were as they had been when he had stepped outside the guesthouse almost two hours earlier. Had he not seen the CCTV footage and the bodies on the adjacent ranch, there would be no indication that an intense danger was lurking somewhere in the darkness.
He began moving forward again but stopped after thirty yards, when he thought he smelled something. It was only the faintest whiff, and the harder he tried to zero in on it, the more he smelled only earth and other odors.
Exhaling through his nose, he gave up and continued on. Ten yards further and the scent was delivered unmistakably on the breeze.
Smoking was something you were never supposed to do on an op, but it was a rule that was broken all of the time. Harvath now knew there was definitely someone up in the clump of trees. Hidden away, at least four hundred yards from his target, whoever it was probably thought they could risk a quick cigarette without tipping anyone off. Most likely, he was using the soldier’s trick of cupping both hands around the cigarette in order to prevent the glowing tip from being seen, but it didn’t make any difference. Harvath knew exactly where he was.
If the man was in fact a sniper, he’d be equipped with some sort of night vision device. But with both hands cupped around his cigarette, he’d be incapable at the moment of anything more than peering through a fixed rifle scope. He wouldn’t be actively looking to either side or, more to the point, behind him.
Quickening his pace, Harvath closed the distance to the copse of maples to thirty yards, then dropped to the ground and crawled in on his belly, inch by carefully silent inch.
He was less than ten yards away when he saw the sudden bright orange glow of the coal as the smoker uncupped his hands from the cigarette and crushed it out. There was a crackle of dry leaves while the sniper adjusted himself behind his rifle and peered into his scope. From his prone position, he slowly pivoted the rifle from side to side. Barely above a whisper, he spoke into his headset microphone and said, “Gold One, you’re clear. Gold Two, also clear. Gold Three, you’re good to go.”
Harvath drew his knife. With his other hand, he felt around him for a rock just the right size. He needed only to distract the man for a second.
As his fingers closed around what he was looking for, he took a silent breath, let it out, and sprang.
CHAPTER 39
The distraction wasn’t as effective as Harvath had planned, because when the sniper’s attention was drawn in the direction of where the rock had been thrown, he immediately seemed to sense he was under attack.
Harvath had launched himself, expecting to land on the man’s back. Gripping his forehead, he would pull his head back, expose his throat, and slice through his larynx, thus silencing him instantly. Then he’d push the head forward and plunge the knife into the base of his skull. With a twist of the blade, the brain stem would be severed and the man would no longer be a threat. That wasn’t exactly how it unfolded.
The sniper rolled over, bringing his rifle with him. As Harvath landed on top of him, the young man swung the stock and connected with Harvath’s left collarbone, creating a shock wave of pain.
His body wanted to roll away from the agony, but he fought to stay where he was. Rapidly his eyes swept the young sniper’s face and neck; in a microsecond, he found what he was looking for.
Being on top, Harvath had the advantage of leverage. In the blink of an eye, he clamped down on the butt of the weapon and drove all his weight forward.
The sniper tilted his head to the side so as not to be hit in the face, and that was the opening Harvath had been hoping for. Reaching over the scope, he swept the knife. It entered behind the man’s right ear and came down below his jawline, slicing through flesh and the wire of his headset.
Taking some of his weight off the rifle, Harvath added pressure to the blade, making sure to cut as deep as possible. As soon as he severed the larynx, he pulled the knife out and slid it between the man’s ribs. He was wearing body armor, but it was soft and meant to stop bullets, not a knife. Adding more force, Harvath thrust the blade up and into the man’s heart.
The sniper’s body went rigid, spasmed, and then fell still. His hands dropped from the rifle. Harvath pulled it away and stood. The entire struggle had lasted only a matter of seconds.
Setting the rifle aside, he relieved the twenty-something sniper of his radio and then dragged him behind one of the maples and dumped the body. In a perfect scenario, he would have taken the man captive in order to interrogate him, but there had been no way to subdue him and he had nothing with which to tie him up. Even then, it would have been an impossible task to keep one eye on the sniper while figuring out where his colleagues were. If he could have done it another way, he would have. As far as he was concerned, he had exercised the only option available to him.
Though he had done it before, Harvath was not fond of using a knife. There was something barbaric about it. It was too close, too messy, too personal. He preferred using a firearm; it allowed him to keep a certain psychological distance.
He had lost track of the men he had killed by pulling a trigger. Those weren’t the faces he struggled to keep banished to remote corners of his psyche.
It was the men he killed up close, inches away, whose faces sometimes loomed in his mind’s eye. He had never figured out why. He was required to kill for a living, and he had little problem doing it. Why should one form of killing be any different from any other? The end result was the same.
The only conclusion he could come to was that civilized people were encoded with an aversion to murder. Throughout thousands of years of history, tales of morality and murder were handed down from one generation to the next. From childhood, human beings are steeped in stories about the unjustified taking of life, and the acts they find the most reprehensible are those committed with the most basic tools—stones or knives, clubs or bare hands —as if the tools most associated with murder are those that have been around as long as murder itself.
There was a dissociation Harvath felt when taking a life via the barrel of a gun. The bullet was his intercessor. He pulled the trigger; the bullet was released; the bullet killed the target. It was clean, simple, it all fit compactly inside an iron strongbox he kept buried away in his mind. And no matter how many times he killed, the box always had room for one more. It was only a handful of kills, no matter how justified, that were occasionally able to slip his mental jailer and prod the edges of his conscience.
Some of Harvath’s strongest qualities, though, were his willpower and his ability to compartmentalize and focus on the mission at hand. He was not prone to doubts or second-guessing.
After clearing away the sniper’s body, he set up the rifle and lay down behind it—a Remington Model 700 with a sound and flash suppressor, as well as a detachable box magazine. He had no idea what caliber it was but assumed it was powerful enough to get the job done from this distance.
Mounted to the top of the weapon was a powerful thermal scope with the ability to “see” in total darkness. Harvath set the radio down in front of him, made sure the volume was adjusted to low, and then peered through the scope.
From the sniper’s last communication, it sounded as if there were three others, which meant he was dealing with a four-man team, just as in Paris and Spain.
As he began panning the area with the scope, the lights in the guesthouse suddenly went out.
“Come on. Where are you?” he whispered as he snugged the stock tighter into his shoulder.
For a fraction of a second, he was gripped by a fear that maybe the hitters were wearing gear that canceled their heat signature, but he soon saw the colored glow of a figure approaching the guesthouse from the northwest, carrying what looked like a suppressed tactical rifle.
To make a perfect shot at this range required a certain amount of data, most of which Harvath would have to guess at.
Bullets drop over distance, so he elevated his point of aim in order to correlate the point of impact. The breeze would blow the bullet slightly off trajectory, plus his target was moving, which meant he needed to aim not where the man was but where he was going to be when the bullet arrived.
He made the calculations instantaneously and adjusted the rifle. Exhaling, he pressed the trigger. The bullet spat from the weapon, raced toward the target, and
