Takedown (30 page)

S
o 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 least 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.”

O
f 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.

It was one such intrigue that had brought Scot here. A joint CIA/DIA team had been tracking Mohammed bin Mohammed since he had returned to Africa. They had followed him up to Tangiers and onto a ferryboat for the quick jaunt across the straits to Gibraltar. They now had him under surveillance in a sumptuous, yet discreet villa near the harbor—not far from the hotel where Harvath was booked. Once Mohammed’s deal for the rogue nuclear material went down, the team had their orders to immediately back off. From that point forward, the al-Qaeda terrorist belonged to Scot Harvath and Scot Harvath only. No bullshit, no bureaucracy, and absolutely nobody but himself to answer to.

For two days, Mohammed played the merry holidaymaker, hitting the beaches by day and then prowling the open-air restaurants and discos for young boys at night. It made Harvath sick. He couldn’t wait to put a bullet in this scumbag. The only thing worse than seeing him pick up the boys was joining the CIA/DIA team in its daily sweep of his villa while he basked on the beach and the staff ran errands. The man was quite the budding cinematographer, and watching him actually in the act made Harvath want to vomit.

It was on the third night in Gibraltar that things finally started getting interesting.

Forgoing his usual nightclub trolling, Mohammed picked one of the more upscale restaurants in town, where he put away a considerable amount of food accompanied by an incredibly expensive bottle of Bordeaux. Afterward, he headed down to the marina and a vintage Riva runabout, which, once he climbed aboard, sped off into the open ocean.

With a host of airplanes, watercraft, and helicopters at his disposal, the lead CIA/DIA agent immediately mobilized all of his assets to follow Mohammed out into the Mediterranean. When offered the opportunity to tag along, Harvath declined. He had a strong feeling that if Mohammed didn’t plan on coming back, he never would have abandoned his newly minted video library back at the villa.

So while the joint task force pursued their man out into the darkening Mediterranean Sea, Harvath returned to his hotel room and, for the hundredth time since he’d arrived, disassembled and oiled his weapons.

Listening to the radio set in his room, he followed the team’s progress as Mohammed’s landing craft spirited him out to a large yacht with an innocuous Bahamian registry. The minute the highly sensitive nuclear materials aircraft zeroed in on it, their monitoring equipment started bouncing. Using the advanced microwave devices aboard the various covert pleasure craft that had sailed within listening range, the team was able to monitor almost the entire transaction.

Convinced they had what they were looking for, they informed Harvath that Mohammed bin Mohammed was on his way back to the marina and that the suspect was all his. Leaving his hotel, Harvath threw his gear into his rental car and headed toward the marina. Something told him that Mohammed might just be in the market for one last night of pleasure before leaving Gibraltar.

Little did Harvath know that someone else was banking on the exact same hunch.

T
he Troll disliked leaving the comfort and security of Eileanaigas House and had done so only because Mohammed bin Mohammed’s escape from American custody had made it absolutely necessary.

Never in a million years would the Troll have believed Abdul Ali able to pull it off, but looking back on the operation, he realized it was his own plan that had been flawed. Once Sacha had helped Ali locate Mohammed bin Mohammed, the Chechen was supposed to kill them both—something that never happened. The Troll had underestimated Ali, but for the moment, none of that mattered. What mattered was that Mohammed be decommissioned once and for all. The fact that the bearded grease tub had forced unspeakable sex acts upon the Troll decades earlier in the Black Sea resort of Sochi made his reasons for killing the man all too personal.

Having searched for him for years and finally locating him, the Troll had hoped that the Americans would do the job for him. The fact that there had been a five-million-dollar bounty on Mohammed’s head had only been icing on the cake. Now, though, the man was free once again, and from what the Troll had observed over the last several days among the bars, restaurants, and discotheques of Gibraltar, this leopard had no intention of changing his spots.

Customized by a reclusive gunsmith in southern France, the diminutive weapon the Troll was carrying had been specially designed to accommodate his exceedingly small frame. Chambered for the devastating .338 Lapua round, its optimal range was between 500 and 1200 meters, with anything below that necessary only when very deep penetration was called for. To use it for any other reason at close range was considered overkill, to say the least.

While the Troll prided himself on being a master of subtlety, he had no reservations about taking Mohammed at even point-blank range, if that was what the situation called for.

While the pedophile had frolicked on the beach by day and had cruised the nightclubs for conquests at night, the Troll had familiarized himself with routes both to and from his potential sniping areas, as well as the routes that could be used for egress from Gibraltar. As with everything else in his world, the Troll was ready for any eventuality.

That changed, though, when he noticed Mohammed bin Mohammed was under covert American surveillance. The team tracking him was exceptional, but not so good that the Troll couldn’t detect their presence. Even so, he decided to remain in play. There was a slight problem, though. The team had an additional man on board—a hitter. The Troll was sure of it. But who was he charged with taking out? Was it Mohammed? Was it the people he was doing business with? Was it both parties?

While the thought of leaving the job to the American assassin was tempting, the Troll knew that if he wanted this done right, he would have to do it himself. And if the American hitter got in his way, he would have to take him out as well.

Attaching a lightweight silencer to the front of his weapon, the Troll reaffirmed to himself that the only thing that mattered was taking down Mohammed bin Mohammed once and for all. If that meant sawing through one or two Americans who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to do so, then that was just the way it would have to be.