Strike Force Delta (30 page)

And right then and there, the Chief lost it. He felt an ice-cold shiver go up and down his spine and back again. He'd been through combat. He'd murdered innocent people in the name of bloodlust and Allah. He'd seen and felt and smelled and even tasted the worst aspects of war.

But he'd never felt anything like this.

Just like with the Patch, the Crazy Americans were now after
him
. And it was the worst feeling in the world.

He looked out on the city again, this time from a horizontal position, as he could barely move. There were more fires and more smoke and more noise and more gunshots—but suddenly these things weren't forefront in his mind anymore. Suddenly it was his own neck he was thinking about, always a priority but now even more so. They got under your skin; that's what everyone said. First you ignore them. Then you laugh at them. Then
you fight them. And then they beat you.
The Crazy Americans
. One close encounter with them was all it took. They got into your bloodstream, and after that it was only a matter of time before they hunted you down and sliced you up.

Who wanted such a horrible way to go?

It was at that moment that the Chief began making plans for his own escape.

Gil Bates was not looking forward to what came next. He was sitting alone in one of the White Rooms at the bottom of the ship. The video captured from a feed by Al-Qazzaza TV and taken down by accessing the ship's Echelon system had just completed loading onto his hard drive—it contained a zillion megabytes. Once it was done, he would have to watch the beheading of Li Cho, one of the bravest, most beautiful women he'd ever met.

As he was head of the Spooks, this would not be the first Islamic execution tape Bates had ever seen. Nick Berg. Eugene Armstrong. Jack Hensley, Daniel Pearl—Bates had watched them all. It was part of his job as the senior intelligence person on the ship, even though he was barely into his twenties, the result of his being a child prodigy and graduating from MIT at the age of 17. Bates
had
to watch Li's execution video because it most likely contained clues about the people who had killed her, the people whom Ryder and the rest of the team
were in the process of stomping, on this, the Ghosts' last mission. Bates also wanted to see the video in its original form before the CIA got ahold of it and doctored it, as they would surely do, seeing as they were responsible for Li's death in the first place.

The signal from Echelon finally completed the endless downloading. Bates immediately made a backup copy and then ended the connection to Echelon. Then he took a deep breath—and pushed the video to play.

The first image was the Al-Qazzaza TV station identification slide. Then it switched to two news anchors jabbering about what was to come. Both men seemed positively orgasmic in announcing that a new execution video had been received.

There was a burst of static and electronic snow. This cleared up in a few seconds, and then Li's image came on the screen. Bates gulped hard; he hit the pause button. These beheadings were always brutal, gory stuff. His hands began to shake. He wasn't sure he was going to be able to handle this.

The ship began rocking sideways; they were in the Gulf and it was a rainy, windy afternoon and the water was getting rough. The sudden lurch brought Bates back to reality. He studied the frozen frame. Li was kneeling before a large handmade black and green flag with Islamic scribbling all over it. There were people kneeling on either side of her. Bates recognized them as Filipino laborers kidnapped by an Al Qaeda group in Iraq in the last two weeks. Standing directly behind them were five men in black uniforms, wearing black ski masks. One was holding an enormous razor-sharp machete.

The tape was very grainy, the sound almost indecipherable, but Bates knew what was going on. The man
with the knife was reading from a prepared statement. He was saying each person in front of him had been convicted of crimes against Islam and that he was about to carry out their death sentence, all in Allah's name, of course.

The man with the knife folded his statement, then went to his right. He grabbed the first Filipino laborer and began chopping at the man's exposed neck. The victim screamed so loud, it blotted out all other sound being picked up by the camera's microphone. He struggled fiercely but to no avail, as his hands were tied behind his back. The blood came first in spurts, then in a gush as tendons, cartilage, and bones were destroyed by the heavy-bladed knife. When the machete hit the man's jugular, the blood began spraying out of him like water from a garden hose. The victim continued fighting, but life was draining out of him. Finally, with one last chop, his head was severed. In a grisly coda, the man's body continued struggling for a few more seconds before it finally went limp. The blood and the gore were massive. Some of it fell on Li.

There was an abrupt stop in the tape, more static, more electronic snow. When the image returned, the man in the mask was reciting another statement. Li had been moved closer to the center and was now shoulder to shoulder with the remaining Filipino. She was blindfolded, as was he, but Bates believed he could see a look of determination, not fear, on her face. At least he thought it best to remember her that way.

His statement concluded, the executioner raised his knife again and with one forceful blow hit not Li but the other Filipino square on the jugular. The man was surprised; he hardly moved as the blade went through the
first half of his neck. The executioner withdrew the machete, then, holding the man's head steady, swung again and completed the job. It had happened so strangely and quickly, the man who'd done the cutting held the man's head up and started laughing through his ski mask. The look on the dead man's face was a mixture of horror and complete, absolute surprise. Again, the gore was unbelievable.

The tape stopped again. When it started a third time, Li alone was sitting before the five men in ski masks. The man started reading his statement. They were the same words every time, so Bates knew it would take exactly 23 seconds for the man to recite them—and then the killing would be done.

This was the moment of truth for the young Bates. He was just a supergeek employed to be a spy. He wasn't blood-and-guts like Ryder and Curry were and Gallant and Phelan used to be, before they died. Bates had fought this war against Al Qaeda from a place so devoid of all of that, they called it the White Room.

But this—what he was about to see? This wasn't going to be so clean. This was going to be rough.

But in a strange way, he felt he owed it to Li to watch it. He knew that after being introduced by Al-Qazzaza, the tape would be shown on TVs all around the globe and downloaded on people's computers and e-mailed everywhere to be laughed at in the slums of Karachi and Delhi and a hundred other places. For her spirit to be defiled like that, Bates thought it would help somehow if a friend saw it first.

The seconds counted down. The executioner was more than halfway through his spiel. He began pulling the machete from his waistband. The men on either side
of him braced themselves for what they knew was about to come.

Ten seconds . . .

Bates's finger hovered over the pause button. Could he do it?

Seven seconds . . .

The guy was folding the paper; he knew the last few sentences by heart.

Five seconds . . .

He raised the machete over Li's neck.

Four seconds . . .

Bates nearly hit the stop button, he so didn't want to see this, but he knew he had to.

Three seconds . . .

Sorry, Li
. . ..

Two
. . .

One . . .

Bobby Murphy was standing at the big window in his cabin, looking out on the dark blue water of the nighttime Persian Gulf. He was praying. For Li. For himself. For all of them. For the whole goddamn world and all the disheartened souls out there, the victims in this war, which Murphy felt would claim more lives than all of the other American wars combined—that it would be the first real nuclear war if Al Qaeda wasn't stopped.

He was praying and extremely bummed out, feeling his soul in his shoes, when suddenly the door to his cabin burst open and Gil Bates, their top Spook, rushed in.

Though Murphy had seen him excitable in the past, he'd never seen Bates quite like this.

He was crying, almost hysterically—and in that first instant this was such a shock to Murphy, because he
knew Bates had been downstairs watching the execution tape and he was sure that the young genius had lost his mind. What he'd seen had been that horrible.

But the strange thing was, Bates was also laughing, just as hysterically. And these two things were coming in waves. Murphy thought he was looking into the eyes of a madman—and in a way, he was.

The young Spook reached the other end of the table and nearly collapsed. He was holding a disk.

“Put this in,” he was saying to Murphy between catching his breath—he'd run up 10 levels to get here.

Murphy just stared at him. He really didn't want to watch Li's murder. His body language alone was screaming that. But Bates was insisting.

Murphy finally relented. He took the disk, put it in his laptop, and started it running.

Bates was beside him by this time. He reached over Murphy's hand and fast-forwarded through the two grisly slayings of the hapless Filipino workers.

Bates stopped the video just as the executioner was hovering over Li, the machete already out of his waistband.

“You have to see this!” Bates insisted.

Bates put it in slow motion. Murphy watched, horrified, as the knife was raised over Li's head, as the executioner began his swing down—and then suddenly a burst of static, followed by a series of scratch lines across the screen.

Then among the electronic snow Murphy could see the ghostly figures of the five men again. The tape became jumpy, and still full of static. But it was clear enough to see the men were discussing something; they
seemed stumped by something. The knife was now back at the man's side, and Li was still unhurt.

More static—then the men changed positions abruptly. It was as if they were starting the execution all over again. But then more static, more scratch lines, and more fuzzy scenes of the men, once again discussing something, being stumped by something.

The very last scene showed the man with the knife literally throwing up his hands in frustration.

Then the video finally ended for good.

Murphy just turned to Bates. The young Spook was now laughing more than he was crying but still doing a lot of both.

“Don't you get it?” he asked Murphy excitedly. “All that static and scratching things at the end is them twisting it backward and going over it, again and again. Three times total. There were trying to get some use out of the last few inches of it. But they couldn't, because there's not enough of it.”

“Enough of what?”
Murphy finally asked him.

Now Bates was just laughing. He was happy.
“Video-tape,”
he replied simply, boisterously. “They
ran out
of videotape . . . .”

Murphy just stared back at him. He had to let this sink in. “They ran out of tape?” he asked, looking back at the blank screen.

“Yes,” Bates replied. “They're rewinding it, thinking they can tape over it—but they can't, not without erasing the tape of the Filipino guys getting it. But you can't rewind cassettes by hand like that.”

Murphy just shook his head.
“They ran out of videotape?”
he repeated Bates's words back to him.

Murphy was suddenly a ball of motion. He started punching numbers into his laptop. He quickly retrieved a short report they'd received from Obo Field in the minutes following the strike team's arrival. The Delta guys had caught a mook looking down at them. He was a messenger of some sort from Khrash, and they had sent him back minus his hands as a message to the people inside the city. But before they cut him up, this flunky had told them that he was out in the wilderness looking for videotapes. Murphy had thought this was very strange at the time.

But then he began typing madly again. He stopped on a file they'd dragged down just the day before. It was the details of an Israeli hit team that had killed a wellknown terrorist courier, someone who was thought to be heading for Khrash. Usually a guy like this might be carrying terrorist money or bombs or bomb parts. But as it turned out, the dead man was carrying just one thing: videotapes.

Murphy just looked up at Bates.

“Goddamn,” he swore. “Could this mean what I think it could mean?”

“I think it might,” Bates replied.

Murphy had his yellow phone up in a flash.

“We've got to call Obo right now!”

The yellow cell phone rang twice before one of the Marine mechanics answered it.

The Marine recognized Murphy's voice right away.
But the Big Boss sounded extremely excited and anxious, not typical for the little man from Texas.

He was almost yelling into the phone. “Can you stop them? Can you?”

The Marine was confused. “Stop who, sir?”

“The guys!” Murphy yelled in reply. “The strike team. Can you stop them? We have some very important information. Something they have to know before they level that place and kill everyone in it.”

But the Marine just found himself shaking his head no. “Sorry, sir,” he told Murphy. “But they left a long time ago.”

No sooner had Murphy hung up when the two Marines heard the sound of an aircraft approaching. They grabbed their weapons, but by this time the aircraft was already coming in for a landing. It was the so-called Scramble copter, the team's third Blackhawk, coming back to pick up the last of the ammunition—and the two Marines. This meant another aspect of the plan was about to take place. Which must have meant things were going well in the battle.