Brad Thor: Blowback

Now, Harvath desperately tried to wrestle the gun out of Alomari’s hand, but the man was amazingly strong. The terrorist let loose with a left hook, and Harvath lurched to the side, the blow glancing painfully off his shoulder. Harvath answered with a swift knee to Alomari’s groin, which caused the man to drop the gun and also to lose his balance. Grabbing the American operative by the shoulders, Alomari took Harvath down along with him.

Before Harvath could right himself, Alomari swung an elbow and caught him right in the mouth. As he tried to recover, he could sense Alomari crawling away from him, and his only thought was that the terrorist was going for his gun.

Harvath’s mind was in overdrive. He’d lost his H amp;K MP7 in the beginning of the scuffle and knew that it was out of his reach. He’d have to go for his sidearm, but could he pull it and fire before Alomari reached his gun and shot at him? Harvath didn’t have much choice.

Reaching for his Beretta PX4 Storm pistol, Harvath drew the.40-caliber from his holster and rolled to his left. Raising the weapon, he pointed it in the direction he had last seen Alomari, but there was no one there. Quickly, Harvath spun 180 degrees. Rising to one knee, he swept the rest of the room, but Alomari was gone. There was only one way he could have escaped, and Harvath had no choice but to go after him.

The Iraqi midday sun was blinding. It took several moments for Harvath’s eyes to adjust and to make out the figure of Khalid Alomari, running, almost a full block away. The terrorist’s muddy-brown robes and brightly checkered kaffiyeh were unmistakable. Harvath didn’t waste any more time.

Sprinting full out in combat boots and desert camo fatigues wasn’t exactly an easy feat. He would have preferred the shorts, T-shirt, and Nikes he ran along the Potomac in back home. However, combat boots and desert camo were what the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) Direct Action Team in Iraq wore, and that was what he had been issued for their coordinated takedown of Alomari. But the coordination had fallen apart.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault in particular. Harvath had been forced to make a command decision, and that’s exactly what he had done. When the timetable had shifted and the team couldn’t get in place fast enough, Harvath, right or wrong, had decided to go it alone. If he didn’t catch Khalid by the time the terrorist reached the large open-air bazaar two intersections up, he knew he would end up losing him yet again. And if that happened, Harvath was going to be in even more trouble than he was now. If only he’d been authorized to kill this animal, he could probably take him out from this distance with his Beretta, but that’s not what his orders were.

Harvath was very close to being SOL yet again, and he knew it. Trying to put everything out of his mind, he drew upon what little reserves he had remaining and ran even faster. Already up ahead, he could see the tented stalls of the large open-air market.

When Alomari entered the souk, Harvath was less than fifteen feet behind him. The assassin ran down one of the many narrow aisles, up-ending tables and pulling down anything he could behind him to slow Harvath’s pursuit. No matter what he tried, none of it worked. Harvath leapt over everything and soon had the gap narrowed to within ten feet.

Harvath wanted to put a bullet in Khalid Alomari more than anything he had ever wanted before, but when he got within five feet, he opted for a brutal tackle that took the terrorist’s legs out from under him and slammed his face into the pavement. The perfectly executed maneuver would certainly have earned Harvath a starting position in the defensive backfield of his alma mater, the University of Southern California.

Immediately, the terrorist began to resist, which was exactly what Harvath had hoped he’d do. He landed a quick series of rabbit punches to his kidneys, causing the man to scream in pain. When Alomari then tried to get up, Harvath mule-punched him in the back of the head and then got a good grip of his dusty kaffiyeh and bounced the man’s face off the pavement three more times.

For some insane reason, the terrorist still hadn’t had enough and once again reached his hand beneath his robes. Harvath didn’t wait to see what sort of trick Alomari had up his sleeve this time. In one clean move, Harvath pulled the man’s hand out from underneath the folds of his robes and broke his arm. Alomari began screaming even louder.

“That was for Cairo, asshole,” said Harvath as he reached into the back pocket of his fatigues for three pairs of flexicuffs. “And this, “He continued as he hog-tied the international assassin in the most excruciatingly painful and humiliating manner possible, “is for making me run for two months, five thousand miles, and three fucking blocks trying to catch you.”

Now that it was all over, Harvath expected a string of invectives in Arabic, English, or both, but instead, Khalid Alomari-Osama bin Laden’s number one hit man-began to cry.

Harvath couldn’t believe his ears. Usually, these assholes were all the same-indignant, self-righteous zealots. They hurled curses at you and your country right up until the moment you put a bullet in them or slammed the cell door shut in their face, but not Alomari. Something was wrong, and it wasn’t until Harvath rolled the terrorist over that he realized what it was. The man he had chased for three full blocks and beaten almost unconscious was not Khalid Alomari at all. Somehow, a switch had been pulled.

Just when Harvath thought things couldn’t get any worse, he looked up into the faces of the crowd surrounding them and then locked onto something really bad-an al-Jazeera camera team who had caught the whole thing on tape.

DHAKA, PEOPLE ’ S REPUBLIC OF BANGLADESH

Until today, Emir Tokay had always felt safe in Bangladesh. While most outsiders viewed it as a cyclone-prone, perpetually flooded country, he had seen it as a land rich in history and, more importantly, rich in its devotion to Islam. Dhaka, the country’s capital, boasted more than seven hundred mosques within its city limits alone. Surely, it was no accident that the Islamic Institute for Science and Technology had been established here-after all, what better place to carry out some of Allah’s most important work? Now, though, Emir was having second thoughts not only about that work, but whether or not he was going to make it out of the city alive.

At first, the fatal heart attack suffered by Dr. Abbas in Dubai had seemed an unfortunate but not unusual circumstance. The man was grossly overweight and had long ignored his family’s and colleagues’ pleas to take better care of himself. The brilliant scientist had claimed that his research took all of his time and left him little opportunity for exercise. Then there was Dr. Akbar in Amman, who was just the opposite of Abbas. Akbar broke his neck diving into the pool he swam laps in every day and drowned. After Akbar came Dr. Hafiz in Damascus. He was a relatively robust man in his fifties with no prior history of health complications who suddenly died of an acute asthma attack.

Next came the deaths of Dr. Jafar in Cairo, Dr. Qasim in Tehran, and Dr. Salim in Rabat. Then the terrible hit-and-run accident involving Dr. Ansari in Lahore. Examined individually, there was nothing unusual about these deaths other than they were unfortunate and untimely. But when Emir Tokay took them as a whole, the larger picture was terrifying. Assuming Dr. Bashir in Baghdad, whom he hadn’t been able to get hold of for several days, was dead, Tokay was the last one on the research team still alive.

Tokay’s first reaction was to notify his superiors, but he knew that would be a big mistake. None of the scientists were supposed to know who they were working with. The Islamic Institute for Science and Technology had cloaked the entire project in secrecy and had kept it tightly compartmentalized. The scientists were not allowed to identify themselves to each other and had only communicated via encrypted, untraceable e-mail addresses. They were allowed to share data only-nothing about their personal or professional lives. The system had seemed foolproof, but the institute had overlooked the fundamental trait that made for a good scientist-curiosity.