Now it was Harvath’s turn. With Bob Herrington and the rest of the team in tow, they picked their way around the dead bodies and brass shell casings at the front of the store and headed toward the vault-style door at the back.

The door was half open and as they approached it, Tracy Hastings ordered the team to stop.

“What’s up?” said Harvath.

Hastings pointed to the pockmarks on the walls and ceiling around the frame and replied, “Shrapnel. We can’t touch that door until we’re sure it’s not rigged.”

Harvath thought she was being a little too cautious, until Herrington said, “Trust her. She knows what she’s doing.”

“All right,” he responded, stepping aside to let her get a better look at it. “But make it quick.”

Once Hastings was convinced it was safe, she waved the rest of the team forward.

Inside, they found a high-tech security control room that had been blown apart by what Hastings claimed was probably one or more fragmentation grenades. Lying on the floor were the badly mangled bodies of three men in tactical vests with modified M16s lying nearby.

“These guys are jarheads,” remarked Morgan as he rolled one of the bodies over.

“Plenty of guys in the security industry cut their hair too short,” said Cates. “That doesn’t make them marines.”

Morgan ignored the remark and pointed at the men’s feet. “The Marines only use the best gear, and these guys are all wearing Quantico Desert Boots.”

While Harvath preferred Original S.W.A.T. boots, Paul Morgan did have a point. Many of the marines he’d known were particularly fond of Quantico Boots, but even with the M16s, there still wasn’t enough evidence to qualify the bodies as being marines.

As if reading his mind, Morgan slid a plate out of one of their tactical vests, wrapped on it with his knuckles and said, “ U.S. military-issue Interceptor body armor. Harder than Kevlar and can stop anything up to a 7.62-millimeter round.”

Cates whistled and said, “These guys certainly were prepared.”

“But for what?” replied Harvath, more for his own benefit than anyone else’s. “Whoever took these marines out must have been very good. Let’s finish clearing these rooms.”

Bob and the rest of the team relieved the marines of their SIG Sauer P228 pistols, as well as their machine guns and as many loaded magazines as they could carry, before sweeping the balance of the Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange. As they did, Harvath tried to figure out what the hell the operation’s real function was. In the heart of New York City, no jewelry store-no matter how busy or how well connected its owners-was going to be granted the protection of three machine-gun-toting U.S. marines.

As they went from room to room, it became apparent that the operation was completely paperless. Whatever secret it held had either been taken to the grave when its personnel had been raked with gunfire, had been stolen by the terrorists, or was locked up in its workstations and racks and racks of servers.

Exercising the only other option left available to him, Harvath collected whatever photo identification he could from each of the fifteen corpses, including the three U.S. servicemen whose IDs listed them in fact as active-duty marines.

He hoped Gary would be able to make some sense out of it, because at this moment, Harvath had absolutely no idea what or who they were dealing with.

Less than halfway through their list of locations, Abdul Ali considered himself lucky that they’d only lost one of the Chechen soldiers. It was a treacherous but necessary path they’d been forced to follow. The Troll had explained that each location would be more difficult to assault than the last, and that was why Ali and his team were taking them in ascending order of difficulty. There was no sense starting with the most difficult location and working their way backward only to find that Mohammed bin Mohammed was being held at one of the less fortified sites. It seemed reasonable and there was a consolation, however small, that with each location they scratched off their list, Abdul Ali was one step closer to recovering Mohammed.

Whether the man was waiting inside this location or the next made no difference to the Chechens. Unbeknownst to Ali, the Troll was paying them on a per-assault basis, and so it was in their financial interest that the attacks continue until the very bloody end.

What Ali did know was that the Troll had been one hundred percent correct about the American government’s penchant for secrecy-especially when it came to the deep-cover operations on their list. Both the left and the right hands purposefully strove to keep each other in the dark and thereby created a considerably uncommunicative culture. It would take days to sort out what had happened to the various New York undercover operations, and by then, Allah willing, Abdul Ali and Mohammed bin Mohammed would be long gone.

As the team approached its next objective, Ali was supremely confident that its occupants had no idea they were coming. He girded himself with the hope that this might be the last assault they would have to conduct.

The vents for the Lincoln Tunnel vent shaft were located at the West Midtown Ferry Terminal, also known as Pier 79, on Manhattan ’s West Side. As Abdul Ali and his Chechen mercenaries arrived, the vent shaft towers were still belching plumes of acrid black smoke high into the air from the hundreds upon hundreds of vehicles burning in the tunnel beneath the Hudson River.

Emergency personnel were everywhere as they tried to use the ventilation shafts to evacuate survivors. With over forty million vehicles passing through the tunnel each year, it was one of the busiest in the world and a perfect target. Ali quietly marveled at the chaos. Allah had indeed blessed their undertaking.

Attached to the north ventilation tower was a New York Waterway bus garage, and Ali instructed Sacha to park just past it alongside two large dumpsters. The men readied their weapons and then donned their gas masks and black tactical helmets. In practiced unison, they exited the vehicles and raced into the nearly empty garage accompanied by a very special Trojan horse.

Most of the bus staff had raced next door to try to help extricate survivors from the tunnel and only a handful remained behind. They were quickly dispatched by three of the Chechens who then dragged their bodies to the rear of the garage, where they could be hidden away out of sight.

The secondary stairwell secreted within the north ventilation tower had been constructed to be very difficult, if not impossible, to find without proper help. Once it was located, the team readied its secret weapon and sent “Ivan” hobbling down the stairs.

Via a fiber-optic camera mounted inside the animal’s collar, Ali and his Chechen handler watched as the small yet sturdy border collie with its brightly colored search-and-rescue vest, limped forward toward a large steel door. Three feet away, the handler depressed a button on his remote, which caused the dog’s collar to beep twice in quick succession. Immediately, the dog began whimpering and laid itself down.

For a moment, it appeared that their tactic was not going to work. Then the groan of metal on metal resounded through the corridor and up the stairwell as the steel door began to slowly open. Two men outfitted similarly to the marines at the Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange appeared, and seeing no one else in the corridor, shouldered their weapons and cautiously approached the injured dog, wondering how it had made its way down there. They assumed it must have been part of the search-and-rescue efforts in the tunnel and had somehow lost its way.

What the marines should have been asking themselves was where the animal’s handler was.