Then, the man moved his head. He had heard something off to his right. Harvath wondered if he had picked up the sound of Ashby’s portion of the team back in the trees.
“Just a raccoon,” Harvath said to himself. “Don’t get out of your chair.”
But somehow the man sensed there was something lurking out there in the darkness, and he not only got out of his chair, he called it in on his radio. Shit.
Harvath watched as the man made a beeline right for where Ashby and her part of the assault team were dug in.
Congo, D.C., even the Blue Ridge Mountains — Murphy was everywhere.
As Harvath continued to watch, he willed the man to break it off, to pick up the radio and tell his colleagues that it was nothing.
Any hope of that happening, though, was dashed when the man neared the trees and definitely saw the operators beyond. His weapon came up so fast, Harvath barely had time to react. But he didn’t need to. Ashby was ready for him and drilled a silenced round right through the guard’s head.
Harvath leapt to his feet and gave the command to hit the house.
As the men appeared out of the woods like wraiths, Harvath had several meters’ head start.
When one of the guards came around the back of the house, Harvath turned, fired, and dropped him.
There were muffled spits off to Harvath’s right as Palmer took out another guard who had come to investigate. That was three down. Based on what Helena had told Mordechai, there were likely at least three more guards, plus Damien and his assistant cum valet, Jeffery.
Reaching the rear of the house, Harvath approached the sliding glass door. He gave the handle a tug, and it slid back. From further inside, he heard an alarm panel chime. Murphy.
He stepped over the threshold into a family room area. The house smelled musty and unused. There was the odor of stale coffee and a hint of a long-dead creature, probably a mouse, rotting somewhere behind one of the walls.
Harvath wanted Damien, and he moved quickly toward where he thought he would be. At the end of the hall was a door that looked like it belonged to a master bedroom. He headed right for it, stopping only to check two closets and a small powder room.
The carpeted floor creaked in spots beneath his boots. Pulling up short just before the door, he positioned himself off to the side and listened. He didn’t hear anything and so reached for the handle.
But before he grabbed it, the door opened from the other side, and he was nose-to-nose with one of Damien’s men.
Jamming his suppressor under the man’s chin, he fired. The man, dressed only in his underwear and likely on his way to the bathroom, fell to the floor dead with half his head missing.
A second man who had been asleep now scrambled for his weapon. Harvath shot him too and exited the room.
Palmer and Ashby were making their way down the hallway toward him, and Harvath waved them off. Crossing back toward the kitchen, he located a staircase, and signaled for them to follow him upstairs.
The stairs creaked worse than the hallway floor. Undeterred, he kept moving.
When he reached the top, there was a door immediately to his right. Reaching for the knob, he twisted it, and pushed the door open. It was a small office of some sort stacked with Pelican Cases and electronic equipment. Standing back, he sent Palmer in to clear it.
Moving down a narrow hallway, the next door he encountered was on his left and opened onto a small walk-in closet. There were only two rooms left. One of them was bound to have Damien.
Pushing open the door to the first room, he could see that it was a guest room of some sort, and that the bed had been slept in. He was about to signal Ashby when suddenly his entire field of vision was obscured.
The man must have been pressed against the wall and had leapt out the minute he saw the door open. All Harvath could do was react. The man was literally on top of him. He couldn’t get his weapon into a good enough angle to shoot, and so he snapped his head forward, driving his night vision goggles into his assailant’s face.
The man staggered backward, blood pouring down his face. Instead of surrendering, though, he charged again. This time, Harvath had enough distance and dropped him with two shots to his head. That left one final door.
Harvath crossed over to it and listened. There was no sound. But there hadn’t been in his other two encounters either.
Signaling the team, he twisted the doorknob. It was locked. Taking a step back, he kicked it open, and they poured in.
Like the other room, the bed was unmade, but there was no sign of its recent occupant. As Ashby quickly checked beneath it, Palmer checked the closet, and Harvath crossed to the bathroom.
It was secured by a sliding pocket door that hadn’t been closed all the way. Through the crack, Harvath could see the man identified as Jeffery, Damien’s valet, putting a shotgun in his mouth.
He took a step back and fired five shots in rapid succession through the door.
The valet screamed in agony as he dropped the shotgun onto the bathroom floor.
Harvath ripped open the door and kicked the weapon out of the way. This guy wasn’t going to get the luxury of taking the coward’s way out and committing suicide. All of his shots had been below the waist, including the valet’s groin.
Leaning over he placed the hot suppressor against the wound, and the valet screamed even louder.
“That was from Helena,” Harvath said. “Now tell me where Damien is.”
CHAPTER 54
Harvath jumped from the ramp of a C-17 Globemaster transport plane, popped his chute, and glided through the warm night air toward the crystalline water below.
Undoing his chest strap and belly-band, he splashed down thirty-two nautical miles north-northwest of Nassau. As soon as his feet touched the water, he disconnected his leg straps and swam free of the main lift webs, leaving his rig to slowly sink. With his dry-bag bobbing in front of him, he paddled toward Pierre Damien’s tropical two-hundred-fifty-acre Bahamian refuge.
Francis Francis — a British sportsman and heir to the Standard Oil fortune — had originally developed the private island in the 1940s. In addition to being an incredible amateur golfer and a member of both the English track and fencing teams, he had also been a renowned aviator who helped develop the ejector seat.
The island had played host to the rich and powerful of its day. Among Francis’s many notable guests were Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Noël Coward, Rock Hudson, David Niven, the Duke of Windsor, and even King Leopold III of Belgium.
It was a tradition of hospitality that Pierre Damien had largely eschewed, preferring instead to keep his ownership of the island secret. Even the Mossad had been unaware of it.
Jeffery had given up its existence, but not without extreme coercion. There was something off about him. Though he had been in great pain as Harvath had interrogated him, he had seemed to enjoy parts of it. The man had problems, lots of them.
Those problems, though, created a psychological makeup that had complimented Damien’s. Renfield-like, Jeffery was devoted both to him, and to his ultimate objective. They were a match made in hell.
Jeffery had not only conducted the torture of Helena, but had led her gang rape once Damien had fled. Like his employer, he was beyond evil.
He had been left behind at the Virginia redoubt to handle communications and to carry out any of Damien’s dirty work should Linda Landon or any of the others fail to carry out their responsibilities. The men Harvath had encountered and killed at Clifton had been in the process of assembling supplies to augment what was already at the fallback location.