Brad Thor - Takedown

“Fuck The Army?” yelled Morgan over the whine of his Suzuki. “Fuck that asshole. Hoorah, Cates.”

Herrington and Hastings both flashed Rick the thumbs-up, and Harvath had no choice but to flash his as well. To be kicked out of the service for what was known as the Big Chicken Dinner, or more correctly a bad conduct discharge meant that the bike shop manager was one screwed-up individual and had committed the equivalent of a serious felony.

To proudly boast that fact underneath a disfigured tattoo of Uncle Sam was unforgivable. He deserved everything Cates had dished out to him and more.

“What do you say, boss?” yelled Morgan as he revved his motorcycle.

Harvath noticed that the team was looking to Bullet Bob for guidance, and as Herrington shot a questioning look in Harvath’s direction, Harvath nodded his head for him to take control. These people respected Bob’s experience and looked to him as their leader.

“Forty-seventh and Fifth,” yelled Herrington, “as fast as we can get there.”

Lowering his head and rocketing his bike out into traffic, Harvath decided he could worry about chain-of-command issues later. Right now, they had a very strange puzzle to start putting together. The only question was, were the few pieces they had going to be enough to make any sort of progress?

Gary Lawlor tried to discern a connection between the two addresses Harvath had given him. The terrorists were obviously looking for something, but what? What could they possibly want in a brownstone on the Upper West Side and a location in the diamond district in Midtown? Neither seemed typical terrorist targets.

Compounding the problem was that someone at the DIA was playing some sort of role in all of this, but until he had a better handle on who and what it was, there was no way Lawlor was going to tip his hand to them. They were a collection of superspooks bound by completely different rules of engagement than the rest of the intelligence community. Theirs were the rules of war, and there wasn’t much they couldn’t do-including locking him up indefinitely without charge for even sniffing around the edges of one of their operations. Call it interagency mistrust or a strong instinct for self-preservation, but until Lawlor got a much better feel for the lay of the land, he was going to stay as far away from the DOD and its Defense Intelligence Agency as possible.

In the meantime, as the director of the Apex Project, he had a host of other resources at his disposal. Logging on to his computer, he accessed the shared intelligence database network and entered the two addresses that Kevin McCauliff had provided Harvath with. When the search results came back, they were more than disappointing-they were downright impossible. According to the database, there was no information available for either address-no utility records, no mortgage or business license information, nothing. Both locations appeared to be operating in a vacuum-a big black one.

Someone had scrubbed both addresses so completely clean that neither offered a single trail leading anywhere. That kind of sterilization normally happened only in covert government operations so deep they were referred to as happening at “crush depth”-a status reserved for issues of vital national security. For one reason or another, these issues were sometimes better handled in the civilian arena, rather than on military bases or at established intelligence agencies, but even so, the crush depth locations Lawlor had known during his career were like mini-fortresses.

Gary still wasn’t any closer to understanding what was going on in New York, though. If the imagery from Kevin McCauliff did indeed show two crush depth locations being hit, what was the reason? Better yet, how in the world could the terrorists have known about them? The operational intelligence would have been Polo Step at the very least. The fact that they had hit not one but two suggested a security compromise so devastating that its repercussions could very well be felt for years, if not for decades, to come.

Lawlor jumped over to the DHS server, pulled up the most current FEMA damage map for New York City and filtered out as much “noise” as possible. He wasn’t interested in casualty estimates or the positioning of emergency equipment. All he wanted to know was where the terrorists had specifically struck. Once that information was isolated, he added secondary problem spots such as reported sniper and RPG locations, apartment building and property fires, as well as any other major events that demanded a large police, fire, or EMS response. With those in place, he added the last layer-the secret Upper West Side and Midtown locations the terrorists had just struck.

He tried to make sense of it, but the harder he stared at the screen the more the questions piled up in his brain. If these were crush depth locations, what agency or group was running them and what was their purpose? With all the chaos in New York, was whoever oversaw those locations even aware that they’d been hit? That was one of Lawlor’s biggest questions.

The only obvious thing in the whole muddled mix was that if the terrorists were pinpointing and hitting actual crush depth locations, then the United States was in even bigger trouble than it thought.

Lawlor realized that he was going to have to go against his better judgment and talk to people outside his immediate circle. Whatever the fallout might be, as long as he could stop the terrorists before they struck again, it would be worth it.

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

Mark Schreiber poked his head into his supervisor’s fluorescent-lit office and said, “I think we’ve got another problem in Manhattan.”

“No kidding,” replied Joseph Stanton, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward the flat-panel televisions on the wall behind him. “Some idiot blogger started a rumor that a bio agent was part of the attack and no matter what Mayor Brown says, nobody is listening to him.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” replied Schreiber as he stepped the rest of the way inside and closed the door behind him. “Transcon and Geneva Diamond are unresponsive.”

Stanton stopped what he was doing and laid down his purple highlighter. His bespectacled face was bloated from a diet too rich in sodium, along with too many Hennessy-and-Cokes after hours. His hair was unkempt and his entire wardrobe seemed to be permanently wrinkled. He wore a seersucker suit that should have been retired years ago and a striped regimental tie decorated with coffee stains. “Unresponsive how?”

“Nobody’s answering e-mail.”

“Did you try calling them?”

Schreiber nodded his head. “The phones don’t seem to be working.”

“How about pinging the servers?”

“I did that and it comes back A-Okay. Still processing.”

“So what’s the problem?” asked Stanton.

“If we can ping the servers via satellite and get a response, then why isn’t their e-mail working? It piggybacks off the same system.”

“ New York ’s in chaos right now. We don’t know what the damage is or what services have been interrupted. Let’s not worry about it.”

“You don’t find it a bit odd that we can’t connect with two of our substations?”

“Considering everything that’s going on up there, not really. The servers are still churning, right? You said so yourself. So, someone has got to be processing data.”

“Yeah, but I just have a bad feeling about it,” replied Schreiber.

“We’re under attack, so having bad feelings is understandable. Give it a little while longer. I’m sure we’ll hear something.”

“And if we don’t?”