Brad Thor - Takedown

After making their way down the metal stairs, the first thing the team noticed was the enormous door that had been blown off its hinges. As they carefully entered the facility, they saw that shrapnel had pitted both the walls and the ceiling. Whatever kind of bomb had gone off in here had done incredible damage. Blood was everywhere and several bodies had been sawed completely in half.

As Harvath tried to pinpoint how long ago the attack had occurred, the one thing he was confident of was that it had happened before their botched ambush in Central Park. They couldn’t have made it here in time even if they had wanted to.

“What the hell hit this place?” said Rick Cates as he stepped around the bodies of what looked like three more dead marines. “This was no fragmentation grenade.”

“This was more like the type of bomb suicide bombers use,” replied Tracy Hastings, who had witnessed the aftermath of suicide bombers more times than she cared to remember.

“Are you saying somebody walked in here and blew him or herself up?” asked Harvath.

Tracy looked around some more and then replied, “Maybe. All I can say is that I think we’re looking at a tight and very powerful package of plastique packed with ball bearings as the projectile.”

“Any idea how it got in here?”

Tracy shook her head.

“Maybe the pizza guy brought it,” said Cates as he bumped the edge of a personal pan-pizza box still sitting on someone’s desk.

The team spread out and combed the facility. Like the others before it, it was all computerized. Now, though, they knew the reason why. Morgan found a functioning workstation, but without a password, he couldn’t gain access to the system. Not only that, but as Harvath studied the shiny dials built into the frames of the computer displays, he realized they weren’t cameras, as several on the team had suspected, but actually retinal scanners. The Athena Program took the handling of its data very seriously.

It was hard to tell if anything had been stolen. From what Harvath and the rest of the team could tell, everything seemed to be there; it was just shot to hell-including the employees. The only thing that had avoided the carnage was the server room, just like in the previous two locations.

But why risk so much just to take out the employees? What the hell was al-Qaeda’s game? Was it some sort of payback? And what did any of this have to do with Sayed Jamal and Mike Jaffe? None of it made any sense.

That said, Harvath had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach that once he did uncover the answers he was looking for, he wasn’t going to like them.

As they left the server room, everyone was helping collect identification from the dead, when Herrington swung his weapon into the firing position and yelled, “Nobody fucking move.”

Harvath and the rest of the team had no idea what the hell he was talking about until they noticed two strangers at the far end of the room pointing a pair of very nasty-looking short-barreled M16 Viper machine guns at them. The strangers ordered Bob and the rest of the team to drop their weapons and remain absolutely still. It was a Mexican standoff-although this time they wouldn’t be able to count on Tracy Hastings sneaking up behind their adversaries with a big leafy tree branch.

“Everybody stay cool,” cautioned Harvath. “What do you guys want?”

“What do we want?” demanded one of the strangers. “Why don’t we start with who the hell are you?”

“My name’s Scot Harvath and I’m with the Department of Homeland Security.”

“Who are the rest of these people?” the man asked, indicating the rest of the team with the barrel of his weapon.

“They’re with me. Who you are?”

“Homeland Security? Bullshit. DHS doesn’t have anything to do with this facility.”

“We do since Captain William Forrester was shot and killed less than an hour ago,” replied Harvath.

“Captain Forrester is dead?”

“As a doornail,” said Morgan as he shouldered his weapon and pulled a half-liter of water from his pack.

Tracy saw the men tense and begin applying pressure to their triggers. “Paul, are you nuts?” she responded. “Quit screwing around. You’re going to get us all killed.”

“No, I’m not,” said Morgan. “And you know why? Because marines don’t kill other marines.”

Once the two strangers had lowered their weapons and downed the water Morgan had given them, Harvath asked, “What are you guys doing here?”

“It’s our shift,” said the lead man, who identified himself as Staff Sergeant Steve Gonzalez, United States Marine Corps.

“With all the shit going on in the Lincoln Tunnel, why didn’t you come earlier?” asked Herrington.

“Orders. Believe me, Tommy and I wanted to come down here as soon as we heard, but it was against the protocol.”

“Whose protocol?” replied Harvath.

“Captain Forrester’s,” said Lance Corporal Thomas Tecklin. “He ran us through every contingency he could think of. The last thing he wanted was for any of the security personnel to be caught in a secondary blast meant to target newcomers rushing to the scene.”

“Wait a second,” interjected Gonzalez, the bodies of his Marine Corps colleagues-and the people they were charged with protecting-littering the floor. “Let’s start by talking about what the hell happened here.”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Harvath. “Captain Forrester gave us this location.”

Gonzalez didn’t believe Harvath. “He wouldn’t have done that. This place is above top secret.”

“He didn’t have a choice,” replied Herrington, who appreciated the man’s loyalty to his mission and his commanding officer. “He didn’t want to see any more of his marines die.”

“More?” repeated Morgan. “What do you mean, he didn’t want to see more marines die? What marines?”

“Two other sites were hit,” said Harvath. He chose the words very carefully, as he wanted to see how much the marines knew.

Gonzalez was very concerned. “Which sites?”

“Transcon Enterprises and Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Tecklin. “How bad?”

“Equally as bad as this. No survivors.”

“Who was it?”

“We believe it was al-Qaeda.”

“Al-Qaeda? Why?”

“We don’t know why,” answered Harvath. “We were hoping that was something you could help us with. Is there anything in particular about the information being processed here that could be beneficial to them?”

“Officially,” replied Gonzalez, “we didn’t know anything about the information that flows through here. Our job is to guard this site.”

“And unofficially?”

“Unofficially? People talk, you know? You couldn’t help but overhear things here. It was all political stuff. Some of it run-of-the-mill dirty dealing and some of it extremely volatile. Like well-placed spies in foreign governments, murder cover-ups, assassination plots, coup attempts-it goes on and on. There is stuff even hotter than that, if you can believe it, but the hotter it is the quieter everyone here is-was-about it. At the end of the day, we actually overheard very little. And none of it directly valuable as far as al-Qaeda is concerned-at least nothing I can think of that would justify all of this,” said the lead marine as he took in the devastated facility.

Three locations and zero leads. It was driving Harvath nuts. The more they uncovered, the less sense it all made. No matter how many steps they took forward, they still couldn’t seem to catch up with whoever was behind these attacks. “What about the fourth site?” he asked.

“What fourth site?” said Gonzalez.