by Vince Flynn
“I think Nassar might have bailed out when they passed under the bridge,” he said into his throat mike. “There’s a cave entrance under here.”
“Shit,” Dumond said. “And I’ve got more bad news. Nassar’s car blew through the village and it’s headed for the mountains. Do you want me to pull the guys back to your position?”
Joe Maslick had a team in the foothills, but the risks of this operation were starting to push the limits of what was acceptable. The hope was that Nassar would lead them to Halabi and maybe a few of the former Iraqi generals he was using to brutalize the region. But even with a reward like that on offer, their primary concern was to make sure Nassar never saw another sunrise. If that meant passing up a chance at Halabi, so be it.
“That’s a negative,” Rapp said finally. “It’s time to pull the plug. Tell Mas to take out that vehicle and check if Nassar’s in it. In the meantime, I’m going to go into this hole and see what I turn up.”
CHAPTER 58
AALI Nassar crouched, feeling the already agonizing pain in his back flare to the edge of what he could bear. He guessed that he had at least three broken ribs and, based on the bone straining against the skin above his right shoulder, a separated collarbone.
The fact that the SUV he’d been transported in was missing its rear doors and seat belts hadn’t registered as unusual. ISIS scavenged what they could from the locals, the Americans, and their victims. Comfort was hardly the concern of men whose goal was to be martyred while visiting misery and death upon everyone around them.
It wasn’t until he was unceremoniously shoved through that gaping doorway that he realized the vehicle had been specifically chosen for its condition. Despite a pile of fetid mattresses, he’d landed hard, rolling at almost forty kilometers an hour before becoming hung up in a cargo net.
It had been the last piece of an elaborate effort to ensure that no one could follow Nassar’s movements across the Middle East. Even he had to admit that the thoroughness of Halabi’s protocols was impressive and almost certainly sufficient to defeat the efforts of even the Americans.
The stone roof rose again and he straightened his injured body, grinding his teeth in response to the pain. The natural cavern was roughly cylindrical, two meters in diameter, and descended at a shallow angle into the earth. The ground was covered with a thick layer of sand, muffling their progress as they continued forward by the glow of a single flashlight.
The passage turned left and Nassar used the opportunity to glance back. The man behind him had stopped, posting himself at the bend and fading into the darkness as they moved away.
It was impossible to judge distance, but Nassar counted off another three minutes before he heard voices filtering to him from ahead. Individual words were muddled by poor acoustics, but the gravity of the hushed tones was clear.
The passage finally opened into a cave more than ten meters square, illuminated with battery-powered work lights. Mullah Halabi was sitting on a stone outcrop, elevated above a group of middle-aged men kneeling in two lines in front of him. At the edges of the space, younger men armed with assault rifles melded into the shadows. Undoubtedly, they were members of Halabi’s famously devoted private guard.
Nassar recognized a number of the older men from information shared by the Americans and Europeans—soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s disbanded army. Most of the high-ranking officers had been either captured or killed, but in many ways these lower-ranking officers were more useful. Their superiors had left the details of war to them while they focused on the much more critical activity of currying favor with Hussein.
Halabi’s predecessor had begun recruiting these men in an effort to turn his motivated but undisciplined forces into an army capable of holding territory. After he died in a drone strike, Halabi took over with the much more ambitious goal of standing even against the powerful Saudi and Egyptian militaries.
“Welcome, Aali. I trust your journey wasn’t too uncomfortable.”
“Not at all,” he said, hiding the pain that speaking caused him.
“I understand that you have something for me?”
The thumb drive Nassar was carrying had been discovered when he was searched for tracking devices in Mecca. He’d been allowed to keep it and now he retrieved it from his pocket. When he stepped forward to hand it to the ISIS leader, the men at the edges of the cave came to life.
“Don’t give it to me,” Halabi said, pointing to a man to Nassar’s right. “Give it to him.”
He did as he was told and watched the man slip the drive into a laptop.
“It’s asking for a password.”
“Of course it is,” Halabi said. “But I suspect that the director will be reluctant to give us that password.”
“The intelligence and bank account information on that drive are yours,” Nassar said.
The mullah smiled. “A meaningless response. Perhaps politics was your true calling.”
“Perhaps.”
“Can we break his encryption?” Halabi asked.
The man shook his head. “Unlikely. Torturing him for it would have a higher probability of success.”
Halabi nodded thoughtfully. “I wonder. It seems likely that there’s a password that would put the information forever out of our reach. Isn’t that so, Aali?”
“It is.”
Halabi rubbed his palms together in front of his face. “The money that drive gives us access to will quickly slip through our fingers, and the intelligence will just as quickly become dated. Is it the information it contains that’s valuable, or is it the guile and experience of the man who brought it here?”
The question was clearly rhetorical, but one of Halabi’s people answered anyway. “Do those qualities make him valuable or do they make him dangerous? He’s betrayed his king and country. Why? For the cause? For Allah? Or is it for personal gain? Can he be trusted, Mullah Halabi? Is he here to assist you, or is he here to replace you?”
“I had power,” Nassar responded. “I had wealth. I had the respect of the king and the Americans. But I jeopardized it all. I—”
“The king is old and weak,” the man interrupted. “You feared the collapse of the kingdom and were playing both sides. The Americans discovered your treachery and now you’ve had to run.”
Once again they were better informed than he’d hoped.
The man who had spoken did so with an arrogance that suggested he had the confidence of his leader. Someone like Nassar would be a significant threat to his position in the ISIS hierarchy.
“They discovered my allegiance to Mullah Halabi, yes. Regrettable, because while I can be of great assistance to you from here, I would have been much more effective at the king’s side. The effort that went into gaining his trust isn’t something that I’d expect a simple soldier to understand.”
The man stiffened at the insult, but Nassar ignored it. “I’ve worked closely with the Americans on their homeland security protocols and in preventing terrorist attacks on their soil. It’s given me an intimate knowledge of their borders and immigration policy, their power grid and nuclear plants. Even their water supply. If we strike surgically, we can turn the tide of the war. We can make the Americans lash out against all Muslims and turn your thirty thousand soldiers into a billion.”
* * *
Rapp strapped his night-vision goggles to his CamelBak and slid a combat knife from the sheath at his waist. The darkness inside the underground passage was too deep for light amplification, and the sound from even a silenced pistol would bounce endlessly off the walls.
He passed through the cavern’s entrance and found himself completely blind. His other senses strained to compensate, but there was nothing for them to cling to other than the scent of earth. He kept his pace agonizingly slow, dragging his fingers along the left wall for reference. There was a significant risk of slamming his head into a rock outcroppi
ng and he had to test every footfall to ensure complete silence.
Despite these precautions, he cut his face on something jutting from a wall and nearly tripped twice, barely managing not to fall. He still hadn’t plummeted down a thousand-foot shaft, though. So that was something.
Because of the sensory deprivation and the focus necessary to remain silent, it was impossible to track time. For some reason he wanted to know how much had passed, but illuminating his watch was out of the question. In this kind of darkness it would look like an explosion.
Rapp slid his toe forward, but stopped when it touched rock. He brushed his fingers along the stone above him, confirming that it maintained its height but that the passage bent left. He altered his trajectory appropriately but barely made it two feet before again bumping into something. Not rock, though.
He brought his hand down and drove the man back, generating a mental map during the struggle that allowed him to get his palm over his opponent’s mouth. The metallic rattle of the man trying to bring his weapon to bear would have been almost inaudible under normal circumstances, but in this situation it assaulted Rapp’s ears, overpowering even the sensation of teeth sinking into his hand.
Rapp shoved the man’s head into the rock as a fist repeatedly slammed into his side and shoulder. The muffled thumps were way too loud, but there was still the possibility that no one had noticed the mortal battle taking place in the confined space. If his opponent’s finger found the trigger of his weapon, though, that anonymity would be gone forever.
He brought the knife up to what he thought was the man’s throat but missed, snapping the point off on the stone wall. It sparked, creating a split-second flash that finally allowed Rapp to drive what was left of the tip into the man’s neck. The dulled weapon didn’t penetrate as deeply as it should have, forcing him to follow his opponent into the dirt, holding on to him until he finally went still. Rapp lay there for another minute or so, listening for anyone bearing down on him. Nothing but the nearly imperceptible drip of blood from his wounded hand.
He ripped a piece of cloth from the bottom of his shirt and used it to secure the thick flap of skin that the man’s teeth had torn loose. Satisfied that the bleeding was at a manageable level, he continued his slow journey through the passage.
The sound of voices reached him first, followed by a dim glow. His movements quickened as his eyes, starved for so long, began picking out the walls and obstacles he’d been struggling to avoid.
The muddled conversation slowly separated into three distinct voices, all speaking Arabic. One calm, one angry, and one on the defensive. He didn’t recognize any of them, but the context suggested that the one making a case for himself was Aali Nassar. Much more interesting was the calm, superior tone of the man officiating. Was it possible that the last-minute plan he and Kennedy had hatched was going to work? Was he about to come face-to-face with Mullah Sayid Halabi?
It turned out to be even better than that. Rapp stopped ten feet from where the passage opened up, spotting Nassar as well as a number of men sitting on cushions on either side of him. Based on their ages, there was a good chance they were the officers whom Halabi had assembled from Saddam Hussein’s military. It was feasible that a significant portion of the ISIS command-and-control structure was in that cavern.
Nassar wasn’t moving around much, and his right collarbone was protruding noticeably—likely injuries he’d sustained in his leap from the vehicle. He was, however, swaying enough as he spoke to reveal glimpses of the man presiding over the meeting. Rapp’s heartbeat increased when he confirmed the man’s identity. Halabi.
Unfortunately, there was no clear shot at the ISIS leader from his position, and he could see only a portion of the chamber the men were set up in. Three armed guards were posted along the right wall and he suspected that there were at least that many just out of sight. Based on the slight movement of air, it was also probable that there were other exits.
If he fired a shot, all hell was going to break loose, and he was at a significant disadvantage—not only from the superior numbers of the enemy but from his confined operating environment.
That left a low probability of success and an even lower probability of survival. His first shot would have to be at Nassar to get him out of his line to Halabi, but after that everything was the luck of the draw. Would Halabi be able to make it to cover before Rapp got a clear shot? Was there someone at the chamber entrance who would immediately block it? Even in a best-case scenario he’d only have time to get Nassar and Halabi before he was forced to bolt for the cover of the corner behind him. Then it was just the not-so-simple matter of making it to the exit before the passage filled with ricocheting lead.
Rapp removed his CamelBak and crouched, digging a penlight and a grenade out of it. He laid them neatly in the sand and then pulled the Glock from his shoulder holster. A quick glance around him at the rock walls suggested that they were more hardened mud than stone. Not as structurally solid as he’d have liked.
With no better option, he pulled the grenade’s pin and tossed it toward the cavern. While it was still in the air, he snatched up the Glock and fired a single round, hitting Nassar in the back of the head. The round did what he needed, which was less killing the Saudi and more distracting the ISIS men from the explosive that had landed in the sand a few feet inside the chamber. Everyone went into motion, but instead of hitting the deck they stood and ran.
Three guards jumped on Halabi before Rapp could get a clear shot, so he turned and sprinted away. Even with his exceptional speed, there wasn’t time for him to reach the bend in the passageway. He heard the explosion and felt the sudden increase in air pressure before going down in a choking cloud of dust.
* * *
Rapp regained consciousness slowly, confused as to where he was. Home? Asleep next to his wife in their house on the bay? His throat felt raw and he was about to get up to find something to drink when he remembered that she was dead and the bay house demolished.
There was a surprising lack of physical pain—not much more than a bad headache that was probably a by-product of what he calculated to be his ninth concussion. The numbness worried him until he managed to wiggle his fingers and toes, ruling out paralysis. Much more movement than that was impossible. His legs were completely pinned, as was his right arm. His left was free and he used it to search for the penlight he’d been carrying. After almost a minute of feeling around, he gave up and started digging. The makeshift bandage came off his hand and he could feel the bite wound fill with dirt. Not exactly sanitary, but avoiding infection was pretty low on his priority list at this point.
After what seemed like about half an hour he was able to free his right arm enough to illuminate his watch. It provided sufficient light to see that the space above him went all the way to the original roof of the passage, but the length wasn’t much more than three feet. His legs were buried to his upper thighs but the weight didn’t feel too bad. He probably could have pulled them out if his head wasn’t wedged against the rubble in front of him. He tried to clear some space but managed only to cause a secondary collapse that filled what little air he had left with dust.
Rapp illuminated his watch again but turned it off after a few seconds. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to look at, and it just magnified his mild claustrophobia. On the bright side, the fact that he’d never made arrangements for his burial wasn’t turning out to be a problem.
He actually laughed out loud at that before letting the silence descend again. Finally he laid his cheek against the ground and stared into the darkness. His hope was that his mind would latch onto all the things he’d accomplished. The people he’d saved. The country he’d strengthened. Instead it got mired down in his failures. The relationship with his brother that he’d let turn into a couple brief phone conversations around holidays and birthdays. A world he’d seen through the sights of a gun. His hopelessly brief stint as a husband
and his recent hesitant steps at acting like a father.
It had been a hell of a ride, though.
* * *
When Rapp woke again, his confusion had deepened. The air supply was giving out. He lifted his head and a cascade of dirt and rock hit him in the face. Maybe the start of a collapse that would put him in the express lane to hell. He smiled weakly. It’d be good to see Stan Hurley again.
“Mitch!”
He ignored the voice, assuming it was just a figment of his oxygen-deprived imagination.
“Mitch!”
This time the voice was accompanied by a light that penetrated his eyelids and the rush of air. A massive hand grabbed the back of his head, protecting it from a cascade of dirt and rock.
“Mitch, it’s Joe! Say something, man!”
His throat was too caked with dust to get anything out, but he managed to grasp the man’s forearm in a weak grip.
“Wick! He’s alive! What’s the ETA on that fucking chopper?”
Rapp wasn’t able to make out the response.
Maslick withdrew his arm and hammered a shovel into the dirt next to Rapp’s shoulder. “You gotta stop doing this to yourself, man. You’re not as young as you used to be.”
EPILOGUE
Franschhoek
South Africa
THE bottom of the couch had been sliced through during the search of Claudia’s home, but it wouldn’t show. Rapp flipped it back upright and swore under his breath when he saw similar damage across the top. She was already looking to cut Joel Wilson’s balls off, and this wasn’t going to help. As much as he’d like to be there to hold him down, Wilson was continuing his extraordinarily meticulous efforts to clear Rapp’s name. The guy was a complete jackass, but he was competent as hell. His balls were going to have to stay attached for the time being.
