Chapter 73

CHAPTER 73

O SLO

The safehouse being used by Colonel Ivan Kapralov and his unit 29155 members was a secluded cabin, deep in the woods, forty-five minutes north of Oslo.

Upon landing, Harvath, Elovik, and Hayes had walked into the private aviation terminal where Chief Inspector Borger was waiting for them. Holidae handed over their passports and the man drove off to get them processed.

A staff member had taken Hayes and Elovik to one of the private suites, where personnel from the CIA's Oslo station had already assembled. Hayes thanked Harvath, wished him good luck, and told him to reach out if he needed anything. She then disappeared inside with her newly minted Russian defector.

Harvath was then shown to the same room he'd been given two days ago when he had arrived from Poland. Inside was the rest of his team from the South of France.

Along with S?lvi and Grechko, they had closed up shop in Eze and had all flown up together.

Despite being a little outside the twenty-four-hour window that she'd been given by the Norwegian Intelligence Service, S?lvi's employers had been more than happy to extend her deadline a few hours—especially if it meant identifying the traitor in their midst.

After some serious horse trading with Holidae Hayes, Elovik had been willing to give up the name of his mole inside the NIS.

The Russian military attaché was an intelligence gold mine and he had struck a very lucrative deal with the CIA. For giving up everything he knew, he would receive not only a new identity and a generous annual stipend, but also a condo on the beach in Miami with deeded parking and a convertible Mustang. As long as he continued to cooperate, he'd be set for the rest of his life.

Once the Bombardier was catered, prepped, and refueled, he'd be on his way to a safehouse and a thorough debriefing back in the United States. It was Holidae's job to make sure he and the operatives traveling with him got off the ground without a hitch.

Because the mole at NIS had been unmasked, Harvath had agreed with S?lvi that it was likely safe for her to return with Grechko. Just to make sure, he had suggested several extra security precautions, which her employers had also agreed to.

He knew that she and Grechko would have been met on the tarmac with a serious security force, who would have whisked them to a highly secure and undisclosed location—this time a military base, which had been one of Harvath's multiple suggestions. The bottle of Krug sitting in S?lvi's fridge would not be opened tonight. That was fine by Harvath. He had one last, extremely important job to do.

According to Elovik, Ivan Kapralov had been injured in a fall after murdering a French DGSE intelligence officer named Jadot. Powell had tipped the Russians that Jadot had uncovered their spy network deep inside the French government. As silencing Jadot was considered a mission of paramount importance, Kapralov had been given the job himself. An arrogant man and a bit of a showboat, he had killed Jadot with an ice axe. He knew that the similarities with the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky would be admired inside the Kremlin.

He sounded like a straight-up psychopath to Harvath and the sooner they put this rabid dog down, the better.

The minute Borger handed Harvath his passport back, the team finished loading the two SUVs Hayes had arranged for them and got on the road. Barton, Morrison, and Gage were in the lead vehicle. Harvath, Nicholas, and the dogs rode in the second car with Ashby driving and Palmer riding shotgun.

As they drove, Harvath had an eerie, unshakable sense of déjà vu. A couple of years back, he'd been on a mission farther north in Norway. The target was a Russian terrorist cell, which had also holed up in a remote cabin. They had booby-trapped the perimeter with antipersonnel mines. It had turned into a total bloodbath. Harvath made a mental note not to repeat those mistakes. He would take things extra slow and pay close attention to every single detail.

The thick tree cover meant their drone was going to be useless. They would have to figure things out on the fly.

Nicholas would hang back with the dogs and function as their mobile command center. Harvath and his five teammates would approach the cabin together and make the final call as to how to take it down once they got there.

Thankfully, the team had brought plenty of ammo. They also had night-vision goggles and the two sets of night-vision binoculars they had used in Monaco. Short of a rocket launcher to blow up the cabin, there was really nothing else he could ask for.

And so, putting his head back, he closed his eyes and tried to relax his mind for the rest of the drive. That bloody image of his prior Norwegian operation, however, kept replaying in his head.