Brad Thor - Blowback

There was no knob or handle on the outside of the door. It could only be opened with a key. Fishing a set of keys from the militant’s pocket, Reynolds found the correct one, slid it into the lock, and slowly opened the door. It swung silently back on its hinges, and Reynolds stepped out of the heat and into the hallway of the considerably cooler offices.

Less than five feet away, he could hear two men talking. Not knowing how long their colleague outside would be napping, Reynolds decided not to waste any time.

Sweeping through the main office door, he brought the Remington up to the firing position and yelled at both of the men in Arabic to get intimate with the carpeting.

For a moment, neither of them moved. Then, as if they were telepathically connected, they both acted at the same time. One of them snatched up an AK-47 while the other made a beeline out a side door and into the warehouse.

Before the man with the AK could get his finger anywhere near the trigger, Reynolds hit him with three rounds from the Remington that nearly tore him in half and sent his bloody body flying across the room. Two stooges down, one to go.

It had been a while since Reynolds had seen this kind of action, and his heart was pumping a mile a minute as he crept into the packed warehouse. Pallets of bottled water as well as what appeared to be various spices were stacked floor to ceiling.

Reynolds tried to concentrate on finding the last remaining Wahhabi wiseguy. Once he was neutralized, Reynolds could drag their unconscious colleague in from outside and start tearing the place apart.

He heard a noise from the other end of the building that sounded like metal scraping on metal. Peeking out from behind the pallet of water bottles he was using for cover, Reynolds took aim with the shotgun and pulled the trigger two more times, but it was no use. The remaining militant had opened one of the doors near the loading bay and had taken off.

There was no telling what contacts the man might have in the neighborhood, so Reynolds had to act fast.

After a quick sweep of the warehouse that turned up nothing of real value, he ran back to the office and tore the entire place apart as he searched for anything that would explain what the hell these people were up to and what the meeting he had witnessed earlier in the day had all been about.

He was extremely thorough, but the office was shaping up to be another dead end. Ready to give up, Reynolds swept the assorted office supplies off one of the desks in frustration and in doing so sent the desk blotter sailing. As it hit the floor, he noticed several pages sticking out from underneath it.

Picking the pages up, Reynolds began reading. They didn’t make any sense. There were lists of currency exchanges, payday loan operations, check-cashing businesses, convenience stores, taxicab companies, and gas stations across the United States. It was all very strange.

Reynolds had no idea what he might have uncovered. It might have been nothing, but taking into consideration everything else he had already seen, he was suspicious enough to want somebody else back in the States to take a look at it.

There was just one problem. Reynolds needed to get the information to someone who’d take it seriously enough not to hand it off and let it get buried. It would also have to be someone who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions about how he got it. With a dead militant and the Saudi Royal Family involved, whoever he reached out to not only would have to have a good amount of power, but also be someone he could trust to do the right thing.

Going to the top at the CIA was definitely out of the question. Reynolds had been gone just long enough to lose what halfway reliable contacts he had in the director’s office. As he shoved the documents into his pocket, he realized there was only one person who could help him. After wiping down the office for prints, he snuck through the warehouse and used the set of keys he had taken from the first militant to let himself out one of the side doors. When he reached his truck, he waited until he was well away from the neighborhood and wasn’t being followed before he picked up his cell phone and dialed the number of his old friend and colleague back in DC.

As the phone began to ring, he hoped like hell Gary Lawlor was at his desk.

SWITZERLAND

W here are we going?” asked Jillian when Harvath got back in the car and pulled away from the curb in front of the hotel.

“Here, “He replied, and handed her the glossy brochure for Sion International Airport he had picked up in the lobby. “This caught my eye when we were on our way out this morning.”

As Jillian looked at it, Harvath added, “It’s a pretty impressive operation. Along with being a military airbase, they’ve poured a lot of money into it in the hopes that this region is going to be the next big thing. Besides having a runway long enough to accommodate the most sophisticated business jets, the airport has just about every service simple tourists like us could ask for.”

“I can see that,” replied Jillian. “Anything and everything when it comes to charters. Helicopters, gliders, hang gliders, parachute flights, sightseeing flights over the Alps. They don’t seem to have missed anything.”

“Nope. They even do glacier aviation, the desk clerk told me. It’s their specialty. If the glacier is big enough, they can actually land a plane on it.”

“So what’s the plan then?” asked Jillian as she set the brochure in the door pocket next to her.

“You and I are going to charter a plane and do a reconnaissance flight,” said Harvath. “We’ve already got pictures of what security is like at the base of the Aga Khan’s funicular. I want to see what things look like up top.”

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll try to figure out what to do next.”

Staring out the windshield at the mountains rising up on both sides of them, Jillian said, “A line like that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.”

Harvath forced a smile and replied, “I’ll try to come up with something a little bit better once I’ve gotten a look at Aiglemont. Right now, though, let’s focus on what we need to get done.”

Harvath and Alcott arrived at the Aéroport de Sion posing as climbers looking to charter a plane in order to conduct aerial surveys for a series of upcoming expeditions in the Bernese Alps. Even without reservations, they had no problem finding a willing charter company. Cold hard cash was an amazing problem solver. Not only did they luck out in finding a plane without a reservation, they also managed to land an extremely chatty pilot with an excellent command of English. The first thing he pointed out as they taxied out onto the runway was where the Aga Khan’s Cessna Citation X jet was parked. Had the police at the bottom of the funicular not been enough to confirm his presence, now they knew for sure that he was in residence. Hopefully, that meant Rayburn and Emir Tokay were at Aiglemont as well.

The pilot went on to explain that whenever the Aga Khan had one of his aid meetings or get-togethers with his bankers in Geneva, he had his own helicopter pick him up at Aiglemont and bring him back. He never drove.

With his detailed atlas of Switzerland on his lap, Harvath was able to guide the pilot over and around the peaks the would-be climbers were interested in tackling. Each pass was designed to bring them as close as possible to the Aga Khan’s mountaintop retreat, which their pilot was pleased to point out and discuss.

When Jillian told the pilot she hadn’t been able to capture the structure as well as she would have liked with her video camera, the pilot was more than happy to oblige with another, lower pass. Not only did they get an even better view, but they also got the additional bonus of seeing how the Aga Khan’s security team reacted to low-flying aircraft. It was exactly as Harvath had feared. The heavily armed men poured out of the building like angry bees from a hive. Though he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure, he even thought he saw one of the men armed with a shoulder-fired missile. The Aga Khan’s security team didn’t leave anything to chance.