow. The recessed deckhouse offered a great view…of the smokestacks, the ladders, and the railings and, of course, all those containers on deck. They stretched out in front of an observer like a railroad yard somehow lost at sea.

Flat and boxy and dirt-dog ugly, the ship looked no different from hundreds of container carriers plying the world’s oceans; dozens could be found at any time in the Mediterranean, or the Indian Ocean or the Persian Gulf.

But
Ocean Voyager
was not a containership. Not really.

Officially, it was an Air-Land Assault Ship/Special.

A warship. In disguise.

It was the British who first came up with the idea of launching jet aircraft from a containership.

During an era of drastic defense cuts in the 1970s, the Royal Navy thought about putting heavy-load platforms onto ordinary containerships from which their VTOL Harrier jump jets could operate. It was considered a cheap alternative to building a new generation of aircraft carriers.

The
Ocean Voyager
took the Brits’ idea further. Much further. Two elevators, of the same type used on U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, had been installed side by side in front of the deckhouse. They could move a load of several dozen tons up from the cargo bay to the deck or vice versa. They were, in essence, movable launch and recovery pads and had more than enough muscle to handle a fighter jet or a couple helicopters. When the elevators were not in use, six empty containers were rolled on top of them, hiding them from prying eyes.

And this was how the people on this ship had been able to pull off the string of deadly counterterrorist attacks in Lebanon, Somalia, the Aegean, and Yemen. The raids had all originated from here, a moving, floating air base with the perfect disguise. No one knew where they had come from and no one knew where they went, because the Harrier jump jet and the two Blackhawk helicopters and all of the raiders they had carried to battle were hidden in the bottom of this innocuous-looking ship.

But
Ocean Voyager
’s assets did not end with its tiny air force and assault team. The ship also had its own naval warfare section, a huge internal logistic operation, and an intelligence station unrivaled anywhere on the globe. It could both track and attack terrorists, almost at a whim, and in complete secrecy. The team onboard had been set up to be totally self-sufficient, able to run missions on its own, independent of any oversight, and unencumbered by international law. In many ways, it was not unlike a “cell.”

Concealed inside the containers on deck were the things that could sustain such an operation. A full deck, meaning about two hundred containers, could support the jump jet, the rotary craft, and the small army of assault soldiers onboard for 45 days without need of resupply—except for the aviation gas. The containers were painted as if they belonged to different shipping companies, such as Sealift, BDT, and Ocean Transport of Britain, to maintain the ruse. They seemed to be stacked in no particular order on the deck, but actually each was in place by means of a strict priority. A color coding system on the access door determined what was within. An orange stripe meant aircraft support: spare parts, control change-outs, tires, spare engines. Blue meant ammunition. Green was electronics. Yellow meant general support, the things needed to keep the ship itself running. White meant human support: drinking water, food, soap, T-paper, the essentials of life at sea.

There were also eight containers with red stripes on their doors. Two were bolted down at the front of the ship, two more were on each side at midships, and two more were located aft. These crates did not contain food or ammo or a spare mouse for someone’s computer down below. Inside these containers were CIWS guns, modern, remote-controlled Gatling guns, fierce weapons that could spit out 600 rounds
a second
. With the ability to drop the sides of their containers at any time, these guns were on hand to prevent the ship from being hit by an antiship missile or anything else unfriendly, if its disguise should fail someday.

The ship was extremely high-tech. It had a Combat Control Center sunk into the first level of the deckhouse that would rival any found on a modern warship. Everything, from the CIWS guns, to the over-the-horizon radar, to its hidden satellite dishes, was run from here. The ship’s controls were all automated; they, too, had come from a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. Its original Mitsu engines had been torn out and replaced by four GE F110-400 gas turbines, the same engines that powered the Navy’s F-14 Tomcat fighter. If they ever had to push it, these powerhouses could get the ship up to an astounding 40 knots or more.

It was at the bottom of the ship though, on the keel level, that the real treasures could be found. This was the heart of the listening station, four interconnected compartments known as the White Rooms. The crew called the people who worked down here Spooks. The compartments—air-conditioned, environmentally controlled, and virtually dirt and dust–free—were crammed with some of the most sophisticated eavesdropping equipment ever conceived. In the space of three 12-by-36-foot containers were devices that allowed the Spooks to intercept just about any E-mail sent over the Internet, and just about any fax, telegram, or wire cable, too. Satellite-relay stations in one container could tap into the National Security Agency’s ultrasecret Echelon system, meaning just about any telephone call made anywhere around the globe could be tracked, recorded, listened in on, or even altered. The containers also housed facilities where CDs, hard drives, official documents, photographs, videos, and DVDs could be manufactured or counterfeited. Fake TV news reports could be broadcast from here, pirate radio programs created, newspapers and magazines replicated.

There was also a Dirty Tricks section where just about anything from superitching powder to a nuclear warhead could be conjured up.

It was in one of these rooms that the bombs used to level the Rats’ Nest had been built.

Whose idea was all this?

No one was really sure. When the ship first set sail for the Middle East two months before, the 43 people onboard had been told to keep the chatter among themselves to a minimum. This was not such an unusual request in the world of supersecret ops, where most people operated on a need-to-know basis only. Everyone onboard had done a good job keeping his mouth shut. Of course it was a relatively easy thing to do. There was no recreation room onboard, no TV room, no game hall. The only common meeting area was the forward mess, and it was huge. The crew ate in shifts, and usually everyone sat at his own table. Between this and the long hours of training and doing mission preps, there really wasn’t much opportunity for interaction or information exchange.

This did not mean, however, that there were no rumors onboard. Military ships floated on scuttlebutt, and just about everyone aboard
Ocean Voyager
was military to some degree. And everyone was familiar with the name of at least one person behind the mystery ship, and maybe the only one. That name was “Bobby Murphy.”

How did they know this name? Because it was plastered just about everywhere on the ship. It was hard not to turn a corner, come to a bulkhead, or work on a piece of equipment anywhere onboard without seeing
Bobby Murphy Approved
scrawled in yellow chalk somewhere near it. From the bow to the stern, from the top of the deckhouse to the floor of the keel, anything that had been installed, refurbished, repainted, or rewired during the ship’s transformation from hulk to secret warship had been given a stamp of approval by Bobby Murphy.