Strike Force Delta (13 page)

The ship turned 180 degrees and was now heading toward the Mediterranean Sea. It was moving at incredible speed, its four jet engines firing in afterburner mode. Ryder soon joined the activity on the deck. The trio of helicopters was in position, rotors turning. Some of those team members who were going—Delta guys, SEALs, SDS, 36 in all—were wearing uniforms still dirty from the mission to Loki Soto. It made no difference to them, though. Their shoulder patches were clean.

The copters were loaded up with little ceremony. As always, most of the troopers were carrying short-stock M16s with extended magazines. But some were also carrying backup weapons such as Mossberg shotguns or grenade launchers. Each man also had his razor-sharp bayonet attached to his first weapon of choice. This was a trademark of the team.

The mood was grim but determined. Murphy had been right. Romantic subplots aside, they'd all thought of Li as one of them—just as much as the SEALs who'd defected or the SDS guys or the original Delta operators. They
had
to go avenge her death. Had to find her killers and had to make them pay. Or at least die trying.

The question, though, was
how
were they going to do it?

Usually they were very well prepared before leaving on a mission. Everything planned to the last detail by Murphy, backed up by intelligence from the Spooks. Just like the recent attack on the Loki Soto prison. Noodled down to the second, never complex, always beautifully timed. And never without enough equipment, weapons, and fuel.

But this? This was different. They didn't even know where they were going. Only that they were heading deep into Al Qaeda territory. That is, if they could even get that far. But again, that was the whole idea. Successful or not, they had to try. They would just have to pick up stuff they needed along the way.

There were some last-minute additions to the strike force. Team members could be seen throwing such items as extra ammo, flares, and American flags onto the waiting copters. One of the Delta guys called a sailor over and made a quick request of him. The sailor disappeared only to reappear a minute later bearing the man's hollow-body guitar. The Delta guy took his knife from his belt, quickly snipped the strings from the instrument, and took them with him. The sailor casually threw the de-stringed guitar over the side of the ship.

Murphy soon joined Ryder on the deck. He was carrying two things he had to give to the pilot. One was a simple black box; inside was a yellow cell phone. Ryder studied the device for a moment. It was videocapable, so they would be able to receive pictures through it. It also had a scramble feature, meaning it would be almost impervious to eavesdropping.

“This is the most secure phone in the world,” Murphy told him. “So be careful how and when you use it. And protect it with your life. We don't want it falling into the wrong hands.”

The second item was a small duffel bag. Murphy put it firmly in Ryder's hands and then indicated he should look in it. Ryder undid the top string and peered inside. The bag was full of money.

“Goddamn,” he swore. “How much is in here?”

“Two million dollars,” Murphy replied casually. “It's all I brought with me.”

“But what's it for?” Ryder asked.

“You're going to Afghanistan,” Murphy told him. “
Everything
is for sale there. This might come in handy on your way. It might also help out once you get back on the ground.”

Murphy then told Ryder he and the Spooks were already working on a way to, at least, get the team to their destination intact and with some of the equipment they might need when they got there. But it was definitely going to be a shoestring thing, with nothing guaranteed along the way.

“Any help you can give us will be appreciated,” Ryder told him.

Finally the copters were ready to take off. They only had enough fuel to reach the tip of Africa or maybe southwestern Europe, still several hundred miles away. They would have to feel their way across the Med and to the Middle East from there. It was a daunting task for any special ops group—but the Ghosts were different. They were good at finding their way in the dark.

The copters were just about to get the go sign from Bingo standing up on the flying deck when there was some movement down by the stern.

Eight men had marched in close formation to the deck just above where the copters were ready to leave.

It was Delta Team Thunder. Still in bandages all of them, still weak and marked from their beatings, they'd come out nonetheless to see the strike force off. They stood at attention and on their commander's call went into a rigid salute.

Ryder was standing next to the lead copter. He looked up at the Delta guys and felt that lump in his throat again.

Damn. . .
.

He finally climbed aboard his copter. Bingo gave the go sign and up they went, all three Blackhawks, one right after another. It was only seconds before they were all airborne.

They formed up and immediately turned toward land. As Ryder settled into the copilot's seat of the lead copter, psyching himself for what lay ahead, the red cell phone rang.

It was Johnny Johnson, the CO of Delta Thunder.

“I appreciate your sendoff,” Ryder told him. “It means a lot to us.”

“It means a lot to us as well,” Johnson replied, his voice strong and determined. “Especially after what you guys did for us. And we know what you're going through. So let me promise you this: No matter where it is you're heading, or how you get there, my men and I will join you as soon as we can. . . .”

It was another long night above Afghanistan.

The strange-looking airplane had been airborne for six hours and 32 minutes. In that time, it had endlessly circled a small target area over the western part of the country, going nowhere fast. The seven-man crew was already drained. It had been a bumpy night, with turbulence shaking them ever since takeoff. Still, they had six more hours of flying to go before they could even think about landing. And even then, after a little food and a little sleep they'd be back up here again, circling, circling, circling . . . like some monstrous mythical bird unable to find its way home.

The aircraft's official name was EC-130H2/P. It most resembled the American-built C-130 Hercules cargo plane; indeed, stripped down to the bare essentials the EC-130H2/P was a typical 130. But there was nothing typical about it in its current form. In fact, it was probably one of the weirdest airplanes ever built.

Most noticeable was its elongated nose; it stuck out
nine feet from the front of the cockpit. Looking out over it were a multitude of oversize cockpit windows, tinted black and resembling bugs' eyes. There were wires strung from these cockpit windows back to the aircraft's tail fin, and on these wires hung mysterious-looking gray spools. The tail wings themselves were hideously distorted; there were four instead of just two, and each of these four winglets had a small forest of antennae sprouting from it.

The aircraft carried no country markings or insignia. The fuselage and main wings were extra thick, giving the overall impression that the plane had muscles. Plexiglas blisters ran up and down the airframe. More strange protrusions grew behind the four overly large turboprop engines. The plane itself was painted crystalcamouflage black to mimic the stars at night. This only added to its bizarre, sinister appearance.

On the airplane's underbelly was the strangest thing of all. It was an igloo-shaped compartment that could be raised and lowered from the body of the aircraft. Called the Snowball by the crew, it was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the U.S. military.

This strange bird was not built for combat. It carried no weapons, or not the typical ones anyway. It was a psych-ops plane, an aircraft jammed with electronic gear whose purpose was to influence the hearts and minds of the people it was flying over, in this case the wild hill tribes of northwest Afghanistan. Predictably nicknamed
Psyclops
, the plane could bend minds, shape opinions, “get under the skull” in psych-ops lingo, of anyone within its reach. It could do this in several ways, all of them highly classified.

The plane was flown by the 31st Special Operations
Group. Its call sign was Commando Solo—
commando
meaning “special operations” and
solo
meaning what they did they did alone. But its crew wasn't black warriors or deep-ops types. In fact, of the seven onboard, two were cops, two were volunteer firemen, one was a high school teacher, one was a banker, and one was a paramedic.

And maybe the strangest thing of all was that these men didn't belong to the CIA or the DIA, AFIA, NSA, NRO, or any of the short list of America's deep-secret operations like Ruby Fruit, Seabreeze, and Team 99.

They were actually part-time soldiers. Members of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard.

Civilians, in uniform.

It was now 0100 hours.

For most of the night the
Psyclops
airplane had been orbiting above a province near the Afghani-Iranian border called Badghis. Staying steady at fifteen-thousand feet and 140 knots, they performed one 360-degree turn every 20 minutes. This meant the airplane was always just a little bit tipped to the side, making it impossible to set anything down—a clipboard, a coffee cup, the latest
Playboy
—without having it slide away.

Captain J.C. Dow was the pilot of this weird airplane. Fifty-one years old with close-cropped hair, he was chief of police in the small Pennsylvania town of Indiantown Gap. His copilot, Clancy Cook, was also 51, also a cop. He served on the PD of Harrisburg, the city that the 31st SOG called home. Dow and Cook had been members of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard for more than 20 years.

The other five members of the crew were the DJs, as in
disc jockeys
. The most innocuous thing the aircraft
did was broadcast its own radio programming. Every night, like some massive overnight shift, the DJs sent out news and music to the Afghan people below. “To all you young lovers out there. . .,” as their crew chief used to say. The music was a mix of ethnic Afghani, Euro-beat, and Elvis, around-the-clock, with no commercial breaks.

But this was just one of the airplane's abilities. It could also broadcast its own TV programs, which, like the radio shows, were filled with American propaganda. When the conditions were right, the DJs could break in on regular TV programming below, overwhelming the local signal and barging in with one of their own. The airplane also had the ability to flood the Internet with messages of its own creation, this by carrying an extremely powerful mobile version of a WiFi. The plane even had a TV band on board that could be used only by the President of the United States, should he want to address the Afghani people directly.

Psyclops
could also broadcast announcements through its wing-mounted loudspeakers directly to the ground below, using an electronic voice that was designed to sound authoritarian and godlike. Sometimes it could be heard up to 40 miles away.

The plane had photorecon ability, could drop leaflets and even send out electromagnetic jamming pulses.

And then they had the Snowball. . . .

Again, while the mission of the
Psyclops
was to basically screw with the average Afghani head, on the books at least the plane was on a humanitarian mission. In the first Gulf War, due to psych-ops, mostly leaflet drops, one hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers surrendered or deserted.
How many would have died if they'd gone on fighting?

This was what the crew was doing above Badghis territory this night. Bombarding those below with messages from America, some subtle, some not so. And there was no heavy lifting involved. Much of what rained down from the
Psyclops
plane was preprogrammed, written, and recorded in dark rooms by men high up on the security chain. For the
Psyclops
crew, most times it was just a matter of pushing the right buttons.

In a way, that made what they did even more curious.

These days, if they flew high enough, Captain Dow imagined he could look right over the top of Iran and see the fires and smoke of the real war still raging in Iraq. Strange, but it was almost a lonely feeling, this yearning for distant thunder. It wasn't like he and the others
wanted
to be over there—they just wanted people to know that
they
were over
here
. Contributing. Trying to win one war, with about one-tenth the manpower, as their comrades to the west were trying to win another.

They just didn't carry much juice. Sure, the
Psyclops
was a top-secret aircraft, but not like a Stealth bomber or the Aurora spy plane. They were never in the middle of the action. They flew the fringes of combat, always at night, always just beyond the glow.

And they'd been doing it like this for many, many months now. Unheralded by necessity. Out of touch with their families due to the strict security. Unnoticed and uncounted, by even the higher-ups. It was easy to think that they'd been forgotten as well.

It was strange then that on this flight, which was just like all the others, Captain Dow was feeling a bit odd.
He was a man of hunches—poker, the state lottery, the racetrack. And he had a good record of guessing right. Sometimes he was not sure where these premonitions came from; sometimes they made little sense. But the ones that seemed the most unlikely, the most out of left field, usually proved to be the ones that came true. . . .

And tonight, this hunch for some reason was telling him that these long uneventful flights that they were so resigned to doing were about to change.

That somehow, someway, they'd be seeing action soon.

The place was called Reggio di Brizzi. It was located on the southernmost tip of Italy, at the very end of the boot.

There was a small U.S. support base here called LORDS. Pentagon-speak for Long Range Distribution System, it was a logistics center, run by the U.S. Navy but serving all branches of the U.S. military.