Blowback

Alomari trained in bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan and then was sent away for further schooling with Pakistan ’s infamous Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence in Islamabad. There, the young man learned the fine arts of prisoner interrogation, blackmail, and assassination. He saw bin Laden only once more after that, just before the al-Qaeda leader had been forced to hide in one of his many mountain strongholds along the Pakistani-Afghan border. Alomari had been in the same room with bin Laden, celebrating the success of the September 11 attacks, when the famous video of his mentor was made, but unlike the other men present, Alomari had been smart enough to move behind the cameraman when the filming started. Not only did the footage prove bin Laden’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks, but it was also used as a who’s who of many of al-Qaeda’s i

Now, Harvath desperately tried to wrestle the gun out of Alomari’s hand, but the man was amazingly strong. The terrorist let loose with a left hook, and Harvath lurched to the side, the blow glancing painfully off his shoulder. Harvath answered with a swift knee to Alomari’s groin, which caused the man to drop the gun and also to lose his balance. Grabbing the American operative by the shoulders, Alomari took Harvath down along with him.

Before Harvath could right himself, Alomari swung an elbow and caught him right in the mouth. As he tried to recover, he could sense Alomari crawling away from him, and his only thought was that the terrorist was going for his gun.

Harvath’s mind was in overdrive. He’d lost his H amp;K MP7 in the begi

Reaching for his Beretta PX4 Storm pistol, Harvath drew the.40-caliber from his holster and rolled to his left. Raising the weapon, he pointed it in the direction he had last seen Alomari, but there was no one there. Quickly, Harvath spun 180 degrees. Rising to one knee, he swept the rest of the room, but Alomari was gone. There was only one way he could have escaped, and Harvath had no choice but to go after him.

The Iraqi midday sun was blinding. It took several moments for Harvath’s eyes to adjust and to make out the figure of Khalid Alomari, ru

Sprinting full out in combat boots and desert camo fatigues wasn’t exactly an easy feat. He would have preferred the shorts, T-shirt, and Nikes he ran along the Potomac in back home. However, combat boots and desert camo were what the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) Direct Action Team in Iraq wore, and that was what he had been issued for their coordinated takedown of Alomari. But the coordination had fallen apart.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault in particular. Harvath had been forced to make a command decision, and that’s exactly what he had done. When the timetable had shifted and the team couldn’t get in place fast enough, Harvath, right or wrong, had decided to go it alone. If he didn’t catch Khalid by the time the terrorist reached the large open-air bazaar two intersections up, he knew he would end up losing him yet again. And if that happened, Harvath was going to be in even more trouble than he was now. If only he’d been authorized to kill this animal, he could probably take him out from this distance with his Beretta, but that’s not what his orders were.

Harvath was very close to being SOL yet again, and he knew it. Trying to put everything out of his mind, he drew upon what little reserves he had remaining and ran even faster. Already up ahead, he could see the tented stalls of the large open-air market.

When Alomari entered the souk, Harvath was less than fifteen feet behind him. The assassin ran down one of the many narrow aisles, up-ending tables and pulling down anything he could behind him to slow Harvath’s pursuit. No matter what he tried, none of it worked. Harvath leapt over everything and soon had the gap narrowed to within ten feet.

Harvath wanted to put a bullet in Khalid Alomari more than anything he had ever wanted before, but when he got within five feet, he opted for a brutal tackle that took the terrorist’s legs out from under him and slammed his face into the pavement. The perfectly executed maneuver would certainly have earned Harvath a starting position in the defensive backfield of his alma mater, the University of Southern California.

Immediately, the terrorist began to resist, which was exactly what Harvath had hoped he’d do. He landed a quick series of rabbit punches to his kidneys, causing the man to scream in pain. When Alomari then tried to get up, Harvath mule-punched him in the back of the head and then got a good grip of his dusty kaffiyeh and bounced the man’s face off the pavement three more times.

For some insane reason, the terrorist still hadn’t had enough and once again reached his hand beneath his robes. Harvath didn’t wait to see what sort of trick Alomari had up his sleeve this time. In one clean move, Harvath pulled the man’s hand out from underneath the folds of his robes and broke his arm. Alomari began screaming even louder.

“That was for Cairo, asshole,” said Harvath as he reached into the back pocket of his fatigues for three pairs of flexicuffs. “And this, “He continued as he hog-tied the international assassin in the most excruciatingly painful and humiliating ma

Now that it was all over, Harvath expected a string of invectives in Arabic, English, or both, but instead, Khalid Alomari-Osama bin Laden’s number one hit man-began to cry.

Harvath couldn’t believe his ears. Usually, these assholes were all the same-indignant, self-righteous zealots. They hurled curses at you and your country right up until the moment you put a bullet in them or slammed the cell door shut in their face, but not Alomari. Something was wrong, and it wasn’t until Harvath rolled the terrorist over that he realized what it was. The man he had chased for three full blocks and beaten almost unconscious was not Khalid Alomari at all. Somehow, a switch had been pulled.

Just when Harvath thought things couldn’t get any worse, he looked up into the faces of the crowd surrounding them and then locked onto something really bad-an al-Jazeera camera team who had caught the whole thing on tape.