Hidden Order: A Thriller

He tried several things, finally settling on an image of Natalie. From there his mind drifted to other things and ten minutes later he fell into a deep, dark sleep.

CHAPTER 5

When Harvath awoke, it was once again to a mental picture of Natalie. Perhaps it was because she was gently knocking on his door. With only one stop for refueling, they had made the entire trip in less than ten hours.

After dressing, Harvath availed himself of the courtesy vanity kit in the lav to brush his teeth and clean up. When he stepped out, Natalie had a meal ready for him. He was able to get through only half of it before the pilot a

He grabbed a couple more bites and then thanked Natalie as she cleared everything away. Looking out the window, he was surprised to see the sun almost in the same place as when they had left Kenya. It was amazing how traveling backward across time zones, especially in such a fast aircraft, could make it seem like the day had stood absolutely still.

Equally amazing was the fact that they were landing at Reagan National Airport and not Dulles International. The only international corporate jet flights allowed to land at Reagan were those originating at foreign airports with U.S. Customs and Border Protection preclearance facilities. Mombasa definitely didn’t qualify. Whoever had arranged this flight had a lot of pull somewhere.

Once they had landed and the plane had taxied to a stop, the crew assembled at the door to say goodbye to their passenger. As Harvath thanked them, the copilot handed him a small gift box. “A souvenir from your flight,” he said.

Looking inside, Harvath found a detailed display model of the Aerion SBJ, right down to this aircraft’s signature paint job. “Thank you,” he replied.

“And you won’t want to forget this,” Natalie added, handing him the vanity kit from the lav.

Unlike his mother, as well as many of the women he had dated, Harvath wasn’t a “travel size” guy. He didn’t keep hotel soaps or shampoos, nor did he keep the complimentary vanity kits when traveling first class. That said, he didn’t want to hurt Natalie’s feelings and so accepted the kit with a smile and a thank-you. He could toss it once he was off the plane.

After he’d cleared customs and passport control, a courtesy vehicle picked him up for the short drive over to Signature Flight Support. It was a “Fixed Base Operator” facility where he’d have a chance to clean up before one of his Carlton Group colleagues drove him into D.C. for his meeting with the Old Man.

As he arrived at the FBO, he saw that it was one of Carlton’s protégés, Sloane Ashby, who had been sent there to pick him up.

Leaning against her car, with her high cheekbones, smoky gray eyes, and hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like the country club wife of some handsome young banker. It would be a mistake, though, to judge this book by its cover.

Sloane was not only brilliant, having graduated at the top of her class from Northwestern University with a dual major in math and chemistry; she was also highly skilled as a winter athlete, having competed in both figure skating and snowboarding. She was also one hell of an operator.

As a former member of the U.S. Freestyle Ski Team, Harvath told his colleagues that what he liked most about her was her prowess in winter sports, but none of them believed him. They all assumed that what he “liked” about her was that she was hot. In other words, even people trained to know better still fell prey to the mistake of judging her solely by what they saw on the surface.

Carlton, on the other hand, had very different reasons for liking her. In addition to admiring her academic and athletic abilities, he respected her because, despite her family’s ability to cover all of her college expenses, she had insisted on paying her own way and had rocketed through the ROTC program. She had signed up insisting that she be promised combat duty. She went on to complete two tours in Afghanistan, killing more enemy combatants than all the women in the theater combined (not to mention many of the men). But when some glossy magazine ran an unauthorized cover story on her, it placed a huge bull’s-eye on her back and brought her combat career to a screeching halt.

The Taliban and Al-Qaeda were both offering big rewards for her head on a pike and the Department of Defense had no other choice but to deny her request for a third tour. Without missing a beat, and as bold as brass, she requested to be sent immediately to Iraq before all the action ended there. She was turned down, though, once again.

She ended up being detailed to North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, where she worked with the all-female Delta detachment known as the Athena Project. Despite her young age, she was an excellent instructor. Everyone knew, though, that her heart and her talent lay in being an operator. She was quite vocal about the fact that if it weren’t for the Islamic bounty on her head and the subsequent PR nightmare her capture or killing would cause, she’d still be out whacking and stacking Muslim terrorists like cordwood. Neither political correctness, nor empathy for the risk aversion of her commanders, was part of her DNA.

Because of that, the United States Army had a love/hate relationship with Sloane Ashby. They loved the fact that they could push a super-attractive, athletic, young American woman as an Army success story, but they hated that she repeatedly suggested, in public, that the Army had no balls and was caving to the terrorists by not letting her return to the fight.

She was definitely a headache for the Department of Defense, but there were many other people in D.C. who absolutely loved her. To the chagrin of her superiors, Ashby was invited to lots of powerful, insider cocktail parties where she freely spoke her mind. It was at one such party where she had met Reed Carlton.

They chatted for over an hour about world events, politics, and the military. The next day they then met for a three-hour lunch. By the end of the month, the Old Man had worked his magic. Ashby was honorably discharged from the military and forty-eight hours later she had been hired on at the Carlton Group.

Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have been relegated to doing airport pickups, but these weren’t normal circumstances for the organization and everyone was chipping in. While she did have a hard-charging style, she was still a team player.

“Hey, old man,” she said as Harvath stepped out of the courtesy vehicle.

Old man? He might have been in his forties, but he was nowhere near “old,” especially when all of them worked for a literal “old” man like Reed Carlton. That said, she never missed a chance to needle him. He didn’t see himself as old at all and it grated on him when she called him that.

“I brought you something from Africa,” he said without missing a beat.

Suddenly, Ashby softened. “Really?” she asked with an almost childlike naïveté. “What is it?”

“This,” Harvath replied, holding up his middle finger.

Ashby laughed. There wasn’t even a hint of anger. She could admire a good joke, even one at her own expense and she never let it dent her ego. She was good at rolling with the punches.

She was also good at sizing up people and situations. It was scary both in how bright she was and how rapidly she could analyze something and figure out what was going on. Harvath hated to admit it, but she was probably much smarter and quicker than he had ever been.

“At least you have something to hang this on,” Sloane said, reaching through the window of her car and pulling out a garment bag.

Harvath walked over to her. “Where’d that come from?”