Forty-five minutes later, Harvath pulled his car over to the side of the road, yanked Jamal out of the trunk, and shoved half a tampon up each of his nostrils to stem his nosebleed. After putting a Windbreaker over the terrorist’s shoulders and zipping it up the front to hide his stained shirt, Harvath slid him into the front passenger seat, fastened his seat belt, and warned him what would happen if he tried to make any more trouble.
Once again, Jamal tried to spit, but Harvath was ready for him. He nailed him with a blow to his solar plexus, doubling him over and knocking the wind out of him.
Reaching back into the bag of goodies he had bought at the convenience store just outside Montreal, Harvath withdrew a PowerBar and a bottle of spring water. At thirty-six, his carefree days of unlimited cheeseburgers and beers were now behind him. At five feet ten and a muscular 175 pounds, Harvath was in better shape than most men half his age, but he found it took more and more work just to maintain his level of physical fitness. If an assignment in a Muslim country required that he grow a beard, after a couple of days he soon saw traces of gray mingled with the light brown that matched the hair on his head. His father, a Navy SEAL instructor who had died in a training accident when Harvath was in his early twenties, had gone completely gray by forty.
Despite the small lines starting to form at the corners of his bright blue eyes, it wasn’t anything Harvath couldn’t live with. Everybody had to get older sooner or later. What the signs of aging did make him wonder about was how much longer he wanted to put up with the stress of working for the government. The fact that he couldn’t get any good information that might have helped him on this assignment about the high-ranking al-Qaeda terrorist the United States had recently bagged was just another in a ongoing string of frustrations he was grudgingly putting up with.
While he respected his president and loved his country, the mounting bureaucratic bullshit was really beginning to piss him off. Having been both a SEAL and a Secret Service agent at the White House, Harvath understood the value of rules, regs, and a proper chain of command. But when the president had created a special international branch of Homeland Security dubbed the Office of International Investigative Assistance and had offered Harvath one of its plum assignments, Scot had thought things were going to be different.
Known as the Apex Project, Harvath’s covert unit was supposed to represent the collective intelligence capability and full muscle of the United States government to help neutralize and prevent terrorist actions against America and American interests on a global level.
Though it “technically” didn’t exist and Harvath was nothing more than a benignly titled “special agent,” just last year a self-aggrandizing senator with her sights set on the White House had been able to discover enough about him and his involvement with the Apex Project to force his resignation. Though it was only temporary, not knowing what his next move would be or what his life might be like with his cover blown was not a very pleasant experience.
He knew that his was a quiet, thankless profession that could only be lived in the shadows, but he was growing very tired of being at the mercy of partisan hacks and career politicians who sought advancement by stomping on the backs of true patriots guilty of nothing more than a deep love for their country.
He was so fed up with all the crap that he’d recently presented his boss, Gary Lawlor, with a.50-caliber bullet wrapped in red tape. The bullet was designed to take out targets at extremely long distances and Lawlor understood that it represented Harvath, who was constantly being sent on missions overseas to take out terrorists. The red tape was self-explanatory.
The job might have been a bit more palatable if it afforded him time to pursue any semblance of a personal life. Most of his buddies, even his former teammates from the SEALs, were pretty much married off and starting families. Though he didn’t necessarily want to start one of his own tomorrow, it would be nice to see a point in his not-too-distant future where his career would allow him to. Of course, that presupposed finding a woman who would want to start one with him as well. Most, he found, were unable to put up with the demands of his job, which regularly sounded the death knell in his burgeoning relationships. There’d only been one woman he’d ever been able to see himself actually making a full go of it with. She was even prepared to uproot her life and move to DC to be with him, but in the end, the demands of his job had made it impossible.
The bright side of everything, if you wanted to call it that, was that if he decided to go through with leaving government service, he was not at a loss for job offers from the private sector. In fact there was one job in particular Harvath was thinking very seriously about taking-an instructor position with a world-renowned tactical training center in Colorado called Valhalla. What haunted him, though, was the fear that once he entered the private sector he would no longer be able to look in the mirror and still consider himself a patriot.
That said, it was still a decision he had to make and he knew that it would undoubtedly weigh heavily on his mind over the upcoming holiday weekend.
Rounding a bend in the otherwise deserted country lane, Harvath’s attention was drawn to more pressing matters as his vehicle was met by a police roadblock.
A smile began to metastasize across Sayed Jamal’s face. The terrorist clearly saw his salvation at hand. No matter who Scot Harvath was and what American agency he worked for, he could not legally take him from Canada against his will. This was about to end up very badly for the United States. The American had been a fool to ever remove him from the trunk. Had he left him there, the man very likely could have driven straight across the border without ever being searched. Sayed knew that it was only a matter of moments now before he would be free and then he would tell every reporter he could find about his terrible ordeal at the hands of the imperialist Americans.
Slowly approaching the roadblock, Harvath kept his cool.
“Can I see your license and registration, please?” asked a machine gun-toting officer in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform when Harvath rolled down his window.
Harvath made a show of patting his pockets and replied, “I was so excited about coming to Canada I must have forgotten to bring them.”
The officer looked around the vehicle and then said, “We get that a lot. Who is your passenger?”
“Help me!” screamed Jamal, sensing this was the only chance he was going to get at freedom. “I have been taken against my-” he continued, but was cut off when Harvath slammed his elbow into the man’s mouth.
“Don’t mind him,” said Harvath, well aware that the Royal Mounted Police not only didn’t carry machine guns, but also didn’t patrol Canada’s borders. “He’s just a little moody. It’s his time of the month.”
“Yeah,” replied the officer. “I can see the tampons.”
“I think he’s just nervous about crossing into the States.”
“I would be too,” said the CSIS agent posing as a Mountie. He then waved for the roadblock vehicles to clear the road and added, “Especially if I’d been responsible for killing and wounding all those American military personnel.”
Jamal’s bloodied face went pale. The Canadians were in on it.
“We just wanted to make sure you got your man,” said the agent. “Anything else about the operation we should know?”
“You’ll want a team to sweep his apartment. He’s got a lot of bombmaking materials in there, but other than that, it was pretty smooth.”
“Okay, then,” said the man as he tapped the roof of Harvath’s car. “Thank you for visiting Canada. Have a safe trip home.”
“We will,” said Harvath, smiling and giving a little wave as he drove away.
Two kilometers later they came to a small clearing, and Harvath exited the car. Checking their GPS coordinates on his Suunto, he activated the preplanned-route feature, grabbed the Styrofoam cooler from the backseat, and pulled Jamal out of the vehicle, shoving him toward the woods.
Less than half a klick in, they heard a branch snap and Harvath knew they weren’t alone. As he looked over his left shoulder, he saw a small team of heavily armed men decked out in digital camouflage materialize from among the trees.
“Welcome to the United States,” said one of the men. “Do you have anything to declare?”
“Yes I do,” replied Harvath as he offered up Jamal and the cooler with the frozen laptop. “ Canada ’s a fabulous country. Great beer, great people, and they have just started a wonderful terrorist lending program.”
The team drove Harvath and Jamal out of the woods to the small town of Rouses Point, New York, where the operation had kicked off and where Harvath’s car was waiting.