Takedown (19 page)

O
nce the two strangers had lowered their weapons and downed the water Morgan had given them, Harvath asked, “What are you guys doing here?”

“It’s our shift,” said the lead man, who identified himself as Staff Sergeant Steve Gonzalez, United States Marine Corps.

“With all the shit going on in the Lincoln Tunnel, why didn’t you come earlier?” asked Herrington.

“Orders. Believe me, Tommy and I wanted to come down here as soon as we heard, but it was against the protocol.”

“Whose
protocol
?” replied Harvath.

“Captain Forrester’s,” said Lance Corporal Thomas Tecklin. “He ran us through every contingency he could think of. The last thing he wanted was for any of the security personnel to be caught in a secondary blast meant to target newcomers rushing to the scene.”

“Wait a second,” interjected Gonzalez, the bodies of his Marine Corps colleagues—and the people they were charged with protecting—littering the floor. “Let’s start by talking about what the hell happened here.”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Harvath. “Captain Forrester gave us this location.”

Gonzalez didn’t believe Harvath. “He wouldn’t have done that. This place is above top secret.”

“He didn’t have a choice,” replied Herrington, who appreciated the man’s loyalty to his mission and his commanding officer. “He didn’t want to see any more of his marines die.”

“More?”
repeated Morgan. “What do you mean, he didn’t want to see
more
marines die? What marines?”

“Two other sites were hit,” said Harvath. He chose the words very carefully, as he wanted to see how much the marines knew.

Gonzalez was very concerned. “Which sites?”

“Transcon Enterprises and Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Tecklin. “How bad?”

“Equally as bad as this. No survivors.”

“Who was it?”

“We believe it was al-Qaeda.”

“Al-Qaeda? Why?”

“We don’t know why,” answered Harvath. “We were hoping that was something you could help us with. Is there anything in particular about the information being processed here that could be beneficial to them?”

“Officially,” replied Gonzalez, “we didn’t know anything about the information that flows through here. Our job is to guard this site.”

“And unofficially?”

“Unofficially? People talk, you know? You couldn’t help but overhear things here. It was all political stuff. Some of it run-of-the-mill dirty dealing and some of it extremely volatile. Like well-placed spies in foreign governments, murder cover-ups, assassination plots, coup attempts—it goes on and on. There is stuff even hotter than that, if you can believe it, but the hotter it is the quieter everyone here is—
was
—about it. At the end of the day, we actually overheard very little. And none of it directly valuable as far as al-Qaeda is concerned—at least nothing I can think of that would justify all of this,” said the lead marine as he took in the devastated facility.

Three locations and zero leads. It was driving Harvath nuts. The more they uncovered, the less sense it all made. No matter how many steps they took forward, they still couldn’t seem to catch up with whoever was behind these attacks. “What about the fourth site?” he asked.

“What fourth site?” said Gonzalez.

“Sergeant, we know there is a fourth and final site. Captain Forrester mentioned it before he was killed. If we’re correct, that’s exactly where the terrorists are headed next.”

Gonzalez didn’t respond.

“He’s right,” replied Tecklin. “We need to warn them.”

“Quiet,” ordered Gonzalez.

“Why? These guys know about the fourth site, and they’re right that the terrorists probably do too.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Sarge, they’ve hit three out of four. I’d say the chances are pretty good al-Qaeda knows about the last location. We can’t just sit here and let our guys get killed. We’ve got to warn them.”

Gonzalez was torn. On one hand there were the lives of fellow marines at stake and on the other were a set of orders that didn’t seem to make much sense at this point. Nevertheless, orders were orders.

“Will you at least call the fourth location and warn them?” asked Harvath.

“It doesn’t matter. I already tried from one of the pay phones outside before we came in here.”

“No answer?”

“All I got was a fast busy signal and a ‘circuits are overloaded’ response.”

“Did you try calling Transcon and Geneva Diamond?”

Gonzalez again nodded his head. “Same thing.”

“You’ve got to tell us where that fourth location is.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t discuss any other location or locations.”

Bob Herrington had had enough. “For fuck’s sake, Sergeant. Those people are going to die over there if you don’t help us out. Make a goddamn command decision.”

“I can’t.”

“The hell you can’t. Your CO has been shot by the NSA program manager, and at this point you are the most senior marine on site. You think they’re going to court martial you for trying to save that other location?”

“The NSA program manager?” remarked Tecklin.

Gonzalez didn’t want to know anything further. He’d made up his mind. “I’m sorry, I have my orders.”

“Well, you and your orders can kiss my fucking ass,” said Herrington. “I thought marines were smarter than this. I guess I was wrong.”

As Bob walked away in disgust, Harvath pulled Gonzalez aside and said, “Steve, I’ve got a lot of respect for your orders, but at least take Morgan and get over there. You guys might be able to help even the odds. The terrorists have enough players on their team to fill at least two Tahoes.”

The sergeant shook his head. “No can do. We’ve got to secure this site and make sure no one else gets in or out until help arrives.”

“You know that could be quite a while.”

“It doesn’t matter. This information needs to be protected.”

“Even if that means other marines might die?”

Gonzalez looked at Harvath and slowly nodded his head. Come hell or high water, he was going to stand his post. In the process, though, several of his comrades were most likely going to lose their lives.

For a fleeting moment, Harvath wondered if they could muscle the marine and get him to crack, but he decided against it. As wrong as he believed the man’s decision to be, Harvath wasn’t going to torture a fellow serviceman faithfully executing his duty.

He was about to make one more impassioned plea, soldier to soldier, when Paul Morgan caught his attention and signaled that he needed to talk to him.

“What’s up?” said Harvath as he crossed over to where Morgan was standing.

“I know where the fourth site is.”

Harvath couldn’t believe it. “How?”

“Tecklin gave it to me. We both went through basic at Camp Pendleton. It turns out we had the same D.I.”

“So because of a drill instructor he just gave the information to you?”

“No,” replied Morgan. “His brother is part of the security detail at the fourth location. When they joined the Marines together, they promised their old man they’d do everything they could to make sure nothing bad ever happened to the other. He respects Gonzalez, but the way he sees it, the Marines not only taught him how to follow orders, but also to react when old orders didn’t make sense anymore and lives were on the line.

“That’s why he wanted us to have the location. But wait till you hear where it is. At first I thought he was pulling my leg, but he swears it’s for real.”

“Where is it? Where’s the fourth location?”

Morgan held up a diagram made by Lance Corporal Tecklin, and it made such perfect sense that Harvath almost couldn’t believe it.

A
bdul Ali watched as Sacha drew his Para-Ordnance 1911 pistol, affixed its silencer, and finished off his wounded comrade. They had done all they could to save him, but it was clear to everyone that Khasan wasn’t going to make it. He was slowing them down, and that made him a liability. As cold as the decision was, they had no choice. Their own survival necessitated the act. Just like the man who had been killed during the assault on Geneva Diamond, Khasan’s payment would be made to his family, including the bonus at the end of the job. Sacha would see to it personally.

Ali knew that the lead Chechen, as well as the rest of his men, held him responsible for this most recent death. Ali had almost walked into an ambush in Central Park and had brought whoever had orchestrated it out after them. The man on horseback had fired his first shot through the rear window of one of their Tahoes, hitting Khasan at the base of the throat. The man’s next shot had gone straight through the tailgate, killing the Chechens’ dog, Ivan, while the third shot had punched through the other side of the tailgate and missed by a matter of millimeters one of their men gunning from the backseat. As far as Ali was concerned, the first shot was all that mattered. The team was down two men now and still had two more locations to go.

With the rear window shattered and the back row of seats covered in Khasan’s blood, Ali decided they not only needed to get rid of both the bodies they were carrying, they needed to get rid of the damaged Tahoe as well. First, though, they needed to find a suitable vehicle as a replacement.

Nearby in the tony Lenox Hill neighborhood, Sacha saw what they were looking for. The all-black GMC Yukon Denali was as close to perfect as they were going to get. Three blocks later, they dumped the damaged Tahoe, the bodies of their two dead comrades, and the body of the woman from whom they’d just carjacked the Denali.

They drove south toward Midtown east and their next assault. With multiple breaching points some distance apart at this location, timing was going to be everything. Though Ali would have preferred to have been on one of the street-level breaching teams, he had no choice but to go with the team that would be coming up from underneath. Theirs was the most perilous trek, and it was also the most likely to encounter resistance from inquisitive police officers. If push came to shove, only Ali and his grasp of American English could help the subterranean team pull it off.

The Denali sped toward 50th while the intact Tahoe pulled up onto the sidewalk of 49th Street, and Ali’s team unloaded its equipment. Startled onlookers backed away as men in balaclavas and black tactical gear set up a utility company–style screen, sparked a Gentec portable acetylene torch, and began to cut through the sidewalk grating. Once the grating was pulled free, a high tinsel tripod complete with enormous rubber feet and a pulley and winch system was suspended above the opening, a rope was fed through, and Abdul Ali prepared to be the first one down.

The goal was to fast-rope in as quickly as possible. That all changed when only halfway down an MTA officer spotted Ali and reached for the radio mic clipped to his shoulder. With the laser sight of his MP5, Ali painted a red dot on the man’s chest and pulled the trigger, quieting any premature announcement of their arrival.

When Ali hit the ground, it took him several moments to pull the officer’s body from the platform and hide it beneath one of the nearby trains. Once he was done, he radioed for the rest of the men to hurry up.

Though rappelling in made much more sense than trying to gain access to the tracks by walking through the middle of Grand Central Terminal, Ali wasn’t going to feel safe until they had left this location far behind them. His sixth sense was speaking to him again, and he didn’t like what it was saying.

Once the rest of the team had joined him, Ali led the way across the tracks toward 50th Street and the Waldorf-Astoria’s secret railway platform. Built in the early 1930s, the platform provided VIP guests with their own private railway cars—a covert alternative to Penn Station or Grand Central Terminal. The platform had been used to gain access to the hotel by such notables as Generals Douglas MacArthur and John Pershing as well as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appreciated yet another feature of what became known among the cognoscenti as the Waldorf’s secret station.

In the middle of the platform was an enormous six-foot-wide freight elevator capable of transporting Roosevelt’s 6,000-pound, armor-plated Pierce Arrow from the Waldorf station up to a highly secure and cleverly hidden section of the hotel’s garage, which had its own private exit.

In addition to being the official residence of the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Abdul Ali prayed to his God that the Waldorf-Astoria was housing one other noteworthy guest—Mohammed bin Mohammed.

Approaching the freight elevator, Ali looked at his Casio and paused to catch his breath. Three minutes later, he entered the code given to him by the Troll and listened to the hum of the elevator as it made its way down to the platform. When it arrived, the team worked quickly to get themselves into place. Once they were all situated, Ali depressed the button for the elevator’s one and only other stop, and the team began its ascent.

When the man sitting in the emergency hatch gave the command, Ali halted the elevator. The torch was quickly lifted up, and the man set to work on the grate covering the old airshaft tunnel. Once it had been removed, the rest of the team crawled inside.

T
he marines guarding the entrance to the Grail site, so codenamed because its analysts handled the most valuable of the Athena Program intelligence, had no idea what hit them when Ali and his team burst from a wall-mounted air duct with their guns blazing. Two additional teams simultaneously appeared from a hallway and a nearby stairwell.

Dropping to the floor of their bulletproof cubicle, the marines scrambled for their assault rifles. Ali’s men, though, didn’t let up for even a fraction of a second. In a perfectly choreographed ballet of deadly fire, the Chechens assaulted the security hut in wave after wave, never giving the marines a chance to return fire. So engaged, neither Ali nor his mercenaries noticed when a heavy metal plate was slid open in the upper corner of the wall behind the marines, and a large-caliber machine gun opened fire.

Two of the Chechens were mowed right down, their bodies torn to shreds by the heavy lead rounds. Falling back, the teams retreated to their breaching points as Sacha yelled orders to his men.

As the Chechens directed all their fire toward the marines in the security booth and the opening in the wall where the machine gun had appeared, Sacha loaded a fast-arming M381 high-explosive round into the 40mm grenade launcher mounted beneath his assault rifle and let the golf ball–sized projectile rip.

When it connected, the explosion was deafening, and it not only succeeded in knocking out the machine gun, but it tore a huge hole in the upper corner of the wall. One of the Chechens raced toward the security booth armed with his 9mm pistol and a good-sized shape charge, but neither did him any good. The two marines inside had opened a narrow slot in the bulletproof glass and began to return fire, killing the man before he could reach their position.

By focusing fire on the slot, the Chechens were able to push the marines back and keep them pinned down while another one of their teammates rushed forward and attached the shape charge to the side of the booth. Even if they had tried to escape, the marines never would have had a chance. The charge leveled the structure, killing both of its occupants instantly.

While the team kept watch for any more peepholes or slide boxes through which weapons could be fired, another shape charge was affixed to the facility’s main door. Retreating a safe distance away, the team donned their gasmasks, blew the charge, and immediately launched a series of tear gas canisters into the series of rooms on the other side.

When the first of the Chechens ran inside, two marines fully outfitted with gas masks of their own were waiting for him and blew the man apart. Stunned at their mounting losses, the Chechens came to a momentary standstill, but Sacha and Ali drove them forward. They hadn’t come this far to give up now.

By the sheer force of the resistance they were encountering, Ali felt in the depths of his soul that they had finally found where Mohammed bin Mohammed was being held captive. All they needed to do now was put down the last of the resistance. Loading another fast-arming M381 into his launcher and pointing it at the marines, Sacha looked ready to do just that.

The round exploded with an overwhelming concussion wave that knocked almost all of the Chechens to the ground, but when the Americans eventually arrived to claim their dead, they’d have to scrape what was left of their precious marines off the walls and the ceiling if they intended to have any sort of a burial for them.

Regaining their feet, the remaining Chechens quickly and methodically made their way through the facility. Ali was filled with anticipation with each door he kicked open, positive he would stumble upon Mohammed at any moment, but as the team swept into the last of the rooms, the man again was nowhere to be found.

Ali slammed a fresh magazine into his weapon, beside himself with both rage and frustration.
How could they have hit four sites and not found him?
Ali was about to share this thought with Sacha, when the redhaired giant took his small bag of electronic devices and headed toward the facility’s servers. At that moment, Ali’s sixth sense began speaking to him again. He probably should have pushed the outrageous thoughts from his mind, but he let them stay. Something told him that what he was thinking might not be so far off the mark. Ali was developing more than a sneaking suspicion that he had been used.

As Abdul Ali seethed, downstairs near the platform, fatally wounded MTA officer Patrick O’Donnell had finally summoned enough strength to radio for help.