Threat Zero Page 4

  “Good. How long?”

  “Give me an hour if they’re in the system. If not, forever.”

  Harwood nodded and walked the length of the gym where he saw about twenty residents standing and sitting along the far, mirrored wall. He caught a glimpse of Hinojosa walking briskly out the opposite door chasing after a stocky blond-haired man in tactical clothing. The man crossed the room and exited into an anteroom that was all hardwood flooring and mirrors. Harwood followed Hinojosa into the room. Several blue mats were rolled and tied in the corner. Yoga room. It smelled of sweat and antiseptic. The mirrors made the room seem larger than it was and reflected the man’s back. On his belt was a hip holster with an HK pistol, a Blackhawk knife, and a tactical flashlight.

  “Not everyone is a suspect,” Hinojosa said, jabbing her finger at the man.

  “Lady, I don’t work for you.”

  Both heads turned toward Harwood as he entered.

  “Fuck you want?” the man spat.

  “Prob just take you down a notch,” Harwood said.

  The compact man came up to Harwood, inches away, looking up into his face. A lizard grin spread on his face, thick lips pulled back against uneven teeth.

  “Holy fuck. If it isn’t the Reaper himself.” Taking a step back the man reached out his hand and said, “Stone. Erik Stone.”

  A little too rehearsed and a little too James Bondish, the salutation smacked of condescension.

  Regardless, Harwood shook the man’s hand and said, “Hinojosa is doing her job. Leave her alone.”

  Stone held up his hands in mock surrender. “Just controlling the environment until I know who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy.”

  “What’s your job? You work for Bronson?”

  Stone laughed. “He might work for me. I don’t work for anyone but the man.”

  “The man?”

  “The president. And you’re on my team, Reaper.”

  Harwood felt the folded papers in his back pocket. Remembered Murdoch’s orders to him. That he was part of a special task force being set up by the president.

  “I think it’s the other way around, Stone. This is my team,” Harwood said. He pushed back just to establish boundaries. Stone was an alpha predator. He’d seen the type many times before. If you didn’t set the markers down immediately they assumed they owned every bit of space you didn’t claim.

  “Actually, you’re both wrong,” Hinojosa said. “You both work for me.” She flashed her phone at them. A text from “Unknown.”

  Unknown: ANY WORD?

  Hinojosa: PROCESSING EVIDENCE.

  Unknown: FASTER

  “You’ve got a call,” Harwood said, nodding at the phone. It was Bronson. She placed the phone on speaker.

  “You’re on speaker,” she said.

  “We’ve got something. Link up with Max and me now,” Bronson directed.

  “Seems like everyone is working for everyone else,” Stone said.

  “Does it matter?” Harwood replied.

  They retraced their route through the gym and into the conference room where Corent had a large fingerprint displayed on a big-screen television monitor.

  Bronson and Corent were discussing something while Faye Wilde turned and looked at them with a grim façade. Harwood locked eyes with her, but she simply shook her head.

  “Find a hit?” Harwood asked.

  “Immediately,” Corent said.

  “We’ve already briefed the president and the director,” Bronson said.

  “That was fast.”

  “We’re shutting down the airports, train stations, the works. We’ve already got a bead on him. We think he’s at Dulles right now.”

  On cue, a man’s passport photo displayed on the screen.

  “Malik Sultan from Crimea. He helped Russia invade. Was a key informant. Known mostly for his explosives capabilities, he’s graduated into money laundering and arms dealing. Kind of a high-end guy to do a hit like this, but he easily could have built the IEDs used in the attack and the secondary attack on the apartment building. Comms records show I ran connections.”

  A live-circuit television showed FBI and other law enforcement closing in on the unsuspecting Sultan as he stood in line to board the airplane to Amsterdam.

  “They’ve got him,” Harwood said. Three agents angled in from the left. Another three from the right. An air marshal came barreling out of the boarding gate door with his pistol drawn, aimed directly at Sultan as he scanned his ticket by the gate. Travelers scattered quickly. The FBI agents closed on Sultan before he could react. Classic takedown. Textbook.

  Bronson nodded, said, “Good job.”

  “Okay, that gives us something to work with,” Harwood said. He envisioned an interrogation followed by a mission to capture the potential other cell members. Seemed logical.

  Bronson and Hinojosa exchanged looks.

  “This way,” Hinojosa said.

  They entered an office off the conference room. She closed the door. The place was cramped with Stone, Harwood, and Hinojosa standing in the small space. A large desk was littered with applications and other paperwork. Two chairs faced the desk. An empty coatrack stood in the corner like a skeletal winter tree.

  Hinojosa retrieved an iPad from the top of the desk, tapped a few buttons and they all watched Google Earth spin and zoom in on the Crimean Peninsula.

  Ultimately the image became that of a large compound.

  “Sultan’s compound. His family lives here.”

  Stone and Harwood nodded, waiting.

  “Our mission is to kill his family.”

  “Kill his family?” Harwood asked.

  “Damn straight,” Stone said, as if this was the best news ever.

  “Yes. Presidential orders under the current authorization of the use of military force. You are Team Valid. These are valid targets.”

  “Families are noncombatants, technically,” Harwood said. Schooled in the art of rules of engagement, Harwood understood the fine line between legit and revenge. Sometimes the two overlapped.

  Hinojosa pulled up three images on the iPad. Side by side they looked like criminals from a Southie Boston lineup. The man on the left looked mid-forties with thick dark hair combed straight up and to the side, punk rocker style. A day of dark stubble dotted his jawline and chin. Flat black eyes stared back. A white T-shirt covered a muscular, but thin frame.

  “This is Murat Sultan, brother of the man we just captured, Malik Sultan. They live in a compound in the highlands above Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula,” Hinojosa said, pointing at the older man on the left. Two teenage boys wearing rebellious scowls were next to Murat. They were dressed in blacks shirts and holding AK-47s at port arms. Headshots for a recruiting poster. “These are Saqir and Amrat, the sons of Murat and Malik, respectively. They all live in the Sultan compound in Crimea. We’ve launched drones from our base in Bosnia and from Incirlik in Turkey. We will have redundant coverage. Another teammate will meet us at the airport.”

  “Did these … men,” Harwood said, “help plan the attacks?”

  Hinojosa pointed at him. “That’s what we’re going with. We’ll work the intelligence en route. We can always wave off if things don’t firm up.”

  “Defeat the enemy at its source,” Harwood said. It was the new National Security Strategy. He liked the concept. Transnational terrorists that fought under an ideology instead of a flag had to be rooted out from their safe havens. Most famously, Al Qaeda had hosted with the protective defenses of the Taliban in the largely ungoverned spaces of Afghanistan. Other organizations were now copying the tactic. Ideology that spread through loosely knit individuals could take root in any living room or ranch. All they needed were a computer and an idea.

  Harwood nodded.

  “You good?” Hinojosa asked.

  “As long as it’s connected. There has to be a thread, like hot pursuit.” The concept of hot pursuit maintained that if a friendly force was in contact with an enemy force and the fleeing
enemy crossed into a protected area, such as say over the Pakistan border from Afghanistan, the pursuing force could continue within reasonable limits. Sergeants such as Harwood appreciated the deliberately vague guidance. But here, Crimea was part of Russia, albeit annexed via combat, and they were not in contact with the enemy. In fact, they were going to have to find them. Looking at the pictures, Harwood could see the menace in their eyes. But was that enough? Of course not. If someone were to use that standard and look at a picture of him when he was nineteen years old, they would have shot him on the spot.

  But he wasn’t associated with a gruesome attack on the families of the president’s cabinet. He stared at the pictures, letting his gaze lock in every detail. The man on the right, labeled, “Amrat Sultan, Malik’s son,” had a scar beneath his left eye. A burn mark on the neck of the center person, tagged, “Sadiq Sultan, Murat’s son.”

  “So we’re going after the men under the assumption that they participated in the planning?” Harwood asked. “No women or children?”

  Hinojosa stared at him. She looked at Stone, who said nothing.

  “We will follow the intelligence where it leads us,” Hinojosa said. “Right now, this is what we’ve got. The president wants this to be swift. To send a message.”

  The sound of rotor blades filled the air. Harwood recognized the whipping blades of a Black Hawk helicopter.

  “Grab your go bags and meet me by the helicopter,” Hinojosa said.

  “What about identifying Samuelson’s body?” Harwood asked.

  Hinojosa looked away, thought for a moment, and then locked eyes with him. “I have a backup in mind. Your primary mission is to get moving.”

  Harwood nodded, walked through the makeshift operations center, nodded at Faye Wilde to say goodbye, and then grabbed his rucksack from the car. Standing in the parking lot, he watched the fire trucks hose down the apartment building, plumes of water arcing into the charred frame. As he turned, there was a group of three men talking near two black government cars about twenty yards away. One man was on a cell phone, pacing. The other two were speaking in low whispers. All of the men were dressed in dark suits. They were standing just outside a streetlamp’s halo of light. The taller man quit speaking and turned toward him.

  Harwood immediately recognized the director of the FBI, Seamus Kilmartin. A former college basketball player and rock star lawyer with a big K Street firm in Washington, D.C., Kilmartin had a reputation as a political climber. Harwood didn’t normally pay attention to politics, but the last couple of years made it mandatory viewing. Whether it was for the reality TV aspect, pop culture, or genuine interest in the political fortunes of the country, there was no avoiding the twenty-four-seven coverage of President Smart, former senator Sloane Brookes, and the beleaguered Kilmartin.

  Kilmartin stared at Harwood with unflinching eyes, which Harwood gave right back to him. It occurred to him that Kilmartin would be in Hinojosa’s chain of command unless something extraordinary were happening, which was certainly possible.

  For no particular reason, Harwood nodded at Kilmartin. He then jogged to the Black Hawk that had just touched down in the field between the apartment building and the ambush location. After boarding, the pilot lifted off, circled the ambush site as if to emphasize the importance of the mission, and then tilted the nose of the aircraft toward Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and its private military airfield.

  Sitting in the seat facing Hinojosa, he asked her through the headsets they were wearing, “What’s up with Kilmartin?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s in the parking lot.”

  She shrugged. “Wouldn’t you be if the president’s cabinet was slaughtered on your watch?”

  Good point.

  “Now, this is important.” She spun an iPad around to him and pointed with a manicured nail. “One more family member. Intel says this is the mastermind of the ambush.”

  Staring back at him was an image of a young woman, maybe in her early twenties. The label beneath her name read, “Malina Sultan, Malik’s daughter.”

  Harwood studied the face. Soft and beautiful. Raven hair, like her brother and cousin. Piercing copper eyes. She would be considered a knockout in any society.

  “We good?”

  Harwood stared as the lights whipped by beneath them. He thought of killing the seed of an entire family. If they had hard intelligence that this was the nerve center and everyone pictured was involved, then so be it. Sucked to be them.

  “I’m good,” Harwood said.

  CHAPTER 5

  The image of the young woman, Malina, hovered in his mind as he prepared to step from the back ramp of an MC-130 Hercules special operations aircraft flown out of Incirlik Air Base. Harwood watched through the back cargo bay of the aircraft as the experimental Zodiac boat rolled out the back with a cargo parachute to stabilize its descent.

  At Incirlik, they had quickly rehearsed the plan to take observation positions on a ridge above the compound. Harwood, the sniper, would provide cover as Stone and Griffin Weathers assaulted into the compound, if necessary. During the flight, they acquainted themselves. Stone introduced himself as a former Navy SEAL turned military contractor, who lived in Virginia Beach where he had served with SEAL Team Six. He was single and had no children. Harwood wondered if Stone had taken a similar rapid reassignment or if his departure was for some other reason. He had an edge that Harwood couldn’t quite place.

  Weathers was former Marine Force Recon and lived in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where he had served with the Marine special operators. He was a dual sniper and assaulter, an expert at explosives, and a student of martial arts, mainly karate and judo. He had commented that the newfangled martial arts were just different names for the same basic punches and parries that he had perfected. Made sense. Weathers was divorced with two daughters who lived in Jacksonville with their mother.

  Hinojosa flew on the airplane in a black cargo jumpsuit, but of course wasn’t jumping. Their plan of entry was to land in the water a mile off Hruzovyi Port, an industrial liquid natural gas transfer point. The Crimean Peninsula was chock-full of gas and oil and a large part of Russian incentive to invade stemmed from Crimea’s port access into the Black Sea and subsequently into the Mediterranean and Atlantic shipping lanes. From their entry point, they would use an airdropped Zodiac boat to motor into the port area. It was approaching midnight of the day following the ambush, which had made international headlines.

  Two F-35 stealth fighters provided air cover as they whipped along the Black Sea at five hundred feet above sea level.

  Harwood jumped, leading Stone and Weathers into the combat mission. The static line on Harwood’s parachute popped immediately and his parachute inflated. Seconds later, he was splashing into the water where he quickly unlatched his canopy release assemblies, dispatching his parachute and its accompanying drag. Gaining his buoyancy, he retrieved his night-vision goggle and used it like a pirate scope to find the flashing infrared beacon they had placed on the Zodiac.

  After turning nearly two-thirds of the way around, he saw the blinking strobe. It was about fifty meters away. He sidestroked toward the raft, hearing only the splashing of his movements in the water. As he approached the small rubber boat, he saw that Stone and Weathers were already inside, which didn’t surprise him given that one was a SEAL and the other a marine. He heard the engine cough and sputter.

  “Hurry, Ranger,” Stone said.

  “Heard that,” Harwood said, slinging his ruck over the rib of the boat. Weathers clasped his forearm and pulled him in.

  “All good?” Harwood asked.

  “All good,” Stone replied.

  He could barely hear the muffled engine in the high-tech Zodiac, kitted with a sound-suppressed motor and other options that could prove useful on egress. Stone stared at the horizon as they sped north toward the lights of Yalta on the eastern shore of the Crimean Peninsula.

  Harwood did what any good sniper would do: check his eq
uipment to make sure everything was operational after the jump. He removed his SR-25 rifle from its watertight pouch, slapped a magazine into the well, and charged the weapon. He screwed the sound suppressor on the muzzle and then laid the stock on the gunwale of the raft. Through his Leupold scope he could see thermal and infrared images. He spotted a fisherman and reported through the communications system, “Fisherman in a small boat. Ten o’clock. Four hundred meters. No activity.”

  “Shoot him,” Stone replied immediately.

  Harwood looked over his shoulder to see if Stone was smiling. He wasn’t kidding. Stone’s face was set, eyes on the horizon. Stone’s hand pressed the small detent button hanging from his communications system.

  “I say again, shoot the fisherman,” Stone repeated.

  “No sign of enemy activity or intent,” Harwood said.

  “We’re not in Afghanistan, Harwood. You’re not the Reaper here, bud. Weathers, go ahead and kill the douchebag.”

  “The fisherman?” Weathers asked.

  Very funny, Harwood thought. No way was he going to shoot an innocent bystander. He’d seen enough senseless death and there could be more people in the boat. While the fisherman could report them, someone calling him may also alert the police if he didn’t answer. Who knew? The mission called for killing those who had planned the ambush, which Harwood had euphemistically rationalized. Sounded a lot better than killing the family members in an eye for an eye fashion.

  Weathers leveled his rifle, an M24 manual bolt-action sniper weapon. The suppressor poked forward from the gunwale. Stone had slowed the Zodiac to a near soundless crawl. The fishing boat was two hundred meters away, nearly parallel with them. Harwood continued to watch through his scope. The fisherman had bib overalls on and Harwood imagined they were the rubber kind that would keep a fisherman dry. There was a lantern hanging from the ceiling of the center console boat. The craft didn’t look modern, rather, it looked like a wooden antique. The fisherman leaned over the edge and began pulling a net into the boat.

  He was checking his nets. As the man pulled another length of net, he stood and looked in their direction. Harwood heard two taps on a buttstock and then Weathers’s weapon coughed. The fisherman continued to stand, then doubled over and spilled into the water.