Brad Thor - Takedown

Except for the IDs Harvath had recovered from Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange, the scene had been a complete bust. In fact it had raised more questions than it had answered, which left them with only one remaining lead-the Upper West Side location.

Since they were not that far from where Harvath had parked, they swung by to grab his bug-out bag. As only soldiers could, Cates, Hastings, and Morgan marveled at Harvath’s custom-designed, high-end Tactical Electronics pack, as well as the wide variety of goodies it held.

Dumping it out in the rear cargo area, Harvath began repacking it with just the essentials he thought he might need, only to have Bob say several times, “You won’t need that. Nope, that either.”

Finally, with Bob’s seal of approval the bag was packed and Harvath changed out of his jeans and polo shirt into a pair of 5.11 Tactical TDU trousers, an Under Armour shirt, a Blackhawk tactical vest, and his Original S.W.A.T. desert boots. He was now ready for anything, or so he hoped.

The team jumped back on their motorbikes, raced out of the garage, and headed north toward 84th Street.

Inside the Transcon building, the carnage was almost identical to Geneva Diamond. The assailants had apparently entered via two breaching points-a front and side door. The men and women who worked inside were dressed in business attire and possessed a fair amount of weaponry. The weapons, though, had done them little good. Their dead bodies were sprawled across the floors or slumped over desks that were slick with blood, while the walls were strike-pointed with multiple-caliber bullet holes.

“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Cates as he surveyed the damage. “Who the hell is doing this?”

“More importantly, why are they doing this?” asked Hastings.

Paul Morgan looked at Harvath and asked, “What’s the connection between these two places?”

Harvath was asking himself the same question, but so far he wasn’t coming up with any answers. “Let’s split up and take a look around. If you find anything out of the ordinary, let me know.”

“Out of the ordinary?” replied Cates as he looked around. “What’s ordinary at this point? Space aliens?”

“You know what he’s talking about,” said Herrington. “We’re all equally in the dark here.”

Cates didn’t buy it. He had a feeling Harvath knew more than he was letting on, but he snapped Herrington a half-assed salute and walked down the hallway.

“What do you think?” asked Bob, once the rest of the team had dispersed.

Harvath took a slow glance around the room, the smell of blood and cordite tap-dancing a little too heavily on his already uneasy stomach. “I don’t know what to think,” he responded. “Obviously, these places were fronts for something, but what? And why are the terrorists so interested in them? After a successful series of attacks on major New York targets, why hang around to do this?” Harvath swept his arm in a wide arc, taking in the devastation around them. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s small-time, compared to what they’ve already accomplished.”

Herrington studied the scene for several moments and then said, “Maybe this has to do with why they were trying to draw off the cream.”

Harvath wasn’t following him.

“The hostage crisis in the Bronx, the fire at the Emergency Command Center in Brooklyn, the sniper targeting aircraft at LaGuardia? All of it served to tie up high-end tactical assets in those boroughs and potentially draw more away from Manhattan. Then the bridges and tunnels go, and every available local, state, or federal law enforcement officer rushes to the scene of the nearest attack, rolls up his or her sleeves, and starts helping pull people out. They’re heroes-don’t get me wrong-but one of the things you rarely hear talked about when people discuss what went wrong on September eleventh is that too many people wanted to be a hero that day.

“It wasn’t like New Orleans after the hurricane hit and the levees broke and cops abandoned their posts. In New York, all of the police, fire, paramedics, and everyone at 26 Federal Plaza rushed to the World Trade Center on 9/11 to help. They saw it as their duty, and right or wrong, they ignored their commanders and ran down there as fast as they could. What if somebody was counting on that happening again?”

Harvath looked at his friend. “Are you telling me you think the attacks on the bridges and tunnels were diversions?”

Bob shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. You tell me. Why shut down the air traffic control system? Why have snipers target boats and helicopters around Manhattan?”

That had been troubling Harvath as well, and there was only one answer he could come up with: “To prevent it from being reinforced.”

“And why wouldn’t you want the island reinforced?”

“Because having to engage reinforcements would either hinder your escape or-”

“Prevent you from accomplishing your primary objective.”

Harvath shook his head. “That’s where this thing loses me. We’ve been saying for years that another attack is not a question of if, but when, and now it’s happened. The death toll from the bridge and tunnel attacks is easily going to exceed 9/11, so how can that not have been their primary objective?”

“That’s the problem with the way we look at these ass-hats,” replied Herrington. “Too often we give them credit for being a lot smarter than they actually are. It makes us feel better that way when they beat us. But I’ll tell you something, taking out those bridges and tunnels isn’t really an issue of smarts, it’s an issue of manpower. You throw enough manpower at any problem and you can solve it, especially when your manpower is willing to die to achieve your goal for you.”

“But we’re talking about a lot of manpower here,” replied Harvath. “The shitbag we interrogated at the First Precinct proves they had some sort of redundancies in place.”

“Two backups, three backups, so what? Look at the London bombings. Look at Madrid. They just took Manhattan and threw more manpower at it, that’s all. Even if we never know exactly how they did it, they did it, and that’s all that matters at this point.”

“Okay,” said Harvath, playing devil’s advocate for a moment. “Suppose everything you’re saying is correct and the bridges and tunnels, the snipers, RPGs, and ATC site bombings are all intended to isolate Manhattan and prevent reinforcements from interfering with the terrorists’ primary objective. From what we can tell, they hit this location and then moved to Midtown to hit the other in the diamond district. What are they after?”

“That’s the hundred-thousand-dollar question,” replied Herrington. “If we can figure that out, we might have a shot at stopping them. If you want my opinion, I vote we go back and convince the NYPD to turn over your pal with the overactive salivary glands so we can take him somewhere and interrogate him properly this time.”

Herrington had a point. The surviving terrorist was the only concrete lead they had.

As a plan began to form in Harvath’s mind he suddenly wondered if maybe dead men could tell tales.

Three,” replied Kevin McCauliff as Harvath readied his pen to take down the information. “Each from a different phone in the group, but all to the same number.”

Harvath had chastised himself for not thinking of this earlier. If they knew which phones the suicide bombers had been using, it made sense to check on their call records. It was McCauliff’s mention of a contact at Nextel that had planted the seed in the back of Harvath’s mind.

“And what were you able to find out about the number?” asked Harvath.