Full Black - Brad Thor [123]
Four two-man teams had left Sarhan’s house and, via intricate SDRs, had taken great pains to make sure they weren’t being followed. Despite leaving before Sarhan, he had beaten them to the airport. Any doubt about what was about to happen was fading from Harvath’s mind.
Sarhan was the cell controller. He had picked the parking garage at Terminal One as an overwatch position. From the northeast corner of the garage, he could watch as all four teams drove past.
The fact that the men were traveling in pairs also made sense now. It was an insurance policy. Each was there to keep the other committed to the operation. With a two-man team, cowardice could be minimized, if not completely eradicated. If one of the men chickened out, the other would take care of the situation. It was a growing trend in terrorist operations.
Sarhan was there to make sure everything went off as planned. Very likely, he had been instructed to film as much of the carnage as possible so that it could be fed to Al Jazeera, which, in turn, would joyfully broadcast it to the Muslim world. Harvath, though, was determined that none of that was going to happen.
Holding his keys in his hand, he moved past the rows of cars pretending he was looking for his.
“The first of the vehicles just entered the airport,” said Nicholas.
“Understood,” Harvath replied as he kept walking.
“Did you notice anything off about any of the vehicles?”
“Negative. Why?”
“One of the guys in the TOC thinks that the cab that just pulled in is riding too low.”
Harvath had been so preoccupied with Sarhan and the men coming out of his house that he hadn’t paid nearly enough attention to the vehicles. “Nobody got out,” he said into his earbud’s microphone.
“Excuse me?” replied Nicholas.
“The van driver. The taxicab drivers. Even the driver of the Town Car. None of them got out when they picked the men up at Sarhan’s.”
“So?”
“So it doesn’t make sense,” said Harvath. “Why didn’t they get out and help with the bags?”
“Maybe they were told not to.”
“Why?”
Nicholas thought a moment. “Because they don’t want anyone else handling the bags?”
“Bingo.”
“I just got another IM from the guy in TOC. He really doesn’t like that first vehicle. He says it reminds him of VBIEDs he saw in Iraq.”
Harvath had seen his share of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices as well. “Watch where it goes, and tell him to look at the other vehicles. I want to know if he thinks the same thing.”
“What are you thinking?” Nicholas asked.
“I’m thinking those guys with the bags go in, explosions happen, and when survivors rush out of the terminals, if those four vehicles are VBIEDs, the survivors get taken out in a secondary attack that’s even worse than the first.”
“What should we tell DHS?”
It was the right question, but not the one Harvath wanted to have to answer. If they told DHS that they now believed they had four teams of suicide bombers being dropped off by vehicles loaded with explosives, it was game over. They wouldn’t wait to see what happened. They’d shut the entire airport down. If Harvath was right, DHS would succeed in saving countless lives. If he was wrong, Sarhan and his men, who could very well be controllers of other cells scattered across the country, would know they had been blown and all those potential leads would evaporate.
The FBI would get involved, but even if they used CIA interrogators, they’d never be able to lean on Sarhan and his men hard enough to get any actionable intelligence out of them. And once the FBI was involved, they’d see to it that the men were afforded every single protection under the law. Nobody would be putting bags over their heads and transporting them to Iceland or one of the other black sites. Caught on American soil, they’d be handled under criminal court rules and proceedings—that is, if the FBI could come up with enough to even hold them.
It wasn’t that Harvath didn’t respect the Bureau, he did. It was just better that they didn’t get mixed up in this. It was also better, at least at this