Strike Force Alpha by Mack Maloney Read Free Book Online Page B

verbally. Nothing was ever written down. The ship never took a call or a radio message from Washington or any U.S. government agency. They never spoke with the Pentagon. They communicated, only when they had to, with a top-secret NSA computer site, located in a typical house in a typical suburban neighborhood somewhere in New Jersey known as Blueberry Park. The only way information could be sent and received from this location was via a porn site chat room on the Internet.
    So the operation wasn’t being run by the generals or the admirals or any U.S. intelligence agency or even by the White House itself. It wasn’t being run by anybody. Again, this meant the team would not encounter any red tape when planning or executing an operation. It would be under no constitutional restrictions as to what it could do, when or where, or to whom. That was the beauty of Murphy’s idea. The unit was self-contained. On its own. And so hush-hush, even the President himself didn’t know all the details, if any at all.
    Bingo’s CO supposedly left him an E-mail that summed up Murphy this way:
    A highly educated loose cannon. A very hands-on, very patriotic guy. He’ll get things done either quietly or with a bang. He’s brash, cocky, unpredictable, cold-blooded. He’s out for revenge against the Arab terrorists, and seems almost maniacal in that pursuit. He’s vowed not to rest until every mook connected with 9/11 has been taken out and appears as fanatical as they are in fulfilling his goal.
    Now, if you give a guy like that a billion dollars these days, what do you get? You get a guy who secretly buys a containership, turns it into something from a James Bond movie, arranges to get Harriers and choppers and Spooks and even some Delta guys onboard, all so they can go out and get down and dirty with Al Qaeda. To get down and fight at their level, with no political correctness bullshit to get in the way, and then disappear once the deed has been done. Is it a good idea? Who knows? Either he’s nuts or I am.

    How did Ryder get involved in this?
    Sometimes he wondered that himself. He’d had an interesting military career up to this point. Originally doomed to flying C-130 cargo planes after completing Air Force flight training, he somehow got slotted into fighter jets. He became so good at it, he was tapped as part of a secret program to be one of the first Air Force guys to go through the Navy’s famous Top Gun air combat school. He performed so well there, more covert assignments followed. He excelled at flying tough and keeping his mouth shut, and soon he was involved in some of the darkest secret operations ever undertaken by the U.S. military. The stories he could tell would make Ian Fleming’s hair curl.
    In between all the black ops, Ryder did airframe testing at Edwards Air Force Base, including the VTOL version of the new F-35 fighter. Later on he flew new plane tryouts at Nellis AFB, which was just outside Las Vegas and practically a stone’s throw from his front door. He was transferred to the Reserves to free up his schedule and finally started giving the black op opportunities to younger guys. Then, at the age of 44, when he had 20 years’ service staring him in the face, he got an offer to test fly for Boeing. He’d be a civilian, but it was more money than he’d ever dreamed of making.
    Then, September 11th. The day his dreamworld came to an end.
    His wife, Maureen, was an on-air TV reporter. Beautiful, blond, and smart, she’d done local news in Las Vegas but had been featured on many national spots as well. She’d flown to Boston earlier that week to do a report on a massive highway project there called the Big Dig. Her assignment wrapped up a day early. She got a seat at the last moment on United Flight 175 to LA. It was the plane that hit the second tower. Back home in Vegas, Ryder had fallen asleep on the couch the night before, typically with the TV on and his cell turned off. He woke up just in time to