When the second moan sounded, Skinny made a beeline for the ice cream chest.
The only upside was that Harvath could see the third man now. He was still holding his cell phone in one hand, but had his pistol in the other. It was time for Harvath to act.
Dropping low, he leaned out from behind the soda cooler and fired twice in rapid succession.
There was an explosion of pink mist as the man with the cell phone took both rounds to his head and dropped.
Before he had even hit the floor, Harvath swung around and put two rounds into the man at the ice cream chest. They were sloppy, but did the trick. One round went up through the man’s jaw and into his brain, the other tore straight through his throat.
Swinging his weapon back toward the front door, he saw that the man with the jet-black beard now had his weapon in both hands and was bringing it up to fire. Harvath fired first.
The first round entered just below the man’s nose. The second entered just above his left eyebrow. He dropped like a bag of wet cement.
Coming out from behind the cooler, Harvath quickly shot each of the militia members point-blank in the head to make sure they were dead.
Picking up the cell phone of the last man through the door, he disconnected the call he had been on, removed the battery, and tucked the device in his pocket.
He then radioed his team as he looked behind the counter for the shopkeeper’s keys. “Tangos down. Staelin, I need you in here.”
“Roger that,” he replied.
Harvath found the shopkeeper’s phone as well as the key to the security door as Staelin entered.
“Nice shooting,” he remarked as he looked at the bodies near the front.
“Open up the rear door,” Harvath said, tossing him the key. “Tell Gage and Barton I need both of the spare gas cans, plus a road flare.”
“Where’s the SAT phone salesman?”
“In the freezer. Now get moving. I want to be out of here in three minutes.”
Staelin did as instructed while Harvath gathered up the militia members’ weapons. All three of them had been carrying Glocks. That wasn’t a weapon you saw every day in these parts. In fact, several years ago, a cache of American Glocks had gone missing from a training camp not far from here. Harvath didn’t have time to think about that now, though.
Despite the heat, two of the men had been wearing camouflage jackets. Removing them, he set them on the counter and then stripped the men of anything that could be used to identify them.
Tim Barton came back inside with Staelin. The former SEAL Team Six member from Tacoma was in his early thirties and only stood about five-foot-six. But what he lacked in height, he more than made up for in width. He was a devoted weight lifter and was built like a fireplug. He had reddish-blond hair, a bright red beard, and was a bit OCD.
In one sense, it was an asset, because Barton would double- and triple-check every piece of gear and everything he did. But he was also a clean freak and carried tons of extra hand sanitizer on ops. His teammates busted his balls over it all the time.
“Where’s the package?” Barton asked, tossing Harvath the road flare.
Harvath nodded toward the freezer.
The SEAL lifted the lid and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” as he turned his head away from the stench.
Harvath accepted the gas cans from Staelin and instructed him to help pull the shopkeeper out of the freezer and get him to the SUV. Unscrewing one of the caps, he then began splashing gasoline everywhere.
It didn’t need to look like an accident. It just needed to slow the local militia. Once he and his team had gotten hold of Umar Ali Halim, he didn’t care what the Libya Liberation Front was able to figure out.
Wrapping their keffiyehs around their faces, Barton and Staelin pulled the shopkeeper out of the rotten-smelling ice cream chest, carried him outside, and tossed him into the cargo area of the SUV.
Barton then hopped into the backseat, pulled out his hand sanitizer, and kept an eye on him.
Six-foot-three Gage from Edina, Minnesota, remained up front with a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek and the engine running.
Staelin returned inside.
“Libyan lightning?” he asked, playing on an old arson joke.
Harvath nodded. “Fire sale. Everything must go. Put this on,” he said, tossing him one of the camouflage jackets.
“Are we taking that technical with us?”
Harvath nodded again and put on one of the jackets himself. After dumping the militia members’ sidearms in his messenger bag, he slung one of the AK-47s and sent Staelin outside with the other two to fire up the truck.
When it was running, he announced. “We’re good to go. Ready when you are.”
“Stand by,” Harvath replied as he opened the second gas can and soaked the corpses.
This was supposed to be the easiest stage of their operation, but it had gone sideways, fast. It wasn’t a good omen.
What can go wrong, will go wrong, he reminded himself. Then something else came to mind. Once Murphy, of the infamous Murphy’s law, had you in his sights, he wasn’t usually content to just let you off with a warning. He tended to stick around and make sure things got much worse. Harvath, though, tried to push the thought from his mind.
Striking the flare, he tossed it into the center of the room. As the fire leapt to life, he backed out of the shop.
But as he did, a very bad feeling about what lay in front of them began to take hold in the pit of his stomach.
CHAPTER 15
Paul Page wasn’t a particularly attractive individual — not on the outside, and definitely not on the inside.
He was in his late fifties, with a receding hairline and gray eyebrows that formed distinct peaks when he was angry or surprised. As a purveyor of global intelligence, rarely was he ever surprised.
He was a hard, calculating man who enjoyed Kentucky bourbon, Maryland crab cakes, and D.C. call girls. The word that best described him, though, was forgettable.
His ability to melt into the background had been an asset as a CIA officer — right up until the moment he’d been “let go.”
He hated the term let go. Cut loose was another he couldn’t stand. He’d been cut loose all right. As if he were an astronaut in the middle of a space walk, Langley had uncoupled his umbilical cord and let him drift off into the cold darkness of space.
Snatching the terrorist Imam off the streets of Milan had been his idea. He had planned it down to the tiniest detail. In retrospect, would he have done things differently? Probably. But he had never expected to get caught.
He had picked the team himself. They were good people, people he knew from his years at the Agency. They were hard workers. He was a hard worker. Creating fully backstopped covers was a pain in the ass and took shitloads of time — a year at least. They hadn’t had that luxury.
When the Imam popped onto the CIA’s radar, Page’s superiors had encouraged him to act quickly. He had made a judgment call. Ironically, no one on his team had given him any pushback.
They all traveled under their real names, used their own cell phones, and checked into their hotels with their loyalty program numbers so they could get rewards points. As long as the government was picking up the tab for the trip to Italy, why not? It wasn’t like they were skimming money out of petty cash.
What he hadn’t seen coming was that the intelligence about the Imam might be faulty. The thought hadn’t even entered his mind.
The thought hadn’t entered the minds of the Egyptian interrogators they were using either. After grabbing the Imam and rendering him to a black site in Cairo, Page and his team had gone back to the United States and waited for him to spill his secrets.