CHAPTER 35
I
t’s referred to as the fifth pillar of Islam. Every Muslim who is physically and financially able is obligated to make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca in their lifetime,” said Harvath.
On his end, Nicholas was scrolling through the pictures of it he had pulled up. “I don’t think I have ever seen crowds this big.”
“It’s the largest gathering of people in the world. Last year, there were two-point-one million people there.”
“It’s the ultimate petri dish.”
Harvath agreed. “Especially when you have millions of hands trying to touch or kiss the Ka’aba and drink from the sacred well of Zamzam.”
“Is the Ka’aba that outdoor, box-shaped structure I see people walking in circles around?
“That’s it. When Muslims pray toward Mecca, technically it’s toward the Ka’aba, which is located in the center of Islam’s most sacred mosque, the Al-Masjid al-Haram. Muslims believe the Ka’aba was built by Abraham, and it’s considered their holiest site.”
“It looks like a crowd control nightmare,” Nicholas stated.
“It is. In fact, thousands of people have died at the Hajj. There have been fires, riots, bombings, stampedes, structural failures because of overcrowding, you name it.”
“What about disease?”
“Plenty of it, and none of it good,” Harvath replied. “There have been outbreaks of meningitis and cholera, as well as things like Middle
East Respiratory Syndrome, also known as MERS. It normally doesn’t get caught until the Hajj participants return to their home countries, and then the illnesses flare there.”
“Don’t they screen them as they come into Saudi Arabia?”
“They try, but people can be asymptomatic when they arrive. They also require specific vaccinations as a condition of entry, but for many pilgrims forged immunization records are easier and cheaper to get than the actual vaccinations. It’s a public health nightmare. The Saudis know it and so do we.”
“Then what’s being done about it?” Nicholas asked.
“I just told you.”
“Global public health is based on the honor system, backed up by supposedly vigilant border guards and passport-stampers?”
“Pretty much.”
“We’re screwed.”
Harvath agreed. “That’s one of the problems of modern air travel. An infected person can get on a plane anywhere in the world and be anywhere else within twenty-four hours.”
“Do you think that’s what this is? Damien and his Plenary Panel cooked up this illness and somehow got it into Mecca? They spread it through the Hajj and then the infected get on planes back to their home countries to start a global pandemic?”
“It’d be a clever way to do it,” said Harvath, as he clicked over to another site to look at something.
“If this is African Hemorrhagic Fever, how did they get it in to Saudi Arabia? You can’t even get near Mecca unless you are Muslim.”
“If I had the resources Damien does, and I was putting this operation together, I’d do it via Zakat.”
“What’s Zakat?” Nicholas replied.
“It’s like an Islamic income tax, or a mandatory form of alms-giving. Allegedly, it’s used in part to help poor Muslims and can even be applied to paying their costs for attending the Hajj.
“Because of how many people want to participate, Saudi Arabia sets quotas for each country. Not only is Congo extremely poor, but it has a very small Muslim population. If I were Damien, I would take advantage of both of those factors.”
“Meaning, you’d fund a group of Muslims from Congo to go to Mecca?”
“Exactly,” Harvath replied. “I would quietly work my diplomatic connections to get the amount of visas I needed and then put the word out in the Congolese Muslim community that a wealthy Muslim benefactor had established a fund to underwrite their pilgrimage to Mecca.”
“Where does African Hemorrhagic Fever enter in?”
Harvath scrolled down on a web site with information about the Hajj. “The Saudi government publishes a list of required vaccines for pilgrims. Yellow fever, polio, things like that. Whether or not my Congolese Muslims had been vaccinated, I would send my own team in, tell them the list had been updated and that they needed an additional immunization.
“And after making sure their travel and medical documents were in order,” Nicholas added, “all you would have to do is just send them on their way.”
“You’d want to do more than that. I’d maximize the spread of the disease by breaking them up at different hotels and attaching them to different tour groups once they arrived in Mecca. But at that point, it would all come down to how communicable the disease was.”
“Then what? Do the Congolese Muslims crash and bleed out in Saudi Arabia? Isn’t that the kind of thing the Saudis would be on the lookout for?”
It was, and Harvath remembered what Leonce had told them about the sick man who had arrived at the Matumaini Clinic and how a nurse believed he could be Muslim because she thought she had overheard him moan the word “Allah.”
No loose ends.
“You’re right,” Harvath replied. “Just because the fuse was lit, it doesn’t mean Damien was off the hook. No bomb maker—even one who has cooked up a plague bomb—would want pieces of it traced to their source. If I were Damien, I’d want those pilgrims back before the Saudis knew what had happened.”
“Which means you wouldn’t leave their return up to commercial air travel. Too many things could go wrong. He probably would have chartered a flight for them.”
“Good point. See what you can find—visas, all of it. And while you’re
at it, see what kind of CCTV footage you can get your hands on. The Saudis monitor everything, particularly during the Hajj.”
“Anything else?”
“If Damien did take them back to Congo, I’m betting they were taken to the Ngoa facility. The staff would be able to quietly get rid of the bodies and public health authorities would be none the wiser.”
“But wasn’t the Matumaini Clinic in touch with the WHO representative in Kinshasa?” Nicholas asked.
“They were. Whoever that rep in Kinshasa is, he’s a part of this. He either tipped Damien or the Ngoa lab about their missing patient. That’s probably why he asked for a picture to be emailed. I assume somebody wanted confirmation before Damien sent Hendrik and his men in to kill everyone.”
“If that’s all he needed, why did he ask for blood and tissue samples?”
“Probably,” said Harvath, “because that’s what they normally do. He was smart enough to not break with protocol. If he ever gets called on the carpet, it looks like he followed every step to the letter.”
That made him think of something, and he made a mental note.
While he was doing that, Nicholas brought up a new question, something that had been weighing on him as well.
“We know Damien wants to drastically reduce the earth’s population,” the little man said. “We also know that he’s a eugenicist who believes that certain races and bloodlines are unfit and should be snuffed out.”
“Correct.”
“So if a guy like that launches a global pandemic, how does he control who gets it?”
It was an important question, especially now that the genie appeared to be out of the bottle, but it wasn’t the right question.
When disease was used as a weapon, the intent was for it to go anywhere and everywhere. No place was to be off-limits or safe. The only people meant to survive were the ones who had launched it and whatever subgroup they felt was worthy of living.
To answer Nicholas’s question, Harvath replied, “He doesn’t control who gets it. What he controls is who
doesn’t
get it.”
“So there’s some sort of an antidote?”
“Or a vaccine.”
“But based on the ‘Outcome Conference’ document that Mordechai told you about,” Nicholas said, pushing back, “the Plenary Panel’s goal is to skin the earth’s population from over seven point two billion down to five hundred million. That’s a ninety-three percent drop. How do you do that?
“I mean, we’ve got a pretty good idea of how they want to get the six and a half billion–plus people infected, but how do you save the others? How do you not only give an antidote or a vaccine to five hundred million people, but the right five hundred million, the ones you want to see survive? And on top of that, how do you do that without them knowing what the hell is going on?”
They were terrifying questions, none of which Harvath had answers for. He couldn’t even begin to fathom how the world wouldn’t collapse with a die-off of over six point five billion people. There’d be nobody to bury the bodies, much less maintain civil order.
Even the Black Death, said to have been the most devastating pandemic in history and estimated to have claimed up to fifty percent of Europe’s population, was no comparison to this. Weaponized African Hemorrhagic Fever would not only blow it away, it would take the lead for worst calamity ever on earth, second only to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
If there was one thing Harvath knew, it was that Mother Nature moved fast, while science moved very, very slowly. If they couldn’t get out in front of this virus, billions of people were going to die.
Looking up from his computer, he wasn’t thinking about himself. He was thinking about Lara and protecting her, as well as her little boy and her parents back up in Boston.
There was also his own mother out in California, as well as others he had always promised he would never let anything happen to.
The magnitude of the task pissed him off. Not because he had to figure how to take care of so many people so important to him, but because he had been put in this position in the first place by an insane, agenda-driven asshole like Pierre Damien.
Harvath knew that there was a special place in hell for a man like Damien; he just hoped the President would let him send him there.
As Nicholas went through the rest of his checklist, Harvath’s mind
was going in multiple directions. He had been taught to think in layers, to make plans for contingencies—if not that, then this. What are my routes of attack and avenues of escape?
He found himself needing not only to focus on his work, but also on the people he cared about. It was the very position he had always said he never wanted to be in. Yet, here he was.
While the SEAL mottos about perseverance and never giving up floated to the forefront of his mind, so did another saying.
You can’t always choose the situation you find yourself in, but you can choose how you react to it
.
His mother had said it to him a million times growing up. She said it so often it drove him crazy to hear it. But he had never forgotten it, its wisdom timeless and invaluable.
“Scot?” Nicholas said, trying to regain Harvath’s attention.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I asked how the hell Damien planned on immunizing five hundred million people. And then when you didn’t answer, I said that if anyone could get it out of him, it’d be you.”
“Only if the President sees this the way we do.”
“How could he not?”
“He’s the President. He operates at a completely different level of calculus. There are always other factors. I think he gets it, though.”
“He’d better,” replied Nicholas.
“Listen, one other thing. When we ran Damien, there were mentions about his involvement in pharmaceutical companies. See what you can find. If there is some sort of antidote or vaccine, there may be some connection there.”
“Got it.”
Harvath was about to reassure him when another call came in.
It was the Old Man.
CHAPTER 36
T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE
H
arvath’s plans for Lara were shelved as soon as Carlton called and told him he was wanted at the White House. In all fairness, the morning was actually already shot the moment he heard from Nicholas that there was a third likely case of African Hemorrhagic Fever in the United States.
He hated to leave her alone at his place, but she was a big girl, and it wasn’t like he had any choice. Guests did not bring guests to the White House, and especially not under the circumstances by which he had been summoned.
He had barely gotten a sip of coffee before he had to dash upstairs and hop into the shower. Lara playfully offered to join him, and it took all he had to turn her down and ask for a rain check.
After a quick shampoo and running soap over his body in record time, he used his perpetually fogged “fogless” shower mirror to shave and then threw the water from hot to ice-cold and forced himself to stand there for thirty seconds. If he wasn’t fully awake before, he definitely was now. It was like downing three rapid espressos.
When he stepped out of the shower, he found that Lara had picked out an outfit for him. All he had told her was that he had to go to the White House. That was all she needed to know. What she chose was perfect—dark suit, white shirt, dark tie.
“Is it like this every morning?” she asked as he moved through the kitchen and kissed her.
“That’s the President for you,” he said. “Can’t live without me.”
She knew he wasn’t serious and grabbed his ass. “Tell him he needs to go through me from now on, or I’m not voting for him again.”
Ever since he had come to the realization that he loved her, everything she did or said seemed to back it up.
“I’ll tell him. Reed Carlton won’t like being cut out of the loop, but he’ll learn to live with it.”
“Let him know he doesn’t have a choice.”
He smiled and kissed her again before grabbing his keys and heading for the door.
“Hey!” she shouted from behind him.
When he turned, he saw her holding up a roadie. “Black. Two shots of espresso.”
Smiling, he crossed back over to her. “I love you. You know that?” he said, trying to take the cup from her.
“Wait. What did you just say?”
Shit
. It had totally slipped out. He meant it, of course, but this wasn’t the way he wanted to say it for the first time—not rushing out the door.
It was a watershed moment. He could make it better, or he could make it worse.
Setting down the mug, he took her face in his hands and said, “I love you.”
Lara was speechless. She had only truly loved one other man, her husband, and had watched him drown right before her eyes. Now, here she was with this SEAL, whom she teasingly referred to as James Blond, and he had just told her that he loved her. For a moment, it felt like she couldn’t even breathe.
“This sucks,” he said.
“No, it doesn’t,” she replied. “This definitely
doesn’t
suck.”
“I thought we’d at least have the morning together. I didn’t think I’d be saying this and running out the door.”
She looked at him. “You were actually
planning
how you wanted to say that to me?”
He didn’t know how to respond. Was “planning” to tell her a bad thing? Didn’t women like when men planned?
He decided to explain how he had planned to do it and why, but all he could get out was, “Yes.”
Lara put her arms around his neck, pulled his lips to hers, and gave him the longest kiss they had ever shared.
Then, she was the one who broke it off. “You’d better get going,” she said. She was smiling from ear to ear. Slapping him on his backside as he picked up his coffee, she added, “Remember what I told you to tell the President.”
All he could do was shake his head and laugh. It was another moment; another brief, wonderful moment where nothing else existed and nothing else mattered. Then he climbed into his SUV and the real world crowded in with him.
He did the time difference in his mind with his mother in California, as well as a former SEAL buddy of his who ran a remote fishing lodge in Alaska. It was too early to call either of them. He decided to put those phone calls on hold.
It was also too early to call Ben Beaman, but that call couldn’t wait. There were some things about Congo that needing sorting out. He also needed a favor. A big one.
By the time Harvath rolled up to the White House security checkpoint at the West Gate, the biggest item on his personal list already had a check mark next to it. It was a good start and with that done, he could focus on work and why the President had called him in.
Pulling into one of the parking spaces near the West Wing entrance, he turned off the ignition and hung the badge he had been issued around his neck. It always felt weird coming back. He had practically lived at the White House at one point. He didn’t miss the Secret Service, though. Leaving the SEALs hadn’t been a mistake. He had learned a lot, met a lot of people, seen and heard some incredible things, but protecting a President had meant playing defense. That wasn’t his strong suit.
Offense was what he did best—finding the bad guys and taking the fight to them before they could bring the fight to us. With the SEALs and the Secret Service, he had gone through the best training the United States had to offer. Then, the Old Man had shown him what else was out there and had taken his game to a level he never before could have imag
ined. He had gone from being an Alpha dog to an Apex Predator—a species that sat astride the top of the food chain with no competition.
He radiated a calm, effective confidence that had nothing to do with arrogance, but rather an effective ability to handle anything that was thrown at him, no matter how fast. It was a good thing too, because things were about to speed up. Dramatically.
The Marine Guard outside the Situation Room waved him to the blast-proof door, which was so well engineered that it opened without any perceptible hiss of its locks releasing or any sound of its bolts sliding back.
Reed Carlton was already inside, as was the President. At the long, mahogany conference table were Lydia Ryan; her boss, CIA Director Bob McGee; General Ian McCollum, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Colonel Sheila White, MD, the Director of USAMRIID.
Absent were any other members of the President’s national security team. His own Chief of Staff wasn’t even there. Per the Old Man’s suggestion, he had kept this meeting highly compartmentalized.
There was something in the wind, something he didn’t like. Seeing those government personnel assembled at Damien’s Virginia estate troubled him. It had looked like a conclave of third-tier royal functionaries, and, historically, when that many functionaries assembled outside a palace, it usually meant that they were up to no good.
The Old Man pulled out the chair next to him and waved Harvath over. Their briefing was already in progress.
Sitting down next to Carlton, Harvath reached for the carafe of coffee in front of them, poured himself a cup, and listened as Colonel White spoke.
“The STAR team’s drone shows zero activity at the Ngoa facility. In fact, it looks completely abandoned. We’re getting the same thing from the satellite.
“Normally, we’d conduct this kind of operation at night, but all things considered, we decided to advance the timetable. With your permission, Mr. President?”
President Paul Porter nodded. He had a glass of orange juice in front of him and looked like he had been up all night.
General McCollum picked up his phone and gave the command to begin the operation. “This is Wedgewood,” he said. “Raptor is a go.”
The raid on the Ngoa facility, where the African Hemorrhagic Fever had allegedly been weaponized, would be coordinated by the United States Special Operations Command out of a highly secretive TOC, also known as a Tactical Operations Center, at a far corner of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The large, acoustically protected, darkened, raised-floor room was packed with flat-panel monitors, electronics, and rows of desks. On the outside of its door, there was no name, no number. None of the personnel who worked there ever spoke of it. It was a black hole from which some of the countries’ blackest operations were conducted. For all intents and purposes, the TOC and what happened within it didn’t exist.
The Situation Room back at the White House was similarly adorned with flat screens. Synched with the TOC at MacDill, each of them showcased a variety of images.
In addition to the satellite and drone footage, there were feeds from the helmet cams being worn by the STAR team.
A voice from the MacDill TOC came down through the Situation Room’s overhead speakers. “Raptor Actual, this is Raptor Main. You are clear to commence.”
“Roger that, Raptor Main,” said a voice from the team in Congo. “Raptor is clear to commence.”
Considering the distance it had travelled up the satellite and back down to the United States, the transmission was clear with almost no delay.
As the team emerged from the tree line and approached the facility, Harvath set his coffee down and leaned forward. It reminded him of his own approach of the Matumaini Clinic just six days ago.
The Ngoa facility was composed of similar one-story buildings clustered around a sizable clearing hacked out of the jungle. Unlike Matumaini, though, Ngoa had layers of perimeter security. The first was a tall, chain-link fence capped with razor wire.
Harvath, the President, and everyone else watched from the safety of the Situation Room as a STAR team member cut through the fence. The rest of the team stood in the open clearing behind him, exposed.
Though they were armed, they were suited up in full biohazard gear, which meant that their ability to detect and react to threats was severely impaired. In other words, they were sitting ducks.
It put everyone on edge, but particularly Harvath, who knew exactly what it felt like to be in their boots at that moment. If they were spotted, it was game over.
The Team in the MacDill TOC seemed to be reading Harvath’s thoughts and called for SITREPs from the two sniper teams that had been sent ahead to provide overwatch. Each team reported back that the coast was clear.
Once an opening had been cut into the fence, the operator with the cutters tucked them in his pack, transitioned back to his weapon, and held the curtain of chain-link open for everyone else to pass through.
The operator with the handheld mine detector got back on point and led the team forward.
As he had done when leading them out of the jungle, he swept the device back and forth, careful to keep his eyes peeled for trip wires or other improvised triggers. This was Congo, and Ngoa wouldn’t be the first time they had encountered antipersonnel devices. The other members kept in tight formation behind.
The second ring of perimeter security was a concrete wall about ten feet high. Along the top, set into the cement, were shards of glass from broken wine and beer bottles. Though inelegant, the message was clear—this facility was not open to unauthorized visitors.
The team made their way to a set of large gates secured by a padlock and chain. The operator with the bolt cutters stepped forward and after another SITREP from the snipers, the team was authorized to make entry.
Once the chain was cut, the STAR team members swept into the compound in perfect coordination, their weapons up and at the ready.
With all of the video feeds coming into the Situation Room, it was like trying to drink from a fire hose. Harvath kept his attention focused on the satellite imagery, only occasionally glancing at one of the helmet cams when he needed a better idea of what the team was seeing.
Their primary target was the largest and most central building in
the compound. Based on analysis of the reconnaissance imagery, it was deemed to be the most likely location of the laboratory.
Harvath checked his watch. The STAR team had to be burning up in those suits. They had covered much more ground than he and Decker had getting to their objective, plus the temperature was higher because it was broad daylight. They weren’t going to be good for much longer.
Arriving at the main building, the bulk of the team formed a stack, or as it was sometimes called, a Conga line, while several other members took up defensive positions outside.
When everyone was in place, the team leader announced they were ready to make entry. Colonel White nodded to General McCollum who relayed permission to the MacDill TOC.
With a final sweep of the structure by satellite and the sniper teams once more radioing their all clear, a voice came over the speakers in the Situation Room.
“Raptor Actual,” it said, “this is Raptor Main. You’re good to go.”
“Roger that, Raptor Main,” the voice from Congo replied. “Raptor is good to go.”
With that, the STAR team leader made sure his team was ready. Then, counting down from three, they breached the building and rushed inside.