Takedown (3 page)

W
hen Sayed Jamal entered the bedroom of his government-subsidized apartment, Scot Harvath slammed the butt of his H&K right into the bridge of his nose, knocking the terrorist to the floor and causing him to bleed profusely.

“Don’t you know that Allah prefers playing to a full house?” said Harvath as he Flexicuffed the man’s wrists behind his back. “He doesn’t like it when you skip out of morning prayers early. And neither do I.”

As Harvath stood up, he gave Jamal a sharp kick to his ribs to emphasize his unhappiness with the man’s premature return to the apartment.

Like Ahmed Ressam—the Algerian-born terrorist who had been caught at the Canadian–U.S. border with over 120 pounds of explosives and a plan to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 1999—Sayed Jamal was yet another Algerian national who had taken advantage of Canada’s liberal asylum policy to hide out just north of the border and plan attacks against the United States.

With its quaint cobblestone streets and European architecture, Montreal was a city that made many people forget they were only twenty-nine miles from New York State. Scot Harvath, though, was no longer one of those people.

Finding a Canadian penny mixed in with his U.S. change once or twice a year, Harvath used to joke that Canada was the most patient invading force in the world—one penny at a time, one pop singer at a time, one actor at a time…. It might take them ten thousand years to conquer the United States, but they were on the move, and the American people needed to wake up. But when Canada started to become an operational staging ground for Middle Eastern terrorists bent on destroying the United States, the joke was no longer funny.

Upon reaching Canada or its territorial waters, all that these “asylum-seekers” had to do was claim status as political refugees, and they would be granted Canadian protection under the UN Convention. That was it. The screening process was so poorly managed that nearly one hundred percent of them were granted a formal hearing complete with free legal advice, money, and a place to stay while they often waited more than two years to appear in front of a Canadian magistrate—if they even bothered showing up at all for their hearing.

With laughable screening procedures and nonexistent enforcement, significant numbers of these fake asylum-seekers found their way to Montreal where they joined Muslim terrorist organizations with strong ties to al-Qaeda. One such organization was known as the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, and it was the GIA that had brought Agent Scot Harvath to Canada.

The United States had been trying unsuccessfully to convince the Canadian Government to extradite Sayed Jamal to stand trial in the United States. Jamal was a former chemistry professor who somewhere along the line found religion—radical Islam, to be specific—joined the GIA, and followed several of his GIA counterparts to Iraq, where he took up arms against the Western imperial crusaders, aka the American military.

Interestingly enough, of all the foreign fighters in Iraq, the majority—over twenty percent—came from Algeria. And while several Syrian terrorist groups were known for producing exceptional snipers, it was the Algerians—the GIA in particular—who were known for being the best bombmakers in the business. In fact, the most horrific roadside bombs—the ones that scared the hell out of even the most experienced EOD, or Explosive Ordnance Disposal techs, were the ones produced by the GIA’s most proficient bombmaker in Iraq, Sayed Jamal.

With over two hundred American servicemen and women killed and wounded as a result of Jamal’s specialty IEDs known as EFPs, or explosively formed projectiles, which could penetrate up to four inches of armor from over 300 feet away, the United States had pulled out all the stops to track him down. When the heat got too intense in Iraq, he fled to Canada. There, he spun an elaborate cover story and was granted full refugee status. But while you can take the jihadi out of the jihad, you can never really take the jihad out of the jihadi. NSA intercepts revealed a dramatic increase in terrorist chatter suggesting that Jamal was coordinating future attacks within the United States.

Once the United States had pinpointed the terrorist’s location, they began extradition requests. Despite a mountain of evidence in favor of the extradition, the Canadians refused. The liberal prime minister wasn’t convinced that Jamal was who the Americans said he was. Even so, the PM made it clear he wouldn’t even begin considering extradition unless the United States promised to waive the death penalty in the case. As far as the United States was concerned, there was no way in hell that was ever going to happen.

Soon after talks broke down, a copy of Jamal’s Canadian Intelligence dossier magically appeared on the president’s desk. Jack Rutledge didn’t need to ask where it came from. He knew how back channels worked, and he also knew that there were several high-ranking members of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service who were sick of seeing their country’s benevolence exploited by Muslim extremists. Considering the sensitivity of the assignment, he knew there was only one person he could call.

With Jamal now zip-tied and under control, Harvath turned his attention back to the most dangerous part of the assignment—securing Jamal’s laptop.

He’d been briefed that the United States had recently lost two very experienced operators when they attempted to retrieve a high-ranking al-Qaeda member’s PowerBook. Harvath didn’t know what spooked him more—the fact that the United States had taken down an al-Qaeda operative so high-ranking that even with his above-top-secret
Polo Step
clearance he couldn’t find out who it was, or that as the two members of the assault team had gone for the terrorist’s laptop, it had detonated, killing them instantly.

All Harvath knew was that Jamal’s computer was believed to contain a veritable treasure trove of information and that because of some association with the aforementioned high-ranking al-Qaeda member, his laptop most likely had been rigged with similar explosives and a mercury tilt switch.

It was at times like this that Harvath would have given a year’s pay to have had a good EOD tech along for the ride. But he didn’t have a good EOD tech; he didn’t even have a bad one. All he had were two empty aerosol cans and a Styrofoam cooler packed with dry ice.

The idea had been to render the mercury in the tilt switch useless with a product used for flash-freezing biological specimens known as Quick-Freeze. After the tilt switch was immobilized, it would create a window of several seconds during which he could pick up the laptop and place it in the cooler. It then could be transported back across the border where a team was waiting to defuse it. At the time, the plan made sense. What nobody had counted on was Jamal coming home early. Because of it, Harvath’s attention had been diverted and now he didn’t have enough Quick-Freeze left to attempt refreezing the tilt switch.

He had to think of something else. Returning empty-handed, or worse,
no-handed
were not options he was willing to consider.

Though Harvath was just two careers removed from his days as a United States Navy SEAL, the lessons he had learned with the Secret Service at the White House and now as a covert counterterrorism operative for the Department of Homeland Security only served to reinforce his Special Operations training—there was an answer to every problem, you just had to look hard enough to find it.

Glancing at the special Suunto X9Mi watch he’d been issued for the trip into Canada, Harvath saw that he was very close to falling behind schedule. He had a rendezvous to keep and if he missed it, it was going to be hell getting out of the country and back across the U.S. border.

As he cycled through various options in his mind, something suddenly bubbled to the surface. Sayed Jamal was a bombmaker and unfortunately a pretty good one. From the intelligence reports Harvath had read, he knew that the man was meticulous. And if he was meticulous, he was probably also very safety conscious. The question was would he have what Harvath was looking for and if so where did he keep it?

Dragging Jamal up by the hair, Harvath put his gun under the man’s chin and said, “You’ve got a lot of soldering equipment in here, Sayed. If a fire broke out it could be pretty expensive—not to mention the undesirable attention it would draw. That was Ramzi Yousef’s mistake with that little chemical fire in the Philippines. If I recall correctly, his pal got busted going back later for their laptop, didn’t he? But you’re smarter than that. I can tell. So tell me, where’s your fire extinguisher?”

Jamal spit in Harvath’s face and cursed him in Arabic.

“Ebn el Metanaka!”
Harvath responded as he jammed the silenced barrel of his weapon into the painfully soft tissue beneath Jamal’s chin. “We can do this in Arabic or English. I don’t really care. I just want to know where it is.”

The bombmaker tried to spit at him again, but Harvath cut him short with a knee to the groin. He’d had a feeling he wasn’t going to get much help, but it was always polite to ask—and Scot Harvath was nothing if not polite.

He dragged the terrorist to the kitchen, where he found what he was looking for under the sink. “Good choice, Sayed,” he remarked as he pulled it out. “Powder extinguishers leave such a nasty residue. CO
₂
is much cleaner and a lot colder.”

Looking around, Harvath then asked, “Now then, where do you keep your falafel mitts, asshole?”

F
orty-five minutes later, Harvath pulled his car over to the side of the road, yanked Jamal out of the trunk, and shoved half a tampon up each of his nostrils to stem his nosebleed. After putting a Windbreaker over the terrorist’s shoulders and zipping it up the front to hide his stained shirt, Harvath slid him into the front passenger seat, fastened his seat belt, and warned him what would happen if he tried to make any more trouble.

Once again, Jamal tried to spit, but Harvath was ready for him. He nailed him with a blow to his solar plexus, doubling him over and knocking the wind out of him.

Reaching back into the bag of goodies he had bought at the convenience store just outside Montreal, Harvath withdrew a PowerBar and a bottle of spring water. At thirty-six, his carefree days of unlimited cheeseburgers and beers were now behind him. At five feet ten and a muscular 175 pounds, Harvath was in better shape than most men half his age, but he found it took more and more work just to maintain his level of physical fitness. If an assignment in a Muslim country required that he grow a beard, after a couple of days he soon saw traces of gray mingled with the light brown that matched the hair on his head. His father, a Navy SEAL instructor who had died in a training accident when Harvath was in his early twenties, had gone completely gray by forty.

Despite the small lines starting to form at the corners of his bright blue eyes, it wasn’t anything Harvath couldn’t live with. Everybody had to get older sooner or later. What the signs of aging did make him wonder about was how much longer he wanted to put up with the stress of working for the government. The fact that he couldn’t get any good information that might have helped him on this assignment about the high-ranking al-Qaeda terrorist the United States had recently bagged was just another in a ongoing string of frustrations he was grudgingly putting up with.

While he respected his president and loved his country, the mounting bureaucratic bullshit was really beginning to piss him off. Having been both a SEAL and a Secret Service agent at the White House, Harvath understood the value of rules, regs, and a proper chain of command. But when the president had created a special international branch of Homeland Security dubbed the Office of International Investigative Assistance and had offered Harvath one of its plum assignments, Scot had thought things were going to be different.

Known as the Apex Project, Harvath’s covert unit was supposed to represent the collective intelligence capability and full muscle of the United States government to help neutralize and prevent terrorist actions against America and American interests on a global level.

Though it “technically” didn’t exist and Harvath was nothing more than a benignly titled “special agent,” just last year a self-aggrandizing senator with her sights set on the White House had been able to discover enough about him and his involvement with the Apex Project to force his resignation. Though it was only temporary, not knowing what his next move would be or what his life might be like with his cover blown was not a very pleasant experience.

He knew that his was a quiet, thankless profession that could only be lived in the shadows, but he was growing very tired of being at the mercy of partisan hacks and career politicians who sought advancement by stomping on the backs of true patriots guilty of nothing more than a deep love for their country.

He was so fed up with all the crap that he’d recently presented his boss, Gary Lawlor, with a .50-caliber bullet wrapped in red tape. The bullet was designed to take out targets at extremely long distances and Lawlor understood that it represented Harvath, who was constantly being sent on missions overseas to take out terrorists. The red tape was self-explanatory.

The job might have been a bit more palatable if it afforded him time to pursue any semblance of a personal life. Most of his buddies, even his former teammates from the SEALs, were pretty much married off and starting families. Though he didn’t necessarily want to start one of his own tomorrow, it would be nice to see a point in his not-too-distant future where his career would allow him to. Of course, that presupposed finding a woman who would want to start one with him as well. Most, he found, were unable to put up with the demands of his job, which regularly sounded the death knell in his burgeoning relationships. There’d only been one woman he’d ever been able to see himself actually making a full go of it with. She was even prepared to uproot her life and move to DC to be with him, but in the end, the demands of his job had made it impossible.

The bright side of everything, if you wanted to call it that, was that if he decided to go through with leaving government service, he was not at a loss for job offers from the private sector. In fact there was one job in particular Harvath was thinking very seriously about taking—an instructor position with a world-renowned tactical training center in Colorado called Valhalla. What haunted him, though, was the fear that once he entered the private sector he would no longer be able to look in the mirror and still consider himself a patriot.

That said, it was still a decision he had to make and he knew that it would undoubtedly weigh heavily on his mind over the upcoming holiday weekend.

Rounding a bend in the otherwise deserted country lane, Harvath’s attention was drawn to more pressing matters as his vehicle was met by a police roadblock.

A smile began to metastasize across Sayed Jamal’s face. The terrorist clearly saw his salvation at hand. No matter who Scot Harvath was and what American agency he worked for, he could not legally take him from Canada against his will. This was about to end up very badly for the United States. The American had been a fool to ever remove him from the trunk. Had he left him there, the man very likely could have driven straight across the border without ever being searched. Sayed knew that it was only a matter of moments now before he would be free and then he would tell every reporter he could find about his terrible ordeal at the hands of the imperialist Americans.

Slowly approaching the roadblock, Harvath kept his cool.

“Can I see your license and registration, please?” asked a machine gun–toting officer in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform when Harvath rolled down his window.

Harvath made a show of patting his pockets and replied, “I was so excited about coming to Canada I must have forgotten to bring them.”

The officer looked around the vehicle and then said, “We get that a lot. Who is your passenger?”

“Help me!” screamed Jamal, sensing this was the only chance he was going to get at freedom. “I have been taken against my—” he continued, but was cut off when Harvath slammed his elbow into the man’s mouth.

“Don’t mind him,” said Harvath, well aware that the Royal Mounted Police not only didn’t carry machine guns, but also didn’t patrol Canada’s borders. “He’s just a little moody. It’s his time of the month.”

“Yeah,” replied the officer. “I can see the tampons.”

“I think he’s just nervous about crossing into the States.”

“I would be too,” said the CSIS agent posing as a Mountie. He then waved for the roadblock vehicles to clear the road and added, “Especially if I’d been responsible for killing and wounding all those American military personnel.”

Jamal’s bloodied face went pale.
The Canadians were in on it.

“We just wanted to make sure you got your man,” said the agent. “Anything else about the operation we should know?”

“You’ll want a team to sweep his apartment. He’s got a lot of bombmaking materials in there, but other than that, it was pretty smooth.”

“Okay, then,” said the man as he tapped the roof of Harvath’s car. “Thank you for visiting Canada. Have a safe trip home.”

“We will,” said Harvath, smiling and giving a little wave as he drove away.

Two kilometers later they came to a small clearing, and Harvath exited the car. Checking their GPS coordinates on his Suunto, he activated the preplanned-route feature, grabbed the Styrofoam cooler from the backseat, and pulled Jamal out of the vehicle, shoving him toward the woods.

Less than half a klick in, they heard a branch snap and Harvath knew they weren’t alone. As he looked over his left shoulder, he saw a small team of heavily armed men decked out in digital camouflage materialize from among the trees.

“Welcome to the United States,” said one of the men. “Do you have anything to declare?”

“Yes I do,” replied Harvath as he offered up Jamal and the cooler with the frozen laptop. “Canada’s a fabulous country. Great beer, great people, and they have just started a wonderful terrorist lending program.”

The team drove Harvath and Jamal out of the woods to the small town of Rouses Point, New York, where the operation had kicked off and where Harvath’s car was waiting.