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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?”
