Strike Force Alpha (30 page)

Ryder couldn’t find his crash helmet.

He’d looked for it everywhere in the makeshift pilot ready room, kicking aside empty beer cans and steak sauce bottles, searching through garbage bags filled with cigarette butts and used pep pill dispensers.

But with no luck. The helmet had disappeared.

“This is just fucking great!”
he cursed.

He was otherwise suited up for flight; his Harrier was getting prepped and would soon be ready to go. His heart was pumping so fast, he could hardly feel his arms, his legs, his toes. His ears were burning red-hot.

He was furious. At himself. At every Muslim. At the whole goddamn world. When he was younger, things had always seemed to go his way. Had this adventure occurred 12 years before, he and his colleagues would have got the drop on the bad guys long before it had come to this. But luck and wisdom had arrived too late this time. As good as Murphy’s team had been in its short heyday, they’d never managed to get any closer than one step behind the mooks.

Ryder had seen the CD-ROM’s third level,
all
of it by this time. Kazeel’s narration was just the beginning. Once his preamble ended, a computer-generated visual of the impending attack on the
Lincoln
had popped onto the screen. Many big planes arriving over the battle group at slightly staggered intervals, then raining down on the carrier from all directions, trying to overwhelm the AirCap of Tomcats and Hornets. It looked like something from a cheap video game but was chilling nevertheless, especially since those airplanes, the real ones, would all be turning toward the fleet soon, if they hadn’t already. The plan of the Next Big Thing? To use about thousand innocent “martyrs” in an attempt to kill five thousand U.S. sailors.

A super-9/11.

Another unthinkable act.

The nightmare had begun in earnest about 30 minutes before.

That’s when Gil Bates, running through the passageways and scaling ladders like a maniac, carried the old PC up to the CQ himself. When he arrived in the stateroom, disheveled and near cardiac arrest, Phelan had asked him: “Why didn’t you take one of the pancakes up?”

Ryder had laughed; they all did. That was Phelan all over. But Ryder knew he’d never laugh quite that hard again.

They watched the computer-generated attack just once, Bates explaining that, by Kazeel’s own words, the terrorists were going to try to overwhelm the carrier’s protective bubble not by technology but by brute force. As the scenario played out, the Spook boss asked the one question on everyone’s mind: “Can the carrier’s fighters handle so many big planes, coming from all directions?”

No one knew. Bingo was on hand by this time; he and Phelan were both Navy guys. But Bingo had served only on cruisers and Phelan had never done carrier ops. He’d never even landed on one. The vision of World War II kamikaze attacks naturally came to mind—and sure enough, the terrorists’ CD contained a segment showing old black-and-white footage of Japanese Zeros plowing into the deck of the USS
Lexington
off Okinawa. The message was clear: If just one small single-engine wooden plane could cause a massive amount of damage on a carrier, albeit fifty years ago, what would happen if something the size of an airliner hit a modern-day carrier? What if many of them managed to hit it? The damage would be beyond description.

“The F-14s will get some of them,” Phelan had finally said. “And the escort ships might get a few more. But can they get them all? I don’t know.”

Then came the topic of nukes. The CD showed some stock footage of a nuclear blast, something from back in the fifties, with Kazeel’s voice-over promising if the planes were aimed right, a mushroom cloud for Allah would result.

Was this possible?

Gallant had asked: “What happens when an unarmed nuclear weapon is involved in an impact or an explosion? Isn’t that what they used to trigger the original atomic bombs?”

“I think the first A-bomb was set off by nothing more than a couple thousand pounds of dynamite,” Curry confirmed.

This was a highly disturbing possibility.

But it would be Ryder who asked the most painful and dumbest question of all: “What about Hunn and his guys? They’re stuck on those planes.”

He knew it was a mistake the second it came out of his mouth, and at that moment he wanted nothing more but to pull the words back in. More proof his timing was gone. The silence that greeted the question said it all. Obviously the chances of any of Martinez’s guys getting out of this were slim.

The CD-ROM finally ended. Now came the big question: What should they do with this bombshell information?

“This could make Nine-Eleven look like a picnic,” Curry had declared. “We’ve got to let those carrier guys know.”

But how?

They had the same problem, for a different reason. This wasn’t a matter of their trying to redeem Murphy’s undoing. And where before they didn’t want to involve anyone else in their undertakings, now it was essential they get word to higher-ups immediately.

But they just couldn’t call the Navy up on the phone, could they? Ryder had asked. Actually, they could, because Bingo had a list of cell phone numbers for every Navy ship in the Gulf area. The trouble was, as before, there was no way anyone would believe them, at least at first. They’d be working against a military mentality where nothing ever moved fast and things frequently moved slow, even in a crisis.

How about a message via ship-to-ship radio then? Bingo would give that a try, too, but there wasn’t much hope in that option either, for the same reason. Who would believe a voice on the other end of the line claiming that catastrophe was just minutes away?

“So what are we going to do?” Gallant had asked. “We can’t just let the Navy sit out there and take the hit. Or hope they spot it on their own—and shoot down all of those planes. How the hell can we make them believe us, quickly?”

That’s when Curry spoke up. “I’ll go tell them,” he’d said. “If you call them, and radio them—and I show up, too—then at least they’ll know
something
is up.”

They’d all looked over at him, his Raiders T-shirt now in tatters. Go
tell
them? How?

“I’ll fly to them,” he’d said. “In the old
Torch
rig.”

The others almost laughed at him. “
Torch
is off the books,” Gallant reminded him. “Its engine can barely turn the rotor. It has no gas. It doesn’t even have a radio.”

“I’ll steal some fuel from the ship’s engines,” Curry said. “If that juice can make the thing fly, I won’t need a radio.”

Martinez started to argue with him. “You won’t get within fifteen miles of the carrier. You could convince them that you’re carrying the President in the back, they’d still shoot you down. Those will be their orders.”

But Curry remained adamant. “There’s no way I’m going to just hang around here and do nothing. I’ve got my brother’s memory to think about.”

A painful silence filled the stateroom at that moment. When Gallant offered to go with him, Curry said no. This would be a suicide mission, and he knew it. There was no sense in taking someone else along.

Finally Martinez just told him: “If you want to go, I can’t stop you….”

That’s when Ryder and Martinez got into it. No sooner had Curry left, CD-ROM in hand, to warn the
Lincoln,
than Ryder insisted he be allowed to take off, too. Martinez flipped. Curry’s mission was a one-way flight. Why would Ryder want to add to the death toll? The Navy was just as likely to shoot down a Harrier as they would a stray Blackhawk.

But Ryder, too, was insistent. He
could not
miss this, not if he ever wanted to sleep peacefully again. Besides, he wasn’t going to warn the
Lincoln
. He was going up to search for the hijacked planes; that’s how he would be of help. He’d seen the plan. He knew where the airliners were at the moment and even the flight paths they would use in their attempts to crash into the carrier. It was all on the CD-ROM.

Ryder also knew he’d be going up with just a couple dozen cannon shells in his aircraft’s gun and less than a half-tank of gas. And he wouldn’t have to worry about landing, because there probably would be no place for him to land and little gas for him to do it with. But…

“If I can intercept at least one or maybe two of them,” he’d declared, “it might affect how this thing turns out.”

“Do you realize what you’re saying?” Martinez had countered. “Do you know what you’ll have to do to stop one or two of them?”

“I do,” was all Ryder said.

In the end it came down to rank. Ryder and Martinez were both colonels, though in different services. They canceled each other out. But Ryder was the senior man, by age and length of service. So there was no way Martinez could tell him
not
to go. Finally the Delta officer relented.

That’s how Ryder won the argument to allow himself to go get killed.

He’d hurried downstairs to get into his flight suit. But now this helmet thing was holding him up.

He was just about to leave and fly the mission without it when he looked in his locker…and found it just sitting there. This was weird. The locker had been the first place he’d searched. Were the pep pills finally getting to him? The lack of sleep? Was he so pumped, he’d seen the helmet without realizing it was there?

He retrieved it from the locker and, in doing so, caught a glimpse of something tucked into its safety netting. It was a photograph of his wife. Ryder froze. He
was
getting old. He had no memory of ever putting the photo in there, though he must have, because it was his favorite picture of her. He’d surprised her one day with his camera while she was weeding her garden, and snapped a picture just as she was taking her hair down. Her expression was not the surprise he was going for but one of joy and good humor, blond curls and beauty.

He collapsed into the room’s only chair now and stared at the photo. The world was falling apart all around him, yet he could not take his eyes off her. He missed her so much. He ran his finger along her face, her smile. He hadn’t dreamed about her lately because he hadn’t been to sleep in days. No matter. He brought the photo up to his lips, then let it ride along his unshaven face.

He might be seeing her again, very soon.

Two minutes later, helmet in hand, Ryder was banging on Phelan’s cabin door.

The young pilot had disappeared shortly after Curry left on his mission. But Ryder knew the kid’s Harrier was being prepped for flight, too.

When he got no response, Ryder pushed the cabin door open. He found Phelan sitting on the edge of his bunk, suited up, ready to go.

But he wasn’t moving.

“You coming?” Ryder asked him.

Phelan was just staring straight ahead, intense and wide-eyed, his eyes zeroed in on his mother’s photograph, hanging on the opposite wall. He looked scary.

Phelan finally acknowledged his presence. “I know this will be hard to believe,” he said slowly. “But I just realized what’s
really
been going on here….”

Ryder was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

Phelan spread out his arms, indicating the ship, the whole operation. “What we’ve been doing out here. The things they’ve had us do. The missions we’ve run. The people we’ve killed.”

He looked up at Ryder. There were tears in his eyes.

“You see it, don’t you? And I’m just the dumbest one in this bunch? The last to understand what’s been happening?”

Ryder could only shake his head. This was an unexpected turn of events. He checked his watch. Time was running out—for both of them.

“Think back to what Murphy did,” Phelan went on. “What he told us, how he got us together. We’d all lost somebody to the mooks. We’d all been touched by it. He provided us the hardware, the gear, the ships, the bombs. No regulations. No oversight. No one to answer to. He made it strictly ‘us against them,’ and gave us a chance to fight back for our country.”

He paused for a troubled breath.

“But what have we
really
done?” he asked. “We’ve lit off car bombs. We’ve blown up kids. We’ve wasted entire villages.”

He put his head in his hands. “
Damn
—all this time, I thought I was doing my duty. I thought I was fighting a war…”

He looked back up at Ryder. “But we go out and kill children now without batting an eye. Just like the terrorists do. We blow up a bus full of innocent civilians in an instant. Just like the terrorists do. We collapse buildings. We poison food. We bring fear and terror and misery. Just like the terrorists do….”

Another breath, deep, trembling. “Do you see what I’m saying? We’ve
become
them, for Christ’s sake. We’ve become
terrorists
ourselves.”

The words hit Ryder like bullets through a balloon. He deflated instantly. Phelan was right, of course. They’d been down in the muck for some time now, and it stunk as bad as the sewage they’d left spewing in the Rats’ Nest.

Become like them
. Murphy’s plan all along.

But it was strange. At that moment, Ryder was painfully aware of two things. One, that he was nearly a quarter-century older than this kid who flew like a dream. But two, at last it dawned on him who Phelan reminded him of. It had always been in the back of his mind, unable to make its way to the front. But now he knew.

Talented but naive? More hot than cool? All talk, but all action, too? More lucky than not? Who did Phelan remind him of? No one more than himself: Ryder Long, 20 years ago.

He felt as old as Methuselah at that moment. He knew that Phelan would probably not heed what he was about to tell him, just like Ryder would have blown off some old fuck trying to talk sense to him when he was 24.

But he had to try anyway.

“OK, so Murphy knew what he was doing,” he began, “He knew I lost my wife, just like you lost your dad and Martinez lost his kid and the chopper boys lost their brothers. He knew we wouldn’t have any qualms about punching back, hard. But he also said something that stuck with me. Do you remember? He said the most important thing we had do was take care of our own.
Us
—and no one else. He knew no one in D.C. was ever going to get off the stick and
really
do something about the people who’d hit the World Trade Center that day. They can give speeches; they can pay off the families. They can invade entire countries. But they’re just politicians. They don’t have a clue as to how to deal with this the right way.”