Strike Force Alpha (6 page)

Lower Sicily
Two hours later

The huge explosion rocked the tiny village of Sardarno just after midnight.

The village police chief was thrown from his bed by the force of the blast. He landed in the far corner of the bedroom, a dresser smashing against the wall next to him. His wife, all 327 pounds of her, was also hurled to the floor, their modest bed stand collapsing on top of her. Every window in their house blew out instantly; their kitchen ceiling came crashing down. Outside, half their flock of pet geese died on the spot—of heart attacks. All this in just a few seconds, and the ground was still shaking.

The chief—his name was Roberto Tino—thought it was the end of the world. Anything less wouldn’t have sounded so loud.

He slowly got to his feet, stepped over his wife, and retrieved his eyeglasses. He pulled the torn curtains from the bedroom’s broken window and looked out.

The night sky was on fire. A red-and-orange spire of flame was rising out of the west. Tino wiped his glasses clean and then realized the flames were coming from the top of Monte Fidelo, the tallest peak in a line of remote hills outside Sardarno. Monte Fidelo was nearly 2,000 feet high—and four miles away from Tino’s farmhouse. Yet the glow was so intense, his roosters were crowing. It was that bright outside.

Tino finally had gone to help his wife when the telephone rang. Stepping over her again, he picked it up to hear the very anxious voice of the village mayor on the other end. The mayor was 91 years old but still a pistol. Tino couldn’t believe he’d been able to dial his phone number so fast.

The mayor had also been thrown from his bed—and he lived inside the village, more than five miles from the peak. He asked if Tino’s house was still intact; the explosion had been so violent, he’d assumed everything between the village and Fidelo had been leveled.

Tino replied that his house was still standing, but that it looked like the summit of the Fidelo was engulfed in flame. Was it an
eruzione,
the mayor asked him urgently. An eruption of a volcano? That’s what everyone in the village thought. People were fleeing toward the sea, many still in bedclothes, expecting to be overtaken by lava at any moment.

Tino didn’t think this was a volcanic eruption. A plane crash, maybe. Nevertheless, the mayor ordered him to get as close as he could to the hill and investigate. Tino began to protest. They’d received an order from the
Carabinieri,
the Italian national police, earlier that very day telling them to stay away from Monte Fidelo and keep any civilians away from the peak as well. (This was not a hard thing to do, as the area was very isolated and only one dirt road ran in and out.) No official reason was given for this order, but the national police had been adamant.

“Maybe this is why they didn’t want us to go near it,” Tino reasoned to the mayor. He knew a little more about Monte Fidelo than he was letting on.

But the mayor couldn’t have cared less about the
Carabinieri
. He was convinced Monte Fidelo was erupting and he wanted Tino to go up there and prove him wrong.

Tino just shrugged and hung up. Orders were orders and the mayor was his boss. So Tino slipped on his boots, grabbed his rifle, and headed out the door. As he passed over his wife, still on the floor, he heard her gently snoring.

No reason to wake her up now,
he thought.

Tino jumped into his Toyota jeep and began driving west, toward the glowing hill.

There was a villa at the top of Fidelo. It was very old, with 12 rooms and a spectacular view of the Mediterranean, a mile over some very rough terrain to the south. In telling Tino to stay away from the hilltop the
Carabinieri
had also asked him to report any unusual activity around the area, but again they never said why. Just after receiving their communiqué, Tino had called a friend at the state police base in Palermo asking if he knew what it was all about. He did. The villa had recently been leased by 16 men of Middle Eastern descent. They’d all claimed on their rental application to be “physicians and religious students.” Their previous address had been a rooming house in Genoa. The national police suspected these men were terrorists and that the villa was rented as a staging point for their operations. Plus, something strange had happened in the Aegean Sea the night before that might be connected with all this.

The
Carabinieri
higher-ups in Rome were going to move on this information very soon, Tino’s friend revealed. He suggested it was best that the police chief obey their order.

“Questa non e una cosa da coinvolgeri,”
his friend had told him. “This is nothing to get mixed up in….”

Tino arrived at the bottom of Monte Fidelo ten minutes later. The flames shooting out of the peak had intensified. But he didn’t see any lava or whatever else might come rolling down the side of a volcano.

He checked his rifle. It was loaded, but only with birdshot. Not much of a punch, but it would have to do. He looked to the summit again and blessed himself. The glow was even brighter. The air around him was getting hot. He vowed to ask the mayor for a raise after this.

He put his Jeep into low gear and started up the hill. It was more than 1,900 feet to the top. The villa was located just below the peak, on the south side. There was a huge abandoned vineyard directly in front of the main house. Thick woods and rock covered the other three sides of the hill.

Tino quickly passed the 500-foot mark but had to slow down as he neared 1,000 feet. The Jeep’s engine was breathing hard and the road went nearly straight up from here. The flames were climbing even higher as he reached the 1,500-foot point. He pulled to the side of the road and stuck his head out the window. He could hear the roar of the fire, the crackle of wood and old vines burning. The smoke was getting thick.

But he pressed on.

His Jeep was just about to quit when he reached the 1,800-foot mark. Here he found a trail leading to the villa.

He got out, locked his doors, and checked his rifle one more time. Then he started walking cautiously toward the flames. The wind was blowing clouds of glowing sparks all the way to the ocean, a mile away. That’s why the sky seemed to be on fire. Tino had never seen anything like it.

He walked out of the woods and onto the pathway leading directly to the villa’s front door. The door was still standing. But the rest of the villa was gone.

Tino was shocked. There was
nothing
left. The villa had encompassed five separate houses, one of which had been four stories tall. But everything was just…gone. There could be no doubt about this: an explosion had taken place up here, one so powerful, it had blown the compound into dust.

The flames were coming from the cellar, the only portion of the main house still intact. Between the path and where the house used to be Tino spotted the remains of six adults. Their bodies were twisted into grotesque positions; all had been horribly burned. They’d been running from the house when the blast went off.

Several nearby residents now arrived on the scene. They’d been about a minute behind Tino in climbing the hill. Tino did not order them away. This was a vision of hell up here, and at the moment he welcomed the company. He did, however, stop them from entering the field where the bodies were located. He asked them what they had seen or heard prior to the explosion. Two reported seeing low-flying helicopters in the area just minutes before the blast but claimed they could not hear them. Tino discounted these reports right away: helicopters always made a racket; he knew of none that could fly silently. Another villager, an Army veteran, told him the wreckage spray indicated an enormous blast must have originated
above
the main house and not inside it. He pointed out that all of the villa’s walls had been blown downward before they were vaporized. His guess was a large cache of explosives had been detonated just a few feet from the villa’s roof, literally blowing the structure into the ground. Tino’s conclusion: someone had bombed the suspected terrorists occupying the house. But who?

There was only one clue. It came with a strange discovery made by another villager who had driven up to the scene but had parked lower on the hill. Walking through the abandoned vineyard, he came upon something very puzzling. Those up near the burning house heard him shouting and made their way to his location. They found him studying the wreckage not of a car or truck or even an aircraft, but of an outboard motor, the type typically used on a large speedboat. It was embedded in a bramble of old vines and was still too hot to touch. Obviously, it had been thrown here as a result of the blast.

But this didn’t make sense. The Fidelo was nearly a half-mile high; the villa was at its summit. The only means of land access was by four-wheel drive, and the road was so steep it was impossible to tow anything up. Plus the nearest deep water was a mile away—and a long way down.

How then did a speedboat motor get way up here?

The place was called Ben Annaba.

It was a small oasis village about fifteen miles in from the Algerian coastal city of El Kala.

Ben Annaba was the headquarters of a terrorist group known as the Holy Islamic Army of God. They were part of Al Qaeda, though one of its smallest components. The government in Algiers wasn’t Muslim enough for the Holy Army, so they had vowed to change it. To do this, they had taken to attacking isolated desert towns and butchering the occupants. Men, women, children—everyone got chopped up in the name of Allah.

Traveling on motorbikes and in high-speed desert SUVs, the Holy Army was always long gone before the Algerian military could arrive on the scene. They moved so fast, in fact, sometimes the military didn’t bother to come at all.

Bobby Murphy had somehow come upon a videotape shot inside the stronghold at Ben Annaba. Using the secure porn site in New Jersey, he’d fed this footage to
Ocean Voyager
’s White Rooms in bits and pieces, disguised as mpgs. The tape showed the Holy Army’s command facilities in the center of the town, with the terrorists’ living quarters and training areas on its periphery. Murphy had also drawn a map of the camp, which he sent as a jpg file. The drawing was so detailed, it looked like a photograph.

The videotape keyed in on one barracks marked:
BAYT ASHUHADA
,
loosely Arabic for “House of Martyrs.” This was where Al Qaeda members stayed when visiting their
mujahideen
brethren at Ben Annaba. Murphy’s information said up to 20 “martyrs” were in residence at the camp, along with their families.

Then there was another building, located next to the main command hut. It was covered with crude drawings warning against bringing any open flames near. Murphy was certain this structure was the Holy Army’s ammunition dump.

Ryder’s primary mission tonight was simple: put a thousand-pound bomb into the House of Martyrs and another into the No Smoking building. If he had any time to spare, he should strafe the encampment as well.

The trip up to Sicily went off without a hitch. The Blackhawks had ingressed at their assigned point, one of them carrying the raft full of explosives picked up during the rescue of the
Sea Princess
the night before. The planning for the terrorists’ attempt to sink the cruise liner had indeed taken place inside the villa atop Monte Fidelo. The explosives that were eventually packed aboard the suicide raft had been kept inside the villa as well. This had been confirmed by cell-phone intercepts pulled down by the Spooks in
Ocean Voyager
’s White Rooms. Once the information was in hand, no one was in the mood to wait for the Italian national police to act. Besides, returning the explosives, raft, engine and all to their point of origin was a message to other terrorist cells: We know who did this and this is how they paid for it. And when we find you, you’ll pay, too….

Once the Blackhawks were safely over land, Ryder and Phelan turned back over the Med and went their separate ways. Ryder would have no wingman for the second half of this night. Phelan went off to a point southeast of
Ocean Voyager,
to fly a sort of flanking picket duty. Ryder meanwhile had headed southwest, toward Algeria.

He went under the Algerian radar net with no problems. His radar signature was less than that of a bird. Once over the coast, finding the target was easy, thanks to the coordinates supplied by Murphy and his hand-drawn map. The camp was in the middle of a large, bare valley, bordered on three sides by coastal mountains. There were about twenty buildings sitting on the edge of the large oasis, most of them pink stucco structures, set low among hundreds of palm trees and other North African fauna.

Ryder came over the top of the mountain 15 miles north of the camp and went down to 200 feet. No one would hear him coming, not until he made his first pass over the camp. He clicked on his FLIR mount. This device gave him a thermal image of the camp, now just 10 miles away. He could see the smoke from a few campfires and some thermal ghosts, actually a bunch of guards, sitting at the edge of the oasis. A quick scan of the rest of the compound showed no SAMs in evidence, no big antiaircraft weaponry at all.