by Brad Thor
For Harvath it was cathartic and something he desperately needed. His entire assignment in New York had been a catastrophic failure. Mohammed bin Mohammed had gotten away, as had the man who had been leading the Chechens, whom Harvath suspected was also the man who had helped spring Mohammed from Libya House, killing Bob Herrington in the process.
The SEALs have a saying that the only easy day was yesterday, but nothing about yesterday was easy, nor were any of the six days before that. For the last week, Harvath had remained alone, convalescing in his hotel room after having been patched up at the VA. He ran the operation through his mind again and again and again, each time trying to figure out a way he could have done things differently. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t think of anything he could have said or done that might have saved Bob’s life. This realization, though, did little to assuage his guilt.
Harvath let that guilt simmer, and it invariably turned to anger, which he focused directly on the bureaucracy back in Washington. Like most people, he wanted answers, but not even Gary Lawlor had them for him. He urged Harvath to be patient, but Harvath had no patience left. He called his pal at Valhalla and began negotiating the terms of his new job.
Inside the church, the guilt, the anger, and the sheer exhaustion with the system still weighed heavily on Harvath as he sat alongside Tracy Hastings, Rick Cates, and Paul Morgan, who had told the VA doctors to go to hell when they refused to discharge him for Bob’s funeral. In the end, it was Sam Hardy who finally stepped in and made it happen.
It was good to be there with them, and Harvath tried to let go of everything he was stewing over so he could say a proper good-bye to his friend.
As the reverend introduced both himself and the military chaplain who had come from Fort Bragg to assist in the service, he informed the mourners that the program was going to be short and simple—marked not by saying good-bye, but by saying hello as Bob was welcomed into the kingdom of heaven. With a smile on his face, the man then apologized for not having enough holy “water” or wine on hand to make his service as enjoyable as the Irish wake from the night before. The crowd, many of who were still hung over, chuckled good-naturedly.
The invocation was given and then came the readings, most of which were given by Bob’s teammates. The final reading was one Harvath had heard umpteen times, but which had never really hit him as hard as it did today: There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
As Harvath turned to look at Tracy, Rick, and Paul, he could see they were each fighting a losing battle to hold back their tears.
When the priest finished his sermon, one of Bob’s teammates, a man named Jack Kohlmeyer, was invited to share some of his reflections. Kohlmeyer was the perfect speaker and spoke eloquently and with the right degree of humor to help ease the sadness everyone was feeling.
“I only knew Bob for a short time. He and I met about three years ago in a valley beneath the mountains of Afghanistan. There I was at eight thousand feet, packing an eighty-pound rucksack, about to head up into the mountains, and Bob just sat on his cot laughing at me—in front of everyone, ‘Nope, you don’t need that,’ he’d say. ‘Or that. Or that. Nope, you don’t need that either.’ ”
Harvath had had the same experience with Bob just days earlier and he couldn’t help but laugh.
“But Bob could get away with it,” continued Kohlmeyer. “He could get away with laughing at us for looking silly. Bob’s trick was that he laughed not at us, but with us. He didn’t laugh to make us look foolish, he laughed to win us over and to make us his friends. And in that he was successful.
“It’s a testament to his success with people that so many of us have traveled so far to be with him today, for the sum of the miles traveled by all of us reach into the tens of thousands.
“Bob loved people and we loved him back. We sustained him and he sustained us. Especially, when we were down.
“Bob reminded me on more than one occasion that life isn’t fair so get over it and keep doing the best that you can do.
“A few weeks before Bob left to come home, the team that I had been assigned to suffered several casualties. The job of packing their bags was given to me. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Bob, though, sat with me and talked—and he talked, and he talked, and he talked. He knew what he was doing. He was keeping my mind off the job at hand. He was a natural with people and he knew it.
“So, Bob kept my mind occupied and when I was done, he put his arm around my shoulder and reminded me once more, Life isn’t fair. Keep doing what you’re doing and make sure you’re doing the very best you can.”
As Harvath sat there, it was almost as if Bob was speaking to him. Hearing those words, Harvath knew he wasn’t going to quit his job—he couldn’t. As much of a pain in the ass as it often was, Harvath knew why he was doing it. It wasn’t for the politicians he had grown progressively more disenchanted with, it was for the people of this country, brave and good people like Bob who along with their honorable way of life were worth fighting for.
Harvath was going to keep doing what he was doing and he was going to continue doing it the very best he could—for himself and also for the memory of Bob Herrington.
When the service had ended, the reverend asked if everyone would follow the procession outside onto the steps of the church.
The street was still devoid of traffic, the ESU officers dutifully at their posts. Chairs had been set up on the sidewalk for family members and those who needed to sit. It was hot and humid, but a faint breeze blew in from across the river. And though the air had gotten much better, it still wasn’t one hundred percent. The scent of death and destruction still hung over everything. It was a smell Harvath would never be able to forget. Like everyone else in New York, it had become a part of him.
Bob Herrington was given a twenty-one-gun salute by seven Special Forces soldiers from across the street, and as taps was played, the flag covering his coffin was folded and handed to his parents.
The coffin was then placed inside the hearse and the rear door closed. Everyone stood or sat in silence. A minute, maybe two passed, the birds of Brooklyn Heights the only accompaniment to people’s private thoughts and remembrances of Bob Herrington.
There was a faint noise from somewhere off in the distance, and Harvath wrote it off to the ongoing S&R efforts on Manhattan, until it began to grow much louder. Looking up from the hearse, Harvath watched as a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter came in and hovered directly overhead. A heavy black rope was lowered, and it was then that Harvath realized what he was seeing. Someone, probably one of Bob’s teammates, had arranged for a symbolic final extraction.
The helicopter then flared and flew off toward the river as the mourners watched. When it was gone from view, Harvath and everyone else looked down to see that Robert Herrington’s hearse had already driven away.
Ninety-Eight
So are we going to the reception, or not?” asked Harvath as the crowd outside the church began to break up.
“We thought we’d do our own private send-off for Bob,” replied Cates.
“What? You mean just the three of you?”
“No. The four of us,” said Morgan. “After all, we’re a team, right?”
Harvath smiled. As he did, Tracy Hastings removed a bottle of Louis XIII from her bag and said, “Bob mentioned he owed you a drink. We all chipped in and bought this in his honor.”
Harvath smiled even wider.
As they had all paid their respects to the family at the wake last night and had stayed well into the early morning hours drinking, nobody could fault them for missing the reception. In fact, few would probably even notice their absence. Besides, swapping stories while they consumed a $1300 bottle of cognac was the kind of send-off Bob would have approved of.
They decided they’d take the Fulton Landing Ferry back over to Manhattan and find a quiet place in Battery Park where they could look out over the Hudson and maybe forget, at lea
st for a while, about everything that had happened.
A block from the church a black limousine pulled up next to them, and when the tinted window rolled down, Harvath thought he recognized the voice of the man calling his name. As he turned to look, he saw Robert Hilliman, the U.S. secretary of defense, waving.
“Quite a moving ceremony,” he said, beckoning Harvath over to the vehicle. “I need a couple minutes of your time. Would you mind?”
Harvath told the others he’d meet them at the ferry and then climbed inside the limousine.
“How’ve you been, Scot?” said Hilliman once the door was shut.
“Fine, sir,” he replied, not exactly happy to be sitting in a limo in the middle of Brooklyn Heights talking to the secretary of defense.
“Fit for duty? The shoulder’s okay? The ankle?”
“The shoulder’s about eighty percent, but the ankle’s okay now.”
“Good, glad to hear it.”
“Sir, what are you doing here?” asked Harvath.
Hilliman smiled. “I knew Robert Herrington. Not well, but I knew him. He was a good man. He was part of my protective detail the first time I visited Afghanistan. There was a situation. It never made the news, but suffice it to say that if it wasn’t for Bob’s efforts in particular, I might not be here right now.
“I paid my respects to his parents earlier this morning and kept a low profile in the back of the church during the service.”
“And the Black Hawk? Was that your doing?”
“His team had asked for it and were getting some static. With everything that’s happened in Manhattan, there were certain people that felt a funeral flyover was an inappropriate diversion of resources. I disagreed. Bob Herrington was a hell of a guy and one of the finest warriors this country has ever seen.”
Hilliman removed a folder from his briefcase and handed it to him. “I read the debriefing they did on you while you were getting patched up at the VA. I thought you deserved to have some of the blanks filled in.”
As Harvath looked through the file, the secretary of defense continued, “Scot, you’ve been in this game long enough to know why certain operations must remain classified. Sometimes it’s of vital national security that the right hand not know what the left hand is doing. Sometimes, though, we begin with the absolute best of intentions and clarity of purpose, but the walls we build to protect our operations can actually prevent us from sharing strategic information of paramount importance. It’s clear now that’s what happened last week and we lost a lot of good people because of it.
“Though I have some incredible resources at my disposal, I can’t change the past. I can, though, have a significant impact on the future.”
Harvath wasn’t listening anymore. When he looked up from the folder the anger was chiseled across his face. “I can’t believe what I’m reading. You were actually getting ready to let him walk? After everything we know about Mohammed bin Mohammed? After the incredible amount of manpower and money that went into tracking him down? What about the people who were killed trying to apprehend him? What about what he is planning to unleash on this country?”
“You don’t know the full story.”
“You know what, Mr. Secretary? I don’t see how that could possibly make a difference.”
“Listen to me and I’ll tell you.”
Harvath tossed the file onto the seat next to him and prayed the man had a good answer. If not, he was going to rip his throat out right in the back of that limousine.
Hilliman took a deep breath and replied, “Nobody can withstand torture indefinitely, not even a man like Mohammed bin Mohammed. The problem lies in knowing when you’ve truly broken them. To know that, you have to verify the intel a subject gives you, and that can take time. Time was not something we had on our side in Mohammed’s case. Making matters even more difficult were his extensive dialysis treatments.
“Therefore, it had been agreed that if we couldn’t make measurable progress within a certain window, we were going to transport him to another nation that collaborates with us in interrogations, a nation we knew his associates might be likely to subvert to help facilitate his escape.”
“I still don’t understand why you’d do that.”
“So we could track him.”
“But it took you guys years to find him in the first place. What makes you so sure you wouldn’t lose him?” demanded Harvath.
“That’s the thing. We were over ninety percent certain we wouldn’t lose him—and in our business, that’s a percentage we were willing to bet the house on.”
“How were you going to track him?”
“Through a radioisotope we’d been administering as part of his dialysis treatments. It creates a very specific signature which can be tracked via satellite.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The secretary held up both hands and said, “So help me. It’s a very new technology, but it works. We’d seen the data, but we went a step further and did a slew of comprehensive tests ourselves. The bottom line is that it works.”
“Ninety percent of the time,” clarified Harvath.
“Correct.”
“So, do you know where Mohammed bin Mohammed is now?”
Hilliman looked at him. “Yes, we do.”
“So what are you waiting for? Why don’t you grab him?”
“Because we need to know who al-Qaeda is about to get their nuclear material from.”
“And once you do? What then?”
Hilliman pulled two more files from his briefcase, handed them across to Harvath, and said, “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
Ninety-Nine
GIBRALTAR
THREE DAYS LATER
Of all the places Harvath had ever traveled to, he’d never had a reason or a desire to see Gibraltar. As his plane circled on its approach, he quickly realized that he’d been missing something extraordinary.
The enormous limestone Rock of Gibraltar rose dramatically from the Mediterranean Sea, forming one of the two ancient Pillars of Hercules, which once marked the very edge of the known world.
Staring out the plane’s window, Harvath could make out the various grassy glens that were home to the only free-ranging monkey in Europe, the barbary ape. He could almost smell the aloes, capers, cacti, and asparagus that grew wild along the nearly 1400-foot-high rock. And though he barely knew her, he could already tell this was the kind of place Tracy Hastings would like—a lot.
After the secretary of defense had dropped Harvath at the ferry, he had joined her, along with Rick Cates and Paul Morgan, to make the somber trip across the East River to Manhattan. As a way to ignore the search-and-recovery efforts happening up and down the river, they staked out a piece of turf on the aft deck and cracked open the bottle of Louis XIII the minute the ferry set sail. Cates, ever the procurement specialist, had secured small plastic cups and by the time they reached Manhattan, the bottle was half empty.
The balance of it was drained as they made their way up First Avenue and deposited Paul Morgan back at the VA. From there, Harvath, Hastings, and Cates proceeded to Bob’s favorite watering hole, the same tavern he and Harvath had been on their way to when all hell had originally broken loose. There, already well lubricated, and fueled by their shared sense of loss, they toasted Bob’s memory again, and again, and again.
The next morning when Harvath awoke, he did so as slowly as possible. It was unlike him to tie one on so bad that he couldn’t remember where he was or what he had done. Knowing that the moment he opened his eyes the wicked machinery responsible for ushering in his inevitable hangover would kick into gear, he lay there and tried to figure out where he was. The first thing he noticed were the silk sheets, and because he could feel the sheets with all of his body, he was relatively confident that he was naked. That fact made his next observation a little more uncomfortable—the smell of perfume.
Reaching out his hand, he had first felt a well-toned calf and then a firm yet feminine
thigh. As his hand slid farther up his bedmate’s body, he felt a taut midriff leading to a pair of perfectly sculpted shoulders. Slowly opening his eyes, he saw Tracy Hastings lying next to him and instantly decided she had one of the most beautiful bodies he had ever seen.
For all of the jokes she made about her face, Harvath found it just as beautiful. Looking into her eyes, he saw that she was awake, and they both smiled.
After recounting the balance of the evening and telling him that he was indeed a good dancer, but that their conversation had been a bit below sparkling, they laughed and made love again. They spent the next forty-eight hours together and were inseparable right up until Harvath had to leave for his operational rendezvous point in Europe.
For his part, Harvath’s only regret about the entire experience was that after being patched up at the VA, he had blown a whole week recuperating in his hotel room—alone. Tracy had offered him the guest room at her parents’ house, as they had decided to remain overseas while Manhattan got back on its feet, but Harvath had politely declined. Somehow, somewhere inside himself he had known this was bound to happen. Now that it had, they were both okay with it. Whether there was a future for them was another question. Harvath knew well enough not to get his hopes up, but he also knew that he was looking forward to spending more time with Tracy and getting to know her much better.
As the plane came in for its landing, Harvath saw traffic being halted in both directions, as one of Gibraltar’s main thoroughfares actually cut right across the airport’s landing strip. A rocky promontory at the southernmost tip of Spain, Gibraltar occupied an area of only 2.5 square miles, but what it lacked in measurable terra firma the minuscule British dependency more than made up for in the size and scope of its international intrigues.
