• • •
The guard turned out to be dangerously inattentive. Rapp and Mohammed approached to within thirty feet and he still hadn’t noticed them. Startling the man wasn’t ideal, but seemed inevitable in the open terrain. The best they could hope for was to be close when it happened.
Twenty feet came and went. Then fifteen. The man remained focused on getting every last bit of smoke out of his cigarette. Maybe they were going to get lucky. Maybe this would go quiet and easy.
Then again, maybe not. At ten feet, the man picked them up in his peripheral vision and spun, clawing for the weapon on his shoulder.
“Brother!” Rapp called, continuing to approach with empty hands spread wide. Mohammed was a pace back, wearing desert garb and a headdress that revealed only his eyes. Rapp was similarly outfitted but had left his face uncovered so as not to obscure his battered face. He seemed to be at the height of his fifteen minutes of fame. Why not use it?
“Jesem?” the guard said before he could line up the rifle. The pronunciation was completely Arabic, suggesting that he spoke no English. Rapp waved Mohammed forward and put an arm warmly around his shoulders. “Translate for me, brother.”
“Of course.”
“General Mustafa has given me back my place on the team. I should have waited until morning to come, but I was anxious to rejoin my comrades.”
Mohammed translated his words and then the man’s response.
“Welcome back, brother.”
Rapp reached into his pocket to retrieve a pack of cigarettes—something he’d learned never to be without when traveling in Muslim nations. At the same time, he slid a knife from his waistband and held the blade flat against his forearm. It was probably more stealth than necessary in light of the fact that the guard was completely hypnotized by the pristine pack of Marlboros. As he leaned in to reach for one, Rapp flicked the knife out and ran it across his throat. The motion was so subtle and the blade so sharp that the man didn’t immediately seem to notice.
Rapp guided him to the ground facedown. A foot between his shoulder blades kept him from splattering them as he bled out.
“Are you all right?” Rapp asked Mohammed.
“Yes. Of course.”
There was no question that Rapp’s companion had seen a great deal in his life. But there was a difference between seeing and participating. He hadn’t panicked or run, though, and that was worth something.
“Then let’s go.”
As they started toward the entrance to the building, Rapp instinctively raised a hand to activate his throat mike but then remembered it wasn’t there. Just like his body armor, night vision gear, and, most critically, his silencer. It wasn’t quite as bad as going up against a group of well-armed jihadists with a stick and a rock, but it was close. At least sticks and rocks were quiet.
They stopped outside the door and Rapp leaned into Mohammad’s ear. “Remember, we belong here. Until we’re sure those kids are locked away upstairs, anyone we run into is our best friend. All you have to do is translate for me just like you did with the guard. If you stay calm, all this will be over in a few minutes.”
After a nervous nod, they entered a lobby decorated with a bullet-ridden plaque commemorating the school’s opening. Dim, widely spaced bulbs strung together with extension cords provided enough illumination to navigate but not much more. Rapp led, bloody knife still held against his forearm.
They stayed in the center of the hallway, walking casually through a litter of crayon drawings that recalled better times.
“Left just ahead,” Mohammed said.
Rapp strode into the narrower corridor, slowing when he noticed that the doors along the right side contained windows. Some had intact glass and others shattered, but all the rooms they looked onto were dark. He moved quickly to the first, peering inside at a classroom full of overturned desks.
The next one looked similar, but with one critical difference visible near the center: a lone cot with a man asleep on it. Rapp was about to continue on when he spotted a shadow moving among the desks piled against the far wall. His hand moved subtly toward the gun in his waistband but then his mind identified the vague shape. A girl, probably not much older than Anna, naked and shivering.
Rapp felt his anger building again, but he pushed it aside. There would be time to let it out soon enough.
Footsteps became audible approaching from the west and Rapp turned away from the window, motioning for Mohammed to remain calm.
The armed man who appeared around the corner looked a hell of a lot more serious than the guard at the gate. Rapp computed the distance between them and tried to figure the odds that he could hit him with an underhand knife throw. Before he could finish his calculation, though, the man shouted at him in thickly accented English.
“Eric! I saw you in the square, but I could not reach you in the crowd!”
Rapp was starting to enjoy his newfound fame. Maybe they’d throw him a party and he could pop every one of these pieces of shit while they were cutting the cake.
“Brother!” Rapp said, throwing his arms around the man, despite the AK between them. It was tempting to use the knife, but their joyful reunion was generating too much noise. Someone was bound to hear the commotion and come to see what it was about.
“Why are you here, Eric?”
“General Mustafa has returned me to the team,” Rapp said excitedly and then pointed to Mohammed. “This is my new friend. He translates for me when it’s necessary.”
“God be with you.”
“And you,” Mohammed replied.
“You really must learn our language, Eric. This is your home now. We are your people.”
“I know,” Rapp said. “You’re right.”
The door that he had peeked into earlier was suddenly thrown open and the man who had been sleeping on the cot appeared.
Rapp raised a hand in greeting, but Mohammed was startled by the sound and spun, firing an automatic burst into the man’s chest.
Rapp’s new buddy, despite having an assault rifle hanging across his chest, hesitated. With no other option, Rapp used that delay to drive his blade into the back of the man’s head.
“Get to the girls!” he said, dragging the body toward the open door Mohammed was frozen in front of.
“I’m sorry,” the Iraqi stammered. “He scared me. I didn’t—”
“The girls!” Rapp said, adjusting the scarf around his neck to cover his face and head. “Now!”
Mohammed started sprinting toward the back of the building as Rapp wrestled the two bodies into the open classroom. He’d barely gotten the first over the threshold when the naked girl shot past him and ran, sobbing, toward the lobby.
The sound of her slamming through the main doors was accompanied by the shouts of men waking up all over the building. What he didn’t hear, though, was a gunshot. Gaffar was thankfully less easy to startle than Mohammad. The girl would be allowed to disappear into the night.
“Americans!” Rapp shouted in Arabic. “The Americans are attacking!”
He slid the knife back into his waistband and clamped a hand over his thigh, lurching forward as though he’d been shot. A man appeared in the stairwell to his right and Rapp motioned toward the lobby. “The Americans! They’re out front! Hurry!”
More men appeared and ran for the main entrance, checking their weapons, speculating loudly as to the strength of the opposing force, and wondering if the Americans would dare use drones. Rapp’s feigned wound gave him an excuse to hang back. Six men were in front of him, none of whom were looking behind them. He reached for Gaffar’s Smith & Wesson but then heard the sound he’d been dreading: the screams of young girls mixed with a drumroll of running feet.
His sweet setup went to shit in a matter of seconds. The men ahead started looking back and a moment later he was engulfed in a sea of panicked children. They flowed around him and the ISIS men, trapping them in an irresistible current moving toward the front of the building. The terrorist
s faced forward again, shouting angrily and swinging their rifle butts. A few connected and the girls went down, but it was useless. The slave trade was clearly better than Mohammed thought, because there had to be at least a hundred of them.
Shooting was pointless. Rapp would be lucky to hit the ground in this environment. He spotted what he needed just ahead and to his right—a three-foot break in the lockers that lined the wall.
With considerable effort, he managed to fight his way out of the flow of escaping girls. Five men were still visible and he braced himself between the lockers, aiming his pistol at a terrorist about to disappear around the corner.
Rapp went for his upper back, not wanting to cause the mess that tended to accompany a headshot. It worked. He went down, but it looked like he’d just tripped in the melee. The gunshot was loud as hell, but in the concrete corridor, it would be impossible to pinpoint its source.
A tall girl with a blanket wrapped around her bumped Rapp’s gun hand as she ran past, but he recovered quickly and took out a man who was actually slashing at the children around him with a sword. A man a few feet behind saw him fall and looked back at Rapp, but he didn’t have time to raise his weapon before taking a round to the throat.
The last viable target disappeared around the corner just as the tail end of the stampede passed by. Only a few very young girls were left behind, confused and crying.
Mohammed appeared a moment later. Apologizing a little too loudly, but at least not shooting at anything.
“They were already coming through the door when I got there! I tried to push it closed, but it was impossible.”
Rapp didn’t respond, instead starting to run toward the front of the building. When he came to the lobby, he found close to fifteen men firing blind bursts through the windows.
Rapp went straight for the middle of them, slamming his back into the closed doors with Gaffar’s pistol held near his chest. “General Mustafa sent us to warn you that the Americans were planning an attack. But we were too late.”
Completely destroying Mustafa’s teams wasn’t part of his plan, but he needed a few more dead before the night was over.
“We have to get out of here!” Rapp continued. “With the girls gone, the Americans will use their drones. We don’t have much time!”
The men nodded their agreement.
“You have to survive to carry out the general’s plans,” Rapp said. “I’ll go out first and draw the Americans’ fire. Follow a few seconds later and run for the desert.”
He lurched over to Mohammed and grabbed him by the back of the neck. “Come with me.”
They went back to the doors and, with a shout of Allahu Akbar, charged out into the night, firing their weapons into the bottom of the hill that Gaffar was ensconced on. Rapp pulled the scarf from his face and hoped to hell that Gaffar was paying attention.
It appeared that he was, because when the flashes from his rifle started up, they were angled safely away from them.
Rapp sprinted ahead, leaving Mohammed on his own and dropping to his stomach about twenty-five yards outside the gate. He aimed through the gloom, tracking the men trying to escape into the night. One to his two o’clock went down, a victim of Gaffar’s marksmanship. His companion crouched and skirted the fence, looking for an easy way over. Rapp squeezed off a single round as the man leapt onto the wire and began to climb. The tango jerked visibly before his body folded lifelessly over the top.
Mohammed ran past, unaware that Rapp was lying only a few feet away. He’d follow in a moment. By his count, two more needed to go down before the night’s work was over.
CHAPTER 42
EAST OF FUJAIRAH
GULF OF OMAN
GRISHA Azarov had taken one of only three hammocks belowdecks. The men assigned to him had commandeered the other two, as well as the limited number of mats spread out below. Crewmembers not on duty were left to sleep among the crates stacked throughout the already claustrophobic space.
By his watch, he had been on the vessel for less than eight hours, but it already felt like days. The captain assured him that they were making good time—the sails were full of the wind so important to Krupin’s plans.
Azarov tried to meditate on the details of the operation, but his mind wandered to Mitch Rapp. Was their confrontation approaching? Would the conflict between them be resolved in the coming days? Maybe even in the coming hours?
It was obvious what defeat would bring, but what would victory feel like? Pride at seeing the CIA man’s lifeless body at his feet? Relief at having neutralized a threat that otherwise would have kept coming until one of them was dead? Or maybe nothing more than the same numbness he always felt when he took a life.
A frightened shout drifted down to him from the main deck. The words were in Arabic, but Azarov understood enough of them to tease out a meaning. The Americans had taken an interest in their modest vessel and were moving to intercept.
Crewmembers scrambled for the ladder leading upward while Azarov’s men began desperately moving crates. Finally, they managed to expose the relevant section of decking and Azarov pulled up three unattached boards, exposing an electric winch.
He flipped a switch and then glued the boards back down with a bottle of instant adhesive. His men immediately began moving the crates back to their original positions over the winch. As they did, the fissile material attached to the hull began to descend at the end of a hundred-meter-long cable. In less than two minutes, their critical cargo would be resting in the silt at the bottom of the Gulf.
When everything was in order, they ascended the ladder to the main deck. Azarov took an anonymous position near the middle of the line of crewmen anxiously watching the approach of an American coast guard vessel.
Charged with contributing to Gulf security, the modern white-and-red Island-class cutter seemed hopelessly out of place against the Middle Eastern backdrop. That made the situation no less dangerous, though.
It pulled alongside and a boarding craft closed the gap between the two vessels at a speed that suggested a certain amount of urgency. An Arab translator came up the cargo net first, speaking to the captain as uniformed members of the American crew followed.
The dog that appeared next was expected. Though not the Arabs’ favorite creatures, they were quite useful in searching for drugs and weapons. The Geiger counter that came up shortly thereafter, though, was definitely not a standard piece of boarding equipment. Of even more concern were the American divers tipping backward into the water.
Russian spec ops had assured him that the size and color of the cable made it virtually invisible when submerged. Further, the Gulf’s current would loop it away from the vessel, making it extremely unlikely that a diver would collide with it.
Again, Azarov felt himself being pulled out of the present—a dangerous vice that seemed to get worse as the years dragged on. What would happen to him if Krupin’s weapons were discovered? Of course, he and the crew would be taken into custody and the dhow would be put in tow behind the Coast Guard ship. The fact that he wasn’t from this region would be quickly discovered, and that discovery would likely be followed by a transfer to one of the CIA’s black sites. Is that how he was destined to meet Mitch Rapp? Not on the battlefield but chained to a chair in some forgotten corner of the world?
Azarov looked around him and saw that his men were visibly nervous. No more so than the crew, though. The sailors were simple, uneducated men, and it was unlikely that their demeanor would seem unusual to the Americans.
After less than five minutes, the Coast Guard sailors searching belowdecks reappeared and delivered their report. In five minutes more, the frogmen reappeared.
And then it was over.
Azarov remained on deck, watching the Americans return to their ship and the captain of the dhow making preparations to get them back under way. Only when the coast guard cutter began to steam away did Azarov go back belowdecks to reel in their contraband.
CHAPTER 43
AL
-SHIRQAT
IRAQ
THE gunfire at the edge of town had been silent for almost half an hour, but vehicles full of armed men were still streaking toward the former girls’ school. With no communications more sophisticated than short-range radios, all they could do was speculate and point themselves in the general direction of the commotion.
Rapp heard a series of individual gunshots to the east and he paused as they were answered with multiple bursts from automatic weapons. The back-and-forth went on for about thirty seconds before going silent.
Mohammed’s brother had driven them to the edge of town where they’d split up on foot. Based on the direction and distance, it seemed unlikely that any of his team were mixed up in that firefight. More likely it was two groups of ISIS morons getting worked up and shooting at each other.
He avoided the main street, threading his way through the back alleys that led in the general direction of Eric Jesem’s apartment. Another forty minutes of cautious progress brought him to the entrance of the building he now called home. After confirming that no one was watching, he slipped inside and silently climbed the stairs.
Laleh was pacing across the main room when he opened the door. She jerked to a stop and spun in his direction. “My brothers. Are they—”
“They’re both fine,” Rapp said, angling toward one of the two chairs in the room. Instead of sitting, he slammed a foot into it, shattering the spindly legs. A few seconds of picking through the debris turned up a wedge-shaped piece that he could shove into the gap beneath the front door. It wouldn’t stop a motivated intruder, but it would slow them down.
“What are you doing?” Laleh asked as he tore a long strip of cloth from the blackout shade covering the window.
“We’re sharing the bed tonight,” he responded. “Get undressed. You can leave your underwear on.”
“What? No! I won’t let you touch me.”
Rapp was in no mood to argue. “Look, I’ve had about three hours of sleep in the last week and I feel like someone beat me with a baseball bat. We just need to put on a show, okay?”