Brad Thor - State Of The Union

Then there was the noise, right around 174 decibels, a thunderous roar that was just below the threshold of damage to the eardrum, but which was still likely to produce a startle reflex even in those expecting the concussion.

Finally, there was the pressure wave. The atmospheric pressure inside a room was raised so that it compressed the body, causing a level of severe uneasiness.

For those who were prepared for it, or had trained extensively in their presence, flashbangs were not a big deal, especially as most teams had trained to enter rooms just after the flash, and concurrent with the bang. But that’s where Harvath’s training and a little trick he had learned was about to pay off.

Harvath made sure the lid on the tin of Vaseline was on tight before calling out, “DeWolfe, flashbang!” and chucking the container toward where he had heard all of the furniture being moved.

If someone was familiar with NFDDs, which Harvath suspected their shooter was, one of the biggest distractions to present them with was an inert device that did not go off. When a flashbang has been loosed anywhere near you, it is nearly impossible not to pay attention to it because youexpect it to detonate. When it doesn’t, it is extremely disconcerting and you end up focusing on it and the direction it came from, wondering what the hell happened. The tactic was something that Special Operations personnel liked to refer to as UW-unconventional warfare-and in this case it worked like a charm.

Harvath counted off the appropriate amount of seconds and then popped up from behind the bench with his flashlight blazing and his pistol ready to fire. This time, he caught his opponent full in the face with the beam from his SureFire. The man was sixty, if he was a day. He had a full head of gray hair and worn, leathery skin-not at all what Harvath was expecting. There was also, at this moment, an expression of arrogant defiance on his face. Though Harvath had never seen him before, there was something familiar about him. It was a gut feeling and he had learned a long time ago that those feelings were seldom wrong.

Whether or not he knew him, the man was still a killer and Harvath wasn’t above helping make him a little more aerodynamic, so he took aim and pulled the trigger.

Once again, the man expertly ducked down trying to get out of the line of fire. Scot kept the flashlight on him as he fired, only to see him disappear right through the wall. It was not the first time he had seen that trick and Harvath was beginning to understand why the man might feel so familiar, but there was also something else-something he couldn’t explain.

Crawling back under the canopy of smoke to where he had left DeWolfe, Harvath asked, “Can you stand up?”

“Of course I can stand up,” replied DeWolfe, angrily. “The guy just got the drop on me. That’s all. I’ll be fine.”

“Where’s your gun?”

DeWolfe was silent.

“So he got your gun too?”

“Don’t start with me, Harvath.”

Harvath held up his hands. “I’m not starting anything. I’m just trying to assess the situation.”

“I don’t need a gun. His ass is mine. I’m telling you. I’m going to get that motherfucker if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Harvath could understand the operative’s frustration. Nobody liked being bested. “Alright, alright, but we’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

When they reached the stairway and opened the door, the thick smoke and quickly rising fire made it obvious that they were going to have to find another way out of the building.

“What do we do now?” asked DeWolfe.

“Let’s go see if we can get your gun back.”

Harvath led DeWolfe to where he had watched their attacker seemingly disappear through the wall.

“What are we looking for?” asked DeWolfe.

“Some sort of false door or panel. I saw the guy vanish, so I know it has to be here.”

As the pair searched, the room seemed to get hotter, and the air more difficult to breathe. DeWolfe, who had been rapping every square inch of the wall with his knuckles, said, “Harvath, I’m not seeing anything and we have to get the hell out of here.”

“There’s got to be something,” replied Scot. “Keep looking.”

“There isn’t anything.”

“So you’re telling me the man who was shooting at us just disappeared? I don’t buy it.”

“Well if we don’t get out of here soon, we’re both going tobuy it.”

DeWolfe was right. Harvath bent down, with his hands upon his knees, to get a clean breath of oxygen and that’s when he saw it. Bathed in the brilliant beam of his flashlight was the almost imperceptible outline of a small trap door. Harvath glanced around at the heavy displaced furniture and understood why the shooter had been so frantically moving things around.He was trying to find this trapdoor.

Harvath waved DeWolfe over and silently instructed him to lift the door, while he readied his weapon. When the communications expert sprung the hatch, Scot swung his pistol and flashlight back and forth across the small opening, but nothing was there. Carefully, Harvath slid into the crawlspace with his H amp;K ready to take out anything that moved. The entire space looked like some sort of labyrinth in miniature. As Harvath wriggled his way along, he found side passages on the left and right, branching off at regular intervals, just like the bedrooms on the second and third floors.

Following one of the junctures off to his right, Harvath’s suspicions about the purpose of the crawl space was confirmed when five feet in, he found a large monocle attached to a braided cable mounted to the floor in front of him. Harvath peered into the monocle and was granted a perfect, albeit relatively dark view of the bedroom beneath. Apparently, Madame Putzkammer was not above spying on her customers.

As Harvath looked around at the relatively outdated, yet still highly effective surveillance equipment, he realized that the King George was not only set up to take still pictures of their customers in action, but audio and video as well. And from the looks of it, Frau Putzkammer had probably been up to it for a very long time.

“Harvath!” yelled DeWolfe from the main passage behind him. “I think I found the Madame.”

Harvath crawled back out of his side tunnel and backtracked to DeWolfe. Inside one of the other side tunnels was the body of a woman shot once in the head. It had to be Nixie’s mother. The resemblance was unmistakable.

“What do you want to do with her?” asked DeWolfe.

“There’s nothing we can do,” replied Harvath. “The tunnels are too tight to drag her with us.” After turning around, he began leading the way forward again. Thirty feet later, the choking smell of smoke mingled with ripples of something else-fresh air.

The main passageway opened up onto a large ventilation shaft that looked to run the full height of the building. Glancing up, Harvath could see the night sky between the blades of the slowly oscillating fan. He climbed into the shaft, followed by DeWolfe and they carefully made their way up and out onto the roof.

Looking over the intricately molded parapet onto the street below, Harvath could see the pile of mattresses that had been used to evacuate the building’s occupants. A crowd of onlookers had formed, and knowing Herman the way he did, Scot expected he had helped the wounded as best he could and then had faded a safe distance away from the scene. No doubt he was somewhere nearby, trying to ascertain his fate as well as DeWolfe’s.

By the close proximity of the other buildings, it wasn’t hard to figure out the route their attacker had taken in his escape. Harvath couldn’t ignore the dull but insistent throbbing deep in the pit of his stomach. It was telling him the name of the person who had attacked them, but he didn’t want to believe it. It was all too impossible. Or was it?