The First Commandment

Still, he asked his question again, and this time more specifically in Arabic. “The night you were freed from Guantanamo you boarded an airplane. Tell me about it.”

“Fuck you,” Najib replied in English. “I will tell you nothing.” His voice was even more unsettling in person.

The man was well over six feet tall and twice as wide as Harvath. His arms were enormous and he looked like one of those people who was naturally muscular and didn’t need to work out in a gym. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and a thin scar running beneath his chin from one ear to another, which Harvath figured he didn’t get from tying his neckties too tight.

All and all, Najib was a very nasty character and Harvath was glad to have gotten the jump on him. No matter how good a fighter you were, this was not somebody you would ever want to meet on an equal footing.

Harvath stepped to the table and withdrew a cordless drill from his duffel bag. He fitted it with a thick, Carbide-tipped masonry bit and gave the drill’s trigger a squeeze to make sure the bit rotated properly.

Next, Harvath took a gauze pad he had found in the nurse’s supply and coated it with Betadine antiseptic solution. Knowing that having an area prepped for injection was often more frightening to most people than the actual injection, Harvath bent and took his time in cleaning Najib’s right kneecap.

Harvath didn’t need to take the man’s pulse to know that his heart was racing. He had only to look at his throbbing carotid artery and the sweat forming on his forehead and upper lip to see that he was scared shitless.

But being scared didn’t mean he was going to cooperate. Harvath decided to give him one last chance. “Tell me about the plane. Who was on it with you?”

Najib focused his eyes on an object across the room and began reciting verses from the Koran. Harvath had his answer.

He shoved a gag in the man’s mouth to prevent his screams from being heard outside the apartment and then snugged his chair sideways up against the wall and pinned him there to keep him from flipping over once the pain began.

Harvath wrapped his arm around the inside of Najib’s thigh, placed the masonry bit at the side of his kneecap and squeezed the drill’s trigger.

The operative’s entire body went stiff. Tears welled in his eyes and as the fluted bit tore into his flesh he began to scream from behind his gag.

He writhed against his restraints, but the duct tape and Harvath’s weight pinning him to the wall allowed him little room to move, much less escape from the incredible pain he was experiencing.

Harvath continued, slowly. When he hit bone, the drill bit created a sickening cloud of smoke, which poured forth from the bloody entrance wound. Najib’s body juddered, every fiber in his being straining to escape the madman whose drill bit was laying waste to his knee.

Suddenly, there was a pop as Najib’s kneecap exploded in a mass of shattered bone and the man finally passed out from the pain.

Chapter 58

Harvath opened an ammonia inhalant and waved the pad beneath the man’s nose. In a matter of seconds, Najib was coughing and rearing his head.

Harvath held up a syringe and tried to get the operative to focus on it. “This is morphine,” he said. “All you have to do is talk to me and you can have all you want.”

His head spinning, Najib looked down and saw his knee swollen to twice its normal size. Averting his eyes, he then saw that his other knee had recently been swabbed with Betadine. It was too much. His head began to wobble as he once again started to pass out.

“Stay with me,” ordered Harvath as he grabbed Najib’s face and forced another ammonia inhalant pad under his nose.

The man’s head reared backward once more and he shook it back and forth to escape the fumes irritating the membranes of his nose and lungs.

Harvath knew that the fumes also triggered a reflex, causing the muscles that control breathing to work faster, and he waited a moment for the operative to catch his breath.

Holding up the syringe again he said, “It’s up to you.”

With pain etched across his battered, furious face, Najib slowly nodded, yes.

Harvath inserted the needle into the man’s thigh. He depressed the plunger, but stopped before all the drug had been injected. “When you tell me everything I want to know, I’ll give you the rest.”

He reached for the gag and added, “If you stall me or try to call out, I will go to work on your other knee. Then I will do your elbows and then I will move on to the individual vertebrae in your back and your neck. Are we clear?”

Najib nodded and Harvath removed the gag.

He fully expected some sort of tough guy pronouncement-a promise to hunt him and everyone he cared about to the ends of the earth or some such thing, but instead Najib surprised him. He stammered a question, “Is Al-Tal still alive?”

The question was all too human and Harvath didn’t like it, not one single bit. It made things difficult. It made them complicated.