Hidden Order: A Thriller (46 page)

“Where is he?” he shouted. “Where the fuck is he?”

Cordero didn’t reply.

Pulling her with him, he stepped into the room and flipped over the race car bed. He then threw open the closet doors but the little boy wasn’t there either.

He then dragged Cordero back down the hall and threw her like a piece of trash onto the living room floor. He pointed his weapon at her
and was about to threaten to kill her in order to get her parents to tell him where the little boy was hiding when he noticed her parents were gone, too.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he screamed. “Where the fuck are they?”

“Out stealing me a new sailboat, asshole,” said a voice from behind.

Before Sabatini could even react, Harvath depressed his trigger twice, the shots perfectly aimed and placed exactly where the killer deserved them.

T
IERRA DEL
F
UEGO

F
IVE DAYS LATER

W
ith its money and powerful reach, the Federal Reserve, or more precisely Monroe Lewis acting under the auspices of the Federal Reserve, was able to make the impossible possible, including establishing phony flight plans for its Aerion Supersonic Business Jet.

As Reed Carlton, Lydia Ryan, and Bob McGee huddled with General George Johnson and his team at the Directorate of National Intelligence, Harvath had been able to cut through all the red tape and trace the plane with one phone call.

“Buenos Aires,” said Natalie, the Swedish flight attendant. “Additional passengers boarded, we flew further south to Tierra del Fuego and then everyone disembarked when we landed at the airport at Ushuaia.”

Harvath thanked her and gave the information to Johnson’s people. Within an hour, they had CCTV footage from Argentina. It didn’t take long to ID the men Phil Durkin had picked up in Argentina. They were a cross section of thugs and hired killers the Agency had used from time to time for assignments in South America.

When they had identified his destination, Ryan called his ex to see if
she might know why he had selected it. Had he ever mentioned any assignments or did he have any contacts all the way down there? Brenda Durkin had laughed.

“Phil had plenty of contacts in Patagonia,” she said. “And they were all slippery, but not in the way you think.”

Brenda explained that her husband was an avid fly fisherman and had taken multiple trips to Tierra del Fuego. His favorite place was the Kau Tapen Lodge on the banks of the Rio Grande River. The river flowed from the Andes down to the Atlantic and boasted the best sea trout fishing in the world. Before their marriage had turned sour, he had talked of retiring there. Though she could never prove it, she half suspected he had been building a house down there.

That was all Harvath and the rest of the people gathered with General Johnson had needed to hear. They were convinced they knew where Phil Durkin was. At that point, it was only a matter of how to deal with him.

Argentina was a politically sensitive country for the United States to deal with. They could be helpful in some areas and downright obstructionist in others. It was decided that the less they knew about what was happening the better.

The weapons arrived in Tierra del Fuego via the Falklands and a contact the Old Man maintained in the British SAS. They offered shooters as well, but Carlton had politely declined. What he did take them up on, though, was surveillance. The SAS had an excellent stable of covert operatives on Tierra del Fuego and they were happy to help out. By the time Harvath and his team arrived, Durkin’s house had been located and everything was in place. Back in Northern Virginia, General Johnson and the Old Man were watching everything unfold via satellite.

Lydia Ryan had insisted on coming along for the operation. From everything Harvath had heard about her, she was more than up to the task and he had no objection. The Old Man wanted Sloane Ashby there, too, and Harvath was glad to have her. Her record spoke for itself.

He had also roped in Matt Sanchez, who had performed so well in Somalia. General Johnson had recommended the team’s final member.

Chase Palmer of Odessa, Texas, had the distinction of being the youngest operator ever to have been admitted to the ranks of the U.S. Army’s
elite Delta Force unit. He was smart, battle-tested, and an exceptionally talented killer of the enemy. The Department of Defense had file cabinets stuffed full with accounts of his exploits. His teammates had nicknamed him “AK” for
Ass Kicker
, but the nickname took on a whole new meaning when he was caught with an empty AK-47 and was able to bluff six heavily armed Taliban into surrender.

Some of his superiors resented not only his talent and meteoric rise, but also his above-average intelligence. When they called him AK, it stood for
Asshole Kid
. General Johnson, though, saw him for what he was—a tremendous asset to the United States—and had taken him under his wing. Though still technically a member of Combat Applications Group, or CAG (the name given to Delta Force to allow the Army to deny the existence of Delta Force), Palmer was assigned to General Johnson and served at his pleasure. Right now, the general’s pleasure was to see to it that
Operation Sierra
, the code name given to the capture of Phil Durkin, was successful.

“Targets have all been ranged. Command Six is good to go,” Sanchez replied over his microphone as Harvath asked his team members one by one for their SITREPs.

The terrain was barren and windswept; more rock and loose shale than anything else. It was cold and misty. Everyone would rather have been someplace else, but you wouldn’t have heard a complaint from a single one of them. This is who they were and what they did. Each of them consoled themselves with the knowledge that no matter how damp and how cold it was, it easily could have been worse, and that what they did, they did for their country. They all knew that there were people who would never know their names and would never know what they were doing this night, but that their way of life hung in the balance.

Lowering his night vision binoculars, Harvath looked at Ryan and said, “Are you ready for this?”

She nodded.

He pointed in the direction of the lodge and said, “We’re on, then.”

Ryan didn’t need the binoculars. She could see the pair of headlights as they drove out of the Kau Tapen and began bouncing along the rutted, partially washed-out road.

“This is Command One,” Harvath said into his microphone as he opened the door of his vehicle and stepped into the rain. “Park Place. Repeat. Park Place.”

Ryan exited as well and, opening her umbrella, stood near the back bumper of their 4x4 with a flashlight. While Harvath pretended to work on a tire, she watched the vehicle from the Kau Tapen Lodge as it wound its way up the ribbon of road, getting closer and closer.

When it reached the right distance, Ryan began to flag the driver down with her flashlight. As the green Land Rover neared, it began to slow, coming to a stop behind their SUV.

The driver was a handsome young man dressed in Helly Hansen foul weather gear. Putting his Land Rover in park, he immediately stepped out to see if he could help.

“Can I help you?” he asked in Spanish.

“I think we may have broken our axle,” Ryan replied in English.

The polite young man switched into English as he approached. “Would you like me to take a look?”

“You’re from the Kau Tapen Lodge?” she asked, pointing at the logo on the side of the man’s vehicle.

The young man nodded. The lodge participated in a hotel management program that brought in international hotelier students throughout the year, many from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They were always polished and attractive, which added to the establishment’s world-class feel.

“You probably have guests you need to get to the airport. We don’t want to keep you.”

“I’m by myself. I’m just delivering food. It’s no problem for me to take a look. My cousin is a mechanic in town.”

“I apologize,” Ryan said.

Whether it was her statement, or the gun she produced, it didn’t matter. The effect was what was desired. The young man stopped and froze in place.

“Turn around,” Ryan ordered. “Hands on your head.”

“You’re robbing me?” he asked, as he turned and did as she had instructed.

“Not exactly.”

As Ryan kept him covered, Harvath rushed forward, cuffed his hands, and placed him in their vehicle. Waiting inside were Sloane Ashby and Chase Palmer. They listened carefully as Harvath asked the young man a quick series of questions regarding Phil Durkin’s home and security measures. The young man was frightened and answered as best he could. Ryan tried to calm him down.

“Just answer our questions and everything will be okay. No one will hurt you.”

The young man gave descriptions of everything he was asked until Harvath was satisfied that they had everything they needed.

“Let’s roll,” he said.

Nodding, Ashby and Palmer climbed out of the 4x4 and jogged back to the Land Rover. It was time to go to the next phase.

As they got the Kau Tapen Lodge’s Land Rover back on the road, Harvath alerted the rest of the team.

“Boardwalk,” he said over the radio. “All teams, Boardwalk.”

A
s Ashby drove, Palmer sat in the backseat and organized the trays of hot food. If it had been him, he would have hired a local to do his cooking for him instead of having his dinners catered from the lodge. It didn’t matter that Durkin could afford to do it; it just didn’t seem tactically wise.

Durkin, though, must have seen things differently. The hired help liked to talk. That was a potential liability he couldn’t afford. Not when he was on the run and knew people would be looking for him. Having the food prepared and brought over, while expensive, did have several advantages, not the least of which was that access with the outside world was limited.

As they closed in on Durkin’s small ranch, Ashby gave a SITREP over her radio and then asked for radio silence, as she didn’t want any distractions at the gate.

Pulling up to the wooden doors, she brought the vehicle to a stop and waited. Two burly men in ponchos stepped out of a stone guardhouse and motioned for the windows to be rolled down as they approached. Palmer
had peeled back the lids on several of the trays so that the odor of food would permeate the Land Rover.

Even standing outside the vehicle in the rain, the men smelled like coffee and cigarettes.

The man on the driver’s side asked where the other delivery boy was. Ashby answered that he had the “Chilean flu” and pantomimed drinking a large glass of booze. The man chuckled and asked her where she was from. He wanted to flirt a little bit with her. His buddy, on the other hand, wanted to eat.

“She’s from the lodge, via the kitchen,” the other guard said. “Go see her when your shift is over. The food’s getting cold.”

Palmer laughed, though he shouldn’t have. The line was not meant for him to hear. He was a servant and should have remained invisible. It was good-natured ribbing between to comrades. His interjecting himself had made it about the man’s machismo.

“You think something is funny?” the first man asked.

“No, señor,” he replied.

“Why are you laughing, then?”

Shit,
Palmer thought to himself.
This guy is bored and itching for a fight
. He needed to come up with something quick.

“I laughed because she doesn’t work in the kitchen, she works in the bar. And it’s her fault our colleague has such a bad hangover.”

The man on the passenger side laughed himself. “See? There you go.”

Palmer looked at the man on the driver’s side. “There are two things you can never trust a woman with: alcohol and guns.”

The gruff man seemed to like this joke and smiled. Reaching his hand in the window, he touched Ashby a little too close to her breast and said, “And what would a little girl like you do with a gun?”

Ashby pumped the gas as she took her foot off the clutch, which caused the Land Rover to leap forward a couple of feet. It also caused the overly friendly gate guard to snatch his hand back out of the window. The man on the other side of the vehicle found this quite amusing and laughed even louder.