Brad Thor - The First Commandment

It was the same nightmare he’d been having about Tracy, but this time it was worse. He dreamed he was standing on a long rope bridge between two groups of people he cared for, each in imminent danger. He could only save one. But instead of making a choice, he stood paralyzed with fear.

His indecision cost him dearly. He helplessly watched as the members of each group were killed one by one, their deaths gleefully carried out by a sadistic demon bent on extracting every ounce of pain-wracked suffering he could. All the while, Harvath merely stood and watched, unsure of himself and his ability to do anything to stop the holocaust being carried out so savagely in front of him.

It was a rapid ringing of the cabin chimes that tore Harvath from his nightmare. Opening his eyes, he looked out the window and saw that they were over land, though where exactly he had no idea. He raised the handset and punched the button for the cockpit.

“What’s going on?” he asked when the copilot answered.

“We’ve got a major mechanical problem.”

“What kind?”

The copilot ignored him and said, “We’re about fifty miles out from the airport. Stay seated and make sure your seatbelt is tightly fastened.” And with that the line went dead.

From the front of the cabin, Harvath heard the bolt of the cockpit door being thrown into place. Maybe it was a legitimate safety precaution, but there was something about it that didn’t sit right with him.

Harvath looked at his watch and tried to compute where they were. He had been asleep for a long time.

Protocol dictated that private aircraft stop at the first major city they overflew upon entry into U. S. airspace to clear customs and passport control, but Tom Morgan had been able to pull some strings with people he knew to have those requirements waived for both the Mexico and Jordan trips.

They should have been somewhere over Canada or the Great Lakes, but the terrain beneath them looked more like the East Coast of the United States. Something definitely wasn’t right.

The Citation X banked sharply and there was a hurried change in altitude as the private jet raced downward. Whatever was going on, Harvath didn’t like it.

He felt the landing gear lower and he cinched his seatbelt tighter.

He looked back out the window and a sense of dread welled up from the pit of his stomach as he recognized where they were.

The jet wasn’t landing anywhere near Colorado. It was on final approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in D. C.

Now he knew why the pilots had locked the cockpit door. There was no mechanical problem. Someone had gotten to Tim Finney. Someone knew that Harvath was on this plane and that person was making it land in D. C.

He needed to plan his next move.

A lot would be based upon what kind of law enforcement presence had been sent to meet the plane on the ground.

Harvath sat glued to his window as the Citation X glided in over the runway and then touched down with a gentle bump of its tires. A string of neon fire trucks and two ambulances had been mobilized and were following the jet on a taxiway just beyond the runway.

It wasn’t the reception Harvath had expected. There wasn’t a police car or an unmarked government sedan in sight. Even so, he remained on guard.

The plane taxied off the runway into a holding area. When the aircraft came to a stop, the emergency vehicles surrounded it and their teams got to work.

Harvath unbuckled his seatbelt and moved to the other side of the jet to see what was going on.

As he did, the main cabin door opened and the high-pitched whine of the Citation’s Rolls-Royce engines filled the aircraft.

A moment later, several firefighters clambered up the airstairs and entered the cabin. Their walkie-talkies belched with orders being barked back and forth between emergency personnel. It was all just background noise to Harvath. He was focused on the men themselves.

Beneath their Nomex turnout gear, they looked like every other firefighter Harvath had ever met. They were lean and athletic, with serious, hard-set faces that communicated they had a job to do.

The only problem was that they bore the same look as many of the elite military and law enforcement personnel Harvath had met and worked with over his years in both the SEALs and the Secret Service.

Harvath stood up and started moving toward the front of the cabin. That was when he saw it. The second “firefighter” had something pressed up against the back of the man in front of him.

In the reflection from the highly polished cabinetry of the galley, Harvath could make out the unmistakable color and size of a Taser X26 pulsed energy weapon. It was the same device he’d used on Ronaldo Palmera just days before.

Harvath was trapped.

As part of his training years ago, Harvath had taken a hit from the Taser to see what it was like. In a word, it was intense-more intense than anything he had ever experienced. He had no desire to ride the bull again, so now he simply sank to his knees and interlaced his fingers behind his head. His twenty-four hours had evaporated a lot faster than he’d anticipated.

With a knee against his neck and his face pressed against the jet’s carpeted cabin floor, Harvath felt the burn of the Flexicuffs as they zipped his wrists up behind his back.

They were being exceptionally rough with him, and their message was clear- Screw with us and things are going to get much worse.

A black Yukon Denali was waiting at the bottom of the airstairs. Harvath’s feet never even touched the ground.

He was thrown into the backseat and bracketed by two men who slammed their doors in unison. One of them buckled him in as the other told the driver to get moving.

He didn’t see the hood until it was placed over his head and everything went black.

It was a long ride. Every minute of sensory deprivation in that impenetrable darkness felt like an hour. When the SUV finally came to a halt, one of Harvath’s minders opened his door and then jerked him from the Denali.

Harvath heard birds and what sounded like a motor of some sort off in the distance. It might have been a lawn mower, but based on the Doppler effect it had produced he guessed it was a boat of some sort. They were probably near the water.

A rough set of hands grabbed hold of him on the other side and he was ushered forward. The smooth pavement under his feet gave way to grass and then to wooden steps.

He was directed up them and made to stop as a door of some sort was opened. The air inside smelled musty, with a faint trace of Pine Sol.

Harvath was steered down a long hallway and stopped in front of another door. His hood was removed and he was shoved inside as the door was closed and locked behind him.

At first, all he could see was the color white. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted, he began to make out some blues, as well as the dark color of the distressed-wood floor. A clutch of hand-painted lobsterman buoys were the first objects he could actually focus on. From there, the entire room began to open up.

The décor was straight out of Coastal Living magazine-bead-board walls, model ships, pillows created from old nautical flags. While Harvath had envisioned many kinds of cells the president might have him thrown into, none of them had resembled this.

Skirting a small daybed, Harvath walked over to the window. He wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t open it. What did surprise him was that it appeared to be made out of bullet-resistant glass, about an inch and a half thick. This was definitely no ordinary room.

Harvath figured he was in some sort of safe house. The first agency that popped into his mind as being its likely owner was the CIA, though it could have belonged to any number of others.