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“Did someone demote you to chauffeur and not tell me about it?” Rapp said, turning one of the car’s AC vents on him as they accelerated toward the main road. He’d left Coleman in charge and had expected to be picked up by one of the CIA’s local staff.
“We’ve got good intel that a nuke is going to be coming through town in a few hours and that al Badr is going to make a play for it.”
“Not ISIS?”
“ISIS? No, why?”
“No reason,” Rapp said. “But why al Badr? They’re a second-string Kashmiri outfit. What are they doing in Faisalabad?”
“Hell if I know. I’m telling you, Mitch, it just keeps getting worse. Pakistan’s got a thousand terrorist groups and I swear every one of them has their eye on the nukes the army’s driving around. If someone doesn’t get control of this chickenshit government fast, we’re going to lose one.”
He and Coleman had been in some hairy situations over the years, but this was about as agitated as Rapp had ever seen the man.
Not that he didn’t agree. Pakistan was a fractured nation with almost two hundred million inhabitants and a stockpile of more than a hundred nuclear warheads—many of which were currently in motion. A screwup didn’t mean getting your ass shot off, it meant watching a million people disappear into a mushroom cloud. Just the kind of large-scale problem Rapp had spent his career seeking out and Coleman had spent his career trying to avoid.
“Who fed us the intel?”
“Redstone.”
r /> Rapp nodded silently as Coleman turned onto a road that tracked north through the tightly packed buildings of Faisalabad. Redstone was one of their top assets in the region, a man highly placed in Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus. He’d had a few misses over the years, but generally his intel was solid.
“If we get involved, are we going to run headlong into an ISI operation?” Rapp asked, referring to Inter-Services Intelligence—Pakistan’s version of the CIA.
“I don’t think so,” Coleman responded. “According to Redstone, you killing the ISI’s director has completely paralyzed them. Everybody’s jockeying for position and playing both sides of the power struggle going on between General Shirani and the president. The fact that someone could wander off with one of their nukes is so low priority to them it barely makes their radar.”
“How many are we tracking now?”
“Thirteen warheads that we know of are currently on the move. We located another two stationary ones while you were gone, putting the total we have a handle on at fifty-three. The analysts are guessing that another twenty-five are attached to missile systems that would make them impractical to move.”
Rapp did some quick math in his head. “So that leaves somewhere in the ballpark of thirty unaccounted for.”
Coleman nodded. “Including the one we’re talking about now. We weren’t aware of it until Redstone tipped us off.”
It was a problem that had existed for years. The Pakistani army was paranoid about the Americans or Indians getting a bead on their nuclear arsenal, so they moved it around—on trucks, in train cars, in the trunks of private automobiles. Hell, there was credible intel that a tactical warhead had once been hauled three hundred miles on the back of a motorcycle.
It had always been an incredibly dangerous situation, but one that the Pakistani army kept more or less under control. The transfers were carefully coordinated and, even more important, the weapons were always partially disassembled and transported as individual parts that couldn’t be used to create a nuclear explosion.
So, on any given day, you could count on the fact that one or two nukes were making their way around the country monitored by an army division set up for just that purpose. Now that stupid—but reasonably well run—program was in chaos. Fully functional weapons were being haphazardly passed around by low-level officers and, in two confirmed cases, civilians. One warhead they were watching was currently parked in a retired captain’s storage unit. A recon team had managed to get a fiber optic camera through the ventilation grate and the Agency was now in possession of an honest-to-God picture of a hot nuke sitting next to a set of golf clubs. At this point, the chances of the situation spiraling out of control was almost a hundred percent.
“This is us,” Coleman said, cutting into an alley. He dialed a code into his phone and a rusted cargo door slid open in front of them. There were three motocross bikes in the bay and Rapp stepped out of the vehicle as they nosed up to them. The door began to close again and a moment later they were standing in the gloom provided by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling.
“The roads are a little narrower than Islamabad’s and the traffic’s about the same as Lahore. So, not knowing how fast we’re going to have to move or exactly where this is going to go down, I figured bikes would be our best bet.”
Joe Maslick, one of Coleman’s top men, leaned his considerable bulk through a door to Rapp’s right. His hand came off the weapon beneath his sweat-soaked shirt when he confirmed their identities.
“What’s the situation?” Rapp said, following the man into the next room.
The building looked like it had at one time housed some kind of convenience store, and it was still lined with empty shelves and counters. The large front windows had been blacked out, with the only illumination coming from places where the paint had gotten scraped off.
“We’ve got cameras on buildings at all the major entrances to town. Our manpower is limited but we have people physically covering some of the others. Keep in mind that most aren’t fighters. We scraped them up from wherever we could.”
“Choppers?”
“One on standby.”
“Anything new from Redstone?” Coleman asked.
“Yeah. He says we’re looking for a produce truck.”
