Free Blowback by Brad Thor Page B

than anything anyone had ever seen. The only thing the USAMRIID team was able to learn was that the black sludge that exited the nasal passages right before death was actually the remains of the victim’s liquefied brain matter.
    Despite their express desire to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction to use against the West, no one could understand how al-Qaeda had been able to come up with something this sophisticated. The idea that they could have bioengineered a substance to attack all but the followers of Islam was beyond comprehension. Harvath was beating himself up for not having apprehended Khalid Alomari sooner. Somehow he was involved in all of this, and Harvath couldn’t help but feel that if al-Qaeda succeeded in carrying out whatever they had planned, he would be largely at fault.
    Based on everything he had learned from Lawlor, it was painfully clear that Khalid Alomari hadn’t been on a fund-raising or planning tour of the Middle East, but had been ticking names off a very special hit list. Whoever those scientists were, they had obviously been involved in engineering this mystery illness and had been taken out one by one in an effort to tie up loose ends.
    While that much made sense, it still didn’t explain Ozan Kalachka’s connection to everything.
    As the flight attendant removed his dinner tray, untouched, Harvath reflected on the somewhat unusual friendship he had developed with one of the East’s most elusive and fabled underworld figures.
    The two had first crossed paths when Harvath had been tasked to SEAL Team Six. He had been part of a joint DEA task force charged with taking down a notorious Mediterranean drug trafficker who had branched out into the black-market arms trade. The problem, though, was that the team had been operating on faulty intelligence. After a very thorough investigation, the DEA, along with local authorities, had been able to apprehend a significant mid-level player out of Morocco. That player in turn agreed to roll over and finger his superiors in exchange for being cut loose. No one had any idea that the man’s superiors had set him up in order to have the DEA do their dirty work for them.
    The mid-level Moroccan provided excellent intel, but it didn’t lead to his superiors; instead it led to Ozan Kalachka-a man whose armstrade turf the Moroccans were trying to cut in on. Despite all the Monday morning quarterbacking, no one disputed that the agents working the case had done everything exactly as they were supposed to. It was the first and last time anyone ever got the better of the DEA in a case of that magnitude, but it could not be denied that during its execution Scot Harvath had almost made one of the biggest mistakes of his career, if not his life.
    At six feet tall and well over three hundred pounds, the sixty-two-year-old Ozan Kalachka nearly measured the same side-to-side as he did up-and-down. With his impeccable taste in clothing and neatly groomed silver hair, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor known as the Fat Man-Sydney Greenstreet. Many mistook Kalachka’s excessive weight as a sign of lethargy and weakness-an indication that he was soft and slow. That was the mistake Harvath had made when the joint task force attempted to arrest the reputed Turkish mobster, and it nearly cost Harvath one of his eyes. Though one would have to look very closely to see it, he still bore the scar from the encounter above his left cheekbone. And in what was more of a testament to his hot temper than his training as a SEAL, Harvath had bestowed upon the Turk the limp with which he still walked to this day.
    Both men, each in his own way, had misjudged the other and had lived to regret it-Kalachka for his limp, and Harvath, not so much for his scar, but rather for the shame of underestimating an opponent and letting him get the better of him. When the physical and legal dust had settled, the encounter had resulted in lessons neither of them would ever forget.