“Answer my question,” Shirani said through clenched teeth. “Just where is it you think you’re taking my prisoner?”
“He’s our prisoner now,” Maslick said, following the script Rapp had given him. “I’m taking him to our base outside of Awaran. So why don’t you get the fuck out of my way?”
Shirani’s cheek twitched visibly. His men moved their hands a little closer to their weapons, waiting for the order to kill the insubordinate American standing in front of them.
“You’re not taking that man anywhere.”
Maslick hesitated and Rapp gave him an encouraging nudge.
“Hey, if you want to talk to Mitch, I can go out and get him. But if he has to come back in here, I can guarantee you he’s going to kick your fat ass up and down this hallway. I’ll bet that won’t play too good on your campaign posters.”
He’d finally pushed the man to the point that he was pretty much mute. Whether that was a good thing or not remained to be seen. What was certain, though, was that he was succeeding in the mission that Rapp had charged him with. He’d made the old soldier so mad that he couldn’t think straight.
As Maslick started forward again, Shirani, in a pathetic effort to save face, grabbed the man he thought was Eric Jesem and looked into his swollen face. “Take him if you want him. He’s given me what I need.”
Maslick’s normal strategy would be to call that a win and get the hell out of there before everyone started shooting at him. But that wasn’t what they were after here.
“He didn’t give your punk-ass interrogators shit.”
Maslick pulled Rapp away from the man and began dragging him toward the front of the building. “Now tell your people to get out of the way so Chutani’s guys can get a transport in. This man needs to be in Awaran by zero six thirty and Mitch and I want to be on a plane out of here in an hour. Is that understood?”
When they came out into the blinding sunlight, Maslick half expected to find fifty guys with M4s pointed in his direction. Instead, there was an armored van and a couple of men from Chutani’s elite guard. He handed his limp prisoner off to them and they literally threw him into the back. Maslick watched as Rapp slammed down on his cuffed hands and rolled into a bench. A moment later, the doors were locked and Maslick was standing in the cloud of dust left by the vehicle’s spinning tires.
He watched it pass through the gate and recede up the road for what was probably too long, then started toward a vehicle that would take him to a commercial airport. Apparently, the G550 was cooked. Rapp had trashed the landing gear with his little excursion into the desert.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Umar Shirani standing in the doorway of the building’s tiny office. The man looked like he wanted to carve someone’s heart out.
Mission accomplished.
CHAPTER 31
THE van doors slammed shut but Rapp remained motionless, lying on the steel floor with his hands secured behind him. The motor came to life and the vehicle began bouncing painfully along the dirt road that led to the missile site’s outer gate. He rolled on his side, closing his eyes to keep blood from flowing into them. Maslick had done a skillful job matching the look of Eric Jesem’s injuries without crossing the line. As near as Rapp could tell, he had no significant damage to his ribs or joints, and his eyes were badly blackened but not so swollen as to interfere with his vision. Bruising on his torso was impressive, but no obvious internal injuries or slipped disks.
On the downside, he’d lost one tooth and a few more were clearly on their way out. The damage to his nose was severe enough that he wondered if he would ever breathe out of it again. And, finally, he was bleeding badly from a cut Maslick had carved into his forehead. An admittedly artistic job, though. It matched the one Jesem had in every detail.
The van jumped onto the pavement and the ride smoothed out as it accelerated. When Rapp was certain they were past any residual guards who might want to look in on him, he pulled off his cuffs. Maslick had used the tips of Jesem’s shoelaces to jam the locking mechanisms while Rapp recovered from a slightly overzealous kick to the stomach. Low-tech but effective.
The back of the van was brutally hot, probably close to one hundred twenty Fahrenheit, with ventilation limited to a few holes drilled through the sides. Soon, though, the sun would go down and the unbearable heat would turn to bitter cold. A good twelve hours of it, if they made it to the CIA black site that was ostensibly their goal. If everything went to plan, though, his trip would last nowhere near that long.
Maslick had done a solid job of winding up Umar Shirani—better than Rapp had imagined the former soldier capable of. The general would be blind with rage at being castrated like that in front of his men, which was exactly the reaction Rapp was looking for. It was unlikely that the old soldier would let that kind of humiliation go unanswered.
At this point, though, his power to retaliate was limited. The best he could do without exposing his role was to get in touch with his contacts at ISIS and give them the route of the van carrying their American compatriot. Shirani would deny the CIA their prisoner and any information he might have.
Rapp closed his eyes and did his best to drift off despite the pain radiating from virtually every part of his body. The heat and lack of water were going to do a job on him and it was critical to conserve as much strength as he could. If he was right about what would come next, he had to maintain as much of his physical and mental capacity as possible.
• • •
Rapp awoke just as the van’s driver slammed on the brakes—a split second too late to keep from sliding forward and smashing his head. Automatic gunfire erupted a moment later and he flattened himself against the steel floor as a few errant rounds rang off the vehicle’s exterior. The barrage grew in intensity, turning deafening when the men in the cab started to return fire.
Rapp’s head was still foggy as he crawled toward the doors and retrieved the discarded handcuffs. Opening one of the shackles so that it could be used as a claw, he slithered the rest of the way toward the rear. Shouts became audible outside and he threw his arms protectively over his head as rounds stitched themselves across the vehicle’s door.
They were clearly intentional. Chutani’s men would do what they could to make sure Eric Jesem didn’t live long enough to be rescued by his ISIS companions.
Rapp heard the handle rattle and he pushed himself to his knees. A moment later, the doors were yanked open and one of Chutani’s men was there, holding a Beretta in his hand. With nothing but two feet of air separating them, this time he’d get the job done.
The pistol rose and Rapp lunged, swinging the open handcuff toward the guard’s neck. By the time they collided, though, the man was already dead—hit by a bullet that entered his right side and exited the left in a cloud of blood and bone. They landed gracelessly on the road and Rapp rolled the corpse on top of him as guns opened up from a chase car stopped twenty-five yards back. The sun was beginning to dip below the horizon, reducing visibility but not the temperature of the asphalt. Sticky tar penetrated his shirt, burning the skin on his back badly enough to force him to cast off the man’s body and run in a crouch for the road’s shoulder.
Bullet impacts sounded to his left and he adjusted his trajectory away from them. The blow to the head he’d suffered when the van stopped would have been enough of a disadvantage on its own. Combined with the heat and the beating he’d take from Maslick, his legs felt like they were going to collapse beneath him.
The rounds continued tracking, getting closer as Rapp ran. He cleared the edge of the road and tripped in the glare of the setting sun, slamming into a pile of jagged rocks before sliding down a steep embankment. When he stopped, he tried to get up, but his body refused to obey. Naked willpower got him to all fours, but then he collapsed and rolled onto his scorched back in the gravel.
Consciousness came and went as the sound of the battle raged around him. Gunfire. Shouts. The screams of the wounded. When he finally managed to o
pen his eyes, he saw the silhouettes of armed men standing over him. One of them unwrapped the scarf hiding his face before putting a bottle of water to Rapp’s split lips.
“What have they done to you, brother?”
CHAPTER 32
LOCATION UNKNOWN
RAPP regained consciousness in frustrating fits and starts. Sound came first—the mechanical growl of distant vehicles, wind whistling through cracks in walls. Muffled voices. Then came the pain. Oddly, the worst of it emanated from the part of his back that had been burned by the road. His head was a close second. Dull instead of sharp, but pounding with impressive intensity.
He let his eyelids rise slightly, adjusting to the glare before fully opening them. The woman hovering over him was in her early thirties, with hair covered by a scarf and a pretty face marred by a prominent black eye. She was dabbing at his forehead with something but scurried off when she saw that he was awake.
Rapp was lying on a bed wearing nothing but Eric Jesem’s shit-stained boxers. The wounds he’d suffered all appeared to have been cleaned, stitched, and bandaged. His nose was of little use but he could taste rubbing alcohol in the air.
The room was small, consisting of nothing more than four concrete walls that had seen better days. Not a cell, though. While there were no windows, there was a threshold with a missing door leading to an outer room. He could hear men speaking Arabic, but their voices were too quiet to make out much more than a few individual words.
A moment later, a young man entered and stood over him, gazing down at his damaged face. When he spoke, he used mangled English.
“Eric. Friend. You awake. You can move?”
Rapp nodded and pushed himself into a sitting position on the bed. Best to keep his social interactions minimal. Irene had managed to provide him with some background on Jesem, but that was after a lot of hard blows to the head and he didn’t remember a lot of it. Even if he did, he would still have no idea who the asshole standing over him was or what his relationship with Jesem had been. He did remember, though, that the Coloradan wasn’t an Arabic speaker.
“The general asks for you. Eric, you come? You are strong?”
Rapp gave another silent nod and the man helped him to his feet. They walked into the outer room, where the woman who had been helping him was cowering in a corner. He didn’t acknowledge her as he passed, following the man down a set of stairs and out into the sunlight.
They walked up a dirt street that was virtually abandoned. From what he could see, the area had once been a commercial center, with shops and stalls that were now burned or gutted by bombs. Rapp glanced at what was left of a few signs, making sure not to give away that he was reading. They contained only enough information for him to determine that he was somewhere in Iraq and not Syria. Good for him because of his more extensive history operating in this theater.
Since the man with him was clearly ISIS and walking around with impunity, it was fairly certain that they were in an area controlled by the terrorist group. At this point, that narrowed it down to north-central Iraq.
He continued his subtle search but could find nothing that contained a city name and he couldn’t risk asking. While it was possible that Jesem had never been there, it was also possible that they’d just left his apartment. Rapp would have to keep his questions limited to things that the American terrorist definitely wouldn’t know.
“How long was I unconscious?”
“Four days, brother.”
Too damn long. The stolen fissile material could have been transported almost anywhere by now.
“How did I get here?”
“We fought the men taking you to the Americans. You do not remember?”
“No.”
“You hurt your head. We thought you die. But Allah is not taking you. He wants you to stay. To fight.”
They turned onto a wider avenue and a pickup full of young armed men passed them, whooping and calling out as they did. Rapp ignored them, focusing instead on the building they were approaching. It had a governmental look to it but the sign had been ripped off and dumped facedown in a pile of refuse. So, still no city name.
The interior showed a significant amount of damage from small arms fire but the stairs to the basement were in good shape. After being led past a few wary guards, Rapp found himself standing in front of a man wearing the uniform of one of Saddam Hussein’s generals.
“I was told what the Americans did to you, Eric, but now that I see it, I’m shocked,” the general said in respectable English. Rapp couldn’t put a name to him, but there was something familiar about his face. Had it been on one of the playing cards they’d handed out to U.S. troops? Had they met when the Agency was trying to get its arms around the tangled web of religious, political, and tribal alliances that plagued Iraq? Back when the politicians in Washington still thought there was some hope of sorting the good from the bad?
“My sources say you faced the CIA’s Mitch Rapp.”
Rapp nodded. “Sources” almost certainly meant that piece of shit Umar Shirani. Fortunately, the man was as predictable as he was corrupt.
“I’m also told that you said nothing. I’m impressed. Rapp has broken great men. Devout men.”
Rapp nodded a silent acknowledgment of the compliment.
“What can you tell me, Eric? What do the Americans know? What do they suspect?”
Now the truly dangerous game started. How much to say? He needed to draw the man into conversation, but it would only take one slip to guarantee a summary beheading.
“They said that we’ve taken fissile material from Pakistan’s missiles.”
“How many?”
“They believe six.”
“So they know of all of them,” the general muttered. “Do they know anything of our plan?”
“They believe that we’re building nuclear weapons and that we’re going to smuggle them into the United States.”
“Fools. How I would love to see the look on the American president’s face when he learns the truth.”
What truth?
“Yes, sir.”
“The nurse who examined you said that none of your injuries are life threatening. You will recover. But, I’m afraid, not quickly enough to play a role in our operation. I’m sorry.”
The expression of deep disappointment that settled on Rapp’s swollen face wasn’t entirely manufactured. It was unlikely that anyone knew where he was or even if he was still alive. With no way to communicate with the outside world, he had no choice but to handle this himself. And that wasn’t something that was going to happen from the bleachers.
“Please, General. I’m already healing. Test me. I can still carry out my part.”
“I admire your devotion, Eric. And you’re right. You will heal and play an important role in spreading God’s law across the world. But not over the course of the next three days.”
So now Rapp had a time frame, but no plan. And still no way to tell anyone even if he did.
“Sir, I beg you—”
“No,” the soldier said, displaying a hint of anger at having his orders questioned.
There was nothing Rapp could do but bow his head submissively.
“I’m truly sorry we can’t use you in this, Eric. But there are more ways than one to reward your courage and devotion.”
CHAPTER 33
RAPP stayed a pace behind the unnamed general as they started up a street occupied by only a few armed men posted on corners. The Iraqi glanced up at the hazy sky and Rapp emulated the familiar tic. People in this region had a well-founded fear of American drones and he now shared it. Standing too close to this piece of shit created the very real danger that he might be vaporized by someone he was on a first-name basis with. Fortunately, the winds had picked up to the point that U.S. drones would be grounded and satellites would be blinded by blowing sand.
The general turned down a bombed-out alley and Rapp followed, glancing back at the man who had rousted him from his bed earlier that day. The
three of them were now alone in the narrow corridor, obscured by walls rising up on either side and the howl of the wind. It would be so easy. A quick turn on his heel followed by a throat strike. The general, lost in his own thoughts, wouldn’t notice anything until Rapp clapped a hand over his mouth and dragged him into one of the collapsing buildings around them.
How long until he was discovered, though? Generals might occasionally stroll through the streets with only a single guard, but their schedules were always tight. It was unlikely that much more than a few minutes would pass before someone came looking. Nowhere near long enough to get any actionable intelligence. And then there was still the problem of getting word out to someone in a position to take that action.
Rapp heard the mob before he saw it. Cheers, loud enough to drown out the wind, rose and fell in an unpredictable rhythm. Less than two minutes later, they entered a large plaza containing a gathering that, under clear skies, would have been immediately targeted by the U.S. There were probably two hundred men, almost all pumping assault rifles in the air. At the north end of the square was a raised stage, hastily constructed of wood planks. And on that stage stood a man holding two girls.
One was probably sixteen and the other no more than thirteen. Both had been stripped naked and looked nearly catatonic. They’d spent their postadolescent lives covered from head to toe and under the watchful eye of their families. Now everyone they knew was dead and they found themselves exposed and alone. Livestock in a sex slave auction.
“If one of these pleases you, you’re welcome to her,” the general said. “But I’ll warn you. Neither is a virgin.”
That explained the bruises that were becoming increasingly evident as they approached through the parting crowd. The girls were being sold for the second or third time by masters who had become bored with them.
A winner in the bidding emerged and leapt onstage. After a careful accounting of his payment, he dragged off the younger of the two girls while the auctioneer tried to drum up enthusiasm for the older one.