Takedown

“Where is it? Where’s the fourth location?”

Morgan held up a diagram made by Lance Corporal Tecklin, and it made such perfect sense that Harvath almost couldn’t believe it.

Fifty-Nine

Abdul Ali watched as Sacha drew his Para-Ordnance 1911 pistol, affixed its silencer, and finished off his wounded comrade. They had done all they could to save him, but it was clear to everyone that Khasan wasn’t going to make it. He was slowing them down, and that made him a liability. As cold as the decision was, they had no choice. Their own survival necessitated the act. Just like the man who had been killed during the assault on Geneva Diamond, Khasan’s payment would be made to his family, including the bonus at the end of the job. Sacha would see to it personally.

Ali knew that the lead Chechen, as well as the rest of his men, held him responsible for this most recent death. Ali had almost walked into an ambush in Central Park and had brought whoever had orchestrated it out after them. The man on horseback had fired his first shot through the rear window of one of their Tahoes, hitting Khasan at the base of the throat. The man’s next shot had gone straight through the tailgate, killing the Chechens’ dog, Ivan, while the third shot had punched through the other side of the tailgate and missed by a matter of millimeters one of their men gunning from the backseat. As far as Ali was concerned, the first shot was all that mattered. The team was down two men now and still had two more locations to go.

With the rear window shattered and the back row of seats covered in Khasan’s blood, Ali decided they not only needed to get rid of both the bodies they were carrying, they needed to get rid of the damaged Tahoe as well. First, though, they needed to find a suitable vehicle as a replacement.

Nearby in the tony Lenox Hill neighborhood, Sacha saw what they were looking for. The all-black GMC Yukon Denali was as close to perfect as they were going to get. Three blocks later, they dumped the damaged Tahoe, the bodies of their two dead comrades, and the body of the woman from whom they’d just carjacked the Denali.

They drove south toward Midtown east and their next assault. With multiple breaching points some distance apart at this location, timing was going to be everything. Though Ali would have preferred to have been on one of the street-level breaching teams, he had no choice but to go with the team that would be coming up from underneath. Theirs was the most perilous trek, and it was also the most likely to encounter resistance from inquisitive police officers. If push came to shove, only Ali and his grasp of American English could help the subterranean team pull it off.

The Denali sped toward 50th while the intact Tahoe pulled up onto the sidewalk of 49th Street, and Ali’s team unloaded its equipment. Startled onlookers backed away as men in balaclavas and black tactical gear set up a utility company-style screen, sparked a Gentec portable acetylene torch, and began to cut through the sidewalk grating. Once the grating was pulled free, a high tinsel tripod complete with enormous rubber feet and a pulley and winch system was suspended above the opening, a rope was fed through, and Abdul Ali prepared to be the first one down.

The goal was to fast-rope in as quickly as possible. That all changed when only halfway down an MTA officer spotted Ali and reached for the radio mic clipped to his shoulder. With the laser sight of his MP5, Ali painted a red dot on the man’s chest and pulled the trigger, quieting any premature announcement of their arrival.

When Ali hit the ground, it took him several moments to pull the officer’s body from the platform and hide it beneath one of the nearby trains. Once he was done, he radioed for the rest of the men to hurry up.

Though rappelling in made much more sense than trying to gain access to the tracks by walking through the middle of Grand Central Terminal, Ali wasn’t going to feel safe until they had left this location far behind them. His sixth sense was speaking to him again, and he didn’t like what it was saying.

Once the rest of the team had joined him, Ali led the way across the tracks toward 50th Street and the Waldorf-Astoria’s secret railway platform. Built in the early 1930s, the platform provided VIP guests with their own private railway cars-a covert alternative to Penn Station or Grand Central Terminal. The platform had been used to gain access to the hotel by such notables as Generals Douglas MacArthur and John Pershing as well as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appreciated yet another feature of what became known among the cognoscenti as the Waldorf’s secret station.

In the middle of the platform was an enormous six-foot-wide freight elevator capable of transporting Roosevelt’s 6,000-pound, armor-plated Pierce Arrow from the Waldorf station up to a highly secure and cleverly hidden section of the hotel’s garage, which had its own private exit.