Brad Thor: Takedown

Harvath told the others he’d meet them at the ferry and then climbed inside the limousine.

“How’ve you been, Scot?” said Hilliman once the door was shut.

“Fine, sir,” he replied, not exactly happy to be sitting in a limo in the middle of Brooklyn Heights talking to the secretary of defense.

“Fit for duty? The shoulder’s okay? The ankle?”

“The shoulder’s about eighty percent, but the ankle’s okay now.”

“Good, glad to hear it.”

“Sir, what are you doing here?” asked Harvath.

Hilliman smiled. “I knew Robert Herrington. Not well, but I knew him. He was a good man. He was part of my protective detail the first time I visited Afghanistan. There was a situation. It never made the news, but suffice it to say that if it wasn’t for Bob’s efforts in particular, I might not be here right now.

“I paid my respects to his parents earlier this morning and kept a low profile in the back of the church during the service.”

“And the Black Hawk? Was that your doing?”

“His team had asked for it and were getting some static. With everything that’s happened in Manhattan, there were certain people that felt a funeral flyover was an inappropriate diversion of resources. I disagreed. Bob Herrington was a hell of a guy and one of the finest warriors this country has ever seen.”

Hilliman removed a folder from his briefcase and handed it to him. “I read the debriefing they did on you while you were getting patched up at the VA. I thought you deserved to have some of the blanks filled in.”

As Harvath looked through the file, the secretary of defense continued, “Scot, you’ve been in this game long enough to know why certain operations must remain classified. Sometimes it’s of vital national security that the right hand not know what the left hand is doing. Sometimes, though, we begin with the absolute best of intentions and clarity of purpose, but the walls we build to protect our operations can actually prevent us from sharing strategic information of paramount importance. It’s clear now that’s what happened last week and we lost a lot of good people because of it.

“Though I have some incredible resources at my disposal, I can’t change the past. I can, though, have a significant impact on the future.”

Harvath wasn’t listening anymore. When he looked up from the folder the anger was chiseled across his face. “I can’t believe what I’m reading. You were actually getting ready to let him walk? After everything we know about Mohammed bin Mohammed? After the incredible amount of manpower and money that went into tracking him down? What about the people who were killed trying to apprehend him? What about what he is planning to unleash on this country?”

“You don’t know the full story.”

“You know what, Mr. Secretary? I don’t see how that could possibly make a difference.”

“Listen to me and I’ll tell you.”

Harvath tossed the file onto the seat next to him and prayed the man had a good answer. If not, he was going to rip his throat out right in the back of that limousine.

Hilliman took a deep breath and replied, “Nobody can withstand torture indefinitely, not even a man like Mohammed bin Mohammed. The problem lies in knowing when you’ve truly broken them. To know that, you have to verify the intel a subject gives you, and that can take time. Time was not something we had on our side in Mohammed’s case. Making matters even more difficult were his extensive dialysis treatments.

“Therefore, it had been agreed that if we couldn’t make measurable progress within a certain window, we were going to transport him to another nation that collaborates with us in interrogations, a nation we knew his associates might be likely to subvert to help facilitate his escape.”

“I still don’t understand why you’d do that.”

“So we could track him.”

“But it took you guys years to find him in the first place. What makes you so sure you wouldn’t lose him?” demanded Harvath.

“That’s the thing. We were over ninety percent certain we wouldn’t lose him-and in our business, that’s a percentage we were willing to bet the house on.”

“How were you going to track him?”

“Through a radioisotope we’d been administering as part of his dialysis treatments. It creates a very specific signature which can be tracked via satellite.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

The secretary held up both hands and said, “So help me. It’s a very new technology, but it works. We’d seen the data, but we went a step further and did a slew of comprehensive tests ourselves. The bottom line is that it works.”

“Ninety percent of the time,” clarified Harvath.

“Correct.”

“So, do you know where Mohammed bin Mohammed is now?”

Hilliman looked at him. “Yes, we do.”

“So what are you waiting for? Why don’t you grab him?”

“Because we need to know who al-Qaeda is about to get their nuclear material from.”

“And once you do? What then?”

Hilliman pulled two more files from his briefcase, handed them across to Harvath, and said, “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

GIBRALTAR

THREE DAYS LATER

Of all the places Harvath had ever traveled to, he’d never had a reason or a desire to see Gibraltar. As his plane circled on its approach, he quickly realized that he’d been missing something extraordinary.

The enormous limestone Rock of Gibraltar rose dramatically from the Mediterranean Sea, forming one of the two ancient Pillars of Hercules, which once marked the very edge of the known world.

Staring out the plane’s window, Harvath could make out the various grassy glens that were home to the only free-ranging monkey in Europe, the barbary ape. He could almost smell the aloes, capers, cacti, and asparagus that grew wild along the nearly 1400-foot-high rock. And though he barely knew her, he could already tell this was the kind of place Tracy Hastings would like-a lot.

After the secretary of defense had dropped Harvath at the ferry, he had joined her, along with Rick Cates and Paul Morgan, to make the somber trip across the East River to Manhattan. As a way to ignore the search-and-recovery efforts happening up and down the river, they staked out a piece of turf on the aft deck and cracked open the bottle of Louis XIII the minute the ferry set sail. Cates, ever the procurement specialist, had secured small plastic cups and by the time they reached Manhattan, the bottle was half empty.

The balance of it was drained as they made their way up First Avenue and deposited Paul Morgan back at the VA. From there, Harvath, Hastings, and Cates proceeded to Bob’s favorite watering hole, the same tavern he and Harvath had been on their way to when all hell had originally broken loose. There, already well lubricated, and fueled by their shared sense of loss, they toasted Bob’s memory again, and again, and again.

The next morning when Harvath awoke, he did so as slowly as possible. It was unlike him to tie one on so bad that he couldn’t remember where he was or what he had done. Knowing that the moment he opened his eyes the wicked machinery responsible for ushering in his inevitable hangover would kick into gear, he lay there and tried to figure out where he was. The first thing he noticed were the silk sheets, and because he could feel the sheets with all of his body, he was relatively confident that he was naked. That fact made his next observation a little more uncomfortable-the smell of perfume.

Reaching out his hand, he had first felt a well-toned calf and then a firm yet feminine thigh. As his hand slid farther up his bedmate’s body, he felt a taut midriff leading to a pair of perfectly sculpted shoulders. Slowly opening his eyes, he saw Tracy Hastings lying next to him and instantly decided she had one of the most beautiful bodies he had ever seen.