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He heard Coleman issue orders for anyone not otherwise occupied to get in the back of the truck. Rapp watched as the last few tools were buried and the men began to climb in. Coleman was last, and Rapp closed, but didn’t lock, the steel doors behind him. When he went around to the cab again, Kadir was finished with the windshield and had taken his place behind the wheel. As promised, the odor given off by the epoxy was already dissipating.
“You ready?” Rapp said, pulling himself into the passenger seat.
The Syrian didn’t respond. His lips were moving silently as he talked to himself or, more likely, his god. It didn’t seem to be a distraction, though. He moved smoothly through the gears as they began to accelerate. Rapp reached through his open window and adjusted the side mirror, searching the starlit landscape behind them. The road in both directions was empty and there was no sign at all of what had just happened there. Other than the remaining blood on the seat soaking through his fatigues, everything was going as planned.
CHAPTER 44
THEtruck hit a fairly innocuous pothole and Rapp once again felt his spine compress. In the back, his packed-in team would be taking even more of a beating, but there wasn’t anything to be done. The military suspension and new tires were built neither for comfort nor for speed. Only durability.
Kadir still looked steady, despite his lips continuing to move manically in the dim light of the gauges. Who he was talking to and what he was saying wasn’t particularly relevant at this point. All that mattered was that his demons seemed to have been temporarily overpowered by his commitment to the mission.
“There it is,” Rapp said, pointing to a dead tree on the west edge of the road.
When Semenov’s facility had served as a hospital, the turn had been paved. Not anymore. Based on satellite images, the first half mile had been torn out to camouflage the entrance and the tree had been erected to mark the turn.
Kadir downshifted and eased the truck onto what looked like opendesert. The truck swayed and bounced, finally regaining asphalt behind a low rise that hid it from the main thoroughfare.
According to the Agency’s cartographers, it would be another 4.8 miles of rolling terrain to the facility’s gate. At their maximum practical speed, that translated to a ten-minute ETA.
“You still good?” Rapp asked his companion.
“I’ve been chosen to do God’s work. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Certain death had a strange way of calming the mind. Rapp had experienced the sensation a number of times before finding a way to cheat the Grim Reaper at the last minute. For Kadir it was different. He had no interest in wiggling out of this trap. Very much the opposite.
“And you, my friend?” Kadir said.
“What?”
“Areyoustill okay?”
Rapp noted a dull glow in the distance. There was no detail to it, but also no doubt about its source.
“Yeah.”
As they closed, the facility came into sharper focus, largely matching his memory and the Agency’s photos. The chain-link fence was supported by concrete pillars every twenty feet or so and topped with razor wire. Thirty-foot towers had been erected on each corner, with a fifth to the left of the only gate. All were assumed to be manned, as was the guardhouse next to the entrance.
From this angle, the two buildings seemed even more independent than he’d expected—physically touching, but of completely different designs and shapes. The older section betrayed its history with a boxy concrete construction, a central glass door, and small windows. The west wing was a story taller, with no windows at all until the top floor, which was constructed almost entirely of glass. Aleksandr Semenov was known for his love of luxury and Rapp was confident that his living quarters were on that floor along with his office suite. Predictably, the windows were dark. At this hour, Semenov would be asleep. Probably next to his latest underage rape victim.
When they got to within a couple hundred yards, Rapp checked to make sure the RPG-7 on the floorboard was out of sight and retrieved his .22 pistol. As they continued to close, he saw that the lights in the underground parking garage were on and that there was still no barrier beyond the wooden arm in the up position. Based on Kadir’s experience, around eight armed men would be waiting there to take charge of the prisoners they believed were in the back of the truck.
Spotlights came to life when they got inside of one hundred and fifty yards, and the chain-link gate began to slide back. A barrier similar to the one on the garage remained down, but it was there less for security than to show drivers where to stop in order to hand over their papers. The real deterrent was a set of aggressive tire spikes that spanned the opening. Sufficient to shred the standard Ural tires, but not a problem for the solid rubber ones that had been compacting his vertebrae since they’d set out.
Otherwise, everything was quiet. The prisoner-swap procedure would have been carried out so many times that the Russians would just be going through the motions. Empty the truck of scared, flex-cuffed people weakened by their living conditions and battered by the trip. Hustle them off to their cells. Refill the truck with the test subjects they no longer had use for. Go back to bed. Nothing bred complacency like a long string of successful repetitive operations.
At least that was the hope.
Rapp retrieved a wireless detonator not much larger than a lipstick tube and installed a double-A battery. The light on the side came on red, then changed to blue when it connected to the explosives in the back.
“Do you understand what you’re going to do?”
“Of course,” Kadir said, rolling down his window.
“And you understand how the detonator works?”
“I’ve practiced this a thousand times with Joe. Ten thousand. A million. The button can only be pressed once. When it’s released the truck will explode.”
“And what about—”
