Brad Thor - Full Black

Harvath doubted it. Chase was going to be out of the game for months, if not longer. “Whatever you say, boss.”

“Don’t patronize me, Harvath,” he shot back. “I want you to promise me that you’ll wait.”

“For what?”

“For taking out Karami and Sabah,” said Chase. “I want to be there.”

Harvath understood the man’s desire for revenge. Harvath felt it just as intensely, if not more so. He had learned, though, to keep such things to himself. “Let’s figure out what kind of shape your arm’s in and then we’ll talk.”

Chase held up his left index finger and pointed at Harvath. “I want us to do it together.”

Harvath smiled. The kid was a liar. He just wanted to do it. It had nothing to do with Harvath. He just didn’t want to be left out. “I’m going to go make sure everything is ready. We shove off in five. Okay?”

“Roger that,” replied Chase as he turned to the mirror and tried, with one hand, to straighten the knot Harvath had tied in his tie. Staring at his reflection as he struggled, he couldn’t help but wonder if this was what so many of America’s disabled vets went through. He didn’t like needing somebody else’s help getting dressed.

In fact, it pissed him off and reminded him of the IED videos the jihadists had been laughing at back at their safe house. That only made him angrier.

The Swedish airport authorities stamped the group’s passports and waved them out toward the tarmac where they boarded their waiting aircraft.

Sentinel Medevac was a private company the Carlton Group hired jets from on occasion. Their normal clientele were humanitarian groups and international NGOs. Sentinel was viewed as something akin to the Red Cross, and that was why the Old Man liked working with them. Their planes were an excellent means of covertly moving personnel and equipment in and out of foreign countries.

What Harvath liked about them was that in addition to their fleet of extensive, high-end aircraft, Sentinel’s owner-a successful young doctor out of North Carolina-was a patriot who was more than happy to assist the Old Man and his operators. The doctor always sent the best jets and the galleys were always well stocked.

Normally, Harvath waited until the plane had taken off before fixing himself a drink. Not this time. Losing all those men had been devastating. He walked straight to the back of the plane, dropped a handful of ice cubes into a glass, and poured several fingers of Maker’s Mark.

He was halfway finished with his first drink before the plane had even been cleared for takeoff. When its wheels finally left the ground, he settled back in his seat and tried to make sense of what had happened.

Operationally, they had played their cards very close to their vest. The Old Man had kept the need-to-know circle tight, working long hours and doing several jobs himself. Nevertheless, the operation had been a total failure, worse than Yemen. In Yemen all they had lost was a high-value target. In Uppsala, a high-value target and his second in command had gotten away and five members of the operation’s assault team had been killed.

From a straight scorecard perspective, it had been very, very bad. Coming on the heels of the failed Yemen op only made it worse.

Karami, the cell leader, was a serious player who truly knew what he was doing. Requiring his safe-house to be completely sterile while cell phones were left in a secondary operations center of some sort across the street showed both discipline and intelligence. Picking up on Chase’s signal via the windows and blinds showed an amazing attention to detail. Having prewired the secondary location to detonate showed an ability to think several steps ahead. Harvath and his team had been incredibly lucky to have gotten as close to Karami as they had. It would be very difficult to do so again.

But Uppsala didn’t appear to have failed for the same reason Yemen had. Did Yemen happen because of a leak or was there another reason? Despite how careful he had been, could Harvath have been followed by Aazim Aleem’s people? Would they kill their own man by blowing up the car he was in via an RPG rather than let him be extradited and interrogated by the Americans? It was possible. Anything was possible. Harvath made a mental note to be even more diligent in the future.

It made him think about the whirlwind of events that had just occurred. Technically, as badly as the Uppsala operation had gone, it hadn’t been a total failure. They had Mansoor Aleem in custody and they had successfully inserted Chase into the cell long enough for him to ID its leader and pick up some minor intelligence on some supposed Sheikh from Qatar.

Their newest problem was Chase’s certainty that Karami was about to activate some sort of attack. Harvath had witnessed firsthand Aazim’s previous attacks by his European and Chicago cells. Very few nights went by that Harvath didn’t picture the faces of the screaming children in the Chicago train station who had come so close to being killed. After that kind of trauma, he had no idea how they could ever grow up to lead normal lives. It was incredibly sad.

Sadder still was the number of innocent people who had been killed around the world by Muslim terrorists. People who had been doing nothing more than going about their daily lives. The majority of these victims had been Muslims themselves. In fact, for all the propaganda to the contrary, the biggest killers of Muslims were other Muslims.

If it were up to Harvath, he’d drop all the supporters of a worldwide Islamic caliphate onto an island and let them battle it out. He’d also include all those who supported Islamic charities knowing full well their money was going to finance terrorism. That you weren’t blowing yourself up or hijacking aircraft didn’t mean you weren’t participating in the jihad. There was jihad of the pocketbook as well.

There was also public relations jihad. It was active daily in the American press. Either media figures denied entirely that there was a Muslim terrorism problem, or they tried to play the false moral equivalency card and paint Christian fundamentalists as equally dangerous and prolific in their violence. When asked for examples, they often cite the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, though McVeigh never claimed to be a Christian and never cited the Bible, or any other religious text, for that matter, as his reason for carrying out his horrific act of terrorism. It was amazing how many people believed the disinformation.

Then there were those media figures who actually tried to put a happy face on Muslim extremism and Sharia law under the banner of cultural diversity. Surely the victims of honor killings, and those beaten and killed for not wearing headscarves, for dating men from outside their faith, or for trying to convert to another religion would strongly disagree.

Harvath was stunned at times by how uncommon common sense was. As far as he was concerned, all of the media figures and the politicians who enabled that kind of barbarism could go to the island, too. Better yet, he would have loved to have flown them all over to Waziristan and dropped them off. Anyone who made it back alive could then spout off about anything they wanted. Until they had seen the evil done in the name of that religion and how good Muslims were brutalized by the people of their own faith, he’d rather not hear them opine on the subject.

He’d seen the worst of what was being done in the name of Islam and it needed more attention, not less. For good Muslims to be able to reform their faith and live peacefully with the rest of the world, they needed American media and politicians on their side, not the side of their enemies.

There were times when Harvath wondered why he continued to do what he did. Why defend a country that included many who thought their nation was arrogant and deserved to be humbled and brought low? Why defend these people? Better yet, agree or disagree, why risk everything, including your life, over and over again, for over 300 million people you would never meet?