Brad Thor - Path Of The Assassin

“So you pulled this off yourselves? Just the three of you?”

“And against orders. Morrell told us to pull out.”

“Pull out?”

“He didn’t want to risk it. He wanted to wait until we had regrouped before doing anything.”

“I’m glad you didn’t listen to him. Thanks for coming,” said Harvath.

“The party’s not over yet. I’d hold your thank you’s if I were you. Let’s get out of here first.”

“Amen. Let’s roll.”

The team snaked down the hall past the dining room. Suddenly, Avigliano held up a fist, signaling the team to come to an immediate stop. DeWolfe drew up shoulder to shoulder with Avigliano, and when Harvath and Meg’s two guards came running around the corner, DeWolfe and Avigliano popped them both with silenced rounds to the head. The men fell straight to the ground, and their rifles clattered on the dark stone floor. Harvath wanted to grab their weapons, but as they weren’t silenced, he knew they couldn’t use them.

Avigliano waited several seconds before signaling that it was all clear to move out. As they passed the two lifeless forms sprawled on the ground, Harvath felt cheated. One of the guards was the man who had struck him several times while they were in the study. That feeling disappeared two minutes later when they entered the compound’s enormous columned rotunda and Harvath saw a certain man before anyone else did.

It was the captain of the guard whom he had fought with the day before. The man had an AK-47 and was playing peekaboo from behind a pillar halfway across the room. There was no time to warn the rest of the group. In a fraction of a second, they would be trapped in his line of fire.

Harvath took a running slide across the slick marble floor and repeatedly pulled the trigger on his silenced H amp;K. The powerful gun bucked in his hand and tore huge chunks of stone from the column behind which the captain of the guard was hiding.

Avigliano and the rest of the team fanned out in all directions as they tried to shield Meg Cassidy and simultaneously spot any additional shooters.

As Harvath’s slide came to a stop, the captain fell forward from behind the shelter of his column. He had taken two bullets to the chest and another through his left eye.

Once Harvath had replaced the spent magazine, he carefully approached the man and rolled him over. Definitely dead. Harvath retrieved his Rolex and went through the man’s pockets until he found his knife too. “Now, we’re finished,” said Harvath to the dead man. “Say hi to Allah for me, asshole.”

DeWolfe booby-trapped the body with two fragmentation grenades and rolled the dead man onto his stomach.

Harvath rejoined Avigliano, who had moved the team toward the entrance of the building. “How are we getting out of here?” asked Harvath.

“If we go out and pull a hard right, there’s a narrow slot canyon. We’ve got a FAV stashed at the end of it about a mile-and-a-half down.”

“Won’t there be a little resistance outside?”

“Tons, but we’ve got that handled,” said Avigliano as he drew a small transmitter from his pocket. “On three. One. Two. Three!”

Avigliano depressed the red and green buttons on his transmitter, and the team ran outside. Explosions ignited at the far end of the canyon, back toward where Harvath had first been held. The canyon floor was littered with dead bodies-the victims of previous explosions. There were still many men left, and they seemed to be running in all directions. It was mass chaos. Trucks drove this way and that, some men apparently fleeing, some trying to help put out the fires and locate the cause of the many explosions. Avigliano and DeWolfe silently took out several terrorists as they made their way to the canyon.

Fifteen yards in, Avigliano’s third operative, a muscle-bound comedian named Carlson, removed two claymore mines from his backpack and handed one of them to Harvath. Where the claymore usually read, “Front Toward Enemy,” Carlson had made a slight change. He had placed a long piece of masking tape with writing on it that read, “Have a Nice Day.” Carlson flashed Harvath a thumbs-up and moved to the other side of the narrow canyon. Once the devices were set, the two men ran to catch up with the others.

Thirty seconds later they heard the sound of the fragmentation grenades detonating inside the rotunda. Someone had found the booby-trapped captain of the guard. Harvath hoped that Adara and her brother had stumbled across the body together, but he doubted they’d been that lucky.

The signature clack-clack-clack of Ak-47 fire erupted from behind them in the canyon. Adara Nidal’s men were hot on their trail.

The canyon was the most dangerous part of Avigliano’s escape plan, as it acted like a funnel, channeling all of the terrorists’ fire right at them. The only thing they could do was keep on running.

They then heard the sound of the claymores detonating behind them. Hailstorms of steel ball bearings propelled by the exploding hunks of C4, showered anyone within fifty meters in front of the antipersonnel devices. Agonizing screams followed from the few men who had actually survived, but had been torn to bits. This bought the team a little time, but not much.

Avigliano worked his radio, calling in their status, as his long legs kept propelling him forward. “Big John, Big John. This is Point Guard. We have the package. I repeat. We have the package. Kick the tires and light the fires. Point Guard out.”

Harvath mouthed, Big John? to DeWolfe, who was running alongside Meg Cassidy and who answered, “That’s our exfil,” short for exfiltration.

It seemed to take an eternity to run the almost mile and a half, but suddenly, the canyon ended and opened up onto a wide, barren plain. Avigliano and his men quickly removed the camouflage netting that disguised their Fast Attack Vehicle.

“Where’s the other FAV?” asked Harvath.

“That’s it. There aren’t any other ones,” said Carlson as he handed Harvath and Meg encrypted radios with headsets. “We’re going tisket-tasket.”

Harvath knew what that meant. He and Meg would be riding in the supply baskets on either side of the vehicle. Harvath quickly helped Meg secure her radio and then belted her into one of the baskets.

“She knows how to use one of these, right?” asked DeWolfe as he handed Meg his Mod Zero.

“I’m a fast learner,” replied Meg, who grabbed the weapon with her right hand and held out her left for extra clips of ammunition.

Harvath hopped in the opposite basket and strapped himself into the modified shoulder straps. Carlson tossed him his Mod Zero, and in less than a minute they were rolling.

Avigliano was behind the wheel with DeWolfe sitting next to him manning the Mark 19 grenade launcher. Up top, Carlson had his choice of either the forward.50-caliber machine gun or a 7.62 millimeter covering their rear. In addition, he carried one Stinger antiaircraft missile as well as an AT4 antitank missile. As it turned out, they were going to need everything they had.

With an added fuel bladder, the FAV had a range of approximately five hundred miles. The amount of terrain Avigliano and his team had already covered to locate Harvath and Cassidy, coupled with the fact that there were now five people riding in the FAV, as opposed to the customary three, made for a drastic reduction in the vehicle’s range.

The exfiltration plan called for the team to rendezvous with a Boeing MH-47 Chinook helicopter, code-named Big John. Flying low to avoid Libyan radar, the blacked-out copter would touch down in the uninhabited desert just south of the Tunisian border, drop its rear cargo door, and the team would drive the FAV right up the ramp. Then they would lift off and disappear like shadows in the night. That was the best-case scenario.