His timing had been perfect. Swerving back into the lane at the last possible second, he watched in his rearview mirror as the white Skoda Fabia behind him careened off the road and slammed into a large tree.

Applying his brakes, he pulled off the road and stepped out of his vehicle. The air smelled of spruce and spilled gasoline. The woman from the passenger side joined him. They needed to move fast.

Half their work had already been done for them. The terrorist in the Skoda’s passenger seat had not been wearing his seat belt. He was already dead.

The driver was trying to unbuckle himself when Scot Harvath arrived at his window. He was cursing at him in Arabic from inside. Harvath removed a spark plug from his pocket and used it to smash the man’s window.

Grasping the terrorist’s head, Harvath gave it a sharp twist and broke his neck. Gently, he guided the dead driver’s chin down to his chest.

The final passenger was a young Muslim man seated in the back of the car who had begun screaming. As Riley Turner opened his door she could see he had wet himself. Painting his chest with the integrated laser sight of her Taser, she pulled the trigger.

The compressed nitrogen propulsion system ejected two barbed probes and embedded them into the young man’s flesh. The insulated wires that led back to the weapon delivered a crackling pulse of electricity that incapacitated his neuromuscular capabilities.

Yanking open the opposite door, Harvath steered clear of the probes as he pulled the man from the vehicle and laid him on the ground. Once he had the man’s hands Flex-Cuffed behind his back, Harvath removed a roll of duct tape and placed a piece over his mouth. Producing a pair of pliers, Harvath snatched out the probes. The man winced and let out a cry of pain from behind his gag. As he did so, Harvath looked up to see a pearl gray Opel minivan approaching.

The van pulled parallel with the crash scene and slowed to a stop. The sliding door opened and a man in his midtwenties stepped out into a puddle of transmission fluid and broken glass.

The young operative’s name was Sean Chase. He was the product of an American father and an Egyptian mother. His features were such that Arabs saw him as Arab and Westerners took him for one of their own. The question was, would the members of the Uppsala cell accept him as well?

Chase was Harvath’s ultimate listening device, and he was going to switch places with the young Muslim man from the backseat, Mansoor Aleem. Mansoor and the Uppsala cell were the only link they had to a string of terrorist attacks that had targeted Americans in Europe and the United States. And as bloody as those attacks had been, they were supposedly nothing compared to what the plotters truly had in mind.

Continue reading the Full Black excerpt.