Strike Force Bravo (24 page)

“Have you ever heard this dimwit speak?” Marcos asked him. “Beyond a few grunts, I mean?”

Ramosa had to think a moment. “No,” he answered. “I don't think I have. Not really. Has anyone?”

Marcos smiled demonically. His razor was back in Uni's face in a flash. He forced the
shuka's
mouth open and pulled out his tongue.

“Well, look at this!” Marcos cried.

He turned Uni's tongue upside down to reveal that a set of tiny numbers, 14 in all, had been tattooed there. Ramosa bent down and studied them. They seemed distorted and unreadable.

“But they are backward,” he said. “Why?”

Marcos thought another moment. Then, another lightbulb.

“So this idiot can see them in a mirror,” he declared. To make his point, he held his very shiny razor blade against Uni's tongue. Sure enough, only in its reflection did the numbers make sense.

“Yes, I see it now,” Ramosa said. “It's a phone number. Country code, area code, and the rest.
That's
the
sharfa.
Call this number and let it ring—no one will ever pick it up probably. They won't have to. The sleepers will know to go into action simply upon hearing it.”

Marcos laughed like a girl. “And the sheikh must have told this moron to keep his mouth shut—and he has. Until now.”

Ramosa looked at the numbers again and winced. “But the pain of putting them there must have been incredible.”

“Nothing like he is about to feel,” Marcos replied. In one swift motion, he lifted his razor and lopped off the end of Uni's tongue, the part containing the numbers. Uni howled. The spurt of blood was sickening. But Marcos simply smiled.

“Now at last, we have the unholy grail,” he said to Ramosa, dropping Uni back to the floor. “And the idiot is an idiot once more.”

There came a commotion at the hangar's main door. One of Ramosa's men peeked outside, then gave a hand signal. Ramosa nodded in reply. The doors opened, and a bizarre-looking airplane taxied its way into the hangar, followed by two nondescript freight trucks.

The noise inside was suddenly overpowering. Ramosa and Marcos had a shouted conversation, most of which only they could hear. It had to do with the crates, what was supposed to be in which crate, and where each crate was supposed to go after being repacked.

“It's another switch in plans!” some of the Americans heard Ramosa yell over the plane's whining engine.

“Are you sure?”
Marcos was heard shouting back. “
Another
switch?”

“Absolutely!” Ramosa yelled in reply. “I got it straight from Palm Tree….”

Now it was Ramosa's small army of men who went into action, repacking the crates according to the latest orders. The crates themselves were actually moved around the hangar floor to the extent that it would have been just about impossible for a casual observer to know which was crate 1, 2, or 3. Finally, though, Ramosa ordered them sealed and loaded onto their predetermined modes of transport.

This done, Ramosa turned to Marcos and started yelling at him again, still straining to be heard over the racket.

“After you take care of them,” some heard Ramosa tell Marcos, indicating the captured Americans, “meet me at the you-know-where.”

With that, Ramosa took the piece of tongue, put it in his pocket, and left.

 

Ozzi was surprised. The bubble of fear from just minutes before had dissipated. He wasn't scared anymore, just the opposite in fact.

“I'm dying for my country,” he kept whispering over and over. “I'm dying…for my country.”

A strange peace had come over the rest of the team, too, even though a grisly death was just seconds away. Sure the tables had suddenly turned on them. But they were still Patriots all, still Ozzi's heroes. He'd been privileged to know them. And
that's
why he was so suddenly calm.

Even still, Ozzi was doing his job, trying to remember everything he had heard. As he was one of the closest to the crates, he'd kept track of the packing process as best he could, taking mental notes as it proceeded at a fast and furious pace. Others along the line of captured Americans were doing the same thing. Even above the racket of the airplane and the trucks' engines, they could hear the sound of more packing peanuts being dumped, more bubble wrap being snapped, more duct tape being torn and applied. They each caught fleeting glimpses of the crates being loaded, being sealed, and finally put on their means of transport. But still, because of all the movement and confusion, Ozzi and the others could not quite tell which crate held what and which crate was going where.

In any case, the two vehicles and the airplane soon departed. One last glance over Ozzi's shoulder confirmed only a few strands of duct tape and some packing peanuts remained.

He turned his head slightly to the right now and could see Marcos out of the corner of his eye. The hoodlum had a huge .357 Magnum in hand and was fiddling with the safety button. He began walking down the line of prisoners, pressing the gun barrel against the neck of each American, sometimes yelling, “Boom!” to frighten one into thinking he would be the first to die.

It didn't work. The Americans weren't scared. In fact, Curry was laughing at him,
daring
Marcos to shoot him first. Puglisi and McMahon began taunting him as well. Soon most of the others were, too. Hunn alone stayed in his private place. He'd come up with another American flag and was quietly holding it in his hands as someone might hold a rosary.

Ramosa had left 10 men behind to cover Marcos while he performed the executions. They were gathered around the prisoners now, like lions waiting for the kill. Marcos went back down the line, muttering angrily, “I decide who will go first!” This as the Americans continued to mock him. Strangely, though, he ended not on one of the raiders but on Uni, the
shuka.
He'd been made to kneel up against the wall with the rest of them.

“I shall do the world a favor, I think,” Marcos declared. “Getting rid of a stupid freak first makes us all a little bit better, don't you think?”

Ramosa's men laughed on cue. “Do him good!” one of them called out.

“And you
are
a fucking imbecile, you know,” Marcos hissed at the eunuch in broken English. “What ever gave you the idea that
you
would wind up making the headlines with this thing? That
you
of all people would come out on top? I guess idiots have no choice but to dream idiots' dreams.”

Marcos then took a step back. Ozzi tensed himself for the gunshot. He could see everything now: Uni, Marcos, the ravenous secret police—it was all happening just a few feet away from him. This was going to be nasty, he thought. But he could not turn away.

Marcos smiled at the cops around him, pointed the gun at the back of Uni's shiny bald head…and pulled the trigger.

The sound of a gunshot exploded throughout the hangar. Ozzi saw the fire and smoke spew from Marcos's weapon. And it really did seem like the round hit Uni's skull. But whether the gun misfired or it was divine intervention or because Uni's head really
was
made of concrete, incredibly, the bullet ricocheted backward…and hit Marcos right between the eyes.

Silence…cold and eerie. Marcos stood there for the longest time, absolute bewilderment on his face. He even reached up and felt the hole in his skull. Hunn was the closest American to him. Marcos turned to him and said one word: “How?”

Hunn was so shocked by what he'd just seen, he couldn't speak. He could only shrug.

Marcos went over in a heap a second later.

Ramosa's men panicked. This was a little too freaky for them. Half began to run; the other half knew it would be wise to finish off the Americans first before they fled—Captain Ramosa did not forgive unfulfilled orders lightly.

But just as these men raised their weapons to fire, one of them was shot through the left eye. He, too, went over with a
thump!
His comrades were aghast.
Now
what was happening? Did this man somehow shoot himself, too? But then the guy beside him got a bullet through the throat and another to the forehead. The cop beside
him
instinctively ducked, but not before he caught a round right between the eyes.

All of the policemen panicked now. This was strange on top of strange, their comrades being shot down by ghosts. But the American prisoners knew what was going on. Ramosa's evil policemen were getting tap-shot.

And that could only mean one thing….

The top of the hangar disappeared a moment later. Suddenly it was just gone, in a blinding explosion, cheap aluminum reduced to metallic cinders. A second after that, a huge airplane roared over the top of the building. Huge…
and
noisy. With a fuselage that looked like the bottom of a boat.

A second after that, six men in barely opened parachutes dropped down through the gigantic hole in the roof, guns blazing. They all hit the floor at the same time.

“We're Americans!”
one of them screamed.
“Team Ninety-Nine—U.S. Navy. Get down on the floor…now!”

Ozzi was stunned. They all were.

Team Ninety-Nine?
he thought.
The SEAL assassins? What the fuck were they doing here?

The American prisoners hit the deck as told and the hangar saw its third gunfight in less than 10 minutes. This one was as one-sided as the last one, though. Ramosa's men weren't combat troops; they were barely cops. They were no match for the SEALs.

As soon as the first six intruders hit the floor, another handful of armed men descended through the roof. These guys weren't SEALs. Just the opposite, they were dressed like they'd just walked out of a J. Crew catalog. Following them were more huge soldiers—as big as Hunn and his guys—wearing the same jet-black combat suits with the infamous 9/11 patch. They came down on ropes, leaving no doubt they were the ethereal tap-shooters.

The invaders dispersed expertly throughout the warehouse, hunting down and brutally eliminating the last of Ramosa's men. It took less than a minute. Then the shooting died down again.

Meanwhile the SEALs came along the row of the suddenly liberated Americans and by procedure frisked each one. By the time they got to Hunn, the SEALs were gloating mightily.

“Got in a bit of a jam, Delta?” one SEAL asked Hunn sarcastically. “Glad we could be of service.”

Hunn just moaned. Happy to be alive, he knew the special ops community would never let him forget the day that SEALs had to rescue Delta.

Ozzi was equally relieved but felt even more embarrassed than Hunn. The Gitmo team were his heroes, yet he'd led them into not one but
two
very dangerous situations, this and the screw-up in the mud room. He was not one of them; just the opposite in fact. But he had one more surprise coming. One last guy came through the roof and landed right in front of him. He took off his helmet and mask and just stood there, smiling.

Ozzi couldn't believe it. It was his boss, Major Fox.

“Sir? What are
you
doing here?” he cried.

“Let me ask you the same thing,” Fox replied. “I thought I left you back at the office.”

Ozzi fell to the seat of his pants—again. “It's a long story,” he muttered. “You must know some of it already. But how did you find me?”

Fox reached inside the young officer's breast pocket and took out his cell phone. He held it up to his eyes. “Don't you
ever
turn this thing off?” Fox asked him.

Ozzi slapped himself upside the head. He couldn't believe it. He'd committed the same stupid mistake the
shuka
had! In this Spook-versus-mook business, only an idiot left his cell phone on these days, that is, if he used the same one more than once. Powered-up cells were how the United States tracked terrorists—after all, that's how the Gitmo team had tracked first Kazeel and then the eunuch. Only a real amateur would have done this. But at least this time, Ozzie's mistake turned out to be a good thing.

Finally the two halves of the rogue American team came together in the center of the hangar. It was the first time the original team members had seen one another since the events at Hormuz. Inside 60 seconds they'd exchanged stories on exactly how they all came to be here. They rejoiced at the news of Kazeel's demise. The Kai team highly commended the Gitmo Four (or Five) for their cunning, initiative—and just plain balls in whacking the superterrorist. The Kais adventure had been of a different sort but just as down and dirty. Though mysteriously cut off from Washington after finding the B-2 spy bomber—no one ever did return Fox's phone calls—they felt they had no other choice but to continue the search for the people responsible for what happened on Fuggu Island. They did this by scouring every island, atoll, lagoon, shoal, and sandbar from the Bangtang Channel down to Manila Bay. They killed many Aboo terrorists along the way, as these places were infested with them. But they uncovered nothing connected to the events which occurred over the northern Philippines that night.

But how then did they get on Ozzi's phone trail or even know enough to start looking for him? the Gitmos asked the Kai team. What's more, how did they know about the Stingers, and the hangar and Ramosa and the
sharfa?
Did they have help—as in “inside help”? Just by body language alone, the Kai team seemed to indicate this was the case, and that it went beyond simply tapping into the NSA's ECHELON system, as the Gitmo group had done. But then the Kais warily eyed the SEALs, the SDS guys, even the DSA officers, anyone not part of the original 9/11 group and buttoned up.
“We'll tell you later,”
was all they said.

The reunion celebration was brief; everyone knew they had to get moving. It was imperative they get out of the hangar before someone else crashed in on
them
—that seemed to be the pattern these days. Plus the Stingers were gone, on their way to the United States, and the puke Ramosa had the
sharfa.
They had to try and catch up to them.