at the same time had a bad feeling that they were all going to be pushed to their limits and would need every last ounce of mental and physical toughness before this operation was over. What they had come to the DPRK to do would be almost, if not completely, impossible to achieve.
CHAPTER 3
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KARACHI, PAKISTAN
Scot Harvath caught sight of himself as he checked the truck’s side mirror. He was wearing the traditional shalwar kameez—baggy, pajamalike trousers with a long cotton tunic. His skin was tan from having spent the summer outside. He had sharp blue eyes, short sandy brown hair, and was in better shape than most men half his age. He needed a shower and shave, but for a former Navy SEAL in his early forties, he looked pretty good.
Sitting next to him, driving their white Toyota SUV, was twenty-eight-year-old Chase Palmer. Eight years ago, he had been the youngest soldier ever admitted to Delta Force, or the “Unit” as members referred to it. His hair was lighter than Harvath’s, but their appearances were so similar they could have been taken for brothers.
Cradling an H&K MP7 submachine gun in the backseat beneath her burka was twenty-five-year-old Sloane Ashby. In her short military career, she had racked up more confirmed kills than any other female soldier, and most of the men. With her high cheekbones, smoky gray eyes, and blonde hair she looked more like a college calendar coed than a “kick in the door and shoot bad guys in the face” operator.
Harvath moved his eyes back to the taillights several car lengths ahead. The night was alive, electric. Motorbikes buzzed in and out of traffic. Trucks clogged the streets. Between the curtains of diesel exhaust, he could smell the ocean. They were getting close. Activating his radio, he said, “Look sharp, everyone.”
With over twenty-three million inhabitants, Karachi was the third-largest city in the world and Pakistan’s most heavily populated. It was an easy place to hide. Staying hidden, though, thought Harvath, required discipline. It meant not going to your favorite restaurant just because it was your last night in town. But that’s exactly what Ahmad Yaqub had planned.
There had been debate over where to grab Yaqub. Should they do it in Karachi while he was under the protection of the ISI—Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency—or should they wait until he returned to his stronghold in Waziristan?
The Secretary of State wanted to wait. He wanted to pay a rival faction in the lawless border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan to snatch him so there’d be no American fingerprints on the job. Hitting an ISI motorcade in Karachi was asking for trouble. A lot of it. The clock, though, was ticking.
Yaqub was an Al Qaeda–linked Saudi who had traveled to Afghanistan for the jihad and had married into a powerful Waziristan clan. From his mountain compound, he helped fund and coordinate terror operations against corrupt Pakistani and Afghan politicians, as well as anyone else seen as enemies of Islam and the Taliban.
His greatest coup had been the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi. She was the American-backed “puppet” who had been predicted to win the election and become president of Pakistan. She had made no secret of the direction she would take the country and how she intended to crush the Taliban.
Yaqub knew there would be an investigation into her death and had left just enough clues to confuse everyone. Some believed a rival political faction had ordered her death. Some blamed the Taliban. Some swore it had come from deep within the ISI, whose continued hold on power was dependent upon chaos reigning throughout the region. Where these clues didn’t lead, though, was back to Ahmad Yaqub. Or so he had thought.
But people in Waziristan talked, especially when money was involved. The Taliban often lamented that cash was the greatest weapon the Americans brought to the battlefield. Money frightened them more than the drones that killed without warning. American dollars were like a cold wind in winter. No matter how well constructed your house, the wind could always find a way inside. And a particular gust of American dollars had done just that.
The U.S. had made the apprehension of Ahmad Yaqub a top priority. They had moved heaven and earth to compile as much information on him as quickly as possible. The best intelligence on Yaqub had come from a private intelligence agency run by an ex–CIA spymaster named Reed Carlton.