Strike Force Alpha (4 page)

But
who
was he?

The
Ocean Voyager
’s commanding officer was a Navy captain named Wayne Bingham, “Captain Bingo” to everyone onboard. Bingo’s CO had actually met Murphy shortly before the ship sailed from Newport News, Virginia, the site of its secret refitting. It had been a brief encounter, but the CO had told Bingo a few details of the chat. This was where the scuttlebutt began. A whisper here, a chance meeting there, and things get passed along, even on a ship full of sealed pie holes. After a few weeks at sea, the story of Bobby Murphy had been retold so many times, some variations bestowed an almost mythical nature on the man. He was a genius. He was insane. He possessed “a beautiful mind.” He was a drunk. He was a highly paid government clairvoyant. He didn’t exist.

The most often repeated story had Bingo’s CO first asking Murphy just who he worked for. CIA? NSA? DIA? NIO? Murphy claimed he didn’t know himself. He indicated that he’d spent time in all of these agencies, the DIA being his most recent. But, he also claimed, he’d been shuffled around so many times between them, due to his status as “a spy, par excellence,” apparently sometimes he
didn’t
know exactly who he was working for.

He knew a lot of people in Washington but quickly added that, in his case, this was not the same as having a lot of friends there. He claimed to have been called into secret trials to give testimony relating to the Middle East and Muslim terrorists, and indeed, Murphy was supposedly a walking encyclopedia on terrorist groups, and especially on the ways of Al Qaeda. Murphy had also bragged about having many friends in other countries’ intelligence agencies, especially the European ones.

Though he’d claimed he was married, he admitted he wasn’t sure where his wife was these days. She was not as in love with the spy game as he. He claimed to have a cadre of beautiful, highly paid prostitutes in place around the world, women he used to get what he could not get by other means. Supposedly a dozen of these beauties were working for him in the United States alone.

But how did the whole
Ocean Voyager
concept come about? It was another murky story, one with holes big enough to sail a battleship through. The most accepted version went like this: After the September 11th attacks, Murphy spent days browbeating his bosses at the DIA to do something—
anything
—to strike back at Al Qaeda. The DIA turned him down: they gathered intelligence; they didn’t run operations, which he knew was a lie. He then went to the CIA and pleaded with them to let him plan a mission similar to Jimmy Doolittle’s raid over Tokyo in the dark early days of World War II, something that would lift the morale of all Americans in the wake of 9/11. The CIA sat squarely on their thumbs for weeks, then months; no one wanted to take responsibility for OK’ing such a plan, no matter what form it might take. Murphy then went to Naval Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, even the National Security Agency. All of them turned him down for the same reasons: too much risk and the fear of insulting both Arabs and allies around the world.

Time passed, but Murphy could not be deterred. He finally prevailed, so the story went, when by sheer pluck he managed to get a sit-down with the President himself. What he told the Chief Executive during the course of their 30-minute meeting was apparently known only to the President and Murphy himself. One account said Murphy promised to hunt down and eliminate every Al Qaeda operative connected to the attacks on 9/11, whether they be foot soldiers or financiers—and grease any other bad guys he found in between. Whatever the case, by the time he walked out of the Oval Office, Murphy had been given a blank check to essentially do his thing.

The assurances to keep it
ultra
secret were all there, too: The President promised absolutely no oversight, no justifications, no receipts. No micromanaging from Washington, no reports to be filed, no debriefings needed. Murphy had been given access to whatever military resources he wanted. He had a lengthy shopping list. The 18 helicopter troops came from Delta Force, America’s best-trained, most secret special operations group. The Blackhawk pilots were from Air Force Special Ops, the best at driving copters in and out of tight spaces. The ship itself was run by a company of handpicked U.S. Navy sailors, each one given the highest security clearance possible. A Marine Air maintenance squad took care of the aircraft hidden below. Murphy claimed that he’d personally selected every person for the secret unit himself sight unseen and as proof rattled off for Bingo’s CO the names of just about every soul who would eventually come onboard.

Murphy got everything he asked for and more—and as a result this was no ordinary secret ops team. There were no uniforms. No IDs. All orders were given verbally. Nothing was ever written down. The ship never took a call or a radio message from Washington or any U.S. government agency. They never spoke with the Pentagon. They communicated, only when they had to, with a top-secret NSA computer site, located in a typical house in a typical suburban neighborhood somewhere in New Jersey known as Blueberry Park. The only way information could be sent and received from this location was via a porn site chat room on the Internet.

So the operation wasn’t being run by the generals or the admirals or any U.S. intelligence agency or even by the White House itself. It wasn’t being run by anybody. Again, this meant the team would not encounter any red tape when planning or executing an operation. It would be under no constitutional restrictions as to what it could do, when or where, or to whom.
That
was the beauty of Murphy’s idea. The unit was self-contained. On its own. And so hush-hush, even the President himself didn’t know all the details, if any at all.

Bingo’s CO supposedly left him an E-mail that summed up Murphy this way:

How did Ryder get involved in this?

Sometimes he wondered that himself. He’d had an interesting military career up to this point. Originally doomed to flying C-130 cargo planes after completing Air Force flight training, he somehow got slotted into fighter jets. He became so good at it, he was tapped as part of a secret program to be one of the first Air Force guys to go through the Navy’s famous Top Gun air combat school. He performed so well there, more covert assignments followed. He excelled at flying tough and keeping his mouth shut, and soon he was involved in some of the darkest secret operations ever undertaken by the U.S. military. The stories he could tell would make Ian Fleming’s hair curl.

In between all the black ops, Ryder did airframe testing at Edwards Air Force Base, including the VTOL version of the new F-35 fighter. Later on he flew new plane tryouts at Nellis AFB, which was just outside Las Vegas and practically a stone’s throw from his front door. He was transferred to the Reserves to free up his schedule and finally started giving the black op opportunities to younger guys. Then, at the age of 44, when he had 20 years’ service staring him in the face, he got an offer to test fly for Boeing. He’d be a civilian, but it was more money than he’d ever dreamed of making.

Then, September 11th. The day his dreamworld came to an end.

His wife, Maureen, was an on-air TV reporter. Beautiful, blond, and smart, she’d done local news in Las Vegas but had been featured on many national spots as well. She’d flown to Boston earlier that week to do a report on a massive highway project there called the Big Dig. Her assignment wrapped up a day early. She got a seat at the last moment on United Flight 175 to LA. It was the plane that hit the second tower. Back home in Vegas, Ryder had fallen asleep on the couch the night before, typically with the TV on and his cell turned off. He woke up just in time to see it all happen in living color.

No good-byes. No final phone call.

His wife was simply gone forever.

How do you live after that? How do you walk or talk or breathe? He stumbled around his house for days, smashing his phone to bits and telling the local media horde pounding on his door to go to hell. How could they ever understand what he was going through? Her running shoes were still waiting by the back door. Her tiny garden out back needed weeding. The dresses in her closet. A sweater left on the bed. He didn’t touch any of it. He couldn’t.

Weeks went by. He didn’t work. He didn’t sleep. Eventually he moved out. He went to a motel on the other side of town and it was here, alone, that he went through the predictable stages of grief. Denial, anger, depression—wrenching, all three. But he missed one. The last one.

Acceptance….

That was the hurdle he just couldn’t get over. The fact that she was really gone. Just couldn’t. Booze. Sleeping pills. Even prayer, an embarrassment on his knees. Nothing worked. In his stupors, he began wondering if maybe going to heaven wasn’t a crock of shit after all, maybe it was a way to see her again, and whether it was better to go slow by the bottle or quick via the muzzle of his hunting rifle.

That’s when the phone rang. It was very early in the dark morning, but Ryder recognized the voice from the past right away. It was a guy named Lieutenant Moon. He’d been instrumental in getting Ryder involved in many black ops over the years. Moon knew about Ryder’s loss and, in a very short conversation, solved Ryder’s problem of getting over the last stage of Maureen’s death. How? By presenting him with another option. By giving him the opportunity to leapfrog over that fourth stage of grief, that big sticking point, that deepest of human emotion, and go on to a fifth:
Revenge
.

“A friend of mine is starting a program…” was all Moon had to say. Ryder didn’t even let him finish the sentence. He just asked him where and when, and Moon told him.

He was packed and gone by noon.

Ryder returned to his cabin now, took a shower, and did his morning business. Then he walked to the forward mess hall, looking to find some coffee. The mess was a cavernous place, low-lit and gloomy and, like his cabin, a study in dirty gray. There were a half-dozen people scattered around the 20 or so tables. No one was talking to anyone.

Ryder took a seat in the corner, near a covered-over porthole. A galley sailor was at his side a moment later. He put before Ryder a huge platter bearing two tenderloin steaks, a baked potato, and a half a loaf of hot bread. A cup of coffee and a stick of butter also materialized. Ryder stared at the meal. His pep pills, free for the asking at the sick bay, were just beginning to kick in. Did he really want to eat all this?

“Those are the orders,” the sailor told him. “Everyone onboard gets steak today.”

At that moment an Army officer strolled into the mess. His name was Martinez. He was a full colonel and an obvious up-and-comer, as he was at least 10 years younger than Ryder. Martinez was tall and rugged, with a dark complexion and movie-star looks. He was rarely seen without a cigar hanging out of his mouth.

Martinez had two jobs. He was the commanding officer of the Delta group and the intelligence officer for the ship. He did all the planning for the unit’s counterterror strikes, he coordinated the land, sea, and air assets, he researched the targets, and he made sure everyone got back in one piece. Martinez probably worked harder and slept less than anybody else onboard, Ryder included.

The team owed a lot to Martinez already. For the first 30 days of the mission,
Ocean Voyager
had sailed in circles around the frigid South Atlantic, far away from the sea-lanes, burning gas while everyone onboard got their act together. Their objective was to become nothing less than invisible, at least whenever they were leaving or returning to the ship. Delta and the Air Force pilots trained endlessly during this period, especially in how to load up their special Blackhawks and take off quickly. The Marine Aviation guys also drilled hard at keeping the two choppers and the Harrier in top condition, bombed up and ready to go, 24/7—not an easy task in the salt-heavy marine environment. Ryder himself constantly practiced landing the jump jet on the moving ship, in all weather conditions, day and night, at 5 knots or 20. (This was not so easy, either. The Navy liked to brag that landing a supersonic jet on an aircraft carrier was the most difficult thing a combat pilot could do. “Like having sex during a car crash,” they said, because when you hit that arresting wire, you went from 120 knots to 0 in two seconds. But getting the temperamental Harrier to set down exactly where it was supposed to, in rough seas, at night, with no radio, no lights—that could be like a car crash, too. Without the sex.)