Full Black - Brad Thor [53]
Harvath reached for the railing to leap over it, but the railing was so hot that he snatched his hand right back.
Striking out with the heel of his boot, Harvath kicked at the door until it dislodged and he shoved it down the stairs behind him. He tried to crouch beneath the smoke, but it was so heavy, so thick, and so voluminous that there was just no bottom to it. Hoping to get some sort of break once he actually got into the hallway, he bent his head and charged the rest of the way up to the landing.
He could feel the hair being singed off his arms as he lunged through the empty door frame and into the hall. There was debris everywhere. Harvath was going to shout, to see if there were any survivors and if they could hear him, but he couldn’t get enough oxygen into his lungs. The heat was unbearable.
The bright orange blaze burned hotter and the flames leaped higher. Harvath knew he should get out. There was no way that anyone could have survived that explosion. But Chase and Schiller and the rest of the team were his responsibility. If only one of them was still alive, Harvath needed to find him, so he pushed deeper into the burning hallway.
He had gone no further than a few steps when there was an earsplitting crack as a larger section of the floor above came pancaking down.
With visibility next to zero, Harvath would have been crushed had it not been for a hand that reached out, grabbed him by the drag handle of his plate carrier, and yanked him into the stairwell.
“We’ve got to get out!” yelled Pat Murphy who had burst into the building from the back.
“No,” Harvath shot back.
“They’re all dead. Let’s go.”
“We don’t know they’re dead.”
“They’re dead,” Murphy insisted as he dragged Harvath away from the landing.
After the first couple of steps, Harvath began moving on his own. When they hit the ground floor and exited the lobby, a crowd had already formed in the street. The people blanched when they saw the two ash-and-soot-covered men exit the building carrying weapons.
Someone noticed that they were wearing Swedish Security Service plate carriers and started to ask Murphy questions in Swedish. The ex–Green Beret ignored him.
“The other car is about two hundred meters behind the woods,” said Murphy, leaning in so Harvath could hear him, but keeping his voice low enough that the onlookers couldn’t discern that he was speaking English. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Harvath had no choice but to agree. There was nothing they could do here. If they stayed, they’d be arrested and an already tragic situation would be made much worse.
Harvath nodded at Murphy, and the two set off for the back of the building, the woods, and the car parked just beyond. Neither the truck nor the car with the book on the dashboard could be traced back to them, so Harvath didn’t think twice about abandoning them. The key now was to get out of the country as quickly as possible.
They were about to swing around the side of the burning apartment complex and disappear, when there was the sound of breaking glass and screams from the crowd of onlookers.
Harvath spun just in time to see a man falling backward out of a fourth-story window of a building across the street.
CHAPTER 26
Chase now knew that Karami had been sketching the windows. Somehow he had figured out the signal he had created with the blinds. Karami had either known or suspected an attack was coming and he’d set up an ambush across the street, duplicating Chase’s entire signal. And if he had done all that, then he had to know Chase was not who he said he was. Therefore, the young operative wasted no time.
He was dramatically outnumbered and the only thing he had on his side was surprise. Surprise, and the shock the men in the room around him were in due to the explosion from across the street.
As soon as he knew he was going to have to fight his way out, he again wished he’d brought along the shiv he’d made.
The hookah was the nearest and best weapon he had available and it broke over the head of the first jihadist he struck