Back Blast

Back Blast

First edition cover
Author	Mark Greaney
Language	English
Series	The Gray Man
Genre	Thriller
Publisher	Berkley Publishing Group
Publication date	February 16, 2016
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover, Paperback), Audio, eBook
Pages	513
ISBN	978-0-425-28279-3
Dewey Decimal	813'.6/dc23
LC Class	PS3607.R4285B33 2016
Preceded by	Dead Eye
Followed by	Gunmetal Gray

Back Blast is the fifth novel by Mark Greaney, published on February 16, 2016, by Berkley Books. It is also the fifth book in the Gray Man series. In this novel, Court Gentry's search for the reasons behind the shoot-on-sight sanction imposed on him by the Central Intelligence Agency continues as he investigates his last CIA mission, Operation Back Blast.

Plot summary

After five years of being on the run overseas from the Central Intelligence Agency, Court Gentry comes to Washington, D.C.. CIA National Clandestine Service (NCS) head Denny Carmichael has been hunting him through the Violator Working Group.

Meanwhile, private contractor Townsend Government Services head Leland Babbitt has been attempting to make amends with Carmichael after the botched Gentry operation in Europe months before. When Carmichael still refuses, Babbitt threatens to leak classified CIA material to the United States Congress, but is stopped by Carmichael's foot soldiers and is brought to Langley. To prevent him from further whistleblowing top-secret operations, Carmichael brings Babbitt and his company back into the hunt for Gentry. Still viewing him as a danger to their operation, Carmichael and his deputy head Jordan Mayes secretly arrange Babbitt's assassination, to be orchestrated by CIA agent Zack Hightower and later to be blamed on Gentry.

That night, Gentry is surveilling Babbitt's residence when Babbitt is killed by Hightower. Gentry then finds himself pursued by Babbitt's security force and later by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operatives, who were sent by the CIA upon news of Babbitt's assassination. Gentry escapes from the compound and later from a shootout at a McDonald's restaurant. While fleeing the scene, he is shot by police officers, who are actually assassins sent by Murquin "Kaz" al-Kazaz, a Saudi Intelligence officer aiding Carmicheal. Wounded, he carjacks a cab and flees.

The next night, CIA Special Activities Division (SAD) head Matthew Hanley, who is the control officer of the Golf Sierra paramilitary force and Carmichael's rival, is visited by Gentry, who wants information. Hanley reveals that Carmichael, the unnamed CIA director and then-CIA chief counsel Max Ohlhauser ordered the shoot-on-sight directive on Gentry five years before because he killed the wrong guy in his last CIA operation, Operation Back Blast, which was in Trieste, Italy the previous year.

Gentry later thwarts an armed robbery on a convenience store that he has been frequenting for his supplies. Catherine King and Andy Shoal, investigative reporters for The Washington Post, deduce that the man who stopped the robbery and the man who raided the drug den nights before are the same person and that he is not possibly the triggerman in Babbitt's assassination.

Court tracks down Ohlhauser, who is now a private lawyer and CNN commentator, and forces him to give him more information about the shoot-on-sight directive, while boarding a train into the Dupont Circle subway station. Ohlhauser reveals that the Autonomous Asset Program (AAP), a top secret assassination program Gentry had entered years before joining the CIA, was reorganized and is still operational. JSOC operatives learn of Gentry's location through facial recognition, and the Kaz's assassins arrive. Ohlhauser, oblivious to their true identities, leads them to Gentry, whom they arrest. Gentry, suspicious of his captors, eventually gets into a firefight with them, killing one and injuring five of the hitmen. Ohlhauser is accidentally killed by the Middle Eastern assassins while Gentry escapes.

Meanwhile, in Israel, Mossad operative Yanis Alvey is placed under house arrest for aiding in the escape of Gentry from Europe. On the fifth day of his confinement, his boss Menachem Aurbach frees him and reveals the reason why helping the Gray Man enter the United States is a dishonor to their country. Years before, Mossad had been successfully running a deep-penetration agent in Al Qaeda, codenamed Hawthorn. It was later hinted that Gentry shot Hawthorn in Trieste, which was likely the reason for the shoot-on-sight order for him.

That night in his home, Gentry tries to remember Operation Back Blast. He alone was assigned by the CIA to rescue an Israeli deep-penetration agent in Al Qaeda, whose real identity was compromised, in the course of a meeting in Trieste between the AQ and Serbian arms dealers to secure weapons for the former. He remembers an Al Qaeda assassin who attempted to kill the Israeli agent in their safehouse on the night of his rescue, but he killed the gunman and together, they escaped. Gentry was further convinced that Carmichael used the rescue operation as justification for the shoot-on-sight order.

A Crime Stoppers tip leads the D.C. Emergency Response Team to Gentry's house, forcing him to run away. After finding a home in an abandoned Civil War-era grain mill outside D.C. the following day, he stumbles upon an article by King about an ex-military assassin terrorizing Washington, D.C., that he read was sourced by certain CIA personnel. Carmichael helped King in her article to use her as bait in order to kill him. Gentry decides to pursue whoever is tailing King.

He eventually discovers that Hightower, his old team leader from CIA, was the one tailing King, and abducts him. Hightower mentions his current work with the CIA, reveals that he killed Babbitt, and tries to convince Gentry that he is on his side. The following day, Gentry lets him go with the assurance that he will not tell Carmichael but Hanley about what happened as well as informing him about the Middle Eastern assassins.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the fallout from her doctored article which Carmichael intended to be the CIA's official version of the events, King receives an e-mail arranging a meeting for more information. This turns out to be Gentry, who mentions everything he knows about his predicament. He later asks for information about her meeting with Carmichael; the D/NCS told her that Gentry was born Jacksonville, Florida, which Gentry interprets as a threat. King promises to go to Israel for more information from Alvey. Gentry decides to go to Florida to find his estranged father James before Carmichael and Kaz's assassins kidnap him.

In Glen St. Mary, Florida, James is eventually interrogated by FBI-type agents, who are actually Carmichael's foot soldiers, about Court's whereabouts. James senses that Court is watching and subtly tells him to go away. Court interprets this as a warning, and later finds out that he was also being hunted by the AAP. He decides to go to Harvey Point in North Carolina, the training ground of the AAP, to find out more answers about the sanction.

Meanwhile, Shoal, who is now part of King's investigative team on Gentry, has procured evidence that a Middle Eastern proxy force has been assisting in the hunt for Gentry, which is illegal. Jordan Mayes intercepts the incriminating video from Shoal's e-mail and presents it to Carmichael, who reveals everything about his secret pact with Kaz. Distraught, Mayes goes away. Later, Shoal is killed by the Saudi assassins under Carmichael's orders.

Mayes later arranges a clandestine meeting with Suzanne Brewer, a CIA senior officer who is also confused about the new players in the hunt for Gentry, and mentions what Carmichael told him, as well as revealing the truth behind Operation Back Blast. Mayes wants to take this matter to the Department of Justice, but Kaz's assassins later arrive and attack them. Now having the leverage in order for her to run the CIA and force Carmichael out for his excessive power, Brewer intentionally crashes her car into a nearby hill, killing Mayes and wounding herself. She calls Carmichael and persuades him to call off the advancing assassins and that she is still an asset to his operation.

Arriving at Harvey Point, Gentry finds his old AAP training ground to be empty and abandoned. Later, he receives a call from King, who says that she fulfilled her promise of going to Tel Aviv and meeting with Alvey, and later reveals that he really killed the wrong guy in Trieste six years before.

Hawthorn had been compromised and was given time to escape by a fellow Pakistani colleague in Al Qaeda in the Serbian safehouse in Trieste. It was revealed that Gentry killed Hawthorn as he is entering the Pakistani's room, mistaking him as the Al Qaeda gunman. He ends up rescuing the Pakistani, who is revealed to be another deep-penetration agent who according to the Mossad is the one who discovered his rival's identity and who lured Hawthorn into his ruse to kill him.

Having discovered the core reason for the shoot-on-sight sanction, Gentry becomes suicidal for his failure. This was interrupted when Hightower arrives at the old AAP training facility and tells Gentry to call Hanley, who has become their de facto boss. Hanley assigns a mission to him and Hightower: to hunt down the Saudi Arabian proxy force of assassins controlled by Carmichael, in order to force him to step down from the CIA. They accept the mission and later head back to D.C. Using Gentry as bait, he and Hightower lure the Saudi assassins to the hotel where they are staying and kill them all. When Kaz finds out about the murders, he panics; Carmichael urges him to go to his fortress-like safehouse which doubles as the headquarters for the Gentry hunt in order to clean up their mess.

This was discovered by Hanley, who relays this information to Gentry and Hightower; he assigns them on a new mission to bring Carmichael in. Gentry decides to siege the heavily guarded safehouse on his own. He takes Carmichael, Kaz and the surviving members of the Violator Working Group hostage in the conference room. Later, he releases the VWG members and leaves himself alone with Carmichael and Kaz, trying but failing to glean any more information.

Meanwhile, the JSOC operatives had been preparing for an assault at the safehouse in order to rescue Carmichael and Kaz and kill Gentry, bypassing the authorities of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team. On the other hand, King, having obtained more information about Back Blast and using it to prevent Gentry from killing Carmichael and Kaz for revenge, persuades him to let him in the safehouse and to reveal the disturbing truth about the operation.

It was revealed that Carmichael personally sent Gentry to rescue the Pakistani deep-penetration agent, who turned out to be Kaz, in Trieste, instead of the Israeli one, Hawthorn. He did not know that Hawthorn, who has more operational power in Al Qaeda than Kaz, was there, and as a result, Gentry accidentally killed him. A full year after the operation, a photo of Gentry with Hawthorn's dead body in the safehouse was clandestinely sent by Kaz through back channels to the Mossad, prompting Carmichael to sacrifice Gentry by issuing the shoot-on-sight directive in order to prevent Israeli intelligence from interviewing him about Hawthorn's death. Since then, Kaz has been running Carmichael in CIA, influencing every decision which in turn would benefit his home country.

This revelation infuriates Carmichael, but by then the JSOC operatives had breached the safehouse. Gentry takes King with him and leaves Carmichael and Kaz to kill each other, giving them a submachine gun. The two enemies now wrestle for control of the weapon. Carmichael later gains the upper hand and shoots Kaz dead just as the JSOC forces storm the conference room and shoot Carmichael dead as well.

Gentry and King then proceed to the attic of the safehouse, where he leaves King and escapes from the JSOC operatives by an experimental ground-to-air retrieval device that keeps him suspended in the night sky, until he was rescued by Hightower and Chris Travers, one of Hanley's SAD men, in a CIA aircraft. Once aboard, they make themselves disappear by parachuting out of the plane and crashing it to the Allegheny Mountains.

Two weeks later, Hanley is now Acting Director of the National Clandestine Service. A few days later, he offers Gentry a contractual job back in the agency similar to his work as the Gray Man, which he accepts; he then gives him his first assignment back in the CIA: in Hong Kong.

Characters

• Courtland "Court" Gentry: freelance assassin (The Gray Man), ex-Special Activities Division (Ground Branch) paramilitary operations officer (call sign Sierra Six), ex-CIA Autonomous Asset Program operative (code name Violator)
• Catherine King: The Washington Post senior investigative reporter
• Andy Shoal: The Washington Post Metro (cops) reporter
• Denny Carmichael: Director of National Clandestine Service, CIA
• Jordan Mayes: Assistant Director of National Clandestine Service, CIA
• Matthew Hanley: Director of Special Activities Division, CIA
• Suzanne Brewer: Senior Officer, Programs and Plans, CIA
• Zack Hightower: Former CIA Special Activities Division (Ground Branch) paramilitary operations officer (call sign Sierra One), Court Gentry's former team leader
• Chris Travers: Special Activities Division (Ground Branch) paramilitary operations officer, CIA
• Jenner: Special Activities Division (Ground Branch) paramilitary operations officer, CIA
• Max Ohlhauser: Former Chief Council, CIA
• Leland Babbitt: Director of Townsend Government Services
• Menachem Aurbach: Director of Mossad (Israeli Intelligence)
• Yanis Alvey: Senior officer in Mossad (Israeli Intelligence)
• Murquin Al-Kazaz ("Kaz"): Washington, D.C., Station Chief – Saudi Arabia General Intelligence Presidency (Saudi Intelligence)
• Dakota: Joint Special Operations Command – Special Mission Unit team leader