Blowback

THIRTEEN

As Harvath’s flight sped across the Atlantic, his mind was reeling. He doubted if anything could have prepared him for the contents of the envelope Gary Lawlor had handed him only hours earlier. The photos and description of what had happened in the village of Asalaam were horrific. In addition to the non-Muslim population, the illness had claimed five U.S. soldiers, all members of the Stryker Brigade Combat Team sent to look for missing American aid workers.

Harvath ran through the images again in his mind’s eye, reliving every horrible stage of infection as it unfolded. A crack containment team from USAMRIID had been dispatched to Iraq as soon as it was discovered that the SBCT soldiers had become infected. It was no use. Hours after the body strapped to the ceiling of the Provincial Ministry of Police had covered them in a fine bloody mist, they began to show symptoms of contamination. Immediately, the soldiers were placed in quarantine, which helped to prevent the illness from spreading, but despite being pumped full of antibiotics, there was nothing that could be done to save them.

The illness worked faster than anything anyone had ever seen. The only thing the USAMRIID team was able to learn was that the black sludge that exited the nasal passages right before death was actually the remains of the victim’s liquefied brain matter.

Despite their express desire to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction to use against the West, no one could understand how al-Qaeda had been able to come up with something this sophisticated. The idea that they could have bioengineered a substance to attack all but the followers of Islam was beyond comprehension. Harvath was beating himself up for not having apprehended Khalid Alomari sooner. Somehow he was involved in all of this, and Harvath couldn’t help but feel that if al-Qaeda succeeded in carrying out whatever they had planned, he would be largely at fault.

Based on everything he had learned from Lawlor, it was painfully clear that Khalid Alomari hadn’t been on a fund-raising or planning tour of the Middle East, but had been ticking names off a very special hit list. Whoever those scientists were, they had obviously been involved in engineering this mystery illness and had been taken out one by one in an effort to tie up loose ends.

While that much made sense, it still didn’t explain Ozan Kalachka’s connection to everything.

As the flight attendant removed his dinner tray, untouched, Harvath reflected on the somewhat unusual friendship he had developed with one of the East’s most elusive and fabled underworld figures.

The two had first crossed paths when Harvath had been tasked to SEAL Team Six. He had been part of a joint DEA task force charged with taking down a notorious Mediterranean drug trafficker who had branched out into the black-market arms trade. The problem, though, was that the team had been operating on faulty intelligence. After a very thorough investigation, the DEA, along with local authorities, had been able to apprehend a significant mid-level player out of Morocco. That player in turn agreed to roll over and finger his superiors in exchange for being cut loose. No one had any idea that the man’s superiors had set him up in order to have the DEA do their dirty work for them.

The mid-level Moroccan provided excellent intel, but it didn’t lead to his superiors; instead it led to Ozan Kalachka — a man whose arms-trade turf the Moroccans were trying to cut in on. Despite all the Monday morning quarterbacking, no one disputed that the agents working the case had done everything exactly as they were supposed to. It was the first and last time anyone ever got the better of the DEA in a case of that magnitude, but it could not be denied that during its execution Scot Harvath had almost made one of the biggest mistakes of his career, if not his life.

At six feet tall and well over three hundred pounds, the sixty-two-year-old Ozan Kalachka nearly measured the same side-to-side as he did up-and-down. With his impeccable taste in clothing and neatly groomed silver hair, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor known as the Fat Man — Sydney Greenstreet. Many mistook Kalachka’s excessive weight as a sign of lethargy and weakness — an indication that he was soft and slow. That was the mistake Harvath had made when the joint task force attempted to arrest the reputed Turkish mobster, and it nearly cost Harvath one of his eyes. Though one would have to look very closely to see it, he still bore the scar from the encounter above his left cheekbone. And in what was more of a testament to his hot temper than his training as a SEAL, Harvath had bestowed upon the Turk the limp with which he still walked to this day.

Both men, each in his own way, had misjudged the other and had lived to regret it — Kalachka for his limp, and Harvath, not so much for his scar, but rather for the shame of underestimating an opponent and letting him get the better of him. When the physical and legal dust had settled, the encounter had resulted in lessons neither of them would ever forget. The DEA, having been duped by the Moroccans, had nothing substantial they could charge Kalachka with, and were forced to stand down. Kalachka, though, had been wronged and intended to inflict maximum damage on the Moroccans who had set him up. Two months after checking out of the hospital, Kalachka sent the lead DEA agent a file three inches thick, which led to the absolute ruin of the Moroccans’ organization.

The entire experience was unusual at best, but even more unusual was the friendship it spawned — a friendship between the man with the limp and the man with the scar. The relationship had actually served Harvath well on more than one occasion. Not that Ozan Kalachka was generous with information. Kalachka was the epitome of the word profiteer. The man never made a single move that didn’t somehow benefit him first and foremost. That said, Kalachka exhibited something that could only be loosely described as a sort of paternal fondness for Harvath. When all was said and done, the man liked him, and to a certain degree, Harvath felt the same way in return.

“Fixer” was the best way to describe Kalachka and what he did for a living. He brokered everything from arms and real estate deals to crooked foreign elections, banana republic revolutions, and assassinations many felt were too difficult or too politically sensitive to attempt. Even the Israelis had employed Kalachka at one time.

Though Israeli Kidon agents had carried out the hits, Kalachka was the person who had blueprinted the assassinations of all the members of Black September — the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Israelis hired him again in a consulting capacity in 1976 and were rewarded with the successful recovery of Israeli hostages from Entebbe, Uganda.

In an attempt to broaden his revenue base, Kalachka, it was said, had offered his services to the United States on two separate occasions and both Presidents Kennedy and Carter had turned him down. Kennedy had said no to Kalachka’s suggestions for taking out Castro in lieu of what would become known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Carter had passed on Kalachka’s ideas for how to successfully recover the American hostages from Tehran. Despite the affinity of several other countries for Kalachka’s talents and abilities, the United States had never warmed to him.

As far as Harvath was concerned, though, as long as Kalachka was helping to organize the assassinations of known terrorists and overthrow corrupt regimes, he was okay. His dealings in the black-market arms trade were among the gray areas that were easier to look at in light of the good he’d done elsewhere.

Kalachka was one of the few people he had ever met who not only knew who he was, but made no apologies for it. No matter how charming and cordial on the outside, the real Ozan Kalachka was a ruthless creature who worked the very outermost fringes of what was legal and would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. The hundred-thousand-dollar question at the moment, though, was what did Kalachka want from him?

Closing his eyes, Harvath tried to put the question out of his mind and was immediately burdened by something else. If Carmichael was successful in dragging him into the media spotlight and destroying his career, what was he going to do with the rest of his life? Depending on how bad a number the senator did on him, he might or might not be able to go into the private sector as a consultant.

Regardless, if Carmichael forced him into the spotlight, there would always be a bull’s-eye painted on his back, and no career other than what he was doing right at this very moment would ever be satisfying for him. Harvath had spent most of his adult life in service to his country and had no desire to see that change.

For the time being, though, he had very little control over his situation. He had to trust that people like Gary Lawlor, the president, and even Chuck Anderson were not going to let him burn for simply doing his job. In a matter of hours his plane would be landing and he would discover what Ozan Kalachka wanted from him.