Full Black

CHAPTER 28

Two extensive medical kits had been allotted for the operation. One was with Riley Turner and Mansoor, who, along with Andy Bachmann, had already left for the airport near Stockholm. The other belonged to the assault team and was sitting in the back of the moving truck that had been abandoned at the scene of the failed safe house raid.

Harvath, though, had a couple of items in his bag of tricks that he never traveled without. As he debriefed Chase and cleaned up his wound, he unwrapped a tampon, cut off about an inch, and packed it into the hole. He then wrapped Chase’s arm with duct tape. It would do for now, but Chase was going to need professional medical help.

Riley had arranged to delay the flight until they could get there. It was a big enough aircraft and the three additional passengers would be posing as the security detail for the wealthy Arab patient. As long as Chase didn’t start bleeding, they should be okay. Just to be sure, Harvath wrapped a few more pieces of duct tape around his arm. It was going to be a pain in the ass to get off, but that was a problem for later.

Murphy sanitized the barn and the farmhouse as Harvath helped Chase put on his suit.

“He must have left the phone in there, knowing we’d be tracking it,” said Chase as he winced, sliding his arm into his jacket.

“Karami definitely knew something was up,” stated Harvath. “He reproduced your signal perfectly.”

Chase felt terrible. “I got those men killed.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“If I’d just found a way to look back out the window sooner, maybe I could have warned you.”

Harvath shook his head and the two men fell silent.

“You didn’t see Karami or Sabah leave the building?” asked Chase.

“No, but I wasn’t looking. If it wasn’t for the guy that came through the window, I never would have known there was a second apartment. I thought you were dead.”

Chase let that sink in for a moment before saying, “How about the Sheikh from Qatar? Any idea who he is?”

“No,” replied Harvath, “but that’ll be one of the first questions Mansoor is going to get asked.”

“I don’t know how we’ll get access to any of the forensics, but I’ll bet the Swedes find fried computer parts in at least one of those apartments that got blown up.”

Harvath nodded. “I agree.”

“They were getting ready to go operational,” Chase said. “I’m telling you. We need to hunt them down and we need to stop them.”

“First things first,” replied Harvath. “You need to get your arm taken care of.”

“Don’t worry about my arm,” Chase said as he tried to move it and failed. “As soon as we get this redneck bandage off and let a real doctor have a look, I’ll be fine.”

Harvath doubted it. Chase was going to be out of the game for months, if not longer. “Whatever you say, boss.”

“Don’t patronize me, Harvath,” he shot back. “I want you to promise me that you’ll wait.”

“For what?”

“For taking out Karami and Sabah,” said Chase. “I want to be there.”

Harvath understood the man’s desire for revenge. Harvath felt it just as intensely, if not more so. He had learned, though, to keep such things to himself. “Let’s figure out what kind of shape your arm’s in and then we’ll talk.”

Chase held up his left index finger and pointed at Harvath. “I want us to do it together.”

Harvath smiled. The kid was a liar. He just wanted to do it. It had nothing to do with Harvath. He just didn’t want to be left out. “I’m going to go make sure everything is ready. We shove off in five. Okay?”

“Roger that,” replied Chase as he turned to the mirror and tried, with one hand, to straighten the knot Harvath had tied in his tie. Staring at his reflection as he struggled, he couldn’t help but wonder if this was what so many of America’s disabled vets went through. He didn’t like needing somebody else’s help getting dressed.

In fact, it pissed him off and reminded him of the IED videos the jihadists had been laughing at back at their safe house. That only made him angrier.

The Swedish airport authorities stamped the group’s passports and waved them out toward the tarmac where they boarded their waiting aircraft.

Sentinel Medevac was a private company the Carlton Group hired jets from on occasion. Their normal clientele were humanitarian groups and international NGOs. Sentinel was viewed as something akin to the Red Cross, and that was why the Old Man liked working with them. Their planes were an excellent means of covertly moving personnel and equipment in and out of foreign countries.

What Harvath liked about them was that in addition to their fleet of extensive, high-end aircraft, Sentinel’s owner-a successful young doctor out of North Carolina-was a patriot who was more than happy to assist the Old Man and his operators. The doctor always sent the best jets and the galleys were always well stocked.

Normally, Harvath waited until the plane had taken off before fixing himself a drink. Not this time. Losing all those men had been devastating. He walked straight to the back of the plane, dropped a handful of ice cubes into a glass, and poured several fingers of Maker’s Mark.

He was halfway finished with his first drink before the plane had even been cleared for takeoff. When its wheels finally left the ground, he settled back in his seat and tried to make sense of what had happened.

Operationally, they had played their cards very close to their vest. The Old Man had kept the need-to-know circle tight, working long hours and doing several jobs himself. Nevertheless, the operation had been a total failure, worse than Yemen. In Yemen all they had lost was a high-value target. In Uppsala, a high-value target and his second in command had gotten away and five members of the operation’s assault team had been killed.

From a straight scorecard perspective, it had been very, very bad. Coming on the heels of the failed Yemen op only made it worse.

Karami, the cell leader, was a serious player who truly knew what he was doing. Requiring his safe-house to be completely sterile while cell phones were left in a secondary operations center of some sort across the street showed both discipline and intelligence. Picking up on Chase’s signal via the windows and blinds showed an amazing attention to detail. Having prewired the secondary location to detonate showed an ability to think several steps ahead. Harvath and his team had been incredibly lucky to have gotten as close to Karami as they had. It would be very difficult to do so again.

But Uppsala didn’t appear to have failed for the same reason Yemen had. Did Yemen happen because of a leak or was there another reason? Despite how careful he had been, could Harvath have been followed by Aazim Aleem’s people? Would they kill their own man by blowing up the car he was in via an RPG rather than let him be extradited and interrogated by the Americans? It was possible. Anything was possible. Harvath made a mental note to be even more diligent in the future.

It made him think about the whirlwind of events that had just occurred. Technically, as badly as the Uppsala operation had gone, it hadn’t been a total failure. They had Mansoor Aleem in custody and they had successfully inserted Chase into the cell long enough for him to ID its leader and pick up some minor intelligence on some supposed Sheikh from Qatar.

Their newest problem was Chase’s certainty that Karami was about to activate some sort of attack. Harvath had witnessed firsthand Aazim’s previous attacks by his European and Chicago cells. Very few nights went by that Harvath didn’t picture the faces of the screaming children in the Chicago train station who had come so close to being killed. After that kind of trauma, he had no idea how they could ever grow up to lead normal lives. It was incredibly sad.

Sadder still was the number of innocent people who had been killed around the world by Muslim terrorists. People who had been doing nothing more than going about their daily lives. The majority of these victims had been Muslims themselves. In fact, for all the propaganda to the contrary, the biggest killers of Muslims were other Muslims.

If it were up to Harvath, he’d drop all the supporters of a worldwide Islamic caliphate onto an island and let them battle it out. He’d also include all those who supported Islamic charities knowing full well their money was going to finance terrorism. That you weren’t blowing yourself up or hijacking aircraft didn’t mean you weren’t participating in the jihad. There was jihad of the pocketbook as well.

There was also public relations jihad. It was active daily in the American press. Either media figures denied entirely that there was a Muslim terrorism problem, or they tried to play the false moral equivalency card and paint Christian fundamentalists as equally dangerous and prolific in their violence. When asked for examples, they often cite the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, though McVeigh never claimed to be a Christian and never cited the Bible, or any other religious text, for that matter, as his reason for carrying out his horrific act of terrorism. It was amazing how many people believed the disinformation.

Then there were those media figures who actually tried to put a happy face on Muslim extremism and Sharia law under the banner of cultural diversity. Surely the victims of honor killings, and those beaten and killed for not wearing headscarves, for dating men from outside their faith, or for trying to convert to another religion would strongly disagree.

Harvath was stunned at times by how uncommon common sense was. As far as he was concerned, all of the media figures and the politicians who enabled that kind of barbarism could go to the island, too. Better yet, he would have loved to have flown them all over to Waziristan and dropped them off. Anyone who made it back alive could then spout off about anything they wanted. Until they had seen the evil done in the name of that religion and how good Muslims were brutalized by the people of their own faith, he’d rather not hear them opine on the subject.

He’d seen the worst of what was being done in the name of Islam and it needed more attention, not less. For good Muslims to be able to reform their faith and live peacefully with the rest of the world, they needed American media and politicians on their side, not the side of their enemies.

There were times when Harvath wondered why he continued to do what he did. Why defend a country that included many who thought their nation was arrogant and deserved to be humbled and brought low? Why defend these people? Better yet, agree or disagree, why risk everything, including your life, over and over again, for over 300 million people you would never meet?

These were good questions and went to the core of who he was and why he did what he did.

Harvath had become a SEAL after his father had died in part because he felt guilty about how rocky their relationship had been at the end. But making your dead father somehow happy, or proud of you, wasn’t enough fuel to have propelled a career like Harvath’s. There had to be something deeper, and there was.

Harvath had no brothers or sisters. Because of his career, his father had spent a lot of time on assignments in places he couldn’t talk about. He often left without even being able to say good-bye. Though his mother tried to compensate for his father’s lengthy absences, he carried an emptiness that he had never been able to fill. He always wanted to feel needed, that he was worth coming home to, or better yet, was worth never leaving.

Growing up on Coronado Island, his best friend had been his nextdoor neighbor, a developmentally delayed boy with an enlarged head, named Fred. Other children taunted him mercilessly and called him “egghead.” Though not particularly big, Harvath stood toe to toe with all comers to defend his best friend. Without his father around to teach him to fight and his father’s pals stopping by only occasionally to take him fishing and check up on his mom, he had to learn how to defend himself and Fred. He became street-tough real fast, often fighting several other children at the same time. Never once was he afraid to do what had to be done to defend his friend. He was the boy’s ever-present protector, a role nobody played in his own life.

It was a void Harvath wouldn’t have filled until he joined the SEALs and had teammates, comrades in arms, to whom he would entrust his life on a regular basis and who always had his back.

Was there a need in Harvath to take risks and would that need have been there regardless of the amount of time his father spent deployed? Most likely. That need to take risks in order to feel alive, to do the impossible, to face one’s fears and not back down, was present in every single warrior he’d ever met. They also shared a sense of honor in being chosen to stand and defend the country and people they held dear. Protecting them and protecting America, making sure no harm came to either, meant they were defending that which they cherished more than their very lives.

Harvath willingly defended those he didn’t agree with, even those who loathed the very existence of men like him, because as Americans or allies, he believed passionately in their rights as individuals to think and do what they wished. It didn’t matter how he might disagree with them or vice versa. He felt it made him stronger to defend their rights-without any expectation, any recognition, or any reward.

In part, he and other warriors like him did it for themselves, to have a better sense of self-worth. It was who they were and what they did best. They did it for the man next to them, the men who had come before them, and the men who had been taken from them on dangerous missions in dirty little places no one would ever hear about. It was simple and it was complicated all at the same time, much like Harvath himself.

Harvath lived by the adage that the measure of a man was what he did when no one else was looking. He also knew, having learned it with Fred, that very few people will stand up and put themselves in harm’s way to protect those who cannot protect themselves. At its root, protecting people was his calling in life. It was something he couldn’t ignore. His honor wouldn’t let him. And in a sense, it was because he had devoted himself to protecting the American dream for others, that he had never been able to fully enjoy it for himself.

Harvath couldn’t stop thinking about the assaulters who had been killed. He wondered how many of them had families. Most likely several of them. Maybe even all of them. How many wives were they leaving behind? How many children? What kind of impact would losing their fathers have on them? The stories that would never be read. The hugs that would never be given. The right piece of fatherly advice at the right time that now wouldn’t be offered. The impact was incalculable.

Opening his eyes, Harvath lifted his head and looked toward the rear of the aircraft. Riley was trying to remove the hillbilly Band-Aid from around Chase’s arm. It wasn’t going well. Almost as if she knew he was watching her, she glanced up, shook her head, and went back to what she was doing.

Harvath had no idea what that was supposed to mean and at this moment, he didn’t care. He tried to focus his mind on rolling up the rest of Aazim’s network before they could carry out any further attacks.

To stop them, though, Harvath was going to have to predict where lightning was going to strike. He was going to have to be in the right place at the right time, or as the father of hockey great Wayne Gretsky taught his son, skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.

The puck had been in Sweden. Was it still there, or had it moved someplace else? If it had moved, where would it be next? Those questions were still at the forefront of Harvath’s mind as he closed his eyes once more and his exhausted body slipped off into the regenerative unconsciousness of a deep, black sleep.

The flight from Stockholm to the former United States Naval Air Station in Keflavik, Iceland, took just more than three hours. Harvath was still asleep when the wheels of the private jet touched down and jolted him awake.

Though on paper the Naval Air Station had been turned over to the Icelandic Defense Agency in 2008, there was still a heavy American presence at the facility.

The aircraft taxied into a large hangar where an ambulance was waiting to take Mansoor to the base’s hospital. Riley had insisted that Chase, his arm in a sling, come along as well so that they could take a better look at him.

Chase could have hopped a flight back home if he had wanted to and gotten patched up back there. Riley had already irrigated the wound, redressed it, and started him on a course of antibiotics. It hurt like hell, though, and he figured the sooner he knew the extent of the damage the sooner he’d know how soon he could get back in the fight.

He also didn’t want to go anywhere until he knew what Mansoor’s prognosis was. If the guy was going to be ready for interrogation again soon, Chase wanted to be there for it. He knew the most about the network and he wanted to help guide some of the questions, if not do a portion of the interrogation himself. Riley was going to stick around and wait for the prognosis as well. Even though she’d be handing him over to a new doctor, she still felt responsible for him.

Harvath was the only one without a reason to stay in Iceland. The only thing he could think of was that if Karami or Sabah popped up somewhere in Europe, he’d be a lot closer and get to them a lot faster from Iceland than he would from D.C.

Something told him that Europe was where the puck had been. America was where he needed to skate to now. That’s where the puck was going to be. He couldn’t help but think that if Aazim Aleem had come to Chicago in advance of those attacks, and had planned on sending Chase to New York while he went to L.A. to oversee additional strikes, the Uppsala cell leader would have to do the same thing. He had nothing to back that up, though. It was just a gut feeling.

His gut also told him that despite what she had said in the barn back in Sweden, he shouldn’t give up on Riley Turner. It could take days for them to run the battery of tests on Mansoor. This could turn out to be the perfect window he’d been looking for to get to know her better and for her to get to know him.

Coming off the deaths of the assault team, though, the timing wasn’t right. Men had died on their operation. She hadn’t been at the scene, but she was part of the team. It was a loss for all of them.

It was also probably just as well. The Old Man was going to want Harvath to render a full debrief. There was also the issue of monitoring the Swedish investigation. Knowing the Old Man, he’d already reached out to the authorities in Sweden with a piece of intelligence that pointed the finger of responsibility for what had happened at a completely different foreign intelligence service. Whatever service he chose to implicate, he would do so in such a way as to not be airtight, but to be enough to convince the Swedes there was little doubt. It also probably served one of the many other ops the Old Man was running at the moment. He often likened running an intelligence service to dropping pebbles in a still pool. You had to know not only how far out every ripple would radiate, but which ones would intersect and with how much force. The man was truly a savant.

Was it the best way to treat an aligned nation like Sweden? No, but it was unfortunately the way the game had to be played. In the world of three-dimensional chess, checkers players found themselves swept from the board pretty fast. You were either steps ahead of everyone, even your allies, or they were steps ahead of you. The Carlton Group had been created to help catapult America back into the lead.

Considering the Old Man’s attention to detail, Harvath wasn’t surprised when moments after stepping off the jet his cell phone rang.

“Yes, sir,” he said, moving aside for the ambulance team that was transporting Mansoor and his stretcher down the stairs.

The Old Man’s voice was as clear as if he were standing right next to Harvath. “What’s the situation there?” he asked.

“They’re transferring Massachusetts to the ambulance now,” Harvath replied, referring to Mansoor Aleem by his operational code name.

“Any change in his condition?”

“Negative.”

“Are you sure he’s not faking it? That’s textbook for these guys, you know.”

Harvath was well aware that they were taught to feign illness, severe if possible, to avoid interrogation for as long as possible. They were also taught to inflict physical harm on themselves and to blame it on their captors in hopes of having their interrogations suspended altogether.

Three SEALs Harvath knew had been accused of abusing a prisoner in Iraq after the guy had thrown himself out of the back of their truck and smashed his own head against his cell wall. The SEALs were eventually exonerated, but not until after being put through a ridiculous trial and having grandstanding members of Congress suggest that all terrorist captures be videotaped via helmet cams and that they remain under video surveillance 24/7.

Harvath had a better idea. Seeing as how most of them were of little to no intelligence value, he figured he could save the U.S. government a lot of money. The United States should simply adopt a policy of no longer capturing terrorists. If we find you, you’re dead. No Gitmo. No nothing. Just dead. It would be interesting to see what ran out first-virgins in Paradise or Muslims down on earth willing to martyr themselves.

“His heart stopped, so I don’t think he’s faking it,” replied Harvath.

“Whatever it is, there’s plenty of people there who can handle it,” said the Old Man. “I need you back here double-time.”

“What’s going on?”

“Your little friend, Moonracer, has been breaking a lot of eggs.”

Harvath knew immediately who he was talking about. His little friend was a dwarf named Nicholas, who until recently had been better known to Western intelligence agencies as the Troll. He dealt in the purchase and sale of highly sensitive and often classified information used to blackmail governments and powerful individuals.

Nicholas had a way with data-both analyzing and accessing it. He had crafted countless algorithms, and one of his trading programs had been purchased by a major international financial institution. None of his legitimate clients knew his true identity. If they had, none of them would have done business with him, rightly assuming that his products contained countless trap doors.

Harvath had crossed paths with Nicholas on multiple occasions, and their relationship had moved from one of hostility to detente to friendship. Despite his stature and various peccadilloes, he was a man of amazing abilities-abilities that Harvath recognized could be of incredible value to the United States.

Nicholas had discovered Aazim’s nephew, Mansoor, and the young man’s connection to the terrorist network. Harvath wanted Nicholas to be brought inside the Carlton Group, and the Old Man had been dead set against it. He had even threatened to terminate Harvath’s contract over the issue if Harvath didn’t drop it. Harvath didn’t drop it. Nicholas was an asset and either he could be their asset, or he could be someone else’s-or worse, continue to work on his own account.

For his role in stealing classified American intelligence, Nicholas had been made an enemy of the state. The Old Man had constructed multiple conditions before he would accept Nicholas’s involvement with the Group, of which the highest and hardest was getting Nicholas pardoned.

Presented with information on Nicholas’s valuable skills and repeated cooperation with previous clandestine assignments, a closed-door meeting of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence decided to make a recommendation in favor of his pardon to the president. The president accepted their recommendation, but the pardon came with multiple strings attached, including the surrender of certain patents and trademarks Nicholas held, the money from which would be accepted in lieu of prison time.

While Nicholas complained that “Uncle Sugar,” as he liked to call the U.S. government, was bleeding him dry, he was happy to join the Carlton Group. Because of his size, he had spent most of his life alone. He felt ennobled to be part of something bigger than himself. Moonracer was the Group call sign he’d been issued.

When the Old Man said that Nicholas was “breaking a lot of eggs,” Harvath remembered Nicholas’s warning when he had joined the Group. His type of work wasn’t pretty. Much of it was also illegal. Breaking a lot of eggs meant he was going to have to do a lot of things Reed Carlton wouldn’t like. He promised to insulate him from as much of it as possible. That said, he was going to continue breaking eggs.

“Well, sir,” replied Harvath, “some organizations need leg breakers and some need egg breakers. At least we’ve got the best.”

“We can debate that later. I want you back here because he’s apparently broken enough eggs to put together an omelet.”

Harvath gripped his phone a bit tighter and lowered his voice. “Did we get a lead on something?”

“You’ll see when you get here. Now get that jet refueled and get moving.”

Harvath had no idea what Nicholas had uncovered, but he quietly prayed that it was something they could use to stop Karami and the other cells before they could strike again.