by Brad Thor
“Is that your bug-out bag?” asked Hastings.
The marine nodded his head and began unloading his pack. “A week’s worth of the very best survival equipment money can buy.”
As Morgan pulled out MREs, chemlights, water purification tablets, parachute cord, and other items, Cates said, “A week’s worth? Whatever happened to seventy-two hours?”
“Hurricane Katrina, that’s what.” The marine looked at Harvath. “Even DHS is now telling people they need to have at least a week’s worth of supplies on hand in case of trouble, right?”
Harvath nodded his head knowing that they were talking about having people raise it to a month or even two. Not only did he have a bug-out bag ready to go at a moment’s notice in case of a terrorist attack or some other sort of disaster, but so did most of the military, law enforcement, and intelligence people he worked worth. Even civilians had them. The way Harvath saw it, it was pretty stupid for anyone, government employee or otherwise, not to be ready in case of an emergency. That said, his bug-out bag was sitting in the back of his TraillBlazer in a garage uptown. It weighed at least fifty pounds, and it would have been quite uncomfortable to carry everywhere with him. Even so, there were several items in it he would have liked to have with him right now.
As Morgan continued to remove items from his seemingly bottomless bag, Hastings asked, “Where’d you get all the money for this stuff?”
“Let’s just say that in my old life I was a good saver.”
“A real good saver,” added Cates as he checked the labels in a couple of the sport coats hanging in Morgan’s closet.
The marine laid out an assortment of extremely high-quality knives from Chris Reeve as well as a brand-new Gerber LMF II-Infantry, which could be used to carve one’s way out of a helicopter fuselage, and respectfully offered Harvath first pick.
Though they were all exceptional, Harvath already had his never-leave-home-without-it Benchmade auto in his pocket, and if they made it back to his TrailBlazer he’d have access to a superb fixed-blade knife from LaRue Tactical.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got some flashbangs in there?” said Harvath as he watched Paul Morgan continue to pull gear out of his bag.
“No, but I do have this,” replied the marine as he withdrew a Blackhawk medical pack.
Harvath was about to say that he hoped they wouldn’t need that when his cell phone rang. It was Kevin McCauliff.
After chatting with him for only a few seconds, two things became apparent. Kevin had some pretty good news. He also had some pretty bad news.
Thirty-Two
Harvath listened as McCauliff gave him the good news first. The NGA analyst had been able to hack the server containing the tracking data for the terrorist’s cell phone that Harvath had “borrowed” from the NYPD’s evidence bag. It was one of over forty-seven different phones operating off the same account. It and one other had continued to broadcast a signal after the bridges and tunnels had been blown. That “other” phone was recognized by the server as the lead wireless reception device. McCauliff explained that all of the units had been programmed to text message positioning data to the lead phone at regular intervals. Now it was time for the bad news.
Wherever that lead phone was, it was now no longer transmitting a signal. McCauliff had no way to tell Harvath its current location, only where it had been—an address on the Upper West Side and another in the diamond district on West 47th Street.
Even though the lead phone appeared to have been disabled, McCauliff strongly suggested that Harvath make sure that the positioning software on the one he was now carrying was turned off. Harvath told him he’d already done so back at the police station and, as he grabbed a pen and paper, asked McCauliff to repeat the addresses the lead phone had been at one more time.
When Harvath asked if there was any satellite imagery available for those locations, McCauliff told him that was also part of the bad news and that Harvath would understand what he meant once he saw it. All Kevin needed was an e-mail address. Harvath saw the cable modem next to the PC on Paul Morgan’s desk, crossed his fingers he’d be able to get online, and gave McCauliff one of the Hotmail accounts he used when he didn’t want to run things through the DHS servers.
Five minutes later, Harvath downloaded the first in a series of e-mails and saw exactly what McCauliff meant about the satellite imagery also being part of the “bad” news. The smoke from all of the fires made it very difficult to make anything out. Three e-mails later, he waved Herrington over and said, “Do you see what I see here?”
Bob stared at the screen and slowly scrolled through the images from the building on West 84th Street. When he was finished, he backed up and did it again, then repeated the process several more times. He wanted to be as sure as possible before rendering any kind of opinion. Finally he said, “The image quality absolutely sucks, but if I had to make a guess, I’d say that those are pictures of two vehicles carrying two breaching teams of anywhere from four to seven men each.”
“That’s what I think too,” replied Harvath as he clicked on the imagery of the diamond district address. “How about here?”
“These pictures are even worse than the others,” said Bob. “Those could be our two vehicles, or they could be completely different ones. With all the haze and interference from the smoke, you can’t tell for sure.”
“Well, there’s only one way to find out.”
“Hoo-ah,” shouted Cates, mocking Morgan, but doing it with the Army yell. “Let’s go get those fuckers.”
Hastings paid no attention to Cates. Looking at all the gear, she said, “Don’t you think we’re going to draw a lot of attention running around Manhattan with all of this stuff?”
“Good point,” replied Herrington as he looked at Morgan.
The marine crossed the room and pulled several backpacks from his hall closet. “A buddy of mine is a rep for CamelBak. These are their new scabbard bags. You can throw a rifle or a shotgun into the scabbard in the center and then pack the rest of your gear in the compartments around it.”
Harvath studied the cleverly designed bags and remarked, “It’s still going to look like we’re packing some serious firepower.”
Morgan pulled three rain covers from behind his snowshoes. “We’ll use these for the Remington, the Troy CQB, and the Mossberg. Nobody will have any idea what we’re carrying.”
For someone who had his hair parted seriously enough by a bullet to be medically discharged from the Marines, so far he seemed to have his act together. This guy didn’t miss a trick. “Okay,” remarked Scot. “I guess now all we have to do is figure out how the hell we’re going to get where we’re going.”
Looking out one of the windows and down the street of the lower-floor apartment, Rick Cates replied, “I’ve got an idea, but I’ve also got a feeling nobody’s going to like it.”
Thirty-Three
Eyeing the collection of dirt bikes outside Cox Cycle Shop, Harvath cautioned Cates not to let things devolve into a That’s my chopper Charlie, this is my gun Clyde kind of situation.
As they stood on the sidewalk watching the Army Civil Affairs specialist spin his story to the cross-armed, heavily tattooed staff of the motorcycle custom shop, Harvath, Herrington, Hastings, and Morgan tried to come up with a Plan B.
They agreed that the fastest way to the diamond district from Gramercy Park was to try to go straight up Fifth Avenue, but it was reserved for emergency vehicles only, and most of the cops they’d been seeing weren’t particularly helpful. Unless you were driving an official vehicle, they weren’t letting anyone through, not even a car full of surgeons they’d seen who needed to get to an uptown hospital as quickly as possible. Harvath was wondering if maybe they would be better off heading north on foot, retrieving his vehicle and using its lights-and-siren package to try to barrel through the rest of the distance, when Cates was shoved backward onto the pavement by one of the tattooed bikers.
Immediately, Harvath and the rest of his g
roup stepped forward, but Cates held up his hand and waved them back. Showing extreme patience and control, he got up off the ground, dusted himself off, and reengaged the man who had just shoved him.
Harvath and the others watched as Cates went toe-to-toe with the 250-pound biker and their exchange got progressively more heated.
Moments later, the biker grabbed Cates by the throat and swung his other arm around in an attempt to hit him in the side of the head. Cates parried the blow and brought his free hand crashing into the man’s jaw. Before the tattooed giant could respond, Cates whipped his head forward and shattered the cartilage in the man’s nose with a vicious head butt.
The bike store manager rammed his knee into Cates’s abdomen, but the Special Forces reservist quickly returned the assault by kicking the big man in the groin, causing his knees to buckle and for him to fall to the pavement in pain.
“If you guys would like to help,” yelled Cates over his shoulder as the rest of the biker staff in the shop began grabbing wrenches, pipes, and assorted bludgeons, “now would probably be a good time.”
Harvath and company drew their weapons and rushed forward. Upon seeing the display of firepower, the biker shop staff laid down their arms and retreated into the back of the garage.
Cates kicked his assailant in the gut and walked inside, located the keys for the motorcycles they wanted, and then hit the button to lower the garage-style door. Once it was down, he jammed a screwdriver into the holes where the padlock normally went, pulled two sets of Flexicuffs from Paul Morgan’s pack, and secured the front door.
“What did I tell you about not turning this situation into a confrontation?” demanded Harvath as they climbed onto the motorcycles.
“I couldn’t help it,” replied Cates as he fired his up. “Did you see that guy’s tats?”
“He’s got a million of them—so what?”
“You obviously missed the one on his left arm,” said Cates as he pulled forward onto the sidewalk. “He had a picture of Uncle Sam with a black eye and underneath it the letters F-T-A.”
“Fuck The Army?” yelled Morgan over the whine of his Suzuki. “Fuck that asshole. Hoorah, Cates.”
Herrington and Hastings both flashed Rick the thumbs-up, and Harvath had no choice but to flash his as well. To be kicked out of the service for what was known as the Big Chicken Dinner, or more correctly a bad conduct discharge meant that the bike shop manager was one screwed-up individual and had committed the equivalent of a serious felony.
To proudly boast that fact underneath a disfigured tattoo of Uncle Sam was unforgivable. He deserved everything Cates had dished out to him and more.
“What do you say, boss?” yelled Morgan as he revved his motorcycle.
Harvath noticed that the team was looking to Bullet Bob for guidance, and as Herrington shot a questioning look in Harvath’s direction, Harvath nodded his head for him to take control. These people respected Bob’s experience and looked to him as their leader.
“Forty-seventh and Fifth,” yelled Herrington, “as fast as we can get there.”
Lowering his head and rocketing his bike out into traffic, Harvath decided he could worry about chain-of-command issues later. Right now, they had a very strange puzzle to start putting together. The only question was, were the few pieces they had going to be enough to make any sort of progress?
Thirty-Four
Gary Lawlor tried to discern a connection between the two addresses Harvath had given him. The terrorists were obviously looking for something, but what? What could they possibly want in a brownstone on the Upper West Side and a location in the diamond district in Midtown? Neither seemed typical terrorist targets.
Compounding the problem was that someone at the DIA was playing some sort of role in all of this, but until he had a better handle on who and what it was, there was no way Lawlor was going to tip his hand to them. They were a collection of superspooks bound by completely different rules of engagement than the rest of the intelligence community. Theirs were the rules of war, and there wasn’t much they couldn’t do—including locking him up indefinitely without charge for even sniffing around the edges of one of their operations. Call it interagency mistrust or a strong instinct for self-preservation, but until Lawlor got a much better feel for the lay of the land, he was going to stay as far away from the DOD and its Defense Intelligence Agency as possible.
In the meantime, as the director of the Apex Project, he had a host of other resources at his disposal. Logging on to his computer, he accessed the shared intelligence database network and entered the two addresses that Kevin McCauliff had provided Harvath with. When the search results came back, they were more than disappointing—they were downright impossible. According to the database, there was no information available for either address—no utility records, no mortgage or business license information, nothing. Both locations appeared to be operating in a vacuum—a big black one.
Someone had scrubbed both addresses so completely clean that neither offered a single trail leading anywhere. That kind of sterilization normally happened only in covert government operations so deep they were referred to as happening at “crush depth”—a status reserved for issues of vital national security. For one reason or another, these issues were sometimes better handled in the civilian arena, rather than on military bases or at established intelligence agencies, but even so, the crush depth locations Lawlor had known during his career were like mini-fortresses.
Gary still wasn’t any closer to understanding what was going on in New York, though. If the imagery from Kevin McCauliff did indeed show two crush depth locations being hit, what was the reason? Better yet, how in the world could the terrorists have known about them? The operational intelligence would have been Polo Step at the very least. The fact that they had hit not one but two suggested a security compromise so devastating that its repercussions could very well be felt for years, if not for decades, to come.
Lawlor jumped over to the DHS server, pulled up the most current FEMA damage map for New York City and filtered out as much “noise” as possible. He wasn’t interested in casualty estimates or the positioning of emergency equipment. All he wanted to know was where the terrorists had specifically struck. Once that information was isolated, he added secondary problem spots such as reported sniper and RPG locations, apartment building and property fires, as well as any other major events that demanded a large police, fire, or EMS response. With those in place, he added the last layer—the secret Upper West Side and Midtown locations the terrorists had just struck.
He tried to make sense of it, but the harder he stared at the screen the more the questions piled up in his brain. If these were crush depth locations, what agency or group was running them and what was their purpose? With all the chaos in New York, was whoever oversaw those locations even aware that they’d been hit? That was one of Lawlor’s biggest questions.
The only obvious thing in the whole muddled mix was that if the terrorists were pinpointing and hitting actual crush depth locations, then the United States was in even bigger trouble than it thought.
Lawlor realized that he was going to have to go against his better judgment and talk to people outside his immediate circle. Whatever the fallout might be, as long as he could stop the terrorists before they struck again, it would be worth it.
Thirty-Five
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
Mark Schreiber poked his head into his supervisor’s fluorescent-lit office and said, “I think we’ve got another problem in Manhattan.”
“No kidding,” replied Joseph Stanton, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward the flat-panel televisions on the wall behind him. “Some idiot blogger started a rumor that a bio agent was part of the attack and no matter what Mayor Brown says, nobody is listening to him.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” replied Schreiber as he stepped the rest of the way inside and closed the door behind him. “Transcon and Geneva D
iamond are unresponsive.”
Stanton stopped what he was doing and laid down his purple highlighter. His bespectacled face was bloated from a diet too rich in sodium, along with too many Hennessy-and-Cokes after hours. His hair was unkempt and his entire wardrobe seemed to be permanently wrinkled. He wore a seersucker suit that should have been retired years ago and a striped regimental tie decorated with coffee stains. “Unresponsive how?”
“Nobody’s answering e-mail.”
“Did you try calling them?”
Schreiber nodded his head. “The phones don’t seem to be working.”
“How about pinging the servers?”
“I did that and it comes back A-Okay. Still processing.”
“So what’s the problem?” asked Stanton.
“If we can ping the servers via satellite and get a response, then why isn’t their e-mail working? It piggybacks off the same system.”
“New York’s in chaos right now. We don’t know what the damage is or what services have been interrupted. Let’s not worry about it.”
“You don’t find it a bit odd that we can’t connect with two of our substations?”
“Considering everything that’s going on up there, not really. The servers are still churning, right? You said so yourself. So, someone has got to be processing data.”
“Yeah, but I just have a bad feeling about it,” replied Schreiber.
“We’re under attack, so having bad feelings is understandable. Give it a little while longer. I’m sure we’ll hear something.”
“And if we don’t?”
Stanton didn’t have time for this. “Then we’ll have a friendly neighborhood beat cop stroll by and give us a report.”
“You’re joking, right?” said the young man.
Of course he was joking, and if this kid spent a little more time interacting with real live people and a little less time at his computer, he might know it. Picking up his highlighter and turning his attention back to the stack of paperwork on his desk, Stanton replied, “It’s going to be a very long night, Mark. Why don’t you take a few minutes, relax, and then see what kind of sourcing help they’re going to need upstairs.”
