by Brad Thor
Three days later, Harvath landed in Baghdad with his new boss’s blessing, an expense account, and permission to do whatever necessary to bring the al-Qaeda cell to justice.
It took Harvath, Dent, and the team of contractors they had assembled $20,000 in bribes and ten days to find the location of the terrorists.
Pure hate for what they had done fueled Harvath as he cobbled together the operation. Like Dent, since hearing the little boy’s story, he had been living for this very moment. Each of the men would be the first through his respective entry point.
They moved quickly and quietly across the cracked, brown earth of the courtyard. Harvath’s team went to the front door while Dent took the other half of the men to the back.
Harvath’s team put on their night vision goggles and when they all flashed him the thumbs-up, he signaled for the battering ram to come forward.
With his team in place, he “clicked” Dent’s team in back and gave them the go-ahead. Moments later, there was the sound of splintering wood as the rear door was battered open and the remaining sentry was taken out.
Harvath counted down from fifteen. He could hear the shouts of the al-Qaeda operatives in the front room as they leapt from their beds and scrambled into the hallway that led to the back door.
Harvath reached the end of his countdown and motioned for the assaulter with the ram to hit the front door.
The entry tool knocked the door completely off its hinges and Harvath charged through, followed by the rest of his team.
Bottlenecked in the hallway, the AQ operatives were mown down with bullets from both sides.
The air was thick with the smell of blood and gun smoke. When Harvath called cease fire, Dent’s team moved up from the back of the house to secure the hallway while Harvath and his team cleared the rest of the house.
They found the entrance to the “spider hole” beneath a stained rug in the main room. One of the men said it reminded him of the hole Delta Force operatives had pulled Saddam out of.
Harvath looked down into the pit. It smelled atrocious. Six sets of hollow, half-dead eyes stared up at him. “Everything is okay,” he said in Arabic as he removed his night vision goggles. “We’re Americans. We’re going to take you home to your families.”
In the beam of his flashlight, he could see a shaft six feet deep that opened into a pit five feet square by three feet high. For their bodily functions, the al-Qaeda animals had left their child hostages only a rusted coffee can. Disgusting didn’t even begin to describe the scene.
Harvath sent one of his men outside to find a ladder and when he returned, they lowered it into the pit.
The children were all male, between four and eleven years old, and were all sons of Iraqi police officers in Fallujah.
They had another thing in common. All of them had been brutally tortured. The oldest boy took charge and sent the others slowly up the ladder. As they emerged, they were assessed by the men of the team, medically treated as necessary, and wrapped in blankets.
As the oldest boy came into view, he was quite upset and explained that there was still one child left behind, badly in need of help.
“Is it Khidir?” Harvath asked hopefully.
The boy nodded.
Gently moving him away from the shaft, Harvath climbed down into the pit. What he discovered wrenched his heart out.
Khidir was now eight years old and severely malnourished. His eyes were set deep in their sockets and surrounded by black circles. His once thick head of black hair had fallen out in clumps and he looked as if he had probably soiled himself repeatedly.
As Harvath triaged the little boy, he discerned that both his arms and legs were broken. His left knee had a large iron nail driven through it, and all the teeth in his mouth had been pulled out, leaving behind infected gum tissue.
His breathing was shallow and came in rapid gasps. Harvath noted his elevated temperature and pulse. The boy was shocky.
Dosing a child for a morphine injection was a tricky gamble. Getting him up the ladder and out of the pit was going to be extremely painful. Harvath removed a preloaded syringe and injected half.
“Prep an IV!” he yelled up the shaft.
Khidir was becoming unresponsive. He needed to move him now.
Cradling the child to his chest, Harvath shifted to the ladder and climbed using one arm. At the top, the medic gently took the little boy from him, laid him down, and began an IV.
“Assad’s dead, but we’ve got two survivors from the hallway,” said one of the men from the team. “What do you want to do?”
“Where’s Dent?”
“He’s processing them outside.”
“Are they stable enough for transport?” asked Harvath.
The man nodded.
“Cuff ’em and stuff ’em with Omar.”
“You got it.”
The medic looked up from Khidir and said to Harvath, “In addition to four broken limbs and septic shock, he has a collapsed lung. I can give him some more morphine so he’ll be comfortable, but he’s not going to make it.”
That was unacceptable. The little boy didn’t deserve to die. Being the son of a policeman should be an honor, not a death sentence. “Can we get him to the hospital in Fallujah?”
“Even if we could, it will be too late.”
Harvath knew both Camp Slayer and the Green Zone were too far. “What about the Norwegian facility near the airbase at Ramadi? They’ve got a fully staffed MSF clinic there.”
The medic shook his head.
Harvath looked down as Khidir started guppy breathing.
“It’s your call,” said the medic. “What do you want to do?”
Harvath couldn’t take his eyes off the boy. “Can I hold him?”
The medic thought about it a minute. “Of course,” he said as he prepped a second syringe of morphine.
Once Harvath had the boy cradled in his lap, the medic piggybacked the drug into the IV.
“His breathing is probably going to stop soon, but I promise he won’t feel any pain.”
Harvath wanted to say Thank you, but the words didn’t come.
“These people are savages,” said the medic as he stood.
Harvath nodded. “Have Dent bring the two survivors from the hallway back in here. I want them to see this.”
The medic nodded. Moments later, Dent and one of his men brought the al-Qaeda operatives back into the room. Harvath nodded at the opposite wall and Dent shoved them down into a sitting position. He told the team member who had helped him bring the prisoners in to go wait outside. Once he was sure the entire house was empty, he came back into the room and nodded to Harvath. He had a feeling he knew what was going to happen next.
One of the al-Qaeda operatives turned his head away. Harvath yelled at him in Arabic to watch. The man reluctantly complied.
The other sat there with a smile on his face and Harvath bored holes into the man’s head with his stare.
Harvath wished the little boy could live, though he knew it wasn’t going to happen. The extra morphine had sealed the deal.
Unable to do anything else for him, he did something he hadn’t done in a long time; he prayed for a painless exit.
The little boy was fast losing his fight. His little chest rose and fell so infrequently that Harvath went for tens of seconds at a time wondering if the child had already expired.
He knew it was only a matter of time. He held the boy tighter and rocked him. The terrorist with the smile laughed at Harvath and called him a pussy.
Harvath ignored him as he tried to figure out how many seconds had passed since the little boy had last breathed.
Placing two fingers on the little boy’s neck, Harvath felt for the carotid artery. There was no pulse. Khidir had passed.
The al-Qaeda operative who had been laughing realized what had happened and now fell silent.
Harvath adjusted the boy in his arms and reached for his lifeless hand. Khidir’s fingers were rough and blistered. I
nto the boy’s hand he placed his Makarov and wrapped one tiny finger around the trigger.
He raised the boy’s arm. Steadying his aim, he pulled Khidir’s finger twice; firing into the laughing terrorist’s stomach.
The al-Qaeda operative screamed in pain. He began rocking back and forth, unable to reach out and clasp his wounds with his hands zip-tied behind his back.
Standing up, Harvath carried the boy outside and placed him in the truck next to Omar-Hakim.
Once everyone was loaded, the drive to Fallujah’s main police station took under half an hour.
It was almost morning, and while it would be a day of thanksgiving for five of the families, for Khidir’s it would be a day of incredible sadness.
As for Omar-Hakim and the two surviving al-Qaeda operatives, their ordeal was only beginning. They would probably never see the inside of a courtroom. Justice for them would be meted out in a different fashion. For what they had done, and what Omar-Hakim had allowed to be done to those little boys, no torture could be too painful or too horrific.
Harvath took little pleasure in what he did, but it had to be done. America was engaged in all-out war with the Islamists. And as America became more aggressive in taking the fight to them, he knew that they were going to become more aggressive in taking the fight to America.
He also knew that the loss of life wouldn’t end with Khidir. Things were going to get much, much worse before they ever got better.
CHAPTER 4
VIRGINIA
MONDAY MORNING
THIRTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER
Harvath changed into shorts, grabbed two six-packs from the fridge, and walked down to his dock. He had wanted to get good and drunk in Iraq, but there hadn’t been time. He had to debrief and clean up a bunch of loose ends before flying home. Now, he had all the time he wanted.
The dock’s wooden planks were hot beneath his feet. Without the throng of weekend boaters, the Potomac was quiet. A light breeze stirred the surface of the water. It was good to be home.
In addition to tying one on, what he needed to do was put the things he’d seen and heard—things he’d known from the outset he’d probably not be able to forget—in an iron box and bury it as deep as possible in one of the farthest corners of his mind. The practice was unhealthy, but he didn’t care. It was the only way he could do his job.
Sitting down at the end of the dock, Harvath leaned against one of the pier posts, opened his first beer, and tipped it back.
His fiancée, Tracy, was up at her grandfather’s cottage in Maine, and he was grateful for the solitude. He didn’t want to see her right away. He needed to decompress and come back to reality. Or at least what he liked to call reality; that world beyond kicking in doors and shooting Islamic fanatics in the face.
The biggest reason he needed time, though, was that he knew he couldn’t talk to Tracy about what he had seen. Children had become one of those topics that they no longer discussed.
Harvath closed his eyes and lifted his face toward the sun. He had given up trying to change her mind. Because of the persistent headaches she suffered, she said she couldn’t even consider becoming a mother. At the same time, she knew that he wanted a family and she had tried to convince him to start over again with someone else. But he wouldn’t leave her, no matter how many times she worked to push him away.
She had been the victim of a vendetta launched by a sick terrorist who wanted to torture him by targeting the people around him. There were days when the pain Tracy suffered was so severe that she wished out loud that the bullet that had struck her in the head had done its intended job. It was agonizing for Harvath to hear her talk like that.
For Tracy, some days she couldn’t tell what was worse, the physical pain from the attack, or the emotional pain from watching one of the most decent men she had ever known forgo the family he desired in order to stay by her side.
His father had also been a Navy man—a SEAL and then a SEAL instructor. When he died, father and son were barely on speaking terms. Harvath had forgone college for a career as an amateur athlete, something the elder Harvath had zealously disapproved of.
After his father’s death in a training accident, Harvath had found it impossible to return to competitive sports. Worried about what might become of him without any sense of purpose and direction in his life, Harvath’s mother had encouraged him to enroll in college.
He graduated from the University of Southern California in three years cum laude with a double major in political science and military history. By the time he finished, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.
Following in his father’s footsteps, he joined the Navy and was eventually accepted to Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL school (BUD/S) and a specialized program known as SQT or SEAL Qualification Training. Though the process was grueling beyond measure, his mental and physical conditioning as a world-class athlete, his stubborn refusal to ever give up on anything, and the belief that he had finally found his true calling in life propelled him forward and earned him the honor of being counted as one of the world’s most elite warriors—a U.S. Navy SEAL.
He served with SEAL Team Two and then Team Six, where he assisted a presidential security detail and caught the eye of the Secret Service. Wanting to bolster their anti-terrorism expertise at the White House, they eventually succeeded in wooing him away from the Navy and up to D.C. Harvath soon distinguished himself even further and after a short time was recommended for an above-top-secret program at the Department of Homeland Security called the Apex Project.
The project’s raison d’être was to level the playing field against America’s enemies. The belief was that if the terrorists weren’t playing by any rules, then neither should the United States, especially when it came to defending its citizens and interests at home and abroad.
But with a new administration had come a new approach to dealing with terrorism, and the Apex Project was dismantled. Harvath had found himself out of a job.
With a unique skill set and a desire to continue serving the interests of his country, he accepted a private sector position with a company specializing in intelligence gathering and highly advanced special operations training near Telluride, Colorado.
In the words of a former CIA director, Harvath knew that intelligence was at the nexus of every major security challenge facing the United States. It didn’t matter if it was al-Qaeda or Hugo Chavez, the need for timely, accurate, comprehensive information was unprecedented.
Harvath and the former CIA director weren’t the only people to recognize that the drive for quality intelligence was paramount in the post–9/11 world. A well-funded group of high-level former military and intelligence operatives had seen the need as well. Deeply concerned with the entrenched bureaucracy at the CIA and the political hobbling of the nation’s defense apparatus, they sought to create an organization that would boldly do what the country’s politically correct, vote-chasing politicians and constantly-covering-their-cowering-asses bureaucrats were too timid and too inept to attempt.
Named after its founder, Reed Carlton—a retired thirty-year veteran of the CIA and one of the nation’s most revered spymasters—the Carlton Group was based upon the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the wartime intelligence agency that had been the predecessor to the CIA. The Carlton Group was composed of patriots who wanted one thing and one thing only: to keep Americans safe no matter what the cost.
Its modus operandi was quite similar to that of the Apex Project, except for one thing—it didn’t fall under the auspices of any politicians or bureaucrats. The Carlton Group was an obscure, private organization funded completely from Department of Defense black budgets. Only a handful of high-level career military DOD personnel knew of its existence, and it represented a major shift in counter-terrorism’s center of gravity. The only thing it was missing was a reliable private intelligence branch. To use existing government intelligence apparatus like DOD, DIA, NSA, or CIA risked exposure and was out of the question. Therefore
, they had to seek something in the private sector.
When the Carlton Group purchased the company Harvath had been working for in Colorado, he received a phone call. The new powers that be were restructuring and they wanted to move Harvath out of simply gathering intelligence and building human networks and into something much more interesting.
Carlton, or the “Old Man” as he was affectionately known by those who worked for him, had personally invited Harvath to his home in northern Virginia to discuss a new position. He had assembled a small group of operatives with military and intelligence experience to carry out “immediate action” assignments. Using the popular Pentagon catchphrase, “Find, fix, finish, and follow up,” he explained that Harvath would be responsible for identifying terrorist leadership, tracking them to a specific location, capturing or killing them as necessary, and using the information gleaned from the assignment to plan the next operation. The goal was to apply constant pressure to terrorist networks and pound them so hard and so relentlessly that they were permanently rocked back on their heels, if not ground into the dust.
In addition to immediate-action assignments, Carlton planned clever psychological operations to eat away at the terrorist networks from within, sowing doubt, fear, distrust, and paranoia throughout their ranks like a cancer. It was everything the United States government should have been doing, but wasn’t.
Serving under a man like Carlton was an honor in and of itself. The scope and intensity of the operations were icing on the cake. Harvath was sold.
For twelve months, the Old Man had put him through the most comprehensive intelligence training he had ever experienced. In essence, Carlton distilled what he had learned over his thirty years in the espionage world and drilled it as deeply as possible into Harvath.
On top of the intelligence training, Harvath was required to keep his counterterrorism skills sharp. He took additional courses in Israeli hand-to-hand combatives and the Russian martial art known as Systema. There were driving classes, language classes, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition fired on the range and in shoot houses with a host of high-end private instructors.
