Alexandria, Virginia
Fox found Ozzi in the bar at the Holiday Inn down near Reagan Airport.
The bar was on the fifteenth floor of the hotel; it was a rotating, flying saucer–shaped affair that gave patrons alternating views of the airport, Washington, D.C., and the deceptively peaceful waters of the Potomac.
It was now midnight, the end of one long day for Fox and the beginning of another. His wife had dinner on the table for him when he finally got home around 11.00 P.M., but a pink Post-it note with Ozzi’s cell number was also waiting on his plate. He and Ozzi had a quick phone conversation, and 10 minutes later Fox was back in his car, speeding down Interstate 95, eating a hastily made peanut butter sandwich and working his own Nokia. Fox knew his deputy had arrived back in the D.C. area at noon that day and yet he never contacted the office. This was unusual behavior for Ozzi, usually a slave to the rules. It was also unusual for him to want to meet Fox in such an out-of-the-way place at so late an hour.
The bartender was clearing away three empty glasses in front of Ozzi when Fox walked in. There was no one else at the bar. Fox smelled bourbon. Cheap stuff, mixed with Coke. He never knew Ozzi to drink much or drink alone. Yet here he was, in the middle of the night, doing both.
Fox took the seat next to him. Ozzi thanked him for driving so far and apologized for the late hour, but both were necessary, he said. The story he’d heard from the “Gitmo Four” was still spinning around his head, just as the bar was spinning around D.C. Indeed, he’d been going in circles up here most of the day. In that time, he’d concluded it might be wise to brief Fox somewhere out of the Pentagon’s immediate neighborhood. Fox told him he understood.
Ozzi ordered another drink.
“I know this will sound like a bad Clancy novel,” he began. “But what I just heard from those guys down there has to be the truth, only because I don’t think anyone could have made it up.”
Fox tried not to roll his eyes. Ozzi was bright and dedicated but still somewhat new to the spy game. Fox ordered a drink for himself and lit up a Marlboro.
“OK, Lieutenant,” he said. “Let’s hear your report….”
The story the four men had told Ozzi was incredible:
Six months before, they’d been asked to join a supersecret special ops team being put together by a shadowy figure known only as “Bobby Murphy.” No one knew who Murphy was or who he worked for. The team was given the latest in weapons and NSA eavesdropping equipment, put on a spy ship disguised to look like a container vessel, and then set loose in the Middle East. Their mission: to track down and eliminate anyone they could find who was connected to the attacks of September 11th. Whether you were one of the terrorist masterminds or just some mook who bought the tickets for the hijackers, you were on this team’s hit list and they were coming to get you. Operating in the deepest secrecy, not only had they assassinated a number of the 9/11 culprits, but they’d done so with such speed and brutality, they’d managed to strike terror themselves into the hearts of many Muslims in the Persian Gulf region, guilty or not.
Then Ozzi delivered a real bombshell: the four men also told him that they’d been involved in a bioterror attack on the Gulf’s food supply and the aerial bombing of a bank building in downtown Abu Dhabi. Fox was jolted by this news. About two months earlier someone had poisoned a large shipment of fruit just before it left port in Libya. The fruit was being sold by a company owned by Al Qaeda. Hundreds died from the tainted citrus all over the Arab Middle East. The fruit company, a $44-million-a-year operation, was out of business in a week.
Just days before that, a bank in Abu Dhabi had been bombed by two mysterious aircraft, at noon, while the streets around it were filled with people attending a government festival. The bank had held $12 million in cash belonging to Al Qaeda, money used to finance their army of jihad fighters. The bombing attack burned this money to a crisp. It also toppled the 16-story building and killed more than a thousand people on the ground.
That these two events happened was public knowledge, of course. The twin attacks had been headlines until the gigantic assault on the USS Lincoln knocked them off the front page. Though Fox was aware of a CIA disinformation campaign blaming these attacks on the Israelis, to his knowledge no one had ever claimed responsibility for them. Until now.
They both ordered another drink. Fox asked for a double. Ozzi continued with his report. Yes, it was them at Hormuz, this after they broke the terrorists’ code at the last moment. But then Ozzi told Fox of other bloody missions the supersecret team had run. They added up to a string of seemingly unrelated incidents that had baffled intelligence services around the world for months. The rescue of a passenger liner near the Aegean Sea, an air strike on a notorious terrorist camp in Algeria. The terror bombing of a wedding hall in Beirut. The brutal executions of several high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives all caught on videotape.
Fox began gulping his drink. Ozzi’s tales conjured up images of futuristic commandos who flew Stealth helicopters and invisible Harriers and who operated off a ghost ship. It did seem like pulp fiction, but there was no doubt that some kind of supersecret team existed. Someone had created all this havoc. And the people Ozzi had just talked to were living proof of it.
“But who the hell prepped them?” Fox wanted to know. One of the DSA’s jobs was to keep an eye on the military’s special operations forces, their weaponry, their missions. “We should have heard about these guys before they got through their first day.”
“That’s just it,” Ozzi said. “The team members weren’t recruited in any normal fashion. They were all called in the middle of the night by this mystery man, Bobby Murphy, or his confederates, of which he must have a few. They convinced these people that this was a happening thing, and somehow this Murphy guy was able to get them just about everything they needed—with absolutely no one knowing about it. A double squad from Delta Force, some Air Force special ops guys to drive the choppers, some Navy guys to run the boat, and a couple top-notch pilots all signed on. Murphy even got ahold of two Harrier jump jets—and stealthy ones no less! He arranged for unlimited air refuelings, weapons resupply, the works. And the Gitmo guys insist Murphy was running the whole show, no oversight, no nothing. That is, until he got arrested. Now, I’ve never heard of him—have you?”
Fox shook his head no. He knew every important special ops player in the U.S. military as well as those in the intelligence community. None of them was named Bobby Murphy. He pulled out his Palm Pilot and accessed his computer back at the Pentagon. He ran the name “Robert Murphy” through the employment files of the Defense Department, the CIA, the NSA, and every other U.S. intelligence agency. He came up with 13 hits, but all of them were low-level bureaucrats and enlisted men.
Fox showed the results to Ozzi. “I’ll have one of our people check out all of these guys,” he said. “Although, the ‘Bobby Murphy’ name is probably just a cover.”
Ozzi agreed with a tip of his glass. Fox lit another Marlboro.
“How did you get these guys at Gitmo to open up to you?” he asked Ozzi. “They’ve been sitting down there for more than a month and no one has got a peep out of them. Everyone thought they were Israelis or mercs of some kind and that’s why they were keeping their mouths shut. I’m surprised they gave you the time of day.”
“Well, they’re a strange crew,” Ozzi replied. “They’re not like the hard-ass operators we usually deal with. They’re…well, different.”
“Different, how?”
Ozzi drained his drink, then signaled for another.
“I can’t explain it any more than to say these guys are authentic heroes. I mean real patriots,” he told Fox emphatically. “They bleed the flag, Major. Remember the stories about the New York firefighters and cops who saved people on nine-eleven? Ordinary people doing extraordinary things? That describes these guys to a T. You see, they all have something in common, something the regular special op guy might not have. Every one of them lost someone on September eleventh or to some other terrorist attack. So it was personal, you know? They were so focused, their unit patch showed the Twin Towers for God’s sake. And what they went through for this Murphy guy was unbelievable. They almost had me in tears.”
Fox sipped his drink. It sounded a lot like what Israel did after the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics in 1972. When a number of their Olympic athletes were taken hostage and eventually murdered by Palestinian gunmen, the Israelis secretly sought revenge. They identified about two dozen PLO members who’d been connected to the massacre and quietly, over the course of the next decade, hunted each one down and put a bullet through his head. What Ozzi was telling him mirrored the Israeli model yet was pumped to the max with stealthy Harriers, Delta guys, and an enormous undercover spy ship.
Fox asked his question again: “Those guys have been locked up down there for a month. Why would they spill now? Did you make them any promises?”
Ozzi shrugged. “Nothing we can’t deliver. I just assured them nothing would happen to their friends. That we’d either just let them fade away or wait until they reveal themselves. The Gitmo guys think they’re trying to get back here anyhow, to get back home on their own, and I say more power to them. They did some questionable things over there, but the good far outweighs the bad, in my opinion.
“I also told them I’d do everything in my power to make sure that what they did was officially recognized somehow—especially for the guys they lost while they were carrying out their missions. They say their buddies who got killed deserve Medals of Honor. I tend to agree with them.”
But Fox frowned mightily at this, though Ozzi was too busy sipping his drink to notice. As a senior man in the DSA, Fox knew a bit more about the politics of special operations. Rule One: No matter how brave the participants might be, they had to be tightly controlled, as exposure—of them or their mission—might lead to anything from national embarrassment to all-out war. It was a different world from what went on aboveground. And that world was no place for spies who liked staying out in the cold.
Fox was also somewhat surprised at Ozzi’s reaction to the Gitmo Four. The young lieutenant was as loyal as the next man and still impressionable to some degree. But never had Fox seen him like this, with so many stars in his eyes.
Fox asked him: “So, there’s no doubt in your mind that the guys who did the Tonka rescue are the same guys who showed up the day the Lincoln was attacked?”
“No doubt at all,” Ozzi replied. “It’s the same MO—fly by the seat of your pants, show a lot of balls, but be damn lucky at the same time.”
“Well, that might have been their thing before,” Fox said, slowly. “Poisoning fruit, bombing banks, and so on. But this last time, they did it for all the world to see. They’re all over the news channels, with this Singapore thing and not just in this country, either. They’re celebrities. And frankly, that’s making some people nervous.”
“So?” Ozzi asked.
“So they just can’t be allowed to ‘fade away,’” Fox said, “someone has to find these guys and bring them in—”
“Bring them in?” Ozzi asked, incredulous. He was drunk and suddenly getting pissed off at his boss, which was rare. Usually he and Fox agreed on everything. “Listen, Major,” Ozzi said, words slurring but sincere. “I’m not such a pup here. Especially after what I just heard down in Gitmo. And I know those guys are not a bunch of angels. But going after them, in any way, shape, or form, questioning them about what they did, it would be like going after all those firemen and cops at the World Trade Center that day. Few of them were angels, either, I suspect. But look what they became. Same thing for the people on that plane that went down in Pennsylvania. The people at the Pentagon. Our first boots on the ground in Afghanistan. God damn it, these guys are just like all of them. And they’ve gone through a lot. Why can’t we just leave them alone?”
“Because we have to follow orders, Lieutenant,” Fox said. with heavy emphasis on the last word.
Ozzi just stared back at him. It was clear Fox didn’t like this any more than he did. Someone must have been pressing him from above.
“That asshole, Rushton?” Ozzi asked him. “He’s behind this?”
Fox just nodded and sipped his drink. “He wants to send Team ninety-nine out after them. He’s logging it in as a rescue mission.”
Ozzi couldn’t believe his ears. In the special ops biz, Team 99 was known as the “Super-SEALs,” though some suspected it was a self-designation. In any case, they weren’t ordinary fish. They were hunter-killers, a particularly cunning and vicious SEAL element that was sent on only the toughest missions, usually to track down the most notorious bad guys. They, too, were a very secret unit.
“I had to call Rushton after we talked,” Fox revealed to Ozzi. “I had no choice. He’d been burning up my line all day—meanwhile I’m stalling for time until I hear from you. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that if you got a lead on the Tonka Tower guys, he was unleashing T Ninety-Nine.”
Ozzi continued staring at his boss in boozy disbelief. “But those assholes will more likely kill them than rescue them,” he argued, but weakly, as if all the air had gone out of him. “And those people out there are heroes, sir. They don’t deserve that….”
Fox’s eyes were downcast. “I know,” he said. “But heroes or not, we just can’t have a rogue team like them operating beyond the realm. No control? No oversight? No accountability? They might be right out of the movies, but this is the real world. And in the real world, these things cannot be allowed to exist.”
Ozzi’s eyes went black. His face turned uncharacteristically stern. He began to say something but stopped. To cause a scene here would be highly unprofessional, especially with the subject they were discussing. He finished his drink. The bar seemed to be spinning a little faster. He had to change tactics.
“But how are they going to go about finding them?” he said finally. “They’re floating around out there somewhere on a containership. And there’s got to be hundreds, if not thousands, of containerships in the world. How do you find just the right one? That’s even if they are still on the ship. They’re experts in avoiding contact. I mean look how they’ve managed to stay invisible so far.”
Fox finished his drink. “I know that, and so does Rushton,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not going to try. Besides, you know how it is these days. No one can hide for very long anymore.”
He signaled for the check. Ozzi could barely move at this point. Fox was torn between duty to follow orders and compassion for his junior officer. The bar spun so that they were looking at the nighttime skyline of Washington.
“Look, Oz-man,” Fox said, giving him a fatherly pat on the back. “If there’s some way I can derail this, I promise you, I’ll give it a shot.”
“And if not?” Ozzi asked him point-blank.
Fox put on his hat and zipped his jacket. “If not,” he said, soberly, “you’d better hope those guys out there choose not to resist.”