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Put your hands through it so they can be seen!
He hadn’t come here to be martyred. His job had been to get the container to its destination outside of Bergamo. He knew nothing more than that. Not why. Not what it contained. Not who would be waiting for him. He didn’t need to know those things. Feeling God’s presence and being of service to Him was enough.
But now the mission had failed, and his orders had changed. Therewas only one thing left to do. One final act that would carry him to Allah’s embrace.
Saeed put the truck in gear and rammed the vehicle in front of him. It rocked on its wheels and began skidding sideways, hopping awkwardly until its tires were torn from the rims. The pitch of shouted orders rose, but no one fired their weapons. They wanted him alive. They wanted to torture him. To force him to give up his brothers and turn his back on God.
Sparks began to fly from the back of the vehicle stuck to his grille, and then, suddenly, he was free of it. He moved through the gears, increasing his speed as the people on the dock tried to escape. He clipped one and managed to hit another head-on, pulling him beneath the truck’s wheels and causing the suspension to jerk satisfyingly.
The gunfire finally started when he wrenched the wheel left and accelerated toward a fleeing man dressed as a dockworker. Holes appeared in his windshield, but he paid no attention. Something impacted the window next to him, embedding glass in the side of his face and blinding him in one eye. Despite this, there was no pain. Only hate and elation.
Saeed twisted the wheel again as his quarry cut right, but this time the trailer lost traction and the weight of the container began pulling it over. He threw his door open and leapt out, enthralled by what he knew would happen next. He’d been given authorization for one last act of vengeance against his people’s oppressors, and now he’d use it.
His feet hit first, but the momentum was too much to overcome, and he found himself rolling uncontrollably across the dock. His position on the ground was enough to save his life when the bomb at the back of the truck’s cab detonated, but not enough to keep his clothes from igniting. Again, there was no pain. Only the yellow firelight visible in his still-intact eye.
Saeed fought his way to his feet and saw the vague outline of ahuman a few meters ahead. The bullets impacting him were barely noticeable as he charged forward and dove at the figure, holding on with what strength he had left as the flames enveloped them.
By that point, he could no longer see but, praise be to Allah, he was still capable of hearing his victim’s screams.
CHAPTER 1
HINDUKUSHMOUNTAINS
AFGHANISTAN
MITCHRapp raised a fist before crouching next to a jumble of boulders. The men behind him would do the same, melting into the darkness and scanning for threats.
Sometimes, though, those threats were hard to see.
To the north, the Hindu Kush mountain range was outlined against the stars. A few of its taller peaks were still holding on to snow that shone dully in the celestial light. They dominated everything in this region, providing mortal dangers to the local inhabitants as well as the means for their survival. Even the shallow canyon Rapp found himself in was the result of ancient glaciers that had made their way across the valley floor.
Water was scarce, but the fact that the ditch to his left was lined with low grass and scrub hinted at its presence just beneath the surface. Not enough to sustain anything that most people would recognize as civilization, but sufficient for a few hearty souls to eke out an isolated existence. And for all their faults, no one could say that the Afghans weren’t hearty souls.
A broad agricultural plot ahead suggested that they were closing in on their target and that’s what had prompted the stop. Confirming what he’d seen on the reconnaissance photos, it appeared to have gone fallow some time ago. A few stone barriers and terraces were all that was left of what was once probably not much former glory. Most likely a family poppy operation with a few goats thrown in. Afghanistan the way it had been before and now was again.
The war was finally over, and it had ended pretty much how Rapp had always expected. To some extent, America was a ceaseless victim of its own success. Over the course of a couple hundred years, it had gone from a British colonial backwater to the most powerful country of the modern era. It had developed the ultimate secret sauce and was happy to pass out the recipe to anyone interested. Who wouldn’t want that? When the US military rolled across your border, it wasn’t to subjugate your country, it was to deliver you from oppression, provide education and health care, and build infrastructure. To create a pothole-free path to peace, freedom, and prosperity.
With all those rainbows and unicorns, what could possibly go wrong?
Same answer as always. Everything.
The Americans had never managed to assemble an Afghan government that wasn’t a combination of the Three Stooges and Dr. Evil. That had created an environment in which the US military had to take over the administration of the country’s affairs, while Afghan officials focused on stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down. Ironically, what had kept Afghanistan on a reasonably even keel during the occupation wasn’t their confidence in their own government, but rather their confidence in the American one. Much like the Romans of the distant past, the US could be more or less counted on to live up to their agreements, pay people on time, and generally get shit done.
When that abruptly ended, the locals had a choice to make, and they’d chosen the Taliban. It was something Rapp had warned Washington about more times than he could count. While the Taliban werebrutal and repressive, they were also predictable. And in this part of the world, predictability was about the best facsimile of stability anyone could hope for.
Back in the US, the mess of a war was inevitably followed by the mess of a pullout and then a mess of finger-pointing. Generals at politicians, politicians at the intelligence community, officers at generals, enlisted men at officers. The truth was that it was a failure at every level. One that the exhausted American people now preferred to pretend never happened.
All of which had combined to bring him to this place at this moment.
There were still a little over twenty Americans trapped in-country under various circumstances. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a story anyone wanted to tell. It didn’t fit into the former president’s image of godlike master of the universe, and the media didn’t see any profit in giving airtime to a subject that made Americans reach for the remote. Fortunately, with a new occupant in the Oval Office and Irene Kennedy back in control of the CIA, the clandestine services were finally able to start tackling the issue.
Or at least that was the theory.
After two minutes of motionlessness, Rapp hadn’t heard anything that couldn’t be attributed to the air filtering through the mountains. He motioned for his men to follow and continued along the degraded trail.
They’d already managed to get eight hostages out the easy way—with money. Taliban rule had plunged much of the country into poverty so abject that even the tough-as-nails Afghans were having a hard time hanging on. Famine was on the horizon and reports of people being forced to sell their children just to survive were becoming increasingly common.
It was a level of desperation that made even the most hardened jihadist forget about revenge in favor of finding the means to feed their families. With one exception, every kidnapper they’d contacted hadbeen happy to just take the cash. And now Rapp had returned to Afghanistan to deal with that exception.
