Brad Thor - Full Black

The team all nodded. “He may still be dressed like this,” continued Harvath, “or they might have made him change clothes. Just remember his face.”

Once again the team nodded as Harvath added, “And don’t forget, you take him down just as hard as you do the others. If you have to Tase him, Tase him. He’s a big boy. He can handle it. The other cell members have to believe he’s one of them. Got it?”

A chorus of “Roger that” swept through the truck and Harvath turned his computer back around and powered it down.

The team went over their satellite footage of the area once more. They discussed points of ingress and egress, as well as plans B, C, and D.

When they had finished, Schiller opened one of the cardboard boxes. He lifted out what looked like two thin plastic briefcases with a shiny, metal scorpion logo in the middle, and handed them to Harvath.

“What are these?” Harvath asked, opening one of them up.

“Stinger Spike Systems.”

It looked like a collapsible metal wall bracket for a makeup mirror, except that it was studded with very sharp, stainless-steel spikes. Harvath had seen law enforcement agencies lay them down across roadways to take out the tires of vehicles in high-speed chases.

“Just in case we need to buy a little more time,” Schiller added.

It was a good idea and Harvath was glad the assault team leader had thought to bring them along.

All that was left to do was to launch the assault. Harvath and Schiller had briefly gone back and forth on the timing. They had debated hitting the safe house just after sunset in hopes of catching the cell members in their Maghrib prayers, but it was a very limited five-to-ten-minute window, and there was no telling exactly when they would start their prayers.

There was also the issue of when a moving truck would legitimately show up to unload. Late afternoon was believable, and though early-evening moves did happen from time to time, they were out of the ordinary and would therefore attract attention. Schiller’s assaulters were already amped up and pulling on the leash. Harvath decided that the team would move now.

First in would be the assaulter Schiller had assigned to cover the back of the building, a former Green Beret named Pat Murphy. Murphy grabbed a small backpack and hopped out of the truck. He would repark the other car and approach through the wooded area behind the apartment complex where he would take up his position.

As he climbed out of the truck, one of the other assaulters leaned out the window and said, “God help us if there’s an Irish bar between here and there.”

Murphy flipped the man the finger, shouldered his pack, and began walking. Harvath watched as he crossed the parking area and disappeared around the corner.

Reaching down into the gym bag, Harvath turned on his radio. Twenty-two minutes later, they heard from Murphy. “Phoenix Seven, in place,” he stated. “Bang a gong.”

That was the all-clear they had been waiting for. It was time to take down the safe house.

Deserted streets always made Harvath nervous. Over his career, he’d been ambushed a handful of times and the scene had always looked the same. People and even animals seemed to be able to sense when something bad was about to happen. More often than not, either the bad guys had told the people to hide inside or the people had noticed the bad guys were up to something and therefore quickly made themselves scarce. Whatever the reason for this block being devoid of any activity, Harvath didn’t care. It just gave him a bad feeling.

“Pretty quiet,” he said as they neared the apartment complex.

“Too quiet,” replied Schiller, who covertly banged on the cabin bulkhead behind him to let his assaulters in back know that they were rolling up on the target.

Harvath scanned the windows and rooftops for any sign of a spotter, but saw nothing. Even so, he felt like there were a thousand sets of eyes on them. “Ten seconds,” he said.

Schiller knocked twice on the wall behind him.

When they arrived in front of the apartment complex, Harvath brought the truck to a stop, put it in park, and turned off the ignition. There was no service entrance. Everything went in and out of the building through the front door. It wasn’t lost on him how exposed they all were out there in the middle of the street. He wanted to get the assaulters into the building as quickly as possible. Then he’d be the only sitting duck out in the open.

He, Schiller, and one other assaulter climbed out of the cab and got to work. Harvath walked around to the back of the truck, extended the ramp, and rolled up the door. Schiller and his assaulter stepped into the lobby of the building. While Schiller pretended to be buzzing up to someone on the intercom system, his assaulter used a lock-pick gun to open the second set of doors. As soon as they were open, he pulled a rubber wedge from his pocket and propped it open.

Schiller followed him inside and called for the elevator. While he waited for it to come down, he pried the glass cover from the fireman’s key box, removed the key, and replaced the cover. When the elevator arrived, he stepped inside and inserted the key. It was now under their control.

The assaulters from the back of the truck had already debused and were stacking boxes on dollies when Schiller and the other man came out to assist them.

Once the dollies were all loaded up, the men disappeared inside with them. Harvath’s job now was to stay with the truck and be the team’s eyes out on the street. He pulled down the rear door, threw the lock, and then walked back up front and climbed into the cab.

Though he wasn’t a smoker, Harvath removed the pack of cigarettes he had purchased, lit one, and hung his arm out the window. It had always been fascinating to him how someone just sitting in a car doing nothing could be suspicious, but the minute you gave him a cigarette and he adopted a casual posture, somehow he became less so. He couldn’t explain why that was, but he’d seen it work enough times that it had become a tactic he liked to employ when he had to hide in plain sight.

The truck’s side mirrors had been angled outward before they departed the parking area to give them the best possible view of the street and the sidewalks on either side. He could even make out the car with the book on its dashboard several car lengths back. Noticing it, he used his free hand to pull the baseball cap he was wearing down a little tighter.

He pretended to fumble with the truck’s radio as he looked out the windshield and studied the windows of the buildings around him. He had yet to shake his feeling that somebody was watching, that something wasn’t right.

He also hated just sitting there. It had been the right decision, but it still didn’t mean he liked it. He wanted to be where the action was, not sitting in a van waiting for everything to go down. Ultimately, being where he was right now had been his call, and it had been the right call. Leadership was not only about taking charge, it was also about giving your team everything they needed to succeed, and then getting out of their way. It meant knowing when you should be the first person charging through a door and when you should stand down and let someone else do it.

Harvath had the makings of a good leader, and at some point, way in the distant future, that was going to be important, because he couldn’t dance on the pointy tip of the spear forever. Eventually, his reaction times were going to slow. When that happened, he was going to have to come to terms with the high-speed life he had lived since his late teens. Time catches up with everyone at some point. The secret lay in knowing when to dial back your lifestyle. Now, though, wasn’t the time. Harvath was in the best physical and mental condition of his life and there was no end of bad guys that needed to be dealt with.