Rising Tiger: A Thriller (8)

His work was done. It was time to get moving. Hopping down from the truck, he took a moment to make sure no more vehicles were immediately inbound and hailed Nicholas. “Talk to me, Moonracer. What are we doing?”

“You picked the right neighborhood,” the little man replied. “Head north and take the road that branches off at two o’clock.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Three blocks down, there’ll be a side street. I’ll call it out to you when you get there.”

“And then?” Harvath asked.

“There’s an old CIA safe house. The Agency mothballed it on its way out of Kabul.”

“Do we know what’s inside it?”

“Negative,” Nicholas responded. “It might be a dry hole, but it’ll get you out of sight until we can figure out our next move.”

Harvath didn’t like the idea of rushing toward a building he knew next to nothing about, but the sooner he was off the street the better. His gunfight, along with the burning vehicles, was going to act like a brand-new bug light and draw even more Taliban into the neighborhood.

He just hoped the safe house wasn’t a mistake, that it hadn’t been taken over by a group of armed squatters or wasn’t across the street from some militant recruiting station.

Someone up above seemed to be listening, because no sooner had he started heading in that direction than he was given what appeared to be a very positive sign.

Fifteen yards from his truck, he looked down and saw his rifle. Picking it up, he gave it a quick once-over. It was dirty, but that was all. Nothing was bent. Nothing was broken. The optic was working and still appeared to be zeroed.

After making sure the magazine was firmly seated and a round was chambered, he picked up his pace. He knew better than to be lulled into thinking that one piece of good luck meant that more were on the way. That wasn’t the way things worked.

In fact, it was usually quite the opposite. The more difficult and dangerous the mission, the more likely Murphy’s Law would come into play. He had seen it too many times to count. He had also learned from it.

The trick was not letting Murphy capture the momentum. No matter what happened, you had to keep pushing. You had to keep fighting. “If you fall,” as his mentor used to say, paraphrasing Wild Bill Donovan, founder of the CIA’s precursor, the OSS, “fall forward in service of the mission.”

It was good advice, even noble, but Harvath preferred not falling. That was why he had worked so hard to develop a very deep set of skills. It was why he trained like hell and wasn’t above taking performance-enhancing substances. Considering the operations he was called on to carry out and the kinds of people he had to go up against, he needed every advantage he could lay his hands on. He wasn’t expected to fight fair. He was expected to win. And getting Topaz and his family out wouldn’t be seen as a bona fide “win” if he ended up getting his ticket punched on some darkened side street in Kabul.

He had been in worse scenarios before and had always found a way out. There was no reason to expect this time would be any different.

But as Nicholas directed him to make a left at the next corner, a bad feeling began to build in the pit of his stomach.

As he drew even with the former CIA safe house, he took everything in, and what he saw caused him to stop dead in his tracks.





CHAPTER 6


The building looked like a bomb had been dropped on it. Part of the fa?ade of the second story had been completely shorn away. The ground-floor doors and windows, from what he could see through the gate, were covered with metal security shutters, all of which had been scorched by fire. The walls of the compound were pockmarked from bullets. This not-so-OK-Corral had seen much better days.

Unfortunately, it was “any port in a storm” time, which meant beggars couldn’t be choosers. Having tried the gate and having found it locked, he raised Nicholas over the radio. “Any chance the Agency left a hide-a-key?”

“In the wall, immediately to the right of the gate,” the little man replied, reading from a file he had accessed, “there should be a green tile with a white teardrop in the center.”

Harvath searched until he found it. “Got it.”

“Behind it there’s a keypad.”

He pushed on the tile, releasing a lock and allowing it to swing open on an internal hinge. Nicholas read the combination to him.

Harvath punched in the numbers, but nothing happened. In the distance, he could hear the sound of more trucks. They were headed his way. He tried the combination again. Nothing.

“It’s not working,” he said. “Are you sure we’ve got the right combo?”

Nicholas repeated the digits and then added, “Does the pad have power? The keys will be backlit. They should glow when you touch them.”

“Negative,” Harvath responded. “They’re definitely not lighting up.”

“You’re going to have to open it up.”

Harvath glanced in the direction the vehicles were coming from. “I don’t have a lot of time here. Likely hostiles inbound.”

“I can see them on my screen,” Nicholas stated. “It looks like an SUV and two pickups. Don’t worry. Just focus on the keypad.”

That was easy for him to say. “What am I supposed to be doing?”