Strike Force Bravo (3 page)

He was heading for a barracks built separately from this main compound; indeed, it was nearly a half-mile farther down the road. It was a slightly smaller building, with its own half-dozen rings of razor wire encircling it. While Ozzi had seen small armies of guards watching over the Islamic detainees back at the main compound, the road leading to this barracks was being guarded by three Bradley Fighting Vehicles, each sporting a huge cannon and several machine guns onboard.

His Hummer reached the barracks' main gate and a squad of Army Rangers appeared. Ozzi had his ID card scanned once, twice, three times. Finally the Hummer was allowed in.

Inside the front door of the building he was met by another squad of Army troops. Green Berets, no less. The Army is all over this place, he thought. Two were guarding a door at the far end of the room; three others were manning a check-in station. Once again Ozzi's bar code was triple-scanned. Then he was frisked. He was beginning to think there were little green men from Mars behind the next door.

He was finally led into the room, escorted by two Green Berets. Four men in prison garb were sitting around a crude metal table. Two were sporting bandages on their heads and hands. They were not Arabs. All four were white, obviously Americans, obviously military. The oldest was in his early forties and had bright red hair. He was one of the bandaged. Ozzi pegged him as the officer in the group. The other three were just kids, like him, in their early twenties. All three were the size of linebackers, though, with WWF muscles straining the upper sleeves of their bright orange detainee clothes.

Definitely Delta Force…
Ozzi thought.

The men barely looked up when Ozzi walked in. They were not handcuffed or in leg restraints, as the Al Qaeda prisoners up the road had been. But they were so rough-looking, it seemed like they should have been. Ozzi's Green Beret escort surprised him by turning on their heels and leaving without a word.

Suddenly it was just him and the four strange men.

He introduced himself as a member of the President's National Security Council, a lie. He asked if each man was comfortable, if they needed coffee or a cold drink. All four declined with a shake of the head. Ozzi got down to business. He told the men of the startling events at the Tonka Tower now just 12 hours old. He explained in detail the actions of the special ops force that, at the very last second, managed to save the lives of hundreds of American children. As he spun his tale, Ozzi watched each man's reaction, hoping a facial expression could provide him a clue. A raised eyebrow or a slightly dropped jaw could speak volumes about a person, depending on what he was hearing when his guard was let down.

But these men were very odd. They were interested in hearing what had happened—and were obviously learning about it for the first time. Yet they didn't seem especially surprised by the dramatic events.

At the end of it there was a long silence. Finally the guy with the red hair spoke. His name tag identified him as
CURRY, R
.

“The world is rid of eight more mooks—and that's a good thing,” he said. “But why are you telling us this?”

“Because of what happened at the Strait of Hormuz last month,” Ozzi replied sternly. “We thought you guys might know the people who were involved in this latest incident, seeing as you were involved in the last….”

What did these four men have to do with Hormuz? A lot. On that day, the crucial information regarding the on-coming hijacked airliners had been delivered to the
Lincoln
by an unauthorized helicopter—actually a Stealth version of a Blackhawk helicopter. It had been chased by two F-14 Tomcats, then battered by anti aircraft fire from the carrier's escort ships, and finally flew through a massive barrage from the
Lincoln's
own close-in guns, which caused it to crash onto the deck of the carrier just as the ship was halfway through the strait. This guy,
Curry, R
., was the man who'd piloted that helicopter and somehow lived to tell about it.

And the other three? Their story was just as unlikely. Four of the ten airliners seized that day had been diverted by various means from slamming into the carrier. One crashed. The three others had been saved, in midair, by the three muscle men. In each case acting alone, they'd overcome the hijackers and helped set the planes down safely, saving all onboard. The grateful Muslim passengers knew these people as “the Crazy Americans.” Though they were heroes, they'd been detained by the U.S. military once the planes were secured. When they refused to answer any questions about the events over Hormuz or what they were doing in the weeks before, the military, thinking they were rogue mercenaries at best, locked them up here in Gitmo, hoping they'd eventually crack. That's how the DSA learned about them.

Ozzi took some photos from his briefcase. Two showed the pair of Harrier jump jets that had appeared at the tail end of the battle over the
Lincoln
. Another showed a very unusual Blackhawk helicopter. Bigger, longer, more bulked-up—like a gunship on steroids—it had all kinds of weapons hanging off of it. This was believed to be Curry's mysterious helicopter, outfitted like the Harriers as radar-evading Stealth aircraft. Ozzi showed them surveillance photos of shadowy soldiers in black uniforms, very similar to the battle suits these four men had been wearing the day of the Hormuz attack. But these visual aids did little to shake the four men. They hadn't spoken a word about their identities since being taken into custody by the U.S. military, and it didn't appear that was going to change now. But Ozzi had to try. After all, that was the purpose of his trip down here.

“So?” he prompted them after making the case that they were obviously involved in defeating the Al Qaeda attacks that day at Hormuz. “Anyone want to 'fess up?”

The four men just looked at the floor. Their body language said it all. No way they were talking to anyone, about anything.

“You're not prisoners,” Ozzi told them. “Not officially, anyway. It's not a name, rank, and serial number sort of thing.”

Still, nothing.

“I don't understand,” Ozzi said, betraying some frustration. “We're all
Americans
here.”

The men shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Ozzi thought he might have hit the mark.

He said to them: “The involvement of these strange people and the strange aircraft at Hormuz is one of the most closely guarded secrets in history. Secret because, despite their valor, their cunning, their bravado, no one in Washington knows who the hell they are.”

He paused for a moment.

“So just help me out here,” he started again. “These guys who pulled off the rescue in Singapore
must
be friends of yours—buddies from your old unit. How did they do it? How did they know the mooks were going to blow up that tower? How could they
be in
that TV helicopter?”

Silence from the four men.

“Do they have ESP?” Ozzi asked them facetiously. “Are they psychic?”

The men looked at one another. Finally the biggest of the lot, a guy named Hunn, just shrugged. Like Curry, he was bandaged up. “Maybe they were stealing the copter when the shit went down.”

Ozzi laughed—but then realized the man was serious.

“But…” he began stumbling over his words. “Why would they be stealing a helicopter in Singapore?”

“You'll have to ask them that,” Hunn said.

Ozzi was perplexed. “And while they are stealing this copter,” he asked the men, “this international incident goes down, and they just happened to be in the right place, at the right time, to save the day—in front of billions?”

“Well, that's just something else about them,” Hunn said. “They're
really
lucky.”

Hunn thought a moment, then added, “Or at least they think they are.”

Silence. The men clammed up again.

Ozzi said: “This is a very important thing, to a lot of very important people. Heroes or not, there is no way of knowing what's going to happen to your friends if they remain off the reservation like this. These things make people in Washington nervous—and no one needs that these days. So, what do you say? Can you throw me a bone here?”

More silence. But then the guy named Curry shifted in his seat again.

“What's in it for us?” he finally asked Ozzi.

At last….

“I can get you out of here, for starters,” Ozzi replied. He wasn't telling them they'd have to sign a loyalty pledge and would be kept under surveillance for many years to come.

But to Ozzi's surprise, the four men didn't seem impressed. Not enough to crack.

“There might also be a bit of mon-e-tary re-mu-ner-ation,” Ozzi added, stretching out those last two words to almost comic proportions. He was authorized to offer each man up to $250,000 for any jackpot information.

Still, the mention of money seemed to have zero effect on them.

Finally, Ozzi just blurted out: “OK—what
do
you want?”

The four men all sat up.

Curry spoke. “We want two things,” he said. “Those guys—our friends out there, the ones who survived—have to be pardoned.”

“Pardoned?” Ozzi interrupted him. “For what?”

“For everything,”
Curry replied sternly. “If there are any federal or military charges against them, for things done before or after Hormuz, they have to be dropped.”

Ozzi had no idea what Curry was talking about, but he indicated it would be no problem. “What else?” he asked.

Curry took a deep breath. “For all the guys who didn't make it that day, and there were a bunch of them, they have to be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. For bravery. Above and beyond.”

Ozzi was startled by the request. These guys didn't want their freedom; they didn't want money. They just wanted their friends, both alive and otherwise, to be done right.

“Now can you do that?” Curry asked him, leaning far across the table. “Or are you just a messenger boy? A small fish?”

Ozzi was insulted, but only for a moment. These guys had a story, and he knew he had to hear it.

“Tell me everything,” he said, finally sitting down at the table. “And we'll go from there.”

 

Ozzi emerged from the special barracks three hours later. He climbed into the back of the waiting Hummer and told the driver to get him back to the airstrip immediately.

It was now close to noon, but Ozzi had lost all track of time. His head was spinning, his hands shaking. He'd been in the DSA since its existence. He'd heard some crazy stuff in that time, but never anything like this.

Ozzi had been taught from his first days in the intelligence game that after leaving an interrogation he should write down his first impressions immediately. Key words, bits of phrases, body language. Inevitably, these notations would prove invaluable when it came time to compose a formal report.

But now, bouncing down the dusty Cuban road, his pen hovering over his notebook, he was suddenly at a loss for words. He didn't know what to say. How could he start writing anything about what he'd just heard and the people he'd just met?

But he felt compelled to write something down. So he scribbled just one word:
Patriots.

Alexandria, Virginia

Fox found Ozzi in the bar at the Holiday Inn down near Reagan Airport.

The bar was on the fifteenth floor of the hotel; it was a rotating, flying saucer–shaped affair that gave patrons alternating views of the airport, Washington, D.C., and the deceptively peaceful waters of the Potomac.

It was now midnight, the end of one long day for Fox and the beginning of another. His wife had dinner on the table for him when he finally got home around 11.00
P.M
., but a pink Post-it note with Ozzi's cell number was also waiting on his plate. He and Ozzi had a quick phone conversation, and 10 minutes later Fox was back in his car, speeding down Interstate 95, eating a hastily made peanut butter sandwich and working his own Nokia. Fox knew his deputy had arrived back in the D.C. area at noon that day and yet he never contacted the office. This was unusual behavior for Ozzi, usually a slave to the rules. It was also unusual for him to want to meet Fox in such an out-of-the-way place at so late an hour.

The bartender was clearing away three empty glasses in front of Ozzi when Fox walked in. There was no one else at the bar. Fox smelled bourbon. Cheap stuff, mixed with Coke. He never knew Ozzi to drink much or drink alone. Yet here he was, in the middle of the night, doing both.

Fox took the seat next to him. Ozzi thanked him for driving so far and apologized for the late hour, but both were necessary, he said. The story he'd heard from the “Gitmo Four” was still spinning around his head, just as the bar was spinning around D.C. Indeed, he'd been going in circles up here most of the day. In that time, he'd concluded it might be wise to brief Fox somewhere out of the Pentagon's immediate neighborhood. Fox told him he understood.

Ozzi ordered another drink.

“I know this will sound like a bad Clancy novel,” he began. “But what I just heard from those guys down there
has
to be the truth, only because I don't think anyone could have made it up.”

Fox tried not to roll his eyes. Ozzi was bright and dedicated but still somewhat new to the spy game. Fox ordered a drink for himself and lit up a Marlboro.

“OK, Lieutenant,” he said. “Let's hear your report….”

 

The story the four men had told Ozzi
was
incredible:

Six months before, they'd been asked to join a supersecret special ops team being put together by a shadowy figure known only as “Bobby Murphy.” No one knew who Murphy was or who he worked for. The team was given the latest in weapons and NSA eavesdropping equipment, put on a spy ship disguised to look like a container vessel, and then set loose in the Middle East. Their mission: to track down and eliminate anyone they could find who was connected to the attacks of September 11th. Whether you were one of the terrorist masterminds or just some mook who bought the tickets for the hijackers, you were on this team's hit list and they were coming to get you. Operating in the deepest secrecy, not only had they assassinated a number of the 9/11 culprits, but they'd done so with such speed and brutality, they'd managed to strike terror themselves into the hearts of many Muslims in the Persian Gulf region, guilty or not.

Then Ozzi delivered a real bombshell: the four men also told him that they'd been involved in a bioterror attack on the Gulf's food supply and the aerial bombing of a bank building in downtown Abu Dhabi. Fox was jolted by this news. About two months earlier someone had poisoned a large shipment of fruit just before it left port in Libya. The fruit was being sold by a company owned by Al Qaeda. Hundreds died from the tainted citrus all over the Arab Middle East. The fruit company, a $44-million-a-year operation, was out of business in a week.

Just days before that, a bank in Abu Dhabi had been bombed by two mysterious aircraft, at noon, while the streets around it were filled with people attending a government festival. The bank had held $12 million in cash belonging to Al Qaeda, money used to finance their army of
jihad
fighters. The bombing attack burned this money to a crisp. It also toppled the 16-story building and killed more than a thousand people on the ground.

That these two events happened was public knowledge, of course. The twin attacks had been headlines until the gigantic assault on the USS
Lincoln
knocked them off the front page. Though Fox was aware of a CIA disinformation campaign blaming these attacks on the Israelis, to his knowledge no one had ever claimed responsibility for them. Until now.

They both ordered another drink. Fox asked for a double. Ozzi continued with his report. Yes, it was them at Hormuz, this after they broke the terrorists' code at the last moment. But then Ozzi told Fox of other bloody missions the supersecret team had run. They added up to a string of seemingly unrelated incidents that had baffled intelligence services around the world for months. The rescue of a passenger liner near the Aegean Sea, an air strike on a notorious terrorist camp in Algeria. The terror bombing of a wedding hall in Beirut. The brutal executions of several high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives all caught on videotape.

Fox began gulping his drink. Ozzi's tales conjured up images of futuristic commandos who flew Stealth helicopters and invisible Harriers and who operated off a ghost ship. It
did
seem like pulp fiction, but there was no doubt that some kind of supersecret team existed.
Someone
had created all this havoc. And the people Ozzi had just talked to were living proof of it.

“But who the hell prepped them?” Fox wanted to know. One of the DSA's jobs was to keep an eye on the military's special operations forces, their weaponry, their missions. “We should have heard about these guys before they got through their first day.”

“That's just it,” Ozzi said. “The team members weren't recruited in any normal fashion. They were all called in the middle of the night by this mystery man, Bobby Murphy, or his confederates, of which he must have a few. They convinced these people that this was a happening thing, and somehow this Murphy guy was able to get them just about everything they needed—with absolutely no one knowing about it. A double squad from Delta Force, some Air Force special ops guys to drive the choppers, some Navy guys to run the boat, and a couple top-notch pilots all signed on. Murphy even got ahold of two Harrier jump jets—and stealthy ones no less! He arranged for unlimited air refuelings, weapons resupply, the works. And the Gitmo guys insist Murphy was running the whole show, no oversight, no nothing. That is, until he got arrested. Now, I've never heard of him—have you?”

Fox shook his head no. He knew every important special ops player in the U.S. military as well as those in the intelligence community. None of them was named Bobby Murphy. He pulled out his Palm Pilot and accessed his computer back at the Pentagon. He ran the name “Robert Murphy” through the employment files of the Defense Department, the CIA, the NSA, and every other U.S. intelligence agency. He came up with 13 hits, but all of them were low-level bureaucrats and enlisted men.

Fox showed the results to Ozzi. “I'll have one of our people check out all of these guys,” he said. “Although, the ‘Bobby Murphy' name is probably just a cover.”

Ozzi agreed with a tip of his glass. Fox lit another Marlboro.

“How did you get these guys at Gitmo to open up to you?” he asked Ozzi. “They've been sitting down there for more than a month and no one has got a peep out of them. Everyone thought they were Israelis or mercs of some kind and that's why they were keeping their mouths shut. I'm surprised they gave you the time of day.”

“Well, they're a strange crew,” Ozzi replied. “They're not like the hard-ass operators we usually deal with. They're…well,
different.
”

“Different, how?”

Ozzi drained his drink, then signaled for another.

“I can't explain it any more than to say these guys are authentic heroes. I mean
real
patriots,” he told Fox emphatically. “They bleed the flag, Major. Remember the stories about the New York firefighters and cops who saved people on nine-eleven? Ordinary people doing extraordinary things? That describes these guys to a T. You see, they all have something in common, something the regular special op guy might not have. Every one of them lost someone on September eleventh or to some other terrorist attack. So it was personal, you know? They were so focused, their unit patch showed the Twin Towers for God's sake. And what they went through for this Murphy guy was unbelievable. They almost had me in tears.”

Fox sipped his drink. It sounded a lot like what Israel did after the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics in 1972. When a number of their Olympic athletes were taken hostage and eventually murdered by Palestinian gunmen, the Israelis secretly sought revenge. They identified about two dozen PLO members who'd been connected to the massacre and quietly, over the course of the next decade, hunted each one down and put a bullet through his head. What Ozzi was telling him mirrored the Israeli model yet was pumped to the max with stealthy Harriers, Delta guys, and an enormous undercover spy ship.

Fox asked his question again: “Those guys have been locked up down there for a month. Why would they spill now? Did you make them any promises?”

Ozzi shrugged. “Nothing we can't deliver. I just assured them nothing would happen to their friends. That we'd either just let them fade away or wait until they reveal themselves. The Gitmo guys think they're trying to get back here anyhow, to get back home on their own, and I say more power to them. They did some questionable things over there, but the good far outweighs the bad, in my opinion.

“I also told them I'd do everything in my power to make sure that what they did was officially recognized somehow—especially for the guys they lost while they were carrying out their missions. They say their buddies who got killed deserve Medals of Honor. I tend to agree with them.”

But Fox frowned mightily at this, though Ozzi was too busy sipping his drink to notice. As a senior man in the DSA, Fox knew a bit more about the politics of special operations. Rule One: No matter how brave the participants might be, they had to be tightly controlled, as exposure—of them or their mission—might lead to anything from national embarrassment to all-out war. It was a different world from what went on aboveground. And that world was no place for spies who liked staying out in the cold.

Fox was also somewhat surprised at Ozzi's reaction to the Gitmo Four. The young lieutenant was as loyal as the next man and still impressionable to some degree. But never had Fox seen him like this, with so many stars in his eyes.

Fox asked him: “So, there's no doubt in your mind that the guys who did the Tonka rescue are the same guys who showed up the day the
Lincoln
was attacked?”

“No doubt at all,” Ozzi replied. “It's the same MO—fly by the seat of your pants, show a lot of balls, but be damn lucky at the same time.”

“Well, that might have been their thing before,” Fox said, slowly. “Poisoning fruit, bombing banks, and so on. But this last time, they did it for all the world to see. They're all over the news channels, with this Singapore thing and not just in this country, either. They're celebrities. And frankly, that's making some people nervous.”

“So?” Ozzi asked.

“So they just can't be allowed to ‘fade away,'” Fox said, “someone has to find these guys and bring them in—”

“Bring them in?”
Ozzi asked, incredulous. He was drunk and suddenly getting pissed off at his boss, which was rare. Usually he and Fox agreed on everything. “Listen, Major,” Ozzi said, words slurring but sincere. “I'm not such a pup here. Especially after what I just heard down in Gitmo. And I know those guys are not a bunch of angels. But going after them, in any way, shape, or form, questioning them about what they did, it would be like going after all those firemen and cops at the World Trade Center that day. Few of them were angels, either, I suspect. But look what they became. Same thing for the people on that plane that went down in Pennsylvania. The people at the Pentagon. Our first boots on the ground in Afghanistan. God damn it, these guys are just like all of them. And they've gone through a lot. Why can't we just leave them alone?”

“Because we have to follow orders,
Lieutenant,
” Fox said. with heavy emphasis on the last word.

Ozzi just stared back at him. It was clear Fox didn't like this any more than he did. Someone must have been pressing him from above.

“That asshole, Rushton?” Ozzi asked him. “He's behind this?”

Fox just nodded and sipped his drink. “He wants to send Team ninety-nine out after them. He's logging it in as a rescue mission.”

Ozzi couldn't believe his ears. In the special ops biz, Team 99 was known as the “Super-SEALs,” though some suspected it was a self-designation. In any case, they weren't ordinary fish. They were hunter-killers, a particularly cunning and vicious SEAL element that was sent on only the toughest missions, usually to track down the most notorious bad guys. They, too, were a very secret unit.

“I had to call Rushton after we talked,” Fox revealed to Ozzi. “I had no choice. He'd been burning up my line all day—meanwhile I'm stalling for time until I hear from you. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that if you got a lead on the Tonka Tower guys, he was unleashing T Ninety-Nine.”

Ozzi continued staring at his boss in boozy disbelief. “But those assholes will more likely kill them than rescue them,” he argued, but weakly, as if all the air had gone out of him. “And those people out there are heroes, sir. They don't deserve that….”

Fox's eyes were downcast. “I know,” he said. “But heroes or not, we just can't have a rogue team like them operating beyond the realm. No control? No oversight? No accountability? They might be right out of the movies, but this is the real world. And in the real world, these things cannot be allowed to exist.”