Free Strike Force Charlie by Mack Maloney Page A

were important to every man here, in more ways than one. They believed one contained information that would prove there had been no legitimate reason for locking them up in Gitmo. More important, though, the other might hold evidence of a very grave threat against the United States—one that nobody seemed to be doing anything about.
    But how did they know this? How did the team have any more than a guess as to what might be on the two files? And who was sending them in the first place? In all cases, the answer was: “Top-secret … .”
    Bates opened the file called “Fast Ball” first. Breaking into it was child’s play for him, quickly solving the security code that had prevented Li or anyone else from reading all of it. And, just as she’d suspected, it was a transcript of an interrogation, one carried out by “senior U.S. military officials,” aboard an unnamed U.S. warship in the South Pacific just a few weeks before. Its entire contents were marked: AUTHORIZED EYES ONLY.
    The men gathered around the computer laughed at seeing this. Why? Because they were the people being grilled in the interrogation, they and their still-incarcerated ghostly colleagues down in Gitmo. Their grand inquisition had been conducted a few weeks after the Singapore Incident, and after the team had been rounded up by the U.S. military in the Philippines and whisked aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, ironically the same warship they’d saved weeks before at Hormuz. This would be the first time the team members would see the official document produced as a result of that interrogation. They all read it silently now, looking over Bates’s shoulder.
    In an odd, roundabout way, the transcript chronicled just about everything the rogue team had been doing in the last six
months. Their heroics, their secret battles, their over-the-top derring-do. Within the endless pages of Q&As was the true story of Hormuz, how the original team, assembled nearly a year before to track down those responsible for 9/11, had stalked the Al Qaeda hijackers the morning of the planned attack, finally breaking their code and alerting the Navy that trouble was coming. So, too, the rescue at Singapore, where on prime-time TV the team saved thousands of innocent people before disappearing just as quickly as they came.
    The document read like the stuff of movies and best sellers, but far from braggadocio, the team members’ tales were told in terms of bravery and sacrifice, especially by their comrades who’d died during the Hormuz operation.
    And while it might have seemed to the world’s eye that the rogue team had vanished after the incident in Singapore, the interrogation document showed, in their own words, that just the opposite was true. They’d never stopped their secret war against Al Qaeda. In fact, shortly after the Tonka Tower rescue the ghosts began not one but two operations against the terrorist organization. One involved a handful of ghosts hunting down and brutally assassinating Abdul Kazeel, the man who’d helped mastermind both 9/11 and the Hormuz attack. The second mission had other team members looking for a wayward shipment of American-made Stinger missiles, surface-to-air weapons highly prized by the Islamic terrorists. The ghosts eventually tracked the missiles to an Al Qaedalinked cell in Manila, but that’s when the U.S. military finally caught up with them, arresting the team en masse just minutes before they could seize the weapons cache. After that, the transcript clearly showed all of the team members insisting not only that the missiles, 36 in all, had been paid for and delivered to Al Qaeda by none other than the DGSE agent Palm Tree but also that the weapons were heading to America, to be used by other terrorists to shoot down U.S. airliners.
    And therein lay the first problem. Certainly three dozen Stinger missiles on the loose inside the United States could wreck