Order to Kill

CHAPTER 27

NEAR BHAKKAR

PAKISTAN

THIS time Rapp was in the left seat of the CIA’s Gulfstream G550. The negotiations to get this meeting set up had been short but contentious. The President of the United States had threatened to use his political clout to cut off every dime of foreign aid to Pakistan. Irene Kennedy, for her part, had made a number of more subtle threats that included General Shirani’s home address and a new class of stealth drone.

No negotiation was completely one-sided, though, and the U.S. had been forced to compromise on a few points. Unfortunately, the first thing to be sacrificed was Rapp’s team. Shirani had made it clear that he would walk if Rapp didn’t come alone. They’d managed to get him to allow a pilot, but Rapp had decided to forgo someone competent at the controls in favor of Joe Maslick, who was parked nervously in the copilot’s seat.

Beyond Rapp’s questionable ability to safely fly the G550, the airstrip below them was hardly the quiet, abandoned field that they would have liked. Instead of descending into a few blowing plastic bags and a herd of goats, they were about to land on a strip crawling with soldiers.

“Looks like about two hundred men total,” Maslick said, peering through the windscreen with a pair of binoculars. “Call it a hundred west of the strip and a hundred east. Tanks, artillery, and fixed machine gun placements just for starters. Looks like they’re using the runway as some kind of half-assed demilitarized zone.”

“Can you tell who’s who?”

“Based on the uniforms you’ve got Shirani’s guys west. Chutani’s presidential guard is east, backed up to the only four buildings still standing. Our intel was right. They look like they haven’t been used in twenty years but they’re still solid enough to provide some cover if everyone starts shooting.”

“What about SAMs?”

“Nothing visible, but you know they’ve got handheld stuff down there somewhere. If the shit hits the fan, we’re probably better off running away from the plane, not toward it.”

Rapp eased forward on the yoke and started their descent while Maslick continued to examine the opposition. They were only a couple hundred feet above the ground when Maslick looked around the side of his binoculars.

“Mitch. You’re too high.”

Rapp ignored him.

“Mitch. Seriously, man. You’re too fucking high. We’re going to overshoot the runway.”

“You want to fly this thing?”

“Oh, shiiiiit!” Maslick shouted in response, putting his feet up on the instrument panel to brace himself.

The landing gear slammed into the runway two-thirds of the way down. Rapp applied the brakes and reversed the engines, but they were still going a good twenty knots when they jumped the end of the tarmac and headed off into the sunbaked mud beyond. The plane bounced wildly over the rough terrain while Rapp fought to keep the tips of the wings from hitting the ground and sending them cartwheeling across the desert. They finally came to a stop in a cloud of dust thick enough to blot out the sun.

“I told you we were too high!” Maslick said. “Why didn’t you just come around for another approach?”

“Where are we?” Rapp asked, calmly shutting down the engines.

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Simple question, Mas. Where are we?”

The former Delta operator thought about it for a moment, an expression of understanding slowly spreading across his features. “Not parked right in the middle of two hundred guys with itchy trigger fingers?”

Rapp thumbed toward the back. “Start unstrapping that thing and let’s get this over with.”

• • •

When Rapp jumped down to the desert floor, the dust haze had cleared just enough to see a black SUV speeding toward them with a single armored vehicle right on its tail. Both skidded to a stop fifteen feet away and one man got out of each. The first was a captain from the Black Storks, a spec ops group controlled by General Shirani. The other was a member of President Chutani’s elite guard. Undoubtedly, every detail of this operation, including who would meet the plane, had been carefully negotiated by the two men vying for control of Pakistan.

“Do you have the warhead you stole from us?” the soldier demanded, while Chutani’s man struck a more respectful pose.

“Right here,” Maslick said, rolling it to the plane’s door. “Enjoy!”

He gave it a hard kick and it dropped the four feet to the ground with an ominous clang that made both men jerk back in fear.

“Load it up,” Rapp said, slipping into the passenger seat of the SUV. The air-conditioning was running and he pointed the vents at himself while the two men looked at each other in confusion. Finally, they were forced to work together to drag the warhead to the army transport. Rapp flipped the radio on and searched for a decent station while they wrestled it into the back.

It was a solid ten minutes before Chutani’s sweat-drenched man finally climbed into the driver’s seat. He started the engine and led out as Maslick watched from the open door of the G550.

“We weren’t informed that you were going to land like that,” the man said nervously.

“Wind,” Rapp lied.

He’d saved Saad Chutani’s life and taken out the man’s main rival at the ISI, but Rapp still didn’t trust him. Like all Pakistani politicians, he was happy to ally himself with America when it benefited him. The moment it no longer did, though, he’d turn on his Western benefactor faster than the idiots in Washington could ever imagine.

“Is everything ready?” Rapp said.

“Yes. It’s just as we discussed.”

They rolled down the middle of the two forces, finally pulling up to a low stone building with a roof that looked like it was on the verge of collapse. Rapp stepped out of the vehicle, making sure not to make any moves sudden enough to startle one of the hundred or so soldiers aiming guns at him.

Two men came out of the building’s only door and an army major indicated for Rapp to put his arms up. He complied, allowing himself to be thoroughly frisked. When the soldier was satisfied, one of Chutani’s men went through the motions of repeating the process. The president didn’t want to give anyone the impression that he was too cozy with America’s CIA, an organization with approval ratings in Pakistan just below those of Satan.

They went inside, where the process was to be repeated by two more men. The first was recognizable as one of Shirani’s most trusted advisors, a squared-away soldier with an impressive physique despite being north of sixty years old. He did an even more thorough job, sliding his fingers along the inside of Rapp’s waistband and insisting that he remove his shoes so that they, too, could be inspected.

Chutani’s man was cut from very different cloth. He was in his early twenties and thin in a way that suggested mild malnutrition. His skin was blackened and marred by a lifetime under the Pakistani sun, but freshly cut hair and an impeccable uniform made him look respectable enough to pass as a young officer.

In fact, Raza Khan was an extremely gifted pickpocket that Chutani’s people had pulled from prison less than fifteen hours ago. He’d been given the choice of performing a small service in return for his freedom, or having his sentence changed from five years to death. Apparently, he hadn’t found the decision difficult.

Khan began to frisk Rapp, starting at the top and moving down as Shirani’s man looked on attentively. The young criminal lived up to his reputation and more. If Rapp hadn’t been expecting it, he wasn’t sure even he would have noticed the tiny Glock 39 slip beneath his shirt and into the waistband Shirani’s man had searched only moments before.

“Are we done?” Rapp said as Khan stepped away.

The pickpocket gave a short nod and opened a door at the back, motioning him through.

The room was windowless and completely empty except for the two men standing silently at opposite ends. President Saad Chutani was a tall, imposing figure with sharp eyes and a suit that was miraculously free of the dust that covered so much of his country. General Umar Shirani was shorter and had a gut held back by the straining fabric of his uniform. He wore the grand mustache favored by Pakistan’s military elite, and a prominent scar ran down one cheek-a souvenir from Pakistan’s 1971 war with India.

Neither of the men moved, clearly not willing to get any closer to one another than was necessary.

Shirani was the first to speak. “You’ve returned my country’s property?”

“Yes,” Rapp responded. “For what it’s worth.”

The soldier’s eyes narrowed as he tried to understand the meaning of Rapp’s words. “Is that another threat? Because if you don’t believe we can get-”

“General,” Chutani cautioned, “before we jump to conclusions, maybe we should let Mr. Rapp explain.”

“I’d be happy to. That bomb’s a dud. There’s no fuel.”

“What are you talking about?” Shirani said. “You-”

“The canister that was supposed to contain the warhead’s fissile material is a fake,” Rapp said, cutting him off.

“This is your doing!” Shirani shouted, pointing an accusatory finger. “You stole our weapon and sabotaged it! Now you’re trying to blame the army. You want to discredit me. To discredit my leadership.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to, General? Don’t accuse me of things we both know I didn’t do.”

“My people saw no terrorists in Faisalabad. Just your people and your helicopter. You wonder why we move our arsenal on a regular schedule? Because of this. Because of the outlaw CIA, killing our people and trying to destroy our ability to defend ourselves.” The aging soldier turned to Chutani. “You made a grave mistake allying yourself with this man. The people of Pakistan don’t want our country to be run from Washington. We are a proud-”

Rapp rushed him, ramming a forearm into Shirani’s throat and driving him into the wall. The general had been a formidable warrior once but had spent his last twenty years sitting on his ass, a luxurious lifestyle that reduced him to slapping ineffectually in Rapp’s general direction.

Rapp used his free hand to take hold of the soldier’s hair and drag him to the floor. A moment later he had the Glock pressed against Shirani’s forehead.

“You…” the general stammered. “My forces are just outside. You can’t kill me.”

“Are you willing to bet your life on that?”

“You’ll die minutes after me. You won’t do it. Americans are cowards.”

Rapp grabbed the general’s sleeve and ripped it from his uniform. The man resisted but couldn’t prevent Rapp from stuffing the starched fabric in his mouth.

“Mitch,” Chutani cautioned from behind. He sounded scared. “Perhaps you should-”

“Shut up,” Rapp said without looking back. “You signed on for this.”

Fucking politicians. They were all the same. Tough as nails when they were barking orders from a distance. But if there was any danger of blood splashing on their five-thousand-dollar suits, they shrank away.

“How many?” Rapp said, pulling the sleeve from the man’s mouth.

“What? I don’t know what you’re-”

The sleeve went back in and Rapp reached for the man’s ring finger, snapping it at the middle joint. The sound of shattering bone was surprisingly loud in the concrete cube of a room. Shirani screamed through his gag, but Rapp didn’t immediately remove it. Better to let the pain work on him for a while.

Kennedy was increasingly convinced that fissile material had been taken from more than just the warhead Craig Bailer had examined. And Rapp found it hard to swallow that Shirani would be completely in the dark about terrorist groups tinkering with his nukes. The man was a scumbag and a thug but not a complete idiot. If he’d gotten even an inkling that his arsenal might be compromised, he’d order a comprehensive assessment.

“How many of your warheads are missing their fissile material?” Rapp repeated, pulling the sleeve out again.

“I don’t-”

He replaced the gag and this time targeted Shirani’s index finger. He needed to get this moving. The Pakistani had more fingers than Rapp did time.

“Mitch…” Chutani said. “He may not know. We-”

“I said, shut up!”

Rapp pulled the gag out again and the man coughed violently, apparently on the verge of vomiting. He’d undoubtedly done much worse to people who had opposed him over the years. Based on the look in his eyes, though, he didn’t much like being on the receiving end.

“You can make this stop, General. How many?”

“Six!” he managed to get out. “There are six including the one you have.”

“Who’s responsible?”

“We don’t know. I didn’t bring in the ISI, so we’re doing the investigation internally. Not Taliban. We know that. My people suspect ISIS. We don’t have much penetration into their network.”

“Where are they? Where are the nukes that have been compromised?”

“We’ve moved them to a nearby missile facility in order to examine them.”

Rapp pressed the barrel of the gun harder against Shirani’s forehead.

“No! I told you what you wanted to know. If you kill me, you and Chutani will never get past my men alive.”

“You should have never agreed to let Chutani’s people take the east side of the runway, General. I’ve got five drones circling overhead and they’re going to rain hell down on your forces while the president’s men take cover behind the buildings. Then it’ll just be a matter of cleaning up the mess.”

The story was only partially true. The drones were there, but Rapp had no idea if the wrecked buildings would hold up to the firestorm they were capable of unleashing.

“There is an alternative,” Rapp said.

“What?”

“You take me to those nukes and resign.”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t be stupid, General. You have what? A hundred and twenty million dollars squirreled away in accounts all over the world? Take your family and your mistresses to London. Buy a mansion and live the good life. Or die here. Now. In this shithole.”

Shirani looked at the president. “Are you sure about this? Are you sure that your position is strong enough to survive the retaliation of the army?”

Chutani shook his head. “I’m not sure, Umar. But you’ve lost control of our nuclear arsenal and put weapons-grade plutonium in the hands of fanatics. One way or another, this must end. Our country and our arsenal must come under responsible civilian control. If we both die here in an effort to achieve that, so be it.”