Free Strike Force Alpha by Mack Maloney Page B

embedded in a bramble of old vines and was still too hot to touch. Obviously, it had been thrown here as a result of the blast.
    But this didn’t make sense. The Fidelo was nearly a half-mile high; the villa was at its summit. The only means of land access was by four-wheel drive, and the road was so steep it was impossible to tow anything up. Plus the nearest deep water was a mile away—and a long way down.
    How then did a speedboat motor get way up here?
     
    The place was called Ben Annaba.
    It was a small oasis village about fifteen miles in from the Algerian coastal city of El Kala.
    Ben Annaba was the headquarters of a terrorist group known as the Holy Islamic Army of God. They were part of Al Qaeda, though one of its smallest components. The government in Algiers wasn’t Muslim enough for the Holy Army, so they had vowed to change it. To do this, they had taken to attacking isolated desert towns and butchering the occupants. Men, women, children—everyone got chopped up in the name of Allah.
    Traveling on motorbikes and in high-speed desert SUVs, the Holy Army was always long gone before the Algerian military could arrive on the scene. They moved so fast, in fact, sometimes the military didn’t bother to come at all.
    Bobby Murphy had somehow come upon a videotape shot inside the stronghold at Ben Annaba. Using the secure porn site in New Jersey, he’d fed this footage to Ocean Voyager ’s White Rooms in bits and pieces, disguised as mpgs. The tape showed the Holy Army’s command facilities in the center of the town, with the terrorists’ living quarters and training areas on its periphery. Murphy had also drawn a map of the camp, which he sent as a jpg file. The drawing was so detailed, it looked like a photograph.
    The videotape keyed in on one barracks marked: BAYT ASHUHADA , loosely Arabic for “House of Martyrs.” This was where Al Qaeda members stayed when visiting their mujahideen brethren at Ben Annaba. Murphy’s information said up to 20 “martyrs” were in residence at the camp, along with their families.
    Then there was another building, located next to the main command hut. It was covered with crude drawings warning against bringing any open flames near. Murphy was certain this structure was the Holy Army’s ammunition dump.
    Ryder’s primary mission tonight was simple: put a thousand-pound bomb into the House of Martyrs and another into the No Smoking building. If he had any time to spare, he should strafe the encampment as well.
     
    The trip up to Sicily went off without a hitch. The Blackhawks had ingressed at their assigned point, one of them carrying the raft full of explosives picked up during the rescue of the Sea Princess the night before. The planning for the terrorists’ attempt to sink the cruise liner had indeed taken place inside the villa atop Monte Fidelo. The explosives that were eventually packed aboard the suicide raft had been kept inside the villa as well. This had been confirmed by cell-phone intercepts pulled down by the Spooks in Ocean Voyager ’s White Rooms. Once the information was in hand, no one was in the mood to wait for the Italian national police to act. Besides, returning the explosives, raft, engine and all to their point of origin was a message to other terrorist cells: We know who did this and this is how they paid for it. And when we find you, you’ll pay, too….
     
    Once the Blackhawks were safely over land, Ryder and Phelan turned back over the Med and went their separate ways. Ryder would have no wingman for the second half of this night. Phelan went off to a point southeast of Ocean Voyager, to fly a sort of flanking picket duty. Ryder meanwhile had headed southwest, toward Algeria.
    He went under the Algerian radar net with no problems. His radar signature was less than that of a bird. Once over the coast, finding the target was easy, thanks to the coordinates supplied by Murphy and his hand-drawn map. The camp was in the middle of a large, bare