Full Black - Brad Thor [43]
These attacks had come on the heels of a wave of attacks in Europe targeting American tourists. Aazim had built a very sophisticated network. What bothered the CIA was that many of his American cells were believed to still be in place. Nobody knew who they were, much less where they were hiding and what they had planned.
Chase had met with Aazim only twice. He was the only American operative to have ever done so. The first time had been brief and had taken place while Chase and Jarrah were traveling through Pakistan. The second meeting had happened in Chicago and had been much more substantive. Chase had finally put another piece of the puzzle in place as he discovered that Jarrah was working for Aazim, who controlled the network.
The meeting had taken place in Jarrah’s office and Chase so impressed Aazim that the terrorist mastermind invited him to help execute a nationwide string of attacks beyond what was planned for Chicago. These attacks, it was alleged, would cause airplanes to rain from the sky, radiation and plague to infect American citizens, and multiple other horrors. Aazim despised America and his goal was for it to know terror like it had never known terror before.
And as that prediction began to unfold, a Mumbai-style siege was launched against three commuter train stations in Chicago and many innocent civilians had been killed.
Jarrah had explained to Chase that Aazim had come to Chicago to check on their final preparations. From there he was going to Los Angeles for the next attack, and he wanted Chase to handle an attack planned for New York City.
When one of the Chicago train station plots was interrupted and Jarrah was murdered, the L.A. and New York attacks never materialized. According to chatter, Aazim had fled the United States. That’s when Chase had been charged with hunting him down.
The hunt had led him to Yemen, but Aazim had proven elusive, at least for the CIA. Harvath, somehow, had much better luck. He not only located the terrorist mastermind, he managed to capture him and stuff him in his trunk.
Chase had just been given the keys to Harvath’s car when it was struck by an RPG and Aazim was incinerated.
The reason the CIA had allowed Chase to join Harvath’s current Uppsala operation was that they were bound and determined to uncover the remainder of Aazim’s network, both within the United States and, if possible, the rest of the world.
The powers that be back at Langley didn’t much care for Harvath’s cowboy reputation. They cared even less for Harvath’s boss, Reed Carlton, but they had little choice but to cooperate.
Chase had invested years of his life in infiltrating Aazim’s network. He knew more about it than anyone else in the intelligence world, and he made it crystal clear to Agency brass that if they didn’t sign off on his joining Harvath’s op, he would quit and sign up with the Carlton Group. Either way, he would finish the job he had started.
Chase was a virtual encyclopedia of Aazim Aleem information. British by birth, the terrorist had been a fat man in his late sixties with a long gray beard when he had been shredded in Yemen. But his girth and facial hair were not his most distinguishing features.
That honor belonged to the two stainless steel hooks that he had where his hands should have been. He had traveled to Afghanistan in the eighties to fight in the jihad against the Soviets, and legend had it that Aazim had lost his hands attempting to defuse a land mine near a school. The story was pure propaganda. The jihadist was a bomb maker and had lost them in a premature detonation.
He had been an adept Islamic scholar who had studied at Egypt’s prestigious hotbed of Muslim extremism, Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Known only as the “Mufti