Foreign Influence_ A Thriller - Brad Thor [9]
Standing up, Harvath carried the boy outside and placed him in the truck next to Omar-Hakim.
Once everyone was loaded, the drive to Fallujah’s main police station took under half an hour.
It was almost morning, and while it would be a day of thanksgiving for five of the families, for Khidir’s it would be a day of incredible sadness.
As for Omar-Hakim and the two surviving al-Qaeda operatives, their ordeal was only beginning. They would probably never see the inside of a courtroom. Justice for them would be meted out in a different fashion. For what they had done, and what Omar-Hakim had allowed to be done to those little boys, no torture could be too painful or too horrific.
Harvath took little pleasure in what he did, but it had to be done. America was engaged in all-out war with the Islamists. And as America became more aggressive in taking the fight to them, he knew that they were going to become more aggressive in taking the fight to America.
He also knew that the loss of life wouldn’t end with Khidir. Things were going to get much, much worse before they ever got better.
CHAPTER 4
VIRGINIA
MONDAY MORNING
THIRTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER
Harvath changed into shorts, grabbed two six-packs from the fridge, and walked down to his dock. He had wanted to get good and drunk in Iraq, but there hadn’t been time. He had to debrief and clean up a bunch of loose ends before flying home. Now, he had all the time he wanted.
The dock’s wooden planks were hot beneath his feet. Without the throng of weekend boaters, the Potomac was quiet. A light breeze stirred the surface of the water. It was good to be home.
In addition to tying one on, what he needed to do was put the things he’d seen and heard—things he’d known from the outset he’d probably not be able to forget—in an iron box and bury it as deep as possible in one of the farthest corners of his mind. The practice was unhealthy, but he didn’t care. It was the only way he could do his job.
Sitting down at the end of the dock, Harvath leaned against one of the pier posts, opened his first beer, and tipped it back.
His fiancée, Tracy, was up at her grandfather’s cottage in Maine, and he was grateful for the solitude. He didn’t want to see her right away. He needed to decompress and come back to reality. Or at least what he liked to call reality; that world beyond kicking in doors and shooting Islamic fanatics in the face.
The biggest reason he needed time, though, was that he knew he couldn’t talk to Tracy about what he had seen. Children had become one of those topics that they no longer discussed.
Harvath closed his eyes and lifted his face toward the sun. He had given up trying to change her mind. Because of the persistent headaches she suffered, she said she couldn’t even consider becoming a mother. At the same time, she knew that he wanted a family and she had tried to convince him to start over again with someone else. But he wouldn’t leave her, no matter how many times she worked to push him away.
She had been the victim of a vendetta launched by a sick terrorist who wanted to torture him by targeting the people around him. There were days when the pain Tracy suffered was so severe that she wished out loud that the bullet that had struck her in the head had done its intended job. It was agonizing for Harvath to hear her talk like that.
For Tracy, some days she couldn’t tell what was worse, the physical pain from the attack, or the emotional pain from watching one of the most decent men she had ever known forgo the family he desired in order to stay by her side.
His father had also been a Navy man—a SEAL and then a SEAL instructor. When he died, father and son were barely on speaking terms. Harvath had forgone college for a career as an amateur athlete, something the elder Harvath had zealously disapproved of.
After his father’s death in a training accident, Harvath had found it impossible to return to competitive sports. Worried