Foreign Agent

CHAPTER 69

Harvath’s original plan had been to get to Baseyev, interrogate Baseyev, and identify the location of the meeting honoring Baseyev. From there, he would call in a drone strike. Then he and Nicholas would embellish.

Nicholas would rework the drone footage to make it look like the Russians had carried out the strike. He would get it out to anti-Russian jihadist websites, forums, and chat rooms. The Islamists in all the places Russia was worried about would go berserk.

For his part, as ISIS fighters rushed to the scene of the attack to look for survivors and help dig people out of the rubble, Harvath would lie in wait with the sniper rifle. He would pick off as many as possible and then flee.

Near the edge of town, the Hadids would have staged an accident. Baseyev would be trapped, unconscious, in a rolled-over vehicle. Harvath would plant the rifle, as well as a few other pieces of incriminating Russian evidence, and they’d all be off. When ISIS found Baseyev, they would tear him limb from limb. Harvath was a sucker for happy endings.

But as things often did in the field, something changed. Baseyev revealed a piece of bombshell information.

Inside the house glowing with monitors, the one with all the extra generators and air conditioning, was the social media mastermind for ISIS — the creative force behind not only their Internet recruiting but all of their propaganda, including their horrific videos.

There was one additional factor that made him special in Harvath’s eyes — he was the HVT Salah had identified. Because of him, the CIA SAD team and their pilots had been killed in Anbar. Because of him, three American women from the U.S. embassy in Amman had been brutally raped and killed. And because of him, Harvath was willing to take a huge risk. The man was too valuable a target to pass up.

At this point, the only question normally on Harvath’s mind was kill or capture? But while killing had always provided a certain satisfaction, it no longer felt like it was enough — not after so many lives had already been lost. He wanted more than blood.

He wanted substantive revenge — against both ISIS and the Russians. That meant the social media mastermind and Baseyev were actually worth more to him alive. And so, he had made up his mind.

“Wait. You’re asking permission to do what exactly?” Ryan replied from Langley.

“I’m not asking permission,” Harvath clarified. “Now, can you get it done or not?”

She knew better than to argue with him. His ability to adapt under high-stress situations and prevail was why they had hired him. He was his own man, especially when he was in the field. With or without them, he was going to do it. His mind was made up.

After a quick discussion with the Pentagon, she came back online. “DoD has a Reaper in Western Iraq. It’ll take them at least forty-five minutes, though, until they can get it on station over you.”

“What’s it carrying?”

“Four Hellfires, plus two five-hundred-pound GBU-38s.”

JDAMs. Harvath knew the munition well. It was a bolt-on guidance package that turned “dumb,” unguided gravity bombs into smart, precision-guided game-changers.

The DoD drone represented a massive amount of ordnance. Harvath liked that. He was a big fan of overkill. If a little was good, then a ton was even better — and it sent a hell of a message.

“The meeting starts in half an hour,” he replied. “Tell them to step on it.”

As Ryan signed off, Harvath’s mind turned to how they were going to pull off snatching the social media guru.

According to Baseyev, there were two guards inside the house — one on the first floor and another up on the second, as Yusuf had seen.

The house also contained three racks of servers. If Harvath could grab their hard drives, in addition to the media mastermind, it would be a huge coup for the United States.

Everyone in the house, though, had explicit instructions to destroy everything if they came under attack. That left Harvath with a serious problem.

The downstairs had been converted into an open area where the social media people worked.

Besides the guru, there were six key players — two video editors, plus four operatives who monitored all the ISIS social media channels and fed ISIS propaganda to a series of sympathizers around the globe who acted as “repeater” stations.

The servers were kept in a locked room upstairs, and Baseyev gave Harvath a complete rundown of how the home was laid out.

If it was all accurate, and considering that Baseyev’s life hung in the balance, and he had no reason to believe it wasn’t, Harvath had the advantage. He would have the element of surprise. What he didn’t have, though, was a plan.

He had beaten Baseyev so badly, the man couldn’t be used as a ruse to get him inside. And while there were only two guards, the rest of the social-media people, though admittedly geeks to greater or lesser degrees, all had AK-47s. They carried them to look tough, but none of them were killers.

Even so, all it took was one lucky shot. An armed combatant was an armed combatant. Geeks or not, they were committed jihadists and Harvath wasn’t going to show any of them an ounce of mercy. The only person he cared about in that house was their head of social media.

Baseyev said his name was Rafael — a twenty-seven-year-old British national of Pakistani descent. He was short and fat with a scraggly beard, greasy hair, and glasses. And while he professed to hate the West for its decadence, he could always be found wearing a vintage Western rock band T-shirt, such as The Clash or Elvis Costello. He was also known for living on huge amounts of strawberry licorice and tall cans of sugary energy drinks.

Reflecting on the details, Harvath thought, Who the fuck lives on strawberry licorice and energy drinks in the middle of a war zone?

Then, like a bolt from the blue, a brilliant and elegantly simple plan crystallized in his mind.