Path Of The Assassin

Harvath finished tightening his FRIES harness and inspected it, then inspected Meg’s and DeWolfe’s. Everyone was good to go. He radioed Avigliano, who told him to stand by. Big John was less than a minute away.

It was amazing to Harvath that he could not yet hear the enormous Chinook, but that was part of the pilots’ M.O. If things went well, you had no idea they were there until they were right on top of you.

Soon enough, the roar of the big MH-47’s rotors was all you could hear. That, and the deafening fire from the Dillon Miniguns, manned by door gunners on both sides of the helicopter, who were throwing down deadly blankets of fire.

As Big John made repeated passes to strafe the Libyan soldiers, Carlson ran out into the wadi with pockets full of Chem-lights to mark their makeshift landing zone. Once Avigliano got the word from Big John that he was coming in to drop the rope, the team made their way toward the LZ.

There was a loud, blowing wind as the Chinook swept in, flared, and then hovered above the wadi. Sheets of sand hitting the rotors gave off sparks making them appear greenish white in the night sky.

One of the Chinook’s crew kicked the heavy FRIES rope out the door, and Harvath and the rest of the team let it hit the ground and stay there for several seconds. Because helicopters weren’t grounded, they generated a tremendous amount of static electricity, which made it necessary to allow the rope to discharge the current before touching it.

Loops were staggered along the thick rope, and Harvath took up the first position, where he rapidly locked his harness in with a heavy metal D ring. Out in the open, even with the heavy fire from the door gunners up above, they were all still sitting ducks. Next on the line came Meg, then Carlson, DeWolfe, and finally Avigliano. Once everyone was clipped in, Avigliano blew the FAV with a remote detonator. He then signaled the pilot with an infrared beam, and the Chinook began its quick ascent.

The key to a hot FRIES extraction was to keep one hand on the rope and the other on your weapon, so you could return fire at the enemy. Harvath, DeWolfe, and Avigliano, along with the gunners in the MH-47, gave the Libyans every single thing they had. With a broken collarbone, it was all Carlson could do to hold on, and it made him madder than hell that he wasn’t able to shoot anybody.

Meg Cassidy’s sheer terror of the FRIES extraction was rivaled only by her newfound hate for Scot Harvath. By the time they had crossed the Tunisian border, she had vowed to herself not only to never trust him again, but never to speak to him either.

52

The new United States Embassy in Tunisia’s capital, Tunis, was located at the intersection of the La Marsa Highway and the road to La Goulette -literally the gullet, which connected the Gulf of Tunis to Tunisia’s main seaport. The sprawling, intricately landscaped compound occupied approximately twenty-one acres and included a chancellery, guardhouses, motor pool, commissary, low-rise office building, warehouse, shops, Marine barracks, recreation center, and embassy staff town houses. All U.S. Embassy operations for Tunisia were headquartered there. Some might wonder why the U.S. needed such a large compound in Tunisia, but Harvath knew the answer.

The embassy served as a major intelligence-gathering center. Its off-limits areas, with raised floors and next-generation satellite listening-and-surveillance equipment, ran at a frenetic pace day and night as operatives tried to stay three steps ahead of everything that was happening in “their corner of the world.” From this forward outpost, the United States monitored, collected, and processed sensitive information regarding most of the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East. Almost the entire staff was on either the NSA’s or CIA’s payroll, and it was no surprise to Harvath that after their extraction from Libya, this was where they had been brought for debriefing.

It had been intense. Though Harvath tried to interject on his behalf, Gordon Avigliano took quite a verbal beating from Rick Morrell for coordinating the unapproved rescue operation. To Avigliano’s credit, he shielded his two fellow operatives from most of the heat and claimed sole responsibility for disobeying a direct order from his superior. Harvath was seeing, yet again, a different side to the CIA and, in particular, the Special Activities Staff. He was beginning to think that his earlier assumptions about the group as a whole might have been wrong.