neutralized. Raising his pistol, he slipped out from behind the container.
The fuselage was difficult to traverse. It was on its side and strewn with debris. There were sharp, jagged pieces of metal everywhere.
As he picked his way through, he kept his eyes peeled for survivors, as well as warm pieces of clothing. He found neither.
At the front of the tail section, he had to step outside to get to the next portion of the plane. Carefully, he leaped down onto the ground.
Immediately, he was hit with a blast of razor-sharp snow. It was driven by one of the coldest, bitterest winds he had ever felt.
As the crystals raked his exposed skin, he knew he would have only minutes in this temperature—five tops—before numbness would commence and the cold would begin to overtake him.
In the fading light, the crash wreckage was scattered as far as the eye could see. It looked to Harvath as if they were in the middle of a snow-covered field, surrounded by forest. He could make out where the plane had torn through the trees. A long scar of burning debris and snapped pines led back into the woods.
Hip-deep in the snow, he crossed to the next section of fuselage and climbed inside. Because this section faced upwind, the freezing air blew through with a vengeance.
With the spare magazine clenched between his teeth, he held the flashlight away from his body in case anyone saw the beam and wanted to take a shot at him. A few moments later, he found another Spetsnaz operative.
The motionless man was still strapped into his seat. His head hung at an obscene angle, his neck probably broken. Harvath grabbed him by the hair and lifted up his head so he could look into his face.
He didn’t know the soldiers’ names. They had only used call signs around him—words in Russian he didn’t understand. What he did understand, though, was what they had done.
After handcuffing him at the house on Governors Island, this Spetsnaz operative had delivered a searing blow to his kidney. Harvath’s knees had buckled. No sooner had he hit the floor than the Russian had grabbed a fistful of hair. Yanking his head up, he had forced him to watch as Josef had murdered Lara, Lydia, Reed, and the Navy Corpsman.
Harvath had thought they were going to kill him, too. And for a moment, he had wanted to die—right there with Lara, whom he loved more than anything in the world. But then he had been jabbed with a needle and everything went black.
When they brought him back around, it was obvious that he had been moved. They were in a dank, cold basement someplace. He didn’t know where, or how long he had been out.
He had a splitting headache, his clothes had been removed, and he had been tied to a chair. A video camera had been set up. Half an hour later, Josef had come down the stairs and the interrogation had begun.
Whenever he hesitated, whenever he refused to answer a question, it was the man with the broken neck who had struck him. In the beginning, Josef was playing good cop; trying to build rapport. It wasn’t until they boarded a private jet that things had gotten really ugly.
Letting the dead man’s head drop, Harvath placed his fingers against his neck, just in case there was a pulse. There wasn’t. “You got off easy,” he said, sizing up the Russian.
The other two soldiers had been monsters—barrel-chested thugs, well over six feet tall. This one was closer to his height and build of a muscular five feet ten.
Wearing nothing but scrubs and the equivalent of prison slippers, Harvath had already begun shaking from the cold. He needed to conserve whatever heat he had left and quickly stripped off the Russian’s uniform.
Snatching an American, especially one of Harvath’s stature, was an act of war—particularly when carried out on U.S. soil. It would have been a completely black operation.
If Harvath had to guess, everything they needed—civilian clothing, fake IDs, credit cards, even weapons—had been arranged via Russian mafia contacts in the United States.
Once the private jet had touched down, the soldiers had changed out of their American street clothes and into cold-weather military uniforms. The man with the broken neck was wearing long underwear, wool socks—the works. Harvath took all of it.
The only thing the Spetsnaz operative wasn’t wearing was a coat. They had boarded with them, though, so there had to be at least one somewhere.