Strike Force Bravo (10 page)

Fox also had an unusual communication device connected to his Fritz helmet. About the size of a Nokia cell phone, with tiny headphones and a microphone built in right above his chin strap, it was called a UPX, for a universal personal communicator. The UPX was a highly classified piece of equipment. It could contact anyone, anytime, anywhere on the planet by either phone, high-band radio, E-mail, or even instant messaging. It could send and receive digital photo images. It could send and receive voice mail. It also served as a GPS device. It was obvious to the team that Fox was the type of guy who had to be plugged in at all times. His UPX would see plenty of action in the hours to come.

Ryder and Gallant found a narrow pathway leading into the jungle. Putting down their night-vision goggles, they plunged right in. This was very thick undergrowth around them: bean leaf plants,
azore
vines, and
kantaki,
a small thorn-covered bush that grew just about everywhere in the Philippines. Martinez and Fox went in right behind them. The Delta operators came next. Behind them the SDS guards, still a little too well dressed for the terrain but plowing forward, jaws tight, shades in place, even at night. Bringing up the rear were the half-dozen SEALs. Soon enough they found themselves having trouble keeping up.

The team moved swiftly, Ryder and Gallant setting the pace. The prospect of finding Kazeel
and
getting home was too much for them to go anything but full-out. The island was about six miles long but just three miles wide. It was about two miles to the center of the knuckle, their first and they hoped, only destination. The jungle was exactly the green hell it appeared to be from the beach, though. The terrain was a nightmare; nothing was flat or straight. The path, centuries old perhaps, turned into an obstacle course of fallen trees, sinkholes, and narrow but rapidly rushing rivers. The jungle canopy overhead was as thick as anything they put on top of their containership, the
Ocean Voyager;
it was a true horror as viewed through the night scopes. Every once in a while they would see birds the size of pterodactyls glide over their heads. Screeches that seemed to be coming from other Jurassic-type creatures also shook the night.

It took them all of an hour, but finally they reached a small clearing just about in the center of the island. The team finally stopped and caught its collective breath, all except Fox, who was talking into his UPX device. He'd been using it continually throughout the dash to this place, keeping those on the other end apprised of the team's progress, though always doing so out of earshot. Even now, Fox moved a good distance away from the others to have his hushed conversation.

Ryder and Gallant finally stepped into the clearing, Martinez a few paces behind. They began sniffing the air. They got a noseful of jungle stink in return but detected something else, too. Burnt rubber, seared metal, the unmistakable odor of aviation fuel. It told them one thing: an airplane had crashed nearby.

A thick ring of dwarfed rubber trees lay beyond the clearing. Behind them was a ridgeline, which in turn led to the base of a thickly covered mountain. Mist was spouting from its peak; it almost looked like a volcano.

Ryder and Gallant followed their noses, Martinez and now Fox were close behind. They made their way across the clearing, through the stunted rubber trees, down into a shallow gully, and then up the side of the ridge. It was maybe 50 feet high. Ryder and Gallant were the first to reach the top. They crawled up to its peak and looked over the other side.

The first thing they saw was a large black metal wing, horribly twisted and sticking nearly straight up in the air. There was a long thin stream of black smoke rising above it. Directly below the wing were the guts of a cockpit, turned inside out and smashed almost beyond recognition. Nearby, was another twisted, misshapen wing. More smoke was rising above it.

“We're not this lucky, are we?” Gallant asked.

“Why not?” Ryder replied. The site seemed to match exactly the telemetry followed from the location of the bright flash on Fox's satellite photo. But as soon as Ryder said those words, he knew he was wrong. Adjusting his night-vision goggles, he saw large pieces of external-style jet engines, two good-sized cargo doors, and the remains of a very large tail section. Much of this was covered in charred white paint.

“Damn…”
Ryder whispered.

This was not the B-2. It was the wreckage of the KC-10 tanker.

Even its refueling probe was still intact, though it was melted into the shape of a pretzel. But something was strange here. While the wreckage was strewn over an area the size of a football field, with most of it scattered haphazardly amid a grove of ink-plant trees, some of the pieces were stacked neatly in piles around the periphery of the crash site.

Fox finally joined them up on the ridgeline. He quickly realized that this was not their primary prize—but declared it a valuable discovery nonetheless. Without another word, the DSA officer went over the top and started scrambling down the other side of the slope, sliding toward the wreckage.

But at the same moment, Ryder noticed something moving in the rubble. Just beyond the smashed cockpit, a glint of metal against the dark sky. A man stood up, alerted by the sound of Fox dropping down the hill. This man was dressed in a black uniform, with a red bandanna wrapped around his head. He was holding an AK-47 assault rifle.

“It's one of those Aboo assholes,” Gallant whispered urgently to Ryder. “The Filipino Al Qaeda….”

No sooner had this man stood up, than another, dressed the same way, emerged from under the bent right wing. Then another appeared near the tail. Then another, and another. And another. Many gunmen were popping up at the bottom of the ridge itself. So the Americans were not the first to discover the tanker's crash site. The terrorists had made it here before them.

If these gunmen had been sleeping when the team came upon them, they were quick to break out of their stupor. All of them turned their guns on Fox, who was just now reaching the bottom of the slope. Ryder raised his weapon; Gallant did, too. But it was too late. The Aboos had spotted Fox and were taking aim at him. Ryder couldn't believe he was about to see the peanut butter sandwich guy get killed. Yet there wasn't even time to shout out a warning to the unsuspecting DSA officer. Disaster seemed inevitable.

But then came an explosion of gunfire from somewhere over Ryder's head. A dozen streams of green tracers combined to hit the terrorists like a tidal wave. The gunmen danced in grotesque slow motion as they were unmercifully riddled with bullets. No sooner had it begun than it was over. Ten Aboos were dead, and Fox was scared shitless. But he was still alive.

Ryder and Gallant looked behind them. It wasn't the Delta guys who'd saved the DSA officer. Not the SEALs, either. It was the SDS guards. Still looking natty in their Banana Republic combat wear, they'd quickly formed a firing line along the ridge and disposed of the Aboos in frighteningly efficient fashion. Ryder and Gallant were astonished by their coolness and accuracy.

Gallant leaned over to Ryder and whispered: “These dudes are beginning to scare me.”

 

As the rest of the team set up a defense perimeter around the crash site, Ryder and Gallant joined Fox at the bottom of the ridge. They searched the Aboo dead, but none was carrying anything more than a gun and some ammo. One man had been found wearing a
kufi,
head garb more at home in the Middle East. But he was small, very dark, and certainly Asian in his appearance. In other words, it was not Kazeel.

The wreckage was eerie up close and personal. Much of it was still smoking, and here and there they could detect the crackle of flames. With the perpetual fog and the heavy overgrowth, though, the site would have been very difficult to see from the air.

Fox was crawling under a piece of torn fuselage, snapping pictures with his UPX.

“Lucky for us this thing was low on fuel when it came down!” he called over his shoulder to the pilots. “Usually when these refuelers crash, there's nothing left but a big hole in the ground.”

They found five charred corpses near the head of the wreckage. This was the plane's crew. The terrorists had recovered their bodies, or what remained of them. Fox scooped up a handful of ash from each and deposited it in its own separate plastic bag. “We'll have to give these guys a decent burial when we have a chance,” he said.

Even after 10 minutes of poking through it, Ryder and Gallant were overwhelmed by the sight of the huge wreck. No pilot wanted to see anything like this.

“What the hell happened to it?” Gallant asked. “I mean, are we saying that on the same night, in the same area, at the same time, two of our airplanes both crashed, accidentally?”

“Damn—this was no accident,” Fox said. He'd climbed up on top of the twisted wreck by now. “Come up and look at this.”

Ryder and Gallant scaled the wall of shredded metal. They found the DSA officer examining a large hole under the tail section of the KC-10 that was now twisted upright. The hole looked like a human puncture wound. The metal was bent in a circular fashion and gallons of red hydraulic fluid had splashed all over it. It looked very much like blood.

“You know what this is, don't you?” Fox asked the pilots, pointing to the hole. “It's an impact point, caused by a significant external explosion. This means the plane didn't go down by accident, nor did it collide with the B-2.

“It was shot down. By a surface-to-air missile….”

 

They climbed back up to the ridge. The rest of the composite team had reassembled here. Fox separated himself from the group, then activated his UPX communication device again. He was soon talking to someone on the other end.

The conversation was brief. Fox hung up and informed the team that they had to move off the ridge and all the way back to the edge of the clearing. This took about ten minutes. Once there, Fox had these words of advice for those present: “Get down and hold on to something,” adding, almost as an afterthought: “I hope we're far enough away.”

Ryder heard it coming seconds later. A deep rushing sound at first, getting louder and louder until suddenly there was no noise at all. He looked up just in time to see the Tomahawk cruise missile flash over his head. It nicked the top of the ridge and detonated right above the KC-10's wreckage.

The explosion was tremendous. The shock wave felt like an earthquake. It sent a shower of hot mud and debris on top of the team members. A fiery cloud rose into the night, but Ryder never saw it.

He was down in the muck, holding on to something, just like everyone else.

There was a small Aboo camp dug into the summit of a mountain about a half-mile from the KC-10 crash site.

It was a strange place for a terrorist camp to be. Very little tree cover to hide it from the air. Very little but rocks and shrubs to hide it from below. More than two dozen Aboo fighters were stationed up here, but they were in the process of making a hast exit.

They'd heard clearly the sounds of gunfire coming from the next mountain over; then they'd seen the Tomahawk destroy the wrecked airplane. The Aboos knew these things could only mean one thing: The Americans were coming. To find their missing aircraft, to retrieve their dead. And that meant it was time for the Aboos to
vamoose
.

Most had faced aerial attacks before, very halfhearted ones, launched by the Filipino Air Force. But no one wanted to be on the receiving end of a Tomahawk missile. This encampment had been established by the Aboos just three days ago. They'd been told to watch over something up here and if necessary defend it with their lives. But those orders were forgotten now. They were
jihad
fighters, not soldiers. No one had told them they had to face the might of the U.S. military.

They were about halfway through bugging out when suddenly one of their comrades appeared at the edge of the camp. He was one of four men stationed between the plane wreck and the Aboo mountain camp, a trip-wire squad of sorts. The man was out of breath and in shock. He'd climbed out of the bare jungle, his uniform torn and bloody, with no weapon, no boots, no bandanna. It was obvious someone was chasing him; indeed, someone was right on his tail.

The man raised his arms in small triumph upon making the camp, but in the next instant a combined fusillade of M16 tracer fire nearly severed him in two. What was left of him hit the ground and slid back down the mountain. His fellow Aboos were horrified. Their decision to withdraw had come too late. Their aerie camp was already under attack.

A small army of men in black uniforms was advancing rapidly up toward them. Streams of tracers were suddenly coming at the Aboos from all directions. Panic ensued; men began dropping, screaming, dying. Those fighters getting hit were all being shot in the head. Red laser horror, in the middle of night.

Twenty-six terrorists were caught in this crossfire. It took less than a half minute to kill them all.

 

The combined American assault team streamed into the camp seconds later. Ryder was at the head of the column, Gallant and the others close behind. They'd come upon the trip-wire squad, killed three of them, then followed the fourth one here. Now Ryder scanned the compound with his night-vision goggles. Why had the Aboos built a camp way up here? So out in the open, with very little cover? This wasn't a permanent base, he surmised. The Aboos were up here guarding something.

The SEALs ransacked the place, turning over anything that was covered, tearing down a handful of small huts in the process. They found nothing out of the ordinary, though. Just food, weapons, and mats to sleep on. One SEAL did come up with a pair of sandals. They were dusty and well worn, of a style more ready for the desert, not the mountains of the Philippines. Did Kazeel wear such sandals? Had he been here?

Ryder examined the footwear and put the question to Gallant. The chopper pilot looked around and sniffed the air for effect. “Hard to tell,” he said, only half-kidding. “Lots of things stink up here.”

They heard one of the Delta guys call out. He'd spotted something. It was a tent, hidden under a crude stick and dirt camouflage net, set off about fifty feet from the camp. Once noticed, it stood out like a sore thumb.

The team converged on it. “What the hell is this?” Gallant asked.

Ryder tore off the top piece of the netting. What lay beneath looked like a prop from a bad sci-fi movie. It was a big piece of machinery, painted bright silver and sitting on a trolley with ten huge rubber tires. A control column that looked like it was run by old-fashioned radio tubes was hanging off one side. Both Chinese and Cyrillic writing could be seen all over it.

It was an SA-4 missile launcher—a very big Soviet era antiaircraft weapon that harkened back to the sixties. Its one and only missile had already been fired.

“Damn…
here's
what killed the tanker,” Fox said, spitting on the launcher's tracks. “One missile, set up for one shot.”

He pulled out his UPX phone and used it as a GPS plotter. He punched in the coordinates of this camp, then matched them with those of the KC-10 crash site and the brief flash of light picked up by the spy satellite.

“See? The telemetry all fits,” he declared. “Someone fired a missile from here; it reached its altitude quickly, and nailed the tanker—and probably the B-2 as well.”

Fox put the UPX away and looked up into the night sky. “They were probably going after an airliner,” he said wearily. “We've seen more than a few fly over since we've been in the area.”

But did that really make any sense? Ryder looked around the camp again. They were about as far from nowhere as they could get. “So someone hauled this monster all the way up here,” he asked, “just to try for a shot at an airliner? You would think there's got to be better places than this to attempt something like that. At least under busier air lanes.”

But Fox just shrugged. “Well, they would have wasted their time if they were gunning for the bomber,” he said. “Besides not being able to know when it was flying overhead, a missile like that couldn't down a B-2. It's a radar-guided weapon and the B-2 is a Stealth.”

Ryder looked at Gallant, who just shook his head. At that moment all he wanted to do was find the damn B-2 so they could all get their ticket punched for home.

They scanned the nearby terrain with their night goggles. It was nothing but mountains and jungle all around them.

“The question is,” Fox said, “where the hell did the bomber wind up?”

At that moment, his UPX started beeping. Another call was coming in. He answered, had a short conversation with someone during which he passed on news about finding the launcher, then said: “Really? Intact? OK—patch me in.”

In a rare moment, he held up the small UPX screen for everyone to see. The rest of the team crowded around him. It was all static at first. But then an image started to form.

“This was shot by a Predator drone just a few hours ago,” Fox explained. “It's only about a mile from here.”

The tiny screen displayed a river, a small beach, and thick jungle all around it.

Sitting on the beach was the unmistakable outline of a B-2 bomber.

 

The quick march through the jungle now became a sprint. Running down trails, over dead trees, across streams. The terrain was continuous in its changes. Jungle paths, ridges, gullies, and hills, all connected by an endless series of hollows and valleys. Through it all, Fox was yelling into his UPX communicator, asking which way they should go next. North? South? Over the next hill or around it?

Someone was directing them, maybe from a Predator, maybe from a satellite, maybe from some piece of gear Fox was carrying. Ryder and the others didn't really know and, at this point, really didn't care. They were too busy running.

It seemed almost impossible, considering the rugged terrain and the darkness of night, but they were nearing their destination in under a half hour. A few more instructions from the UPX phone and they soon broke through a line of undergrowth—at the exact spot they were told to be.

Problem was, there was no beach here, no river. No clearing. And definitely no B-2.

What they found instead was a black lake.

“What the fuck is this?” Fox cursed. He studied his UPX readout, matching their GPS position with the coordinates that had just been provided by the Predator.

Everything checked out. They were where they were supposed to be. It was the lake that was out of place.

The team collapsed at the water's edge, exhausted from their grueling, breathless trek. This didn't make any sense. Fox rechecked his data over and over again. He gave it over to Ryder and Gallant. They did the math. It still came out right. Everything matched—except the lake.

“Are we on the right island?” Gallant wondered.

Just then Martinez, who'd been sitting quietly a few feet away from them, suddenly got up, took off all his clothes—dived into the dark water.

“What the hell is he doing?”
Gallant yelled.

He and Ryder were both up on their feet in an instant; the whole team was.

“Not the time for your guy to go for a swim!” Fox yelled.

They all watched the surface of the water, black and treacherous. The seconds ticked by. Five. Ten.
Fifteen….
Martinez never came back up. Ryder and Gallant began ripping off their boots, intent on jumping in to save their colleague. But just as they were about to dive in, Martinez came back up. He looked half-drowned. He could not swim. He was struggling to catch his breath. Ryder and Gallant jumped in, pulled him to the water's edge, then dragged him up to land. Only then did they realize he had something in his hand. It was a long, thin piece of metal, with several tiny protrusions on the tip. Fox took it from him, though for a few seconds Martinez was reluctant to let it go.

“This is a high-gain UHF antenna,” Fox said, examining the object through his night-vision goggles. “It's right off the front of a B-2 bomber.”

They all turned back to the lake.

“Son of a bitch,” Ryder said.
“It's under the water?”

“Damn,” Fox said over and over again. “Damn…it
must
be down here.”

“But how?” Gallant asked. “The photo shows it on
dry land.
”

They stood in silence for a long time, trying to solve the puzzle. It was Barney, the chief SEAL, who figured it out first.

“They dammed a river,” he blurted out. “They raised the water level in this area somehow…and covered the bomber over.”

He and his SEALs were off like a shot. They began running along the south bank of the lake. Just as quickly, the Delta guys headed north. In two minutes, the Delta squad called Fox's cell phone. They'd found an ancient water gate 500 feet up from the team's location. It was in the open position. Then the SEALs called in. They'd discovered a temporary earthen dam about the same distance to the south. This barrier was keeping the water in. Fox gave two quick orders: he told Delta to close the water gate; then he told the SEALs to blow the temporary dam.

Then everyone else just sat down on the edge of the small lake and watched the water go down.

 

It only took about ten minutes before the top of the B-2 came into view. The moon had risen by this time and it was actually easier to see without their night goggles. The water drained out quicker by the second, revealing the huge bomber a few inches at a time.

Fox was on his UPX again, repeating over and over, “We've found it. That's affirmative…. We found it.” He was giving someone a blow-by-blow description of what was happening, this as the water continued to drain from around the large, bat-wing shape.

The more the water went down, though, the more obvious it became that this billion-dollar bomber had not been shot down, as had the KC-10. Rather, it had crash-landed and had somehow stayed in one piece, more or less. It was also clear that the Stealth plane would never fly again. Its nose was crushed, its cockpit windows were blown out, and its bat shape was twisted and torn. There was a lot of debris surfacing on the water all around it.

Gallant lit up a soggy cigarette. “Who's going to pay for this?” he asked snidely.

Fox meanwhile was becoming especially anxious. He was pacing the water's shrinking edge, the UPX burning his ear, continuously checking his watch, and talking to his mysterious friends, always out of earshot of the others. He seemed to grow more uncharacteristically agitated as the minutes ticked by.

Ryder and Gallant tried their best to listen in on Fox's conversation. He was raising his voice, but his words were mostly garbled…except for one last sentence Fox half-bellowed into his UPX. They heard it very clearly. He said:
“It was carrying what?”

Ryder and Gallant exchanged worried looks. They turned back to the bomber, now about halfway revealed.

“I knew it,” Gallant whispered. “That fucking thing has a nuke in it.”

Ryder, too, was concerned. “I don't think they carry just one nuke,” he said. “I think these things carry many, many nukes.”

At that moment, they saw Fox hastily end his conversation and toss his UPX to the ground. He looked extremely pissed off. Then he suddenly plunged into the shrinking lake, clothes and all, its water now just four feet deep. He waded over to the waterlogged bomber and boosted himself up on its crumpled wing. Ryder and Gallant followed him in. By the time they got to the wing, Fox was already inside the bomber, having gone in through the cockpit's broken windshield.

Ryder reached the top of the plane, walked out onto its very blunt nose, and nearly slipped. Black Stealth paint was coming off on his hands and feet. He dropped down through the open window, hitting the pilot's seat with a thump. The water had drained out of here by now, leaving behind a major soggy mess.

Gallant came down almost on top of him. He was jarred by the battered cockpit, too. “Got to be at least fifty mil down the drain just in here,” he said.

“Maybe twice that,” Ryder told him.

They moved aft, finding the bomber was not so gigantic on the inside. It was actually rather cramped.

They could hear Fox down below. He'd quickly slipped through an access panel leading directly into the bomb bay, as if he'd been prepped ahead of time on just how to do this.

By the time Ryder and Gallant reached Fox's location, the DSA officer was standing in knee-deep water, his flashlight shooting beams madly about the bomb bay. But the bomb bay was empty. No bombs. No bomb racks. No nothing. Just an empty chamber.