Brad Thor - Full Black

Chase hated tobacco, flavorful or otherwise. But the men were making a new overture toward him and he was determined to take advantage of it. “Of course,” he said.

The man with the tongs used them to withdraw a small piece of coal from a paper bag near the TV. Holding his lighter underneath, he heated the coal until it began to glow and then placed it on the screen above the fruit-flavored tobacco, or shisha. Chase was offered the honor of smoking first.

The hose was covered in brightly colored braided silk. Chase placed the plastic tip between his lips and breathed in. The water inside the pipe gurgled as the smoke was cooled and fed into the hose.

Chase took a deep drag and allowed the smoke to completely fill his lungs. He held it for a moment and then, instead of allowing it to slowly escape through his mouth or nostrils, he encouraged his coughing response and began hacking.

The four jihadists roared with laughter. The newcomer was obviously a neophyte and had no experience with a hookah. Instead of telling the truth, he had lied to protect his manliness.

Still hacking, Chase struggled to stand. He continued coughing as he placed his hands on his thighs and fought to breathe. The cannon fodder laughed as if they were watching the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

Being the butt of the joke didn’t bother Chase. In fact, that’s exactly why he’d spurred on the coughing fit. Shuffling toward the window, he kept coughing as the men kept laughing. In fact, it wasn’t until he had his hand on the blinds that they realized what he was up to.

“Don’t,” said one of the men who could barely stop laughing long enough to get the word out.

“Karami will cut your hands off,” said another.

A third added, “He’ll cut all our hands off,” as the men began laughing even harder.

“I can’t breathe,” said Chase, who was pretending to be in between coughing fits. He knew the men were serious about his not opening the window and would probably try to physically restrain him if they had to. But he had no intention of opening it. He just wanted a peek outside and would then immediately abandon the window, appearing to heed his colleagues’ warnings.

As he pulled back the edge of the blinds, Chase’s cough immediately stopped. The moving van was already outside, but it wasn’t in the right place. Harvath and the assault team had made a mistake. They were hitting the building across the street.

And though it was difficult to tell for sure, it looked as if someone had adjusted the windows and blinds of an apartment across the street, exactly the way he had.

As Harvath was envisioning the assault team entering the safe house, the entire third floor of the apartment complex exploded. The shock wave tilted the moving truck up onto two wheels and almost knocked it completely over onto its side. Shards of glass rained down on the street as columns of boiling fire leaped out of the third-story windows and rolled up into the sky.

Stunned, Harvath snatched up his radio and tried to hail the members of the team, but his ears were ringing so badly that, even with the volume all the way up, he wouldn’t have been able to hear anything. It was as if Yemen were replaying itself all over again. The terrorists must have had the whole third floor wired with explosives.

Pulling his plate carrier from the bag, he threw it over his head and then snatched up his MP7. Opening the door, Harvath leaped out of the truck and bolted into the building. It was exactly what he had been trained not to do. Even if the explosion was a booby-trap rigged to the front door, or had been set off by the terrorists inside when they realized they had been compromised, there could still be a secondary device, a device meant to kill any rescuers who then rushed into the building. That was all true, but Harvath didn’t care. Those were his men up there. If any of them were alive, he was going to get them out.

As Harvath charged up the stairs three at a time, the temperature soared and thick, black smoke filled the air. It was nearly impossible to breathe. Pulling his T-shirt up from beneath the vest and over his mouth and nose, he exposed the flesh of his midsection. It felt as if the surface of his skin was being blasted with a blowtorch. He was starting to burn, but he pushed it from his mind.

The deafening roar of the fire grew as he neared the third floor. Coming up to the last flight of stairs, he saw that the blast had blown the metal fire door completely off its hinges and it was now blocking the stairwell.

Harvath reached for the railing to leap over it, but the railing was so hot that he snatched his hand right back.

Striking out with the heel of his boot, Harvath kicked at the door until it dislodged and he shoved it down the stairs behind him. He tried to crouch beneath the smoke, but it was so heavy, so thick, and so voluminous that there was just no bottom to it. Hoping to get some sort of break once he actually got into the hallway, he bent his head and charged the rest of the way up to the landing.

He could feel the hair being singed off his arms as he lunged through the empty door frame and into the hall. There was debris everywhere. Harvath was going to shout, to see if there were any survivors and if they could hear him, but he couldn’t get enough oxygen into his lungs. The heat was unbearable.

The bright orange blaze burned hotter and the flames leaped higher. Harvath knew he should get out. There was no way that anyone could have survived that explosion. But Chase and Schiller and the rest of the team were his responsibility. If only one of them was still alive, Harvath needed to find him, so he pushed deeper into the burning hallway.

He had gone no further than a few steps when there was an earsplitting crack as a larger section of the floor above came pancaking down.

With visibility next to zero, Harvath would have been crushed had it not been for a hand that reached out, grabbed him by the drag handle of his plate carrier, and yanked him into the stairwell.

“We’ve got to get out!” yelled Pat Murphy who had burst into the building from the back.

“No,” Harvath shot back.

“They’re all dead. Let’s go.”

“We don’t know they’re dead.”

“They’re dead,” Murphy insisted as he dragged Harvath away from the landing.

After the first couple of steps, Harvath began moving on his own. When they hit the ground floor and exited the lobby, a crowd had already formed in the street. The people blanched when they saw the two ash-and-soot-covered men exit the building carrying weapons.

Someone noticed that they were wearing Swedish Security Service plate carriers and started to ask Murphy questions in Swedish. The ex-Green Beret ignored him.

“The other car is about two hundred meters behind the woods,” said Murphy, leaning in so Harvath could hear him, but keeping his voice low enough that the onlookers couldn’t discern that he was speaking English. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Harvath had no choice but to agree. There was nothing they could do here. If they stayed, they’d be arrested and an already tragic situation would be made much worse.

Harvath nodded at Murphy, and the two set off for the back of the building, the woods, and the car parked just beyond. Neither the truck nor the car with the book on the dashboard could be traced back to them, so Harvath didn’t think twice about abandoning them. The key now was to get out of the country as quickly as possible.

They were about to swing around the side of the burning apartment complex and disappear, when there was the sound of breaking glass and screams from the crowd of onlookers.

Harvath spun just in time to see a man falling backward out of a fourth-story window of a building across the street.