Strike Force Alpha (20 page)

Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Five days later

The maids at the Royal Dubai were starting to complain.

They were an army of 20, all Filipinos, and they could clean every room in the ultraluxurious Gulf-side hotel in under six hours. But the guests had to cooperate. They had to allow the maids into the room some time before 2:00
P.M.
every day. They had to present dirty linen in order to get the clean. And they had to return room service plates and utensils after every meal.

But the men staying in the penthouse weren’t doing any of these things. They had been guests in the hotel for three weeks, their number fluctuating between five and seven. In that time they had not once allowed a maid to enter the expansive tenth-floor suite. They had not put out any dirty laundry, nor had they taken in such essentials as soap, shampoo, or toilet paper. The men had all their meals delivered by room service and requested the food trays be left outside their door. But they had yet to return any of the dirty dishes.

When the maids pressed their ears against the penthouse door, they always heard the same thing, day or night: a constant clicking sound, like someone continuously flipping a switch. This and voices speaking softly into telephones.

The mystery guests had shown another peculiarity. They’d spent lavishly in their first two weeks at the five-star hotel. They’d indulged in many of the gourmet foods the kitchen had to offer. They’d purchased pay-for-view movies around-the-clock. They’d even bought a couple of laptop computers from the hotel’s gift shop, at outrageous expense. They’d also run up huge bills for using the hotel’s Internet access lines, and their long-distance phone charges were into the thousands of dollars after just a few days. But then the extravagant spending came to a halt. For several days the men ordered no food or drink at all. The six TVs in the penthouse were never turned on, or at least not to any of the pay channels. They’d made no long-distance phone calls and did not access the Internet once. It was as if they’d become penniless overnight.

Then suddenly they were flush again. One of them had returned to the hotel late Thursday night, after a day trip to Riyadh, and paid their bill in cash. He also secured the suite for five more days. Then he ordered nearly three hundred dollars in room service food brought up to the penthouse and the spending spree began again.

The hotel management was suspicious of all this, of course. But then again, this was the Middle East and high-priced hotels were always suspicious of their guests, especially those who paid in cash. Calling the Dubai state police was like placing a collect call to Al Qaeda, and no one wanted to do that.

So the hotel management simply issued a new policy: the maids should stop complaining, stay out of sight, and, for the time being, be less ambitious about keeping the penthouse clean.

Aboard
Ocean Voyager

Ryder would never quite recall why they’d decided to gather in Phelan’s cabin that night.

Their traditional hangout spot had been on the fantail, where a few beers and the sight of the ship’s huge wake could have a calming effect at times. But that was the trouble—they had been doing nothing
but
hanging out lately. They’d been lifeless at sea for nearly a week, just drifting around the upper Indian Ocean, with nothing to do and not knowing what they should do next.

All the plugs had been pulled on them by now. Things had been flicking off all over the ship since a few days after the bank bombing. Even while the raid to Libya was in progress, their lifelines were being cut and a slow withering on the vine process begun. The last of the porn sites had disappeared that morning, killing the White Rooms’ last link to the outside world. The ship was also running out of necessities as the 45-day limit on resources was suddenly upon them. The days of Kobe steak were long gone. Coffee was being rationed. The T-paper supply was getting low. And they were almost out of beer.

Meanwhile the world seemed to be falling apart all around them, due at least in some part to the bank bombing in Abu Dhabi and the bioattack on Heavenly Fruits. According to BBC broadcasts picked up on the ship’s lowly radio, the ripple effect of the twin attacks had caused so much instability around the Persian Gulf, gas prices in the United States were soaring. This while the stock market was doing a new swan dive with every session. The food industry was reeling, too, as few people wanted to eat anything that didn’t come out of a can these days. And gold had become a very precious commodity again, always a bad sign.

Most acute, though, the U.S. airline industry was on the verge of total collapse. About two weeks before, someone began quietly hacking into the computers of all the major U.S. air carriers and buying up huge numbers of tickets, sometimes using bogus credit card numbers for payment but many times not. Almost immediately after buying a ticket on one computer, the hackers would then cancel it on another, in effect putting the seat in limbo. At first the computers handled the purchases like normal transactions, as many came in just one or two at a time. But as the cyber-attack continued undetected, a domino effect slowly befell the airlines. Flights that had no real passengers meant airplanes full of empty, and ultimately unpurchased, seats. Every time an airline tried to rebook a flight, the hackers would simply override the security codes, delete the new ticket purchases, and reinstate the old ones, just to cancel them again. It took a while, but eventually the entire U.S. booking system became overloaded with this new kind of spam. It finally crashed several days ago. Attempts to revive it had been sporadic at best.

Making the situation worse, many U.S. airlines, and especially those that flew to Europe, had been in this same time period victims of a staggering number of bomb threats, to both aircraft and airport facilities. Many had been called in while the planes in question were in the air and frequently while they were over the Atlantic. The flood of false warnings not only resulted in many flights being cancelled, it caused U.S. airline terminals in London, Paris, Rome, and a dozen other cities, including all those in the Middle East to close. These shutdowns were wreaking further havoc with overseas flight schedules.

What did it all mean? No one knew. U.S. intelligence wasn’t even sure if the two situations were connected.

But air travel between the Unites States and Europe was just 10 percent of what it had been just three weeks before—and was in real danger of disappearing completely.

“We could always go into business hauling freight,” Gallant had suggested this night, after the usual suspects had squeezed into Phelan’s quarters. “We’ve got the ship already. We’ve got the equipment. And we’ve got the crew. Who would ever know?”

He was only half-kidding, trying to lighten the mood in the crowded, gloomy cabin. But the others were in no mood to have their moods changed. It had been a lot like that lately.

They presented as a fairly sad bunch these days. Curry in his Oakland Raiders T-shirt, its colors fading and fraying around the edges. Gallant looking more like a very tired Clark Kent than his superhero alter ego. Martinez, eyes bloodshot and sunken, perhaps betraying years beyond his admitted 35. And Ryder, feeling every bit the old man at 44.

It was Phelan, though, who looked the worst. Normally, you couldn’t shut the guy up. But he hadn’t spoken more than three words to any of them in days. His sunny disposition had turned very dark, like a light had gone out upstairs. The others were worried about him.

“What’s killing me,” Curry said a few minutes into the bitch session, “is that Murphy was
so
close to cracking the mooks’ Next Big Thing. After all the time he’d spent down in the White Rooms, he probably knew more about it than the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA put together. Now we’ll just have to sit by and let it happen.”

“What else
can
we do?” Martinez shot back.

They’d been over this a hundred times. They had no commanding officer. No orders. No mandate. They didn’t have any of the intelligence that routinely bubbled up from the White Rooms; they were almost out of bombs and ammo. Plus, they didn’t have any aviation gas. Or not much anyway. Both copters were below a third full. The Harriers had even less than that. They’d gone from a very effective fighting force to an almost nonexistent one in just a week.

Worse, they had no idea about their own fates. Who knew what Bobby Murphy had
really
got them into? His last words to Ryder still haunted the team. The thought that the entire enterprise never had White House approval was so disturbing, no one wanted to believe it. But as Murphy had managed to get himself arrested, they had no reason to think the same wouldn’t happen to them at any minute. Just why they weren’t all taken into custody along with Murphy was perhaps the biggest mystery of all.

Certainly their military careers were over. There was no mystery about that. They’d almost single-handedly plunged the United States into another depression—such things would not look good on their service résumés. Curry had made the suggestion earlier that they quietly sail to someplace like Mexico, dock the ship, and then scatter to the four winds. It was sounding more and more like their best option.

But something strange would happen this night.

A jolt of inspiration, again from a most unlikely source, would change everything….

It came while the team was still crowded into Phelan’s room, jawing away. Phelan himself was sitting on his bunk, looking very agitated. It didn’t take a shrink to know what was bothering him. He’d failed his dad.
His hero.
He’d missed his only real opportunity to avenge his father’s death. Somehow, the bad guys had won again.

As a way of venting, Phelan was taking his precious music CDs one at a time from their cases and methodically flinging them around the cabin, Frisbee-style. They were bouncing off the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the backs of people’s heads, some breaking, some not. He didn’t seem to be paying much attention to anything besides this until…

“Freaking used CDs!”
he suddenly cried out.

The others looked at him as if he’d finally cracked.

“What did you say?” Ryder asked him.

“The CD-ROM, the one with the plan for the Next Big Thing!” Phelan replied, breathless. “I think I know where one is.”

The others were immediately skeptical.

“How the fuck is that possible?” Curry challenged him. “That CD is probably the most valuable piece of intelligence in the world right now. How could
you
suddenly come up with a location for one?”

Phelan jumped off his bunk to the middle of the floor. “You remember how Murph was bummed out that we iced that mook Zoobu before we figured he was distributing the CD-ROMs?”

Everyone nodded.

“Murphy was convinced the guy had at least one on him when we whacked him in the electronics store, right?”

Again, they all agreed.

“But he was clean when we hit him,” Phelan went on. “Which means if he
did
have a CD on him, he must have ditched it before Hunn’s boys started chopping him up.”

Everyone turned to Martinez. “Did that mook have enough time to hide something before he got stuck?” Curry asked him.

Martinez shrugged. “A few seconds maybe. But where would he hide a CD in just a few seconds? Especially in a place where he absolutely did not want it to be found?”

Phelan smiled. The light was back in his eyes.

“Dude—think about it,” he said. “They killed him in the
used CD section
.”

Martinez considered this for a moment. “Are you’re saying he might have stashed the CD-ROM somewhere in that store?”

“If he had it on him and he saw us coming, can you think of a better place?” Phelan replied. “There’s got to be hundreds of CDs in that place. And who could tell one from the other if they weren’t looking for it? I’ll bet he dumped it into one of the racks.”

Martinez just shrugged. “It’s a possibility, I suppose. But so what? What good does it do us now?”

“Dude, we can go get it,” Phelan told him. “If we find it and crack into it, maybe we can throw a wrench into the mooks’ plans after all.”

Martinez just shook his head and laughed. “Whatever you’re smoking, can you give me some? I need a good buzz right about now.”

“Wait a minute,” Gallant interrupted. “Maybe Phelan’s right. Maybe the mook
did
dump it—and it’s just waiting there to be found. If there was even a chance of that, I think we’d be crazy
not
to go back and look for it….”

Clearly Martinez was astonished at what he was hearing.

“Do you realize what you are suggesting?” he asked them. “Do you know how unauthorized that would be?”

Now it was their turn to laugh at him. “
‘Unauthorized’?
Are you kidding?” Curry roared back. “This whole fucking bad movie has been
unauthorized
. If anything, Murphy sure as hell confirmed that. Besides, they’re probably fitting us for leg irons as we speak. So what the hell do we have to lose?”

“Are you actually proposing that we run an operation—on our own?” Martinez asked him sternly. “With no orders? No Murphy? No nothing?”

Curry, Gallant, and Phelan all nodded.

Martinez just shook his head. “You’re all crazy. Don’t you realize they started shutting us down right after the bank bombing? That was their way of telling us we’re ghosts. We have nothing left….”

He turned to Phelan. “And no offense, Lieutenant—but the last time you came up with an idea, it sent Murphy over the edge to Libya.”

Gallant was instantly furious: “Man, that’s unfair…. I would have told Murphy to do the exact same thing if he’d asked me.”

“Sure it’s a long shot,” Curry said to Martinez. “But look at it this way: if we
were
able to finesse something here, we might head off another Nine-Eleven—or even something bigger….”

“And maybe we can all avoid going to Leavenworth, too,” Gallant added.

Martinez was at a loss for words. He was the straightest shooter of them all, the most military of the bunch. It was against his nature to go against the book, even though the book had been tossed overboard a long time ago.