“Exactly.”
“I’ll fly back as soon as I can.”
“Thank you. With both you and Scott gone, our operation there is starting to unravel. And on top of that, we need to return their device. The political pressure is getting heavy and we’re seeing action by the army that we don’t like. This could be the first sign of a coup by General Shirani.”
Rapp let out a long breath. Pakistan run by Shirani would be a disaster. The current president was a scumbag but at least he was a secular, Westward-leaning scumbag. Shirani was a wannabe fundamentalist dictator with an insatiable thirst for power and a deep hatred for the United States.
“We’ll work fast,” he said as an old pickup rolled to a stop next to the jet. “I’ll contact you if we find anything interesting.”
Rapp disconnected the call and walked back onto the tarmac in order to greet the man stepping out of the truck. Craig Bailer was a full three inches taller than Rapp, with thick, tattoo-covered arms extending from a T-shirt extolling the virtues of Pabst Blue Ribbon. His gaunt face was shadowed by three days of stubble and a baseball cap equally enthusiastic about PBR.
“How’s it going, Mitch? Been a while.”
Despite his outward appearance, Bailer held three PhDs-one in nuclear physics and two in fields Rapp couldn’t pronounce. Kennedy had snapped him up after he’d unexpectedly walked away from Lockheed Martin but he’d hated Langley, hated his job, and hated being cooped up in an office. Toward the end of his tenure at headquarters, Bailer had spent most of his time working in the motor pool. In fact, it was he who had tricked out Rapp’s Dodge with full armor, run-flats, nitrous, and bulletproof glass, among other things. The people in personnel were fairly certain he was the best-educated and best-paid auto mechanic in history.
When he inevitably quit, Kennedy had gone into crisis mode. It had been Rapp’s idea to move him into an abandoned Cold War missile facility in a remote corner of Virginia. If Bailer wouldn’t go to the mountain, they’d just move the mountain to him.
Despite the huge financial outlay, though, Bailer spent less time at the facility than he did in the local drunk tank. The Agency only brought him in when there was a job no one else could handle. And that’s just the way the gregarious redneck liked it. He had a legitimate machine shop about twenty miles away where he fabricated custom parts for spy satellites and hot rods.
“Good to see you,” Rapp said, extending a hand. “Sorry about the short notice.”
Behind them, Joe Maslick had the warhead balanced in the plane’s open hatch. “Where’s the transport?”
“Right here,” Bailer said, slapping the side of his truck. He jumped in and backed up to the plane before getting out again to rearrange a cooler and some shovels to make room.
“Roll it on in,” Bailer said.
“That’s a three-foot drop.”
“It’s not a bottle of nitro, Mas. Do you have any idea how many intricate reactions it takes to set one of these things off?”
“No.”
Bailer grinned. “Me neither. But I figure it’s got to be more than two.”
Rapp gave a subtle nod and Maslick rolled the weapon out the door. It hit the bed of the truck with an earsplitting clang, nearly bottoming out the shocks.
“Hop in the back, Mas. There’s not enough room for all three of us in the cab.
Maslick jumped in, his two-hundred-twenty-pound frame pushing the chassis the rest of the way down. “Anything in that cooler?”
“Would I leave you hanging?” Bailer said, sliding behind the wheel.
Rapp opened the passenger door and picked up a stick of dynamite lying in the seat. Bailer grabbed it and tossed it into the back. “I was doing a little fishing last weekend. So how’s the Charger?”
“Stereo sounds like shit,” Rapp said as they accelerated up the tarmac.
“Yeah, I had to take out the main speakers to make room for the Kevlar. They’ve got some thinner stuff now and I’ve got a great sound guy I work with. You should bring it by.”
Maslick banged on the top of the cab with a beer can and Bailer held a hand through his open window to take it. “You want one, Mitch?”
“No.”
He popped it open and took a healthy slug as the vehicle bounced across a grassy field. With the shocks already at their limit, the nuke was making quite a racket bouncing off the sides of the truck’s bed, but Rapp didn’t worry about it. If Craig Bailer said it wasn’t a problem, it wasn’t a problem.
They finally skidded to a stop in an unremarkable part of the field and Bailer pointed to the visor above the passenger seat. “Could you hit that garage door opener, Mitch?”
He did and a moment later they were descending on a massive elevator platform once used to move intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“So are you looking for anything special, man? Or do you just want to know if the Pakistanis can detonate the thing without blowing their dicks off?”
“Irene wants a rundown of the technology and power,” Rapp said.
“What about you?”
“Someone tried to steal it. I want to know who.”
“No problem. I’ll bring in some of the forensics guys I work with. Anything else?”
“No,” Rapp said, watching the gray concrete walls slip slowly by.
“You all right, man?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure? Because it’s a beautiful night and we have a cooler full of beer and a stolen A-bomb. It don’t get any better than that.”
CHAPTER 22
NORTH OF ISLAMABAD
PAKISTAN
GRISHA Azarov pulled his hat down his forehead and tilted his face into the upturned collar on his jacket. The sun was gone but the heat was still hovering at thirty-eight degrees Celsius, making his choice of clothing both uncomfortable and likely to attract attention. Fortunately, the private airstrip was all but abandoned at this time of night.
He jogged up the steps of his company’s Bombardier Challenger 650, heading for the back as the pilot closed the door. The interior had been redesigned to his specifications, reducing the number of seats and adding a sofa long enough to sleep on without causing stiffness. He entered the expanded bathroom and closed the door, leaning over the sink and staring into the mirror.
His face was dotted with bandages that a few hours ago had matched his skin tone but were now dark with blood. He began peeling them off, pulling glass from the wounds he hadn’t had time to clean during his escape. None were serious enough to need stitches, though the half-moon slice on the bridge of his nose was deeper than he’d realized. That one had been too close. Less than a centimeter from his right eye.
He couldn’t help but be reminded of the severe acne he’d suffered as a teenager, the damage from which had been repaired during the plastic surgeries he’d undergone before going to work for Maxim Krupin.
The phone lying on the counter next to him came to life with a number that belonged to the president’s secure cell. Azarov considered ignoring the call, but giving into that temptation would be unwise in the extreme. Instead, he inserted a Bluetooth headset and picked up.
“Good evening, sir.”
“What the hell happened, Grisha? My people in Pakistan report that Mitch Rapp is still alive and that he has the weapon.”
“I can’t confirm those reports with certainty, sir. But they seem credible.”
Krupin let out a lengthy string of expletives in Russian. “I should have seen through your false bravado and known you’d fail me.”
It was an entirely predictable revision of their last meeting. Azarov had done nothing to hide his concerns regarding a confrontation with Rapp and had gone so far as to recommend against it. Krupin, though, would never admit to an error and was already shifting the blame. It was always odd to watch these deflections because of the strange honesty to them. Azarov had come to believe that they were less a deliberate reaction to failure than an unconscious one. Krupin saw himself as infallible and lapses in his own judgment tended to cause unbearable cognitive dissonance. Typically, that dissonance was resolved at the expense of one of his underlings.