The Athens Solution: A Short Story by Brad Thor Read Free Book Online Page A

agreed, for pickup.
    “Sir,” said one of the Diplomatic Security Service agents as he approached the table. “There’s a car waiting. We’d like to get you back to the embassy.”
    Avery nodded and was just about to shut down his laptop, when he noticed the camera from the Acropolis being moved. There were jerky flashes of legs and feet as someone hastily repositioned it to overlook the road below. Seconds later, the white embassy van with the Marines and the NSA tech entered the frame. The camera followed its approach.
    How the hell did they already ID the van? Avery wondered. “Are you seeing this?” he asked the lead Diplomatic Security Service agent.
    The agent looked at the ambassador’s screen.
    “Why would they want us to watch our own guys?” Avery continued.
    The agent raised his sleeve and spoke into the microphone. “Beachcomber, this is Point Guard,” he said. “Be advised, someone is filming your approach. You have been compromised. Repeat. You have been compromised.”
    But before the men in the white van could respond, the entire Plaka district shook with what sounded like a giant knife tearing through the fabric of the afternoon sky. The ambassador watched, aghast, as the video feed showed a shoulder-fired missile slamming through the windshield and the van exploding.
    The lead DS agent didn’t waste any time. Grabbing the ambassador and the laptop, he and his partner sped Avery out of the café and down the closest side street.
    All around them, people rushed out of the shops and restaurants to look up and stare at the plume of black smoke rising from the Acropolis.
    As the ambassador and the DS agents turned the next corner, they could see the embassy’s dark armor-plated BMW. The street was completely abandoned. “Faster!” the lead agent yelled. They were almost there.
    Reaching the car, the lead agent flung open the rear door. As he began to shove the ambassador inside, a motorcycle screamed down the sidewalk.
    The DS agents reached for their weapons, but it was too late.

ONE MONTH LATER
    DODECANESE ISLANDS
    SOUTHEASTERN AEGEAN, GREECE
    L ying in the tall grass less than a hundred meters from a sprawling, whitewashed villa, Scot Harvath could hear the ocean pounding against the rocky shore below. He used the Leopold Mark 4 scope and Universal Night Sight atop his SR25 Knights Armament rifle to search for any sign of the home’s owner, Theologos Papandreou.
    U.S. Intelligence had fingered Papandreou as the mastermind behind what were being called the “Acropolis attacks.”
    Despite the fact that a firebomb had been tossed into the car after the shooting and the bodies were burned beyond recognition, ballistics reports indicated that the weapon used to kill Ambassador Avery, as well as the two DS agents accompanying him, was a .45-caliber automatic—the same .45-caliber used in a string of high-profile assassinations attributed to the Greek terrorist organization 21 August.
    The group took its name from the date of their first terrorist attack—August 21, 1975—when they assassinated the CIA’s Athens station chief, along with his deputy.
    They were a Marxist-Leninist organization that despised capitalism. Their number one goal was to rid Greece of all Western influence, particularly American influence, and install a more “equitable” system of government, no matter what it took.
    Papandreou was heavily connected to the group and apparently didn’t like that the U.S. Defense Department had teamed up with a Greek technology company on a revolutionary new device.
    Though the device was originally created to remotely tweak the navigational routes and fuel efficiency of large container ships via satellite, the Pentagon had seen an even bigger potential for it. With the right enhancements to the software, a missile could be diverted mid-flight, a ship sent in a completely different direction, or a plane could be taken back from hijackers without a hostage rescue team ever stepping