The Pentagon, subbasement level
Lieutenant Mikael Ozzi did not see the miraculous rescue at the Tonka Tower.
Stuck in one of the most remote sections of the Pentagon, his office was not wired for cable. It was big enough to accommodate his desk, a chair, and his PC and little else. In fact, before he arrived here, the space had been used to store cleaning supplies, this only because by the Pentagon building codes it wasn’t big enough to be considered a broom closet. Ozzi was sure it was the smallest office in the massive building.
But if the first rule of military intelligence was to stay out of sight, then this tiny room was the ideal place for Ozzi to do his thing. He was part of one of the most secret units in the history of the U.S. military. It was called the Defense Security Agency.
Created by executive order in the wake of September 11th, the DSA’s mission seemed simple enough. It was to “maintain security within the ranks of the U.S. military.” This was a deliberately open-ended phrase, though. The DSA actually played several roles in the post-9/11 world. First, it rooted out any U.S. military personnel who might be terrorist agents in disguise. (It sounded improbable, but the DSA had already caught five such sleeper agents, all of them Saudis, one serving as an instructor at West Point.) The DSA investigated any unresolved disappearances of U.S. military weapons, from bullets to bombers, another growing problem. The agency also watched over the Pentagon’s on-line security systems, its communications networks, even its bank accounts. Any irregularities there might indicate foreign intrigue.
The DSA was so secret, many of the highest officers in the Pentagon had no idea of its existence. Its members wore Army uniforms, but even this was a misdirection. Ozzi was a Navy man, others in the DSA were Air Force, and Marines; only a few were true Army. The agency was practically unknown to the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and the rest of the United States’ intelligence services. It was a secret unit hidden in a sea of secret units.
It was a small operation by necessity. Just a dozen people, three staffed here, in offices found at opposite ends of the Pentagon, the rest undercover overseas. But in this case, size really didn’t matter: small or not, the DSA was really wired in, and when needed, it could get some juice. It could call on any number of U.S. special ops units to do its bidding; it also had access to all intelligence gathered by any other U.S. spy agency. It took its orders directly from the National Security Council and operated under its cover. When the DSA got a mission, they were allowed carte blanche to see it through. Their unofficial motto: “Go Anywhere. Do Anything. Just Don’t Tell Anybody.”
Ozzi was just 25 years old, a graduate of Annapolis near top in his class. He was barely five-five, diminutive in size and frame, with pale skin and premature baldness already setting in. He was a hard worker, frequently staying at his desk past midnight and sometimes not leaving until dawn or later. Service to the country was the hallmark of his well-to-do Baltimore family, descendants of czarist royalty. His father had been CIA for 35 years. His grandfather had served in the OSS. The spy business was in Ozzi’s blood.
He was not exactly a cloak-and-dagger guy, though. His specialty was advanced systems analysis. Most of his work was done poring over data flowing into the Pentagon’s massive computer networks, again looking for anything out of the ordinary. He enjoyed his job, here on the front line of the battle for cyberspace. But often he yearned to leave his four small walls and actually get his hands dirty for a change.
Soon enough, he would have his chance.
It was shortly after 9:00 P.M. when Major Carlson Fox walked into Ozzi’s office. He was carrying a DVD player and portable TV.
Tall, handsome, rugged—three things Ozzi was not—Fox was Ozzi’s boss and a top operational guy in the DSA. He was in his early fifties, a CIA veteran who’d been lured back to service after the attacks of 9/11. He was married, again unlike Ozzi, had two kids and a nice house in nearby Silver Springs. His wife was gorgeous, a former model. Trouble was, they saw each other only a few minutes a day, so crazy was his work schedule. It was a rare evening that Fox was home before midnight.
He and Ozzi were opposite sides of the same coin. They worked well together because they were both easy-going and were good at keeping secrets. Fox was a down-and-dirty type guy. He had a mind like Sherlock Holmes, was more detective than military officer, which was practically a requirement in the DSA. He was from Alabama and spoke in a drawl.
“Get your nose out of your computer for a moment,” he said to Ozzi. “There’s something you’ve got to see.”
Fox cleared a spot on Ozzi’s desk for the DVD player and TV. The events at the Tonka Tower had already been burned onto a disk and he was here to play that disk for Ozzi. In seconds they were watching a replay of the takeover of the tower and the dramatic rescue of the young hostages. Ozzi was as astonished as the top brass had been just an hour ago, especially by the bravery and cunning of the rescuers.
And he asked the same question everyone asked: “Who are those guys?”
Fox just shrugged. “No one knows.”
Ozzi was confused. “No one knows? How can that be? They’re obviously Americans, obviously some kind of special ops team. They looked like Delta guys to me.”
Fox shook his head. “Sure, they looked good,” he said. “And they’re already heroes around the world. But I checked the special operations active file myself, twice in fact. Then I ran a search through the NSC’s database. Then I checked back with every contact we have here in town. No one knows who this outfit is or who they are working for.”
Ozzi just stared back at the screen. It was playing the events in Singapore again.
“Fascinating,” he murmured. “A special ops unit so secret, no one knows it exists?”
Fox smiled. “I knew you’d like it. The DoD is holding a press conference upstairs in about thirty minutes. They are going to announce that this unit cannot be identified for security reasons. That will sound good, but the truth is, they don’t have a clue who they were, where they came from, where they went.”
“Wild,” Ozzi said, starting the DVD a third time.
“It gets better,” Fox said. “This is actually the second time these guys have shown up.”
Ozzi finally took his eyes from the TV screen. “I think I missed that,” he said.
Fox got up, closed the door, then returned to his seat on the edge of the desk.
“What’s your security clearance these days?” he asked Ozzi.
“Red-Eight,” Ozzi replied. “Same as yours.”
But Fox was shaking his head. “Sorry, I was bumped up to Red-Nine months ago,” he said.
Ozzi was surprised and a little hurt. “And you didn’t tell me?” he asked Fox.
The senior officer just shrugged. “I couldn’t,” he replied. “But it’s a moot point now.”
He reached into his pocket and came out with a DSA security badge. It consisted only of a bar code.
“Congrats,” Fox said. “You’re now a Nine, too.”
Ozzi studied the ID card for a moment. “To what do I owe this honor?”
“To the fact that what I’m about to tell you is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the past one hundred years.”
“That these guys have shown up before?” Ozzi guessed.
Fox just nodded.
“Recently?” Ozzi asked.
Fox nodded again.
Ozzi sat straight up in his seat. “When?” he asked. “Where?”
“They were at Hormuz,” was all Fox had to say.
What happened in the Strait of Hormuz a little more than a month ago had been nothing less than Islamic terrorists trying to pull off an attack to rival the destruction of 9/11.
Al Qaeda–funded terrorists had hijacked 10 airliners and two military planes and attempted to crash them into the Navy’s supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln as the ship was making the narrow transit through the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway that led into the turbulent waters of the Persian Gulf. The attack, well planned and hyper-violent, ended in failure for the terrorists, though, dealing a major blow to Al Qaeda’s network. Every airliner was either forced to land before it reached the carrier or shot down by the Navy. A bloody day certainly, as the hijacked airliners were all local Arab carriers, carrying hundreds of local Muslims. But the carrier made it through virtually untouched—and the 5,500 U.S. sailors aboard were saved.
The Navy had been heaped in glory with its valiant defense of one of its prized warships, but as was usually the case in great battles, there was more to the story.
“The reason the Navy was so successful in saving their precious carrier,” Fox told Ozzi, “was not entirely due to their defensive procedures or the skill of their pilots. They had some unexpected help. A last-minute piece of intelligence, delivered to them in a very unconventional way, allowed the Navy to know where and when the hijacked Arab airliners were coming, what their flight paths were, and their estimated time of arrival over the carrier. It was really just an aerial massacre after that.”
Ozzi pointed to the screen. “You think these are the guys who tipped them off?” he asked.
Fox nodded. “Not only that,” he said. “But two of them were flying around in Harrier jump jets that day—stealthy Harrier jump jets. Even after all the airliners were shot down, they knew two more planes were out there somewhere. Turned out that two of our own air refueling tankers were taken over by Bahrani fanatics posing as copilots. They came real close to banging both of those planes into the Lincoln. It was only because these two guys in the Harriers brought them down that the Lincoln isn’t sitting at the bottom of Hormuz right now, instead of floating off Iraq.”
Ozzi was stunned. The public knew none of this. And judging by the security level attached to it, few people in the U.S. government or the military knew it, either.
“What does all this mean for us?” he asked Fox.
Fox lowered his voice even further. In this business, you never really knew who might be listening, no matter where you were.
“You know that asshole Rushton?”
Ozzi nodded. General Jim Rushton. Assistant to the President on military special ops. A disturbingly incompetent human being, somehow left over from the Clinton administration, Rushton knew almost nothing about special ops despite his rank, yet was in a position to run roughshod over it.
“While the boys upstairs were watching all this,” Fox explained, “the White House was watching it, too. Rushton was paging me before CNN took its first commercial break. He wants to know the same as everyone else: who are these people, who do they belong to, and how are they able to do these things.”
Fox paused for a moment. The DSA was already running on eight cylinders, juggling many assignments. Another mission would only add to the burden. But Rushton was attached at the hip to the National Security Council. When he spoke, he was acting on the NSC’s behalf. Sort of…
“And he wants to know before anyone else in this building knows,” Fox added. “So, bottom line, it’s up to us to find out who these guys are. Or more specifically, you have to find out….”
Ozzi fought off a smile. Was he really going to get out of his rabbit box?
“A field op, for me? Really?”
“Think you can handle it?”
Now Ozzi just laughed. “You know I can. Where do I start?”
His boss replied: “Go home and pack a bag. I’ve already booked you passage to Gitmo.”
Two hours later, Ozzi was climbing onto a USAF C-12 aircraft at Andrews Air Force base, just outside Washington.
It was the beginning of a scary, roundabout night for him. The plane took off just before midnight. It flew him south, to Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida, a two-hour journey plagued by heavy turbulence and rain the whole way. Once down at Jax, he was put aboard a Navy C-2 Greyhound transit plane and flown out to the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, lying 200 miles off Miami. This was another bumpy, white-knuckle flight. It ended by banging down on the carrier’s deck just after 3:00 A.M. Ozzi was immediately transferred to an SH-53, the giant naval version of the Army’s CH-53. Ozzi hated helicopters, simply because the first workable one had been designed by a Russian and he didn’t trust any Russian, even though he was a Russian himself. This helo especially looked too big, too old, too clumsy to fly.
The SH-53 took him to a spot about twenty-five miles off the southeast coast of Cuba. There it entered the strict air corridor allowed by the Cuban government for the United States to travel to Guantánomo Bay, the unlikely, oddly placed American base found hanging by a nub off the eastern end of the communist island. This flight took about thirty minutes, ending as the chopper set down in the middle of a severe, if local, thunderstorm. This while the sun was just peeking over the horizon.
Ozzi practically fell out of the old copter, the rain lingering just long enough to soak him to the skin. A Navy ensign was waiting for him. There was a flurry of ID checking, which ended with the scanning of the bar code on Ozzi’s new security pass. Then he was put in a Hummer; it left the airstrip with a screech.
They drove up and over a hill or two and through several security checkpoints. Soon enough, up ahead Ozzi could see the detention camp set up for Al Qaeda fighters captured during American combat operations in Afghanistan after 9/11, and more recently other places. Though it was considered bad taste locally to call this place a prison, it was nothing but. A fortress of razor wire and wooden buildings, it looked surreal in the damp early-morning sun.
His vehicle roared past the line of simple plywood barracks, all of them skewered by miles of electrical chain link and barbed wire. He spotted a few small figures wearing bright orange jumpsuits kneeling in a holding pen. Handcuffed and shackled around the ankles, they were no doubt Al Qaeda prisoners. Ozzi could see their faces as they drove by. None looked happy.
He was heading for a barracks built separately from this main compound; indeed, it was nearly a half-mile farther down the road. It was a slightly smaller building, with its own half-dozen rings of razor wire encircling it. While Ozzi had seen small armies of guards watching over the Islamic detainees back at the main compound, the road leading to this barracks was being guarded by three Bradley Fighting Vehicles, each sporting a huge cannon and several machine guns onboard.
His Hummer reached the barracks’ main gate and a squad of Army Rangers appeared. Ozzi had his ID card scanned once, twice, three times. Finally the Hummer was allowed in.
Inside the front door of the building he was met by another squad of Army troops. Green Berets, no less. The Army is all over this place, he thought. Two were guarding a door at the far end of the room; three others were manning a check-in station. Once again Ozzi’s bar code was triple-scanned. Then he was frisked. He was beginning to think there were little green men from Mars behind the next door.
He was finally led into the room, escorted by two Green Berets. Four men in prison garb were sitting around a crude metal table. Two were sporting bandages on their heads and hands. They were not Arabs. All four were white, obviously Americans, obviously military. The oldest was in his early forties and had bright red hair. He was one of the bandaged. Ozzi pegged him as the officer in the group. The other three were just kids, like him, in their early twenties. All three were the size of linebackers, though, with WWF muscles straining the upper sleeves of their bright orange detainee clothes.
Definitely Delta Force… Ozzi thought.
The men barely looked up when Ozzi walked in. They were not handcuffed or in leg restraints, as the Al Qaeda prisoners up the road had been. But they were so rough-looking, it seemed like they should have been. Ozzi’s Green Beret escort surprised him by turning on their heels and leaving without a word.
Suddenly it was just him and the four strange men.
He introduced himself as a member of the President’s National Security Council, a lie. He asked if each man was comfortable, if they needed coffee or a cold drink. All four declined with a shake of the head. Ozzi got down to business. He told the men of the startling events at the Tonka Tower now just 12 hours old. He explained in detail the actions of the special ops force that, at the very last second, managed to save the lives of hundreds of American children. As he spun his tale, Ozzi watched each man’s reaction, hoping a facial expression could provide him a clue. A raised eyebrow or a slightly dropped jaw could speak volumes about a person, depending on what he was hearing when his guard was let down.
But these men were very odd. They were interested in hearing what had happened—and were obviously learning about it for the first time. Yet they didn’t seem especially surprised by the dramatic events.
At the end of it there was a long silence. Finally the guy with the red hair spoke. His name tag identified him as CURRY, R.
“The world is rid of eight more mooks—and that’s a good thing,” he said. “But why are you telling us this?”
“Because of what happened at the Strait of Hormuz last month,” Ozzi replied sternly. “We thought you guys might know the people who were involved in this latest incident, seeing as you were involved in the last….”
What did these four men have to do with Hormuz? A lot. On that day, the crucial information regarding the on-coming hijacked airliners had been delivered to the Lincoln by an unauthorized helicopter—actually a Stealth version of a Blackhawk helicopter. It had been chased by two F-14 Tomcats, then battered by anti aircraft fire from the carrier’s escort ships, and finally flew through a massive barrage from the Lincoln’s own close-in guns, which caused it to crash onto the deck of the carrier just as the ship was halfway through the strait. This guy, Curry, R., was the man who’d piloted that helicopter and somehow lived to tell about it.
And the other three? Their story was just as unlikely. Four of the ten airliners seized that day had been diverted by various means from slamming into the carrier. One crashed. The three others had been saved, in midair, by the three muscle men. In each case acting alone, they’d overcome the hijackers and helped set the planes down safely, saving all onboard. The grateful Muslim passengers knew these people as “the Crazy Americans.” Though they were heroes, they’d been detained by the U.S. military once the planes were secured. When they refused to answer any questions about the events over Hormuz or what they were doing in the weeks before, the military, thinking they were rogue mercenaries at best, locked them up here in Gitmo, hoping they’d eventually crack. That’s how the DSA learned about them.
Ozzi took some photos from his briefcase. Two showed the pair of Harrier jump jets that had appeared at the tail end of the battle over the Lincoln. Another showed a very unusual Blackhawk helicopter. Bigger, longer, more bulked-up—like a gunship on steroids—it had all kinds of weapons hanging off of it. This was believed to be Curry’s mysterious helicopter, outfitted like the Harriers as radar-evading Stealth aircraft. Ozzi showed them surveillance photos of shadowy soldiers in black uniforms, very similar to the battle suits these four men had been wearing the day of the Hormuz attack. But these visual aids did little to shake the four men. They hadn’t spoken a word about their identities since being taken into custody by the U.S. military, and it didn’t appear that was going to change now. But Ozzi had to try. After all, that was the purpose of his trip down here.
“So?” he prompted them after making the case that they were obviously involved in defeating the Al Qaeda attacks that day at Hormuz. “Anyone want to ’fess up?”
The four men just looked at the floor. Their body language said it all. No way they were talking to anyone, about anything.
“You’re not prisoners,” Ozzi told them. “Not officially, anyway. It’s not a name, rank, and serial number sort of thing.”
Still, nothing.
“I don’t understand,” Ozzi said, betraying some frustration. “We’re all Americans here.”
The men shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Ozzi thought he might have hit the mark.
He said to them: “The involvement of these strange people and the strange aircraft at Hormuz is one of the most closely guarded secrets in history. Secret because, despite their valor, their cunning, their bravado, no one in Washington knows who the hell they are.”
He paused for a moment.
“So just help me out here,” he started again. “These guys who pulled off the rescue in Singapore must be friends of yours—buddies from your old unit. How did they do it? How did they know the mooks were going to blow up that tower? How could they be in that TV helicopter?”
Silence from the four men.
“Do they have ESP?” Ozzi asked them facetiously. “Are they psychic?”
The men looked at one another. Finally the biggest of the lot, a guy named Hunn, just shrugged. Like Curry, he was bandaged up. “Maybe they were stealing the copter when the shit went down.”
Ozzi laughed—but then realized the man was serious.
“But…” he began stumbling over his words. “Why would they be stealing a helicopter in Singapore?”
“You’ll have to ask them that,” Hunn said.
Ozzi was perplexed. “And while they are stealing this copter,” he asked the men, “this international incident goes down, and they just happened to be in the right place, at the right time, to save the day—in front of billions?”
“Well, that’s just something else about them,” Hunn said. “They’re really lucky.”
Hunn thought a moment, then added, “Or at least they think they are.”
Silence. The men clammed up again.
Ozzi said: “This is a very important thing, to a lot of very important people. Heroes or not, there is no way of knowing what’s going to happen to your friends if they remain off the reservation like this. These things make people in Washington nervous—and no one needs that these days. So, what do you say? Can you throw me a bone here?”
More silence. But then the guy named Curry shifted in his seat again.
“What’s in it for us?” he finally asked Ozzi.
At last….
“I can get you out of here, for starters,” Ozzi replied. He wasn’t telling them they’d have to sign a loyalty pledge and would be kept under surveillance for many years to come.
But to Ozzi’s surprise, the four men didn’t seem impressed. Not enough to crack.
“There might also be a bit of mon-e-tary re-mu-ner-ation,” Ozzi added, stretching out those last two words to almost comic proportions. He was authorized to offer each man up to $250,000 for any jackpot information.
Still, the mention of money seemed to have zero effect on them.
Finally, Ozzi just blurted out: “OK—what do you want?”
The four men all sat up.
Curry spoke. “We want two things,” he said. “Those guys—our friends out there, the ones who survived—have to be pardoned.”
“Pardoned?” Ozzi interrupted him. “For what?”
“For everything,” Curry replied sternly. “If there are any federal or military charges against them, for things done before or after Hormuz, they have to be dropped.”
Ozzi had no idea what Curry was talking about, but he indicated it would be no problem. “What else?” he asked.
Curry took a deep breath. “For all the guys who didn’t make it that day, and there were a bunch of them, they have to be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. For bravery. Above and beyond.”
Ozzi was startled by the request. These guys didn’t want their freedom; they didn’t want money. They just wanted their friends, both alive and otherwise, to be done right.
“Now can you do that?” Curry asked him, leaning far across the table. “Or are you just a messenger boy? A small fish?”
Ozzi was insulted, but only for a moment. These guys had a story, and he knew he had to hear it.
“Tell me everything,” he said, finally sitting down at the table. “And we’ll go from there.”
Ozzi emerged from the special barracks three hours later. He climbed into the back of the waiting Hummer and told the driver to get him back to the airstrip immediately.
It was now close to noon, but Ozzi had lost all track of time. His head was spinning, his hands shaking. He’d been in the DSA since its existence. He’d heard some crazy stuff in that time, but never anything like this.
Ozzi had been taught from his first days in the intelligence game that after leaving an interrogation he should write down his first impressions immediately. Key words, bits of phrases, body language. Inevitably, these notations would prove invaluable when it came time to compose a formal report.
But now, bouncing down the dusty Cuban road, his pen hovering over his notebook, he was suddenly at a loss for words. He didn’t know what to say. How could he start writing anything about what he’d just heard and the people he’d just met?
But he felt compelled to write something down. So he scribbled just one word: Patriots.