The lone NYPD officer standing guard outside the battered Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange storefront was relieved when Harvath appeared and flashed his DHS credentials. The fact that he had pulled up on a dirt bike along with four other rather hard-looking individuals didn’t faze him a bit, not with everything else that had already happened that afternoon.
The officer had been waiting for backup since stumbling onto the scene forty-five minutes earlier while en route to another location. With every pair of professionally trained hands in the city needed to help search for survivors in the rubble of the bridge and tunnel bombings, random lootings weren’t on the patrolman’s priority list. But when a group of 47th Street merchants flagged him down and told him what had happened, the officer immediately changed his mind.
After moving onlookers away from the front of the store, he ventured a few feet inside. What he saw had caused him to remain there until help arrived. He was just about to reluctantly abandon the post, when Harvath showed. Now, he was more than happy to turn things over to someone with more authority and greater jurisdiction. In all his years on the job, nothing had prepared the patrolman for the carnage he’d seen inside.
Now it was Harvath’s turn. With Bob Herrington and the rest of the team in tow, they picked their way around the dead bodies and brass shell casings at the front of the store and headed toward the vault-style door at the back.
The door was half open and as they approached it, Tracy Hastings ordered the team to stop.
“What’s up?” said Harvath.
Hastings pointed to the pockmarks on the walls and ceiling around the frame and replied, “Shrapnel. We can’t touch that door until we’re sure it’s not rigged.”
Harvath thought she was being a little too cautious, until Herrington said, “Trust her. She knows what she’s doing.”
“All right,” he responded, stepping aside to let her get a better look at it. “But make it quick.”
Once Hastings was convinced it was safe, she waved the rest of the team forward.
Inside, they found a high-tech security control room that had been blown apart by what Hastings claimed was probably one or more fragmentation grenades. Lying on the floor were the badly mangled bodies of three men in tactical vests with modified M16s lying nearby.
“These guys are jarheads,” remarked Morgan as he rolled one of the bodies over.
“Plenty of guys in the security industry cut their hair too short,” said Cates. “That doesn’t make them marines.”
Morgan ignored the remark and pointed at the men’s feet. “The Marines only use the best gear, and these guys are all wearing Quantico Desert Boots.”
While Harvath preferred Original S.W.A.T. boots, Paul Morgan did have a point. Many of the marines he’d known were particularly fond of Quantico Boots, but even with the M16s, there still wasn’t enough evidence to qualify the bodies as being marines.
As if reading his mind, Morgan slid a plate out of one of their tactical vests, wrapped on it with his knuckles and said, “ U.S. military-issue Interceptor body armor. Harder than Kevlar and can stop anything up to a 7.62-millimeter round.”
Cates whistled and said, “These guys certainly were prepared.”
“But for what?” replied Harvath, more for his own benefit than anyone else’s. “Whoever took these marines out must have been very good. Let’s finish clearing these rooms.”
Bob and the rest of the team relieved the marines of their SIG Sauer P228 pistols, as well as their machine guns and as many loaded magazines as they could carry, before sweeping the balance of the Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange. As they did, Harvath tried to figure out what the hell the operation’s real function was. In the heart of New York City, no jewelry store-no matter how busy or how well connected its owners-was going to be granted the protection of three machine-gun-toting U.S. marines.
As they went from room to room, it became apparent that the operation was completely paperless. Whatever secret it held had either been taken to the grave when its personnel had been raked with gunfire, had been stolen by the terrorists, or was locked up in its workstations and racks and racks of servers.
Exercising the only other option left available to him, Harvath collected whatever photo identification he could from each of the fifteen corpses, including the three U.S. servicemen whose IDs listed them in fact as active-duty marines.
He hoped Gary would be able to make some sense out of it, because at this moment, Harvath had absolutely no idea what or who they were dealing with.