Blowback

Harvath felt sick and beyond angry with himself as the news sliced right through him. The whole reason they were here was to rescue Tokay, and they had failed. He had failed. He had allowed himself to get distracted from their primary objective, and because of it, two men had died and their mission was a failure. “You’re going to be okay, “He said as he pulled down a tapestry, folded it, and pressed it against Schroeder’s chest as a compression bandage. If Schroeder died, not only would Claudia never forgive him, but he’d never forgive himself. This hadn’t been Schroeder’s fight. He had come to help, and already one of his men was killed. Harvath owed it to him to make sure he and the rest of his team got out of there alive.

“What about Rayburn?” Harvath asked as he laid Schroeder’s arm over the tapestry. “What happened to him?”

“Gone. The minute the shooting started, he disappeared.”

“What about the remote? Did you try to detonate the device he was wearing?”

Schroeder shook his head. “By the time I knew what was happening, he was out of range. “Sliding the remote from his pocket, he handed it to Harvath and said, “Here. He’s all yours.”

As much as Harvath wanted to chase after Rayburn and Kalachka to make them pay for what they had done, he needed to get the parchments and folios scattered across the Aga Khan’s desk. There was no telling what they might be able to learn from them.

The first of Rayburn’s security forces were pouring through the door behind the Saint Nicholas statue at the end of the hallway when Harvath placed Schroeder’s hands over the tapestry and said, “You’re going to be okay, ”before dashing back inside the Aga Khan’s chambers.

SEVENTY-NINE

Harvath could feel the heat tightening the skin on his face as he ran into the room. It was impossible to see, and he had to make his way completely from memory.

Once he made it to the Aga Khan’s enormous wooden desk, he bent down beneath the level of the smoke, where he could see pieces of parchment and the pages from ancient manuscripts already starting to curl because of the heat. Opening the top three buttons of his Nomex shirt, he began stuffing it with whatever he could get his hands on.

As he shoved the remaining pages inside his shirt, the sides of the desk glowed a fluorescent orange and then burst into flames. Harvath leapt back as the wood from the burning desk began to snap and pop from the intense heat. At least, that’s what Harvath initially thought was happening.

When a bullet narrowly missed his shoulder and sent him stumbling backward, he suddenly realized it wasn’t the fire he’d been hearing. Raising the MP7 he had taken from Schroeder, he raked the entire room with gunfire and then dropped to the floor. As he ejected the spent magazine and inserted a fresh one, Harvath greedily took in enormous gasps of air.

“Sloppy work, asshole,” yelled Rayburn’s choked voice from somewhere within the wall of smoke and flames consuming the room.

Harvath was tempted to empty another magazine and spray the room with lead, but he restrained himself. He needed to stay in control. Fishing the remote detonation device from his pocket, Harvath powered it up and depressed the transmit switch again, but nothing happened. Rayburn had somehow deactivated it.

The heat in the room had Harvath close to passing out. He forced himself to think. If he were Rayburn, where would he be? He’d either be standing in the doorway where he could at least have some sort of reasonable air supply from the hall, or he’d be hugging the floor. If Rayburn was in the doorway, he’d make a decent target, but if he was hugging the floor, there could be any number of pieces of furniture standing between the two of them.

“Show yourself, motherfucker,” yelled the ex-Secret Service man, “and I promise I’ll kill you quick.”

Hearing the voice, Harvath ascertained that the man wasn’t standing in the doorway after all. He was crawling along the floor, and he was closing in.

Harvath had to bite his tongue to keep from responding. There were only about a million things he wanted to say, several of them quite clever, but if all they wound up doing was help Rayburn zero in on his position, he knew he was better off keeping his mouth shut.

It was a smoke-shrouded Mexican standoff. Neither knew exactly where the other was, but both had a somewhat vague idea. They could have played at it all day if the fire wasn’t sucking the last vestiges of air from the room and the flames weren’t on the verge of consuming them both. The heat had become so intense he needed to raise his arm to shield his face.