Brad Thor - Full Black

“He what?”

Riley shoved Harvath aside and laid her fingers on Mansoor’s carotid. She then leaned her ear over his mouth. “I think I can feel a breath.”

Tilting the prisoner’s head back, she pinched his nose, placed a CPR barrier over his mouth, and delivered a breath of air. She waited for several seconds and then repeated the process two more times until he began breathing on his own.

“Is he alive?” asked Harvath.

“Barely,” replied Riley. “We need to get him warm and get an IV started.”

Bachmann wrapped Mansoor with the blanket Harvath had brought with him and then went to the farmhouse to gather more.

Harvath handed Riley the items she requested from her medical bag and then rigged up a makeshift IV stand.

Once she had the fluids running into the young Muslim’s arm, Harvath asked, “How long until he’s ready to be interrogated again?”

Riley looked up at him. He couldn’t tell if what he was seeing on her face was admiration or disgust. He figured it was probably a mixture of both. “You’ve got to be one of the luckiest people I’ve ever met. Don’t push it.”

Harvath had often said it was better to be lucky than good, but he didn’t offer that sentiment to her. “I need to know how soon I can start asking him questions again.”

Riley shook her head. “First he’s got to regain consciousness.”

“How long?” Harvath insisted.

“It’s indefinite at this point. He probably has some sort of underlying heart condition. I think that’s why he coded. He could also have brain damage now. He’s going to need some tests; tests we can’t conduct where we’re supposed to be going. We’re going to need access to a friendly hospital.”

Harvath knew what she meant by a “friendly” hospital. They had planned for the possibility that Mansoor might get injured in the car crash. Whether that happened or not, he was going to be drugged up and flown out of Sweden on a Sentinel Medevac jet. All the paperwork was in order and an impeccable passport had been created for him. They’d be portraying him as the son of a wealthy Arab who’d had a stroke and was being flown back to the UAE for emergency medical treatment. Not even the most rigorous of authorities would have any reason to suspect the party and their patient were anything other than who they said they were.

By the time Mansoor awoke from his drug-induced stupor, the flight plan would have been refiled for Jordan and he would find himself in one of the multiple “extraordinary rendition” black interrogation/detention sites still in operation despite the U.S. government’s public proclamations to the contrary.

Based on the cyber jihadist’s enhanced medical needs, though, they were probably going to have to reevaluate which host country’s site they were going to use. Carlton and the DoD would make the final call.

The members of the Uppsala cell were another matter. Harvath had decided it would be foolish to put all of his eggs in one basket. He wanted Mansoor out of the country as quickly as possible. He had developed another plan for getting the safe house terrorists out of the country, though he still had no idea at the moment how many there were.

First things first. “How long until he can be ready for transport?” asked Harvath as he gestured at Mansoor.

Riley glanced at her patient and again shook her head. “At this point, I don’t even want to try to move him to the farmhouse. That said, the plane has a lot of the medical equipment he’s going to need, so as soon as he is ready to be moved, I think we should move him.”

Getting Mansoor to the airfield was another shell game, which would be played out via a private ambulance service from Stockholm willing to make the drive up to Uppsala. Looking at the man lying on the floor, Harvath wondered if he’d even survive the trip to the airport. Fortunately, that wasn’t his problem. It was Riley’s. He had other problems.

The biggest among them was deciding how long to leave Sean Chase in place and when to take down the Uppsala cell. With Riley now tied up with overseeing Mansoor, Harvath was going to have to shift to his contingency plan. He didn’t like it, but they had all known that it was a possible outcome. The team, and more important Harvath, would have to do without her.

That meant that things were about to get much more dangerous.

The two brothers who picked Chase up at the soccer field did not speak. They didn’t ask about his medical condition, nor did they offer him any food or water. They simply drove him to an abandoned garage on the outskirts of Uppsala and kept an eye on him while they all waited.

What they were waiting for, Chase wasn’t exactly sure, but he had an idea. More than likely, the man he had spoken to over the phone, the man he assumed was in charge of the cell, was checking out his story about the accident.

When it was time to pray, the two men let Chase pray alongside them, but he stopped when the wound on his head opened up and started bleeding again.

Fairly confident of how the authentic Mansoor Aleem would behave, he made sure to make a real pain in the ass out of himself. He lectured his two guards about Islamic doctrine and their duty to see to his well-being.

He harangued them so badly that one of the men threatened to kill him. Eventually, he wore them down, and one of them left to purchase some items he had asked for.

The man came back twenty minutes later with energy drinks, candy bars, and first-aid supplies. They allowed Chase to use the garage’s filthy, foul-smelling bathroom to clean himself up and tend to his wounds. He did the best he could and then came out and choked down some nourishment. He hated energy drinks and he wasn’t all that big on candy bars, but that was the quintessential IT/hacker diet and it was important that he looked the part, right down to the smallest detail, as the smallest details often played the biggest part in making or breaking a cover.

If he had wanted to, Chase could have taken out both in quick succession. There were multiple items lying around the old garage that could have been used as weapons. In the bathroom, he had found a decent strip of metal that he had folded to about four inches long. It was rusting, yet had a sharp enough point that it could be used as a shiv. He wrapped the handle portion of the weapon with plumber’s tape he’d found around one of the pipes beneath the sink.

He’d been processing every single nuanced, nonverbal cue the two men had been giving off since they had picked him up. He knew all too well what he could end up having to do and how far he might have to go and he was getting himself all jacked up over it. He had to get it under control.

Taking a look in the mirror, he took a deep breath and told himself to relax, everything was cool. All that nervousness was just his limbic system. A student of Hagakure, he’d meditated extensively on death. He’d done so right before this operation. It was the same before every operation. Death was inevitable. He imagined the worst for himself daily. Whatever was going to happen, was going to happen. That didn’t mean, though, that he wouldn’t take as many of them with him as possible. Nevertheless, he decided to abandon the homemade weapon.

While he probably could have concealed it in his pocket, if it had been discovered, it would have created no end of problems for him. Even the most paranoid of computer geeks wasn’t going to be fashioning his own shivs.

In the gray half-light that spilled in from the dirty glass skylights above, Chase studied the men who’d been charged with babysitting him. If he had to, he could take them, but there was a lot that could go wrong, and if something did go wrong, he had no doubt either of the men would kill him without hesitation.