Brad Thor - Full Black

Each of the assaulters had brought a change of clothes, so Harvath put together a surveillance roster-who would go, when he would go, and what his ruse would be while passing the safe house so that none of them would draw undue attention.

They had an additional vehicle parked a block away from the truck, and Harvath decided they would use it as well, but sparingly. If any of the members of the cell saw the same vehicle go by twice, especially one that wasn’t a regular in the neighborhood, they might get spooked and do something stupid.

With all the rotations decided upon, all they could do was wait. The ball was now in Chase’s court.

Chase had zeroed in on the cell leader the moment he’d been shown into the apartment. Mustafa Karami was a slight man who looked much older than the other members. He sported a patchy beard, a slim nose, and a pair of deeply set, dark eyes.

He radiated a controlled, simmering anger that seemed ready to erupt at any moment. He was different from most of the jihadists Chase had come across. Not unique, just different. Most of them were not very bright, and they lacked self-control. That wasn’t Karami, though. He was the picture of self-control. He was also very intelligent. Chase could tell that just from one look at his face. That’s what made him different.

As the man embraced and kissed him on both cheeks, Chase sensed something else. This was a man who would slash your throat at a moment’s notice if he felt it necessary. He would feel no remorse about it either. He’d probably sit there and drink his chai as he watched you bleed out on the floor. Between Karami and Sabah, his number two, Chase had a lot to be concerned about.

The other cell members in the apartment were like the two men who had picked him up at the soccer field and had taken him to the garage. They were either muscle or simply jihadist cannon fodder. None of them were exceptionally intelligent nor were they particularly talented. He doubted they’d be of any intelligence value whatsoever.

After welcoming him, Karami sat Chase down and asked the huge man named Sabah to fetch tea. He made small talk as was customary and when Sabah returned with a tray, he poured the tea and offered Chase a snack. There were bowls of dates, figs, and nuts. Chase thanked him and helped himself.

“Your uncle was a wonderful soldier of Allah. He is in Paradise now.”

“Masha’Allah,” Chase replied. God has willed it.

“It was your uncle’s desire that if anything happened to him, we take care of you.”

Chase shrugged and took a sip of his tea. It was important that he maintain his aloof, disinterested hacker attitude.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

Karami was testing him as Sabah had. The last time Chase had seen Aazim Aleem was when pieces of him had been blown all over a Yemeni sidewalk, but he couldn’t exactly share that. He also couldn’t exactly share how he and Aazim had first met.

Chase had spent three years infiltrating Aazim Aleem’s terrorist network. He had worked his way right into a position next to a man named Marwan Jarrah, who was helping coordinate Aazim’s attack plans for the United States. Then Harvath showed up, Jarrah was gunned down, and Aazim disappeared, but not before several attacks in Chicago were launched and scores of people were killed.

These attacks had come on the heels of a wave of attacks in Europe targeting American tourists. Aazim had built a very sophisticated network. What bothered the CIA was that many of his American cells were believed to still be in place. Nobody knew who they were, much less where they were hiding and what they had planned.

Chase had met with Aazim only twice. He was the only American operative to have ever done so. The first time had been brief and had taken place while Chase and Jarrah were traveling through Pakistan. The second meeting had happened in Chicago and had been much more substantive. Chase had finally put another piece of the puzzle in place as he discovered that Jarrah was working for Aazim, who controlled the network.

The meeting had taken place in Jarrah’s office and Chase so impressed Aazim that the terrorist mastermind invited him to help execute a nationwide string of attacks beyond what was planned for Chicago. These attacks, it was alleged, would cause airplanes to rain from the sky, radiation and plague to infect American citizens, and multiple other horrors. Aazim despised America and his goal was for it to know terror like it had never known terror before.

And as that prediction began to unfold, a Mumbai-style siege was launched against three commuter train stations in Chicago and many innocent civilians had been killed.

Jarrah had explained to Chase that Aazim had come to Chicago to check on their final preparations. From there he was going to Los Angeles for the next attack, and he wanted Chase to handle an attack planned for New York City.

When one of the Chicago train station plots was interrupted and Jarrah was murdered, the L.A. and New York attacks never materialized. According to chatter, Aazim had fled the United States. That’s when Chase had been charged with hunting him down.

The hunt had led him to Yemen, but Aazim had proven elusive, at least for the CIA. Harvath, somehow, had much better luck. He not only located the terrorist mastermind, he managed to capture him and stuff him in his trunk.

Chase had just been given the keys to Harvath’s car when it was struck by an RPG and Aazim was incinerated.

The reason the CIA had allowed Chase to join Harvath’s current Uppsala operation was that they were bound and determined to uncover the remainder of Aazim’s network, both within the United States and, if possible, the rest of the world.

The powers that be back at Langley didn’t much care for Harvath’s cowboy reputation. They cared even less for Harvath’s boss, Reed Carlton, but they had little choice but to cooperate.

Chase had invested years of his life in infiltrating Aazim’s network. He knew more about it than anyone else in the intelligence world, and he made it crystal clear to Agency brass that if they didn’t sign off on his joining Harvath’s op, he would quit and sign up with the Carlton Group. Either way, he would finish the job he had started.

Chase was a virtual encyclopedia of Aazim Aleem information. British by birth, the terrorist had been a fat man in his late sixties with a long gray beard when he had been shredded in Yemen. But his girth and facial hair were not his most distinguishing features.

That honor belonged to the two stainless steel hooks that he had where his hands should have been. He had traveled to Afghanistan in the eighties to fight in the jihad against the Soviets, and legend had it that Aazim had lost his hands attempting to defuse a land mine near a school. The story was pure propaganda. The jihadist was a bomb maker and had lost them in a premature detonation.

He had been an adept Islamic scholar who had studied at Egypt’s prestigious hotbed of Muslim extremism, Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Known only as the “Mufti of Jihad,” his anonymous writings and audio sermons on violent jihad were famous throughout the Muslim world. Until Chase, no Western intelligence service had ever been able to uncover the Mufti of Jihad’s true identity. Aazim had traveled extensively promoting war against the infidels and the West while collecting a full disability pension back in the United Kingdom.

Since no one really knew who he was until Chase discovered him, the man had traveled freely under his real name. Once he disappeared, Chase went back and studied that travel extensively. It wasn’t hard to put together a trail of tickets and every time his U.K. passport had been scanned. It was how he was able to answer Karami’s question. “I saw him about three months ago,” he replied. “Before he left for Chicago.”