Thriller (59 page)

One week later

Dodecanese Islands

Southeastern Aegean, Greece

Lying in the tall grass one hundred meters from a sprawling,

whitewashed villa, Scot Harvath used the Leupold Mark 4 scope

and Universal Night Sight of his SR25 Knights Armament battle

rifle to search for any sign of Theologos Papandreou, the man

U.S. Intelligence had fingered as the mastermind behind the

murder of Ambassador Avery and his multiagency security detail.

As a Navy SEAL, and now as a covert counterterrorism operative for the U.S. government, Harvath had spent the better part of

his professional life pulling a trigger. One of the sadder truths he

had learned was that there were a lot of people in the world who

needed to be killed. He tried to remind himself that more often than

not, the people on the receiving end of his lead-tipped missives

453

were beyond reasoning with. They posed serious threats to the stability and safety of the civilized world and had to be taken out.

Tonight, though, Harvath had his doubts. Something didn’t

feel right.

Before leaving D.C., Harvath had been fully briefed on the

murder of Ambassador Avery. Two years prior, a Greek company

headed by a man named Constantine Nomikos had approached

the United States to partner up on a technology venture. They

were developing a revolutionary new system to better track their

fleet of next-generation tanker and cargo ships worldwide.

Nomikos needed heavy access to satellite and radar systems to

further his research. While reviewing the project, the U.S. had

noted several excellent military applications and immediately

jumped into bed with them. It wasn’t until later in the development process that the Defense Department discovered the device’s full potential.

Anything with an electronic guidance system—aircraft, missiles, ships—could be rendered completely invisible to radar. But

that was only the half of it. The device could also override guidance systems and remotely control an object’s course, speed, trajectory—you name it. With the right satellite uplinks, a missile

could be diverted off course or a plane could be hijacked without terrorists ever having to set foot on board.

The Defense Department deemed it one of the most exciting

and dangerous pieces of technology ever developed. They also

gave it its code name, the
Achilles Project
.

Two weeks prior to Ambassador Avery’s assassination, the device had been stolen from Nomikos’s research and development

facility near the Athenian port of Piraeus. Shortly thereafter, an

unidentified organization contacted the U.S. embassy in Athens

and offered to sell it back to the United States. Avery and his team

had been participating in an operation to recover the device

when they were killed.

Despite the fact that a firebomb had been tossed into the car

after the shooting and the bodies were burned beyond recogni-
454

tion, ballistics reports indicated that the weapon used to kill

Ambassador Avery, as well as the CIA operative accompanying

him, was a .45-caliber automatic—the same .45 caliber used in

a string of high-profile assassinations attributed to the Greek terrorist organization 21 August.

The name 21 August corresponded to the organization’s

first attack. On August 21, 1975, they shot and killed the

CIA’s Athens chief and deputy chief of station. In a long and

rambling letter to a left-wing Athenian newspaper, they

claimed credit for the murders, spelled out their MarxistLeninist beliefs and outlined their plans for ridding Greece

once and for all of any Western—specifically American—influences.

Be that as it may, the current president of the United States had

different plans for 21 August. He was furious that in a country

of only eleven million, the Greeks couldn’t seem to lay their

hands on what every Western intelligence agency agreed was a

cell of no more than ten or fifteen people. The “Athens Problem,”

as it had become known in Western intelligence circles, had

been a problem for too long, and he wanted it stopped. He

wanted 21 August neutralized before they could mount any more

attacks against American interests or, God forbid, sold the

Achilles device to one of America’s enemies.

The CIA had tentatively identified Papandreou, an associate

of Constantine Nomikos, as a key personality behind 21 August.

Evidence also suggested he had a hand in the attacks upon Ambassador Avery and his team. The dots didn’t connect for Harvath as cleanly as he would have liked—and certainly not cleanly

enough to base a decision to take a man’s life, but nevertheless,

he had his orders. He had been sent to Greece to take Papandreou

out as quickly as possible and recover the Achilles device by any

means necessary. Adding to the mission’s urgency, the CIA had

just learned that 21 August had a buyer for the device—an

unidentified Jordanian national, and the transaction was going

to take place any day.

455

Still dubious about the intelligence the U.S. had gathered from

its Greek sources, Harvath glanced at his Kobold tactical wristwatch and wondered where the hell his target was. Papandreou

should have been here by now.

Suddenly, the sound of the ocean crashing on the rocky beach

below was replaced by the sound of tires crunching down the

villa’s long gravel drive. Harvath readied his rifle and pressed

himself flatter against the damp earth. He prayed to God his superiors back in Washington weren’t making a mistake.

A blue Land Rover rolled to a stop before the large double doors

of the house. When the driver’s door opened Harvath peered

through his scope, but it was no good. He couldn’t see the man’s

face. He’d have to wait for him to exit the vehicle.

“Norseman, can you properly ID the target?” said a voice over

his headset, thousands of miles away in the White House Situation Room.

“Negative,” replied Harvath. “Stand by.”

Pressing his eye tighter against his scope, Harvath strained to

get a positive identification on Papandreou so he could do his

job and pull the trigger.

“Norseman, satellite is giving us only one, I repeat
one
individual in that vehicle. Can you confirm the subject’s identity? Do

we have our man?”

Command-and-control elements in the rear always wanted to

know everything that was going on in the field. Harvath, though,

couldn’t give them a play-by-play
and
pay full attention to his

assignment, so he gave them the field operative’s polite equivalent of
shut the hell up
, “Clear the net.”

The chatter on his headset fell silent and Harvath watched as

the driver began to exit the vehicle. From where he was positioned,

he’d have to wait until the man came around the Land Rover and

made it to the double doors of the villa before he had not only a

clear view of his face but also a clean shot to take him out.

“Ten seconds until subject ID,” said Harvath, more for his own

benefit than the men and women gathered in the Situation Room.

456

Three more steps
, Harvath thought to himself as the man

rounded the grille of the Land Rover.

It was hot and Harvath could feel beads of perspiration collecting on his forehead.
What if this wasn’t the right guy?

As the man’s head came into view, Harvath took a deep breath,

held it, but delayed applying pressure to the trigger of his SR25.

A few more steps
, he thought to himself.
A few more steps
.

Suddenly a shot rang out and Harvath’s target fell face-first in

a spray of blood onto the gravel drive.

“What the—” Harvath whispered into his microphone.

“Norseman,” came the voice from the Situation Room. “What

just happened?”

Harvath scanned the area as best he could with his scope. “We

have another shooter on-site and the subject has been downed.

Who else is on this job?”

“You’re the only operator on this assignment,” replied the

voice from Washington. “Can you ID the target?”

Harvath stared through his scope at the man lying in the driveway. “Negative. A positive ID is impossible from my position.”

Moments later the voice responded. “Norseman, you’re going

to need to change your position ASAP and get that ID.”

“The subject’s facedown in the gravel.”

“Then get down there and lift him up.”

Harvath tried to keep his anger in check. “We’ve got an active

shooter. I need you to pinpoint him for me first.”

“Negative, Norseman,” said the voice from the Situation

Room. “No can do. All the infrared satellite is showing is you

and the subject adjacent to the vehicle.”

“No heat signature from a recently discharged weapon?” asked

Harvath, though he knew if they could see it, they’d tell him.

“That’s a negative. No heat signature.”

Whoever that shooter was, he was very good and being very

careful.

Harvath was truly up against it. There was no way he could

move to the driveway, not when the other sniper could be out

there waiting for someone to approach the body.

457

Though he was trained to expect the unexpected, an additional shooter was something Harvath hadn’t banked on. Nevertheless, the idea that somebody else might be after the Achilles

device was perfectly reasonable, but none of that mattered now.

Harvath needed to identify the guy in the driveway and make his

way into the villa where the device was supposedly being kept,

and to do that, he was going to need a distraction.

Waiting for him two hundred meters offshore was the
Amalia,

a weather-beaten Greek trawler manned by the only two people

in Greece Harvath could trust, Ben and Yannis Metaxas. Harvath

had met Ben while his SEAL team was training in the Aegean

with the Greek navy. The two had become fast friends, and to

this day Harvath still spent a good amount of his vacation time

every year kicking back at Ben’s beach bar on the island of Antiparos.

Changing his radio frequency, Harvath raised Ben out on the

Amalia
and told him what had happened and what he needed

him to do. When Ben’s flare broke over the water four and a half

minutes later, Harvath was already up and running.

He never bothered ID’ing the body—it would have been suicide. Instead, Harvath grabbed the man by the collar, kicked open

the villa’s double doors and dragged him inside the courtyard. It

was only then that Harvath rolled the body over. There was no

mistaking the man whose photo he had seen during his briefing

in Washington, Constantine Nomikos.
What the hell was he doing

here?
Harvath examined him. Head wounds always bled profusely and he looked like he had lost a lot of blood. Harvath

doubted he would make it.

“Goddammit,” he mumbled under his breath. Nomikos had

picked a hell of a time to come visit his old pal. Changing freqs,

Harvath clued the Situation Room in on the development.

With no other vehicles inbound, Harvath was told to shift to

locating the Achilles device.
Easy for them to say,
he thought.

Somewhere, very nearby, was a killer who was most probably sent

to Papandreou’s villa with the same orders as he was.

458

With the Metaxas brothers offshore on the
Amalia
, Harvath

had no direct backup. He could only rely on himself. He was in

the process of rigging a booby trap when the landscaping lights

illuminating the neat rows of olive trees throughout the courtyard dimmed and went dark. Harvath had been in this game long

enough to know there was no such thing as coincidence. The

other sniper had just cut the power. That could only mean one

thing—he was about to breach the villa. Harvath needed to move.

Finding the front door unlocked, Harvath quickly made his way

inside and searched for the study. Five minutes later, he had uncovered Papandreou’s safe. While he knew more than most about

safecracking, tonight it made no difference. Secreted behind a false

panel was an American-made Safari-brand safe. Safaris were the

best and Harvath knew he had no choice but to blow it. The only

question was whether or not he’d brought along enough C4.

Considering Safari’s impregnable reputation, Harvath prepared

to use everything he had. If he overestimated and it resulted in

him damaging the Achilles device inside, then so be it. He knew

Washington would be glad just to know the device was out of

commission.

Taking cover behind Papandreou’s desk, Harvath blew the

door off its hinges in an enormous explosion. Once the smoke

had cleared, he rushed forward only to discover that it was totally empty.

The CIA was positive the device was being kept at the villa—

most likely in Papandreou’s safe, but apparently that location had

seemed too obvious.

Knowing that blowing the safe had drawn the attention of the

other sniper, Harvath quickly exited the room and began making his way down the hallway, his SR25 up and at the ready.

He passed several rooms, and was about to pass the kitchen