Page 12 of Dead Fall

“You’re asking me to remove evidence from a crime scene. It’d be nice to know why before I do.”

“We now have a bona fide national security issue on our hands. Burman didn’t die by suicide.”

CHAPTER 3

WARSAW, POLAND

Harvath had thought it a fitting tribute to Reed Carlton that he and his team had used the same family of smugglers to get them into and out of Belarus that the Old Man had used back in the days of the Iron Curtain.

Two more of Harvath’s teammates—another ex–Delta Force operative named Palmer and the team’s only female member, a former Army soldier named Ashby—had been held in reserve to act as a quick reaction force if anything had gone wrong.

Thankfully, nothing had, which was rare. It had been a good, clean operation and Al-Masri’s death had already made the news. Harvath hoped it would win him a few brownie points back at the office. Lately, it felt like he had been in the penalty box.

Over the course of the last month, he had been assigned to operations in four different countries—Tajikistan, Afghanistan, India, and Romania. He was overdue to rotate home. Yet the powers that be back in Northern Virginia had told him to stay put, in Bucharest of all places.

It wasn’t that Bucharest was a bad city. It actually had quite a lot going for it. He’d made a couple of good contacts in the Romanian Intelligence community and had been keeping his skills sharp cross-training with their Special Forces. But it wasn’t like being home. And that, he suspected, was the point.

The phrasebe careful what you wish forhad kept pinging in his head. Because he had made it clear that he didn’t want to stop doing fieldwork,his employer appeared to be giving him exactly what he said he wanted. They were keeping him overseas and keeping him busy with mission after mission.

Was it a punishment? Some sort of twisted tactic meant to grind him down and get him to tap out? Or was the Carlton Group just that busy? Despite pushing for clarification, none had been forthcoming.

Compounding his frustration was the fact that he was engaged to a woman who lived in Oslo and two months had passed since they had last seen each other.

Part of the problem was the demands of his job. The other part was that her position with Norwegian Intelligence was equally demanding.

Unlike Harvath, Sølvi Kolstad had recently accepted a promotion that almost entirely removed her from field operations. She had been put in charge of one of Norway’s most clandestine programs. If the Russians ever invaded, it would be up to her department to mount a shadow intelligence service and coordinate resistance. She now practically lived at her office. But she missed him and needed a break as well, so Harvath had made an executive decision.

When the smugglers got them safely across the border from Belarus into Poland, Harvath and the team had driven the rest of the way to Warsaw, dropping their SUV off at the airport. His teammates had boarded a flight back to the United States and he was supposed to catch a flight back to Bucharest, but he opted to pull the plug.

Warsaw was only an hour-and-forty-five-minute flight from both Bucharest and Oslo. It was a physical representation of what he and Sølvi had been trying to do throughout their long-distance relationship: meeting in the middle.

As soon as his operation was over and he was safely across the border, he had texted Sølvi. She had jumped at the chance for them to see each other.

Figuring he would probably be denied, Harvath hadn’t requested the days off; he had simply taken them. A weekend in Warsaw with Sølvi would be more restorative than going back to Bucharest and staring at the walls of his hotel room. And even if the Carlton Group ended up calling and needing something done in Romania, he could be back before anyone ever knew that he hadn’t yet returned.

The hardest part of his plan ended up being finding a room in the Polish capital. He had arrived on the country’s National Independence Day. All of the rooms were booked. Thankfully, he had a contact at the U.S. Embassy who was able to pull a few strings and get him a reservation.

In the heart of Warsaw’s Old Town, his suite at the Mondrian overlooked the cobbled streets and pastel-colored buildings of Market Square. Since Sølvi wouldn’t be getting in until later, he had taken a cab in from the airport alone.

It was hard to believe that the last time he had entered Poland it had been in a rigid inflatable boat, under machine-gun fire, as he had sped across Goldfarb—the lake Poland shared with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. All things being equal, a rented car from the border and then a taxi from the airport was a lot more civilized.

After checking in, he spent the afternoon exploring. Warsaw was an amazing city, steeped in history, which was one of Harvath’s favorite subjects.

The excitement for Independence Day was palpable. The cafés were overflowing, anyone who wasn’t drinking was singing, and Polish flags were flying everywhere. The country had come a long way and had much to be proud of.

As Harvath moved about the capital, there was a certain piece of Poland’s past that he was particularly interested in visiting and, as a warrior, to which he wanted to pay his respects.

In the summer of 1944, the Polish underground launched the largest operation of any European resistance movement of World War II, known as the Warsaw Uprising. The Poles battled Nazi troops for sixty-three days. They received little to no outside help.

The Soviet Red Army had halted their advance on the outskirts of the city, which allowed the Nazis to turn their attention to crushing the Polish Home Army, known as the “Armia Krajowa,” or AK for short.

Despite early successes, which saw the AK make clever use of the city’s sewer system and take large portions of the city, the Germans launched a series of absolutely monstrous counterattacks. Goaded on by Heinrich Himmler, the sadistic head of the SS, Hitler ordered that Warsaw, and its inhabitants, be completely destroyed and wiped from the face of the earth.

Tanks, dive-bombers, and artillery were unleashed on the Polish capital, along with some of the most ruthless units of the SS. Chief among those units was the notorious Dirlewanger Brigade.

The brigade, filled with violent criminals, mental asylum patients, and even concentration camp inmates, was named after an SSOberführerand personal friend of Himmler’s—Oskar Dirlewanger.

Dirlewanger was a convicted rapist, known for being a barbaric, mentally unstable alcoholic, child molester, and devotee of sadism and necrophilia.

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