Act of War

by Brad Thor

  As he put the rest of the wheels in motion, Shi worried about the early February attack date. He was concerned about the weather. Snow Dragon was designed as multiple attacks that would be launched simultaneously. If one cell launched before the others, or if any one of the cells simply failed to launch, the entire operation could be undone. He kept wishing there was a way that the Politburo Standing Committee could be made to reverse its decision and agree to his earlier attack plan. Then, something had happened.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  * * *

  NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

  Wazir Ibrahim wasn’t stupid. Only a guilty man would ask for a lawyer. If they had anything substantial on him, they would have arrested him already.

  “You know what this is, Wazir?” the young detective asked, holding up an official-looking piece of paper. “This is a police report. Your wife claims you roughed her up. What do you have to say about it?”

  The Somali man took a deep breath and replied, “It is not true.”

  “You’re calling your wife a liar?”

  “She does not speak the truth.”

  “You didn’t beat her?”

  “I did not beat her,” Wazir replied.

  The detective smiled. “I think you’re full of shit. You know that?”

  The Somali had seen this man’s type before. He was angry, coiled tight inside like a snake. He had become a police officer so he could lord his power over others. He had an inflated sense of self. He held himself out to be a protector of the weak when in reality he had pursued his badge so he could prey upon a sea of others with impunity. Insecure men with a patina of authority could be annoying. Give those same men actual authority and they could be deadly. Wazir had seen it time and again in Somalia. America pretended to be better. Wazir knew different. Men were men no matter what country they called home.

  This man named Hoffman possessed a bearing beyond that of a simple police officer, one that he couldn’t immediately place.

  “Does it make you a tough guy to beat your wife, Wazir?” Detective Hoffman asked.

  “I did not beat my wife, sir.”

  Hoffman placed the piece of paper he had been holding back into the folder and removed another. “Does Islam condone the beating of wives, Wazir?”

  It was a rhetorical question. The Somali man understood that well enough to know that the detective did not expect a reply.

  “For an infidel, I thought I was pretty squared away when it came to Islam and wife-beating.”

  Infidel. It was an interesting choice of words. The detective didn’t refer to himself as a Jew or a Christian. He referred to himself the way Muslims would have referred to him. Wazir could now place the officer’s hostility, his bearing. He had served in the U.S. military and had probably seen combat in a Muslim nation. Maybe he had been shot. Maybe he had seen his comrades die. If so, he was much more dangerous than just an insecure policeman hiding behind a badge.

  “The prophet Mohammed’s fathers-in-law slapped his wives Aisha and Hafsa for annoying him, didn’t they?” he asked.

  The Somali paused for a moment before nodding.

  “When Mohammed heard this, what did he do? He laughed. He thought it was funny.”

  Wazir Ibrahim didn’t bother to reply. What the man was saying came from the Hadith.

  “One night when Aisha left the house without permission, Mohammed punched her, right in the chest, didn’t he? His favorite wife. He struck her so hard that she claimed it gave her great pain. Correct?”

  The Somali didn’t answer.

  “The Qur’an specifically gives husbands permission to beat their wives, doesn’t it?” Hoffman asked. “So if you beat your wife, you’re only doing what the Qur’an gives you permission and the Hadith supports you in doing, right?”

  “I did not beat my wife, sir.”

  “Is the wife-beating subject a little boring for you?” the young man said, setting the paper down. “Why don’t we talk about something else? Let’s talk about what the Prophet Mohammed thought about nine-year-old girls.”

  Wazir Ibrahim’s cool expression, along with his confidence that the police had nothing to charge him with, suddenly melted away.

  The detective noticed the change instantly. “What’s wrong, Wazir?”

  Panic began to build in the Somali’s chest. “We’re not talking about the Prophet Mohammed anymore, are we?”

  “No, we’re not,” said the detective. “We’re talking about a group of Somali men from Minneapolis and the underage girls they brought to Nashville for sex. What do you know about it?”

  Wazir looked away and replied, “I think I am done answering questions.”

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  * * *

  USS FLORIDA

  Placing the hood back over his head, Harvath and the SEALs transported Ahmad Yaqub from the dry deck shelter down into the USS Florida.

  While they moved him, crewmembers were kept out of the gangways. This way, if ever asked, they could testify that they never saw a thing.

  Yaqub was put in dry clothes, cuffed to a bunk in a private berth, and covered with blankets. A SEAL corpsman monitored him. When he started to come around, he was given warm soup and hot tea to help bring his core body temperature back up. Once the corpsman gave the okay, Harvath began to interrogate him again from the beginning.

  He focused on Ismail Kashgari, the Chinese Muslim who had approached Yaqub for help in staffing the attack on the United States. He was probing for inconsistencies in Yaqub’s story. He pushed him for every detail he could remember: their means of communication; where, when, and how often they had met; how money was exchanged; how much money was exchanged—all of it. Harvath filled half a legal pad with notes.

  An hour later, he changed the subject and asked about Khuram Hanjour, the recruiter. He now wanted to know everything he could about him—where he lived, how to contact him, who he associated with, what mosque he went to, anything that could help them paint a better picture.

  When he had exhausted the salient details about Hanjour the recruiter, he handed over the interrogation to a SEAL named Scobell, and stepped out into the gangway.

  His mouth was dry and his head was pounding. He needed a handful of aspirin, a bottle of water, and a cup of coffee.

  Harvath stuck his head inside the berth next door and asked if any of the SEALs had any Vitamin M, slang in the SEALs for Motrin. One of the men tossed him a bottle.

  Harvath shook two pills into the palm of his hand and tossed the bottle back. Thanking the SEAL, he headed down to the submarine’s mess hall.

  Entering the mess, he asked for a bottle of water. On the wall was a plaque commemorating the Florida for being the first Ohio-class sub to ever fire a Tomahawk cruise missile. At the other end of the room, a group of sailors were watching one of Harvath’s favorite westerns—The Magnificent Seven with Steve McQueen. He remembered someone telling him that it was the second-most-shown film in U.S. television history, second only to The Wizard of Oz.

  In the Navy, you ended up watching any and every movie ever made. There wasn’t much else to do if you were under way and not on shift. While Harvath had seen The Magnificent Seven plenty of times in the Navy, the first time he ever saw it was with his father.

  It was playing in a small movie theater in San Diego that occasionally revived popular Westerns. He and his father had driven across the bay from their home on Coronado one Saturday afternoon to see it. Harvath had been about nine years old at the time.

  The film followed a team of gunslingers hired to protect a small Mexican village from marauders. The villagers were farmers and didn’t know how to fight. The gunslingers taught them.

  Harvath’s father was a SEAL and the movie was a great metaphor for what they did. It helped Harvath better understand his father. It was full of great dialogue, with more than a few poignant lines.

  Sitting there in the dark, Harvath watched his dad silently recite line after line by h
eart. It had a profound impact on him.

  They returned together over the next three Saturdays. It was the happiest he could ever remember being, sitting alone in the dark with his dad. They weren’t sports guys and they couldn’t talk very much about what his dad did for a living, but they had movies, and especially, this movie.

  By the time Harvath was seventeen, he had seen The Magnificent Seven more than two dozen times. He now knew all of the lines by heart as well. Some took on greater meaning for him as he grew older, but one in particular resonated with him after his father had died in a training accident and Harvath had become a SEAL himself.

  Many of the villages he passed through around the world reminded him of the one in the movie. There were always children and they were always fearless. They gawked at the weapons he and his teammates carried and wanted to touch all of their equipment. What’s this do? What’s that do? The questions were always the same and the children sported smiles that seemed outsized for the squalid conditions they were living in.

  While the SEALs were indeed a novelty in most of the places they were dispatched, the children in particular were drawn to them, often to the exclusion of their own families. While this was problematic for obvious operational reasons, there was also a balance that needed to be maintained. If not careful, the SEALs could have been seen as stealing the thunder of the village men, which wasn’t their intention and could have disastrous consequences. The SEALs needed their cooperation, not their resentment.

  In one village, a young boy had told Harvath that he wanted to be a brave warrior like him someday, not a coward like his father who was just a farmer. Via his interpreter, Harvath admonished the little boy right in front of all the others. Just as Charles Bronson had done in the film, he told the little boy that carrying a gun wouldn’t make him a man; carrying responsibility was what would make him a man.

  He explained that the men of their village were truly brave. They cared for their families, they went out to their fields and worked hard every single day, not knowing if they were going to be able to provide enough to eat, yet they worked their hardest nonetheless because their families were counting on them. That was courage.

  The boys were ashamed of themselves, as they should have been, and they sulked off, leaving Harvath to contemplate his own courage, particularly as it related to relationships.

  He wanted a family, but he knew what he did for a living would make that difficult. Having to disappear in the middle of the night, not knowing when or if he would be coming home was almost too much to ask of the people you loved.

  He had watched SEAL marriages fall apart left, right, and center. But almost to a man, those SEALs had chosen incompatible women. There were SEALs who had solid marriages and they were always the envy of the rest of the men. Harvath had always wanted to be one of those guys, but the rigors of his career had made personal relationships difficult to establish, never mind maintain.

  For the people of the United States to enjoy the American dream, someone had to protect it. Harvath saw himself as one of those protectors. In his worldview, there were wolves, there were sheep, and there were sheepdogs. He was a sheepdog—he always had been, even as a child when he befriended a mentally impaired kid next door who had been plagued by bullies. Harvath had never tolerated those who preyed upon the innocent or the weak. That wasn’t in his DNA. For better or for worse, he always did the right thing even if it cost him, which sometimes it had.

  But his greatest fear was of failing. Failing his team, failing his country, failing himself. It drove him and was why he pushed himself as hard as he did. It was why he had become so good at what he did.

  At some point, though, he knew he would have to dial it back. Not today, not tomorrow, but at some point he’d have to hand over the watch to someone younger, faster, and able to rebound in less time. He wasn’t twenty-two anymore. What’s more, he had met someone. She was a wonderful woman with a wonderful little boy and he had begun seeing the possibility of a life together with them.

  Twisting the cap off the water bottle, he popped the Motrin in his mouth and stepped closer to the TV. Yul Brynner was about to deliver a great line. When asked by one of the village leaders how there could be a gunslinger who didn’t care about money, Brynner explained that men who carry guns for a living aren’t all alike. Some don’t care about money at all. Some, for their own reasons, simply enjoy the danger.

  Harvath mouthed the words just as his father had done sitting next to him in that darkened theater in San Diego when he was a little boy. Then, grabbing a paper cup, he filled it with coffee and walked back to check on Yaqub.

  Scobell stepped out of the berth to debrief Harvath on what he had learned. There were details about Yaqub’s organizational structure and how they moved men and supplies in and out of Waziristan. It was low-hanging fruit.

  Harvath thanked him, told him to keep at it, and, coffee in hand, went forward to file his report.

  After the submarine came up to periscope depth and his encrypted transmission had been sent, Harvath grabbed a quick shower and a shave before finding an empty bunk where he could get some sleep. It was cramped quarters, but it was warm and it was dry. This was the Four Seasons compared to some of the places he had been forced to sleep over the years.

  Having left word with Scobell to wake him if Yaqub revealed anything that could be of value to their operation, he closed his eyes and, willing himself to relax, concentrated on slowing his breathing in order to help fall asleep.

  As he did, his mind drifted to the four-man reconnaissance team the President had sent into North Korea. He tried to envision where they would be at this point in their operation.

  He had conducted only one operation ever in North Korea and it had been harrowing. He said a prayer for the men on the ground that it would be successful. They were going to need all the help they could get.

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  * * *

  NORTH KOREA

  Every freedom in the DPRK was restricted, especially freedom of movement. Over his years of infiltrating the communist country, CIA operative Billy Tang had organized a loose underground railroad that had helped shuttle him around. He learned quickly that the only North Koreans who believed in the government’s communist vision were the bureaucrats at the very top—and even then, the majority were only giving lip service to it in order to avoid being executed.

  Human beings were hardwired to act in their own self-interest and the North Korean people were no different. Almost all of them were on the lookout for any opportunity to earn extra money. Even the smallest amount could make a huge difference in their lives and the lives of their families. Everyone did it. The key was doing so at a level that didn’t draw the attention of government officials.

  Citizens in the oppressive communist state, though, were also wary of entrapment and Tang hadn’t built his network overnight. Favor by favor, envelope of cash by envelope of cash, he expanded and tended his relationships like a garden. Some of them had grown to be as strong as family ties. In fact, so many families relied on him that Tang had more than once smuggled his own money into the country when the notoriously bureaucratic CIA had been late disbursing his operating capital.

  Born in the United States of South Korean parents, Billy Tang was not only of Korean extraction, but he spoke the language fluently. The North Koreans he bankrolled had no idea he was American, much less an operative for the CIA. They believed him to be a South Korean journalist aligned with a human rights organization in Seoul. He snuck into the DPRK, or so they thought, to chronicle its abuses and help expose them to the rest of the world. It was dangerous work, but for the risks they took, his North Korean assets were rewarded handsomely.

  Each time he visited, he brought not just money, but also medicine. Cholesterol lowering drugs, blood pressure medication, insulin, EpiPens, and even Viagra—he was seen as an angel of mercy and in some cases a literal lifesaver. The more Tang did for his network and their family me
mbers, the more loyal they grew. And the more loyal they grew, the greater the risks they were willing to undertake on his behalf. Some risks, though, were too great to ask even of his core people, so he had begun branching out.

  Unlike the rest of the world, where organized crime tried to infiltrate the government, in North Korea the government worked hard to infiltrate organized crime. Even at the top of the totalitarian food chain, life in the “utopia” of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was so destitute that many high-level officials searched for ways to augment their own meager incomes and improve the standard of living for themselves and their families. To do that, they turned to organized crime.

  They trafficked internationally in methamphetamine, opium, heroin, counterfeit currencies, and knock-off luxury goods. The illicit trade was estimated to contribute upward of a billion dollars a year to North Korea’s coffers. But while much of the organized crime was geared toward distributing products into foreign markets, there was still a certain amount of organized crime conducted within the DPRK itself. Tang’s challenge hadn’t been infiltrating one of these groups, but rather finding one that wasn’t already shot through with government officials. The last thing he needed was to be directly doing business with members of the state’s armed forces, diplomatic corps, or intelligence service. If he ever could turn one of these people, it would be best to do it through a cutout.