Act of War (11 page)

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At seven minutes to six, the call came in that a man fitting Khuram Hanjour’s description had just pulled up in front of the hotel. He valet-parked his white Mercedes and walked inside. There was no one else with him.

As the spotter relayed what the man was wearing, Anne Levy told the rest of her team, particularly the couple she had sitting in the restaurant, that the target had arrived.

Turning to Harvath she said, “Now what?”

“Now we wait,” he replied.

The Arabian Courtyard Hotel was built around a grand atrium with glass elevators you could watch ascend. That allowed Cowles, who was seated in the ground-floor lounge, to watch Hanjour cross the marble lobby, get into one of the elevators, and take it up to the Silk Route level. After relaying the target’s movements, he sat back and pretended to enjoy a coffee as he continued to scan the lobby and the front door for any unwanted guests.

“We’ve got him,” the female CIA operative said over her Bluetooth earpiece when Hanjour entered the restaurant. She watched him speak with the hostess and then be shown to a table near the windows.

Hanjour was a balding man of medium height with a thin build. He wore an obviously dyed, tightly cropped black beard and a pair of stylish, frameless glasses. He had paired his khaki trousers with a white, short-sleeved silk dress shirt and a pair of soft leather driving shoes. On his right wrist was a large gold Rolex and on his left pinky finger was a gold signet ring. He wore no other jewelry and carried nothing in his hands that they could see.

He ordered a gin and tonic and surveyed the room as he sipped, waiting for his companion to arrive. The young CIA couple kept him in their peripheral vision, pretending to be more into each other than anything else. The last thing they needed was for him to know he was under surveillance.

When the clock on his phone read two minutes past six o’clock, Harvath texted Hanjour a picture. It showed a pillow on a turned-down bed. Propped up against the pillow were two small plastic bags. One was filled with what looked like meth and the other with what looked like synthetic marijuana. There was a box of condoms and a red rose. The only text that accompanied the picture was the room number, 501.

Hanjour slid the phone from his pocket and read the message. Taking out his wallet, he left some money for the waitress and walked over to the hostess. He said a few words to her and she smiled as he tipped her. Then he exited the restaurant.

The female CIA operative rang Levy. “He just left.”

Levy pinged Cowles down in the lobby and told him to watch the
elevators. Raising his coffee cup to his mouth, Cowles turned his attention to the elevators and gave a play-by-play of what he saw, ending with, “The elevator is stopping on five. He’s getting off. Headed in your direction.”

Levy looked at Harvath and said, “Here he comes.”

The door had been propped open using the swing guard lock. When Hanjour entered, he would walk down a short hallway with the darkened bathroom to his right. The bedside table lamps were on, but had been covered with pieces of red fabric to dim their brightness and add to the mood. A small amount of incense had been burned so that it would appear that perhaps Fahad was trying to cover up that he had already started partying and was ready to go right to play mode. The bedspread had been kicked off and dropped on the floor at the foot of the bed. The radio was playing softly.

Dim lights, a little bit of incense, the bedspread on the floor, and music. It was all designed to throw Hanjour off balance; to reinforce in his mind what he wanted to see.

All they needed now was for him to walk through the door, which was exactly what he did next.

K
huram Hanjour gently pushed the door open and slipped inside room 501. He saw the bedspread up ahead on the floor. Turning, he locked the door behind him.

He spoke in hushed Arabic as he kicked off his shoes and began unbuttoning his shirt. He had dropped it to the floor and was just unbuttoning his pants when he stepped into the bedroom and saw Anne Levy standing there. In her hands was a suppressed, Elite Dark SIG Sauer P226, the same weapon carried by a lot of Texas Rangers and Navy SEALs. It was pointed right at him.

Hanjour spun, as if to flee, only to see that Harvath had stepped from the darkened bathroom and also had a weapon pointed at him. This one, though, looked different, like something out of a sci-fi movie. Its barrel was rectangular with a bright, white light and two integrated lasers.

Before Hanjour was able to process that he was looking at a new cutting-edge Taser, Harvath depressed his trigger. The weapon delivered an incapacitating electrical charge that caused Hanjour’s muscles to seize. His body went completely rigid and he cried out as he fell forward. As soon as he hit the floor, Harvath was on top of him.

“We’re out of here in ninety seconds,” he said, securing Hanjour’s wrists and ankles with FlexiCuffs.

Levy placed a strip of electrical tape over the recruiter’s mouth, then stood up and alerted the team to go to the next stage.

As Harvath finished trussing up Hanjour, Levy reclaimed a large,
hard-sided Storm Case from the closet. Air holes had been drilled in strategic places and covered with a fine mesh, painted the same color as the case. It had sturdy wheels rated for over three hundred pounds of gear, far exceeding what Hanjour weighed. Kicking it over onto its side, Levy flipped open the latches and threw open the lid.

The effects of a Taser were short-lived. Once the subject was down, you had to move fast, which was exactly what Harvath had done. As soon as Levy opened the case, Hanjour knew what was in store for him and began to thrash around wildly like a fish on a hot summer pier.

It was estimated that anywhere from five to seven percent of the world’s population suffered from severe claustrophobia. In their files, the French and the Brits had remarked not only on Hanjour’s sexual proclivities, but also on the fact that he was likely a claustrophobic. His reaction upon seeing the Storm Case was the only confirmation Harvath needed.

He had very strong hands and grabbed Hanjour by the back of the neck and squeezed until the man stopped struggling.

Nodding to Levy, he stood and then they bent over, picked up Hanjour, and attempted to put him in the case. Immediately, he started going wild again—thrashing against his restraints, twisting his body, and screaming from behind the duct tape that muffled his mouth. Harvath signaled for Levy to put him down.

He got right up in Hanjour’s face and said, “If you fight, if you so much as make a sound, I’m going to weigh this box down with rocks, cut a nice big hole in the corner, and dump you in Dubai Creek to drown. Do you understand me?”

Hanjour looked from Harvath to the Storm Case and back to Harvath. He began shaking his head wildly.

“Khuram,” Harvath said. “This isn’t a negotiation. You’re going in that box and trust me, at this point, you’ve got much bigger things to worry about. Now, we can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way. It’s up to you.”

Hanjour continued to violently shake his head.

Harvath handed Levy the Taser and grabbed the duct tape. When he had a piece starting to peel away from the roll, he nodded for her to give him another charge.

When she did, Hanjour’s body went rigid once more and he let out another muffled yell from behind his gag. When his body lost its rigidity, Harvath brought the man’s chest to his knees, rolled him onto his buttocks, and began wrapping him with duct tape.

Almost immediately Hanjour was fighting him again. Harvath had to work fast. He had no idea if anyone in the hotel had heard his initial cry upon being Tasered and had possibly called security. They needed to get out of the hotel as quickly as possible.

With Levy’s help, they forced his arms across his chest, and with a second roll of tape succeeded in mummifying him in the fetal position. He was harder to pick up this time, but they managed, and laid him on his side inside the Storm Case. He was rocking violently from side to side, but that would change once the lid was shut and his shoulder was pinned up against it.

Before closing the lid, Harvath reminded him one last time what would happen if he didn’t cooperate. “Move or make a sound and you’re going to the bottom of Dubai Creek. Understand me?”

Hanjour didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. The fact that he finally stopped thrashing was response enough.

Harvath closed and locked the lid as Levy quickly wiped down the room for prints. She tucked Hanjour’s shoes and shirt into her bag and informed the team they were on the move. Once the hallway was given the all clear by the operative in the stairwell, they exited the room.

With Harvath pulling the case down the brightly carpeted hall, they made their way to a service corridor where another one of Levy’s people was waiting with the freight elevator. After making sure the coast was clear downstairs and the BMW was at the loading area, they stepped into the elevator and depressed the button for the ground floor.

Once they were there, Cowles met them and helped Harvath wheel the Storm Case out the service entrance, down the ramp, and load it into the trunk of the waiting BMW. Harvath took the front passenger position, Levy got in behind him, and Cowles sat behind the driver.

Quietly they pulled away from the loading dock, down the alley, and disappeared into the deepening night of Bur Dubai.

N
ORTH
K
OREA

D
uring the five-hour drive, the Operation Gold Dust team tried to catch some more sleep, but it came only in fitful snatches. The North Korean roads were terrible. No sooner would they fall asleep than the truck would hit another rut, or a mammoth pothole, and they’d all be slammed awake.

When they arrived at the drop-off point, which was nothing more than a kilometer marker and a sign for the next village over one hundred kilometers away, they climbed out of the truck. While Billy Tang discussed the pickup with Hyun Su, the SEALs fanned out and took up firing positions.

Once Billy was done talking, he said good-bye to Hyun Su and rejoined the team. Fordyce studied their position on his map and compared it to what his GPS was telling him. With a lot of ground to cover and limited darkness in which to do it, he was anxious to get going.

The team waited until Hyun Su had driven off and they could no longer hear the sound of his engine. And then they waited some more.

They let the pitch-black North Korean night close in around them as they familiarized themselves with every sound it produced. Finally, Fordyce gave his men the signal to move out.

Their course would take them up through a series of steep, forested foothills and over the back side of one of the mountains that bracketed their objective—the tapered valley that had been partially obscured from satellite view. They were expected to be dug in by sunrise and to spend the day collecting as much intelligence as they could before retreating to the pickup point, where Hyun Su would drive them back to the coast.
There, they’d link up with the minisub and be delivered back to the USS
Texas,
where they could prepare a full briefing and securely transmit it back to the States.

So far, the forest floor was covered with soft pine needles and reminded Fordyce a little bit of Pennsylvania. If his Lab Bailey had been along, he could have imagined for a moment that they were out for a nighttime hunt. That was until the gradient began to change.

Even though the team was in top physical condition, the steep angle, combined with the eighty-plus pounds of gear each of them was carrying, made the climb more difficult.

They drank water from their Camelbaks via the hoses threaded through their pack straps and kept their suppressed rifles ready to fire. Fordyce, Johnson, and Tucker all carried H&K 417 carbines, while Tang carried an M4 by FN, which had been secreted in the back of the truck with the SEALs.

Their direction of approach had been chosen not because it would give them the best view, but because it was the most challenging and, they hoped, would be less guarded than the other ways into the valley.

As Fordyce checked their progress once again on his GPS, he reviewed the mission for the thousandth time in his head.

According to the intelligence the CIA had developed, China was training some kind of landing force on the other side of this mountain in rural North Korea. It hadn’t been described as an invasion force, but rather a follow-on force that was supposed to land after a major attack on the United States took place. No one, though, seemed to know what kind of attack it was going to be. All Fordyce and his team had been told was that it was designed to wipe out at least 90 percent of the U.S. population.

Using the term “rural” in the mission briefing had drawn head-shaking from the SEALs. There wasn’t much of North Korea that
wasn’t
rural. There were virtually no modern conveniences in the entire country outside a very small handful of cities. The DPRK was another testament to the failures of communism. The entire nation was a horrific pit of misery and human suffering.

The DPRK was beset with starvation and malnutrition. Bodies fished out of rivers after floods or boys lucky enough to escape alive showed
teenagers were now five inches shorter and weighed twenty-five pounds less on average than their contemporaries in South Korea. Mental retardation brought on by childhood lack of nutrition was estimated to have rendered a quarter of the DPRK’s male population unfit for military service. Even in its largest cities, like Pyongyang, Kaesong, and Chongjin, North Koreans were starving to death.

While the “free” people starved, “enemies of the state” had it even worse. The tales of North Korea’s savagery toward prisoners were brutal and legion.

Hundreds of thousands languished in hidden prison camps across the country—many sent without charge or trial. As part of a collective punishment system known as “guilt by association,” relatives, children, and entire families were imprisoned as well. To “cleanse the bloodline” of evil deeds, the DPRK often targeted three generations of a transgressor’s family.