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
