Black List (31 page)
Harvath drew his knife. With his other hand, he felt around him for a rock just the right size. He needed only to distract the man for a second.
As his fingers closed around what he was looking for, he took a silent breath, let it out, and sprang.
T
he distraction wasn’t as effective as Harvath had planned, because when the sniper’s attention was drawn in the direction of where the rock had been thrown, he immediately seemed to sense he was under attack.
Harvath had launched himself, expecting to land on the man’s back. Gripping his forehead, he would pull his head back, expose his throat, and slice through his larynx, thus silencing him instantly. Then he’d push the head forward and plunge the knife into the base of his skull. With a twist of the blade, the brain stem would be severed and the man would no longer be a threat. That wasn’t exactly how it unfolded.
The sniper rolled over, bringing his rifle with him. As Harvath landed on top of him, the young man swung the stock and connected with Harvath’s left collarbone, creating a shock wave of pain.
His body wanted to roll away from the agony, but he fought to stay where he was. Rapidly his eyes swept the young sniper’s face and neck; in a microsecond, he found what he was looking for.
Being on top, Harvath had the advantage of leverage. In the blink of an eye, he clamped down on the butt of the weapon and drove all his weight forward.
The sniper tilted his head to the side so as not to be hit in the face,
and that was the opening Harvath had been hoping for. Reaching over the scope, he swept the knife. It entered behind the man’s right ear and came down below his jawline, slicing through flesh and the wire of his headset.
Taking some of his weight off the rifle, Harvath added pressure to the blade, making sure to cut as deep as possible. As soon as he severed the larynx, he pulled the knife out and slid it between the man’s ribs. He was wearing body armor, but it was soft and meant to stop bullets, not a knife. Adding more force, Harvath thrust the blade up and into the man’s heart.
The sniper’s body went rigid, spasmed, and then fell still. His hands dropped from the rifle. Harvath pulled it away and stood. The entire struggle had lasted only a matter of seconds.
Setting the rifle aside, he relieved the twenty-something sniper of his radio and then dragged him behind one of the maples and dumped the body. In a perfect scenario, he would have taken the man captive in order to interrogate him, but there had been no way to subdue him and he had nothing with which to tie him up. Even then, it would have been an impossible task to keep one eye on the sniper while figuring out where his colleagues were. If he could have done it another way, he would have. As far as he was concerned, he had exercised the only option available to him.
Though he had done it before, Harvath was not fond of using a knife. There was something barbaric about it. It was too close, too messy, too personal. He preferred using a firearm; it allowed him to keep a certain psychological distance.
He had lost track of the men he had killed by pulling a trigger. Those weren’t the faces he struggled to keep banished to remote corners of his psyche.
It was the men he killed up close, inches away, whose faces sometimes loomed in his mind’s eye. He had never figured out why. He was required to kill for a living, and he had little problem doing it. Why should one form of killing be any different from any other? The end result was the same.
The only conclusion he could come to was that civilized people were encoded with an aversion to murder. Throughout thousands of years of
history, tales of morality and murder were handed down from one generation to the next. From childhood, human beings are steeped in stories about the unjustified taking of life, and the acts they find the most reprehensible are those committed with the most basic tools—stones or knives, clubs or bare hands—as if the tools most associated with murder are those that have been around as long as murder itself.
There was a dissociation Harvath felt when taking a life via the barrel of a gun. The bullet was his intercessor. He pulled the trigger; the bullet was released; the bullet killed the target. It was clean, simple, it all fit compactly inside an iron strongbox he kept buried away in his mind. And no matter how many times he killed, the box always had room for one more. It was only a handful of kills, no matter how justified, that were occasionally able to slip his mental jailer and prod the edges of his conscience.
Some of Harvath’s strongest qualities, though, were his willpower and his ability to compartmentalize and focus on the mission at hand. He was not prone to doubts or second-guessing.
After clearing away the sniper’s body, he set up the rifle and lay down behind it—a Remington Model 700 with a sound and flash suppressor, as well as a detachable box magazine. He had no idea what caliber it was but assumed it was powerful enough to get the job done from this distance.
Mounted to the top of the weapon was a powerful thermal scope with the ability to “see” in total darkness. Harvath set the radio down in front of him, made sure the volume was adjusted to low, and then peered through the scope.
From the sniper’s last communication, it sounded as if there were three others, which meant he was dealing with a four-man team, just as in Paris and Spain.
As he began panning the area with the scope, the lights in the guesthouse suddenly went out.
“Come on. Where are you?” he whispered as he snugged the stock tighter into his shoulder.
For a fraction of a second, he was gripped by a fear that maybe the hitters were wearing gear that canceled their heat signature, but he soon saw
the colored glow of a figure approaching the guesthouse from the northwest, carrying what looked like a suppressed tactical rifle.
To make a perfect shot at this range required a certain amount of data, most of which Harvath would have to guess at.
Bullets drop over distance, so he elevated his point of aim in order to correlate the point of impact. The breeze would blow the bullet slightly off trajectory, plus his target was moving, which meant he needed to aim not where the man was but where he was going to be when the bullet arrived.
He made the calculations instantaneously and adjusted the rifle. Exhaling, he pressed the trigger. The bullet spat from the weapon, raced toward the target, and
missed
.
He had no idea where it hit, but it was close enough to cause the man running toward the guesthouse to pull up short, turn his head, and look directly in his direction.
“Damn it,” Harvath said aloud, as he cycled the bolt and chambered another round. Repeating the process, he recalculated and was preparing to fire when the target took off running. “Damn it,” he muttered again.
Exhaling, Harvath anticipated where the man was going to be, readjusted his aim, and fired. This time the bullet was spot-on.
Before the man’s body even hit the ground, Harvath had cycled the bolt and was scanning for the other two. He picked up his second target, also carrying a weapon and closing in on the guesthouse from the south. Taking aim, he exhaled once more and pressed the trigger.
The bullet connected with the man’s torso, and he went down but only to one knee.
Harvath pulled back the bolt, ejected the spent casing, and drove it home, advancing the next round.
The target was trying to get to his feet when Harvath fired again, this time nailing him right in the head.
He looked back through the scope at his first target, who was lying facedown on the ground and hadn’t moved, and then began searching for number four. Seconds ticked by.
The radio had been silent, which meant that unless the fourth man had seen his colleagues gunned down, he had no idea what was going
on. Harvath kept searching for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. That could only mean that he was coming up on the guesthouse from behind. Harvath needed to warn Nicholas.
Identifying the windows of the master bedroom, Harvath aimed high and fired one round into the room, following it immediately with a second.
He then threw the levers of the scope mount, detached the device from the top of the weapon, and ran toward the guesthouse.
G
et behind the bed, lie down, and don’t move,” Nicholas said.
“Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?” Nina implored. “It’s the people who killed Caroline, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. The power fluctuated a little while ago. This may be nothing.”
“Which is why you have me in here, along with the your dogs and a gun?”
“Shhhhh,” he said. “You need to be quiet, Nina. Please.”
The young woman did as he asked and the room fell silent. The dogs knew something was wrong and stood staring at the closed bedroom
door, their ears alert, their noses sniffing the air for any foreign scent. Draco was the first to begin growling. Something had caught his attention.
As Argos joined him, two rounds pierced the bedroom’s upper window. Nina shrieked but quickly muffled her scream by clapping her hand to her mouth.
Nicholas shuffled over to her. “I’ve changed my mind. Stay as low to the floor as you can and get to the bathroom. Crawl into the tub and stay there. Don’t move until I come for you.”
Nina nodded as he raised his weapon and took aim at the bedroom door. The dogs were growling louder, and he could tell someone was in the house now.
“Stoy,”
he whispered to them sternly in Russian.
Stay! “Tzeeha.” Quiet!
Harvath knew that Nicholas was armed. He wouldn’t reenter the guesthouse without announcing himself. Somebody else had come in.
The little man glanced around quickly and came up with a plan. After positioning the dogs and ordering them to be quiet, he took his hiding place. The field of view was terrible, but at least he was concealed and would hopefully have the element of surprise on his side. If only he had his .45 as well.
Clutching the tiny M3, Nicholas felt his heart pounding in his chest and tried to slow it down. He took one deep breath after another. He was about to take in his fourth when a hail of bullets ripped through the door and the drywall beside it. There were sparks and the sounds of hisses and pops as the rounds chewed up the extensive computer setup. As soon as the shooting had begun, it stopped.
Nicholas knew he should breathe, but he couldn’t bring himself to, for fear of giving away his location. Instead, he gripped his weapon tighter while he prayed that none of the rounds had found Nina or the dogs.
The seconds ticked by, and he half wondered if maybe the attacker had moved on to the other rooms, but he knew better; especially when the knob turned and the door slowly swung open.
He braced himself for some sort of distraction device. He had heard that the effects of a flashbang, or stun grenade, could be mitigated by closing your eyes, jamming your fingers into your ears, and opening your mouth slightly to equalize the pressure, which is what he did.
He counted to three, and when nothing happened, he opened his eyes and looked. The first thing he saw was a suppressor, quickly followed by a fraction of a barrel and then a short handguard. Soon the entire weapon appeared, as well as the person holding it.
The attacker crept cautiously into the room, sweeping his rifle from side to side.
Two more steps,
Nicholas said to himself.
Two more steps.
The attacker took one, and was about to take another, when something suddenly made him stop.
Don’t stop. Just one more step.
But the man turned and started going in another direction. He was going toward the bathroom. Nicholas had to do something.
Cracking the lid of the empty equipment case he was hiding in, he raised his weapon.
Come back this way,
he silently pleaded, but the attacker had made up his mind.
In three more steps, Nicholas would lose sight of him. A shot from this angle wouldn’t be lethal, but it was all he had. Steadying himself, he lined up his weapon.
The .22 rounds came flying out of the little gun, hitting the attacker in his rump and the back of his left leg. He screamed in pain and spun to face his assailant. As he did, Nicholas yelled in Russian for the dogs.