by Brad Thor
“We’ll have good light in about ten more minutes,” he said. “You can still opt out of this. I’ll have them move the vehicles back and one of the guys will stay with you.”
Decker shook her head. “I want to do this. I have to.”
Harvath wasn’t going to fight with her. “Okay.”
“What’s that smell?” she asked.
“Jet fuel.”
“Did they use it to burn the bodies?”
“Probably.”
Closing her eyes, she leaned into him and placed her head against his shoulder. “Seeing death up close never gets any easier, does it?”
It was one of the first purely human glimpses he had seen of her. “No,” he replied. “It doesn’t.”
He knew the Brits were watching, and he didn’t care.
Like most pure moments, though, this one was fleeting. Decker straightened up, turned her back on him and walked around to the other side of the Land Cruiser to drink her coffee and watch the sunrise.
Harvath removed his Toughbook laptop, placed it on the backseat, and turned it on. He had already uploaded the video footage from the clinic and had composed a brief SITREP for the Old Man. Now that he had an unimpeded view of the sky, he wanted to transmit it back to the States.
Powering up his Iridium WiFi cube, he set it on the roof of the SUV and angled its antenna. While it searched for satellites, he also powered up his phone to see if he had received any texts.
Once the cube was connected, he watched for the message icon to light up on his phone. It didn’t. Turning it off, he focused his mind on business.
He had broken the video up into pieces to make it easier to transmit. Pulling up the string of encrypted emails, he hit send and then grabbed his video camera. The sun was strong enough now to begin seeing the pit.
Finished with her coffee, Decker pulled a box of high-end surgical masks out of her bag and offered them around. Everyone accepted one of the disposable respirators, even Jambo and the Brute Squad who would be staying with the vehicles and securing the road. There was no telling what was in the pit or suspended in the atmosphere around it.
Harvath doubted anything could have survived a jet fuel–assisted fire, but he knew that the remaining smoke and ash could present a whole host of health problems and so fitted his mask over his mouth and nose.
Turning the video camera on, he documented the tire tracks and tread marks leading to and from the pit. While a lot of it was nothing more than puddles of red mud, there was enough there to show what type of equipment had come through.
When he had what he needed, he joined Decker and they walked with Ash and Mick out toward the pit.
It was a solemn procession. No one spoke. With the sun up, they could see the occasional wisp of smoke rising into the air in front of them. But with all of the rain, how was that even possible? The horrific answer became clear soon enough.
Like most of the terrain they had been through, the area surrounding the clinic was mostly sloped. The same could be said for where the staff disposed of their trash. It was a narrow, level strip at the base of a steep, nearby hill. But it was what had been done with the hill that turned their stomachs.
Even through their masks, the smell of jet fuel was now overpowering. Harvath took one look at everything and knew why.
A bulldozer had definitely been brought in, but not to bury bodies. It had been brought in to engineer a grisly crematorium.
A huge chunk had been ripped out of the bottom of the hill to create the oven. With Decker following behind, Harvath climbed to the top and let his nose be his guide. It didn’t take long to find the empty fuel barrels hidden beneath a makeshift blind. Each one had been punctured with a small hole.
Several yards away he uncovered the air shaft and knew exactly what he was looking at. He also knew why the satellite image had looked off to him.
“What is all of this?” Decker asked as he recorded it.
“A giant rocket stove.”
“What’s a rocket stove?”
Harvath pointed to the shaft and then at the barrels. “Oxygen would have been sucked in from the base of the hill and drawn up through this shaft. Those punctured barrels of jet fuel would have continued to drip-feed the fire.
“The stronger the fire got, the more oxygen would have been sucked in. And the more oxygen that got sucked in, the hotter the fire would have raged. The temperature would have been amazing; total combustion of almost anything placed down there.”
“Including bodies?”
“If they stacked them right.”
Decker suddenly didn’t feel so well.
Harvath noticed that her color was off. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “It’s the jet fuel. Can we walk back down?”
“Of course,” he replied, offering her his arm.
Decker accepted it, but let go halfway when the trail became too narrow for them to walk side by side.
At the bottom, Ash and Mick were studying something at the edge of the pit.
As he saw the Americans approach, Ash raised his hand for them to stop.
“You don’t want to see this,” he warned.
“See what?” Decker replied, undeterred.
Mick turned and gently tried to block her, but she nudged him out of the way.
She took one look and came charging back past Harvath with her hand over her mask. Seconds later, she was in the brush vomiting.
“Are you okay?” he asked, but she waved him off.
He looked over at Ash who motioned for him to come see what they had found. Harvath knew it wasn’t going to be good.
The men stepped aside as he joined them. On the ground at their feet were the skulls of three small children. Beyond was a jumble of bones, also small.
While any loss of innocent life was lamentable, the loss of children was doubly so.
Though he didn’t want to, Harvath raised the video camera and recorded everything. There was one thing that still didn’t make sense—the size of the pit. If you were just going to murder the people at the clinic, why did this have to be so big? It didn’t make any sense.
He was taking close-up shots when Mick asked, “What happened to Dr. Decker?”
Harvath paused the camera and looked around. He didn’t see her either.
“Maybe she went to get a fresh mask,” said Ash. “Or a toothbrush.”
She probably just needed a break, thought Harvath. This was hard for anyone to handle.
“I’ll go look for her,” he said, handing the camera to Mick.
“Don’t go too far,” Ash warned.
Stepping away from the pit, Harvath looked uphill toward where the fuel barrels were. He doubted she had gone back up there, but he climbed the hill just to make sure. There was no trace of her.
She must have gone back to the vehicles. Walking back down the trail, he got to the bottom and headed back toward the Land Cruisers.
But as he got closer and could see everybody but Decker, his internal alarm system started to go off.
When Jambo, Simon, and Eddie all confirmed that they hadn’t seen her, he radioed Ash and Mick and made his concern official.
CHAPTER 18
* * *
Eddie and Simon were exceptional trackers. Starting from where Decker had last been seen, they worked the ground inch by inch until they had picked up her trail.
Decker appeared to have started back toward the vehicles, but then had diverted for some reason. They couldn’t figure out why. Then, they came across another set of tracks. She appeared to be following someone.
Whoever it was, he was leading Decker due west, directly away from the pit. Harvath was pissed off at her all over again. What was she doing? He could not have been clearer wi
th her. Damn it. She seemed determined to get all of them killed, including herself.
Walking off, though, was soon no longer the worst part. Two hundred meters into their hunt, Eddie picked up on a third set of tracks. Decker was being followed.
Ash signaled for them to split up. He took Simon and Mick into the jungle to flank, while Harvath and Eddie stayed on Decker’s trail and closed the gap with whoever was following her.
Despite his size, Eddie moved with incredible speed. He ran with his lips pulled back, his jet-black Van Dyke highlighting two sharp canine teeth that made him look like some kind of giant vampire.
While Harvath was tripped up twice along the overgrown path, Eddie never once lost his footing. It was like watching an enormous jaguar tear through the jungle.
And then, out of nowhere, he put on the brakes, thrust his left hand behind him, and signaled for Harvath to stop.
Harvath did as he was ordered and waited while Eddie surveyed something in front of them. Finally, he waved Harvath up to join him.
Cradling the shotgun he had taken from LC1, Harvath crept up to where Eddie was on his stomach peering through the foliage.
Through a quick series of hand signals, the Brit relayed to Harvath what he had seen. He parted a cluster of ferns and rolled to his left so Harvath could peer through.
In the distance, was a small village. There couldn’t have been more than ten, perhaps, thirteen individual huts, as well as a smattering of animal pens and some sort of communal pavilion.
“Which one?” Harvath whispered.
“The big one,” Eddie replied. “Three o’clock.”
He had a small monocular with him and he handed it to Harvath so he could surveil the village.
After the pavilion, the hut was the largest structure in town, which wasn’t saying much. There were pens, but they were empty. There were no animals, no signs of life at all. No children, no smoke from cook fires, no nothing. It was a ghost town.
“Are you positive?” Harvath asked.
Eddie nodded.
“Can you lase it for Ash?”
The man nodded and hailing his boss over the radio, relayed everything to him. He then removed a black tube the size of a half-smoked cigarette and depressing its switch, painted the roof of the big hut with a tiny green laser. Ash radioed back and confirmed the target. Now, all they had to do was come up with a plan.
Harvath snapped a mental grid over the scene and surveyed the village one slice at a time. He was trying to figure out two things—first, where was everyone? and second, was this a trap?
What looked like heavy tire tracks on the edge of the village helped bring the picture quickly into focus.
Handing the monocular to Eddie, he showed him what to look for. Once the man had seen it, he radioed Harvath’s plan to Ash, who agreed. Stepping out of the jungle, Harvath and Eddie cautiously made their way down to the village.
There was sparse cover and concealment, and they took turns moving and providing overwatch for each other. In any other situation, exposing themselves by running through so much open space would have been insane, but the circumstances offered no other alternative.
When they made it to the village, they pulled up at the first hut, flattened their backs against the wall, and took several heavy, but quiet gulps of air.
Once their breath had begun to return, they tried to listen beyond the thudding of their hearts and the blood rushing in and out of their ears. Was there any sound coming from inside that hut?
They waited and listened. After enough time had passed, Harvath directed Eddie to the hut’s lone window on that wall as he made his way forward in anticipation of hitting the front door.
At the edge of the wall, Harvath flashed Eddie the five-second signal and then disappeared from view. Coiled tighter than a jack-in-the-box, Eddie began counting backward, ready to pop into the window.
Harvath slipped beneath the hut’s front window and positioned himself outside the front door. As he mentally kept track of the countdown, he placed his hand against the door and applied a whisper of pressure. This was a village in the Ituri rain forest. It was amazing there were even doors. He didn’t expect to find any locks.
When his countdown hit zero, he applied pressure against the door. Encountering no resistance, he swung it open wide and spun inside. At the same moment, Eddie and his AK-47 announced themselves via the window.
The hut, as they had expected, was empty.
Harvath did a quick reconnaissance, while Eddie extricated himself and took up a defensive position outside.
There was nothing at all to tell Harvath what had happened. Everything seemed to be normal. As best he could tell, the family in this hut had been living their lives the way they normally did until something had happened, and they had all disappeared. Seeing a doll lying in the corner, Harvath corrected himself. The people of this village hadn’t disappeared. They had been cremated.
Death dripped from the thatched rooftops of this village. The sooner they could get Decker and get the hell out of here, the better he was going to feel.
Stepping back outside, he waved Eddie up to the next hut and let him clear it.
It was empty—as was the one after that, and the one after that. The only hut that appeared to have any life was the big one, and that was where Eddie had seen a man rushing a woman, who they all believed to be Jessica Decker, inside.
One hut away from the big one, Harvath and Eddie stopped and crouched down.
“I guess we now know why the burn pit was so large,” the Brit said.
It didn’t make any sense. “Why would they need to take out an entire village?”
“Maybe they were all infected.”
Harvath hoped that wasn’t true. Not that it made any difference. These people were all dead. Their children were dead. Those were the little skulls they had seen back at the pit. There might be even more, just waiting to be uncovered. The idea of going through that little lake of ash with a rake was more than Harvath could take.
He held up three fingers, counted down, and spun into the hut. It was empty. Just like he knew it would be. With this side of the village secure, they waited inside for Ash and Mick to come down and join them. Simon would remain out of sight in the jungle to provide overwatch.
Once the rest of the team arrived in the hut, Ash deferred to Harvath.
“She’s your colleague,” he said. “How do you want this to go down?”
It was a sign of respect. Technically, she was his colleague and he should be the one making the call as to her recovery.
Harvath gave Ash a nod. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s how we’re going to do this.”
•••
The improvised flashbang grenade Harvath had fashioned created more bang than flash, but it did the trick. Before the occupants of the hut knew what was happening, the entry team was already inside.
Harvath moved to cover Decker while Ash and Mick took down the two tangos.
No sooner had Harvath gotten to her, than she began screaming.
“No!” she cried. “Stop!”
She fought to push Harvath out of the way and get around him.
He grabbed her wrist and tweaked it, just enough to get her attention.
“That hurts,” she protested.
“Good,” he replied. “Now back up.”
It wasn’t a request.
When she failed to move, he applied more pressure. The pain brought her up onto the balls of her feet, and he stepped her out of the hut, to allow Ash and Mick to finish securing the two inside.
“Don’t hurt them,” she ordered.
Harvath let her go.
“Who are they?”
“The son’s deaf,” she replied. “The father used to help at the clinic.”
“Why did you wander off?”
“I spotted the boy and I wanted to see where he was going. I thought he could tell us something.”
“You should have gotten me first.”
“And what if I had lost him? What if he hadn’t come back here?”
She had a point, but Harvath didn’t feel like debating with her.
“I don’t care what the situation is,” he answered. “You don’t go off by yourself. Now, why was the father following you?”
“Because he was worried.”
“About the boy?”
“About everything,” she exclaimed. “Look at this village. There’s no one left. What do you think they filled that oven with?”
“Did he tell you that?”
Decker nodded.
“Does he know what happened?”
“He knows more than we do. A lot more.”
CHAPTER 19
* * *
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
Helena was angry. She was angry with everyone—with Bentzi, with Damien, with her father for never finding her, never rescuing her after she was kidnapped. The one person she wasn’t angry with was herself.
She had an excellent quality of life in Israel. She had an apartment and a car. She shopped pretty much wherever she wanted and went to the best clubs and restaurants. She made more money in two months than she would have back home in Eastern Europe in a year.
She had thought about modeling. In fact, she had been asked countless times by photographers to sit for them, but Bentzi had forbidden it. He claimed it wasn’t good for her to have photos floating around out there. It made sense, but as was usually the case with Bentzi, there was what he called the “truth” and then there was reality.
Israel was everything to him. He would say or do anything to protect it. Bending or flat out breaking the truth was all just part of the job. Whatever needs to be done. It was his one and only directive. And he applied it without remorse.
After what he had experienced at the hands of the enemy, she couldn’t blame him. But she wasn’t the enemy.
