State of the Union (24 page)

Confused, Herman pulled up short and turned around to look at him as he came running down the last flight of stairs followed by DeWolfe and then Nixie. “Why are we stopping?” asked Toffle.

“Can’t you feel it?” replied Harvath.

“Feel what?”

“The air in here. It’s grown thinner.”

“And hotter,” said DeWolfe as he joined his colleagues at the bottom of the landing.

Herman scowled. “We’re wasting time.”

Nixie sniffed the air a moment and added, “And what’s that smell?”

The minute she pointed it out, Harvath knew what it was—
accelerant
. Pushing his way past Toffle, Harvath reached out his hand and gently placed it against the stairwell door.

Immediately, he snatched his hand back away from the heat and said, “There’s a fire on the other side of this door.”

“Oh my God,” replied Nixie. “We have to get everyone out.”

“First things first,” replied Herman, raising his weapons. “Kiefer and Verner may be in trouble.”

“We all might be in trouble. Let’s be smart about this,” responded Harvath, as he tugged the sleeve of his leather jacket over his hand so he could pull the door open. “Everybody back up. When I count to three, I’m going to slowly open the door. Ready?”

DeWolfe and Herman repositioned themselves so they could cover Harvath and then nodded their heads, while Nixie flattened herself as best she could against the near wall of the stairwell.

Harvath indicated his countdown with his fingers and then slowly cracked the door. Instantly, he was blown backwards as the roaring conflagration forced its way into the stairwell, desperate to feed on the fresh supply of oxygen.

Instinctively, DeWolfe and Toffle hit the deck, but Nixie stood in abject horror as she watched the roiling fireball come racing for her and engulf her in flames.

Harvath was the first to regain his feet and he ran to Nixie, covering her with his coat and knocking her to the ground. He rolled her from side to side, slapping at her body with his bare hands as he tried to put out the fire. Once he was convinced that he had it out, he began to remove the jacket and right away smelled the sickening scent of burnt hair and flesh coming from her body.

Her once stylish designer suit now hung in charred strips from her blistered torso. Her eyebrows were gone, as was much of her once beautiful mane of blond hair, but she was alive. Harvath did a quick assessment of her injuries and found her to be unresponsive. Most likely, she had gone into shock. “We need to get Nixie to a hospital, fast,” said Harvath, but neither DeWolfe nor Toffle was listening. They had exited the stairwell and leapt through the flames into the foyer of the King George.

Harvath yelled to them, but doubted he could be heard over the thunderous roar of the fire. Now that the door was open, his nostrils were filled with unmistakable tang of the accelerant that someone had used to deliberately set this fire. The sting of the noxious odor was so pungent it was like being slapped in the face. As the acrid smoke began to intensify, Harvath worried about how safe it was to be breathing such rapidly deteriorating air. He called out again and was answered to by two three-round bursts of semiautomatic weapons fire, which he assumed were from DeWolfe’s Beretta.

Making Nixie as comfortable as he could, he propped her against the railing and crept over toward the door where he aimed his H&K at the sea of blinding orange fire, just in time to see an enormous silhouette making its way toward him. Through the jagged blades of flame, he tried to make out who or what it was, but the scorching intensity of the fire made it impossible. As he stared into the inferno, Harvath’s brain tried to make out what he was seeing, but he couldn’t categorize it. The dimensions were all off. Reflexively, he raised his pistol, ready to fire.

Then, he heard a low, guttural roar and made a last minute decision to roll out of the way, just as Herman Toffle leapt through the wall of flames separating the foyer from the stairwell. He landed with an amazing crash, dropping the body of Kiefer, the security guard, whom he had fireman-carried all the way back through the blaze.

“Verner’s dead,” said Toffle, gasping for breath as he beat his hands around his body, making sure neither his hair nor his clothing were on fire.

“Where’s DeWolfe?” asked Harvath.

“He saw someone in the foyer and chased after him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”

“What about other people in the building?”

“From what I can see, the whole downstairs is on fire. There’s no getting out this way.”

“Why haven’t the sprinklers kicked in yet?”

“The building is pre–World War II. It probably doesn’t have them.”

“Okay, then,” said Harvath, thinking. “Then the only way we can go is up. Can you make it?”

Herman was coughing and obviously suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, but the resilient former terrorism expert flashed Harvath the thumbs up and tried to force a smile.

With Harvath helping Nixie and Herman carrying Kiefer, they struggled up the stairs to the next level, where the stairwell door was actually a false piece of richly engraved wood open to a long handsomely paneled hallway. Doors were spaced evenly along the corridor and it was readily apparent that this was where a good part of the King George’s business was conducted as customers and employees in various states of undress were running screaming up and down the hallway.

Getting his bearings, Harvath found the door to one of the bedrooms he assumed faced the front of the building and kicked it open. Three very attractive young women and one balding, overweight middle-aged man had shattered the window and were frantically trying to pry loose the decorative fleur-de-lis ironwork that stood between them and a one-story drop to freedom.

“Stand back,” ordered Harvath as he laid Nixie on the bed and took aim at the grating. He fired five shots in quick succession, sending sparks and chunks of masonry in all directions.

When Harvath lowered his pistol, the middle-aged client quickly moved back to the window and began shaking the ironwork for all he was worth. He was a man possessed, and when the grating failed to give way, he began crying, convinced he was going to die. Spent, the man fell to the floor and continued to sob.

“
Passen Sie auf!
” yelled Herman as he set Kiefer down on the floor and after picking up an antique bureau, ran at the ironwork-covered window with all his might.

There was the sound of splintering wood and groaning metal as the improvised battering ram struck its target head on and the fleur-de-lis grating tore from its moorings and fell with a crash onto the sidewalk below. Wheezing, Herman withdrew the dresser from the window and shoved it into the corner. Immediately, the sobbing man began scampering out the window.

“Hey,” yelled Harvath. “Get back here.”

Herman reached through the window, grabbed the man by his trousers and yanked him back in.

“
Was?
” implored the man.

“First of all, you’re welcome,” replied Harvath. “Secondly, do you speak English?”

“Yes, of course,” answered the man in a heavy German accent.

“Good. We’re going to need your help.”

“But this is the only way out. We already tried to go down the stairs. There is too much fire. Please, we must hurry.”

“We will hurry, but here’s what I want you to do. You and my friend,” said Scot as he nodded at Herman, “are going to gather up all of the mattresses you can from the rooms on this floor and throw them out the window so people have something to land on. Then I want you to let people in the hallway and the stairwells know they can get out this way. Tie the bedding together and use it to lower the injured.”

“What are
you
going to do?” asked Herman.

“I’m going to find DeWolfe,”

“Be careful. All of this happening just after we arrived is a little too coincidental and I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Neither do I,” replied Harvath, who inserted a fresh magazine into his H&K as he turned and left the room. “Neither do I.”

T
he hallway was quickly filling with more smoke and more screaming people as Harvath swung the red dot of his pistol’s laser sight into every room looking for DeWolfe. Aside from the fact that the rooms seemed to have unusually low ceilings, there was nothing else very remarkable about them.

As he passed the panicked throngs, he instructed them in his best German possible to stay low to the floor and make their way to the bedroom he had just come from at the right front of the building. With each face he looked into, the realization began to grow in him that any one of them could be the killer who had started the fire, and he would never know it. He had to find DeWolfe.

Harvath fought his way up one of the public stairwells and found that the third floor was laid out much the same as the second. He checked each room, but there was still no sign of DeWolfe.

Back on the stairs, he could hear people below him, but the terrified tide making their way down from above had stopped. Hopefully, they had all gotten the message and had headed for the second floor.

After climbing two more flights of stairs, Harvath carefully pulled open the door and crept into what he expected to be another long hallway similar to those he had searched on the previous two floors. Instead, he found himself in a large chamber with rough sawn hardwood floors. Harvath quickly swept the filtered red beam of his flashlight around the room and realized he was in a mockup of some sort of Medieval dungeon. Chains hung from the ceiling and there were assorted torture devices scattered around the room.

As Harvath made his way to the lone door on the far side of the chamber, he heard a sudden noise off to his right. Dropping to one knee, he spun and pointed his pistol in the direction from which the sound had come. Raising his flashlight and depressing the thumb switch, Harvath illuminated a long leather couch and, as he tilted it upwards, he found the helpless form of DeWolfe, gagged and shackled against the wall but still struggling against his restraints. The man’s eyes appeared to be bulging out of their sockets and Harvath had no idea if it was from abject fear or fury.

Whoever had hung DeWolfe up like a trophy probably wasn’t too far away. He pulled the suppressor from his pocket and screwed it onto the threaded barrel of his H&K. Taking careful aim, he put two quick rounds into the hinges of the metal restraints that were pinning the communication expert’s wrists to the wall. Just as he lowered his weapon, someone punched him incredibly hard right in the small of his back. At least that’s what it felt like.

Without even thinking about it, Harvath released the thumb switch of his flashlight, plunging the room back into darkness and began rolling along the floor in the direction he had come. As he did, he could hear the pop of dry wood as a course of bullets from a silenced weapon tracked his progress, tearing up a straight line across the floorboards right at him.

Without the beam from his flashlight Harvath was completely blind, and he rolled hard into something big and sturdy, smacking his head against what he assumed was some sort of table leg. He scrambled to get out of his attacker’s line of fire and knew that the only way the person could be following his movements was with night vision goggles. It made perfect sense. Cut the power and blind your opponent. Bait the trap properly and when he comes to you, killing him will be easier than tipping over drunk Frenchmen at a Beaujolais festival. That plan, though, had one major problem. Scot Harvath was not that easy to kill.

Reaching out to find one of the legs for orientation, Harvath quickly pulled himself beneath the table. Taking a deep breath, he lunged upwards in a squat thrust maneuver flipping the table over and affording himself at least the appearance of better cover. Though his attacker was using a silenced weapon, the word
silenced
did not mean completely devoid of sound and Harvath had developed at least a vague idea of where he was.

He could see only one means of escape. After flipping up the hinged red filter cap from his flashlight, he reached around to the small of his back and pulled the painfully oversized PDA from his jeans. He felt along its smooth surface for the place where the device had deflected the shot and saved his spinal cord from being severed and said a quick word of thanks, then sent the device arcing in the direction of his attacker. When he heard it smash against the far wall, he jumped from behind the table and aimed the 225-lumen power of his SureFire flashlight in the same direction in order to blind his attacker. The white-hot beam sliced through the blackness of the chamber, lighting up the entire far side of the room, but the shooter wasn’t there.
The son of a bitch had moved.

Harvath ducked back down behind the table just as one of the uppermost legs splintered into hundreds of ungainly toothpicks. The shot had come from over his right shoulder. The shooter was right behind him! Harvath turned and opened fire as he raced to get out of the open and find a new place to hide, but where the hell could he go? Without turning his flashlight on, he couldn’t see a thing. He needed to formulate another plan, and fast.

Harvath rolled along the ground back over to where he had first seen DeWolfe.
There had to be a way out of this.
When he found him, DeWolfe was lying on his back trying to catch his breath.

“Are you okay?” whispered Harvath.

DeWolfe nodded his head, slowly.

“Can you sit up on your own?” continued Scot as he disconnected the laser sight from beneath the barrel of his gun.

“Yeah.”

“All right. I’m going to give you my laser sight so you can draw this guy’s fire. Do you think you’re up to that?”

DeWolfe held out his hand for the device.

Harvath smiled. “Good. I figure he’s at about our two o’clock, so when I say ‘go’ I want you to raise that thing above the couch and start shining it over there like we’re to trying to pick him off, okay?”

“What are you going to?”

“I’m going to pick him off, what else? Ready?”

DeWolfe nodded his head.

“Go!” said Harvath as he rolled across the floor.

DeWolfe sat up and started pointing the laser sight as if he were aiming a gun of his own. The shooter went for the bait and immediately fired several rounds into the couch DeWolfe was using for cover.

The muffled spits were enough to give Harvath a lock on the shooter’s location. Harvath depressed the thumb switch of his SureFire and lit the guy up like an inmate going over the wall at San Quentin.

Just as Harvath suspected, his assailant was wearing night vision goggles, but what he hadn’t expected were the man’s superb instincts. Instead of being startled and turning into the beam from Harvath’s flashlight, the man shed his goggles, dropped to the ground and began firing.

Harvath had to roll hard and quick to get out of the line of fire. As he rolled, he got off a series of shots, one of which he was positive had made contact when he heard his opponent groan in pain.

“Gotcha,” coughed Harvath, as he found shelter behind a long bench covered with short metal spikes, the uses for which he couldn’t even begin to fathom.

Smoke was filling the room and it was becoming more difficult to breathe.
The fire was getting closer
. Harvath worried that if he and DeWolfe didn’t get back down to the second floor soon, they were going to have to find another way out. And with very little clue as to the layout of the building, Scot wasn’t exactly crazy about their chances.
He had to do something, but what?

Suddenly, there was what sounded like large pieces of furniture being hurriedly dragged across the floor.
Was the shooter creating more cover for himself? Was it some sort of ruse?
Harvath didn’t know what to think. The one thing he did know was that his opponent could smell the smoke just as well as he could and was just as aware of how close the fire was getting. At that same moment, something else struck Harvath. If this man had started the fire, he wouldn’t have brought DeWolfe all the way up to the fourth floor without some plan for his own escape.
But where would he go?
Something Nixie had said about the King George was suddenly echoing in his mind, ‘The entire building is riddled with secret doors and passageways to help certain people sneak in and out during the Cold War.’

Why not?
Thought Harvath. If his group had used one of the secret passageways, why couldn’t this person use others? It was possible, but it not only begged the question, how did this person know about the passageways, but also who the hell was he and what did he want?

There was no time for that now. Harvath needed to focus on getting himself and DeWolfe out of the building alive. He felt around himself and found a large cardboard box. Reaching inside, he wasn’t surprised to find what felt like leather cat-o’-nine tails, vinyl masks, and other assorted S&M toys, but it was something in the far corner of the box that gave him a new idea. Harvath pulled out a round tin, about the size and weight of a small can of shaving gel. Unscrewing the lid, he knew right away what it was—
Vaseline
.

The contents didn’t matter as much as the size, shape and heft of the container. Not only was it very similar to a small can of shaving gel, it was also very similar to a flashbang grenade. And sometimes, as Harvath had learned in his counterterrorism training a long time ago, throwing a dud could be better than actually throwing a live device.

Flashbangs, more properly referred to in the industry as NFDDs—Noise Flash Distraction Devices, often required the use of surprise in order to be fully effective. That said, there were three major physiological effects that could not be quickly protected against.

Flashbangs produced an incredibly bright light—approximately two million candela, which even with eyes closed would cause a bleaching of the rhodopsin, the visual purple in the eye, creating the spots and temporary blindness most people have experienced and referred to as the
flash bulb effect
.

Then there was the noise, right around 174 decibels, a thunderous roar that was just below the threshold of damage to the eardrum, but which was still likely to produce a startle reflex even in those expecting the concussion.

Finally, there was the pressure wave. The atmospheric pressure inside a room was raised so that it compressed the body, causing a level of severe uneasiness.

For those who were prepared for it, or had trained extensively in their presence, flashbangs were not a big deal, especially as most teams had trained to enter rooms just after the flash, and concurrent with the bang. But that’s where Harvath’s training and a little trick he had learned was about to pay off.

Harvath made sure the lid on the tin of Vaseline was on tight before calling out, “DeWolfe, flashbang!” and chucking the container toward where he had heard all of the furniture being moved.

If someone was familiar with NFDDs, which Harvath suspected their shooter was, one of the biggest distractions to present them with was an inert device that did not go off. When a flashbang has been loosed anywhere near you, it is nearly impossible not to pay attention to it because you
expect
it to detonate. When it doesn’t, it is extremely disconcerting and you end up focusing on it and the direction it came from, wondering what the hell happened. The tactic was something that Special Operations personnel liked to refer to as UW—unconventional warfare—and in this case it worked like a charm.

Harvath counted off the appropriate amount of seconds and then popped up from behind the bench with his flashlight blazing and his pistol ready to fire. This time, he caught his opponent full in the face with the beam from his SureFire. The man was sixty, if he was a day. He had a full head of gray hair and worn, leathery skin—not at all what Harvath was expecting. There was also, at this moment, an expression of arrogant defiance on his face. Though Harvath had never seen him before, there was something familiar about him. It was a gut feeling and he had learned a long time ago that those feelings were seldom wrong.

Whether or not he knew him, the man was still a killer and Harvath wasn’t above helping make him a little more aerodynamic, so he took aim and pulled the trigger.

Once again, the man expertly ducked down trying to get out of the line of fire. Scot kept the flashlight on him as he fired, only to see him disappear right through the wall. It was not the first time he had seen that trick and Harvath was beginning to understand why the man might feel so familiar, but there was also something else—something he couldn’t explain.

Crawling back under the canopy of smoke to where he had left DeWolfe, Harvath asked, “Can you stand up?”

“Of course I can stand up,” replied DeWolfe, angrily. “The guy just got the drop on me. That’s all. I’ll be fine.”

“Where’s your gun?”

DeWolfe was silent.

“So he got your gun too?”

“Don’t start with me, Harvath.”

Harvath held up his hands. “I’m not starting anything. I’m just trying to assess the situation.”

“I don’t need a gun. His ass is mine. I’m telling you. I’m going to get that motherfucker if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Harvath could understand the operative’s frustration. Nobody liked being bested. “Alright, alright, but we’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

When they reached the stairway and opened the door, the thick smoke and quickly rising fire made it obvious that they were going to have to find another way out of the building.

“What do we do now?” asked DeWolfe.

“Let’s go see if we can get your gun back.”

Harvath led DeWolfe to where he had watched their attacker seemingly disappear through the wall.

“What are we looking for?” asked DeWolfe.

“Some sort of false door or panel. I saw the guy vanish, so I know it has to be here.”

As the pair searched, the room seemed to get hotter, and the air more difficult to breathe. DeWolfe, who had been rapping every square inch of the wall with his knuckles, said, “Harvath, I’m not seeing anything and we have to get the hell out of here.”