VIRGINIA

MONDAY MORNING

THIRTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER

Harvath changed into shorts, grabbed two six-packs from the fridge, and walked down to his dock. He had wanted to get good and drunk in Iraq, but there hadn’t been time. He had to debrief and clean up a bunch of loose ends before flying home. Now, he had all the time he wanted.

The dock’s wooden planks were hot beneath his feet. Without the throng of weekend boaters, the Potomac was quiet. A light breeze stirred the surface of the water. It was good to be home.

In addition to tying one on, what he needed to do was put the things he’d seen and heard-things he’d known from the outset he’d probably not be able to forget-in an iron box and bury it as deep as possible in one of the farthest corners of his mind. The practice was unhealthy, but he didn’t care. It was the only way he could do his job.

Sitting down at the end of the dock, Harvath leaned against one of the pier posts, opened his first beer, and tipped it back.

His fiancée, Tracy, was up at her grandfather’s cottage in Maine, and he was grateful for the solitude. He didn’t want to see her right away. He needed to decompress and come back to reality. Or at least what he liked to call reality; that world beyond kicking in doors and shooting Islamic fanatics in the face.

The biggest reason he needed time, though, was that he knew he couldn’t talk to Tracy about what he had seen. Children had become one of those topics that they no longer discussed.

Harvath closed his eyes and lifted his face toward the sun. He had given up trying to change her mind. Because of the persistent headaches she suffered, she said she couldn’t even consider becoming a mother. At the same time, she knew that he wanted a family and she had tried to convince him to start over again with someone else. But he wouldn’t leave her, no matter how many times she worked to push him away.

She had been the victim of a vendetta launched by a sick terrorist who wanted to torture him by targeting the people around him. There were days when the pain Tracy suffered was so severe that she wished out loud that the bullet that had struck her in the head had done its intended job. It was agonizing for Harvath to hear her talk like that.

For Tracy, some days she couldn’t tell what was worse, the physical pain from the attack, or the emotional pain from watching one of the most decent men she had ever known forgo the family he desired in order to stay by her side.

His father had also been a Navy man-a SEAL and then a SEAL instructor. When he died, father and son were barely on speaking terms. Harvath had forgone college for a career as an amateur athlete, something the elder Harvath had zealously disapproved of.

After his father’s death in a training accident, Harvath had found it impossible to return to competitive sports. Worried about what might become of him without any sense of purpose and direction in his life, Harvath’s mother had encouraged him to enroll in college.

He graduated from the University of Southern California in three years cum laude with a double major in political science and military history. By the time he finished, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

Following in his father’s footsteps, he joined the Navy and was eventually accepted to Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL school (BUD/S) and a specialized program known as SQT or SEAL Qualification Training. Though the process was grueling beyond measure, his mental and physical conditioning as a world-class athlete, his stubborn refusal to ever give up on anything, and the belief that he had finally found his true calling in life propelled him forward and earned him the honor of being counted as one of the world’s most elite warriors-a U.S. Navy SEAL.

He served with SEAL Team Two and then Team Six, where he assisted a presidential security detail and caught the eye of the Secret Service. Wanting to bolster their anti-terrorism expertise at the White House, they eventually succeeded in wooing him away from the Navy and up to D.C. Harvath soon distinguished himself even further and after a short time was recommended for an above-top-secret program at the Department of Homeland Security called the Apex Project.

The project’s raison d’être was to level the playing field against America ’s enemies. The belief was that if the terrorists weren’t playing by any rules, then neither should the United States, especially when it came to defending its citizens and interests at home and abroad.

But with a new administration had come a new approach to dealing with terrorism, and the Apex Project was dismantled. Harvath had found himself out of a job.

With a unique skill set and a desire to continue serving the interests of his country, he accepted a private sector position with a company specializing in intelligence gathering and highly advanced special operations training near Telluride, Colorado.

In the words of a former CIA director, Harvath knew that intelligence was at the nexus of every major security challenge facing the United States. It didn’t matter if it was al-Qaeda or Hugo Chavez, the need for timely, accurate, comprehensive information was unprecedented.

Harvath and the former CIA director weren’t the only people to recognize that the drive for quality intelligence was paramount in the post-9/11 world. A well-funded group of high-level former military and intelligence operatives had seen the need as well. Deeply concerned with the entrenched bureaucracy at the CIA and the political hobbling of the nation’s defense apparatus, they sought to create an organization that would boldly do what the country’s politically correct, vote-chasing politicians and constantly-covering-their-cowering-asses bureaucrats were too timid and too inept to attempt.

Named after its founder, Reed Carlton-a retired thirty-year veteran of the CIA and one of the nation’s most revered spymasters-the Carlton Group was based upon the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the wartime intelligence agency that had been the predecessor to the CIA. The Carlton Group was composed of patriots who wanted one thing and one thing only: to keep Americans safe no matter what the cost.

Its modus operandi was quite similar to that of the Apex Project, except for one thing-it didn’t fall under the auspices of any politicians or bureaucrats. The Carlton Group was an obscure, private organization funded completely from Department of Defense black budgets. Only a handful of high-level career military DOD personnel knew of its existence, and it represented a major shift in counterterrorism’s center of gravity. The only thing it was missing was a reliable private intelligence branch. To use existing government intelligence apparatus like DOD, DIA, NSA, or CIA risked exposure and was out of the question. Therefore, they had to seek something in the private sector.

When the Carlton Group purchased the company Harvath had been working for in Colorado, he received a phone call. The new powers that be were restructuring and they wanted to move Harvath out of simply gathering intelligence and building human networks and into something much more interesting.

Carlton, or the “Old Man” as he was affectionately known by those who worked for him, had personally invited Harvath to his home in northern Virginia to discuss a new position. He had assembled a small group of operatives with military and intelligence experience to carry out “immediate action” assignments. Using the popular Pentagon catch-phrase, “Find, fix, finish, and follow up,” he explained that Harvath would be responsible for identifying terrorist leadership, tracking them to a specific location, capturing or killing them as necessary, and using the information gleaned from the assignment to plan the next operation. The goal was to apply constant pressure to terrorist networks and pound them so hard and so relentlessly that they were permanently rocked back on their heels, if not ground into the dust.