by Brad Thor
The job might have been a bit more palatable if it afforded him time to pursue any semblance of a personal life. Most of his buddies, even his former teammates from the SEALs, were pretty much married off and starting families. Though he didn’t necessarily want to start one of his own tomorrow, it would be nice to see a point in his not-too-distant future where his career would allow him to. Of course, that presupposed finding a woman who would want to start one with him as well. Most, he found, were unable to put up with the demands of his job, which regularly sounded the death knell in his burgeoning relationships. There’d only been one woman he’d ever been able to see himself actually making a full go of it with. She was even prepared to uproot her life and move to DC to be with him, but in the end, the demands of his job had made it impossible.
The bright side of everything, if you wanted to call it that, was that if he decided to go through with leaving government service, he was not at a loss for job offers from the private sector. In fact there was one job in particular Harvath was thinking very seriously about taking—an instructor position with a world-renowned tactical training center in Colorado called Valhalla. What haunted him, though, was the fear that once he entered the private sector he would no longer be able to look in the mirror and still consider himself a patriot.
That said, it was still a decision he had to make and he knew that it would undoubtedly weigh heavily on his mind over the upcoming holiday weekend.
Rounding a bend in the otherwise deserted country lane, Harvath’s attention was drawn to more pressing matters as his vehicle was met by a police roadblock.
A smile began to metastasize across Sayed Jamal’s face. The terrorist clearly saw his salvation at hand. No matter who Scot Harvath was and what American agency he worked for, he could not legally take him from Canada against his will. This was about to end up very badly for the United States. The American had been a fool to ever remove him from the trunk. Had he left him there, the man very likely could have driven straight across the border without ever being searched. Sayed knew that it was only a matter of moments now before he would be free and then he would tell every reporter he could find about his terrible ordeal at the hands of the imperialist Americans.
Slowly approaching the roadblock, Harvath kept his cool.
“Can I see your license and registration, please?” asked a machine gun–toting officer in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform when Harvath rolled down his window.
Harvath made a show of patting his pockets and replied, “I was so excited about coming to Canada I must have forgotten to bring them.”
The officer looked around the vehicle and then said, “We get that a lot. Who is your passenger?”
“Help me!” screamed Jamal, sensing this was the only chance he was going to get at freedom. “I have been taken against my—” he continued, but was cut off when Harvath slammed his elbow into the man’s mouth.
“Don’t mind him,” said Harvath, well aware that the Royal Mounted Police not only didn’t carry machine guns, but also didn’t patrol Canada’s borders. “He’s just a little moody. It’s his time of the month.”
“Yeah,” replied the officer. “I can see the tampons.”
“I think he’s just nervous about crossing into the States.”
“I would be too,” said the CSIS agent posing as a Mountie. He then waved for the roadblock vehicles to clear the road and added, “Especially if I’d been responsible for killing and wounding all those American military personnel.”
Jamal’s bloodied face went pale. The Canadians were in on it.
“We just wanted to make sure you got your man,” said the agent. “Anything else about the operation we should know?”
“You’ll want a team to sweep his apartment. He’s got a lot of bombmaking materials in there, but other than that, it was pretty smooth.”
“Okay, then,” said the man as he tapped the roof of Harvath’s car. “Thank you for visiting Canada. Have a safe trip home.”
“We will,” said Harvath, smiling and giving a little wave as he drove away.
Two kilometers later they came to a small clearing, and Harvath exited the car. Checking their GPS coordinates on his Suunto, he activated the preplanned-route feature, grabbed the Styrofoam cooler from the backseat, and pulled Jamal out of the vehicle, shoving him toward the woods.
Less than half a klick in, they heard a branch snap and Harvath knew they weren’t alone. As he looked over his left shoulder, he saw a small team of heavily armed men decked out in digital camouflage materialize from among the trees.
“Welcome to the United States,” said one of the men. “Do you have anything to declare?”
“Yes I do,” replied Harvath as he offered up Jamal and the cooler with the frozen laptop. “Canada’s a fabulous country. Great beer, great people, and they have just started a wonderful terrorist lending program.”
The team drove Harvath and Jamal out of the woods to the small town of Rouses Point, New York, where the operation had kicked off and where Harvath’s car was waiting.
Eight
After a short debrief, a man named Mike Jaffe, who was the lead Joint Terrorism Task Force agent, asked, “So where to now? You going back to DC for the Fourth of July weekend?”
Harvath shook his head. “I’m stopping in New York City to see an old friend who just got back from Afghanistan.”
The man smiled and asked, “Where are you going to watch the fireworks from?”
“Probably a bar stool.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” said Jaffe, the pronounced New York accent unmistakable in his voice. “Let me tell you something. The best place to watch them is in Brooklyn on Furman Avenue between Atlantic and Cadman Plaza.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“And if you’re hungry afterwards, go to Lundy Brothers on Emmons Avenue for a real bowl of New York red. Don’t miss their egg cream either. They throw in a pretzel for a swizzle stick.”
Harvath laughed and shook his head. He had no idea what a bowl of New York red was, much less why it was important that he search out a “real” one. And he’d never had an egg cream in his life. But that was New Yorkers for you. The sun rose and set by their city. Anyplace else in the world was only second best.
“You getting all this?” asked the intense, silver-haired Jaffe, sensing Harvath’s mind was wandering. “Or do you want me to write it down for you?”
“I think I got it,” replied Harvath. “What about you guys? A weekend in the Catskills before running our pal down to sunny Guantánamo Bay?”
Jaffe laughed. “Actually, we were thinking about stapling all of his indictments to him and stringing him up outside Fort Drum. We figured we could sell tickets at a buck a whack and tell the soldiers he was a Muslim piñata.”
Harvath liked the JTTF agent’s sense of humor. “You’d probably make a fortune,” he responded, knowing that New York’s Fort Drum was the home of the 10th Mountain Division Light Infantry and that they’d lost more than their fair share of people in Iraq, especially to IEDs.
“But unfortunately, we don’t have time for that,” replied Jaffe. “The Bureau wants him down at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan today for his initial processing. After that, though, he’ll be somebody else’s problem.”
Harvath didn’t envy the people who would have to spend the holiday weekend away from their families and friends while they interrogated Sayed Jamal, but that was how the business worked and Harvath knew it all too well. America couldn’t afford to take a day off from its fight on terrorism, not even on the anniversary of its independence. The bad guys were always working;always probing for another soft spot they could exploit, and America had to remain one step ahead.
As Harvath watched Jaffe walk away to join his men, he lamented the immutable fact that no matter how hard it tried, the United States would never be able to be on top of everything. This time, just like so many times before, they’d gotten lucky. That was it. Though they’d pulled a r
ather big player off the field, there were innumerable second-stringers standing in the shadows ready to take his place.
For all of the setbacks the enemy had supposedly suffered, their roster of fresh bodies seemed to roll on without end.
And the one unspoken truth that every American involved in the war on terror knew was that it wasn’t a matter of if the terrorists would hit us again, it was only a matter of when.
Harvath prayed that he would never see that day, because he knew that when it came, it would make 9/11 look like choir practice.
Nine
NEW YORK CITY
The drive from Rouses Point to Manhattan normally took five and a half hours, but with the help of a thermos full of coffee, a heavy foot, and George Clinton and Parliament, Harvath made it in four.
With the sunroof open, the windows rolled down, and “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” pumping from the speakers of his black Chevy TrailBlazer, Harvath rumbled across the George Washington Bridge toward Manhattan a little after 2:00 PM. As he took in the skyline and watched the tidal wave of fleeing holiday traffic, the weather couldn’t have been better—low eighties, bright sunshine, and only a trace of humidity. It was going to be a perfect weekend.
An hour outside the city, Harvath had phoned his pal, recently retired Delta Force operative Robert Herrington—better known to his friends as “Bullet Bob”—and established a rendezvous point for their meeting.
Because Bob was still wrapping things up at the Manhattan VA, they decided to meet at one of Harvath’s favorite pubs near Times Square called the Pig & Whistle, where they’d begin the first leg of their bar-hopping Alcoholics Unanimous meeting.
After driving around the neighborhood for twenty minutes, Harvath settled on the cheapest garage he had seen, agreed to hand over his first born, three pints of blood, and a vital organ to be named at a later date as payment, and then walked four blocks over to the Pig.
Inside, the staff and the customers were glued to TV sets. Harvath grabbed a seat at the bar, ordered a pint of Bare Knuckle Stout, and tried to piece together what was happening.
The stations were covering a hostage standoff at a grade school in the Bronx. What a way to start the Fourth of July weekend, thought Harvath as he ordered a late lunch and tried to forget about the world and its problems for a while.
His mind drifted to the first time he and Bob Herrington had met. They’d been assigned to a unique Joint Special Operations program training the special forces of an allied South American country. The soldiers’ final task at the end of the training was to show off their new skills in a series of high-end exercises culminating with them assembling on a mountain plateau where the country’s president, its top generals, and other assorted VIPs were sitting in a reviewing stand. The catch was that it had to be done in a very tight time frame.
Though the soldiers were performing better than any of their American instructors thought they would, once they hit the run up the steep mountain face, it was obvious they weren’t going to make it up to the parade ground by the specified time. So what did Bob do? Once they arrived at the base of the mountain and were out of sight of the reviewing stand, he gathered up all the soldiers’ rifles, strapped them to his pack, and ran ahead of them.
For his part, Harvath couldn’t understand what Herrington was doing. Just below the plateau, he stopped and then handed a rifle to each one of the soldiers as they passed. Up on the parade ground, there were several moments of confusion as the soldiers traded rifles back and forth until each was with its rightful owner. As Harvath walked to the edge of the parade ground, he saw Bob smiling, and it was at that moment that he learned his greatest lesson about leadership—the only thing that matters is that your team achieve its objective together. How that happens is immaterial as long as you all cross the finish line together.
Bob could have taken credit for the soldiers’ success, but that wasn’t his style. He was happy just to see them succeed. Harvath had liked Bob from the minute he met him, but on that dusty parade ground in South America, he had developed a real respect for him and that respect had turned into a friendship that transcended the years and more than a few assignments together. In fact, Harvath often joked that Bob had become the older brother he never wanted.
Forty-five minutes later, Harvath was about to order another beer, when Bullet Bob materialized out of thin air and slapped a Joint Special Operations Task Force coin down on the bar. The rule was that if you and a colleague had both been given the same coin for an operation or a team you’d been on and you didn’t have your coin with you, you were responsible for buying the round. If you did have it, then the man who issued the challenge had to pick up that round. Harvath was way ahead of his old friend. Reaching down, he lifted his cocktail napkin and revealed his coin.
After asking if there was any Louis XIII Cognac in the house, Harvath shook his buddy’s hand. “Nice try, my friend,” he said, careful of Bob’s injured shoulder.
“You win some, you lose some,” replied Herrington, who was at least three inches taller than Harvath and a bit broader in the chest. His similarly colored brown hair was cut neat, but he still sported his go native Afghanistan beard. His narrow green eyes took in everybody and everything in the room. Turning to the bartender, Herrington said, “Bring us another round of whatever he’s drinking and make mine a double.”
“He’s having a pint of stout, love,” the Irish barkeep said flirtatiously.
Bob smiled his most charming smile and replied, “Then bring me two of them. I don’t like the fact that this guy’s got a head start on me.”
The woman rolled her eyes as she went in search of three new glasses.
“I think she likes you,” said Harvath once the woman was out of earshot.
“Hearts and minds. It’s what I’m all about.”
Harvath laughed. It was nice to see Bob in reasonably good spirits. Under the smile and devil-may-care attitude, though, he knew the man was not taking his forced retirement well. That was a big part of why Harvath was spending the Fourth of July weekend in New York City.
The other part was because at present, he didn’t have a solid relationship with anyone worth spending the weekend with. The only woman Harvath could have seen himself with was otherwise engaged, quite literally, and on her way to marrying someone else.
As if he could read minds, Bob wasted no time in asking, “So, how’s Meg?”
Harvath knew the subject was bound to come up. Both he and Bob had been part of a hostage rescue team that had freed Meg Cassidy from a hijacked airliner just a few years prior. Because Meg had been the only one to see the key hijacker’s face, she had been recruited to help track and ID him for termination. A good part of her training for the assignment had taken place behind the fence, as it was known, with Bob and several of his colleagues at the Delta Force compound at Fort Bragg. “This time next year, you and I’ll probably be attending her wedding,” said Harvath.
“You’ve gotta be one of the dumbest people I’ve ever met, you know that?”
“Good to see you too, Robert,” replied Harvath as the bartender returned with their beers and set one in front of Harvath and two in front of Bob.
After she walked away to take care of another customer, Bob said, “Meg Cassidy is hands down the best woman I’ve ever seen you with and you let her slip right through your fingers.”
“It’s complicated.”
“She’s a woman,” said Bob as he took a sip of his stout and let his response hang in the air between them. “They’re always complicated.”
It was a subject Harvath really had no desire to get into. “It’s over, okay?”
“It’s okay with me if it’s okay with you.”
“It’s okay with me,” said Harvath centering his beer on its coaster.
“So who are you dating now?” asked Bob.
“Nobody.”
Herrington smiled, “So then you’re not really okay and its not really over, is it?”
“G
ive me a break, would you?”
“At least tell me you’re gay. SEAL or no SEAL, you were in the Navy, after all. Being gay comes with the territory for you squids. What do they say? When you’re under way, gay is okay?”
“Fuck you,” replied Harvath, who then added, “You know if at any point you want to pull that excessively large nose of yours out of my personal life, I’d be more than happy to discuss what happened in Afghanistan.”
This time, it was Bob’s turn to be silent. Though he hadn’t meant to, Harvath had dragged a piece of sandpaper over a very raw nerve.
When Herrington finally spoke he said, “How many men did you lose when the president was kidnapped?”
“Too many.”
“Yeah,” said Bob, nodding his head knowingly. “It sucks. But you know what can be worse?”
Harvath shook his head.
“Having men under your command seriously maimed and in constant pain. That’s worse than seeing them die. At least when they’re dead, they’re not in anguish anymore.”
Harvath signaled the bartender to bring him another round and said, “What happened in Afghanistan?”
Bob waited until Harvath had his beer and after a little more prodding responded, “We were tasked with taking down a target near Herat. Somehow, they must have known we were coming, because they hit us first and hit us hard—real hard.”
“We had a guy attached to our unit who’d messed up his ankle and I was helping hump his load. I should have seen that ambush coming, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t on point. I was the third guy in the column, making my way back up to the lead when it happened. The two guys in front got it real bad. I got off easy compared to them, but it doesn’t matter. Because of me, all three of us were handed medical retirements.”