Full Black

CHAPTER 44

When the light had completely gone and Harvath had finished his meal, he left the dock and headed back up to his house. Sooner or later, the Old Man was going to want his written report. Tonight seemed as good a time as any.

Grabbing his laptop from the safe in his office, Harvath powered it up and made himself comfortable at his desk. Normally, his dog would have been sitting right underneath his feet, but he’d been away so much he’d left him with friends.

Harvath spent the next several hours working on his report. Reed Carlton was a detail person and never complained that Harvath’s summaries were too long. That was fine by Harvath, he was a detail guy as well and he found that the deeper into detail he went, the better he was able to wrap his head around what had gone right, what had gone wrong, and what needed to happen going forward.

He had begun his narrative in the aftermath of the Yemen operation and moved forward. Halfway through, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to sleep until he had written everything down, so he got up and went into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. Carrying an extra-large mug back to his desk, he sat down at his laptop and picked up right where he had left off.

As he wrote, he became increasingly confident that Karami, the Uppsala cell leader, was still in Sweden. Leaving the country after what had happened would have been too risky. His network might be able to get him out by boat, but they’d have to wait until the heat died down. Harvath made note of it in his report and also made a mental note to bring it up with the Old Man.

From there, Harvath moved on to a moment-by-moment breakdown of everything that had happened leading up to the explosion. Chase was undoubtedly working on a similar report for his superiors, and Harvath made an additional note to get a copy of it to see if it would help fill in any of his blanks.

Soon, he found himself speculating about what had gone wrong. It wasn’t easy reliving the blast and envisioning the deaths of Schiller and his team, but it was necessary. Harvath put his ego aside and was completely candid about where he felt he had failed and how he believed the terrorists had been able to gain the upper hand.

Harvath was focused on being brutally honest regarding his possible failings in the assignment. Men under his command had died and he owed it to them and their families to try to ferret out every single detail, no matter how damaging it might be to him, in order to make sure that such a thing never happened again.

He was so focused on this part of his report that he didn’t at first hear his cell phone vibrating on the credenza behind him. When he did finally notice it, he reached for it without looking and raised the device to his ear.

“Harvath,” he said absentmindedly, as he finished typing his sentence with his free hand.

“Do you have the TV on?” asked the Old Man.

Harvath was no longer focused on his report. “No. Why?” he asked, reaching for the remote and turning on the TV in his office. “What’s going on?”

“We just got hit. Simultaneous attacks in multiple cities across the country.”

“What were the targets?” he asked as he flipped to the channel he wanted.

“Movie theaters. Multiple bombings in at least twenty of them.”

Harvath had one of the cable news networks up on his TV and he could see live footage of fire trucks and ambulances outside a theater complex in Oregon.

“The death toll is predicted to be in the thousands.”

Harvath feared the Old Man was right. On a Saturday night, many theaters would be packed. “Do we know anything about the bombers?”

“The FBI has taken the lead and they’re already on the ground at several of the sites. I’ve got a call in to a contact there and he’s going to share whatever they find.”

Harvath watched as footage from other movie theater bombings was fed onto the screen. There was no one word to describe the feeling that was rushing through him. It was eerily reminiscent of how he had felt on 9/11. It was a mixture of pure rage and a haunting, guilt-ridden feeling of responsibility. It was his job and the job of others like him to stop things like this. It was their job as sheepdogs to keep the wolves away from the flock. They had failed. Though they needed to be right 24/7, 365 days a year, the terrorists had to be right only once. It was only a matter of time.

Nevertheless, that didn’t make Harvath feel any better about what was unfolding right now on TV screens across the country. Somehow the wolves had snuck one past-a big one. Thousands of people were dead. There was no telling at this point how many more were injured. The sheepdogs had just chalked up a major loss.

“Do we have any idea who was behind this?” he asked.

“Not at this point,” said Carlton, “but I think we should assume it’s our network.”

If that turned out to be true, then Chase was spot-on about their going operational. “What can I do?”

“Moonracer thinks he may have something. How soon can you get to the office?”

Harvath looked at his watch. “I can be there in an hour.”

“Hurry up,” replied the Old Man. “If this is our network, this is just a warm-up. They’re going to try to hit us again and I want to make sure they don’t succeed.”