Strike Force Delta (14 page)

There weren't any supplies here. This place was all about the latest military buzzword:
megaflow
. The facilities at LORDS did nothing less than keep track of all U.S. combat equipment, from bullets to bombs, used by the American military in operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Located inside a plain concrete building not far from a cliff overlooking the Med, the centerpiece of LORDS was its pair of huge Gray supercomputers, machines that could do trillions of calculations a second. At a cool $3 billion each, they had more brainpower than a division of supply clerks.

Still, it was a daunting task to keep tabs on an institution
that consumed 1 billion dollars' worth of supplies every day, day after day. Thus the need for
two
supercomputers. But the system actually worked pretty well. Despite all the artificial gray matter, LORDS was a model of simplicity. Almost everything used by the U.S. armed forces these days was bar-coded. The Grays kept track of all those bar codes—where they were going, who was getting what, when they were getting there—and broke everything down into two lists: what was available and what was needed to refill the supply.

If a combat unit in Kuwait or Kabul or Karbala needed a new machine gun for its Hummer, a track for its M1 tank, or armor plating for its helicopters, somehow, someway, that request would transit through LORDS. If the wanted item was in the inventory—a lot of which was spread out all over the Mediterranean—then, in most cases, it was on its way to its destination in a matter of days, sometimes hours. If not, the needed piece of equipment was ordered from supply points back in the United States.

Again, the Grays did most of the work; that's why on this dark night, thunder booming, wind blowing like crazy outside, only Ensign Gary Olsen was atop “Reggie Breeze,” manning LORDS's so-called Forward Office.

This was the pits of graveyard duty: 2300 hours to 0900 hours the next day. Sitting in a room with nothing else but the two huge computers, Olsen had been stationed here for 18 months. It was lonely, and the installation, being so isolated and hanging out over the Med, could be creepy. But it was sure a lot better than getting his ass shot off in Baghdad.

He spent most of his time tonight at his desk, reading
comic books, checking the two Gray lists only once in a while. When something went off-kilter—like a naval gun gone missing, some ammunition unaccounted for, or even a load of food or water not arriving at its appointed destination—the Grays would sound a simple electronic alarm: One beep meant there'd been an incident, but nothing serious. Two beeps meant an event worth looking into. Three beeps indicated something big was up.

It was now 0230 hours. Olsen had just finished the latest
Superman
when the Grays started spitting out a series of single beeps. No big deal: These low-level warnings would happen an average of twice ahour. Still, Olsen rolled his chair over to the main readout screen and looked to see what the fuss was about.

A pallet of ammunition was missing from the U.S. Navy base at Folobra in Sardinia. They were .50-calber rounds, several thousand in all. While at first look this might have merited something more than a one-beep warning, Olsen knew that usually in these cases the lost article was not stolen but had simply fallen through the cracks somewhere, stored away in the wrong part of the warehouse, something along those lines. He made a notation of it in his log and rolled back across the room, ready to begin his new
Fantastic Four
.

He was halfway across the floor when the computer began emitting single beeps again. Olsen stopped in midroll and was quickly back in front of the readout screen. Fifteen hundred gallons of helicopter fuel was missing from a U.S. Navy base in Sicily. Again, another routine incident. Olsen made the notation in his log and started across the room again.

But then the Grays started bleating again, and this time they were beeping twice. Olsen had already reached the other side of the room. He had to launch himself back once more.

Four Hellfire missiles could not be accounted for at the U.S. Army base in Sbreka, Bosnia, just a few hundred miles east of Olsen's current location. This was why the second-degree alarm had gone off. Hellfire missiles were state-of-the-art air-launched weapons that could be highly destructive in the wrong hands.

He studied the readout screen and then his log. Three lines in red—three incidents, two minor, one
mezzametz
, all in less than five minutes. In all his time working at Reggie Breeze, Olsen had never had more than two alarms of any kind in an hour's time.

As he was contemplating what this might mean, the beeps went off again, and this time it was a third-degree alarm.

“Jesuzz Christ . . .,” he moaned.

Two giant two-thousand-pound bombs were missing from a U.S. base in Turkey, along with something called an M-31/EAS, which was a portable arresting gear setup allowing jet fighters to land on runways built too short to normally handle such aircraft.

This was getting serious now. Olsen immediately instructed the Grays to look for any pattern in the incidents, as this might indicate something along the lines of organized theft. On the other hand, no pattern would indicate these things were just random, which was what Olsen was praying for. Because if this
wasn't
a random thing, then guaranteed, a large amount of shit was about to hit a very big fan.

The Grays were superfast, and before Olsen could
say the first three words of a Hail Mary, the readout screen started blinking the words:
Alert Security Officer
.

The supercomputers had found something.

Olsen immediately put in a call to his CO, buzzing his pager, which he knew the senior officer always kept on his person, even when he was asleep. Then Olsen read the Grays' preliminary report: These events weren't just cases of missed inventory or things falling through the cracks. These
were
thefts. They had all happened over the past eight hours and indicated whoever was stealing these things was moving east, across the Med, apparently stopping at every U.S. base they could find, in a more or less straight line.

What's more, the Grays were now telling Olsen, reports of security breaches were turning up from these very same installations. In each case, unauthorized personnel had been reported skulking around the base before the thefts were discovered. Then the Grays spit out one last piece of information: Again, in each case, it was being reported that at least one unauthorized helicopter had been spotted in the area.

Olsen scratched his head. Unauthorized personnel? Unauthorized helicopters?

What the hell was going on?

At that moment, his CO arrived. The usually gruff security officer seemed different somehow. Normally he'd be pissed at being woken in the middle of the night. But at the moment, he seemed almost too cheery to be upset, like a man holding a secret.

Olsen read him the Grays' report, as he was supposed to do. The thefts, the reports of unauthorized personnel, the unauthorized copters, the missing weapons, ammo, equipment, and fuel. Olsen's conclusion: A terrorist
group had somehow gotten ahold of at least one helicopter and was going on a well-planned stealing spree. If true, it could be disastrous for U.S. interests in the area.

The CO listened but then shook his head at the Grays' recommendation that an all-points alert be put out across the Med. “That won't be necessary,” the CO told Olsen.

Olsen was puzzled. “But, sir—these people have already stolen several million dollars' worth of combat gear. Dangerous stuff.”

“Higher Authority's got a handle on it,” the CO replied, calmly lighting a cigarette.

“Higher Authority, sir?”

The CO smiled—a rarity. “Higher Authority doesn't necessarily mean Navy High Command, Ensign.”

Olsen had to think a moment. “Are you saying a special ops unit is taking these things?”

The CO just shrugged. “Maybe. . . .”

But Olsen wasn't going to settle for that—besides, it looked as if the CO
wanted
to tell him. “If some special ops group wanted all this stuff,” he began, “then why didn't they just requisition it through proper channels? Those guys do that all the time—with the right authorization, that is.”

Again the CO shrugged. “Maybe they're not an authorized special ops group.”

This took a few more moments to sink in, but finally it dawned on Olsen what was
really
going on here.

“The Ghost Team?”
he asked in a whisper.

The CO let out a long stream of smoke and nodded. “But remember, I never said that. . . .”

Both men had heard about the Ghost Team, of
course. They were a very mysterious special ops outfit that might very well be operating without government approval—or at least beyond the control of the Pentagon. That's what made them so cool, though. Their exploits at Hormuz, Singapore, and right inside the United States had made them folk heroes. Like characters from a comic book, these near-mythical figures seemed to be the only people actually fighting the perpetrators of 9/11.

“I talked to someone just a few minutes ago,” the CO finally confided in Olsen. “Someone with a Level six security rating, which he proved to me was legit. He asked that we just turn a blind eye to this, said that it would end shortly.”

“All this stuff must be for something important,” Olsen said, in a million years never thinking he would be involved with the Ghost Team someday, however tangentially. “Something to tell my kids, I guess.”

The CO nodded, then joked: “But only if your kids have a Level Six security rating.”

Then almost as an afterthought, Olsen asked him: “If I might be so bold sir, this guy you talked to—what was he? An admiral? A general? CIA?”

The CO just shook his head. “He didn't say. He just gave me his security level and the day's passwords.” He thought a moment, then added: “Funny, though. He did give me his name—Mullen, or Murphy, something Irish. But he sounded like he was right out of the middle of Texas. . . .”

Colonel Armeni Barji was asleep at his desk. Again. . . .

He was commander in chief of Iranian Revolutionary Air Force Base #3, here at Hakpit, in the extreme western portion of Iran, a place near the vast southern marshes that led right into nearby Iraq.

Commander in chief of an entire air base might have sounded like a big job, with lots of authority and political pull, but in this case, the opposite was true. Base #3 wasn't a combat facility. It was a graveyard.

And what was buried here?

Fighter planes. Old ones.

Base #3 was where the bulk of Iran's F-14s had come to die. Not to be refurnished or made ready to fly again. But to be entombed.

Iran was the only country the U.S. Navy's premier F-14 was exported to—this back in the days of the Shah, a pig by another name, but a pig who had many high-level friends in the White House at the time. The sale had taken place more than 30 years before, and because
Iran had been turned upside down by Islamic radicals in the intervening years, for a while the Tomcats wound up being flown by one of America's staunchest enemies. That situation didn't last long, though. Lack of spare parts started humbling the Iranian F-14 fleet after just a few years. These days, hardly any of the exported Tomcats were flying regularly.

Eighteen of the F-14s were now here at Base #3. Officially, only four of them were airworthy, and them just barely. Could those four actually go into combat? Could they ever hope to fire the weapon the Tomcat was built for—the very dangerous over-the-horizon Phoenix missile? No way. These planes were used mostly for training purposes by the Iranian Air Force or, on occasion, for aerial flyby displays made during military holidays.

This was no place to be then, and Colonel Barji was bitter. Now almost 60 years old and at one time a general, he'd flown in the IAF since the war against Iraq back in the late seventies. He'd carried out strafing missions on rebellious villages inside Iran and the occasional sneak attack on Sunni Muslims living just over the border in Iraq. That had been the extent of his military career—shooting at unarmed people. But just by longevity alone he was somewhat of a hero inside the Persian air corps.

Or he used to be anyway. A dispute over lack of flying time with his old F-14 unit located just outside Tehran led to a fight with his CO. Barji was reprimanded, disciplined, reduced in pay and rank, and sent here. That had been two months ago. One of Iran's most seasoned, most veteran pilots was now a nonperson, out in the marshes, at the country's aerial cemetery.

So, yes, he was bitter.

But he was also looking forward to getting his revenge.

Barji had been working a scam since the day he arrived at Base #3. In his first week, he'd submitted a false report to IAF headquarters stating that one of the flyable F-14s had been destroyed by a hangar fire. It was a lie, but no one in Tehran ever came down to check it out. So not two weeks into his stint here, Barji had one of the workable F-14s in his back pocket.

Then he had his men—they too were black sheep and exiles—steal as many parts as possible from the 15 or so inoperable F-14s, covering their tracks this time with false repair reports. By doing this, they were able to essentially construct an entirely new F-14. One that could fly and carry bombs and fire a nose gun, but was a complete phantom, a plane that could not be found anywhere on the books.

At the same time, Barji let it be known, through a network of relatives he had spread out over the Middle East and southern Europe, that he had two F-14 Tomcats for sale.

He wasn't so stupid that he would think a legitimate government would buy them to use in their air forces. What he was hoping for was some country—China, Russia, maybe India, would buy them and secretly have their pilots train
against
them just as U.S. pilots trained against simulated and real MiGs at places like Top Gun and Red Star in the American desert. In that regard, the planes could be regarded as very valuable.