Path of the Assassin (26 page)

At breakfast the next morning, Meg Cassidy’s slight hangover from several Coronas and way too many M&M’s didn’t do much to improve her mood. When the doctor’s assistant doled out her vitamins, Meg palmed them just as Harvath had asked, and returned with them to the table.

Scot looked through the multicolored tablets and shook his head.

“What is it?” asked Meg.

“You’ve heard of better living through chemistry?’

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, this is better soldiering through chemistry.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry to tell you, but these aren’t all vitamins.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m no pharmacist, but I’m pretty sure I recognize one of these little guys.”

“Which one,” asked Meg as she leaned in and stared at the pills in Harvath’s hand.

“This one,” he said as he rolled an oblong capsule off to one side of his palm. “They call them
Unkies
.”

“What the hell’s an
Unkie?
” asked Meg as she rolled the pill around with her finger.

“You know how they say, ‘The Lord loves a workin’ man’? Well, we used to always say ‘Uncle Sam loves a fightin’ man.’ Some adjunct of the Special Operations community a ways back came up with an anabolic steroid derivative which was supposed to safely increase strength and stamina, but had the nasty side effect of putting a mean edge on people’s tempers.”

Concern was etched across Meg’s face. “Were there any other side effects?”

“Like regular steroids, they could mess up your complexion with acne and that kind of stuff.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing you need to worry about.”

“You know what?” said Meg, anger sliding into her voice. “I’m getting pretty sick and tired of people deciding what Meg Cassidy should and shouldn’t worry about. I want you to tell me, right now, what the other side effects were!”

“Don’t get pissed at me. I didn’t prescribe these.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

“Fine. The biggest side effect was that your testicles could shrivel up,” said Scot as he wondered how that one was going to sit with Meg.

“So there are potential reproductive side effects?”

“As far as I know, only if you have testicles,” said Scot, trying not to laugh.

“You think this is funny? This is
not
funny. This is my body we’re talking about here. I didn’t give any of these goddamn CIA mad scientists permission to monkey around with my body. What the hell are they thinking?”

“I think they’re thinking they want you a bit more aggressive.”

“Aggressive?”
repeated Meg, her voice now incredulous.

“They want you to be a real eat-glass-and-drink-gasoline kind of gal. They don’t want you falling apart crying on the battlefield if things get tough.”

“So are you telling me you support this?”

“Absolutely not,” said Harvath in all seriousness. “No one but you has a right to decide what goes into your body.”

“You’re goddamn right,” said Meg. “What is it with you men?”

“Hey don’t lump me in there again.”

“Oh, who cares? You’re all the same, always trying to control women’s bodies!”

Meg was reaching critical mass, and just as Harvath was attempting to calm her down, Rick Morrell entered the lodge. He was fuming, obviously intent on a heated confrontation over the pranks that had been played on him the night before. Little did he know that Meg was even hotter under the collar than he was. Before Harvath could stop her, she jumped from the table and made a beeline straight for him.

“Get out of my way,” said Morrell as Meg approached him. “My beef’s not with you, it’s with Harvath.”

“You’d better think again, mister. Your beef is most definitely with me. Just who the hell do you think you are?”

Morrell had obviously never been confronted by an extremely angry woman before. He had no idea how to handle the situation. If Meg Cassidy had been a man, it would have been easy, but she wasn’t. So, Morrell did what most men normally did in a situation like this and just stood there with his mouth agape and a stupid
what’d I do?
expression on his face.

“Do you get off on controlling people? Is that what this is all about? Is it?” railed Meg. “You have got to be the ultimate micromanager, you know that? I’ll have you know that I am NOT one of your operatives, and I will not—”

Morrell, having recovered some of his sense of dignity interjected, “Why don’t you just calm down?” BIG mistake number one.

“Calm down? Calm down?” screamed Meg, even angrier now. “Of all the arrogant, chauvinistic…You just snap your fingers and expect little ole me, the woman, to just do as you say. Is that it?”

“Ms. Cassidy, I don’t know what the problem is—”

“The problem appears to be that I’m not aggressive enough for you. Is that it correct? Is
that
what the problem is here, Mr. Morrell?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Whatever this is, you are obviously overreacting.” BIG mistake number two.

Out of nowhere, Meg Cassidy hit the enormous CIA operative with a very well placed right hook. While it didn’t send Morrell slumping to the floor, he’s knees did buckle, and he was sure everyone in the room had seen it.

“Now that’s overreacting! I hope it was aggressive enough for you,” said Meg as she sidestepped Morrell and left the building.

Harvath was right behind her. On his way out the door, he couldn’t help but take a shot at a dazed Morrell. “You’ve got a hell of a way with the ladies, Ricky. A hell of a way.”

The lone assassin entered Saudi Arabia just as before, via a series of intermediaries and paid conspirators along the Yemeni border. As with the previous mission in Medina, the objective was the same—wreak maximum terror and maximum devastation. This time it would be at Mecca, the very heart of the Muslim world.

The silver-eyed terrorist carried neither identity papers nor documents that could be linked to the Hand of God organization. Saudi Arabia would know the Hand of God had been on their soil only if the mission was successful. Should the assassin be killed or captured along the way, the authorities would never comprehend the full picture. Neither the most vigorous of interrogations nor the most thorough of background checks would reveal anything. In essence, the highly skilled operative was nothing short of a ghost—a wraith borne straight out of the Saudi royal family’s worst nightmare.

It was widely known that King Fahd had abandoned the title of “His Majesty” for “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” a reference to the mosques of Medina and Mecca. Tying himself to the holy sites and his people’s faith was a desperate attempt to tighten a slipping grasp on the legitimacy of his monarchy. As the importance of Muslim clerics grew in the daily lives of the Saudi people, less reliance was placed upon the king. The less the people relied upon their king, the greater the threat that one day they would wake up and decide they did not need a king anymore. Fahd and the royal family could easily wake up one morning and find themselves on the outside looking in, exactly as the Shah of Iran had. It might take more work to get rid of the Saudi royal family, but it was amazing what a populace, especially one infused with religious fervor, could do when their minds were set to a task. This was the ever-present reality the Saudi monarchy lived with and feared, day in and day out.

As guardian of two of the holiest sites in the Muslim world, King Fahd took his responsibilities very seriously and had beefed up security at pilgrimage sites around the country. For Fahd, it wasn’t a question of
if
the Al-Haram Mosque at Mecca, the holiest place on earth to Muslims, akin to what the Vatican was for Catholics, would be attacked, but
when
. It was the final jewel in the triple crown of terror that he knew the Jewish Hand of God organization had planned. They had made the battle personal by murdering his son, Prince Khalil, in Paris and he was bound and determined not to let them succeed in any further efforts to harm any part of the Muslim world under his protection.

The king had dispatched increased numbers of police, as well as members of the Saudi National Guard, the Special Security Force, and even members of the elite Special Warfare Unit to watch over the great mosque at Mecca, as well as other holy sites along the great pilgrimage trail. His efforts though, were all for naught.

After murdering Prince Khalil in Paris, the assassin had traveled to Montpellier by train. There, it was a short car ride to the seaside home of Jacques Thevenin. Thevenin had been a member of France’s fabled counterterrorism team known as the GIGN. In 1979, the Saudis had called in the GIGN to help dislodge several hundred armed Muslim extremists who had taken over the sacred mosque at Mecca and who were holding thousands of pilgrims hostage in the sixty square kilometers of tunnels and passageways beneath the mosque.

Through a thoroughly detestable little man, known as the Troll, who dealt in the purchase and sale of highly classified information, the assassin discovered that against strict operational policy, Thevenin had kept the plans of the 1979 takedown of the mosque, as well as detailed blueprints of the tunnels beneath, as a souvenir.

Thevenin was still a relatively young man, only in his mid-fifties, but he had gotten soft and careless. To his credit, he did put up some resistance, but only a token amount. The assassin had only begun to fillet his left foot, with a long fishing knife from the kitchen, when Thevenin gave up the location of the plans for the takedown and the schematics of the tunnels. The man also provided the assassin with updated security measures being employed by the Saudis, to which he was privy, having been hired by their government in the last several years as a security consultant.

This last bit of information was an unanticipated bonus. Thevenin had proffered it in the hope that he would be able to save his own life. The hovering specter of death had a way of encouraging dramatic confessions and efforts at bargaining. This was precisely why, whenever possible, the assassin didn’t kill instantly. So much more could be gained by taking one’s time.

When the skin up to Thevenin’s knees was peeled back and most of the flesh had been cut away, the assassin realized the man had nothing more to give. It wasn’t that Thevenin hadn’t tried. He had offered a wealth of information, but none of it was useful to his inquisitor. The assassin removed a long garrote wire from the backpack resting against the chair to which Thevenin had been duct-taped, and wrapped it quickly around the man’s throat. The razor-sharp wire cut into the former counterterrorism operative’s neck as if it were nothing more than a wheel of soft Camembert cheese.

Thevenin’s schematics turned out to be even more helpful than the terrorist had thought they’d be. Not only were the tunnels beneath the Al-Haram Mosque accurately detailed, but structural comments littered the diagrams as well. It only took the assassin one visit inside the labyrinth of passages to understand that the attack would be a huge success.

Knowing where all of the security measures were made the assassin’s job that much easier. The terrorist was able to proceed at a relatively leisurely pace, confident that none of the Saudi security forces knew what was going on beneath the mosque and its grand courtyard.

The assassin placed bombs strategically throughout the tunnels and enhanced their deadly force by adding aluminum azide, magnesium azide, and bottled hydrogen. While normal high explosives had a velocity of at least three thousand feet per second, these bombs would detonate with a velocity of over fifteen thousand. To add to the devastation, the assassin also lashed canisters of sodium cyanide to the bombs directly beneath the mosque in the hope that the fumes would vaporize and be sucked up into the ventilation and air-conditioning systems, as well as the stairwells and passenger tunnels—killing scores more.

The assassin knew that there was a reason what was about to happen had to happen. No longer blinded by youth and naiveté, the assassin saw the world as it was, stripped of all its pretense. It had been a mistake to think that some of those people were different. They had no hearts. They were incapable of feeling. They were not even people. They were animals who deserved to die. And they would die. All of them. It was only a matter of time.

As much as the terrorist wanted to stay to watch the explosion and its deadly aftermath, training and a strong instinct for self-preservation dictated leaving the country as quickly and as quietly as possible.

The assassin stopped at a postbox and deposited a letter to each of the most widely read Arabic dailies,
Ar-Riyadh
and
Al-Jazirah
. By the time these letters were received, the damage would already be done and the world would be closer to embracing the inevitable.

In a remote corner of North Carolina’s Fort Bragg stood a high cyclone fence patrolled by heavily armed soldiers. On the other side of the fence lay one of the most secure counterterrorism training facilities in the world—Delta Force’s famed headquarters and multimillion-dollar Special Operations Training facility.

The facility was known by many different nicknames. Some called it SOT for short, while others, because of the original stucco siding, called it the Fiesta Cantina. The real comedians liked to refer to it as Wally World, after the amusement park in the Chevy Chase movie
Vacation,
or the Ranch, because of early Delta Force operatives’ penchant for chewing tobacco and wearing cowboy boots. Whatever name was used, there was no escaping the fact that it was the most impressive complex of its kind.

The Ranch boasted a wide array of training areas. There were large two- and three-story buildings used for heliborne inserts and terrorist takedowns; indoor and outdoor live-fire ranges, as well as ranges for close-quarters battle, combat pistol, and sniper training; Delta’s Operations and Intelligence Center; staging grounds where mock-ups of structures in different terrorist scenarios could be constructed; and a host of other facilities and training areas too numerous to list. Simply put, the Ranch was where the best of the best came to train, and that was the reason Harvath had chosen it.

As a former SEAL, Harvath and his charge would have been welcome guests at SEAL Team Six’s training facility located in Dam Neck, Virginia, but there would have been too many questions asked. Having been on-site for the hijacking in Cairo, Delta already knew about Operation Phantom and Hashim Nidal. Plus, Delta had everything they needed right at Fort Bragg. SEAL Team Six was always jetting off someplace or other to train. They climbed oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, parachuted in the Arizona desert, practiced boarding tankers in Southern California, and sharpened their close-quarters battle skills at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida. Total-immersion training with Six was too widespread and would have taken too much time. Every second Harvath had with Meg Cassidy needed to be as efficiently spent as possible.

When Meg had sucker punched Rick Morrell in the middle of the Harvey Point lodge, Harvath knew he had to get her out of there. Not only was she suffocating under the routine, she wasn’t getting everything she needed in the realm of counterterrorism training. Even though she was a civilian riding along on a government operation, she was traveling with experienced soldiers and needed to learn the ropes as quickly as possible. Harvath had hoped that Morrell and his men would teach her, but when it became apparent that they weren’t going to, he marched over to the Point’s communications center and was cleared by Morrell to make two phone calls.

The first call was to Gary Lawlor, who had been appointed his liaison and, for lack of a better term, supervisor, for Operation Phantom. Once Harvath had explained the situation and had gotten Lawlor’s approval, Harvath made his second call. Within forty-five minutes, he and Meg Cassidy were packed and standing on the Harvey Point helipad as an MH-60K Special Operations helicopter, piloted by members of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or SOAR, touched down and took them aboard. Also known as the Night Stalkers, for the pilots’ unparalleled ability to fly over all kinds of terrain in all kinds of weather using only night-vision devices, SOAR was attached to Delta Force specifically for the purpose of aviation support and getting Delta’s “guys in the skies.”

Harvath hadn’t expected a tearful farewell from Morrell and didn’t get one. He simply ferried Scot and Meg to the helipad in his Suburban, asked for their ID badges back, told Harvath to stay close to his beeper, and then drove off. Harvath had pulled some major strings and knew Morrell was seething about it, but didn’t care. The man was not running his operation correctly, and Harvath was not about to stand by and see Meg miss out on training that might save not only her life, but also the lives of her teammates. Meg Cassidy was going to get the best training the United States was capable of.

When the helicopter touched down at the Special Operations training facility at Fort Bragg, Bullet Bob was waiting. He stood off to the side of the helipad with several of the Delta Force operatives who had been part of the takedown in Cairo. When Harvath and Meg stepped out of the helicopter, Bullet Bob lifted a walkie-talkie to his mouth and said, “Let ‘em rip, T-Bone.”

From a nearby demolition range came the sound of a twenty-one-gun salute—all done with explosives.
There is nothing like guys who enjoy playing with demo,
thought Harvath. And so the tone for their time at the Ranch was set.

Meg Cassidy was again pushed to her limits day in and day out, but always by intelligent instructors who clearly articulated and explained the goals of the exercises.

In concert with Bullet Bob and several Delta instructors, Harvath had come up with what they believed was a thorough yet turbocharged curriculum in counterterrorism training. She was instructed in the use of weapons, including stun grenades and flash bangs; close-quarters battle, also known as CQB; room-clearing techniques; self-defense and hand-to-hand combat; land navigation; small boat operation; encrypted radio operation; and basic first aid. She excelled in everything, except the training that involved heights.

Rappelling, fast roping from a hovering chopper, and land qualifying for parachute jumping were the most difficult training sessions of all. Meg even refused to get into Fort Bragg’s vertical wind tunnel to simulate free fall unless Harvath was with her. She was deathly afraid of heights and practically had to be dragged to every session kicking and screaming. It was important to have Meg acclimated to all situations that required her to deal with heights, just in case. But, as the operation profile didn’t call for anything along those lines, Harvath eventually backed off the exercises.

Meg’s training was rounded out by spending time with female members of Delta, affectionately nicknamed by the men as the Funny Platoon. Members of the Funny Platoon were experts at infiltrating foreign countries to conduct reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. Harvath figured that they could give Meg special insight into the experience of being a woman involved in covert operations.

He and Meg had been at the Delta facility for two weeks, when she entered the cafeteria one day and found him in the back, reading the paper. Harvath was engrossed in a story about the bombing at Mecca and how Jordan was currently amassing armored divisions along Israel’s borders. Not only had the death toll from the Hand of God attack been staggering, but the group had struck at the most sacred Islamic site in the world. Thousands of worshippers outside the Holy Mosque had been killed when the center of the courtyard exploded in flames and collapsed, while thousands more inside had perished as a result of the vaporized cyanide. The explosion had taken with it the Ka’ba, a square stone, wood, and marble building, which Muslims considered the most holy structure in Islam—believed by some to have been the first house of worship, originally built by Adam, and of great importance in the life of Muhammad.

The article explained that even though the previous attacks had been horrendous, the bombing of Mecca was seen as an absolutely unforgivable assault upon the Islamic world. Even liberal and moderate Arabs, so heavily relied upon to keep the peace in the Middle East, were now calling for an all-out war against Israel.

A million scenarios ran through Harvath’s mind as to how Hashim Nidal could now definitively push the region into all-out war, and he didn’t like the United States’s chances of stopping any of them.

“Were you looking for me?” asked Meg as she put a gentle hand on Harvath’s shoulder and sat down next to him, interrupting his thoughts. She was wearing a gray T-shirt with “ARMY” emblazoned across the chest and a pair of black fatigue pants. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She didn’t need to. All of the outdoor training had tanned her skin to a deep, rich brown, which enhanced her beauty even more.

Harvath tried to pull his mind back to business. “Yeah. I heard from Washington last night. It looks like the CIA might have new information on Hashim Nidal’s whereabouts. What do you think? Are you ready?”

Meg had done extremely well and had excelled at almost everything she had been taught, but classroom proficiency was not a reliable indicator of real-world performance.

“Ready? You bet I’m ready. Look at this,” said Meg as she flexed her bicep before twisting the lid off a bottle of Gatorade and taking a long drink.

“That’s all well and good, but what about up here?” asked Harvath as he tapped a finger against his temple.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t think you could cram any more knowledge in there.”

“You’ve really been fast-tracked through this stuff. If we had more time—”

“But we probably don’t. Don’t worry. I’ve got it all down. Honestly, I’m good to go.”

Harvath had his reservations. “Meg, it takes months to learn this stuff and years to perfect it. You’ve been here two weeks. I don’t want you getting overconfident in your abilities. If this thing goes according to plan, we’ll be in and out without encountering any—”

“Hostile fire or dangerous situations which might necessitate calling upon my newfound skills. Scot, I know all this. You sound like an old lady. I am one hundred percent ready to go.”

Meg had done well, and, unfortunately, she knew it. But, she had also become a little too cocky, and that was dangerous. Harvath worried that he might have created a monster. She’d been thrown in at the deep end and had proved she could swim, but that was in the pool. The next test would be the open ocean itself.

“You’ve done a good job,” said Harvath as he reached for his coffee.

“
Good job?
I’ve done a
great
job.”

“Easy there. I don’t want this going to your head. There’s a big bad world outside the Ranch, and it’s a completely different place. Out there, the bombs are real, the bullets are real, and people die—” Harvath’s admonishment was abruptly halted by the sound of his pager going off.

“What is it?” asked Meg as Harvath studied the display.

“The big, bad world. Time to see how well you’ve learned.”