by Brad Thor
As the president came to the end of his remarks, he abandoned his script.
“And to the terrorists responsible for this revolting act of cowardice, I say this. America will never stop until we have hunted every last one of you down. We will go to the far corners of the earth, draining every swamp and turning over every rock along the way. And when we find you—and we will find you—we shall use every means at our disposal to visit upon you a death one thousand times more hideous than that which you have delivered to our doorstep today.
“America has defeated the greatest evils of the modern world and it will defeat the scourge of radical Islamic fanaticism as well.
“Thank you and God bless America.”
The red light atop the main camera switched off, but no one spoke. Not even the floor director, whose job it was to inform the president that they were safely off the air.
“Am I clear?” asked Rutledge.
The irony was not lost upon the director, who replied, “I’d say you were crystal clear, sir.”
Knowing it would take several minutes for the technical people to pack up their equipment from the Oval Office, Chuck Anderson asked, “Mr. President, may I have a word, please, in my office?” Pointing at the press secretary, he added, “You too, Geoff.”
Once they had gone through the adjoining door and it had closed firmly behind them, the chief of staff said, “Do you have any idea what you’ve just done?”
“We’re not going to hide behind politically correct labels anymore, Chuck.”
“I’d say you made that abundantly clear. Along with the fact that the Christian West is now officially at war with Islam.”
“I didn’t say we were at war with Islam. I said radical Islamic fanaticism,” replied the president.
The chief of staff looked at the press secretary. “Am I wrong, Geoff, or are we now officially at war with the Islamic religion?”
“I think you’re taking the president’s remarks slightly out of context,” said Mitchell.
“And you don’t think that’s what’s being done right now by every two-bit imam and petty despot in every Muslim nation around the world?”
“I don’t think it’s beyond repair. He was angry and with very good reason. We can smooth it over.”
“Just hold it,” ordered the president. “We’re not retracting, repairing, or smoothing anything over. I’m tired of dancing around. This country is going to stand by those remarks.”
“All the same, sir, I wish you would have run them by me first,” said the press secretary. “Going off-the-cuff like that can be very damaging, no matter how well intentioned.”
The chief of staff, a longtime friend of the president’s, shrugged and said, “The president doesn’t do anything off-the-cuff, Geoff. He knew very well what he was saying.”
“I don’t understand,” responded Mitchell.
Rutledge took a deep breath. “Am I angry? You’re damn right I am. Our country has been attacked, and I have no idea if because of those attacks my daughter is going to live or die. I said what every single American and every single Western world leader wanted to say and needed to say—radical Islam must be stamped out. Everyone tiptoes around the elephant in the middle of the room while the elephant continues to eat and grows bigger and bigger right before our eyes.”
“What about our Muslim allies?”
“What about them?” scoffed the president. “Radical Islam is an even bigger threat to them, and yet they sit idly by and do nothing at all about it.”
“What about the regular Muslims who might see this as a slight against them and their religion?”
“To hell with them. Mainstream Islam has done absolutely nothing to stop this cancer metastasizing within their midst. They haven’t even wholeheartedly condemned it. As far as I’m concerned, they don’t get a pass anymore. No more sitting on the fence, waiting to see which way this all goes. Either they’re part of the solution or they’re part of the problem. Period.”
The chief of staff as well as the usually verbose press secretary were both at a loss for words.
Finally, Geoff Mitchell said, “Then I guess we really are at war.”
Thirty
For security reasons, they had agreed that real names would not be used. From an operational standpoint, it was much better that way for all of them. To tell them apart, Jaffe and his team had assigned nicknames to the two foreign intelligence agents working with them. The lanky, dark-complexioned man in his mid-thirties with the Brillo-pad hair and breath that reeked of garlic was called Rashid, while the older, more experienced operative with the pockmarked face, jet black eyes, and Turkish mustache was referred to as Hassan.
Outside the interrogation room, Jaffe banged one of the monitors on the AV cart, hoping to improve the quality of the satellite downlink. “C’mon, damn it,” he mumbled as he tried to tweak the signal.
“I think we’re really crossing the line with this one,” said Brad Harper as he stood and watched the ghostlike images fading in and out of focus from halfway around the world. “Mohammed’s only been in U.S. custody for six weeks. We can break him. We just need to give it more time.”
“We might not have any more time.”
“But now we’re talking about noncombatants. Kids, for Christ’s sake.”
“Really?” said Jaffe. “What about all the kids killed on the bridges and in the tunnels today? Do you think these people gave a damn about them?”
“Obviously not, but—”
“How about all the other kids who will be killed if that sick son of a bitch in there gets away with launching multiple nuclear attacks on our soil?”
“That still doesn’t make it right, and I want to go on the record as being completely against this.”
“Duly noted,” replied Jaffe as the signal finally improved enough for them to proceed. “I don’t know how long we’ll be able to hold the downlink, so get in there and make sure we’re ready to go. And by the way,” he added as Harper began walking away, “I want you to remember that I didn’t get to where I am by being stupid or soft.”
Harper had considered the man neither stupid nor soft. In fact, he might have even been too hard for his own good. Nevertheless, there was nothing for Harper to say. All he was left with was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Marines were honorable, and they sure as hell didn’t torture children.
Even though it was going to happen on the other side of the globe, Harper felt as responsible for what was coming as if he were standing in North Africa carrying out the orders himself. He could only hope that God would have mercy on their souls for what they were about to do.
Moments later, the door to the interrogation room opened and Mike Jaffe rolled the AV cart inside with its multiple cables snaking behind into the hallway. Before turning the monitors back on, he addressed the prisoners, who were Flexicuffed to two very uncomfortable wooden chairs. Both of the men spoke English well enough, so there was no need for a translator.
“It took us quite a while to make the connection between you two. In fact, we almost missed it. We’d spent so much time looking for any of bin Laden’s or Zawahiri’s children who might have gone into the family business, that we foolishly never considered your lineage, Mohammed. You must be very proud of your nephew here. He seems to have really taken to the profession.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what the bin Mohammed-Jamal family crest might look like. Maybe two lions holding a roadside bomb, or would it be more subtle? Maybe a chain of blasting caps over a nice banner that read Women and children first?
“Anyway, we decided to do a little more genealogy, and guess what we found?” Jaffe nodded his head and Harper activated both of the monitors. “Ra’na is quite a lovely village.”
As the monitors glowed to life, one showed the battered, mud-brick exterior of a large village house, while the other showed a family of women and children huddled in one of the rooms inside. Several men in black fatigues with dark balaclavas covering
their faces held them at gunpoint.
Sayed Jamal instantly stiffened in his chair. It was exactly the reaction Jaffe had been hoping for. “I guess I don’t need to ask whose house we’re looking at.”
Mohammed knew that he was looking at his nephew’s home and family, but he remained completely impassive.
“Take a good look at them,” said Jaffe, as he held up his cell phone. “The men in that house work for me. They obey my orders, and unless you start cooperating, things are going to get very unpleasant for your nephew’s family. Now tell me about the nuclear material.”
Jaffe counted quietly to three and asked the question in a different way. “We already know where the material was stolen from a top secret European facility. We also have a pretty good handle on when it was stolen. What we don’t know is who’s planning on selling it to you and how you planned to use it. Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll have my men leave that house right now.”
When Mohammed refused to answer, Jaffe raised the cell phone to his ear and said, “Start with the oldest daughter.”
Immediately, there was a frenzy of activity on the monitor as the order was relayed and one of the gunmen pulled a screaming young woman away from her family and dragged her out of the room. The family members wailed and the image shook as the camera was removed from its tripod and rushed down the hallway. It caught up with the gunman in what appeared to be a bathroom. A large copper tub was filled with water and the gunman was holding the woman’s head underneath.
Sayed Jamal cursed his captors in Arabic as tears began to stream down his face. Jaffe, though, paid no attention to him. His eyes were locked on Mohammed bin Mohammed.
Jamal quickly realized what was going on and turned to his uncle, begging him to tell the Americans whatever they wanted to know. Mohammed yelled at him to shut up.
Brad Harper didn’t give a damn if it was insubordination or not—he couldn’t allow this to go on any longer. Approaching Jaffe, the powerfully built marine said, “That’s it. We’re not doing this. You’re going to have to find another way.”
Without taking his eyes off Mohammed, Jaffe drew his pistol and pointed it at Harper’s head, stopping the marine in his tracks. “Every member of this family will die, slowly and painfully, unless you tell me what I want to know,” said Jaffe, his eyes boring into Mohammed’s. “Who is selling the nuclear material?”
When the man still refused to answer, Jaffe spoke into his cell phone again. “Kill her.”
The command was relayed to the gunman on the monitor, who drew his sidearm, placed it over the edge of the tub, and fired two shots.
Jamal was hysterical with rage and screamed first at the Americans and then at his uncle for having killed his daughter.
Mohammed looked at him and told him to shut up.
Jaffe didn’t bother asking about the nuclear material now. Instead he spoke into his cell phone, and once the camera had returned to the room where the family was corralled, he said to Mohammed, “Why don’t you pick the next one?”
Thirty-One
Harvath had just hung up with Kevin McCauliff when Herrington walked into Dr. Hardy’s office with his crew and said, “Everyone’s in.”
Harvath looked Morgan, Cates, and Hastings over—sizing them up, as it were, trying to divine whether they’d be up to what he might call on them to do.
Bits and pieces of the things Bob had told him about them in his e-mails floated to the forefront of Harvath’s mind. Cates, who had relocated to New York from Oklahoma, was the son of evangelical parents. Though he himself was not particularly religious, he saw the war on terror exactly as his enemy did, as an out-and-out crusade. The physical stresses of the job had bought him a ticket out of active duty when both his knees blew on an assignment in the south of Afghanistan.
Morgan, the youngest team member, had been raised by a single mother. He’d been in big trouble with drugs and street gangs and had joined the Marine Corps as his ticket out and a way to see the world beyond New York. Though a head wound left him unfit for duty, many doctors, including Hardy, questioned if he wasn’t already just a bit off—a bit too reckless with his own life long before that fateful day in Iraq.
Finally there was Tracy Hastings—the Naval EOD tech. She was the daughter of a wealthy New York family; her parents had seriously disagreed with her decision to join the armed forces, but the attack on the USS Cole had helped her make up her mind, and the headstrong young woman wouldn’t be dissuaded. She hadn’t joined the Navy in spite of her affluent upbringing, she had joined because of it. She thought that if anyone had an obligation to serve their country, it was people who had profited so handsomely by it.
Tracy used a little makeup to cover the facial scars left by an IED disposal gone bad, but the damage was still visible. From what Herrington had told Harvath, her injuries had been quite severe, but the surgeons had done a remarkable job—right down to matching the particularly pale blue color for her artificial eye.
Harvath could tell by looking at each of the people standing there that they were a tightly knit group. That was good. The question was, could they function both as individuals and as a cohesive unit under the stress of combat? And just as important, would they accept him, an outsider, as both one of their own and as their leader?
As Hardy went to check on some of his other patients, they had the office to themselves. Harvath asked Herrington to close the door. Once it was shut, he said, “I am going to be completely honest with all of you. You’re not my first choice for something like this, and you’re not even my last choice. But the situation being what it is, you are my only choice.”
“Fuck you too,” said Morgan.
Herrington held up his hand and said, “Let him finish.”
Harvath waited a beat and then said, “State, local, and federal resources are completely, and I mean completely, tied up with search-and-rescue efforts. Air traffic over and maritime traffic around Manhattan has been suspended due to sniper and RPG fire. What helicopter and boat traffic there is, is working off the opposite sides of both the Hudson and East rivers. Somebody doesn’t want any reinforcements making it to Manhattan. That means that we will have no support for this assignment whatsoever. Your participation will be in an unofficial, unrecognized, and most definitely unsanctioned capacity.”
“Meaning what?” asked Cates.
“It means you’re not federal employees and you are not being recognized as active duty soldiers—in essence, your disabled status hasn’t changed.”
“I guess it’s lucky for you then that even though they took our jobs, we all got to keep our training,” replied Cates.
Harvath liked that answer. Continuing, he said, “We’re dealing with an extremely well organized enemy of indeterminate size and resources who is presumably still operating somewhere in Manhattan.”
“You mean they’re not done yet?” responded Paul Morgan.
Harvath shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to be completely straight with you. In short, we have very little idea of what we’re up against. This could turn out to be nothing, but I’ve got a feeling it might be an extremely dangerous assignment. Anybody have any other questions?”
“Yeah,” joked Cates, “so what’s the bad news?”
A wave of tense laughter rolled through the room.
Tracy Hastings raised her hand halfway and asked, “If we don’t know who these people are and what their objective is, how are we supposed to find them?”
“I just got off the phone with someone who’s working on it,” replied Harvath. “We might have something very soon, so we need to be ready to move. In the meantime, we’ve got a bigger problem. All I have is a pistol, and it’s in my truck back up in Midtown. We’re going to have to figure out what we’re going to do for weapons.”
Another wave of laughter rolled through the room, but this time it was anything but tense.
Twenty minutes later Paul Morgan removed a piece of false drywall from the back of a
closet in his small Gramercy Park apartment and said, “Go ahead and take your pick.”
It was a veritable arsenal. In the pistol department Morgan had two Unertl MEU SOC 1911’s, a Glock 19, and a four-inch-barreled .357 Smith & Wesson 620. Hanging next to them were a Mossberg 590 12-gauge shotgun, a Remington 40-X .308 sniper rifle, and a fully automatic Troy Industries CQB-SPC A4 assault rifle that Morgan had chanced a big official ass-whupping for smuggling out of Iraq.
“So much for our weapons problem,” said Harvath as he gazed at the display. “I’m going to ask another stupid question, but how are you set for ammo?”
Once again, the group laughed. Morgan crossed into the kitchen, which was covered with travel posters for places he hoped some day to see—Paris, Rome, Hong Kong—and removed a set of keys from his pocket. The refrigerator was a mosaic of snapshots showing Morgan as a marine in a number of other exotic locations around the world that were normally much more humid or dusty than Paris, Rome, or Hong Kong.
He unlocked a small padlock on the side of the freezer door and swung it open. Inside, boxes of shrink-wrapped ammunition stood in a neat series of rows.
“Where do you keep your grenade launcher?” asked Herrington.
“Dr. Hardy told me that grenade launchers are for paranoids, so I sold it to a buddy of mine a while back.”
Morgan let them stand there wondering for a second longer and then smiled and said, “Kidding. Only kidding. I never had a grenade launcher. Besides, with what the surface-to-air missile battery I’ve got up on the roof cost me, who could afford a grenade launcher?”
Everyone laughed, but secretly none of them would have been surprised to find that Morgan did have a crate of SAMs stashed somewhere upstairs.
Clearing off the kitchen table, Morgan hoisted a KIVA technical backpack stuffed to the gills with gear and set it onto one of the chairs.
