Harvath had removed the man’s shoes and socks back in Karachi. The cold water was already covering the tops of his feet.
“What do you want from me?”
Harvath ignored him and held his mask up to the light to judge whether he had fully coated the inside.
“Answer me,” the Saudi demanded.
Picking up his tank, Harvath carefully slung it over his back and slowly adjusted the straps. Finally, he addressed his prisoner. “How long do you think you can hold your breath, Ahmad?”
Yaqub nervously looked around the narrow, cramped space. Despite the chilly temperature, he had begun to perspire.
The dry deck shelter hadn’t been Harvath’s first choice. What he had wanted to do was get onboard and drag Yaqub straight down to the torpedo room, stuff him in a tube, and flood that. The sensation would have been much more unnerving. The problem had been getting him past the Florida’s crew. There’d be too many witnesses, so the plan was nixed back in D.C. Whatever Harvath intended to do with Yaqub, it had to be done in the confines of the dry deck shelter.
That meant either threatening to drown him, or locking him in the forward hyperbaric chamber and keeping him there until his ears bled or his eyes popped out of his skull. One way or another, Yaqub was going to tell Harvath everything he wanted to know.
Each of the SEALs who were present had been read in on the prisoner and the imminent threat to the United States. Not only would they never reveal whatever Harvath was going to do, they’d help him with it. The President himself had pulled out all the stops. Harvath’s instructions had been perfectly clear—do whatever needed to be done to neutralize the threat. And that’s exactly what he would do.
He had no reservations about torturing a scumbag like Ahmad Yaqub if he had to. He had done it before.
While the politically correct crowd was against any form of coercion, Harvath appreciated its merits. The uninformed often confused enhanced interrogation techniques like loud music, sleep deprivation, and open-handed slaps with torture. Those weren’t torture. And they didn’t bring America down to the terrorists’ level.
What would bring America down to the terrorists’ level was if the United States had the same callous disregard for human life. Life was cheap in the eyes of the terrorists, not so for America. The United States revered human life and therefore would do everything it could to protect it. Using enhanced interrogation techniques, or even torture in some cases, demonstrated the high value America placed on the lives of its citizens.
People liked to talk about the Geneva and Hague conventions, but very few had read them. Not only were terrorists not signers to the conventions, but they also didn’t wear uniforms to identify themselves on the battlefield—a key provision. They hid in the general population, behind women and children, and therefore were not entitled to any of the Geneva and Hague protections.
In any other time in history, terrorists would have been shot on sight, not shipped off to some Caribbean island for religiously sensitive Halal meals including dates, honey, olive oil, and fresh-baked pita bread, along with access to lawyers, newspapers, unlimited DVDs, a library, and soccer games.
The terrorists had chosen to not only go to war with the U.S.A., but to keep that war going through attack after deadly attack. Their convoluted religious ideology was beyond reasoning with. It was impossible to convince them, facts be damned, that America had been the greatest force for good in the history of the world. They would slaughter innocent men, women, and children to impose their will on the entire world. As far as Harvath was concerned, America and its allies couldn’t kill these people fast enough.
• • •
The water in the DDS was now up to Yaqub’s knees. “If you had wanted to kill me,” the terrorist said, feigning bravado, “you would have done it in Karachi.”
Harvath thought he heard a slight tremor in the man’s voice, though it could have been from the cold.
“That’s right,” Harvath replied. “I don’t want to kill you. I want to watch you suffer and then I want to kill you.”
The expression on Yaqub’s face tensed. Just for a moment, before turning defiant again. It was a microexpression, something Harvath had been trained by the Secret Service to detect. It was a subconscious indicator given off by a subject when under stress. It normally meant the subject was lying or intending to do harm. It