From the outset, Harvath had never believed the kidnapping could have been conducted by Middle Easterners. Call it an ingrained bigotry he had picked up in the SEALs or a healthy understanding of what Mideast terrorist groups were and were not capable of, but an operation of this nature, carried out in snow, just couldn’t have been pulled off by any group from the Mideast. Harvath had discounted the lone body found with a Skorpion as a red herring from the beginning. It bothered him that Sam Harper had managed to get a shot off, but somehow no one had ever heard it.
If Middle Easterners hadn’t actually pulled off the job, could they have financed it? Yes, that was definitely a possibility, but Harvath had an even harder time believing that men like Bill Shaw and even Senator Snyder would sell their country out to foreigners. That didn’t fit.
Scot’s head began to throb as his mind drifted, and he struggled to again bring it back and concentrate on what he knew.
His gut told him that the people who pulled off the attack and kidnapping worked very well in snow and had a lot of experience. They had access to explosives to trigger the avalanche, money and international contacts to purchase the jammer, and came up with incredible tactical advantages that allowed them to wipe out the president’s protective detail and get away leaving almost no trace at all.
Almost no trace were the key words. They had left traces at the Mormon farmhouse. There had been cigarette smoke and that piece of Swiss chocolate. He had seen mousetraps in the kitchen and in one of the bathrooms, so Harvath knew the chocolate couldn’t have been there long. It had to have been dropped by whoever was watching the house, waiting for the rest of the kidnappers to return. Then there was the e-mail from Nestle that said the chocolate was sold only in Switzerland. Had one of the kidnappers bought it on a layover on a flight from somewhere in Sand Land? Not likely. It wasn’t until he read the note and saw the Interlaken post office box address in the manila envelope Martin had led him to that his hunch about Switzerland began to seem like such a good possibility.
As the train gently rocked back and forth along the tracks, Scot glanced out the window at the majestic, snow-covered Swiss mountains. A Swiss railway magazine hung from a small hook above the seat opposite him with a title in German and English: “The Eiger…Only for the Foolish?” Scot took down the magazine and began to skim the article. It talked about one of the country’s most daunting peaks and the attempts by teams from all over the world to conquer it.
As his eyes drifted from the photos in the glossy magazine to the Swiss countryside speeding past his window, he was positive his instincts were correct. Whoever arranged to kidnap the president had put together an incredible team of soldier mountaineers. Germany, France, Italy, and Austria could also boast men potentially up to the task, but it was the smattering of clues, hints really, that narrowed Harvath’s gut feeling down to Switzerland.
Scot still had the same question that every law enforcement officer in America had. Cui bono? It was Latin for “Who benefits?” Who would benefit from kidnapping the president? The possibilities were endless. Although all the communications received by Washington since the kidnapping seemed to point to the Fatah, Scot made up his mind to leave the Cui bono? question to the FBI and everybody back home.
Right now who benefits was not as important as who took him and where is he? Harvath had learned a long time ago to go with his gut. Everything that had happened, everything he had seen and felt, told him the men responsible for taking the president were from here. And as sure as he knew that, Scot also knew that he would bring the president back and bring him back alive, no matter how long it took to find him.
47
The hardest thing to get used to had been the smell-the godawful smell-that and the intolerable, intermittent wailing of people being called to worship over scratchy public address systems. Then there was the sand. It was everywhere-in his clothes, in his hair, even in his food. There didn’t seem to be a single crack or crevice in the president’s cell that the sand hadn’t made its way into. He had heard that about the desert. It would eventually overtake anything, even if it took thousands of years to do it. The sand reminded him of when he and his late wife had visited Egypt and the Pyramids many years ago. He wondered where in the world he was now.
He knew he was someplace hot. At times unbearably hot, and very dry. The calls to worship meant that he was close to an Islamic population-maybe a town, a village, or even a city of some sort. His cell had no windows, so he had no idea if it was day or night. Only the deliveries of terrible-tasting food through a sliding grate at the bottom of the cell door interrupted his isolation.
The floor was covered with straw. There was a bed with a thin mattress against one wall and a Turkish toilet in the corner-which was nothing more than a hole in the floor with two stone footrests to stand on. At first, he thought the terrible stench was wafting up from the toilet, but gradually he realized it was coming from outside and was being carried in by the ventilation system of his cell. He tried to memorize every detail, as he knew there would be a very extensive debriefing once he returned home. If I return home, he thought.
Of course he would return home. He couldn’t let himself think otherwise. He was the president of the most powerful nation on earth. Right now in D.C. they would be doing everything they could to get him back. He knew that, and had to keep focusing on it. If the kidnappers had wanted him dead, they could have killed him already. There was no reason to keep him alive unless they intended to return him once their demands were met.
To take his mind off his confinement, the president tried to think about his daughter, but that only led to more distress. He had no idea what had happened to her. The last thing he remembered was splitting up with her detail, planning to meet back at the house for hot chocolate. As he made his way down Death Chute, there was some sort of accident and he lost his vision. There were strange voices, and someone started an IV on him, and then he awoke in this cell dressed in a cheap and uncomfortable peasant robe bearing an Arabic logo. That was all he was really sure of.
Even though there was a huge chunk of his memory missing, it wasn’t hard to figure out that his detail had been ambushed and he had been drugged, kidnapped, and then taken someplace very far away. He only hoped Amanda hadn’t been harmed. He tried to convince himself that she had made it back to the house safely. Scot Harvath was on her detail, and he was one of the best. He wouldn’t have let anything happen to her. She had to be all right. She was all right. Anything else was unthinkable. Losing his wife had been painful enough, but if anything happened to Amanda, he didn’t know if he could go on living.
For now, though his body was weak and he had no sense of time, his mind was strong and he vowed to hold on. The United States would not allow its president to languish in a cell in the middle of some godforsaken desert. His salvation would come. He would be getting out, and getting out alive. This would be the only thought he would allow his mind to entertain. He had a daughter to get back to and a country to lead.
The president’s interior pep talk was interrupted by the sound of the bolt sliding back from his cell door. Two large men entered wearing desert fatigues and kaffiyeh headdresses that covered their faces. One was carrying a Kalashnikov AK-47 machine gun, and the other had one hand hidden behind his back. The man with the machine gun gestured for the president to move back against the wall.
Instead of moving, Rutledge rose to his full height and said, “I demand to speak with whoever’s in charge here. Now!”
For a moment, both of the men stood still, shocked into immobility by the outrageous insolence of their prisoner. The shock wore off quickly, though, and the guard with the machine gun covered the distance across the cell to the president in a fraction of a second. He raised the butt of his weapon and was preparing to strike Rutledge when the other man stopped him with what sounded to Rutledge like a quick stream of angry Arabic.
The guard lowered his weapon. The president began to breathe a sigh of relief, which immediately caught in his throat as the other man, who had been steadily moving toward him, grabbed him by the wrist and plunged a long hypodermic needle into his arm.
48
