Takedown

Studying the floor, Herrington and Harvath soon discovered the true route by which the terrorists had exited the corridor.

Once Tracy gave them the thumbs-up indicating that the door wasn’t rigged, they slowly made their way down the stairs, keeping their eyes open for booby traps the entire time.

Despite Harvath’s discovery, McGahan’s two ESU officers opted to tackle the window. They were going with their guts and Harvath couldn’t blame them, though his gut told him it was a dead end. The real trail was the one he and his team were following right now down an old metal staircase.

As they descended, the brick walls on either side grew slick with moisture. The air was dank and moldy. A series of bare lightbulbs lit their way down until finally, at the bottom, they encountered a large iron door marked Utility Tunnel Access. Keep Out. Authorized Personnel Only.

Cates, who was bringing up the rear, smiled and raising his weapon, said, “I brought my authorization.”

“Shut up, Rick,” replied Tracy. She didn’t like what she was seeing. The fact that the door had been left ajar put her on edge. It was almost too inviting.

Harvath, though, doubted that it was rigged. Whoever had gone through the trouble of breaking the window upstairs hadn’t expected to be followed-at least not right away.

Once Tracy finished checking the door over and gave the okay, the team filed though.

Rusting pipes of varying sizes lined the fetid walls, while water dripping from the ceiling created a patchwork of stagnant puddles along the floor. Even their breathing seemed to send echoes bouncing off in all directions, and as they made their way forward, Harvath, Hastings, Cates, and Herrington took great pains not to make any unnecessary noise.

The tunnel curved to the right and then intersected with another. The light wasn’t very good;even so, when Harvath looked into the new tunnel, he could see movement way down at the other end.

Holding his hand up in a fist, he froze his team in place. Tunnels were very bad places to get into gunfights. The walls had a very nasty habit of funneling rounds right at you. Turning, he used hand signals to let the others know what he was looking at.

Herrington queried him on range and Harvath relayed what he thought the distance was.

Raising one of the M16 Vipers they’d taken from the Geneva Diamond location, Bob indicated what he wanted to do. Nodding his assent, Harvath peered back around the corner just in time to see the terrorists disappear from view.

Eighty-Three

Abdul Ali had no idea where the access door led. He knew only that this was the one they needed to take. Whether it was precognition, a gut instinct, or divine intervention he had no idea, but an overwhelming sense of urgency had overtaken him and it told him to get out of the tunnels as quickly as possible. He sometimes wondered if it was Allah Himself speaking to him. It made no difference where it came from. When the voice spoke to him, he did what it said, and he knew that was one of the reasons he had lived as long as he had.

Crashing through two more doors the team found a set of stairs and followed them up into a large commercial laundry area. From the uniforms of the startled staff as well as the stenciled letters across the large canvas carts, the team realized that they had stumbled into the bowels of the Doubletree Metropolitan Hotel.

One of the Chechens raised his weapon as if he was going to fire, but Sacha quickly pushed it back down and shook his head no. They hadn’t been hired to kill civilians. That was what the Arabs did, not them. It was a pointless waste of ammunition and would draw too much attention.

Ali waved the team forward and they threaded through the carts and stacks of laundry to a small corridor and a bank of elevators at the end. As he pressed the button, Sacha withdrew his map of New York and tried to figure out where they were.

“ Lexington and Fifty-first,” he said as a set of elevator doors opened and they filed in.

Ali did the calculation in his head and replied, “About five blocks from the final target.”

As Sacha was not the leader of this operation, he simply raised his eyebrows in response as if to say How should we proceed?

His index finger hovering in front of the elevator buttons, Ali tried to decide the best course of action. They had never planned on losing their vehicles. Their dangerous carjacking attempt in front of the Waldorf had almost cost them their lives, but might be worth trying again. Confident that he would come up with something, he pressed the button for the lobby level and stated, “Allah shall provide.”

Little did he know that what Allah chose to provide were four very well armed and extremely dangerous American Special Operations personnel.

Eighty-Four

Bursting into the laundry area, Harvath and the rest of the team swung their weapons from side to side but saw no trace of the terrorists save for a few barely detectable wet footprints they had tracked in with them.