State of the Union

by Brad Thor

  Suddenly, there was what sounded like large pieces of furniture being hurriedly dragged across the floor.Was the shooter creating more cover for himself? Was it some sort of ruse? Harvath didn’t know what to think. The one thing he did know was that his opponent could smell the smoke just as well as he could and was just as aware of how close the fire was getting. At that same moment, something else struck Harvath. If this man had started the fire, he wouldn’t have brought DeWolfe all the way up to the fourth floor without some plan for his own escape.But where would he go? Something Nixie had said about the King George was suddenly echoing in his mind, ‘The entire building is riddled with secret doors and passageways to help certain people sneak in and out during the Cold War.’

  Why not?Thought Harvath. If his group had used one of the secret passageways, why couldn’t this person use others? It was possible, but it not only begged the question, how did this person know about the passageways, but also who the hell was he and what did he want?

  There was no time for that now. Harvath needed to focus on getting himself and DeWolfe out of the building alive. He felt around himself and found a large cardboard box. Reaching inside, he wasn’t surprised to find what felt like leather cat-o’-nine tails, vinyl masks, and other assorted S&M toys, but it was something in the far corner of the box that gave him a new idea. Harvath pulled out a round tin, about the size and weight of a small can of shaving gel. Unscrewing the lid, he knew right away what it was—Vaseline.

  The contents didn’t matter as much as the size, shape and heft of the container. Not only was it very similar to a small can of shaving gel, it was also very similar to a flashbang grenade. And sometimes, as Harvath had learned in his counterterrorism training a long time ago, throwing a dud could be better than actually throwing a live device.

  Flashbangs, more properly referred to in the industry as NFDDs—Noise Flash Distraction Devices, often required the use of surprise in order to be fully effective. That said, there were three major physiological effects that could not be quickly protected against.

  Flashbangs produced an incredibly bright light—approximately two million candela, which even with eyes closed would cause a bleaching of the rhodopsin, the visual purple in the eye, creating the spots and temporary blindness most people have experienced and referred to as theflash bulb effect .

  Then there was the noise, right around 174 decibels, a thunderous roar that was just below the threshold of damage to the eardrum, but which was still likely to produce a startle reflex even in those expecting the concussion.

  Finally, there was the pressure wave. The atmospheric pressure inside a room was raised so that it compressed the body, causing a level of severe uneasiness.

  For those who were prepared for it, or had trained extensively in their presence, flashbangs were not a big deal, especially as most teams had trained to enter rooms just after the flash, and concurrent with the bang. But that’s where Harvath’s training and a little trick he had learned was about to pay off.

  Harvath made sure the lid on the tin of Vaseline was on tight before calling out, “DeWolfe, flashbang!” and chucking the container toward where he had heard all of the furniture being moved.

  If someone was familiar with NFDDs, which Harvath suspected their shooter was, one of the biggest distractions to present them with was an inert device that did not go off. When a flashbang has been loosed anywhere near you, it is nearly impossible not to pay attention to it because youexpect it to detonate. When it doesn’t, it is extremely disconcerting and you end up focusing on it and the direction it came from, wondering what the hell happened. The tactic was something that Special Operations personnel liked to refer to as UW—unconventional warfare—and in this case it worked like a charm.

  Harvath counted off the appropriate amount of seconds and then popped up from behind the bench with his flashlight blazing and his pistol ready to fire. This time, he caught his opponent full in the face with the beam from his SureFire. The man was sixty, if he was a day. He had a full head of gray hair and worn, leathery skin—not at all what Harvath was expecting. There was also, at this moment, an expression of arrogant defiance on his face. Though Harvath had never seen him before, there was something familiar about him. It was a gut feeling and he had learned a long time ago that those feelings were seldom wrong.

  Whether or not he knew him, the man was still a killer and Harvath wasn’t above helping make him a little more aerodynamic, so he took aim and pulled the trigger.

  Once again, the man expertly ducked down trying to get out of the line of fire. Scot kept the flashlight on him as he fired, only to see him disappear right through the wall. It was not the first time he had seen that trick and Harvath was beginning to understand why the man might feel so familiar, but there was also something else—something he couldn’t explain.

  Crawling back under the canopy of smoke to where he had left DeWolfe, Harvath asked, “Can you stand up?”

  “Of course I can stand up,” replied DeWolfe, angrily. “The guy just got the drop on me. That’s all. I’ll be fine.”

  “Where’s your gun?”

  DeWolfe was silent.

  “So he got your gun too?”

  “Don’t start with me, Harvath.”

  Harvath held up his hands. “I’m not starting anything. I’m just trying to assess the situation.”

  “I don’t need a gun. His ass is mine. I’m telling you. I’m going to get that motherfucker if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

  Harvath could understand the operative’s frustration. Nobody liked being bested. “Alright, alright, but we’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

  When they reached the stairway and opened the door, the thick smoke and quickly rising fire made it obvious that they were going to have to find another way out of the building.

  “What do we do now?” asked DeWolfe.

  “Let’s go see if we can get your gun back.”

  Harvath led DeWolfe to where he had watched their attacker seemingly disappear through the wall.

  “What are we looking for?” asked DeWolfe.

  “Some sort of false door or panel. I saw the guy vanish, so I know it has to be here.”

  As the pair searched, the room seemed to get hotter, and the air more difficult to breathe. DeWolfe, who had been rapping every square inch of the wall with his knuckles, said, “Harvath, I’m not seeing anything and we have to get the hell out of here.”

  “There’s got to be something,” replied Scot. “Keep looking.”

  “There isn’t anything.”

  “So you’re telling me the man who was shooting at us just disappeared? I don’t buy it.”

  “Well if we don’t get out of here soon, we’re both going tobuy it.”

  DeWolfe was right. Harvath bent down, with his hands upon his knees, to get a clean breath of oxygen and that’s when he saw it. Bathed in the brilliant beam of his flashlight was the almost imperceptible outline of a small trap door. Harvath glanced around at the heavy displaced furniture and understood why the shooter had been so frantically moving things around.He was trying to find this trapdoor.

  Harvath waved DeWolfe over and silently instructed him to lift the door, while he readied his weapon. When the communications expert sprung the hatch, Scot swung his pistol and flashlight back and forth across the small opening, but nothing was there. Carefully, Harvath slid into the crawlspace with his H&K ready to take out anything that moved. The entire space looked like some sort of labyrinth in miniature. As Harvath wriggled his way along, he found side passages on the left and right, branching off at regular intervals, just like the bedrooms on the second and third floors.

  Following one of the junctures off to his right, Harvath’s suspicions about the purpose of the crawl space was confirmed when five feet in, he found a large monocle attached to a braided cable mounted to the floor in front of him. Harvath peered into the monocle and was granted a perfect, albeit relatively dark view of the bedroom beneath. Apparently,
Madame Putzkammer was not above spying on her customers.

  As Harvath looked around at the relatively outdated, yet still highly effective surveillance equipment, he realized that the King George was not only set up to take still pictures of their customers in action, but audio and video as well. And from the looks of it, Frau Putzkammer had probably been up to it for a very long time.

  “Harvath!” yelled DeWolfe from the main passage behind him. “I think I found the Madame.”

  Harvath crawled back out of his side tunnel and backtracked to DeWolfe. Inside one of the other side tunnels was the body of a woman shot once in the head. It had to be Nixie’s mother. The resemblance was unmistakable.

  “What do you want to do with her?” asked DeWolfe.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” replied Harvath. “The tunnels are too tight to drag her with us.” After turning around, he began leading the way forward again. Thirty feet later, the choking smell of smoke mingled with ripples of something else—fresh air.

  The main passageway opened up onto a large ventilation shaft that looked to run the full height of the building. Glancing up, Harvath could see the night sky between the blades of the slowly oscillating fan. He climbed into the shaft, followed by DeWolfe and they carefully made their way up and out onto the roof.

  Looking over the intricately molded parapet onto the street below, Harvath could see the pile of mattresses that had been used to evacuate the building’s occupants. A crowd of onlookers had formed, and knowing Herman the way he did, Scot expected he had helped the wounded as best he could and then had faded a safe distance away from the scene. No doubt he was somewhere nearby, trying to ascertain his fate as well as DeWolfe’s.

  By the close proximity of the other buildings, it wasn’t hard to figure out the route their attacker had taken in his escape. Harvath couldn’t ignore the dull but insistent throbbing deep in the pit of his stomach. It was telling him the name of the person who had attacked them, but he didn’t want to believe it. It was all too impossible. Or was it?

  Chapter 34

  T hree blocks away, Helmut Draegar stumbled into his newly rented Volkswagen, closed the door, and started the engine so he could get the heat going.How could I have been so stupid? he asked himself as he unbuttoned his shirt to look at the wound. Thankfully, the bullet had only nicked the upper part of his left arm, just below the shoulder. It hadn’t entered. Yes, the wound was bleeding, but the bleeding would eventually stop. There was always the chance of infection, as with any bullet wound, but that too was easily handled. He would drive until he found one of Berlin’s all-night pharmacies where he could purchase some antibiotics. At this point, an infection was the least of his concerns.

  The triage of his injuries complete, Draegar fashioned a makeshift bandage around his arm and pulled away from the curb, his mind a tempest of self-loathing over the string of failures he ultimately could blame on no one other than himself.

  In the beginning, Überhof had seemed to Draegar an inspired choice. During the Cold War, Überhof had been based in East Berlin and attached to one of the Soviets’ highly secretive Spetsnaz details. The Spetsnaz were Russian Special Forces units charged with wreaking maximum havoc upon the enemy in the days just prior to a war by destroying infrastructure, command and control centers, and weapons systems, as well as assassinating or snatching high ranking military and diplomatic officials. When the East Berlin team wasn’t training, they often took “freelance” jobs working for the KGB, or in Überhof’s case, theMinisterium für Statessicherheit .

  It was while working for the Stasi that Überhof had first come to Helmut Draegar’s attention. The man was an exceptional operative, and on assignment after assignment had never let Draegar down. In fact, it was Überhof who had saved Draegar’s life.

  Even though it was fifteen years ago when one of Draegar’s former contacts had popped up, claiming to have “valuable” information for him, it still felt like yesterday. Because Draegar had been suspicious, they chose to meet at the remains of an old monastery on the outskirts of the city. It was raining that night and there were a million other places Draegar would have rather been, but again, his contact had always been reliable and had always been able to get his hands on extremely sensitive material. If nothing else, Draegar at least needed to see what he had.

  When the man arrived, he led Draegar deep into the ruined church where he claimed to have hidden a very special package. Draegar was reluctant, but proceeded nevertheless and followed the man down a set of worn stone steps into a rotted and moldy crypt. When Draegar ducked beneath the mortised archway and entered the decayed undercroft, he knew that his premonition had been correct. It was an ambush. Standing in the center of the burial chamber, with his gun pointed at him, was Gary Lawlor.

  Draegar knew why he was there. He had killed Lawlor’s wife, and the man had come for revenge. There was no use even asking his would-be executioner how he had uncovered him as the driver in the hit and run. Someone had given him up; who, though, he had no idea. He turned to look at his once reliable contact, but the man refused to look him in the eye. There were no allegiances when it came to the information trade. Lawlor handed the man an envelope and after checking its contents, the man turned and disappeared up the crumbling crypt stairs.

  Draegar did not even attempt to beg for his life. He may have entered the monastery alone, but he did so wearing a wire. He chose his words carefully, deliberately, conveying his exact position and situation in such a way that Lawlor would not take notice, but his team would. Hearing the exchange, it was only a matter of time before his backup would arrive.

  What Draegar didn’t know was that the thick walls of the underground burial vault were impeding the signal from his wireless transmitter. That was precisely why Lawlor had chosen it. He had thought that Draegar might bring backup, but had given the professional operative credit enough to know that he would keep them out of sight. The only way he would have been able to communicate with them was via radio. By obstructing his transmission, Gary was given enough time to do what he had to do—and he didn’t waste a single minute of it.

  After instructing Draegar to remove his gun, drop it on the ground, and kick it over to him, Lawlor ordered him to strip. That was when he found the wire. There was no time to go through Draegar’s pockets, and Lawlor didn’t want to risk frisking him. Almost instantly, Draegar began shaking from the cold.

  Gary steered him to the far end of the vault, past door after rusted ancient iron door protecting small burial alcoves that had long since been looted, to a stone wall beneath a large iron ring where he made him sit. Though Lawlor had tested the ring to make sure it absolutely could not be pulled loose, he had underestimated the bulk of his prisoner’s thick arms and shoulders. It would be impossible to run the handcuffs through the ring and secure both of the man’s wrists. He’d only be able to secure one. With time running out, Gary decided to improvise.

  Throwing the handcuffs to Draegar, he instructed the man to attach one of the bracelets to his left wrist and then hold his left arm above his head.

  “Fuck you. Just shoot me and get it over with,” Draegar had responded.

  Lawlor was tempted, but it wasn’t the type of ending he had envisioned. Carefully, he approached and with his pistol cocked and pressed against Draegar’s forehead, he shackled the man’s left wrist and attached it to the iron ring. Though he would have liked nothing more than to pistol whip his wife’s killer, Lawlor restrained himself. He didn’t want to risk Draegar losing consciousness. He needed him awake for the revenge he had planned.

  With his free hand, Lawlor removed a roll of duct tape from his coat and used his teeth to unravel a long section, which he wrapped several times tightly around the Draegar’s mouth, completely gagging him.

  His prisoner now secure, Gary set his pistol down on a nearby sarcophagus and picked up a large piece of dislodged masonry. It was about the size of a concrete cinder block and he brought it down in one crushing blow upon Draegar
’s left ankle. The Stasi agent howled in pain as his bones splintered and popped, but his cries were effectively muffled by the layers of duct tape.

  Though he would have loved to have savored the moment further, Lawlor had no time. He quickly picked the block back up and repeated the hobbling treatment on Draegar’s right side. There was no way the man could stand at this point, so escape was futile. All he could do was watch the last minutes of his life, quite literally tick away until he died.

  “My wife,” said Gary, as he emptied the contents of three duffle bags and assembled them in piles just out of Draegar’s reach, “had no idea her life was about to end. I guess in that respect, she was fortunate. You, on the other hand, are not going to be granted that sort of mercy.”

  Draegar stared at the brick sized parcels wrapped in what looked like brown wax paper and knew exactly what they were—cakes of C4.Where the fuck is the backup team? Did Lawlor actually manage to take them out? Draegar began to panic.

  Gary was pleased to see the look of fear in the man’s eyes. He’d been prepared for his wife’s killer to maintain an icy calm all the way to the end and not grant him any added satisfaction. This sudden change in his demeanor was a pleasant bonus.

  Lawlor rigged the charges and in front of each neat little stack of plastique placed glass jars of road tacks, essentially overgrown children’s jacks with their points filed down into razor-sharp spikes. Though the explosion alone was enough to kill the man, Gary wanted to add a little something extra for Draegar. Hopefully, the thought of the shrapnel tearing through his body would add another layer to the man’s fear.

  His work complete, Lawlor activated the timer and placed a large, red LED display on top of one of the piles so Draegar could watch the last minutes and seconds of his life melt away.