The Athens Solution

by Brad Thor

  Experience a heart-pumping and thrilling tale of suspense! Originally published in THRILLER (2006), edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author James Patterson.

  In this tense Thriller Short, #1 New York Times bestselling writer Brad Thor sends his hero Scot Harvath to Greece on the trail of the terror group known as 17 November. A US ambassador to Greece, Michael Avery finds himself at the mercy of 17 November, who are forcing him to pay a huge ransom for a device so powerful that it could bring down the world’s airline industry. After seeing the threat firsthand, Avery pays the ransom, only to be double crossed. Enter Navy SEAL Scot Harvath, brought in to retrieve the device and neutralize the head of the terrorist organization. What Harvath doesn’t count on, though, is another assassin and a conspiracy that threatens to turn his mission on its head. But then, things seldom turn out the way he expects.

  The Athens Solution

  Brad Thor

  CONTENTS

  The Athens Solution

  BRAD THOR

  Brad Thor spends a lot of time in Greece and has always wanted to set a novel there. When he was approached to write for this anthology, he knew right away that he wanted to write about an idea that came to him in the Greek Islands several years ago.

  For decades a terrorist organization known as 17 November wreaked havoc throughout Greece. In fact, the United States still spends more money defending its embassy in Athens than any other embassy in Europe. It started in 1975 when the organization assassinated the CIA’s Athens station chief with what would become its trademark .45-caliber pistol. Since then, the group has claimed responsibility for twenty-one murders, four of which were U.S. diplomats. Though 17 November’s initial attacks were directed at senior U.S. officials and Greek public figures, they eventually expanded their targets to include ordinary citizens, foreign businesses and European Union facilities.

  Thor was always perplexed by the government’s inability to make any progress in bringing 17 November to justice. For years, no member of the organization had ever been arrested, and no clues as to who was orchestrating their attacks had ever been found.

  A breakthrough occurred in 2002 when a bomb being carried by a forty-year-old icon painter prematurely detonated in the Athenian port of Piraeus. The bomber was also carrying a set of keys and a prepaid telephone card, which led police to an apartment in downtown Athens packed with antitank rockets, missiles and other weapons. Within two weeks, police uncovered a string of 17 November safe houses, two of which contained additional caches of weapons, disguises and the group’s signature .45-caliber Colt 1911 semiautomatic pistol used in some of their most high-profile assassinations.

  Since those successes things have been relatively quiet in Greece, but intelligence officials are concerned that several members of the organization may have slipped through their net and have gone deeper underground. These same officials worry that if and when these last remaining members do surface again, it will be with a terrible vengeance.

  Which brings us to The Athens Solution.

  THE ATHENS SOLUTION

  June 12

  Athens, Greece

  U.S. ambassador to Greece Michael Avery picked his way through the late-afternoon throng of tourists clogging Athens’s famous Plaka district. Behind him, a team of CIA operatives mixed within the crowd, while two streets over, in a nondescript van, a contingent of heavily armed Diplomatic Security Service agents and NSA communications experts followed as closely as they dared. Avery had been told to come alone, but both the Departments of State and Defense would hear nothing of it. Too much was at stake.

  With his crisp white sport shirt and blue blazer, Avery looked like any other upscale Westerner visiting Greece during the height of the tourist season. He even had a small backpack casually slung over one shoulder. But unlike the other backpacks around him, his contained an encrypted laptop, complete with a wireless modem and sophisticated remote-viewing application.

  He was passing a small outdoor café with a nice view of the Acropolis and the majestic Parthenon atop it when his cell phone rang.

  “Stop here and take a table,” said a voice with a heavy Greek accent. “You know what to do next.”

  Yes, the ambassador did know what to do next. A CD ROM and final set of instructions had been delivered to the embassy that morning. The instructions indicated that the CD could only be used once and that any attempts to copy or crack it before the appointed time would result in all of its data being destroyed.

  Avery sat down at a table and, after ordering coffee, removed the encrypted laptop from his backpack and powered it up. The CD whirred in its tray. Within moments an instant-message screen appeared and the words, “Good afternoon, Mr. Ambassador. Thank you for coming,” flashed.

  Back in the van, the NSA communications experts could see in real time exactly what the ambassador was seeing, thanks to the laptop’s remote-viewing application, and began trying to locate the source of the transmission.

  Are you prepared to transfer the funds? appeared next.

  How do we know the merchandise is authentic? typed Avery.

  One word was returned, Watch.

  The ambassador’s screen split into two separate windows. Next to the dialogue box, an image came up entitled JFK/ATC. He discreetly tilted his head and spoke toward the microphone sewn into the lapel of his blazer, “Are you getting this?”

  “Loud and clear. So is Washington,” replied one of the techs in the van. A satellite uplink was beaming everything back to the States for verification.

  Avery pressed the mini-earpiece farther into his ear as he anxiously awaited word. Seconds later, it came.

  “Verification complete. Mr. Ambassador, you are looking at a live picture of JFK’s Air Traffic Control system.”

  Knowing what would happen next sent chills down Michael Avery’s spine. His hands shook as he typed the following message, We are ready to proceed.

  One by one, aircraft started disappearing from the screen.

  Ninety seconds later, the NSA man’s voice came back over the ambassador’s earpiece. “JFK is reporting a major ATC system malfunction. They’re losing track of aircraft left and right. The merchandise is authentic. You are authorized to complete the transaction.”

  Initializing funds transfer, typed the ambassador as he began the predetermined sequence. The green status bar seemed to take forever. When the Transfer Successful message finally materialized on the screen, aircraft flying in the New York area began reappearing on ATC radar.

  Simultaneously, a third window appeared on the ambassador’s laptop. In it, he could see a live picture of the device the United States had just paid so handsomely for. As the image widened, he could see the Parthenon in the foreground.

  “We’re on it,” said one of the NSA men over Avery’s earpiece as the van took off to claim the merchandise.

  The ambassador continued to watch the feed as a pair of hands came into view, picked up the device and secreted it inside the nearest trash can, as agreed, for pickup.

  “Sir,” said one of the CIA operatives as he approached the table. “There’s a car waiting. We’d like to get you back to the embassy.”

  Avery nodded his head and was just about to shut down his laptop when he noticed the live image from the Acropolis was moving. There were jerky flashes of legs and feet as someone moved the camera and repositioned it overlooking the road below. Seconds later, the white embassy van with the Diplomatic Security Service agents and the NSA team entered the frame.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Avery. “It’s a trap. Get them out!”

  The CIA operative who had been sitting in the café looking over the ambassador’s shoulder grabbed both him and the laptop while shouting into his radio, “Beachcomber, this is Poin
t Guard. You’ve been compromised. Abort now. Repeat. You have been compromised. Abort!”

  Before the men in the white van could respond, they heard what sounded like a giant knife tearing through the fabric of the afternoon sky. The ambassador grabbed the laptop back just in time to see a shoulder-fired missile slam through the windshield of the van and explode.

  The CIA operative, code named Point Guard, didn’t waste any more time. He steered the ambassador out of the café and down the closest side street as he radioed the driver of their car to come get them. The other operatives headed for the Acropolis as people ran out of the shops and restaurants around the Plaka in response to the explosion.

  As Point Guard and the ambassador turned the next corner, the pair could see the embassy’s dark, armor-plated BMW and began running even faster. They were almost there.

  Suddenly, a motorcycle screamed out of a nearby alleyway. Point Guard reached for his gun, but he was too late.

  * * *

  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 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 recognition, 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 Marxist-Leninist 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.

  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.

  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.

  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.