Takedown (21 page)

W
hile a two-man contingent of McGahan’s officers used the gear from the back of the Tahoe to rope down through the sidewalk grate and cover the Waldorf platform, Harvath and his team ran back up Lexington toward the 50th Street stairwell.

When they arrived, they found not another Tahoe but a black Yukon Denali double-parked on the sidewalk. It had the same dashboard-mounted lights that flashed bright halogen strobes of blue and red. As Harvath carefully peered inside, he saw crushed CD jewel cases, South Beach Diet bar wrappers, and a stack of textbooks littering the floor. Two or three hair scrunchies were wrapped around the gearshift, and a pink snowflake air freshener dangled from the front passenger door handle.

The terrorists had been driving two identical Tahoes, but not anymore. Harvath must have caused more damage than he thought to force them to steal a new vehicle. Judging by the thin mist of blood that had been spattered on the driver’s-side headliner, the owner of this vehicle had not met with a very pleasant end. Removing his knife once more, he plunged it to the hilt in two of the tires, just in case the terrorists were able to slip by them.

The bad guys had blown the lock out of this door just like the one on 49th Street. When Hastings realized the door was open, she replaced the det cord and slung the demo bag over her shoulder. Backing away, she signaled everyone to take their places. Harvath radioed McGahan and told him that his team was ready.

“Roger that,” came the commander’s voice. “Teams one and two in place.”

Listening to McGahan’s countdown over his headset, Harvath counted backward on his fingers from five. When he closed his fist and pulled it down like a trucker blowing an air horn, Hastings pulled the door open.

With Harvath in the lead this time, they all poured into the stairwell and took the stairs as quickly and as quietly as they could.

Simultaneously, McGahan’s breaching team hit the door on 49th Street and bounded up the stairs.

By the time the lead man noticed the booby trap, it was too late. Shrapnel ripped through the tightly packed stairwell, killing two officers and wounding three more. It was complete pandemonium.

Despite barely being able to hear as a result of the explosion or breathe because of the smoke, McGahan radioed his team’s situation to help warn the others. After hearing the details, one of the special-response officers below on the platform responded that he was leaving to get the medical kit from their truck. Harvath told the man to remain at his post, but the NYPD officer ignored him. He didn’t take his orders from DHS. He had injured colleagues who needed immediate medical attention, and that’s what he was focused on.

With the 49th Street assault team out of commission and the team on the platform down to only one tactical officer and two MTA patrolmen, the brunt of the assault had just fallen squarely on the shoulders of Scot Harvath and company.

Harvath held up a closed fist to stop his team so that he could relay the information. It was then that a man in a black balaclava appeared at the top of the stairs with a grenade and all hell suddenly broke loose.

W
ith their vehicle on the 49th Street side compromised by the presence of the police, exiting by the 50th Street side made the most sense, but somehow something just didn’t feel right about it for Abdul Ali. If the police knew about the railroad platform and the 49th Street entrance, then they very likely knew about the 50th Street stairwell too. Ali could be running right into another trap, and so he made sure to choose their method of egress very carefully.

Because the Grail facility’s private garage entrance let out onto the 49th Street side of the building, it was immediately ruled out. That seemed to leave them with no alternatives until Ali realized that the hotel had at least two more perfectly acceptable exit points—the main doors at the rear of the hotel on Lexington Avenue as well as those at the very front of the Waldorf on Park Avenue. The only question was how they were going to get there.

As the secret garage exit opened only from the inside of the facility, Ali was fairly confident that they would not find a swarm of police officers waiting for them on the other side. Once in the garage, they could locate a service entrance to the hotel and from there make their way to either the Park or Lexington Avenue exits. Considering that everything was happening at the east end of the hotel, near Lexington, Ali leaned heavily toward making an escape via Park Avenue. They could decide what to do next, once they were safely out of harm’s way.

As Ali put the finishing touches on one of the little surprises they planned on leaving behind, Sacha dispatched men to check the status on each of the stairwells. Osman was the first to report. From what he could tell, the booby trap in the 49th Street stairwell had been triggered and the police had been forced to retreat. Yusha reported not seeing any signs of pursuit via the 50th Street stairwell, but then he suddenly broke off. When Sacha asked him what was going on, the man quietly spoke into his microphone to say that he thought he heard people approaching. Sacha told him to fall back and wait, that they were coming to support him, but the overconfident warrior told his commander not to bother. He had the high ground and could handle it himself. It was the very last Sacha heard from him.

W
ith the man at the top of the stairs lined up right in the center of his sights, Harvath yelled “Grenade!” and lunged backward, knocking his team down the stairs. As he fell with them, Harvath repeatedly squeezed the trigger of his weapon until its magazine was empty.

The team hit the landing in a pile of twisted limbs and then scrambled to descend farther to safety. When the grenade detonated, they were pressed against the opposite wall a story and a half down. Harvath had quite literally saved their lives.

As the stars began to clear from their heads, Harvath inserted a fresh mag and they remounted the stairs twice as fast, knowing that the terrorists’ colleagues couldn’t be far behind.

When they reached the uppermost landing and stepped over what was left of the man’s corpse, they could see he was probably dead before the grenade even detonated. Most of Harvath’s shots had found their marks—in both the man’s head and chest area. Falling to the ground, the grenade must have rolled backward into the corridor where, a few feet later, it detonated and tore huge chunks away from the concrete walls and ceiling.

As the team stared at the dead body, they all noticed that it appeared too pale to be Arab. “He almost looks Caucasian,” said Hastings, not realizing that in the truest sense of the word she was absolutely right.

“Who the hell are these people?” asked Herrington as he removed the man’s balaclava so they could get a good look at his face. “Are we sure we’re dealing with al-Qaeda?”

Harvath went through the man’s pockets but found nothing helpful. He was just as in the dark as his team was. All he knew was that they were less than a step behind the terrorists now and he didn’t want to lose any ground.

The group fell into a stack formation, pushed on into the corridor, and got ready for the fight they all knew was waiting for them just up ahead.

When they hit the Grail’s entry chamber, it looked like a scene straight out of Iraq or Afghanistan. The charred walls were riddled with bullet holes. The floor was covered with spent shell casings, blood, and body parts. Off to the side, three more Caucasian corpses, their balaclavas removed, were lying facing the Lexington Avenue wall.
Or had they been positioned that way—facing east toward Mecca?
Harvath filed that part of the scene away, and once they had gone through the dead men’s empty pockets, he led the team deeper into the facility.

The carnage inside was just as bad, if not worse than what they had seen at the three previous sites. The marine guards were all dead, as was each and every facility employee. And for what?
What were these people after? Why risk so much just to attack these sites?
No matter how hard Harvath tried, he just couldn’t wrap his head around it.

The other thing he couldn’t understand was where the rest of the terrorists were. Including the man he had gunned down in the stairwell, there were five corpses in the Grail facility, all dressed in the same black Nomex fatigues with patches identifying them as members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team—
yet another ingenious ploy.
With everything going on today, the cops were even less likely to question federal officers than their own Emergency Service personnel. What’s more, the NYPD for the most part knew very little about the makeup of HRT. The chances of the terrorists being uncovered as frauds, at least in the short run, seemed pretty minimal.

As Harvath and his team continued to clear the facility, they readied themselves for the inevitable.
There had to be more men somewhere
—the satellite photos had shown at least two teams of four to seven men. Would the four dead men have needed to come here in two separate vehicles? There had to be others and they
had
to be close. Harvath could feel it.

Walking back into the center of the main room, Harvath took another look at its raised floor platform. It was about thirty by thirty and similar to those he’d seen in brokerage houses, as well as in the FBI and DHS crisis management centers. Framed within the polished aluminum railings that defined the platform’s edges were the facility’s computer workstations. On the first pass, Harvath had thought he’d heard something strange, and now as he stood still, he could almost make out what it was—a strange beeping coming from one of the computers.

As he hopped up onto the platform, he radioed the special response officer downstairs on the train siding. Since no one had come out the 50th Street stairwell and he knew that even the wounded McGahan and his remaining officers had their eyes on the 49th Street stairwell and the adjacent garage, the only remaining egress the terrorists had was via the elevator.

The officer reported back that not only had they not seen anything, they hadn’t heard anything either. Wherever the elevator was, it hadn’t moved—he was certain of it.

Harvath was pretty sure of it too. Just as he was sure they hadn’t finished off the last of the terrorists.
But if they hadn’t taken the elevator, where the hell were they?

The question was still banging on the front door of Harvath’s mind as he approached the beeping computer. Suddenly Tracy Hastings yelled, “Stop!”

As Harvath looked at her she added, “Whatever you do, don’t move.”

T
he beeping of the computer had been joined by something else—something barely audible just below the surface of the first noise. Harvath hadn’t been able to hear it until he neared the work station. It sounded like the high-pitched whine a professional photographer’s flash makes as it charges back up. The funny thing was, Tracy Hastings had heard it too and she wasn’t even standing on the platform. That could mean only one thing—the whining noise hadn’t actually begun until Harvath neared the computer.

“Stay put,” cautioned Tracy. “Don’t even shift your weight. Do you understand me?”

“What’s going on, Tracy?”

“I think you tripped a pressure switch.”

“A pressure switch?”
repeated Harvath. “Are you sure?”

“EOD’s all about attention to detail, right? You said so yourself.”

As Tracy tried to find an access panel to get under the floor and see what they were dealing with, the rest of the team stood there, not knowing what to do. Harvath looked at Herrington and said, “If you want to watch me wet my pants, we can do it later once I down that bottle of Louis XIII you owe me. In the meantime, why don’t you guys figure out how our terrorists got out of here. If this ends badly, I’d rather face Allah by myself. Speaking of which—”

“Those three outside?” replied Herrington. “Yeah, I noticed. They were all left facing east towards Mecca.”

“What do you think?”

“If they’re Caucasian Muslims allied with al-Qaeda, then they’ve gotta be Chechens.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Harvath.

Bob was just staring at him wordlessly, so Harvath said something for him. “Get the hell out of here. Can’t you see Tracy and I want to be alone for a while?”

Herrington forced a smile and replied, “See you soon.”

Harvath nodded and watched as Cates and Morgan followed him out of the room. Once they were gone Harvath asked, “How are we doing down there?”

Several moments went by without a response so Harvath tried again. “Talk to me, Tracy. What are we looking at?”

Still nothing.

“Hey, Tracy. How about a situation report already?”

The waiting was interminable, especially when it was his ass on the line and he could do absolutely nothing about it. He was about to call out again, when Hastings popped her head up over the edge of the platform. Harvath was going to ask her if it was actually a bomb and if she could handle it, but he didn’t have to. The look on her face said it all.

“It’s a bomb. A big one.”

“Great,” replied Harvath as he began to shift his weight to his other foot and then caught himself just in time. “So what’s the bad news?”

“I don’t think I can defuse it.”

“Oh yes you can.”

Hastings turned her scarred face away.

“Tracy, you can do this stuff in your sleep,” said Harvath. “Let’s just take it one step at a time.”

“I can’t, Scot.”

“Did I ever tell you what a good dancer I am?”

She looked back over at him, unable to keep the smile from her face. “What does that have to do with any of this?”

“It has everything to do with this,” he replied. “I was going to wait for a more romantic opportunity to ask, but I was hoping I could take you out when we’re all finished with this.”

“You want to take me out? Dancing?”

“That depends. If you don’t defuse this bomb, I think our budding friendship is going to be a little bit strained.”

Hastings smiled again.

That was what Harvath needed to see. “You can do this, Tracy. Get back down there and tell me what you see.”

“I can tell you right now,” she replied, the smile disappearing from her face. “It’s almost identical to the last bomb I handled.”

“Then it should be a piece of—” said Harvath who suddenly realized what she was saying.

The last bomb Tracy Hastings had attempted to defuse had detonated, taking her left eye, half her face, and life as she’d known it along with it.