Memorial Day

Eighteen

Finding a CIA station in a new town was a little bit like looking for a Catholic cathedral. Scan the horizon for the highest point and that was most likely where you would find it. Kandahar was no different, except there were no cathedrals, or even churches-only mosques. The Agency had set up shop at a villa that overlooked the entire town. The place had been built and occupied by a wealthy Afghan family who had fled like all the other well to do families when the Soviet Union had invaded their country. During the eighties the compound had been occupied by the Soviets and then in the nineties by the Taliban, and now it was the Americans.

The recently paved road to the station snaked its way up the hillside to a checkpoint manned by U.S. Marines. The Toyota 4 Runners did not turn off on the road, though. Rapp had told Urda of his plans, and his fellow CIA officer thought it best if they steered clear of both official and unofficial types of U.S. installations. There was a place a little further down the road that Urda knew of. Rapp didn't bother to ask him how he knew of it, or if he'd actually used it. There was no need to ask prying questions in their profession. They only led to liabilities and answers that one was better off not knowing. At the CIA the attitude toward torture was a little bit like the military's policy on homosexuality: don't ask, don't tell.

Rapp was perhaps more comfortable with this state of intentional ignorance than anyone at the Agency. His entire recruitment into the CIA was part of a plan launched by the then director of operations Thomas Stansfield. Stansfield had been a member of the CIA's precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. He'd distinguished himself during WWII when he became a highly effective and decorated operative, serving behind enemy lines in both Norway and France. After the war, when the CIA was formed, Stansfield became one of the Agency's first employees.

Stansfield was on the ground in Europe during the Cold War and had been the strategist behind some of America's greatest intelligence coups. During the Church Commission hearings on Capitol Hill in the seventies, when some of the CIA's biggest dunderheads were exposed, he was grateful to be ensconced behind the Iron Curtain. He was hopeful that the Agency would rebound from the hearings as an organization more focused and clear in its mission, but it was not to be. Stansfield watched his once great spy organization slide further into decline during the Iran-Contra fiasco, and saw long before anyone else what political correctness would do to the effectiveness of the CIA.

In the late eighties he reacted by creating a covert organization called the Orion Team. Its mission was to take the war to the terrorists. Stansfield understood, possibly more than any person in Washington at the time, that fighting religious fanatics by civilized means was a doomed endeavor, and ignoring them simply wasn't an option.

The twenty-two-year-old Rapp had been Stansfield and Kennedy's prized recruit. An international business major fluent in French, Rapp was an All-America Lacrosse star for the Syracuse Orangemen. During his junior year thirty-five of his fellow classmates were killed while returning from a semester abroad. The Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack had changed Rapp's life irrevocably. His high school sweetheart, the woman he planned on marrying some day, had been on the plane.

The pain from that tragedy had fueled Rapp's motive for revenge, and over the next decade he was honed into the most effective counterterrorism operative in America's arsenal. All of this was done without the official knowledge of either the Executive or Legislative branches of the government. There were certain key people in Washington who knew of the Orion Team, several esteemed senators and congressmen, but the specifics had been known only to Stansfield. These elder statesmen knew a full decade before the rest of their colleagues that there was a war on terrorism, and they also understood that neither their colleagues nor the American public had the stomach for what it would take to fight the rise in fanaticism.

Calling Rapp a counterterrorism operative was essentially a polite way of ducking the truth. When everything was stripped away, the reality was that he was an assassin. He had killed, and killed often, for his country, and in his mind 9/11 was proof that he hadn't killed enough. These zealots would stop at nothing to impose their narrow interpretation of the Koran, and that included the detonation of a nuclear warhead in the center of a civilian population. Rapp did not look forward to what he had to do, but he certainly wasn't squeamish about it either. There was a very real possibility that the men he had taken from the village possessed information that could save thousands of lives-possibly even hundreds of thousands, and Rapp would do whatever it took to ferret out what they knew.