Full Black

CHAPTER 7

Harvath had rented a farm on the outskirts of Uppsala for their safe house. It was far enough away from neighbors that they could interrogate their prisoner and come and go without attracting any attention.

In the city of Uppsala itself, he had rented an apartment where he had staged an assault team. Though they were outfitted with gear to look like members of the Swedish Security Service, the government of Sweden had no idea an American operation was taking place on their soil. They were purposely being kept in the dark for the time being. Somewhere in the intelligence community, there was a leak. Because of that leak, one of the highest-value terrorist targets the United States had ever bagged, Aazim Aleem, had been assassinated.

Sitting in the darkened room, Scot Harvath played the entire scene across the panorama of his mind’s eye for the millionth time. It was all there-all so vivid-the boom of the rocket-propelled grenade leaving its launcher; the whoosh as it blistered through the air en route to its target, and finally the deafening explosion as the RPG connected with the trunk and gas tank of his car and the vehicle went up in a billowing fireball.

In a blinding flash, his Yemen operation had gone from a resounding success to a spectacular failure. Aazim, who’d been in the trunk, would have purchased Harvath’s group some much-needed goodwill with the CIA, but it was too late for that now.

Staring out the window, he caught a glimpse of his reflection. Although he had crossed the threshold into his forties, he still looked as if he was in his early thirties. His sand-colored hair showed no traces of gray; his handsome, green-eyed face bore few if any lines, and his five-foot-ten body was in better physical shape than those of men half his age. To see the toll the years had taken, one would have to look elsewhere.

By most measures, Harvath was a success. In the immortal words of Mark Twain, he had made his vocation his vacation. He was a man of particular talents who was deeply committed to his country. Those talents and that commitment had propelled him to the pinnacle of his career. The cost to his personal life was something he didn’t like to think about.

Nevertheless, ever since Yemen his relationships had been very much at the forefront of his mind. But it wasn’t romantic relationships that he had been thinking about. Someone had professionally betrayed him, someone with intimate knowledge of his organization, someone close.

It was precisely because of this apparent leak that Harvath had requested permission to run this assignment himself. Somewhere there was a leak, and until that leak was plugged, there was a very short list of people Harvath could trust.

At the top of that list was a thirty-year CIA veteran named Reed Carlton. Carlton had watched as bureaucracy and inertia devoured what had once been the best intelligence agency in the world. As management became more concerned with promotions and covering its tail, and as the Agency’s leadership atrophied, Carlton could see the writing on the wall. By the 1990s, when the CIA stopped conducting unilateral espionage operations altogether, he was disappointed, but not at all surprised.

While there were countless patriotic men and women still left at Langley, the institutionalized bureaucracy made it all but impossible for them to effectively do their jobs. The bureaucracy had become risk-averse. Even more troubling was the fact that the CIA now subcontracted its actual spy work to other countries’ intelligence services. They happily handed over huge sums of cash in the hopes that other countries would do the dangerous heavy lifting and would share whatever they developed.

It was the biggest open secret in the intelligence world and it was both humiliating and beneath America’s dignity.

Once the secret was out that the CIA was no longer truly in the spy business, Carlton knew he had to do something. It was then that he began recruiting former Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operations personnel and stood up his own venture-the Carlton Group. It was modeled upon the World War II intelligence agency known as the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. It was composed of patriots who wanted one thing and one thing only-to keep Americans safe no matter what the cost.

Frustrated with the CIA’s reluctance to do its job, the Department of Defense eventually turned to Carlton to provide private intelligence services in Iraq and Afghanistan. The group’s operatives had performed dramatically, developing extensive human networks across both countries. They penetrated multiple terrorist cells and delivered exceptional, A1 intelligence that resulted in huge successes for American forces, not to mention the saving of countless American and coalition lives.

Based upon this success, a key group of DoD insiders decided to bring the Carlton Group all the way inside. They were paid from black budgets and hidden from D.C.’s grandstanding, self-serving politicians. The fact that not one single Central Intelligence Agency employee had lost his or her job after 9/11 told the Pentagon all they needed to know about the broken culture at Langley.

The Carlton Group’s mission statement was a testament to their singular focus and consisted of only three simple yet powerful words: find, fix, and finish.

An exceptional judge of talent, Reed Carlton had studied Harvath for some time before making his first approach. Harvath’s background and abilities were a perfect fit for the private intelligence service Carlton had begun to build.

Originally a member of SEAL Team 2, Harvath’s language proficiency and desire for more challenging assignments had gotten him recruited to the storied SEAL Team 6. While with Team 6, he caught the eye of the Secret Service and was asked to come help bolster counterterrorism operations at the White House.

Having been trained to take the fight to the enemy, Harvath didn’t do well in a defensive role with the Secret Service. Waiting for bad guys to strike was just not his thing. What’s more, he lacked diplomacy-a prerequisite when working around politicians. As a result, Harvath pissed a lot of people off, some of them very powerful.

The one person he had managed to keep in his corner was the then-president of the United States, Jack Rutledge. Recognizing that America was faced with a fanatical enemy who refused to play by any rules, Rutledge had taken a significant step toward tilting the playing field back to America’s advantage. In short, he had set Harvath loose.

The clandestine program the president had established worked exceedingly well. Harvath did overwhelming damage to the enemies of the United States and continued to do so right up until the end of Rutledge’s second term, whereupon a new president entered the Oval Office with a different approach to dealing with America’s enemies.

Direct action, political speak for wet work, was replaced with engagement, diplomatic speak for capitulation, and Harvath found himself out of a job. As many men of his background do, he moved into the private sector. It wasn’t the same, and though Harvath told himself he was still doing good for his country, he was disappointed with the job opportunities. It was then that Reed Carlton had come into his life and had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Within twelve months, the “Old Man,” as Harvath affectionately referred to Carlton, had drilled thirty years of tradecraft and hard-won espionage experience into him. He had also smoothed out many of his rough edges.

Combined with the deadly skills Harvath had acquired as a SEAL and the exceptional things he had learned in the Secret Service, Harvath’s training at the hands of Carlton vaulted him to the top of a very exclusive food chain. He had reached a level many seek, but few ever achieve. He had become an Apex Predator.

The Old Man made the resources available and turned Harvath loose with a simple three-word mandate-find, fix, finish. His job was to identify terrorist leaders, track them to a fixed location, and then capture or kill them as necessary, using any information gleaned from the assignment to plan the next operation. The goal was to apply constant pressure on the terrorists and pound them so hard and so relentlessly that they were permanently rocked back on the defensive, if not ground into dust.

In addition to direct-action assignments, Harvath was allowed to stage psychological operations to eat away at the terrorist networks from within, sowing doubt, fear, distrust, and paranoia throughout their ranks. It was everything the United States government should have been doing, but wasn’t. At least, it hadn’t been until the Carlton Group came on board.

Looking at his watch, Harvath decided Mansoor Aleem had been marinating long enough. It was time to begin the interrogation.