F
rom the streaks of blood on both the floor and along the wall of the elevator, it looked as if the ambassador had stumbled inside after being shot and had managed to swipe his keycard and press the button for their floor before collapsing.
“Don’t touch him!” commanded Jaffe as the two Libyan intelligence agents rushed into the elevator. Until he knew what the hell was going on, he wanted everything taken very slowly.
That plan, though, fell to pieces when the agent they called Hassan leaned down close to the ambassador’s face and could hear the sound of breathing. “He’s alive!” he shouted.
Jaffe gave a rapid series of orders and after sending Harper for the medical kit and telling the two Libyans to back out of the elevator, he stepped inside to have a look for himself.
Shouldering his weapon, Jaffe carefully approached the ambassador to check on his condition. The man was in bad shape, and what Hassan had thought to be the sound of breathing was actually the sound of the ambassador choking on his own blood. If they didn’t do something and fast, the man was going to die.
Calling Rashid, Hassan, and his two other marines back into the elevator, Jaffe placed them along both sides of the ambassador and prepared them to carefully turn the man while he supported his head. On three, they began to roll him over, and that’s when Jaffe realized he hadn’t been cautious enough. The ambassador was indeed choking on his own blood, but he was also desperately trying to warn them not to move him. By the time Jaffe realized what was happening, it was too late.
The improvised device rigged to the ambassador exploded in an enormous fireball, ripping the roof off the car, shearing the cables, and sending it plummeting into the basement.
U
pon hearing the explosion, Ali ran back up the stairs and detonated a second device, blowing the welded door right out of its frame.
He stepped into the freight area and saw the blackened elevator doors standing open, but nothing else. It was like an enormous gaping mouth with smoke billowing from its throat.
His weapon up and at the ready, Ali began his search for Mohammed. Moving quickly, he swept into the first three offices along the hall and finding them empty, moved on. In the fourth, he found a television set, a cooking area with a sink as well as a table, chairs, and some couches, but nothing more.
The next door was marked with both the English and Arabic words for
washroom.
He pushed the door open and quietly slipped inside. Having looked inside every stall and confident that they were all empty, he exited and continued his search. There were only about five offices remaining. The next was empty, as was the next after that. As Ali quickly moved toward the last three rooms, he found the next one he approached was locked. A handwritten sign identified its function as a sterile treatment room and listed a set of instructions to follow before entering. Abdul Ali kicked it open and inside found a surgical table, a medical recovery recliner, a wheelchair, various first aid supplies, and right in the center of it all a high-end Nova Medical Systems dialysis machine.
The next room was the nerve center of the interrogation operation. The walls were covered with dry-erase boards, maps of the Middle East and Africa, multiple photographs of the al-Qaeda hierarchy, as well as various organizational and relationship diagrams. Desks were laden with audio and video equipment as well as monitors tuned to cameras that must have been positioned all over the floor. Seeing the image on the largest monitor, Abdul Ali turned and fled.
Bursting into the room across the hall, he was ready to weep with joy. There, bound to a small, wooden chair was Mohammed bin Mohammed. Next to him, unconscious and severely beaten, was a man Ali had never met but most definitely knew of. The last he’d heard, the man had been in Canada. He had no idea Mohammed’s nephew, Sayed Jamal, had been taken prisoner.
As he rushed to Mohammed’s side, he saw that he was naked from the waist down, his penis red and swollen beyond belief. “What unspeakable acts have they done to you, my brother?” he asked as he removed a knife and begun cutting away the restraints.
At first, Mohammed didn’t want to believe his eyes. His body was so racked with pain and his mind was clouded by the horror of his torture. Surely it was some sort of trick. Then he saw Ali holster his weapon and remove a knife to help cut him free.
It was Ali, wasn’t it?
At this point, he didn’t know what to believe. “Is it you?” he asked, his voice hoarse from his screaming.
“Yes, Mohammed, it is I. I have come to take you home,” replied Ali.
Looking in the direction of his nephew, Mohammed asked, “And Sayed?”
Ali reached over and felt the man’s pulse. It was weak, too weak. “I’m sorry. There is nothing we can do for him. He is not going to make it.”
Mohammed hung his head. “At least his family is already waiting for him in paradise.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Americans took each one of his children and killed them. Then they took his wife. They made us both watch it on television, hoping it would force me to tell them what they wanted to know.”
“And what did you tell them?” asked Ali, concerned that everything he had been through, everything they had risked might now be for nothing.
Mohammed’s face was a block of implacable granite. “I told them nothing. Even while they killed Sayed’s family one by one, I told them nothing.”
Ali looked at Jamal once again. His trouser legs had been sheared away, and his knees were a mass of bloody pulp. “What did they do to him?”
“They used a drill,” he croaked.
Ali had no intention of making his colleague relive any more of the brutality. “Can you stand?” he asked as he helped Mohammed to his feet. “I have a safe place I can take you.”
Mohammed shook his head. “My pain is too great. They stopped my dialysis as a part of the torture. You’re too late. Soon I will follow Sayed.”
Ali shook his head. “I have a hotel room near here with a small dialysis machine. You are not going to die, my brother. Not today. But we must get to safety quickly.”
“I fear I won’t be able to walk very far. I have grown too weak.”
Ali thought about it for a moment and then told Mohammed not to move. Leaving him, Ali went back out into the hallway and made his way to the dialysis room.
After unfolding the wheelchair, he rifled through the cabinets until he found a pair of surgical scrubs big enough to fit Mohammed. He gathered a few additional supplies and was putting them all in a small bag, when he heard a voice from behind him say, “Don’t even think about moving.”
T
hough Abdul Ali had been meticulous about clearing the otherwise empty rooms, what he didn’t realize was that, as in many consulates and embassies around the world, hidden passageways as well as escape exits were often part of the architecture. It was just such a passageway that had allowed the surviving marine, Brad Harper, to create an advantage and assume the upper hand.
He had already been on his way back with the medical kit when the blast from the first explosion had knocked him to the ground. When the second, smaller explosion detonated, he wisely rushed back to the control room to see what was happening on the closed-circuit monitors.
Now, as Harper held his modified M16 Viper on the man who had just assassinated his entire team, he was very tempted to administer justice himself. All it would take was a simple pull of the trigger, and this entire nightmare would be brought to an end, but Harper knew better. He also knew the man he had in front of him was extremely dangerous and could have any one of a hundred possible tricks up his sleeve. “I’ve got every reason in the world to kill you right now. Try anything stupid and I will pull this trigger. Do you understand me?”
Ali had no idea how he had missed this man. His eyes darted around the room as his mind scrambled for a way out.
Harper shifted his sights a fraction of an inch to the right and he pulled the trigger, sending a quick burst of fire over the man’s shoulder and into the Sheetrock in front of him.
“Do you understand?”
he repeated.
Ali nodded his head.
“I want you to raise your hands, slowly. That’s it. Nice and easy. Now interlace your fingers behind your head.”
Once Ali had complied, Harper ordered him onto his stomach. With the man fully prone, the young marine cautiously leaned down to cuff him. It was at that moment that Mohammed bin Mohammed snuck up behind him and with the very last reserves of strength, hit the large marine not once but twice across the back of the head with a fire extinguisher, knocking him to the floor unconscious.
A
s Harvath and the rest of his team rapidly made their way to Libya House, things were beginning to make sense. In 2003 the United States made headlines when in exchange for agreeing to lift its sentence of rogue-nation status and restart diplomatic ties with Libya, the Libyans agreed to abandon their weapons of mass destruction, discontinue any support of terrorism, and enact sweeping social and democratic reforms.
Such unprecedented cooperation in the war on terror might very well have been just the surface of a much deeper and much quieter deal. It was no wonder that even with his Polo Step clearance Harvath had not been able to learn which top al-Qaeda member the United States had taken into custody. Somewhere at State or the Department of Justice, somebody was walking a very thin legal line. The only way Harvath could figure they had pulled it off was to have brought M&M up to the edge of international waters on a private craft of some sort and flying him the rest of the way by chopper, then dropping him on the roof of Libya House, where the Libyans took over.
Though he was sure the American involvement was supposed to be nothing more than “observer” status, he knew who was really running this show. In fact, he had a pretty good feeling he knew the person by name: Mike Jaffe. What he didn’t have a good feeling about was their being able to get access to Libya House. Gary was right. It was sovereign territory and without an invitation, the only way they were going to be able to get inside was by force. But as it turned out, that wasn’t necessary.
When they arrived, the few people who were in the lobby were in an absolute panic. Harvath flashed his DHS credentials and was told by a man who identified himself as the mission receptionist that there had been an enormous explosion from somewhere within the building and that they couldn’t raise their ambassador, his assistant, or the ambassador’s security team.
After Harvath explained that they were there because terrorists had targeted the building and they believed that an attack was eminent, the receptionist assigned them the building’s only security guard and sped them into one of the lobby elevators for the ambassador’s office on the twenty-third floor.
The moment the doors opened, the guard showed them into the ambassador’s office, where they came upon the bodies of the assistant and the two bodyguards.
Borrowing the guard’s radio, Harvath called down to the receptionist to ask how long it had been since the man had last had contact with the ambassador, his assistant, or any members of the protective detail.
The man filled Harvath in on everything he knew, including the unannounced visitor with the diplomatic passport. He provided a full description, but when Harvath asked his next question, the receptionist became very quiet.
The entire staff of Libya House had been told that the twenty-fourth floor was absolutely off-limits, and even its existence shouldn’t be discussed with anyone. The receptionist had suspected it had something to do with the two stern-faced intelligence agents who had joined the mission from Tripoli. Faced with the very real fact that the building was under siege, the man shared the rest of what he knew.
Before the receptionist was even done speaking, Harvath and company. were rushing for the freight elevator. They were halfway there when the receptionist came back over the radio. Based on what he could see from his security panel, the freight elevator was no longer operational. What’s more, even though the rest of the building was supposedly empty, one of the main elevators had unexpectedly risen to the twenty-second floor and was now beginning to descend.
Though he couldn’t put his finger on why, Harvath had a very bad feeling about who was inside that elevator.
Shrugging off the pain in his shoulder, he made for the stairway, but Bob Herrington and Tracy Hastings were already in front of him.
Relieving the lumbering security guard of his radio and with Rick Cates and his bad knees bringing up the rear, Harvath hit the stairwell and barreled down as fast as he could go.
The landings, which he normally would have taken by gripping the handrail with his right hand and swinging his body around, were nearly impossible because of his wounds, and so he took the tight turns as best he could, relying only on his feet. More than once, his excessive speed caused him to slam his left side up against the wall before he could regain his path and tackle the next set of stairs. Invariably, he lost sight of Bob and Tracy, who were making much better time than he and considerably better time than Cates, who was sucking up the pain and moving as fast as he could.
Twice, Herrington and Hastings stopped on random floors to depress the elevator’s call button in hopes of stopping it. But without a keycard, it was no use. Once they finally realized they couldn’t stop it, the pair tore back into the stairwell and continued their mad dash down the stairs.
Within ten floors of the ground level, Harvath radioed Herrington on his Motorola. “Bob, what’s your status?” he asked.
It was a moment before Herrington replied, “At the lobby now. We’re going to intercept that elevator.”
“Negative,” said Harvath. “Wait for me.”
“What floor are you on?”
“Eight. I’ll be right there.”
“You’re not going to make it. The elevator’s already on four.”
“Wait, for me, Bob,” repeated Harvath.
“Listen, there’s a mail room kitty-corner from where you’re going to hit the lobby,” said Herrington. “That’s where we are. You can give us fire support from the stairwell when you get here.”
Harvath, who was now touching one, maybe two steps in between each landing as he flew down the stairs, was about to remind Herrington who was in charge of the operation, when Bob’s voice came back over his radio. He was counting down the elevator’s arrival. “Two. One. Bingo!”
Based upon the scene in the ambassador’s office, Harvath knew that if this was their guy, he wasn’t going to come easily, and based on Mohammed bin Mohammed’s extremely bloody history, neither was he.
Harvath expected to hear gunfire the second the elevator opened, but nothing came. Instead, Herrington’s voice crackled over his earpiece, “Shit. It’s not stopping. They’re going for the garage.”
“I’m coming up on the fifth floor,” said Harvath, his chest heaving for oxygen. “Wait for me in the stairwell.”
“We’re going to lose him,” replied Herrington.
“You’ve seen what this guy can do. We’re all going in together.”
Harvath waited for Bob to reply, and when he didn’t, Harvath knew it meant that Bob had decided to go without him. If he could have run any faster, he would have, but as it was, Harvath was tackling the stairs faster than anyone in their right mind should have. He’d be lucky if all he got out of it was a bruised shoulder from bouncing off of each of the landing walls.
Harvath was at the second floor when the ear-splitting thunder of automatic weapons fire started and filled the narrow stairwell. When he hit the lobby level, just one floor from the garage, Tracy Hastings’s frantic voice came over the radio yelling, “Man down! Man down!”