Code of Conduct

by Brad Thor

  Immediately, the other soldiers raised their weapons.

  The lead soldier spun and angrily pointed his AK at Harvath. “Que faites-vous?” he demanded. What are you doing?

  “Everybody relax,” Decker said as she put her hands out, appealing for calm. She glared at Harvath. It was a good question. What the hell was he doing? From inside the Land Cruisers, the Brits were thinking the same thing.

  “Je suis l’assistant du médecin,” Harvath stated, donning a headlamp he had retrieved from his bag. I am the doctor’s assistant. He turned the lamp on and swung his head from side to side—blinding several of the soldiers with its intense glare. They threw their arms up to shield their eyes and cursed at him.

  “Si nous avons besoin de l’assistant d’un médecin, nous vous appellerons.” If we need a doctor’s assistant, the lead soldier barked, we’ll call you. “Retournez dans votre véhicule.” Get back in your vehicle.

  With that, the man grabbed Jessica Decker by the arm and steered her toward the jungle.

  Facing a row of angry men with AK-47s, Harvath did the only thing he could do at the moment. Reluctantly, he climbed back into the Land Cruiser.

  “She’s insane,” Ash stated.

  Harvath had already developed his own opinion about Decker, but now wasn’t the time to discuss it. “Look at their shoes,” he said.

  The SAS men did as he suggested.

  “None of their boots match. Two of them are wearing tennis shoes.”

  Ash cursed under his breath. “The uniforms may be from the Congolese army, but these guys definitely aren’t.”

  “So who are they?” Mick wondered.

  Harvath nodded at the two rebels closest to them. “Both of them, as well as the guy Dr. Decker just walked off with have the same tattoo. Looks like a cobra.”

  “Shit,” Ash replied. “Rebels. FRPI.”

  There were so many rebel groups in Congo, it was hard to tell the players without a scorecard. Harvath had uploaded a list of them to his phone before leaving and had tried to study up as much as he could on the flight over.

  “Free Republic of—” he attempted before Mick interrupted him.

  “Front for Patriotic Resistance of Ituri,” he said, looking at the uniformed men. “Based out of Bunia. I’ve never heard any reports of them being along this road, much less posing as Congolese regulars. They must be desperate for cash.”

  They were desperate for something, Harvath thought. “How bad is this group?”

  “The FRPI? Pretty bad. Rape, mass murder, drugs. You name it. But the tattoo is the problem. These guys are a unit of shock troops. Kind of like a republican guard. They do everything from protecting high-ranking FRPI leadership, to terrorizing civilians.”

  “Which probably explains why they’re out here with an injured patient and not back at the hospital in Bunia. This is not going to end well.”

  “We don’t know that,” Mick offered.

  “Listen, these rebels just hit the jackpot. They not only now have a doctor, they have a very attractive female doctor. They’re not going to give her back. That goes double if whoever needs the medical care is a high-ranking rebel with a price on his head.”

  “What if you’re wrong?” Mick asked with his eyes focused on the rebels.

  “What if I’m not?” said Harvath.

  “Then they’re going to want to get rid of us,” Ash stated.

  “We’re already outgunned. All they’d have to do is bury our bodies and torch the trucks. Wouldn’t be the first time it had happened in Congo, right?”

  “No, particularly not where the FRPI is concerned.”

  “So the longer we sit here,” Harvath continued. “The worse our odds get. At some point soon, an order is going to come over that radio and they’re going to open fire on us. We need to get off the X right now. What kind of weapons do we have?”

  “Torch the trucks. Get off the X. What kind of weapons do we have . . . Who the hell are you?” Mick demanded as he turned around to face him.

  “I’m the client.”

  Ash studied Harvath in the rearview mirror, and Harvath met his gaze. Alpha dogs always recognized another Alpha when they saw one. He was no ordinary client. They had known that from the moment they first met him.

  Harvath couldn’t keep them completely in the dark. If they were going to get out of this alive, they were going to have to work together. He would have to give them something.

  “CARE sent me to assess the situation,” he said. “They want to open two more facilities in Congo.”

  “What kind of assessment?”

  “Security.”

  “And your background?”

  “SEAL Team Two and then DEVGRU.”

  Ash continued to hold Harvath’s gaze. Finally, he said, “You look it.”

  Harvath didn’t know what the remark was supposed to mean. Before he could reply, Ash said, “We’ve got two Glock 17s up front with us and there’s a shotgun under your seat.”

  “Can I get to it without flipping it up?”

  “No. Besides, it’s too loud. There’s no telling how many more of them are up the road or out in the jungle. It would just draw them in.”

  “And the Glocks won’t?” Harvath asked.

  Ash nodded to Mick, who pointed over Harvath’s shoulder and said, “There’s a box of car parts behind you. Inside are two inline fuel filters. They’ve been modified with a thread adaptor to screw onto the Glocks.”

  Homemade suppressors. Smart.

  “What else do you have?”

  “The Brute Squad have Glocks, as well as rifles,” Ash replied.

  “What kind of rifles?”

  “AKs, like our friends outside.”

  “Can you slip me your Glocks without them noticing?”

  Mick turned his shaved head back around and focused on the soldiers. Slowly, he began to work his pistol between the seat and the center console. Ash then did the same.

  Careful not to draw any attention, Harvath reached behind his seat and felt for the box of car parts. Once he found it, he removed the two filters. He also grabbed the extra medical bag.

  “What are you thinking?” Ash asked.

  Harvath began screwing the makeshift suppressors onto each of the Glocks. “See the third soldier on the left?” he said. “The one with the dirty bandage around his left hand? That dressing probably hasn’t been changed in a while, if at all. I think that’s our best chance to get me close to them.”

  “And?”

  “I get him into your headlights to examine his hand. If I can, I enlist two of his comrades to help, give them stuff to hold and keep them busy. When I give you the signal, you flip on your high beams, I pull one of the Glocks, and we go hot. Anything driver’s side is mine.”

  “And Mick takes out the rest.”

  Harvath nodded.

  “What about the others? We have no idea how many more are out there.”

  “We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it.”

  Ash thought about it for a second. “What do you want to use for your signal?”

  Harvath slid Mick’s pistol back to him. Removing some items from the medical bag, so he could stash the remaining suppressed Glock, he took out a penlight. Cupping his hand around it to hide the beam, he checked to make sure it worked.

  “When you see me pull out the penlight, watch for two quick flashes. Once that happens, wait ten seconds and then hit your high beams and come out firing.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” said Harvath.

  Ash quietly radioed the plan to the Brute Squad. Once they had acknowledged, he looked at Harvath in the rearview mirror and nodded.

  It was time to roll.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  The moment Harvath popped the Land
Cruiser’s door open and climbed out, the soldiers began shouting at him to get back in. Keeping a smile on his face, he ignored their commands. Instead, he moved toward them.

  The medical bag was slung over one shoulder and in his arms he cradled an assortment of supplies. Nodding toward the soldier with the bandaged hand, he offered to change his dressing in exchange for being allowed to step off the road and relieve himself afterward.

  One soldier in particular raised his rifle as if he was about to strike Harvath, but the man with the bandaged hand told him to stop. He needed his dressing changed, badly.

  Harvath stepped into the beams cast by the Land Cruiser’s headlights and motioned the man to him. Once he was there, Harvath convinced two more to join him and assist. Slinging their rifles, they accepted the supplies and did what Harvath asked.

  Even lightly touching the man’s bandaged hand caused him to wince. He was in considerable pain. Harvath could see that the wound was oozing. It was infected.

  As he carefully unwound the bandage, he asked the young man how he had been injured. The soldier, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, explained that his hand had slipped while using his machete. Congolese rebels could be horrific butchers. Harvath didn’t want to know the details.

  The wound was a week old, and another soldier had dressed it for him. The bandage hadn’t been changed. As soon as Harvath had it unwound, the stench alone told him the man’s hand was a lost cause.

  “Is it very bad?” the young soldier asked in French.

  Holding the man by the wrist, Harvath rotated the hand from side to side. “We need more light,” he said, moving the soldier farther away from the group. Gesturing with his head, he encouraged the other two to move with them. They did.

  Once he had them where he needed them, he pretended to examine the wound once more and then told the man’s compatriots what he needed them to do. Explaining that they had limited disinfectant, he told one man he would need to pour it over the top of the wound while the other man held a clean dressing underneath to catch the liquid as it poured down. They would then wring the bandage out over the wound to give it a second cleansing.

  As men who led lives of unfathomable paucity, reusing the liquid made complete sense to them. In order to keep their attention focused on the wound and off of him, Harvath further instructed them to watch for any indication that the discharge was changing color.

  Harvath had his patient, as well as his two assistants, squat down so they could all work better via the Land Cruiser’s headlights.

  One of the men became agitated when he saw him reach into his medical bag and demanded to know what he was doing. Harvath held out then penlight and showed it to him. Satisfied, the rebel returned his focus to his colleague’s wound.

  Taking one last look around and fixing everyone’s position in his mind, Harvath instructed the man with the disinfectant to very slowly start pouring it over the wound and reminded the man holding the dressing underneath to make sure he caught every last drop.

  Standing up straight, he moved the penlight to his left hand and held it where Ash and Mick would be the only ones able to see it. Then, sliding his right hand into the medical bag, he wrapped it around the butt of his weapon and took a deep breath. Exhaling, he depressed the light’s tail cap, giving out two quick flashes as he began to count backward from ten.

  When the Land Cruiser’s high beams kicked on, Harvath already had the suppressed Glock free of the bag and his finger applying pressure to its trigger.

  The three rebels next to him were stacked almost like a totem pole, with one head on top of another. Harvath started with the man who was pouring the disinfectant and worked his way down. Three headshots in less than two seconds.

  Before the bodies had even crumpled to the ground, Harvath had his weapon up and trained on the remaining soldiers. Mick, though, had been just as deadly. All of his shots had found their marks.

  Nevertheless, Harvath moved over to them to make sure they were dead. They were. The Brits joined him and quickly helped secure the scene.

  After stripping the dead rebels of their weapons, ammunition, and sole radio, which they gave to an amazingly unperturbed Jambo to monitor, they tossed the bodies in the jungle on the opposite side of the road. Life in Africa, and especially Congo, was exceedingly cheap.

  “How do you want to handle Dr. Decker?” Ash asked.

  Harvath had never wanted her along in the first place. After what she had done, part of him wanted to leave her here, but he couldn’t do that. He knew he was going to have to be the one to get her out.

  He also knew that Murphy, of the eponymous law, loved Africa more than any other country in the world. If it could go wrong, it would go wrong, especially in Africa. That went double for Congo.

  Looking at the weapons they had taken off of the dead soldiers, two options popped into Harvath’s mind. A cigar roll or a picket fence.

  In the cigar roll, he’d stagger Ash and his men along a route between the road and wherever Jessica Decker was. Once he had her, and they were making their escape, the shooters would give them cover and then join them in their retreat, “rolling” the cigar as they worked backward toward the vehicles. But that was one of the spots where Mr. Murphy would be waiting with the vehicles.

  They needed to keep the Land Cruisers running and ready to go. There was no telling how many rebels they might have on their tail as they tore through the jungle. It would be a death sentence to arrive at the road and discover that something had happened to their only means of ultimate escape. They couldn’t risk leaving the vehicles.

  Judging by the little he knew about Ash, the Brit wouldn’t like Harvath’s plan. Ash was a good man, a soldier. He’d want to go into the jungle too, but Harvath couldn’t ask him to do that. It wasn’t right. Not with how much had already been kept from him and his team.

  Harvath decided to go with the picket.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  Ash looked at Harvath in disbelief. “That’s got to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Four blokes from the Regiment—four—and you want us to mind the car park? Are you out of your tree?”

  “It’s a SEAL thing,” Harvath responded. “Don’t take it personally.”

  “The hell it is. You have no idea what’s waiting for you in there. If it goes pear-shaped, you’re going to need backup.”

  “Give me a radio,” he replied. “If anything happens, I’ll call you.”

  “Sure you will, Superman,” Ash said as he walked away to get a radio. “Bloody Americans.”

  Even though Ash didn’t like it, the picket was the right way to do this, and he knew it.

  Harvath walked over and checked on Simon and Eddie. It was amazing how fast they moved. He could almost sense a rivalry between the two as they fieldstripped the dead rebels’ AK-47s, wiped everything down, and rapidly reassembled them. Lives depended on those weapons working, specifically the lives of Scot Harvath and Jessica Decker.

  Mick duct-taped magazines together so that all Harvath would have to do was spin a spent mag upside down in order to reinsert a fresh one. He knew, though, that if Harvath needed a second mag for any of these weapons, it was because he was in more trouble than a second mag was likely to ever help him get out of.

  “Here’s your radio,” Ash said, handing it to him. “Don’t be afraid to use it.”

  “I won’t,” Harvath replied as he worked the bone microphone into his ear.

  After a quick commo check, Harvath pocketed a stack of loaded Glock mags and shouldered six AK-47s. It was a rough load, but he had humped worse. It would get lighter as he got closer to Decker. Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

  “You’ll want these too,” Ash remarked as he gave him a handful of mini chemical light sticks.

  Harvath thanked him, and without another word, turn
ed and headed off in the direction Dr. Decker had been led into the jungle.

  The great thing about the British SAS was that they viewed war the same way the American Special Operations community did. You didn’t win by thinking inside the box and following someone else’s rules. You turned the box upside down and made your own rules, no matter what the enemy threw at you.

  Just as they had found a way to suppress their Glocks, they had also found a way to lay their hands on a pair of night vision goggles.

  As Harvath picked his way through the jungle’s total darkness with them, he was thankful for the team’s ingenuity. Using a flashlight would have been like taking out a billboard telling the bad guys he was coming and when he was going to be there. With what he had planned, he preferred that they not have any advance notice. Surprise was one of the things he needed to keep on his side.

  Though it wasn’t raining, it might as well have been. Everything was damp and drops of water continued to roll off the heavy tree canopy high above. The rain forests of the Congo Basin contained so much water that they caused their own weather system, and were known as the “Lungs of Africa.”

  Harvath had operated in plenty of jungles, and he had never liked any of them. He hated humidity. He preferred the high desert. High altitude and cold were his favorites. Jungles were just plain dangerous. You not only had to worry about bad guys but everything else lurking out there that wanted to eat you too.

  Then there was the orchestra of noise. One sound layered upon the next. There was so much of it, it was hard to think, much less listen for any indication of danger. You had no way of knowing if what you had heard was five yards away, or five inches. That went double in the dark.

  The path Dr. “Do Gooder” and the lead soldier had taken was pretty well trampled and easy to follow. As Harvath positioned his first AK and marked its hiding spot with one of the mini chemlights, his mind was taken up by how pissed off he was at Decker.

  She had placed her ideology over her instincts. Harvath, who was all instinct, had seen her type before. It never ended well for them. And in a conflict zone, it all too often ended very badly for the people around them. He had no intention of letting that happen here.