Foreign Influence

by Brad Thor

  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. Into 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 counterterrorism’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 catch-phrase, “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.

  He made excellent progress and, despite his recent milestone birthday, felt that he was in better shape and better equipped than he had ever been before. Even so, he’d recently begun to notice that it was taking him slightly longer to bounce back from injuries. The job was a dream come true, but he knew he couldn’t keep doing it forever. At some point, maybe ten years from now, maybe fifteen, things were going to change. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life kicking in doors and shooting bad guys in the head.

  Carlton had been ready to put Harvath in the field, but before he could begin, Harvath had asked for permission to conduct the Iraq operation. The Old Man had agreed and through the DOD had greased Harvath’s passage into Iraq, seeing to it that he had everything he needed.

  With the Iraq operation complete, the Old Man had given him a couple of days off before the real work was to begin. He had suggested time with Tracy. Harvath had told him he’d think about it.

  He was on his second beer, still thinking about it and gazing absent-mindedly across the water when his phone vibrated. He took it out and checked the display. It was an international call, but the country code was 34—Spain. Figuring it had to be one of his guys who was using a Spanish cell phone company to get better calling rates out of Iraq, he took the call.

  The minute he heard the heavily accented voice on the other end, he realized he had been wrong. “Mr. Harvath?” said the voice.

  “Who’s this?”

  “I’m a friend of Nicholas.”

  “Nicholas?” repeated Harvath. “Nicholas who? How’d you get this number?”

  The man ignored the question. “He says you share an affinity for the same breed of dog.”

  Immediately, Harvath’s mind was drawn to his dog, Bullet. A Caucasian Ovcharka, or Caucasian sheepdog as the name translated, Bullet was named after an old friend of his, Bullet Bob, who had been killed during a terrorist attack on New York City. Ovcharkas were exceedingly fast, fiercely loyal, and absolutely vicious when it came to guarding those closest to them, which was why Bullet was with Tracy up in Maine.

  The name Nicholas now registered. Harvath’s dog had been left on his doorstep as a thank-you cum peace offering from a dwarf who dealt in the purchase and sale of highly sensitive and often highly classified information. Though commonly referred to as the Troll, the little man had told Harvath he preferred his friends to call him Nicholas.

  Harvath had reached a certain détente with Nicholas, but describing it as friendship would have been stretching the definition of their relationship. In fact, if he never saw or heard from the little man again it would be fine by him.

  “What do you want?” asked Harvath.

  “Someone tried to kill Nicholas,” said the voice.

  “You reap what you sow. He probably deserved it.”

  The man pushed forward undeterred. “The bombing in Rome two days ago—”

  “Does he know something?” interrupted Harvath. He had heard about the bus explosion and the horrible loss of lives before leaving Iraq. It was all over the news.

  “He says he needs to talk to you about it.”

  “Does he know who was behind the attack?”

  There was a pause as the man seemed to gather his thoughts.

  “I want to speak with Nicholas,” Harvath said finally.

  “He’s not in a condition to talk. Not right now.”

  “Well, when he is, tell him to call me back.”

  Harvath was about to hang up when the man stated, “He needs to see you in person.”

  “I’m not comfortable with that.”

  “Mr. Harvath, you’re going to be presented with evidence, false evidence, implicating Nicholas in the attacks. In fact, two black SUVs have just pulled into your driveway.”

  Harvath looked up toward his house. “Why should I believe you?”

  “I’m just the messenger,” replied the voice. “Nicholas is the one you need to speak to. He can help you track down who did this, but he needs you to come to him, and to come alone.”

  Harvath didn’t like it. It felt wrong, and that little voice in the back of his mind that never lied and had always helped to keep him alive was telling him to be very, very careful. “The only thing this offer’s missing is a dark alley,” he said.

  “Someone wants your government to believe Nicholas was involved. Ask yourself why. Review the evidence, and if you decide you want the truth, be in the old town of Bilbao the day after tomorrow. Behind the Cathedral in the Calle de la Tendería is a tobacconist. Ask the man there for cigarettes named after Nicholas’s dogs and you’ll receive instructions on what to do next.

  “And Mr. Harvath? Please hurry. Nicolas believes there may be more attacks in the works.”

  Harvath was about to interject when the call was disconnected. From up near the house, he could just make out the sound of several car doors slamming.

  CHAPTER 5

  CHICAGO

  Burt Taylor
had just come back from the hospital cafeteria, and his wife, Angela, was next to their daughter’s hospital bed when trauma surgeon, Dr. Dennis Stern, walked into the room.

  It had been ten days since the hit-and-run. Alison Taylor had suffered severe brain damage, as well as multiple broken bones, severe lacerations, and internal bleeding.

  Her parents had driven in from Minnesota as soon as they’d received the news. For the first few days, neither of them had left the hospital. Now, they spent the days together with Alison and took turns spending the night by her bed.

  “Have the Chicago Police come up with anything?” asked Stern as he finished his examination.

  Mr. Taylor had trouble keeping his anger in check. “Not a damn thing.”

  Normally, Mrs. Taylor would have called him on his cursing, but in this case she agreed with his choice of words. The police had been less than satisfactory.

  “It’s like they aren’t even interested in finding the guy,” continued Taylor. “They quote stats for annual hit-and-runs as if we’re supposed to just accept what happened to Alison as a consequence of living in Chicago. It’s ridiculous.”

  “I agree with you,” said Stern. “Most cops mean well, but the CPD is overworked. This city’s deficit is like a black hole. It just keeps sucking more and more into it, and it leaves the cops with less and less to work with.” He could see the anger building in Burt Taylor’s eyes. “But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be doing everything they can to find the person who did this to your daughter.”

  “You’re damn right.”

  “I think you should have someone working this for you from the inside.”

  “Working this from the inside?” repeated Taylor incredulously. “Isn’t that what the detectives assigned to Alison’s case are supposed to be doing?”

  “Technically, yes. But like any big-city police force, the CPD has a large bureaucracy. That doesn’t excuse how your daughter’s case is or isn’t being handled. It’s just a fact. Again, the majority of cops at the CPD are good people. They’re just swamped with murders and rapes and shootings and all of it.”