Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

  Carmichael protested, but Court just lifted his weapon off the table and pointed it at him till he shut up. Looking at Catherine he asked, “How do you know this?”

  “Denny assassinated Jordan Mayes yesterday. He framed you for it, but someone in the car with Mayes at the time he was killed confirmed it was not you. Before he died, Mayes told this source of mine that Denny had revealed the truth of Operation BACK BLAST. It was an attempt to rescue the other Arab, because he was the spy for the United States. Carmichael didn’t know Hawthorn was an Israeli asset. He thought he was just an AQ hit man out to kill his agent.”

  Court leaned back heavily in his chair, his MP7 lowered into his lap, though it remained pointed in the general direction of the two hostages.

  “Who was Denny’s agent?”

  Catherine King looked to Murquin al-Kazaz. “He’s sitting right here, Six.”

  Court turned to the man slowly. Looked at his face. He tried to add a beard, and to take off six years. He wasn’t sure.

  Al-Kazaz yelled now. “This is an outrageous lie! I know nothing of this!” He turned to Carmichael. “Denny, tell them this is not true. Don’t join their lie to save yourself. You need me!”

  Court lifted the HK assault weapon off the table and pointed it at al-Kazaz’s head. “Well, I sure as shit don’t need you.”

  Kaz shut his eyes.

  Catherine King screamed, “No, Six! Don’t do it!”

  Court held the gun there, the laser sight painted on the man’s forehead. Finally he lowered it. With his eyes still on Kaz, he said, “Denny, your only chance at surviving the next fifteen minutes hinges on you coming clean on all this. Right fucking now.”

  Catherine King did what she could to defuse the situation. “Denny, anything you say will be considered off the record. You have my word.”

  Denny Carmichael spoke in a defeated voice now. “You have to understand the opportunity that I had. It was one of the most successful intelligence operations of the past half century, and it was all me. No one knew I had a highly placed man in al Qaeda, and a highly placed man in Saudi intelligence.”

  He paused for a moment, then turned to Kaz. “It was the same man.

  “It’s true. Kaz had been feeding me al Qaeda intel for two years, but he knew he was burned. AQ discovered he was a Saudi intelligence officer. He’d been tipped off that the trip to Italy was cover to get him out of Pakistan so he could be assassinated without causing a rift between al Qaeda and their Saudi benefactors. He asked me to save him. I needed to keep Kaz secure, but I couldn’t pull him out by going through normal channels, because the relationship was not approved. I sent you, Six, gave you an old image of Kaz he’d taken in Tel Aviv, and told you he was an Israeli asset.”

  Carmichael continued, “I swear to Christ, Court, I had no idea the assassin was an Israeli asset. Kaz didn’t know, either.

  “I made a quick decision, the only rational decision I could have made. I had to save him.” Carmichael leaned forward, straining against his bindings. “And lo and behold, it worked.”

  Court was still looking at Kaz, but he spoke to Carmichael. “The only problem was the man I killed was the best penetration agent any service had in the enemy’s command structure. Higher than Kaz. He was core AQ.”

  Carmichael lowered his head. “A few days after BACK BLAST I got a call from Manny Aurbach at Mossad. He said he had a man go dark in Trieste. He told me he was undercover as AQ. Manny asked me if we’d heard any chatter. Immediately I suspected, but I asked for a picture. I sent it to Kaz and he confirmed it was the man you shot. I had to cover it up from the Israelis, not to protect you”—Carmichael shrugged when he said it—“but to protect Kaz. By this time he was back in Saudi Arabia, but if I told Manny the truth, that it was an honest mistake, he would know I’d been trading intel with the Saudis at an unapproved level, and he would have gone to others here in the U.S. to have me derailed.

  “So I lied to Manny. That should have been that.”

  “But?” Catherine asked.

  Denny continued, “But a full year later a Serbian who was at the villa in Trieste gave the Mossad a picture of you standing over Hawthorn’s body.”

  Court cocked his head. “How the hell did he happen to get a picture of that?”

  “It was a covert camera set up in Kaz’s room. It’s a picture of you standing in front of a window, silenced pistol. Hawthorn is in the doorway falling to the floor after you shot him. God knows why the Serbian gangsters set the camera up, or why they sent it to the Mossad, but they did. At that point Manny knew his man had been assassinated, and he knew the only force that could pull it off was the Americans.” He paused. “I couldn’t deny. I told them you must have gone rogue, done the job for money. I had to terminate you so the Israelis couldn’t talk to you. If they did, they could just show you a picture of Hawthorn and you would know that wasn’t the man you were sent to rescue. If you told the Israelis then they would know BACK BLAST was a lie.”

  Court looked down at the floor for a minute, saying nothing.

  Finally Catherine called out to him. “Six, are you okay?”

  Softly he said, “The Serbians did not have a camera in that room.”

  “They must have. How else did they get the image?”

  “They didn’t.” Court turned to al-Kazaz. “You took the picture. I remember.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “The pen. The pen in your hand. I remember it now. All your other items in that room, papers, luggage, your computer. Everything else could stay, but you had to put that pen in your pocket. I thought it was strange at the time, but I had too much going on to worry about it.”

  “What does a stupid pen have to do with any of this?”

  Denny Carmichael’s face reddened with fury. “I gave you that pen. It contained a pinhole camera. You son of a bitch!”

  Catherine connected the dots. “Al-Kazaz gave the image to the Israelis.” She looked at the Saudi in the chair across from her. “Which means you knew Hawthorn was a Mossad agent the entire time. The whole damn thing was a setup.”

  Carmichael roared, “Goddammit, Kaz! No!”

  Court said, “Denny, you were wrong before. Kaz wasn’t your man in al Qaeda. He wasn’t your man in Saudi intelligence. You were his man in the CIA. He ran you. He still does.”

  Denny’s hands were bound behind the chair, but he looked like he might try to kill the man tied next to him with only his gnashing teeth.

  Kaz surprised everyone in the room with a slight smile. He turned to Denny, on his left. “I ran you for years when I worked inside AQ. Giving you enough information to solidify me as a source, to make me look good, and passing disinformation when it suited Saudi interests. I fed you intelligence that I knew would go straight to your friend Manny Aurbach at Mossad. You believed it all because I’d proven myself. And Manny believed it all because it came from you, and he never knew I existed.”

  Denny said, “I’m going to kill you.”

  Kaz laughed now. “No, you won’t.” He pointed his forehead at Gentry. “This man will do the honors. You and I will die tonight, but I can die in peace, because although my scheme was discovered at the end, my efforts succeeded for many years. I can be proud of my service to my kingdom.” He laughed again, more cruelly this time. “You, Denny, will die knowing you failed your country.”

  Denny Carmichael turned to Catherine King. “I did not know. You have to believe me. Whatever happens to me, you can’t report that I did anything to hurt the CIA.”

  King said, “You were next in line to become director. If you had succeeded in killing Six, as you tried so hard to do, then al-Kazaz would have been able to manipulate the director of the CIA.”

  It was a statement, and Denny had no reply to it.

  Kaz was about to speak again, but the lights in the conference room went off
suddenly, shrouding the scene in darkness.

  76

  Five seconds after cutting power to the south wing of Alexandria Eight, Dakota spoke into his helmet-mounted headset. “Breach!”

  The explosive ordnance expert on the team depressed the detonator, and a breaching charge on the wall just to the left of the steel double doors blew. A large water bladder covering the outside of the charge tamped the explosion, both keeping the men outside the wall safe from the backblast, as well as pushing the majority of the explosive power into the fortified wall.

  Within seconds of the explosion the first two JSOC operators had their weapons through the oval-shaped hole in the wall. While they covered ahead, two more operators climbed through, took a knee in the hallway, and searched for targets in prearranged geometries of fire. The hallway was pitch-black, but both of these operators, as well as all the other men on the team, wore GPNVG-18s, state-of-the art night vision goggles that rendered the darkness before them in varying hues of green in a wide, ninety-seven-degree panoramic view.

  Assaulters five and six were through the breach an instant later, and they moved down to the far end of the hallway to the small door that led straight to Denny’s office. They set a small breaching charge on the lock of the door, planning to enter and then take the other exit out of the office. They would then move up the small hall past the attic stairs and into the conference room.

  Seven and eight moved straight between the cordon of armed men covering all angles, and these two ran to the wall just left of the conference room doors. One man carried a large shield-looking device in his hand, and he shoved it against the wall, affixing it with pre-placed adhesive. This large breaching charge was also backstopped with a water barrier, but it was designed to minimize the inward blast, so that hostages inside would not be injured.

  Nine and ten, Dakota and Harley, moved into the hallway last. They each set two more small charges wide of the first two, both at shoulder height. These would blow small holes in the wall, creating gun ports so operators could cover the assaulters moving into the main breach.

  While one operator connected the det cord to all three charges on the wall, the other men moved wide of the area, lined up in two stacks, one on each side, and prepared to execute the dynamic entry.

  —

  When the lights went out, Catherine King could not understand why Court Gentry sat calmly in his chair for several seconds, apparently sending a text message. And when the explosion in the hallway rocked the room and Catherine King screamed in shock, Denny Carmichael could not understand why Gentry cut him free from his bindings. It was too dark in the room to see any faces, but Denny wondered if Gentry was afraid of the attack to come and had some plan that involved Denny being ambulatory.

  But Gentry just moved over to al-Kazaz and cut him free, as well.

  Denny’s first inclination was to dive for Kaz’s throat. He wanted to kill the man who had ruined everything, the man who had hurt Denny’s nation and destroyed his reputation, the man who had tricked him and deprived him of everything in the past decade he had counted as a success. Nothing else mattered to Denny now, not even his own life.

  But he didn’t go for Kaz’s neck, because when the JSOC men entered, as they would in mere seconds, Denny knew he’d only survive if he remained perfectly still.

  Getting shot by army commandos would end his attack on Kaz long before he could strangle the life out of the younger man.

  Catherine grabbed Gentry by the arm while he was still cutting the rope binding Kaz’s wrists. She implored him, her voice cracking with panic. “They will kill you as soon as they get through the door. They will not take you alive. You have to trade Carmichael for your freedom. It’s your only chance!”

  “No. Once I entered here, I knew I would not be walking out.”

  “You don’t have to do this! You know everything now. You can get out of here and—”

  Court took her by the wrist and pulled her around the table, away from the two men. He walked to the wall next to the doors to the hallway, then he moved all the way to the end of the long table, close to the narrow hallway towards the attic stairs and Denny’s office. He could see Denny and Kaz just barely in the dark; they remained in their seats next to each other, facing the doorway to the hall.

  They looked to him, straining to see him in the darkness.

  Court checked his watch, then he unhooked his HK MP7 from the sling around his neck, and he placed it at the end of the long conference table.

  He kept his hand on the weapon for a short time, while he tried to think of something to say. No words would come to him now. Catherine pulled at his arm, trying to get him to lie on the ground, but he pulled back, still staring at the two men in the low light.

  “I promised Hanley I wouldn’t kill you, Denny. So I’m going to give Kaz a gun so he can do it for me.”

  Court Gentry surprised everyone in the room by sliding the loaded weapon across the long, shiny conference room table, in the direction of the two men. As the HK spun towards them Court rushed down the hall to the attic stairs, pulling Catherine along behind him.

  —

  Denny Carmichael and Murquin al-Kazaz both launched to their feet, reaching for the gun skittering by on the table. They both knew the assault team would breach within moments, but they both also knew they were in danger as long as the other had access to a loaded weapon.

  Kaz grabbed it by its short barrel, near the muzzle, but Denny managed to take hold of the grip of the weapon. While Kaz screamed in fear, Denny ripped the gun off the table and twisted towards Kaz, who still held on to it for dear life.

  Carmichael jammed his finger onto the trigger, yanked it back, and fired a long fully automatic burst of 4.6-millimeter hollow point rounds into Kaz’s stomach at a range of one foot.

  The weapon lurched in Carmichael’s hand, so he took hold of the forward grip to steady it.

  The loud roar of the gun drowned out the tamped explosions on the wall fifteen feet away, and Denny’s eyes were locked on Kaz, whose expression of pure shock and agony shone bright as day in the fat red flames of the gunfire.

  Denny emptied most of the magazine into the flailing body of al-Kazaz, then he spun to his left, aware suddenly of the noise, light, and motion there.

  He turned wildly with the gun in his hand still firing, and then Denny Carmichael rocked back on his heels, slammed into the bookshelf behind him. The HK flew from his hand and then he dipped forward, dropped onto his knees, and fell down flat on his face behind the conference table, coming to rest across the legs of al-Kazaz.

  He’d been shot twice in rapid succession, straight through his necktie and into his heart.

  —

  Dakota raced through the ragged breach and into the conference room. One of his assaulters in the gun port had just shot a hostage, he’d seen it through his NODs as he entered, but his main objective all along was to kill Violator, and that had not changed.

  He lined up in front of his men, cleared the room, and moved right, towards the hallway there. With three operators on his heels, he led the way.

  At the foot of the attic stairs he met up with the two men who had breached the door to Denny’s office. They’d reported no joy on the target, so they knew he was in the attic.

  All six operators began moving up the steps.

  —

  Court shouted to Catherine King, twenty-five feet away in the attic. “Lie flat on the ground, facedown, hands out to your sides. Cross your legs at the ankles. No matter what happens, you don’t move till they move you. You do all that and you’ll be safe.”

  Two decades of yoga had not instilled in Catherine the sense of calm necessary to endure all that was happening around her. She thought her heart would burst, but she complied with Court’s instructions, lying on the dusty old wooden floor near the stairwell. Looking across the darkened attic, she coul
d barely see him, kneeling in front of a large backpack.

  She called out to him. “Let me talk to them! Maybe I can—”

  “No! Do not move from where you are!”

  “Six, lie here with me! They will kill you if you don’t—”

  “Just stay there, Catherine,” he ordered.

  She looked at him again. Cocked her head. “What are you doing? What . . . what is that?”

  —

  Harley set the breaching charge on the door to the attic, unwound the det cord, and backed down a few feet. He called, “Fire in the hole!” and the explosion blew dust and splinters on the men all around.

  Dakota took the second position as the assaulters rushed up and past Harley and through the blown door. As soon as they were in the dark room the first operator in the stack shouted, “Don’t move! Don’t move!”

  Dakota stepped to the side and saw the woman from the Washington Post lying on the floor, in a compliant stance. Her head was down, her arms were out, and her legs were crossed behind her. Someone had given her a lesson in how to not get shot by a tactical team.

  While the first assaulter kept his gun trained on her, a massive explosion to Dakota’s left knocked him off balance, all the way down to his kneepads.

  The room filled with smoke, and when he spun around and looked in the direction of the noise he couldn’t see a thing, even through his panoramic night vision goggles.

  All the men in the stack were in the attic now, covering the main part of the room with their rifles, desperate to find a target through the thick smoke.

  Another noise came from the smoke. It wasn’t an explosion; more like the sound of an electric engine.

  Dakota didn’t want his men running into a trap. “Hold positions! Hold till you can see your way forward!”

  The smoke cleared a little, but the NODs weren’t cutting through it. Dakota called, “White light!” into his mic, then he flipped up his goggles and actuated the flashlight on the bottom of his rifle. Quickly the other operators followed suit.