The Last Man Page 5

  CHAPTER 6

  U.S. EMBASSY, KABUL, AFGHANISTAN

  “I’VE never even heard of this man,” the woman said with obvious frustration. “Who the hell does he think he is?”

  Colonel Hunter Poole took a final drag from his cigarette, then tossed it to the gravel and crushed it with the heel of his black jump boot. “I don’t know much about him.”

  “But you’ve heard of him?”

  Poole knew he needed to be careful. Arianna Vinter was a passionate woman whose one glaring weakness was that she thought she could bully her way to any victory, and from what he’d heard about this Rapp fellow, it was probably not wise to attack him in a direct fashion. Poole shrugged and said, “He’s a spook. They don’t exactly advertise their resumes.”

  Vinter regarded her military man with a skeptical squint of her hazel eyes. “You’re holding back.”

  Poole played it cool. “I’ve heard a few things . . . the kind of stuff that doesn’t make it into official reports.” He lit another cigarette and said, “He’s notorious in certain circles.”

  “Notorious how?” Vinter asked, taking a deep pull off her thin menthol cigarette.

  Their liaisons had become increasingly common. The embassy was a crowded, cramped place, and smoking indoors by Americans was strictly forbidden, even in a country where virtually everyone smoked. And then there was the simple fact that they needed to be careful about their relationship. So they came to this corner of the compound where the multicolored shipping containers were stacked. It was the hinterlands, where the workers and the occasional jarhead came to replenish supplies, but never the higher-ups from the embassy, and Poole and Vinter were definitely higher-ups.

  Poole placed a hand against a rust-colored Conex container and thought about the various rumors regarding Mitch Rapp. The man, like Poole, was in his midforties. Unlike Rapp, however, Poole had a sterling record. He’d graduated in the top 5 percent of his class from West Point, completed Ranger School, and then blazed a trail through the big Green Machine with stops at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was a platoon leader in the first Gulf War, and by the time the Iraq campaign started he was the company commander of Alpha Company, Second Ranger Battalion. He completed three combat tours with the Rangers, two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. During his second tour in Afghanistan he was serving as an intelligence officer on the Joint Special Operations Command staff when he heard his commanding officer tell a story about a CIA covert officer who had bluffed his way into a detention facility at the Bagram Air Base by impersonating a U.S. Air Force colonel from the Office of Special Investigations.

  A week earlier two high-value Taliban commanders had been caught on the battlefield and thus far had refused to talk. In less than an hour Rapp managed to get one of the men to spill the beans on an impending terrorist operation set to target the United States. The rumors about how he pulled this off were varied, but they all circled around some very Orwellian tactics that created a mix of awe and fear among the men at JSOC. There were other stories out there about Rapp, most of them from second- or third-hand accounts of his exploits in Indian country. If they were to be believed, Rapp was a person capable of extreme violence, with little concern for his own mortality and an absolute disregard for the political and legal issues that the men and women in uniform had to wrestle with.

  Poole had followed the rules as any smart West Pointer would, and he was now on the doorstep of receiving his first star—a lifelong dream, but that wasn’t where it was going to end. Poole felt he had the right stuff. Shooting for the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs was his ultimate goal, and if that worked out, who knew, maybe even the Oval Office was a possibility. Up until recently Poole would have found it difficult to understand a man like Rapp. Poole had been a rule follower, but Vinter had opened his eyes to the reality of Washington. She had shown him that there were times where rules were senseless obstacles. Rapp appeared to have built his entire career and reputation on the same philosophy. As enticing as it was to cut corners, Poole knew he needed to be careful. The U.S. Army was an entirely different playground. One misstep in the eyes of the wrong general and your career was over.

  It was the fear of just that kind of misstep that caused Poole to temper what he knew about Rapp. “It’s not easy to separate fact from fiction where he’s concerned, but if you believe even half of what is said about him, he’s an extremely reckless individual.” The kind of man that could sink my career, Poole thought to himself.

  “Dammit!” Vinter flicked her cigarette into the side of the container, sparks cascading to the ground. “The last thing we need right now is some brute from the CIA screwing this up. I’ve worked way too hard.” Vinter thought of her career at the State Department and all of the sacrifices she’d made to climb the ladder alongside all of the other scheming and plotting diplomats. She’d taken this god-awful posting in Afghanistan for multiple, complicated reasons and one very simple one—because it would further her career. Vinter hated Afghanistan. It was a country filled with people who were stuck in some ancient misogynistic culture that should have died a century ago. The place was filled with hocus-pocus religious fanatics, who had less respect for women than most men had for their dogs.

  As much as it bothered Vinter that a bunch of bearded freaks could terrorize women with impunity while the U.S. government stood by, her boss had made it clear that there were other priorities. The orders had come from the White House that with the election bearing down on the administration they needed to accelerate the military withdrawal. The administration was looking for an excuse, any excuse that would satisfy the independent voters. For several years, Vinter had been pushing reintegration as a solution. The original term had been amnesty, but it didn’t poll well, so she came up with something more benign. After multiple focus groups and $125,000 to one of K Street’s top PR firms, they landed on reintegration. The word had a more clinical sound to it, but more important, it would pave the way for exit and victory.

  It was one of those rare moments in Vinter’s career when her genius had led to something that she didn’t want. It had been nearly a year ago when the secretary of state’s assistant told her to come on up to the palatial office for a very important meeting. It started out well enough. The secretary told her the president loved her idea. Vinter had beamed with pride, like a child finally receiving due recognition from a distant parent, and then came the bad part. The president wanted her to take the lead, run with her idea, and make sure it got implemented. Her boss told her, “The president wants you on the ground in Kabul supervising the entire operation. You’ll report directly to me. We’re putting a lot of power in your hands. The ambassador will be told to aid you in any way you need and the White House is prepared to lean very heavily on the Pentagon and the CIA to make sure they support you. For all intents and purposes you will be running the show in Afghanistan.”

  Vinter didn’t really hear the rest of it; her mind hung up on the part about living in Kabul, as if it were some bone-jarring pothole in an otherwise smooth road. Vinter had traveled to Afghanistan on multiple occasions, and she had long ago decided that she detested the place, but this was a career maker. She knew almost immediately that if she did her year or two in hell she could demand any post she wanted afterward. Her husband was not thrilled that she had failed to consult him on the decision, but she knew he wouldn’t have the balls to really stand up to her. And besides, her teenage son was driving her nuts. There was too much testosterone in the house for her liking. She rationalized that it might be the best thing for her to take a break from the two men in her life, and if it caused her marriage to fall apart, that was something she could deal with. After seventeen years, change might not be the worst thing.

  “He’s a small cog in an extremely big wheel,” Poole said, trying to calm her down.

  Vinter was an extremely intelligent and passionate woman, but she could handle only one
passion at a time, and Poole was more interested in getting her to hike up her skirt at the moment. He reached out and placed his right hand on her shoulder. “One call to the secretary and you can have him shipped off to Antarctica.” He started rubbing her shoulder.

  Vinter turned that possibility over in her mind until she figured out that her little Army boy was a bit too earnest in his physical contact. “What in the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to help you relax. You don’t think clearly when you get like this.”

  “And you don’t think clearly when you let your dick do your thinking. I’ve seen that look in your eye before. You’re not worried about me thinking clearly, you’re focused on having sex.” Vinter saw the playful grin on Poole’s face. “It’s only been, what . . . six weeks and I already have you figured out. There will be no screwing back here between the storage containers like a couple of dogs in heat. It happened once. It was a moment of weakness, and it will never happen again.”

  “Come on,” Poole half moaned. He pulled her close, adding, “I need you.”

  “You had me two days ago. I don’t think you need it that bad.”

  “Normally I’m not like this, but you make me crazy.” He kissed her lips while his hands found her backside.

  Vinter pushed him away. “We have a meeting in ten minutes. Snap out of it. Zahir is threatening to take his men and go back to the mountains. If that happens it could create a domino effect and all of the progress I’ve achieved over the past year will vanish. All because some spook got kidnapped.” She thought about the strange turn of events. “I hear this mercenary who is trying to undo all of our hard work is going to show his face at the meeting.”

  Poole pulled Vinter’s hand toward his crotch. “Speaking of hard.”

  Vinter almost slapped him. “Stop it. We need to focus. Darren is absolutely beside himself. He says this Rapp has serious mental issues. Do you know what Washington will do if they hear we screwed this up?”

  Poole had finally got it through his head that they weren’t going to have sex. He took a deep sigh. “You’re making way too big of a deal out of this. We didn’t screw anything up. We’re on schedule with reintegration. If this thing goes off the tracks at this point we blame it on Rapp. We lay it at the feet of the CIA and get out of the way.”

  “That doesn’t work for me. I don’t fail.” Vinter stabbed herself in the chest with her index finger, attempting to add some unneeded emphasis to her position. Her hazel eyes wild with fury, she added. “I’m not going back to D.C. a fucking disaster.”

  Poole sighed. It appeared that a confrontation was unavoidable. He wondered if there was any way to minimize the oncoming clash. Vinter would expect 100 percent support from him, but Poole had already decided it would be foolish to confront Rapp in such an open way. Poole had learned that when going into battle against an unknown enemy you must set your ego aside and have a contingency in place for a tactical withdrawal. That was the careful course he would have to navigate. Vinter would scream at him later, but even with the great sex, he was growing tired of her browbeatings. Maybe this would present an opportunity to balance the scales and make her more compliant.

  “I’m going to support you, but I’m warning you he might not be the kind of guy you want to pick a fight with.”

  “Well, I’m not the kind of woman you want to pick a fight with. And it’s not going to be a fight. I’m going to tear his balls off and send him packing and that’s going to be the end of it.”

  As much as Poole wanted to believe her, he shared none of her confidence. “Arianna, I know I’m not going to be able to change your mind, but don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.” Having no desire to hear her response, Poole turned and began making his way toward the main building.

  CHAPTER 7

  INTER-SERVICES INTELLIGENCE HQ, ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN

  NADEEM Ashan walked down the broad hallway with a sense of dread. After twenty-nine years of working for Pakistani intelligence, one would think Ashan would be used to these bumps in the road, but this particular bump concerned him for reasons that he was extremely reluctant to share with anyone else in the building. Ashan was an expert navigator when it came to the turbulent waters of the ISI, and that historical knowledge only added to his growing concern. The place was not some monolithic bureaucracy where like-minded men shaped the intelligence-gathering and covert activities of Pakistan. The ISI was a deeply divided, sectarian institution composed of intelligence professionals and military personnel who had vastly different ideas about what was best for their country.

  The main fault line lay between the secularists and the religious fanatics, with various groups within each camp. The secularists typically pushed for modernity and stability. They had warned for years that the intelligence agency’s support of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir, India, would eventually bite them in their proverbial behind. The religious fanatics saw the Taliban as an ally that could be used to keep neighboring Afghanistan weak, and the fiercely nationalistic element of the group refused to waver in their support for the terrorists in Kashmir. Their hatred for India ran so deep that they blindly supported the savages who intentionally killed civilians in an effort to make Kashmir a free state.

  The hard-liners were exposed as reckless fools in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks that left 195 dead and the world-famous Taj Hotel a smoldering ruin. The international outcry was deafening. As the deputy general for Analysis and Foreign Relations, Ashan heard it the loudest. Even before the attacks on New York and Washington, Ashan had had a very close relationship with the CIA and MI-5. After those attacks, Ashan began to see just how dangerous it was to support the mongrel dogs of jihad. Even President Musharraf began to see the light, and when he moved to support the United States in the War on Terror, those dogs turned on him and tried unsuccessfully to take his life seven times during his tenure as Pakistan’s head of state. Only five of those incidents had been reported. Ashan and his colleagues at ISI helped cover up the other two due to the conspirators’ ties to certain intelligence officials.

  All of these incidents were embarrassing for the ISI, but none of them compared to what was uncovered when the Americans sent in one of their elite commando units to kill the world’s most notorious terrorist. Bin Laden, it turned out, had been hiding in Pakistan for years. Ashan instantly knew that factions within the ISI had been harboring him. Money would have changed hands, to be sure, but the primary motivation was undoubtedly ideological symmetry. No matter how Pakistan tried to deny it, there were a significant number of men in the Pakistani military and ISI who supported and applauded the actions of the Taliban and al Qaeda.

  Ashan was on his way to see just such an individual. Lieutenant General Akhtar Durrani was the deputy general of the ISI’s External Wing. Durrani and Ashan ran two of the ISI’s three main groups. Their influence was vast, and they both reported directly to the ISI’s director general. Ashan managed to move back and forth between the secularists and the hard-liners depending on the situation, while Durrani was firmly in the camp of the hard-liners. Ashan’s pragmatism was driven by an obvious fact—Pakistan was overwhelmingly a Muslim country.

  Ashan moved past the handpicked military bodyguards and his colleague’s male personal assistant with nothing more than a nod. ISI Headquarters was a sprawling compound and the Foreign Relations Wing was a healthy distance from the offices of the External Wing, but even so, the two deputy generals were very close. Almost every day Ashan made the lengthy walk from his office to Durrani’s. Unlike most of the Pakistani men his age, Ashan was very focused on his health. Neither of his parents had made it to sixty. His father died of a heart attack brought on by years of smoking cigarettes, and his mother died of lung cancer brought on by years of smoking. Ashan abhorred smoking and made every effort to eat right and walk every day. He was intent on living well into his eighties.

  The heavy door to Durrani’s office was closed. Ashan glanced over his sh
oulder at the assistant, who checked the lights on his phone.

  “He’s alone.”

  Ashan knocked on the door and turned the knob. He stepped into the large rectangular office and was enveloped in a haze of gray smoke. Ashan didn’t hesitate. He flipped a switch on the wall and the hum of an exhaust fan kicked in. He had had the unit installed nearly four years ago, because he could no longer tolerate sitting in the smoke-filled office. He considered chastising his friend for not having it on, but thought better of it. The man was breathing the carcinogens directly into his lungs. The exhaust fan would make little difference.

  “Nadeem,” Durrani said, leaning back in his high-back black leather chair, “what a pleasure.” Durrani was dressed in his Army uniform, lest anyone forget the duality of his importance.

  Ashan, having served only four years in the Air Force, was dressed in a blue suit and yellow tie. “I was in the neighborhood and I decided to stop by.”

  “Exercising again.” Durrani smiled and held out his cigarette. “I’ve warned you, if you keep that up it will kill you.”

  “Yes, I know. If only I smoked like you and the rest of the country I would be much healthier.”

  “You might have more fun,” Durrani said with a broad grin forming under the ample black mustache that seemed to be a prerequisite for being an officer in the Pakistan military.

  “I have plenty of fun.” Ashan continued past the two chairs in front of his friend’s large desk and sat in the chair by the window that looked out onto one of the many inner courtyards of the compound. The armchair was something else he had ordered on his own. The two chairs in front of Durrani’s desk were stubby little things that forced the occupants to look up at Durrani as if he sat high atop K2. Ashan couldn’t be certain, but he suspected that the seating arrangement was a holdover from the old colonial days when British officers ran their country.