Full Black - Brad Thor [51]
From there, they’d be placed in a different windowless vehicle from the moving van that had been used in the raid. Harvath’s clever plan for getting them out of the country, with the Swedish government none the wiser, would be put into effect.
Chase wasn’t looking forward to any of it, but no one had forced him to take this assignment. He had agreed to it because he knew that until they had hunted down every last member of Aazim Aleem’s network, America wouldn’t be safe. You couldn’t just cut out part of this kind of cancer and hope that it never came back. You had to get all of it. Any cells left behind were guaranteed to metastasize.
There were many ways of going after the cancer of Islamic terrorism. There was the radiation of interrupting terrorist financing, the chemotherapy of denying havens from within which to train and operate, and the most delicate and most efficient method, which was also the most dangerous and time-consuming, was to go in with a scalpel and carve up every single cell. Only through the last and most extreme method could you be absolutely sure that no cancer remained behind. It was in this particular area that men like Sean Chase and Scot Harvath were particularly skilled.
But unlike Harvath, because of his background Chase could be injected right into the Muslim corpus. He could drift through the Islamic bloodstream, seeking out the most radical, the most deadly cancer cells without ever being seen as foreign and eliciting any sort of immune response. Once in, he could mount his own T-cell response, calling in highly efficient killer cells, run by men like Scot Harvath, to attack the cancer and permanently purge it from the body.
Harvath liked Chase’s no-BS attitude and ability to cut through red tape to get the job done. Though he had been trained for long-term deepcover assignments with little to no contact with his handlers, when he did have to deal with day-to-day operations at the CIA, the bureaucracy bothered him. It had chewed up and spat out a lot of good operatives. A handful of them had written books about how broken Agency culture was. Much to Langley’s displeasure, one of the most insightful, The Human Factor, had become a huge favorite among CIA employees and a de facto field manual for those who wanted to keep America safe. Chase had read The Human Factor so many times the cover had fallen off.
And while he hadn’t been at the Agency long enough yet to become completely jaded, the lessons he learned from the book informed everything he did. That was part of the growing appreciation he had for Harvath. Mission success was everything to a guy like that. If Harvath broke some of the crockery along the way, that was the cost of doing business. He’d worry about the Krazy Glue later. Though it would drive his bosses nuts, that was exactly how Chase thought the war on terror, or whatever politically correct term the Seventh Floor was using these days, ought to be fought.
As the thought drifted from his mind, Chase watched one of the jihadists lean over and grab a hookah pipe from the corner. Standing up, he took it into the bathroom and filled it with cold water.
“Do you smoke?” he asked when he returned and began packing the bowl while another man pulled out a pair of tongs and a lighter.
Chase hated tobacco, flavorful or otherwise. But the men were making a new overture toward him and he was determined to take advantage of it. “Of course,” he said.
The man with the tongs used them to withdraw a small piece of coal from a paper bag near the TV. Holding his lighter underneath, he heated the coal until it began to glow and then placed it on the screen above the fruit-flavored tobacco, or shisha. Chase was offered