Strike Force Alpha (18 page)

Bahrain

Marty Noonan, tanker driver, was back from another mission.

This one had brought him and his crew over the familiar waters of the lower Gulf, near Hormuz. They juiced up some F-15s from Sultan Air Base, the semisecret U.S. facility found in the middle of the Saudi desert, then flew around while some Marine F-18s based in Qatar used them for target-tracking practice.

The mission had lasted 10 hours, a typical night’s work. It was now 5:00
A.M.
Noonan craved nothing more than a few beers at the OC, some chow, and then eight hours’ sleep. He would need the rest, if not the food and beer. He’d be going back up again later that day, and every day, at least until the Fifth Fleet battle group arrived.

He taxied the big KC-10 Extender over to its appointed hardstand and killed the engines. He ran the postflight checklist himself. His radioman shut down their communications suite. His boom operator locked up the refueling bubble. His flight engineer shut down the airplane’s environmental systems, and the Bahrani copilot cleaned up the coffee station and galley.

All this took 15 minutes; then Noonan dismissed the crew. He did the interior postflight walk-through and found no problems. It was 0530 when he finally climbed down from the big jet himself. He was always the last to leave.

With the long walk across the tarmac to the officers’ club, he began wondering if there might actually be something good to eat at the bar this time of day. Suddenly a hand grabbed him from behind. Another hand quickly went over his mouth. Instinctively he began to struggle, but many hands were grabbing him now. They forced him to the ground, locked his arms behind him, and clamped his feet together. The next thing Noonan knew, he was being carried away by a half-dozen people dressed in black and wearing ski masks.

They trundled him up and over the nearby sand dunes, dropping him to the ground in front of a weird-looking helicopter that had landed on the edge of the secret base undetected. Two men were sitting inside the copter’s cargo bay. There were 10 cases of Budweiser stacked between them. They lifted their ski masks.

It was Ryder and Phelan.

“You guys?”
Noonan cried out.

“Yeah, us,” Phelan told him.

Noonan was totally confused. “What the hell is going on here?” he screamed at them. “I thought I was about to be killed.”

“Sorry for the dramatics,” Ryder said. “But we’re in a strange position here.”

“What kind of strange?”

“You like Bud?” Phelan asked him.

Noonan eyed the cases of authentic American beer.

“Who doesn’t?” he replied.

They were called buddy tanks, or BTs.

Huge, bomblike containers that attached under an aircraft’s wing, they not only carried extra fuel for the host plane but also had the ability to stick out a hose from its rear end and let another aircraft get a drink, like a mini in-flight refueler.

BTs were usually a Navy thing, and they were rare at that. But Ryder and Phelan had spotted some Air Force models at the secret base during their first unscheduled visit here. That’s why they were back. They needed four buddy tanks, 600 gallons in size, all filled with aviation fuel.

Noonan was not a Boy Scout and it wasn’t like it was
his
gas. Plus this
was
a secret base; people were stopping by asking for strange things all the time. A few BTs for some Harriers was not that big of a deal. But how were they going to get them off the secret base without anyone knowing?

Ryder and Phelan directed Noonan’s attention to the next dune over. Here he saw an empty container, the size of a railroad boxcar, inexplicably sitting in the middle of the desert. It was stuffed full of packing, from fireproof blankets to Styrofoam peanuts, millions of them.

Before he could ask Ryder and Phelan how this thing had got here, he saw the answer himself. Hovering above the container, maybe 50 feet up, was another weird helicopter. It had a three-chain lifting brace swinging beneath it. Its engine was absolutely silent—that’s why Noonan didn’t see it at first.

“Now that’s freaking weird,” Noonan said. Seeing a chopper in flight that made no noise was almost a surreal event.

“If you can pack the BTs in that thing,” Ryder said to Noonan, pointing to the huge red container, “we’ll take it from there.”

There was only one way they could make Murphy’s new mission work.

Three aircraft had to be involved and each one would have to fly more than 2,000 miles. The BTs they’d received for the cases of Bud were mounted onto the Harriers belowdecks on
Ocean Voyager
. The jump jets would use one BT between them, in addition to the fuel they already had onboard. They would each carry another BT to take turns feeding the helicopter that would make up the third part of their three-plane flight. The fourth BT, carried by helicopter, would stay full. After finding a place somewhere halfway between the ship and their target, they would hide this tank temporarily. It would be their lifeline, the fuel they needed to get back.

The Harriers took off first on the night of the mission. The Blackhawk quickly followed them into the air. It was just sunset and the ship was rounding the tip of Oman, sailing west. The three aircraft hugged the coastline until they got to the eastern border of Yemen, the Harriers going as slow as the helicopter was going fast. They turned north, staying low, at no more than 250 feet maximum altitude, and dashed up to the southwestern part of Saudi Arabia. It was a quick flight over featureless terrain. About 50 miles inland from the top of the Red Sea, there was a small mountain range called Al-Hibiz Zim. It was uninhabited and held the distinction of having the most inclement weather on the Arabian Peninsula. The mountains were the first high ground after coming off the Red Sea, and thus clouds tended to form in front of them and then spill over. Many times, these clouds turned into rainstorms, or worse.

They hid the lifeline tank here.

The sun had gone down on Qartoom hours ago.

The activity around the port did not let up, though. This was a 365-day operation, especially on the docks at Heavenly Fruits. Two separate workforces changed places every eight hours. A ship could arrive at three in the morning, ten at night, or quarter to noon. It would be loaded, quickly, efficiently—just as long as the ship’s captain paid all his fees in cash.

Qartoom was also a naval base, a small one with two escort destroyers and a pair of harbor police boats. The police slept during the day, but at night they patrolled the port’s three miles of inner waterways, letting their searchlights randomly sweep over the piers. They were looking for animal smugglers mostly.

The two Polish-built DD-6 destroyers based here represented about one-tenth of Libya’s tiny whitewater navy. These ships rarely left port. They had been stationed at Qartoom Harbor as a favor from the Libyan government to the owner of Heavenly Fruits and had yet to be withdrawn by the “new” Khadafi. Their presence here added a substantial layer of visible security. They were here as a deterrent to trouble.

That’s why it was such a surprise when the commander of one of the destroyers was roused from his sleep to be told British jet fighters were about to attack their base.

“No Englishman is up this late,” the commander said drowsily. But he climbed out of bed and got dressed anyway.

The destroyer captain did all the right things. He woke the rest of the crew; it was the sole man awake, the bridge watch officer, who had first alerted him. He sent his men to their battle stations. He ordered the ship’s engines started and lines made ready to cast off. Only then did he get up to the bridge to see what all this fuss was about.

Two planes had flown up the main waterway four minutes ago, the watch officer reported. He had watched them pass overhead. They were Harriers; he was familiar with their silhouette. He’d just guessed at their being British.

Why had no one else heard them? the CO asked him. Why was work continuing on the docks all around them?

“The jets were very, very quiet,” the watch officer replied.

The CO was close to accusing the officer of sleeping and then dreaming up the planes…when suddenly he couldn’t see anymore. A huge, extremely bright explosion had gone off not 200 feet from the port side of the diminutive warship. Both the CO and the watch officer found themselves thrown to the deck by its intensity. It took nearly 20 seconds of feeling their way around in the darkness before their sight finally returned.

Strangely, there had been no sound.

The destroyer’s captain got to his feet, just in time to see two jet fighters streaking by, no more than 20 feet off the top of his bow. And there
was
noise this time. It arrived just moments after the fighters appeared, and it was as deafening as the bright flash had been blinding seconds before.

The dual assault on their senses threw both men for a loop. It was all they could do to keep the two jet fighters in sight as they roared back down the inland waterway, two streams of hot exhaust getting smaller by the instant. Before the captain could give an order, the planes started dropping “bombs” again.

Except they weren’t really bombs. They were flares. Dozens of them were spilling out of the back ends of both aircraft, lighting up the night.

This caused great panic on the docks. The tremendous noise, the blinding light. The Navy officers could see dockworkers taking cover everywhere as the flares floated down all around them. Some workers even jumped into the water to get away. A moment later, someone killed all the lights around the harbor. When the string of flares petered out, Qartoom was plunged into complete darkness.

The destroyer’s captain ordered his ship’s air-raid alarm to be blown. Among other things, he wanted to wake the crew of his sister ship, docked just a few hundred feet away. It seemed like a good idea. But in reality, the weird electronic crying just caused further panic among the hundreds of dockworkers now scrambling around in the darkness. The planes came back again. This time they released even longer, brighter streams of flares, and it seemed their engines were twice as loud. Amid the clamor of the jets and the ship’s air-raid siren, small scatterings of return gunfire could be heard.

Four of the destroyer’s crewmen charged up to the bridge; one turned on the ship’s air defense radar. The captain was soon huddled over its read-out screen. The jets went by again—more blinding flares, more earsplitting noise. In the glow of the phosphorescence, the officer could now see utter chaos on the docks. Dozens of workers were plunging into the water, leaving crates of cargo wherever they dropped them. Gunfire, the air-raid siren, the screech of jet engines—the multiple dots of light burned into everyone’s eyes, like flashbulbs at a wedding. All over the port, confusion reigned.

And yet the two planes were not showing up on radar.

“This is
so
strange,” the destroyer’s captain was heard to say. “Perhaps I’m the one still asleep.”

While all this was going on, no one noticed that a helicopter had landed on the roof of the Heavenly Fruits warehouse. The rain of flares was blinding even up here, a quarter-mile away.

Gallant and Curry were flying the Blackhawk. It was the
Torch
ship troop carrier, but all its external weapons had been removed and cans of aviation fuel had been bolted down in their place. Its benches, radios, and other nonessential equipment inside had been stripped out, too, making more room for more gas.

They were carrying two unlikely passengers with them. Sitting in the back was Bobby Murphy himself. Swimming in an overly large Delta operator’s suit, helmet and all, he looked like a kid going out for Trick or Treat. Beside him, dressed just as foolishly, was a Spook named Benny Aviv. He was the mad scientist of
Ocean Voyager
.

Aviv was a nerd from central casting: Coke-bottle glasses, unkempt hair, a pocket protector to protect his favorite pocket protector. He was brilliant, though. A Russian Jew who came to the United States as a boy, he’d worked his way through Harvard and then MIT. He had lost someone, too. His father was employed as a clerk by the CIA. He was murdered in Beirut in 1982 by Iranian gunmen who mistook him for the U.S. Ambassador. Aviv was just 10 years old when it happened.

It had been Aviv’s job to dream up new ways to make life miserable for the mooks. Working in his own container compartment at the bottom of
Ocean Voyager,
he’d built the nail-heavy Rats’ Nest bombs, he’d concocted the superitching powder, he’d designed the trigger that allowed the raft full of explosives to detonate above the villa on Monte Fidelo. In the parlance of espionage, Aviv was known as a “brain man.”

Murphy had told Aviv about the Heavenly Fruits warehouse and what he wanted to do there. The plan was
so
nasty, they’d actually engaged in a moral discussion about its implications, albeit a brief one. Aviv came back with what looked like a huge aerosol spray can, about the size of a household fire extinguisher. It was exactly what Murphy had wanted.

Aviv explained that in order for the can to work, it had to be kept under 75 degrees Fahrenheit until it was ready to deploy. Then, five minutes before use, Murphy would have to heat it up by putting a cigarette lighter at a spot precisely three inches off the center of the big can’s base. When the molecules inside were properly heated, a small red button would pop, up near the handle, just like on a Thanksgiving Day turkey. This meant the can would be ready for use. But then there was the matter of installation…. It was at that point Murphy made an executive decision and told Aviv he was coming along for this 2,000-mile chopper ride.

Now, here they were. They had survived the long, bumpy low-level flight, over three hostile nations, to find themselves atop the warehouse building, with the huge spray can and brilliantly blinding flashes of light going off all around them. The Harriers were dropping flares, not bombs, because there just wasn’t enough gas available for them to lug any heavy ordnance into the air. Neither did they have any cannon shells in their guns. They were here making a ruckus by shooting blanks.