State Of The Union

Without the beam from his flashlight Harvath was completely blind, and he rolled hard into something big and sturdy, smacking his head against what he assumed was some sort of table leg. He scrambled to get out of his attacker’s line of fire and knew that the only way the person could be following his movements was with night vision goggles. It made perfect sense. Cut the power and blind your opponent. Bait the trap properly and when he comes to you, killing him will be easier than tipping over drunk Frenchmen at a Beaujolais festival. That plan, though, had one major problem. Scot Harvath was not that easy to kill.

Reaching out to find one of the legs for orientation, Harvath quickly pulled himself beneath the table. Taking a deep breath, he lunged upwards in a squat thrust maneuver flipping the table over and affording himself at least the appearance of better cover. Though his attacker was using a silenced weapon, the wordsilenced did not mean completely devoid of sound and Harvath had developed at least a vague idea of where he was.

He could see only one means of escape. After flipping up the hinged red filter cap from his flashlight, he reached around to the small of his back and pulled the painfully oversized PDA from his jeans. He felt along its smooth surface for the place where the device had deflected the shot and saved his spinal cord from being severed and said a quick word of thanks, then sent the device arcing in the direction of his attacker. When he heard it smash against the far wall, he jumped from behind the table and aimed the 225-lumen power of his SureFire flashlight in the same direction in order to blind his attacker. The white-hot beam sliced through the blackness of the chamber, lighting up the entire far side of the room, but the shooter wasn’t there.The son of a bitch had moved.

Harvath ducked back down behind the table just as one of the uppermost legs splintered into hundreds of ungainly toothpicks. The shot had come from over his right shoulder. The shooter was right behind him! Harvath turned and opened fire as he raced to get out of the open and find a new place to hide, but where the hell could he go? Without turning his flashlight on, he couldn’t see a thing. He needed to formulate another plan, and fast.

Harvath rolled along the ground back over to where he had first seen DeWolfe.There had to be a way out of this. When he found him, DeWolfe was lying on his back trying to catch his breath.

“Are you okay?” whispered Harvath.

DeWolfe nodded his head, slowly.

“Can you sit up on your own?” continued Scot as he disconnected the laser sight from beneath the barrel of his gun.

“Yeah.”

“All right. I’m going to give you my laser sight so you can draw this guy’s fire. Do you think you’re up to that?”

DeWolfe held out his hand for the device.

Harvath smiled. “Good. I figure he’s at about our two o’clock, so when I say ‘go’ I want you to raise that thing above the couch and start shining it over there like we’re to trying to pick him off, okay?”

“What are you going to?”

“I’m going to pick him off, what else? Ready?”

DeWolfe nodded his head.

“Go!” said Harvath as he rolled across the floor.

DeWolfe sat up and started pointing the laser sight as if he were aiming a gun of his own. The shooter went for the bait and immediately fired several rounds into the couch DeWolfe was using for cover.

The muffled spits were enough to give Harvath a lock on the shooter’s location. Harvath depressed the thumb switch of his SureFire and lit the guy up like an inmate going over the wall at San Quentin.

Just as Harvath suspected, his assailant was wearing night vision goggles, but what he hadn’t expected were the man’s superb instincts. Instead of being startled and turning into the beam from Harvath’s flashlight, the man shed his goggles, dropped to the ground and began firing.

Harvath had to roll hard and quick to get out of the line of fire. As he rolled, he got off a series of shots, one of which he was positive had made contact when he heard his opponent groan in pain.

“Gotcha,” coughed Harvath, as he found shelter behind a long bench covered with short metal spikes, the uses for which he couldn’t even begin to fathom.

Smoke was filling the room and it was becoming more difficult to breathe.The fire was getting closer. Harvath worried that if he and DeWolfe didn’t get back down to the second floor soon, they were going to have to find another way out. And with very little clue as to the layout of the building, Scot wasn’t exactly crazy about their chances.He had to do something, but what?