Brad Thor - State Of The Union

Whoever had hung DeWolfe up like a trophy probably wasn’t too far away. He pulled the suppressor from his pocket and screwed it onto the threaded barrel of his H amp;K. Taking careful aim, he put two quick rounds into the hinges of the metal restraints that were pinning the communication expert’s wrists to the wall. Just as he lowered his weapon, someone punched him incredibly hard right in the small of his back. At least that’s what it felt like.

Without even thinking about it, Harvath released the thumb switch of his flashlight, plunging the room back into darkness and began rolling along the floor in the direction he had come. As he did, he could hear the pop of dry wood as a course of bullets from a silenced weapon tracked his progress, tearing up a straight line across the floorboards right at him.

Without the beam from his flashlight Harvath was completely blind, and he rolled hard into something big and sturdy, smacking his head against what he assumed was some sort of table leg. He scrambled to get out of his attacker’s line of fire and knew that the only way the person could be following his movements was with night vision goggles. It made perfect sense. Cut the power and blind your opponent. Bait the trap properly and when he comes to you, killing him will be easier than tipping over drunk Frenchmen at a Beaujolais festival. That plan, though, had one major problem. Scot Harvath was not that easy to kill.

Reaching out to find one of the legs for orientation, Harvath quickly pulled himself beneath the table. Taking a deep breath, he lunged upwards in a squat thrust maneuver flipping the table over and affording himself at least the appearance of better cover. Though his attacker was using a silenced weapon, the wordsilenced did not mean completely devoid of sound and Harvath had developed at least a vague idea of where he was.

He could see only one means of escape. After flipping up the hinged red filter cap from his flashlight, he reached around to the small of his back and pulled the painfully oversized PDA from his jeans. He felt along its smooth surface for the place where the device had deflected the shot and saved his spinal cord from being severed and said a quick word of thanks, then sent the device arcing in the direction of his attacker. When he heard it smash against the far wall, he jumped from behind the table and aimed the 225-lumen power of his SureFire flashlight in the same direction in order to blind his attacker. The white-hot beam sliced through the blackness of the chamber, lighting up the entire far side of the room, but the shooter wasn’t there.The son of a bitch had moved.

Harvath ducked back down behind the table just as one of the uppermost legs splintered into hundreds of ungainly toothpicks. The shot had come from over his right shoulder. The shooter was right behind him! Harvath turned and opened fire as he raced to get out of the open and find a new place to hide, but where the hell could he go? Without turning his flashlight on, he couldn’t see a thing. He needed to formulate another plan, and fast.

Harvath rolled along the ground back over to where he had first seen DeWolfe.There had to be a way out of this. When he found him, DeWolfe was lying on his back trying to catch his breath.

“Are you okay?” whispered Harvath.

DeWolfe nodded his head, slowly.

“Can you sit up on your own?” continued Scot as he disconnected the laser sight from beneath the barrel of his gun.

“Yeah.”

“All right. I’m going to give you my laser sight so you can draw this guy’s fire. Do you think you’re up to that?”

DeWolfe held out his hand for the device.

Harvath smiled. “Good. I figure he’s at about our two o’clock, so when I say ‘go’ I want you to raise that thing above the couch and start shining it over there like we’re to trying to pick him off, okay?”

“What are you going to?”

“I’m going to pick him off, what else? Ready?”

DeWolfe nodded his head.

“Go!” said Harvath as he rolled across the floor.

DeWolfe sat up and started pointing the laser sight as if he were aiming a gun of his own. The shooter went for the bait and immediately fired several rounds into the couch DeWolfe was using for cover.

The muffled spits were enough to give Harvath a lock on the shooter’s location. Harvath depressed the thumb switch of his SureFire and lit the guy up like an inmate going over the wall at San Quentin.

Just as Harvath suspected, his assailant was wearing night vision goggles, but what he hadn’t expected were the man’s superb instincts. Instead of being startled and turning into the beam from Harvath’s flashlight, the man shed his goggles, dropped to the ground and began firing.

Harvath had to roll hard and quick to get out of the line of fire. As he rolled, he got off a series of shots, one of which he was positive had made contact when he heard his opponent groan in pain.

“Gotcha,” coughed Harvath, as he found shelter behind a long bench covered with short metal spikes, the uses for which he couldn’t even begin to fathom.

Smoke was filling the room and it was becoming more difficult to breathe.The fire was getting closer. Harvath worried that if he and DeWolfe didn’t get back down to the second floor soon, they were going to have to find another way out. And with very little clue as to the layout of the building, Scot wasn’t exactly crazy about their chances.He had to do something, but what?

Suddenly, there was what sounded like large pieces of furniture being hurriedly dragged across the floor.Was the shooter creating more cover for himself? Was it some sort of ruse? Harvath didn’t know what to think. The one thing he did know was that his opponent could smell the smoke just as well as he could and was just as aware of how close the fire was getting. At that same moment, something else struck Harvath. If this man had started the fire, he wouldn’t have brought DeWolfe all the way up to the fourth floor without some plan for his own escape.But where would he go? Something Nixie had said about the King George was suddenly echoing in his mind, ‘The entire building is riddled with secret doors and passageways to help certain people sneak in and out during the Cold War.’

Why not?Thought Harvath. If his group had used one of the secret passageways, why couldn’t this person use others? It was possible, but it not only begged the question, how did this person know about the passageways, but also who the hell was he and what did he want?

There was no time for that now. Harvath needed to focus on getting himself and DeWolfe out of the building alive. He felt around himself and found a large cardboard box. Reaching inside, he wasn’t surprised to find what felt like leather cat-o’-nine tails, vinyl masks, and other assorted S amp;M toys, but it was something in the far corner of the box that gave him a new idea. Harvath pulled out a round tin, about the size and weight of a small can of shaving gel. Unscrewing the lid, he knew right away what it was-Vaseline.

The contents didn’t matter as much as the size, shape and heft of the container. Not only was it very similar to a small can of shaving gel, it was also very similar to a flashbang grenade. And sometimes, as Harvath had learned in his counterterrorism training a long time ago, throwing a dud could be better than actually throwing a live device.

Flashbangs, more properly referred to in the industry as NFDDs-Noise Flash Distraction Devices, often required the use of surprise in order to be fully effective. That said, there were three major physiological effects that could not be quickly protected against.

Flashbangs produced an incredibly bright light-approximately two million candela, which even with eyes closed would cause a bleaching of the rhodopsin, the visual purple in the eye, creating the spots and temporary blindness most people have experienced and referred to as theflash bulb effect.