by Brad Thor
In the garage, Ralston grabbed a flashlight and walked over to the key box. He bypassed all of Salomon’s luxury automobiles and selected the keys for his vintage navy blue Wagoneer.
Disengaging the overhead opener, he rolled up the garage door and told Salomon to get in the truck. Hopping in beside him, he fired up the Wagoneer and pulled into the motor court.
The gates at the bottom of the drive were on a separate circuit from the house and opened as the Wagoneer rolled over the pressure plates. The marine layer had turned into a thick fog. That would work to their advantage and it helped Ralston decide in which direction to head.
“You’re bleeding,” said Salomon as they turned out onto the road.
Ralston touched the side of his head and looked at his fingers. The bullet that had whizzed by his ear had actually grazed him. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.
Salomon was worried about it, though. He was worried about all of it. He knew Ralston was right. More men would be coming after him. He had uncovered the truth, and the truth made him a liability.
CHAPTER 7
SWEDEN
Harvath had rented a farm on the outskirts of Uppsala for their safe house. It was far enough away from neighbors that they could interrogate their prisoner and come and go without attracting any attention.
In the city of Uppsala itself, he had rented an apartment where he had staged an assault team. Though they were outfitted with gear to look like members of the Swedish Security Service, the government of Sweden had no idea an American operation was taking place on their soil. They were purposely being kept in the dark for the time being. Somewhere in the intelligence community, there was a leak. Because of that leak, one of the highest-value terrorist targets the United States had ever bagged, Aazim Aleem, had been assassinated.
Sitting in the darkened room, Scot Harvath played the entire scene across the panorama of his mind’s eye for the millionth time. It was all there—all so vivid—the boom of the rocket-propelled grenade leaving its launcher; the whoosh as it blistered through the air en route to its target, and finally the deafening explosion as the RPG connected with the trunk and gas tank of his car and the vehicle went up in a billowing fireball.
In a blinding flash, his Yemen operation had gone from a resounding success to a spectacular failure. Aazim, who’d been in the trunk, would have purchased Harvath’s group some much-needed goodwill with the CIA, but it was too late for that now.
Staring out the window, he caught a glimpse of his reflection. Although he had crossed the threshold into his forties, he still looked as if he was in his early thirties. His sand-colored hair showed no traces of gray; his handsome, green-eyed face bore few if any lines, and his five-foot-ten body was in better physical shape than those of men half his age. To see the toll the years had taken, one would have to look elsewhere.
By most measures, Harvath was a success. In the immortal words of Mark Twain, he had made his vocation his vacation. He was a man of particular talents who was deeply committed to his country. Those talents and that commitment had propelled him to the pinnacle of his career. The cost to his personal life was something he didn’t like to think about.
Nevertheless, ever since Yemen his relationships had been very much at the forefront of his mind. But it wasn’t romantic relationships that he had been thinking about. Someone had professionally betrayed him, someone with intimate knowledge of his organization, someone close.
It was precisely because of this apparent leak that Harvath had requested permission to run this assignment himself. Somewhere there was a leak, and until that leak was plugged, there was a very short list of people Harvath could trust.
At the top of that list was a thirty-year CIA veteran named Reed Carlton. Carlton had watched as bureaucracy and inertia devoured what had once been the best intelligence agency in the world. As management became more concerned with promotions and covering its tail, and as the Agency’s leadership atrophied, Carlton could see the writing on the wall. By the 1990s, when the CIA stopped conducting unilateral espionage operations altogether, he was disappointed, but not at all surprised.
While there were countless patriotic men and women still left at Langley, the institutionalized bureaucracy made it all but impossible for them to effectively do their jobs. The bureaucracy had become risk-averse. Even more troubling was the fact that the CIA now subcontracted its actual spy work to other countries’ intelligence services. They happily handed over huge sums of cash in the hopes that other countries would do the dangerous heavy lifting and would share whatever they developed.
It was the biggest open secret in the intelligence world and it was both humiliating and beneath America’s dignity.
Once the secret was out that the CIA was no longer truly in the spy business, Carlton knew he had to do something. It was then that he began recruiting former Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operations personnel and stood up his own venture—the Carlton Group. It was modeled upon the World War II intelligence agency known as the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. It was composed of patriots who wanted one thing and one thing only—to keep Americans safe no matter what the cost.
Frustrated with the CIA’s reluctance to do its job, the Department of Defense eventually turned to Carlton to provide private intelligence services in Iraq and Afghanistan. The group’s operatives had performed dramatically, developing extensive human networks across both countries. They penetrated multiple terrorist cells and delivered exceptional, A1 intelligence that resulted in huge successes for American forces, not to mention the saving of countless American and coalition lives.
Based upon this success, a key group of DoD insiders decided to bring the Carlton Group all the way inside. They were paid from black budgets and hidden from D.C.’s grandstanding, self-serving politicians. The fact that not one single Central Intelligence Agency employee had lost his or her job after 9/11 told the Pentagon all they needed to know about the broken culture at Langley.
The Carlton Group’s mission statement was a testament to their singular focus and consisted of only three simple yet powerful words: find, fix, and finish.
An exceptional judge of talent, Reed Carlton had studied Harvath for some time before making his first approach. Harvath’s background and abilities were a perfect fit for the private intelligence service Carlton had begun to build.
Originally a member of SEAL Team 2, Harvath’s language proficiency and desire for more challenging assignments had gotten him recruited to the storied SEAL Team 6. While with Team 6, he caught the eye of the Secret Service and was asked to come help bolster counterterrorism operations at the White House.
Having been trained to take the fight to the enemy, Harvath didn’t do well in a defensive role with the Secret Service. Waiting for bad guys to strike was just not his thing. What’s more, he lacked diplomacy—a prerequisite when working around politicians. As a result, Harvath pissed a lot of people off, some of them very powerful.
The one person he had managed to keep in his corner was the then-president of the United States, Jack Rutledge. Recognizing that America was faced with a fanatical enemy who refused to play by any rules, Rutledge had taken a significant step toward tilting the playing field back to America’s advantage. In short, he had set Harvath loose.
The clandestine program the president had established worked exceedingly well. Harvath did overwhelming damage to the enemies of the United States and continued to do so right up until the end of Rutledge’s second term, whereupon a new president entered the Oval Office with a different approach to dealing with America’s enemies.
Direct action, political speak for wet work, was replaced with engagement, diplomatic speak for capitulation, and Harvath found himself out of a job. As many men of his background do, he moved into the private sector. It wasn’t the same, and though Harvath told himself he was still doing good for his country, he was disappointed with the job opportunities. It was then that Reed Carlton had come into his life and had
made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Within twelve months, the “Old Man,” as Harvath affectionately referred to Carlton, had drilled thirty years of tradecraft and hard-won espionage experience into him. He had also smoothed out many of his rough edges.
Combined with the deadly skills Harvath had acquired as a SEAL and the exceptional things he had learned in the Secret Service, Harvath’s training at the hands of Carlton vaulted him to the top of a very exclusive food chain. He had reached a level many seek, but few ever achieve. He had become an Apex Predator.
The Old Man made the resources available and turned Harvath loose with a simple three-word mandate—find, fix, finish. His job was to identify terrorist leaders, track them to a fixed location, and then capture or kill them as necessary, using any information gleaned from the assignment to plan the next operation. The goal was to apply constant pressure on the terrorists and pound them so hard and so relentlessly that they were permanently rocked back on the defensive, if not ground into dust.
In addition to direct-action assignments, Harvath was allowed to stage psychological operations to eat away at the terrorist networks from within, sowing doubt, fear, distrust, and paranoia throughout their ranks. It was everything the United States government should have been doing, but wasn’t. At least, it hadn’t been until the Carlton Group came on board.
Looking at his watch, Harvath decided Mansoor Aleem had been marinating long enough. It was time to begin the interrogation.
CHAPTER 8
The best interrogators knew that the most effective tool at their disposal was time. Left alone long enough, a prisoner’s mind would do half an interrogator’s work for him, if not more. No matter what horrors you could conceive of inflicting on a prisoner, the prisoner himself would always conceive of much worse. That was why Harvath liked to leave his interrogation subjects isolated and alone for as long as possible.
Interrogation was a delicate art. The key was getting the subject to tell you what you wanted to know, not what he thought you wanted to hear. A good interrogator operated like a surgeon; he wielded a scalpel, not a machete.
Only amateurs and the incredibly desperate actually resorted to true torture. And true torture was not turning up the air-conditioning, putting a subject in a stress posture, shaking him by his shirtfront, or giving him an open-handed slap across the face. Those were harsh interrogation techniques. They were not torture. Harvath knew the difference. He had used harsh interrogation techniques. He had also used torture.
And while he had never taken pleasure in it, it wasn’t something he had a moral problem with.
Torture was something he had used only as an absolute last resort. He loved to hear TV pundits and others cite the Geneva and Hague conventions. Putting aside the fact that most of them had never read any of those treaties, the key fact that they all missed was that America’s Islamist enemies were not a party to these agreements. What’s more, the conventions strictly forbade combatants from hiding and attacking from within civilian populations. Lawful combatants were also required to appear on the battlefield wearing something, whether a uniform or even just an armband, identifying them as combatants—overgrown beards and high-water pants didn’t count.
The long and short of it was that if one party refused to sign on and follow the rules, it couldn’t expect any sort of protection from those rules. And as far as Harvath was concerned, those who championed the extension of Geneva and Hague to Islamic terrorists were uninformed at best and apologists for terrorists at worst. Believing his country to be made up of good, reasonable people, he preferred to put the terrorist protectors in the former category.
Harvath never allowed himself to underestimate the capabilities or determination of America’s enemies. He had looked directly into the eyes of some of the most capable warriors Islam had dispatched, and he saw not only the depth of their conviction, but also the depth of their hate for the West and everything it stood for. There would be no truce with Islam. And while there were indeed good, decent Muslim people around the world, there were not enough of them. They lacked the collective will and desire to not only stand up to the violence being carried out in their name, but to reform the very tenets of their religion that called for that violence.
This was not how Harvath wished the world to be, but the world cared little for what he wanted. It was what it was. Harvath had shouldered a Herculean burden on behalf of his country so that it might remain free and unmolested. Though many others were also responsible for the fact that America remained free, Harvath found particular shame in the fact that it had not remained unmolested.
Attacks on Americans and American interests both at home and abroad had been picking up speed. For every attack that was thwarted and every terrorist taken off the street, ten, twenty, even thirty more popped up in their place. As more attacks had been put in play, some had begun getting through—even to American soil. A handful of those attacks had been Harvath’s responsibility to stop. He hadn’t always been able to do so. And while the attacks that had slipped through might have been much worse had Harvath not acted, people had still been killed—lots of people. This knowledge followed Harvath like a diseased crow sitting on his shoulder.
The only way to disrupt the enemy, and beat them so far back that they couldn’t attack, was to relentlessly hunt them down like the animals they were and unceasingly take the fight to them. That meant the gloves were off. It also meant that certain operations had to be kept secret from grandstanding politicians who would sooner bare America’s throat before the pack of wolves outside its door, than summon the fortitude to do the hard work necessary to ensure America’s survival.
Though Harvath couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had happened, at some point in the last seventy-or-so years, the political class had become completely disconnected from reality. It was a malady that struck equally on both sides of the aisle. It was evident in every single thing Washington, D.C., did, from its profligate spending, to granting terrorists greater rights and protections than CIA and military interrogators.
Harvath knew what a chilling effect the threat of litigation had created throughout the ranks of American interrogators. It made little difference that the interrogators had gotten real intelligence that had saved lives.
Only a select few of the decent politicians remaining in Washington understood what had to be done and supported it. If the rest of the pols, though, discovered even a fraction of what Harvath had done, he had no doubt they’d drag him to the public pillory and follow that up with a crucifixion upon the Capitol steps with all the media present.
Harvath didn’t care very much and he worried about it even less. First they would have to catch him. Then they would have to prove it. He had no intention of ever allowing either of those things to happen.
In fact, as Harvath opened the weathered barn doors to interrogate his prisoner, consequences were the furthest thing from his mind.
CHAPTER 9
Though no longer part of a working farm, the barn still retained the musty smell of raw earth and animal dung. It was exactly the kind of sensory input a man like Mansoor Aleem would find offensive.
Harvath made a loud show of closing and locking the wide doors behind him as he entered. In the center of the barn, the young jihadist was tied to a wooden chair taken from the farmhouse kitchen. A hood had been placed over his head before they had pulled away from the accident scene.
Though Mansoor had been an unknown up until quite recently, it wasn’t hard to work up a profile on him. In fact, by the very nature of what he did, it was quite easy to understand how he thought and thereby select the best approach for his interrogation.
As far as the real world was concerned, the young jihadist was a loser. He was unremarkable in almost every way. With a poor complexion, unappealing features, and a pair of eyes that bulged just enough to suggest he might have a thyroid condition, he was considerably unattractive. He was too skinny and therefore unimpressive physically. Beyond the b
ulging eyes, he fit the cyber jihadi/hacker mold to a T.
While he was nothing in the real world, in the digital world he could very well be the heat. He might woo the women in the chat rooms as if he were Don Juan incarnate, but he’d never have the courage to approach a member of the opposite sex in the flesh. Cyber-geeks like Mansoor were all about control; the control of information. It was the only thing they could have power over. Without it, they were impotent. When you placed them in a situation where they were devoid of any authority, or more precisely devoid of any control, it was tremendously unsettling for them.
They were also completely visual. Depriving them of the ability to see tipped them off-balance and made them more pliant to interrogation.
Harvath knew that the young man would still be in shock over what had happened in the car. That shock would only have been compounded since he had been taken prisoner and kept in the dark. He had been stripped down to his underwear and was shivering in the nighttime cold of the barn.
Harvath walked over and stood just behind the man’s left shoulder. He knew Mansoor had heard him enter and he didn’t doubt the man could sense his presence directly behind him. Keeping an eye on his watch, he allowed several minutes to pass, adding to the man’s discomfort.
Without warning, Harvath drew his hand back and slapped the jihadist hard in the side of his hooded head to make sure he was psychologically off-balance and hadn’t manufactured some semblance of resistance or bravado. It was important for the jihadist to understand that he was absolutely helpless.
Harvath stepped back and waited a full three minutes before speaking.
When he broke the silence, he was explicit. “Let me explain to you what is going on,” he said. “The only reason you’re alive is that until now, I have let you live. I can very easily decide to let you die. The choice is one hundred percent mine. The people I work with couldn’t care less what happens to you. Everything that happens from this point forward will depend on whether you cooperate with me. Do you understand?”