by Brad Thor
“Even if it means war?”
Esposito nodded and the President thanked her. He then turned to the Director of National Intelligence. “Against that background, let’s address what the CIA learned in Hong Kong.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” the DNI said as he turned toward the other members of the National Security Council. “As you all have been made aware, a CIA asset with access to high-ranking members within the People’s Liberation Army and China’s Ministry of State Security has learned of a potential attack on the United States, codenamed Snow Dragon.
“While the asset was not able to ascertain the date or methodology, the attack is believed to be imminent. The Chinese have projected a 90 percent fatality rate within one year, which leads us to believe we’re looking at something nuclear or biological in nature.”
“Missiles?” the Attorney General asked.
The DNI shook his head. “We don’t think so. According to the intelligence acquired by the CIA, the Chinese used a cutout named Ismail Kashgari from the Uighur region to approach an Al Qaeda fixer in Pakistan named Ahmad Yaqub. Our belief is that Yaqub was hired to staff the operation.”
“The Uighur area borders Afghanistan, doesn’t it?” asked the Director of Homeland Security. “Can’t we get to this Kashgari character?”
“He’s dead,” the DNI replied. “We believe the Chinese killed him to cover up their involvement.”
“What about Ahmad Yaqub? Can we get to him?”
“Yes,” replied the President. “We have actionable intelligence on Yaqub’s whereabouts. A mission plan is being developed as we speak.”
“Do we have any leads beyond this Ahmad Yaqub?” the Attorney General asked.
“There’s one more,” replied the DNI. “According to the CIA’s asset, the Chinese have been training some kind of special PLA detachment in North Korea.”
“What’s so special about it?” the Director of Homeland Security asked.
“We believe it is a landing force of some type, training to come in after the attack. As you can see on the screens, the area they are supposedly training in has been netted over. We can’t see what they’re up to. If we could get eyes on, we believe we might be able to learn more about the nature of the attack.”
“How would you go about that?”
“We’d insert a four-man SEAL reconnaissance and surveillance team,” the Secretary of Defense replied.
The Attorney General was a bit taken aback. “Into North Korea?”
He nodded.
Looking at the Secretary of State, the AG asked, “Where do you stand on all of this?”
The Secretary of State took a moment to collect his thoughts before speaking. “I stand with the President, but I have a couple of concerns.”
“Such as?”
“We’ve been able to confirm some of the intelligence the CIA received, but it’s still largely single-source. That’s dangerous. We don’t know if this is officially the People’s Republic of China at work. It could be a rogue element from somewhere within their intelligence service, the military, or even the Chinese Communist Party. We just don’t know.”
“Which is exactly why the North Korea and Ahmad Yaqub operations are necessary,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs stated. “If it makes it easier, consider them fact-finding missions.”
“With guns and Spec Ops personnel.”
“These aren’t trips to Disneyland, Mr. Secretary.”
The Secretary of State took in a deep breath, puffed out his cheeks, and then slowly exhaled in exasperation. “My job is diplomacy and I’d prefer diplomatic channels, but the President is right. We can’t let the Chinese know we suspect them.”
All eyes shifted to Porter. As great as the risks were, the greatest risk lay in doing nothing. Both operations needed to go forward. There was no other course a responsible leader could choose to take.
Nodding to his Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Defense, he said, “I’m green-lighting them.”
The men immediately reached for secure telephones.
“Blackbird is a go,” the Director of National Intelligence said into his.
Moments later, the Secretary of Defense’s call was answered. “We’re go for Operation Gold Dust,” he confirmed.
Blackbird and Gold Dust were codenames randomly created by the CIA and DoD for two missions that might save America from an unspeakable attack, or a deadly, all-out war.
After they had discussed what military assets could be repositioned without tipping their hand to the Chinese, the meeting was adjourned.
As his national security team filed out of the Situation Room, the President asked the Secretary of the Treasury to remain behind. There was an additional piece of intelligence the CIA had collected, but that had been excluded from the briefing.
Once they were alone, the President spoke. “Dennis, I want you to do something for me and you need to be very quiet about it.”
CHAPTER 2
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NORTH KOREAN COAST
Four men in drysuits quietly broke the surface of the choppy, black water and scanned the rocky shoreline. The North Koreans were paranoid about invasion. They went to great lengths to defend themselves, even raking their beaches in order to make footprints visible.
A high-altitude low-opening (HALO) jump had been out of the question. No plane would be able to get them close enough to North Korean airspace. The insertion had to be done via water.
They had used a minisubmarine known as an Advanced SEAL Delivery System. Unlike the open SEAL Delivery Vehicles, which exposed SEALs to strength-sapping cold water, the ASDS was completely contained, warm and airtight. After a battery problem had caused an early prototype to catch fire, a rumor circulated that the SEALs had canceled the program. In fact, it had merely been put on hold until a student at MIT conceived of a completely new way to deal with the batteries. At that point, it was full speed ahead.
The minisub could be launched from any Virginia-class submarine and had a range of over 150 miles. For the insertion into North Korea, the ASDS had been launched from the USS Texas. Once the four-man team had exited the minisub via its moon pool, the ASDS left to rejoin the Texas and cruise the Sea of Japan for the next seventy-two hours until returning for the team’s extraction.
What was to have been a four-SEAL DEVGRU reconnaissance and surveillance team ended up being three SEALs and an agent from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Operations Group. The SEAL leading the mission hadn’t been crazy about the substitution. Thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant James “Jimi” Fordyce of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, thought swapping out one of his shooters for a spook, even one with local contacts and language capability, was neither a good idea nor necessary for the successful outcome of the mission. The Pentagon, the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Joint Special Operations Command had all disagreed, and Fordyce had been overruled.
The other two SEALs on the team were twenty-eight-year-old Petty Officer First Class Lester Johnson of Freeport, Maine, and twenty-five-year-old Petty Officer Second Class Eric “Tuck” Tucker of Bend, Oregon.
Rounding out the team was thirty-year-old CIA operative Billy Tang from Columbus, Ohio.
Billy not only spoke the language, but he knew North Korea better than almost anyone else in the United States. Over the last six years, he had successfully infiltrated the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea eleven times. Whether his teammates appreciated it or not, there was a host of problems they could end up facing in the DPRK that weren’t going to be fixed with the business end of a gun.
Because the North Koreans had the ability to pick up transmissions beamed out of the country, this was going to be a no-comms op. The men could communicate with each other via their encrypted radios, but even then they had been instructed to do so only sparingly. If they were compromised or captured, there would be no rescue. The United States would disavow any knowledge of the men and why they were
there. That was why Billy Tang had been added to the team. If things went south, Billy was their insurance policy.
As soon as Jimi Fordyce had given the all clear, the men had begun swimming and the minisub had gone to rejoin the Texas. The ASDS had the capability to remain submerged for days without resupply, but the sooner it left, the better. Even along this remote, jagged strip of the North Korean coastline, a coastal patrol had passed right above them. Putting the minisub down in a depression in the sea floor had allowed them to just barely escape detection. Leaving the getaway car idling in the driveway would have been just asking for trouble and they were already going to have enough of it.
Nothing about the mission was going to be easy, but that’s why Operation Gold Dust had been built around the SEALs. No matter what happened, they would see it all the way through. And things did happen. Even in a business this precise with men this well trained, Mr. Murphy, of the eponymous Murphy’s Law, had a way of popping up at all the worst times. The SEALs had witnessed it during the Bin Laden raid and on multiple other operations. Sometimes, things just happened. But when they did, SEALs adapted and overcame. Failure in their culture was never an option.
The surface swim was made difficult by a strong current that tried to drag them off target. When they finally reached the shore and pulled themselves and their equipment out of the water, they had taken a few minutes to rest. They needed their strength. Towering above them was a cliff the height of an eighteen-story office building.
As if they could read each other’s minds, the three SEALs rose in concert and began prepping their climbing gear.
Billy Tang had worked with SEALs before. They were smart, hard men just this side of machines. They embodied a toughness that very few possessed these days. No matter how bad things got—no matter how cold, how desperate, how dangerous, or how deadly—the SEALs pushed on.
Tang admired them for that and at the same time had a bad feeling that they were all going to be pushed to their limits and would need every last ounce of mental and physical toughness before this operation was over. What they had come to the DPRK to do would be almost, if not completely, impossible to achieve.
CHAPTER 3
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KARACHI, PAKISTAN
Scot Harvath caught sight of himself as he checked the truck’s side mirror. He was wearing the traditional shalwar kameez—baggy, pajamalike trousers with a long cotton tunic. His skin was tan from having spent the summer outside. He had sharp blue eyes, short sandy brown hair, and was in better shape than most men half his age. He needed a shower and shave, but for a former Navy SEAL in his early forties, he looked pretty good.
Sitting next to him, driving their white Toyota SUV, was twenty-eight-year-old Chase Palmer. Eight years ago, he had been the youngest soldier ever admitted to Delta Force, or the “Unit” as members referred to it. His hair was lighter than Harvath’s, but their appearances were so similar they could have been taken for brothers.
Cradling an H&K MP7 submachine gun in the backseat beneath her burka was twenty-five-year-old Sloane Ashby. In her short military career, she had racked up more confirmed kills than any other female soldier, and most of the men. With her high cheekbones, smoky gray eyes, and blonde hair she looked more like a college calendar coed than a “kick in the door and shoot bad guys in the face” operator.
Harvath moved his eyes back to the taillights several car lengths ahead. The night was alive, electric. Motorbikes buzzed in and out of traffic. Trucks clogged the streets. Between the curtains of diesel exhaust, he could smell the ocean. They were getting close. Activating his radio, he said, “Look sharp, everyone.”
With over twenty-three million inhabitants, Karachi was the third-largest city in the world and Pakistan’s most heavily populated. It was an easy place to hide. Staying hidden, though, thought Harvath, required discipline. It meant not going to your favorite restaurant just because it was your last night in town. But that’s exactly what Ahmad Yaqub had planned.
There had been debate over where to grab Yaqub. Should they do it in Karachi while he was under the protection of the ISI—Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency—or should they wait until he returned to his stronghold in Waziristan?
The Secretary of State wanted to wait. He wanted to pay a rival faction in the lawless border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan to snatch him so there’d be no American fingerprints on the job. Hitting an ISI motorcade in Karachi was asking for trouble. A lot of it. The clock, though, was ticking.
Yaqub was an Al Qaeda–linked Saudi who had traveled to Afghanistan for the jihad and had married into a powerful Waziristan clan. From his mountain compound, he helped fund and coordinate terror operations against corrupt Pakistani and Afghan politicians, as well as anyone else seen as enemies of Islam and the Taliban.
His greatest coup had been the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi. She was the American-backed “puppet” who had been predicted to win the election and become president of Pakistan. She had made no secret of the direction she would take the country and how she intended to crush the Taliban.
Yaqub knew there would be an investigation into her death and had left just enough clues to confuse everyone. Some believed a rival political faction had ordered her death. Some blamed the Taliban. Some swore it had come from deep within the ISI, whose continued hold on power was dependent upon chaos reigning throughout the region. Where these clues didn’t lead, though, was back to Ahmad Yaqub. Or so he had thought.
But people in Waziristan talked, especially when money was involved. The Taliban often lamented that cash was the greatest weapon the Americans brought to the battlefield. Money frightened them more than the drones that killed without warning. American dollars were like a cold wind in winter. No matter how well constructed your house, the wind could always find a way inside. And a particular gust of American dollars had done just that.
The U.S. had made the apprehension of Ahmad Yaqub a top priority. They had moved heaven and earth to compile as much information on him as quickly as possible. The best intelligence on Yaqub had come from a private intelligence agency run by an ex–CIA spymaster named Reed Carlton.
As part of the Carlton Group’s force protection contracts with the Department of Defense, they had developed unparalleled human networks throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nobody collected better intelligence in the region than they did; not even the CIA.
Within twenty-four hours of being tasked, the Carlton Group had reached out to its networks and had assembled an impressive dossier on Yaqub. They knew exactly where he was, how long it would take him to do his banking and assorted business in Karachi, and where he’d be spending his last evening. But the Carlton Group’s expertise didn’t end there.
In addition to hiring top people from the intelligence world, Carlton also recruited the best talent from the Special Operations community. One of his greatest accomplishments had been landing Scot Harvath.
Harvath had served on SEAL Teams 2 and 6, with the Secret Service’s Presidential Protection Division, and under a prior president who had successfully used him to covertly hunt and kill terrorists. Harvath and the President had enjoyed a simple understanding—if the terrorists refused to play by any rules, Harvath wasn’t expected to either.
Carlton saw in Harvath a bottomless well of raw talent. When he hired him, he had not only honed Harvath’s exceptional counterterrorism skills, he had also taught him everything he knew about tradecraft and the world of espionage.
When he was finished, Harvath had become more than just a talented hunter and killer of men. He had become an apex predator—a creature who sat atop the food chain, feared by all others.
There was one other plus Harvath brought to the current assignment—plausible deniability. The Carlton Group was a private organization. If Operation Blackbird went sideways, there wouldn’t be a trail leading back to the White House.
In order to give the United States even greater in
sulation, Harvath had suggested using Kurdish Peshmergas instead of American operators for the hit. The Peshmergas had trained with U.S. Special Forces, were tough, and could be relied on no matter how bad things got.
The Peshmergas would be augmented by a couple of trustworthy Pakistanis from the Carlton Group’s network who had supported delicate, in-country covert operations in the past. Harvath and his people would not get involved unless absolutely necessary. That was the best he could offer. The U.S. had to move on Yaqub. Time was running out. It had to be now and it had to be in Karachi. The Secretary of State had reluctantly agreed.
Once they had the green light, Harvath and Carlton began planning the operation. There was layer upon layer of detail to be covered—weapons, logistics, contingencies, and personnel chief among them. The key was to get Yaqub in transit. That was when he’d be most vulnerable. Harvath knew exactly who he wanted with him on the assignment.
Chase Palmer was smart, aggressive, and very talented. By twenty-eight, he’d seen more action than many Unit operators ever would and was already looking for his next adventure. Having worked with him on a previous assignment, Harvath had been quite impressed and knew he’d be perfect for the Carlton Group. That was all it had taken.
With Chase on board, there was only one other operator he had wanted along.
With the Taliban and Al Qaeda having put a price on her head for all her kills in Afghanistan, the Army had removed Sloane Ashby from combat. They had assigned her to the Unit compound at Fort Bragg, where she had become a trainer for Delta’s all-female detachment known as the Athena Project. She was a good instructor, but she was far too young to be mothballed and she missed the action. When Carlton met her and offered her a position, she had jumped at the chance.
Noting the intersection they were approaching, Sloane said, “Khayban-e-Jami coming up.”
