Free Strike Force Charlie by Mack Maloney Page B

havoc in the skies above the homeland. But instead of
pursuing crucial leads given to them by the team members, their inquisitors went in the other direction: they tried mightily to get the ghosts to change their stories, to turn on one another, and, most important, to tell the military authorities just who put the team together in the first place.
    This was someone’s ploy to dissolve the team once and for all. But it didn’t work. None of the ghosts fell for it. While those questioned gave explicit answers, no one spilled his guts. No one gave details about who organized them or who managed to get them a containership filled with the latest in combat gear and snooping systems or who had the guts to gather together such an elite group of war fighters in the first place, all of whom had lost loved ones to Islamic terrorism in the recent past. In other words, the team members had no problem telling their inquisitors what they had done at Hormuz and Singapore. They just didn’t tell them how.
    So, too, did every man stay true to the group. Their interrogators even went so far as to suggest that the team was actually involved in moving illegal drugs when they were caught in Manila and not trying to find the Stinger missiles. It was total bullshit, of course, but if just one team member agreed to change his story and follow this script, then, it was promised, he would be set free and given a million dollars in cold cash, not a bad payoff for about an hour’s work.
    But again, not one of them took the bait. Not one of them even remotely flipped on his friends. These guys weren’t just patriots. They were loyal, too.
    By the end of it, their inquisitors were stumped as to what to do.
    So they threw them all in jail.
    Â 
    Where were the Stinger missiles now? No one knew. But there were some clues. And they were contained in the second cryptic e-mail, the one called “Slow Curve.”
    Once again, Bates worked his magic and opened it in a snap. But unlike the first attachment, “Slow Curve” was not all text. Rather, it also contained images caught by a photophone, along with some audio downloads. Together they
told the strange story of a sports reporter from Los Angeles named George Mann and what had happened to him shortly before his body was found, with two bullets in the head, dumped in a ditch in the desert northeast of Los Angeles.
    Stitched together from smaller files Mann had sent by phone to his home computer, the file presented a morbidly disjointed picture of the last hours of the reporter’s life. He’d been assigned to cover a Southeast Asian soccer team that had traveled, by boat, to LA and was barnstorming the United States. Mann apparently met their ship at the port of LA but was nearly run down by the team’s pair of Greyhound buses, purely by accident, it seems. Mann later caught up with one of those buses in a small California desert town, where his picturephone transmitted images of at least some of the soccer team riding in one of the Greyhound coaches. As it turned out, this bus was also carrying an arsenal of weapons in a secret storage area—an arsenal that included at least 18 Stinger missiles. The file ended abruptly just as a fleeting phone image of the missiles was sent back to Mann’s home computer.
    As sketchy as the “Slow Curve” attachment was, anyone viewing it could only reach one, rather incredible conclusion: These soccer players weren’t soccer players at all. They were Al Qaeda terrorists. And they were now inside the United States, carrying at least 18 Stinger missiles with them.
    Scary … .
    A qualifying paragraph inserted at the end of the file indicated that the bombshell info was not obtained by a physical break-in. Rather, an ultrasecret NSA eavesdropping satellite known only as Keypad had been used to access Mann’s information. This system could zero in on, listen, and secretly record any cell-phone call made by