Chapter 50
Davi’s people had done exactly as she had promised. Two blocks out from the boatyard, there was no uniformed police or military presence to be seen. Traffic was being peeled away before it got close, diverted by men in plain clothes in unmarked vehicles whose flashing lights remained dark.
From out on the river, there were neither sirens nor visible patrol craft. In fact, there was no sign anywhere in the neighborhood that anything had changed at all. Harvath, however, knew that wasn’t true.
They had parked their SUVs a block away and gone in on foot. When they got near the boatyard, Harvath took a moment to study the terrain ahead.
The yard sat behind a sagging chain-link fence, patched in places with mismatched wire and sheet metal. He allowed his eyes to move across the property the way Koebler’s would have and saw the broken sight lines, elevated perches, and multiple choke points.
There were shadowed pockets where a man could disappear five feet from a search team and never be seen.
There were multiple routes to the water.
Every rusting piece of machinery, every battered hull, every shed wall offered concealment or cover.
So many obstacles meant that any pursuit was guaranteed to turn into a series of blind corners.
“Still like it?” Haney asked.
Harvath shook his head. “No. Which is why he probably does.”
Haney followed his gaze. “Lot of places to hide.”
“And to kill from.”
A few yards away, Staelin adjusted his suppressed Sbr. Ashby and Palmer were already widening the team’s shape, fanning out in opposite directions. Morrell stayed with Harvath and Haney, while Staelin trailed a step back, his eyes working the fence line and the sheds.
In the brutal heat of midafternoon, the humid air hung hard over the yard. Perspiration was already running down Harvath’s back as he tried to formulate a plan.
He intended to use the clutter to his advantage.
The dry-docked hulls and low sheds, not to mention the old fuel drums and other randomly strewn pieces of junk, broke the yard into usable pieces and provided the team enough cover to work their way forward without undue exposure. But it all came with a cost.
Any hidden pocket that they could exploit, so could Koebler. There was no telling where one of his wireless cameras or a trip wire might be hiding.
He indicated the path they would take and added a warning over the radio. “Use the cover, but don’t trust it. Check for cameras and expect traps.”
With that, they slipped through a section of fence that had been bent down and flattened, possibly by a truck backing out too fast.
As soon as they crossed the property line, it began to smell like diesel, bilgewater, and rot.
Beneath it all was the thick, muddy scent of the river.
Harvath paused beside a peeling fishing boat and listened.
No voices. No clang of tools. No radio coming from one of the sheds.
Whatever this place had been earlier in the day, it wasn’t that now.
Activity here had wound down and stopped.
He raised his hand and gestured. Ashby peeled left toward a stack of drums and an aging work bay. Palmer drifted right, using a trawler up on blocks as cover.
The team moved in short bounds, covering each other when they had to cross more exposed ground.
Harvath kept checking the obvious places Koebler might have hidden cameras, but so far, he hadn’t seen any.
Then, at the far end of the nearest work bay, something caught his eye—a workbench covered with a tarp.
Immediately, it felt wrong. Nothing else in the yard had been protected like that. Then he spotted the corner—taped up to form a small triangular opening. It was at just the right height for a man lying beneath the tarp to watch the approach without being seen.
Harvath froze. It was a blind.
He dropped low and motioned Morrell and Haney down with him. Across from them, Ashby stopped behind the drums. Palmer disappeared behind the trawler’s hull. Staelin sank in beside a rusting winch and brought his rifle up to bear.
Harvath seated his own weapon against his shoulder. It was exactly the sort of position Koebler would have chosen—concealed, shaded, and with a clean view across the approach.
He was preparing to angle Haney and Morrell around one side, while Staelin covered the opening, when he noticed something else—something that made even less sense.
The opening in the tarp wasn’t aimed at the route Harvath’s team had taken in.
It was trained on the service road as it cut through the property and hooked back toward the water.
Whoever had built the blind wasn’t concerned with intruders coming through the damaged perimeter fence. He was lying in wait for a vehicle.
That thought had barely formed in Harvath’s head when the tarp moved. Not much. Just enough for Harvath to catch the dark circle of a rifle optic nestled in the tarp’s opening.
A second later, the barrel beneath it shifted a fraction and settled again. Not toward Harvath and his team, but even more toward the service road.
Morrell saw it too. “What the hell?” he breathed.
Harvath didn’t answer. Using his own optic, he was already scanning, looking past the blind, searching deeper into the work bay for anything he might have missed the first time. And then he found it.
Half-buried in shadow, behind an engine block stand near the back wall, was another armed figure, crouched low and motionless, except for the faintest turn of his head.
He had no idea who these two were, but he had a pretty good feeling he wasn’t looking at Koebler, and he definitely wasn’t looking at private security hired by a boatyard that couldn’t be bothered to repair its fence. Something was going on.
Barely above a whisper, Harvath said into his radio, “Two concealed shooters in the bay, eleven o’clock. They’re oriented on the service road, not us. Hold.”
One by one, the team members clicked their acknowledgment of Harvath’s message over their radios, as they solidified their positions.
Across the yard, Ashby sank lower behind the drums. Palmer faded even deeper into the shadow beneath the trawler.
Haney scanned for perimeter threats, while Morrell made sure no one was creeping up on their six.
Staelin, who had never taken his eyes off the target, held his rifle steady on the tarp.
“I’ll take the sniper under the tarp,” Staelin whispered to Harvath over the radio. “You take the other guy in the bay. We’ll fire simultaneously. Just say the word.”
“Right now the word is hold,” Harvath quietly replied. “We have no idea who these guys are. Everybody stay frosty. Keep your eyes peeled for Koebler.”
No sooner had Harvath issued his order than the figure under the tarp made another minute adjustment. At almost the same moment, the second figure, behind the engine block, shifted as well, his head moving again, this time toward the far end of the property.
Seconds later, Harvath heard it. An engine. Faint at first. Then closer.
Morrell looked at him and mouthed, Vehicle.
Harvath gave the slightest nod. Over the radio, still barely above a whisper, he said, “Inbound vehicle. Everybody hold. Let it come.”
It was moving slowly, cautiously, its tires crunching over gravel and patches of old shell. The sound drifted ahead of it, down the crooked service road as it drove toward the river.
Harvath kept his eyes fixed on the bay. Whoever was under the tarp was now as still as a corpse. At the back of the bay, the second hidden figure had tucked himself tighter into the shadows and was bringing his weapon up.
Then the SUV appeared.
Dark and dusty, with deeply tinted windows, it emerged between two dry-docked hulls and moved at a crawl, following the service road down to the water. There, it made a tight, deliberate turn, until the vehicle was pointed back toward the street.
The hidden shooter under the tarp didn’t move. Neither did the second man in the bay.
The SUV began moving again. Twenty meters later, it rolled to a stop.
For a moment nothing happened. Its engine kept on running. Then all four doors opened almost at once.
Heavily armed Chinese operatives, all carrying PP-2000s, came out fast and in sequence.
One man moved immediately to the front corner of the SUV, another to the rear, while the other two pivoted outward and scanned the yard with the eyes of men who had already lost too many teammates and were guarding against losing any more.
For several long seconds, it was nothing but Chinese heads on swivels; their eyes scanning this way and that. Once they were in place, none of them moved.
The SUV idled where it had come to a stop, its engine emitting a low, steady growl beneath the ticking of hot metal and the distant slap of the river water against pilings.
One of the Chinese, at the front corner, said something quietly in Mandarin. Another answered from beside the rear passenger door. Then the man at the front called something out.
It wasn’t particularly loud, just loud enough to carry. Nevertheless, he got nothing back.
Harvath didn’t need to know exactly who these new arrivals were to understand what he was looking at.
Koebler had been working for the Chinese.
Koebler got burned. And now a heavily armed Chinese team, all carrying the telltale PP-2000 personal defense weapons, had shown up at a remote site to help get him out. This was his extraction.
There was only one problem. Nothing happened. Koebler didn’t materialize.
The Chinese operative called out for him again. They waited. But still, nothing happened.
Morrell leaned in. “He’s not coming out.”
“No,” Harvath replied. “He probably thinks it’s a trap.”
That was when the tarp flexed and the second concealed figure brought his weapon up another inch.
As the Chinese operative took a step forward, Harvath instinctively applied pressure to his trigger. That was when Koebler made his move.