His thighs felt like they were on fire but his lungs and heart were handling the workload with an ease that surprised even him. A carefully administered drug regimen increased his blood’s ability to carry oxygen to his muscles, but today that had been supplemented with an inhaled substance that he knew nothing about. He’d expected the performance improvement to be subtle as it had been in the past when his pharmaceutical cocktail was adjusted. It was anything but.
Azarov maintained his momentum through to the top of the hill and found himself on the top of a butte that jutted from the jungle. To his right, he could see the ocean in the distance and at his ten o’clock was a stucco-and-glass building that encompasses a little more than two hundred square meters. Next to it, a man in his late sixties was standing behind a table with a laptop computer on it.
Azarov pulled two custom pistols from their shoulder holsters as the man dodged right and grabbed a long steel pole. He swung it toward Azarov just as the Russian came to a stop and took aim at a paper target five meters away. On the end of the pole was a life-size silhouette constructed of aluminum to make hits clearly audible.
The man used it to try to interfere with Azarov’s aim as he fired both weapons at the target. When he was empty, he dropped one of the pistols and reloaded the other while moving left. When the magazine clicked home, he went into a two-handed stance and emptied the weapon into a target set up thirty meters to the east.
The older man dropped the pole and retreated to his laptop, squinting at the screen through the glare of the Costa Rican sun. “How did you feel?”
Linus Heis’s clipped German accent was no different than it had been the first time they’d met—when Azarov was a seven-year-old biathlete with dreams of making the Soviet Olympic team. It had been Heis who had found the slight heart murmur that disqualified Azarov and changed the course of his life. In subsequent years, the murmur had proved to be completely irrelevant and the scientist was still defensive about what may have been the only mistake he’d ever made in the field of human performance.
“I felt good. My heart rate seemed lower than normal at the top of the climb.”
“Fourteen percent lower,” Heis agreed. The approving expression was unusual for the stoic German. “And that translated into steadier hands. Your accuracy was one hundred percent.”
“What about my speed?”
The man’s barely perceptible smile disappeared. “You beat your personal best by two percent.”
“Two percent? Impressive.”
Heis shook his head. “It should have been three point six. Did something go wrong? Did you stumble on the way up?”
Azarov considered lying. There was nothing that infuriated Heis more than when one of his arcane calculations failed to predict reality. The purpose of this exercise wasn’t to make the old man happy, though.
“No. Nothing.”
“You should have been faster,” he repeated.
“I’m sure you’ll find the problem and correct it, Linus. You always do.”
The German folded his arms in front of his narrow chest. “I’m not so sure. Your shooting is excellent but your running is suboptimal. It occurs to me that firing a weapon is easy while running is hard. I wonder if the problem isn’t physical. If it’s mental.”
“I’ve taken more psychological tests than I can count, Linus. And I’ve been involved in more operations than I can count. There’s never been even a hint of weakness. You know this.”
“Things change, Grisha. People change. You’re not as young as you once were. We all slip eventually. But I admit that my concern may be premature. It’s three degrees warmer than when you set your prior personal best, and despite living in this godforsaken jungle furnace, you’ve never dealt well with heat. Or perhaps you’re just not fully focused. It would be understandable after what happened to Olga.”
Azarov resisted the urge to glance right. She was buried at the edge of the clearing, next to a man he’d inadvertently killed in a training session six years ago. It was a pleasant spot, with a view of the ocean and particularly vibrant flowering trees. Not that either of the two had cared much about the wonders of nature, but he felt obligated to do what he could to honor their memories.
“Is that it?” Heis probed. “Is it Olga?”
“Yes,” he responded, but it wasn’t true. It wasn’t Olga and it wasn’t the heat. It was everything else.
Anxious to change the subject, Azarov pointed to a pistol lying next to Heis’s computer. “What’s that?”
The man glared at him for a few seconds more but then decided to drop the subject of his pupil’s mental state for the time being. “A new weapon for you to try. Nadia is quite proud of it.”
Azarov picked up the gun and turned it over in his hands.
“It’s a full two centimeters shorter than what you’re using now. That should increase the speed of your draw significantly. Your current weapon takes too long to clear its holster. Also, the integrated silencer is three millimeters smaller in diameter.”
“Does it still perform?”
“Better, in fact. She’s reduced sound output by one decibel.”
Azarov aimed at the five-meter target. “May I fire it?”
“Of course.”
Heis was right. The report was noticeably duller. Balance was better. Accuracy and recoil were unchanged.
“It’s quite light.”
“Almost a twenty percent reduction in loaded weight,” Heis agreed.
“Drawbacks?”
“It can use standard nine-millimeter rounds, but to get the full benefits, it needs custom ammunition.”
“Durability?”
“If you use the recommended ammunition, she estimates that you’ll be able to fire two thousand rounds before you start to see a degradation in performance. With commercially available rounds, service life will be cut in half.”
“How much?”
“Seventeen thousand euros. Rounds are another eight euros each.”
Azarov stared down at the weapon. Mitch Rapp still used a Glock 19 with an AAC Ti-RANT 9S suppressor. A reasonably accurate and reliable weapon. A bit loud and long, but it had the benefit of being extremely common.
“I’ll take three. And a thousand rounds.”
“I’ll pass that on. Now let’s get into the gym. I have you scheduled for a brief strength workout before your swim.”
As they walked, Heis lectured him on the need to push harder, to go deeper. The drug regimen created a situation where his mind no longer understood the full capabilities of his body. He needed to learn to break through the limitations his subconscious was imposing on him.
Azarov was barely listening. His mind was consumed by Mitch Rapp. How would he perform on Heis’s tests? Could he and his technologically unremarkable Glock have achieved one hundred percent accuracy? In all likelihood, yes. But how quickly could he have completed the run? In his youth, he had been exceptionally fast. The X-rays Azarov had been provided, though, showed a new reality. Years of damage that had left him with thickening scar tissue and thinning cartilage. Would he be able—
“Grisha! Are you listening to me?”
Azarov smiled and bowed his head respectfully. “Every word, Linus. Every word.”
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 R
app 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—”