Full Black - Brad Thor [49]
Schiller knocked twice on the wall behind him.
When they arrived in front of the apartment complex, Harvath brought the truck to a stop, put it in park, and turned off the ignition. There was no service entrance. Everything went in and out of the building through the front door. It wasn’t lost on him how exposed they all were out there in the middle of the street. He wanted to get the assaulters into the building as quickly as possible. Then he’d be the only sitting duck out in the open.
He, Schiller, and one other assaulter climbed out of the cab and got to work. Harvath walked around to the back of the truck, extended the ramp, and rolled up the door. Schiller and his assaulter stepped into the lobby of the building. While Schiller pretended to be buzzing up to someone on the intercom system, his assaulter used a lock-pick gun to open the second set of doors. As soon as they were open, he pulled a rubber wedge from his pocket and propped it open.
Schiller followed him inside and called for the elevator. While he waited for it to come down, he pried the glass cover from the fireman’s key box, removed the key, and replaced the cover. When the elevator arrived, he stepped inside and inserted the key. It was now under their control.
The assaulters from the back of the truck had already debused and were stacking boxes on dollies when Schiller and the other man came out to assist them.
Once the dollies were all loaded up, the men disappeared inside with them. Harvath’s job now was to stay with the truck and be the team’s eyes out on the street. He pulled down the rear door, threw the lock, and then walked back up front and climbed into the cab.
Though he wasn’t a smoker, Harvath removed the pack of cigarettes he had purchased, lit one, and hung his arm out the window. It had always been fascinating to him how someone just sitting in a car doing nothing could be suspicious, but the minute you gave him a cigarette and he adopted a casual posture, somehow he became less so. He couldn’t explain why that was, but he’d seen it work enough times that it had become a tactic he liked to employ when he had to hide in plain sight.
The truck’s side mirrors had been angled outward before they departed the parking area to give them the best possible view of the street and the sidewalks on either side. He could even make out the car with the book on its dashboard several car lengths back. Noticing it, he used his free hand to pull the baseball cap he was wearing down a little tighter.
He pretended to fumble with the truck’s radio as he looked out the windshield and studied the windows of the buildings around him. He had yet to shake his feeling that somebody was watching, that something wasn’t right.
He also hated just sitting there. It had been the right decision, but it still didn’t mean he liked it. He wanted to be where the action was, not sitting in a van waiting for everything to go down. Ultimately, being where he was right now had been his call, and it had been the right call. Leadership was not only about taking charge, it was also about giving your team everything they needed to succeed, and then getting out of their way. It meant knowing when you should be the first person charging through a door and when you should stand down and let someone else do it.
Harvath had the makings of a good leader, and at some point, way in the distant future, that was going to be important, because he couldn’t dance on the pointy tip of the spear forever. Eventually, his reaction times were going to slow. When that happened, he was going to have to come to terms with the high-speed life he had lived since his late teens. Time catches up with everyone at some point. The secret lay in knowing when to dial back your lifestyle. Now, though, wasn’t the time. Harvath was in the best physical and mental condition of his life and there was no end of bad guys that needed to be dealt with.
As long as he stayed on the right side of his ops and the people he