The Lions Of Lucerne

Reaching a schedule board near the ticket window, Scot saw that there was a train leaving soon that would get into Interlaken at 12:20.

He paid the equivalent of fifty dollars in Swiss francs and bought a second-class ticket. On the platform, he noticed a group of students and casually made his way over to them, trying to blend in. The train arrived exactly on time, and Scot boarded with them. He placed his bag, which he had converted to a backpack, on the overhead rack and sat as close to the students as possible. The train made a couple of stops within and around Zurich, then began to pick up speed as it traveled out into the countryside. Once the conductor had passed through the car and checked on people’s tickets, Scot leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

It would take about two and a half hours to cover the 239 kilometers between Zurich and Interlaken, and by the time he arrived, he hoped to have made some sense out of the last four days.

Starting at the begi

Shaw had admitted that Harvath had been at his house, but denied the true reason he was there, what he did, and what they discussed. So Shaw was unquestionably covering for Senator Snyder and the two were definitely in bed together, but why? How could Shaw, a career Secret Service man, be involved with something that resulted in the deaths of so many of his own men? What was the reason? That was where it started to break down for Scot.

Why would they frame him and then turn around and try to kill him? Whoever had knocked him out in his apartment could easily have finished the job as he lay unconscious on his kitchen floor. Why not kill him right then and there? Why the cat-and-mouse game? Unless framing him would take the heat off them, and he had spoiled their plans by refusing to allow himself to be captured. How was Senator Rolander co

As Scot tried to make the pieces fit together, other images and fragments flooded his mind that didn’t seem to have a place in the puzzle. He felt his headache increase in intensity and decided to leave alone what he didn’t know for the time being and focus on what he did know and why he was here.

From the outset, Harvath had never believed the kidnapping could have been conducted by Middle Easterners. Call it an ingrained bigotry he had picked up in the SEALs or a healthy understanding of what Mideast terrorist groups were and were not capable of, but an operation of this nature, carried out in snow, just couldn’t have been pulled off by any group from the Mideast. Harvath had discounted the lone body found with a Skorpion as a red herring from the begi

If Middle Easterners hadn’t actually pulled off the job, could they have financed it? Yes, that was definitely a possibility, but Harvath had an even harder time believing that men like Bill Shaw and even Senator Snyder would sell their country out to foreigners. That didn’t fit.

Scot’s head began to throb as his mind drifted, and he struggled to again bring it back and concentrate on what he knew.

His gut told him that the people who pulled off the attack and kidnapping worked very well in snow and had a lot of experience. They had access to explosives to trigger the avalanche, money and international contacts to purchase the jammer, and came up with incredible tactical advantages that allowed them to wipe out the president’s protective detail and get away leaving almost no trace at all.

Almost no trace were the key words. They had left traces at the Mormon farmhouse. There had been cigarette smoke and that piece of Swiss chocolate. He had seen mousetraps in the kitchen and in one of the bathrooms, so Harvath knew the chocolate couldn’t have been there long. It had to have been dropped by whoever was watching the house, waiting for the rest of the kidnappers to return. Then there was the e-mail from Nestlé that said the chocolate was sold only in Switzerland. Had one of the kidnappers bought it on a layover on a flight from somewhere in Sand Land? Not likely. It wasn’t until he read the note and saw the Interlaken post office box address in the manila envelope Martin had led him to that his hunch about Switzerland began to seem like such a good possibility.

As the train gently rocked back and forth along the tracks, Scot glanced out the window at the majestic, snow-covered Swiss mountains. A Swiss railway magazine hung from a small hook above the seat opposite him with a title in German and English: “The Eiger…Only for the Foolish?” Scot took down the magazine and began to skim the article. It talked about one of the country’s most daunting peaks and the attempts by teams from all over the world to conquer it.

As his eyes drifted from the photos in the glossy magazine to the Swiss countryside speeding past his window, he was positive his instincts were correct. Whoever arranged to kidnap the president had put together an incredible team of soldier mountaineers. Germany, France, Italy, and Austria could also boast men potentially up to the task, but it was the smattering of clues, hints really, that narrowed Harvath’s gut feeling down to Switzerland.

Scot still had the same question that every law enforcement officer in America had. Cui bono? It was Latin for “Who benefits?” Who would benefit from kidnapping the president? The possibilities were endless. Although all the communications received by Washington since the kidnapping seemed to point to the Fatah, Scot made up his mind to leave the Cui bono? question to the FBI and everybody back home.

Right now who benefits was not as important as who took him and where is he? Harvath had learned a long time ago to go with his gut. Everything that had happened, everything he had seen and felt, told him the men responsible for taking the president were from here. And as sure as he knew that, Scot also knew that he would bring the president back and bring him back alive, no matter how long it took to find him.

47

The hardest thing to get used to had been the smell-the godawful smell-that and the intolerable, intermittent wailing of people being called to worship over scratchy public address systems. Then there was the sand. It was everywhere-in his clothes, in his hair, even in his food. There didn’t seem to be a single crack or crevice in the president’s cell that the sand hadn’t made its way into. He had heard that about the desert. It would eventually overtake anything, even if it took thousands of years to do it. The sand reminded him of when he and his late wife had visited Egypt and the Pyramids many years ago. He wondered where in the world he was now.

He knew he was someplace hot. At times unbearably hot, and very dry. The calls to worship meant that he was close to an Islamic population-maybe a town, a village, or even a city of some sort. His cell had no windows, so he had no idea if it was day or night. Only the deliveries of terrible-tasting food through a sliding grate at the bottom of the cell door interrupted his isolation.

The floor was covered with straw. There was a bed with a thin mattress against one wall and a Turkish toilet in the corner-which was nothing more than a hole in the floor with two stone footrests to stand on. At first, he thought the terrible stench was wafting up from the toilet, but gradually he realized it was coming from outside and was being carried in by the ventilation system of his cell. He tried to memorize every detail, as he knew there would be a very extensive debriefing once he returned home. If I return home, he thought.