by Brad Thor
A chorus of “Roger that” swept through the truck and Harvath turned his computer back around and powered it down.
The team went over their satellite footage of the area once more. They discussed points of ingress and egress, as well as plans B, C, and D.
When they had finished, Schiller opened one of the cardboard boxes. He lifted out what looked like two thin plastic briefcases with a shiny, metal scorpion logo in the middle, and handed them to Harvath.
“What are these?” Harvath asked, opening one of them up.
“Stinger Spike Systems.”
It looked like a collapsible metal wall bracket for a makeup mirror, except that it was studded with very sharp, stainless-steel spikes. Harvath had seen law enforcement agencies lay them down across roadways to take out the tires of vehicles in high-speed chases.
“Just in case we need to buy a little more time,” Schiller added.
It was a good idea and Harvath was glad the assault team leader had thought to bring them along.
All that was left to do was to launch the assault. Harvath and Schiller had briefly gone back and forth on the timing. They had debated hitting the safe house just after sunset in hopes of catching the cell members in their Maghrib prayers, but it was a very limited five-to-ten-minute window, and there was no telling exactly when they would start their prayers.
There was also the issue of when a moving truck would legitimately show up to unload. Late afternoon was believable, and though early-evening moves did happen from time to time, they were out of the ordinary and would therefore attract attention. Schiller’s assaulters were already amped up and pulling on the leash. Harvath decided that the team would move now.
First in would be the assaulter Schiller had assigned to cover the back of the building, a former Green Beret named Pat Murphy. Murphy grabbed a small backpack and hopped out of the truck. He would repark the other car and approach through the wooded area behind the apartment complex where he would take up his position.
As he climbed out of the truck, one of the other assaulters leaned out the window and said, “God help us if there’s an Irish bar between here and there.”
Murphy flipped the man the finger, shouldered his pack, and began walking. Harvath watched as he crossed the parking area and disappeared around the corner.
Reaching down into the gym bag, Harvath turned on his radio. Twenty-two minutes later, they heard from Murphy. “Phoenix Seven, in place,” he stated. “Bang a gong.”
That was the all-clear they had been waiting for. It was time to take down the safe house.
CHAPTER 23
Deserted streets always made Harvath nervous. Over his career, he’d been ambushed a handful of times and the scene had always looked the same. People and even animals seemed to be able to sense when something bad was about to happen. More often than not, either the bad guys had told the people to hide inside or the people had noticed the bad guys were up to something and therefore quickly made themselves scarce. Whatever the reason for this block being devoid of any activity, Harvath didn’t care. It just gave him a bad feeling.
“Pretty quiet,” he said as they neared the apartment complex.
“Too quiet,” replied Schiller, who covertly banged on the cabin bulkhead behind him to let his assaulters in back know that they were rolling up on the target.
Harvath scanned the windows and rooftops for any sign of a spotter, but saw nothing. Even so, he felt like there were a thousand sets of eyes on them. “Ten seconds,” he said.
Schiller knocked twice on the wall behind him.
When they arrived in front of the apartment complex, Harvath brought the truck to a stop, put it in park, and turned off the ignition. There was no service entrance. Everything went in and out of the building through the front door. It wasn’t lost on him how exposed they all were out there in the middle of the street. He wanted to get the assaulters into the building as quickly as possible. Then he’d be the only sitting duck out in the open.
He, Schiller, and one other assaulter climbed out of the cab and got to work. Harvath walked around to the back of the truck, extended the ramp, and rolled up the door. Schiller and his assaulter stepped into the lobby of the building. While Schiller pretended to be buzzing up to someone on the intercom system, his assaulter used a lock-pick gun to open the second set of doors. As soon as they were open, he pulled a rubber wedge from his pocket and propped it open.
Schiller followed him inside and called for the elevator. While he waited for it to come down, he pried the glass cover from the fireman’s key box, removed the key, and replaced the cover. When the elevator arrived, he stepped inside and inserted the key. It was now under their control.
The assaulters from the back of the truck had already debused and were stacking boxes on dollies when Schiller and the other man came out to assist them.
Once the dollies were all loaded up, the men disappeared inside with them. Harvath’s job now was to stay with the truck and be the team’s eyes out on the street. He pulled down the rear door, threw the lock, and then walked back up front and climbed into the cab.
Though he wasn’t a smoker, Harvath removed the pack of cigarettes he had purchased, lit one, and hung his arm out the window. It had always been fascinating to him how someone just sitting in a car doing nothing could be suspicious, but the minute you gave him a cigarette and he adopted a casual posture, somehow he became less so. He couldn’t explain why that was, but he’d seen it work enough times that it had become a tactic he liked to employ when he had to hide in plain sight.
The truck’s side mirrors had been angled outward before they departed the parking area to give them the best possible view of the street and the sidewalks on either side. He could even make out the car with the book on its dashboard several car lengths back. Noticing it, he used his free hand to pull the baseball cap he was wearing down a little tighter.
He pretended to fumble with the truck’s radio as he looked out the windshield and studied the windows of the buildings around him. He had yet to shake his feeling that somebody was watching, that something wasn’t right.
He also hated just sitting there. It had been the right decision, but it still didn’t mean he liked it. He wanted to be where the action was, not sitting in a van waiting for everything to go down. Ultimately, being where he was right now had been his call, and it had been the right call. Leadership was not only about taking charge, it was also about giving your team everything they needed to succeed, and then getting out of their way. It meant knowing when you should be the first person charging through a door and when you should stand down and let someone else do it.
Harvath had the makings of a good leader, and at some point, way in the distant future, that was going to be important, because he couldn’t dance on the pointy tip of the spear forever. Eventually, his reaction times were going to slow. When that happened, he was going to have to come to terms with the high-speed life he had lived since his late teens. Time catches up with everyone at some point. The secret lay in knowing when to dial back your lifestyle. Now, though, wasn’t the time. Harvath was in the best physical and mental condition of his life and there was no end of bad guys that needed to be dealt with.
As long as he stayed on the right side of his ops and the people he worked for, everything would be fine.
No sooner had that thought entered his mind than the radio in the bag next to him clicked. Schiller was indicating that he and his assault team were geared up and ready to breach the apartment.
Murphy clicked back the all-clear from behind the complex and after one last check of the street, Harvath reached his hand into the bag and clicked back his response. All clear. It was time to clean out the rats’ nest.
As Harvath’s hand felt for the butt of his MP7, he could completely visualize what was going on upstairs. With the all-clear having been signaled from outside, Schiller would motion up his breacher, have him pause, and then click his radio one last time before giving the man the com
mand to swing the breaching ram and knock the safe-house door right off its hinges.
Flicking his cigarette into the street, Harvath drew his left hand inside the window and hovered it over the truck’s horn. He wanted to give Chase a heads-up, but he knew he couldn’t. He needed to appear just as shocked by the entry team as everyone else. If there was a signal before the attack, they could very well cue in on that after the fact. Harvath’s plan for leaving Chase under cover with them once they had been transported to a black site for interrogation could all come unraveled.
As Harvath waited on the street below for the assault team to enter the apartment, his heart began to beat faster and the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stood on end as if the air was charged with electricity. It was a way his gut had of signaling him that something wasn’t right.
CHAPTER 24
Having seen the book on the dashboard of the car outside, Chase knew the assault team would hit the apartment before nightfall. There was no way of knowing if they had seen his signal. He hoped so, because he couldn’t do it a second time. There was a very bad vibe in the safe house. If he got caught opening the blinds or any of the windows again, he had no doubt there’d be hell to pay.
Sabah had returned, and he and Karami had shut themselves up in one of the rooms at the end of the hall. Chase wondered if there were any computers or weapons hidden away in that room. He also wondered where Sabah had gone in such a hurry and what he and Karami were now talking about.
Chase was certain that the Uppsala cell was in the final stages of something. What it was, he had no idea, but it sure felt as if they were about to go operational on something. Was the Uppsala cell Aazim’s dead man switch? Had he provided Karami with a target deck and a way to activate the network’s sleepers in the United States and elsewhere upon his death?
These were all questions Chase couldn’t wait to start asking. He also wanted to know why it had been so important for the Uppsala cell to bring Aazim’s nephew in. Was the uncle just that overprotective, or did Mansoor know something or have access to something of value? They’d be getting to the bottom of all of it soon enough.
In the meantime, Chase stayed with the cell’s cannon fodder and watched war porn. One of the jihadists got up at one point to get tea and actually brought back an extra glass for the newcomer. It was a good sign; a sign of respect. Quietly, Chase hoped that it meant that they had begun to accept him. Their willingness to believe he was one of them would affect how successful the interrogations would be once they had been deposited in whatever black site Harvath had arranged for them.
Chase knew exactly what was in store for him. Very likely, he was going to get Tasered when the assault team hit the safe house. He’d be FlexCuff’d and hooded. If he resisted, which he planned on doing quite vehemently, he’d get a tune-up, which meant he’d be slapped around.
After they were tossed in the truck with the other cell members and spirited back to the farm, Harvath would line them up in the barn and have their clothes cut away from their bodies with EMT shears. They’d then receive the same “packaging” all extraordinary rendition prisoners had been receiving since 9/11.
After being fitted with suppositories containing a psychotropic drug to make them more compliant and to disorient their comprehension of time and space, they’d be fitted with diapers for the long plane ride, dressed in matching coveralls, shackled, and with their heads still hooded with bags that allowed for no light to get in, they’d have sensory deprivation headsets fitted over their ears.
From there, they’d be placed in a different windowless vehicle from the moving van that had been used in the raid. Harvath’s clever plan for getting them out of the country, with the Swedish government none the wiser, would be put into effect.
Chase wasn’t looking forward to any of it, but no one had forced him to take this assignment. He had agreed to it because he knew that until they had hunted down every last member of Aazim Aleem’s network, America wouldn’t be safe. You couldn’t just cut out part of this kind of cancer and hope that it never came back. You had to get all of it. Any cells left behind were guaranteed to metastasize.
There were many ways of going after the cancer of Islamic terrorism. There was the radiation of interrupting terrorist financing, the chemotherapy of denying havens from within which to train and operate, and the most delicate and most efficient method, which was also the most dangerous and time-consuming, was to go in with a scalpel and carve up every single cell. Only through the last and most extreme method could you be absolutely sure that no cancer remained behind. It was in this particular area that men like Sean Chase and Scot Harvath were particularly skilled.
But unlike Harvath, because of his background Chase could be injected right into the Muslim corpus. He could drift through the Islamic bloodstream, seeking out the most radical, the most deadly cancer cells without ever being seen as foreign and eliciting any sort of immune response. Once in, he could mount his own T-cell response, calling in highly efficient killer cells, run by men like Scot Harvath, to attack the cancer and permanently purge it from the body.
Harvath liked Chase’s no-BS attitude and ability to cut through red tape to get the job done. Though he had been trained for long-term deepcover assignments with little to no contact with his handlers, when he did have to deal with day-to-day operations at the CIA, the bureaucracy bothered him. It had chewed up and spat out a lot of good operatives. A handful of them had written books about how broken Agency culture was. Much to Langley’s displeasure, one of the most insightful, The Human Factor, had become a huge favorite among CIA employees and a de facto field manual for those who wanted to keep America safe. Chase had read The Human Factor so many times the cover had fallen off.
And while he hadn’t been at the Agency long enough yet to become completely jaded, the lessons he learned from the book informed everything he did. That was part of the growing appreciation he had for Harvath. Mission success was everything to a guy like that. If Harvath broke some of the crockery along the way, that was the cost of doing business. He’d worry about the Krazy Glue later. Though it would drive his bosses nuts, that was exactly how Chase thought the war on terror, or whatever politically correct term the Seventh Floor was using these days, ought to be fought.
As the thought drifted from his mind, Chase watched one of the jihadists lean over and grab a hookah pipe from the corner. Standing up, he took it into the bathroom and filled it with cold water.
“Do you smoke?” he asked when he returned and began packing the bowl while another man pulled out a pair of tongs and a lighter.
Chase hated tobacco, flavorful or otherwise. But the men were making a new overture toward him and he was determined to take advantage of it. “Of course,” he said.
The man with the tongs used them to withdraw a small piece of coal from a paper bag near the TV. Holding his lighter underneath, he heated the coal until it began to glow and then placed it on the screen above the fruit-flavored tobacco, or shisha. Chase was offered the honor of smoking first.
The hose was covered in brightly colored braided silk. Chase placed the plastic tip between his lips and breathed in. The water inside the pipe gurgled as the smoke was cooled and fed into the hose.
Chase took a deep drag and allowed the smoke to completely fill his lungs. He held it for a moment and then, instead of allowing it to slowly escape through his mouth or nostrils, he encouraged his coughing response and began hacking.
The four jihadists roared with laughter. The newcomer was obviously a neophyte and had no experience with a hookah. Instead of telling the truth, he had lied to protect his manliness.
Still hacking, Chase struggled to stand. He continued coughing as he placed his hands on his thighs and fought to breathe. The cannon fodder laughed as if they were watching the funniest thing they’d ever seen.
Being the butt of the joke didn’t bother Chase. In fact, that’s exactly why he’d spurred on the coughing fit. Shuffling toward the window, he
kept coughing as the men kept laughing. In fact, it wasn’t until he had his hand on the blinds that they realized what he was up to.
“Don’t,” said one of the men who could barely stop laughing long enough to get the word out.
“Karami will cut your hands off,” said another.
A third added, “He’ll cut all our hands off,” as the men began laughing even harder.
“I can’t breathe,” said Chase, who was pretending to be in between coughing fits. He knew the men were serious about his not opening the window and would probably try to physically restrain him if they had to. But he had no intention of opening it. He just wanted a peek outside and would then immediately abandon the window, appearing to heed his colleagues’ warnings.
As he pulled back the edge of the blinds, Chase’s cough immediately stopped. The moving van was already outside, but it wasn’t in the right place. Harvath and the assault team had made a mistake. They were hitting the building across the street.
And though it was difficult to tell for sure, it looked as if someone had adjusted the windows and blinds of an apartment across the street, exactly the way he had.
CHAPTER 25
As Harvath was envisioning the assault team entering the safe house, the entire third floor of the apartment complex exploded. The shock wave tilted the moving truck up onto two wheels and almost knocked it completely over onto its side. Shards of glass rained down on the street as columns of boiling fire leaped out of the third-story windows and rolled up into the sky.
Stunned, Harvath snatched up his radio and tried to hail the members of the team, but his ears were ringing so badly that, even with the volume all the way up, he wouldn’t have been able to hear anything. It was as if Yemen were replaying itself all over again. The terrorists must have had the whole third floor wired with explosives.
