Strike Force Bravo (8 page)

Ryder heard himself groan. This was no seaplane. It was a boat—a
flying
boat.

“This is the pooch you were asking us about?” he said to Fox.

“‘Pooch'?” Fox replied with feigned insult. “Colonel, this airplane features the best in Japanese engineering and manufacturing. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces have been flying these things for more than fifteen years. It's also just about the only flying boat operating today. It can fly almost anywhere in the Pacific, get to islands that have no runways, pick up people who are sick or whose ships are sinking. Hundreds owe their lives to this aircraft.”

Ryder just shook his head. “And
this
is how we're going where we're going?”

Fox nodded.

“And you expect us to fly it?”

“Can you?” Fox asked them.

Ryder and Gallant contemplated the huge aerial boat again. There was an old saying in aeronautics: If it looks good, it flies good. But the reverse was also true. Just looking at the airplane, Ryder knew it would be a bitch to fly.

“Fifteen years old, you say?” he asked Fox. “Does it have flight computers onboard? Pilot assistance? Fly-by-wire, things like that?”

“You bet,” was the reply. “The guys who flew it here tell me it handles like a dream.”

Ryder and Gallant just looked at each other.
The guys who flew it here?

“If they loved it so much, where are they now?” Ryder asked Fox looking around. “And why can't they be the drivers?”

Fox readjusted his wraparound sunglasses. “Number one, even though they are on the CIA's payroll, they don't have the security clearances that you guys do,” he said. “Number two, they have an idea where we are going…and, well, they wanted no part of it. So they're on their way up to Saigon as we speak.”

Sure enough, Ryder and Gallant could see a small motor launch north of them, two people onboard, waving furiously but moving away from them as fast as they could. In the movies, this was the part where one of the men on the boat would yell out: “So long, suckers!”

“So you really
were
counting on us to get everyone out of here in this thing?” Ryder asked him. “That was a leap of faith.”

“Your friends in Gitmo assured us you could do it,” Fox told him. “So did your service résumé.”

Ryder threw his expended cigarette over the side. He could fly anything; he knew that. Ditto for Gallant. Though he was a chopper pilot, he knew his way around big planes, too. But this monster?

“You say this thing is Japanese military?” he asked Fox.

The man nodded. “Self-Defense Forces, right. It's called a ‘Kai.'”

The plane was unmarked—or more accurately, the huge red ball of the Japanese national insignia had been painted over, hastily.

“If this belongs to the Japanese Navy, what are you guys doing with it?”

Without missing a beat, Fox replied: “We stole it….”

Ryder and Gallant looked at each other again and did a simultaneous eye roll. “Stole it?” Ryder asked.

“Well, it's a game we play,” Fox said, as if these things were routine. “They know we've got it. They're just not trying too hard to find it.”

 

It took just 10 minutes to get the composite team loaded aboard the enormous Kai flying boat.

The eight Delta guys sat up front, just behind the crew compartment. The half-dozen Team 99 SEALs, still sulking, were huddled at the opposite end of the compartment. In between were the State Department Security guards, 10 in all, yet to be seen without their sunglasses. These guys were as top-secret as the DSA itself. Tough and very, very quiet. Facing straight ahead, they resembled automatons.

Ryder and Gallant settled into the pilots' seats. Fox hadn't misled them here at least; the control panel was highly automated, just the way they liked it. There were extensive microprocessing assist units and everything was indeed fly-by-wire. This meant tiny computers actually flew the airplane by responding to the movements of the pilots on the controls and not through cables or wires. The flight panel looked as good as anything found inside a modern airliner.

They ran down a checklist. Ryder recited from a document crudely translated from Japanese, as Gallant tried to pick out the corresponding control system. They started the engines; the four huge turboprops coughed to life in sequence, like clockwork. They were big, noisy, powerful, with tons of horsepower in each. And yet the torque barely rocked the flying boat as it floated in the calm inlet water.

Fox took up the seat behind Ryder and Gallant. Martinez was installed in a jump seat located on the far edge of the cockpit, silently looking on.

It took about twenty minutes to check and recheck everything. Finally they were ready for takeoff. The people in the back sat stoically. Fox, however, wasn't so calm. Convincing Higher Authority that including the rogue team was a good idea had taken some doing. It was only the passion displayed by Ozzi after he spoke with the Gitmo Four that gave Fox the gumption to even suggest it to General Rushton and the NSC. In the end they agreed only because not doing so would have wasted precious time. That clock was still ticking, and Fox knew with each passing moment their window of opportunity was getting smaller.

Finally Ryder just looked over at Gallant, who gave him a mock thumbs-up. Could a jet test pilot and a special ops chopper driver really get the huge flying tub into the air?

They would soon find out.

 

Bingo and most of the remaining occupants were now on the bow of the huge hidden containership. Only here was there a respite from the heavy camouflaged top; about two dozen people were crowded on the deck now, including the Vietnamese woman, Ky Li.

They watched as the flying boat's four huge engines whipped themselves into a frenzy, gaining more power by the second. The air around the ship seemed to be vibrating, so powerful were the propellers, just 200 feet away.

At last the Kai started moving. The calm waters of the small bay suddenly began to roll. Pushed by the strong props, the big plane did a 180-degree turn, its huge snout for a moment turned right at the front of the secret boat. Many on the ship's deck waved as the airplane bobbed on by.

Flying boats had gone out of style, at least in U.S. forces, just about the time Captain Bingham was graduating kindergarten. He'd never seen one this big before. As it slowly gained speed, plowing through the waves first like a yacht and then like a speedboat, it seemed too large to get into the air, never mind having to rise up from the water to do so. Its takeoff run could stretch on to infinity, though, Bingham thought, and indeed, the plane was now skimming very fast along the inlet's surface. There came another huge roar from the airplane—it was now about a quarter-mile away from the ship. The water around it began spraying up fiercely. The engines roared again. More water, more spray. One last scream from the engines and the huge airplane leaped into the air.

A spontaneous cheer rose from those on the ship. The Kai went up grudgingly, though. At just 50 feet or so, it began a wide shaky turn, its engines now crying and billowing smoke. For one frightening moment it appeared to be in trouble.

But it climbed a little more and then leveled off. It was also heading right for the ship again. More cheers, more waving. Another roar from the engines. The big plane was coming on full guns—but it was not climbing anymore; in fact, it had dipped a little. The noise of those four engines, a moment before so powerful, now became frightening as the plane seemed way too low to clear the top of the ship. Everyone on the deck stopped waving and started ducking. The big Kai went over the
Ocean Voyager
a second later. It clipped the main antenna off the top of the ship's forward mast, sending a rain of parts down past the camouflage canopy and onto those below.

“Jesuzz!” Bingham cried. “Those bozos are trying to kill us!”

The plane somehow cleared the rest of the ship and finally got a little more air under its ass. Flying it was obviously a work in progress for Ryder and Gallant, but at last it began to gain significant altitude. It managed to wag its wings back at those on the ship before taking another long slow turn, this one to the east.

That's when a separate hatch on the deck popped open and a handful of people climbed out. They mixed freely with Bingham's crew. They were a ragged lot. Uncut hair, overgrown goatees, tarnished earrings, thread bare Hawaiian shirts. All were in their early twenties; they looked like a bunch of hip Wall Street investment bankers who'd been shipwrecked for a month or so.

In reality, these were the Spooks, the contingent of computer geniuses that had run the eavesdropping devices aboard the
Ocean Voyager
during its short heyday. They weren't CIA and resented any suggestion that they were. They were, in fact, employees of the National Security Agency, the NSA, America's biggest and probably by size its most secret spy works.

The Head Spook was a guy named Gil Bates. He was just 20 years old. He'd been a key figure in the events leading up to Hormuz—and a controversial one. Not only had he been in charge of the ship's high-tech listening station (still buried at the bottom of the boat); he'd also fathered the plan to attack downtown Abu Dhabi in broad daylight, an act that killed more than a thousand innocent civilians. In many ways, his heart should have been weighed down just as much as Martinez's. But Bates had had a reprieve: he was the one who cracked the terrorists' code at the last possible moment, just before the
Lincoln
was attacked. It was only by his warning, carried to the carrier by Red Curry in his crash landing, that the big carrier had been saved.

Incredibly though, despite all the special ops activity on the boat in the past two hours, no one—not the State Department guards, not the SEALs, not Fox himself—ever asked about the NSA Spooks. And no one onboard the ship was about to volunteer the information.

After all, they had to keep
some thing
s secret.

The Spooks had to allow their eyes to adjust to the sunlight. They didn't come up from the bottom of the boat too often, and today was now an intensely bright day.

“Anyone mention us?” Bates asked Bingham as the Navy captain lit a cigarette for him.

Bingham just shook his head. “All clear as far as I'm concerned.”

But Bates had already started back down the hatch, heading to the bottom of the ship again. His eyes were starting to hurt.

“That's good,” he said over his shoulder. “Though I'd prefer it if they thought we were
all
dead.”

Bingham watched the flying boat disappear over the horizon.

“You never know,” he said. “We might still get that wish.”

The cage was made of bamboo.

It was four feet square and just 18 inches high. Forty-seven bamboo sticks held up the top, each one precisely 4 inches from the next. The sticks served as bars. The tiny cage was a jail cell.

This was where the B-2F pilot code-named Atlas found himself when he came to.

His last conscious memory from the night before was of the big bomber falling out of the sky. His engines were barely turning, they'd sucked up so many pieces of the doomed KC-10 tanker. They were heading straight down, the three tiny islands and a lot of dark water rushing toward him. It was an image burned onto his retinas forever. Sitting next to him, Teddy Ballgame was not talking. His nose was pressed against the cockpit window, while Atlas tried to get some control over the wounded bomber.

Then a miracle, it seemed. Suddenly Teddy was shouting: “There! Down there! See it?”

Atlas saw only a strip of pearl white—almost phos-fluorescent in the dark night—cutting through the jungle on one of the islands. He really didn't have much time to think about it, for in the next instant they were at treetop level, and the next he was heading for a very hard landing on that strip of pearl, which turned out to be a beach of sand and white coral. Not a runway, just a flat piece of ground in the midst of the thick jungle.

A hard landing, of course, was just another way of saying a crash landing. But the B-2 was a bat-wing design, and this helped in the last few moments before they hit. Atlas had had the presence of mind to pull the bombers' drag chute just seconds before impact. The combination of the drag chute and the bat wing pulled the front of the airplane up, just for a second, but enough to allow it to glide in, as opposed to going down nose-first.

Still, when it came, the impact was violent. It split Atlas's helmet in two and sent chunks of flight panel flying off in every direction. The windshield gave in, showering him with shards of glass. Fire burst forth. Smoke filled his lungs. It seemed to go on forever, but finally they came to a halt. He recalled looking around the remains of the cockpit and thinking that while he'd survived the crash, he'd also managed to total a $1.5 billion bomber. He lost consciousness soon after that.

When he awoke again, he was inside this box.

 

He was a prisoner of the Abu Sabas terrorist group. They were the Filipino affiliate of Al Qaeda and had been operating in the islands around the northern and central parts of the Philippines for at least a couple years. Their aim was to create a radical Islamic state in this part of southeast Asia—and kill as many nonbelievers as possible in the process.

Known locally as the “Aboos,” the Muslim terror group was vicious even by Al Qaeda standards. They had a penchant for kidnapping American tourists and making long lists of impossible demands for their safe return. When those demands were not met, the group would make good on its threat to execute their hostages. Their favorite means of dispatch: decapitation.

As with all the pilots at the secret base on Oki Jima, Atlas had been briefed on the Aboos, because sometimes their classified missions brought them over territory held by the terror group, just like the mission the night before. But never did Atlas ever think it would amount to anything like this.

It was now about noon. Atlas had been awake for a few hours. Though he was in pain, he was nevertheless coherent and luckily not in shock. He was in a small camp dug into the side of a heavily forested hill. His cage was last in a line of at least a half-dozen. There might have been more, but movement was difficult inside the bamboo box so his vision was limited. As it was, he was forced to lie on his side, with his arms and legs drawn up into a fetal position and his head hard against one corner. He was so scrunched up, he couldn't even tell if he had any broken bones.

He was sure his mission commander, Teddy Ballgame, was in the next box down. His back was to him, but Atlas could see his flight suit and someone had put his boots on top of his cell.

But Teddy wasn't moving; he hadn't moved all day. There were many guards prowling around, easy to spot in their black pajamas and red bandanna ensemble. The small camp was so well guarded, Atlas had not been able to call out to his colleague.

Atlas could see people in the next five boxes down, but again it was hard to get a good read on them. It was also dark in the camp, even though it was the middle of the day. However he thought he could see a woman in the box next to Teddy, a man with a gray beard next to her, and a younger female next to him.

The camp was not only frightening for its gloom; it was putrid as well. There was a stream running next to Atlas's box. Even though he was very thirsty and parched—his guards had given him neither food nor water—he would not have wanted to even dip his fingernail into this slowly trickling water. It looked like an open sewer. There was the smell of body odor, burned rubber, and fetid jungle around the camp.

The stink of death was here as well.

 

Atlas knew he was in trouble. But he also knew that if somehow he was able to live through this, he would have a lot of valuable intelligence to pass along to somebody. Convincing himself that he was actually doing some good here helped keep his anxiety from getting out of control. As it was, though, it was right on the edge.

Many of the Aboos were gathered in a hut in the middle of the camp. Though the living conditions were crude, the hut was equipped with a number of modern devices, including a satellite dish, color TVs, a satellite phone receiver, a GPS device, and many, many weapons. The terrorists also had cell phones capable of taking and transmitting pictures, which they treated like toys.

There was much coming and going around this command hut. The camp would go into lockdown anytime an aircraft was heard; this happened about once an hour. Atlas was keeping a mental list of each one. Some of the aircraft had to be U.S. planes looking for his B-2 and the missing tanker—or so he thought. But most of those he heard were way off in the distance. None had flown directly over the camp.

One problem: Atlas had no idea where he was or how far away he was from his own crash site. He'd been unconscious at least 12 hours and maybe a lot more. His flight uniform was torn and bloodied, especially on the knees and elbows. He believed he'd been dragged for some distance. He also detected the odor of chloroform around him, another tactic known to be used by the Filipino guerrillas for subduing their hostages.

For all he knew, he could have been a hundred miles away from his crash site by now.

 

The heat inside the box became unbearable as the day wore on. An early-afternoon rainstorm saved him. Only a few drops made it down through the jungle canopy, but they were enough to cut the brutal heat a bit.

Once the rain passed, the jungle seemed cooler. The terrorists became more active, leaving the hut and lounging about the garbage-strewn camp. At midafternoon or so, Atlas saw the leader of the group have an animated conversation with two men who appeared to be his officers. A round of orders was given, and soon three underlings were opening up one of the tiger cages. It was the box three down from him, the man with a beard. He was in his fifties and it took a while for the terrorists to untangle him from his cramped position. Even when they finally extracted him, he had trouble standing. The woman in the box next to him was his wife. She began crying out for him. Judging from his emaciated body, Atlas guessed he'd been here at least a couple months.

They took the man to a bench set up next to the main command hut. The man's clothes told Atlas that he was a minister, perhaps a missionary of some kind. A guard approached him with a cup of water but instead of giving it to him to drink threw it in his face. His wife cried out again. One of the Aboo officers arrived with a super-eight video camera. He turned the camera on the dazed man, and the other officers started interrogating him.

Atlas could not hear what was being said exactly, but he could tell the poor man was trying his best to both answer the terrorists' questions and steal glances at his wife, back in her box. By giving her brief smiles and on occasion a wave of his hand he was trying to indicate to her that he was all right.

The taping went on for an hour. The man grew weaker as the terrorists grew angrier. Finally the bench was removed and the man made to stand up. An ancient Willys Jeep appeared from somewhere in the jungle. It stopped in front of the prisoner and his guards. At first Atlas thought the terrorists were moving the minister to a different location. But the man's wife began wailing at the first appearance of the jeep. Whatever was about to happen, she'd obviously seen it before.

Atlas contorted his body, hoping to get a better view. The back panel of the jeep was lowered. A large piece of wood had been bolted to this panel, with belt buckles for straps located at either end.

The man was made to lay his head on this block of wood, his hands put into the buckle restraints. He looked over at his wife; his face was pure white. He knew what was about to happen. She did too. He mouthed some words of comfort to her; Atlas tried to lip-read them. That's how he failed to see the terrorist who walked out from behind the Jeep with the huge ax in his hand.

The terrorist set himself over the man, made sure the camera was running, then raised the ax over his head.

Atlas was able to close his eyes just a second before the blade came down on the minister's neck.