But winning proposition or not, this was the hand that Rapp had been dealt and he intended to play it. If the FAIRBANKS job had been easy, the Agency would have sent someone else to do it. Rapp was here because he was uniquely suited to punch the financier’s ticket.
It was just that simple.
Until his phone rang.
CHAPTER 13
FOR a long moment, Rapp considered not answering.
He wasn’t just on the job.
He was moments away from walking into a crowded room to kill a terrorist. Like a fire-and-forget missile, once Rapp was activated, he could not be called back. He had been chosen for the Orion program precisely because his psychological profile showed the sort of independence and critical thinking that a deep-cover operative needed to stalk and kill his prey in a foreign land absent a safety net. Rapp didn’t ask permission before he squeezed the trigger. Nor was he subject to the whims of a staff weeny watching the encounter from a thousand miles away.
But the caller was not a staff weeny.
Rapp slowed his stride as he dug the phone from his pocket. He was thirty feet from the front door. Close enough to attract the attention of one of the bodyguards standing post in front of FAIRBANKS’s car. Rapp felt the man’s attention and used his peripheral vision to evaluate the bodyguard’s response.
He was good.
The man reacted to Mitch’s approach by clasping his hands in front of his chest. Known as the interview stance, the positioning permitted the bodyguard to block an attack or go hands-on without telegraphing his intent. But even as he prepared for a potential physical confrontation, the man didn’t focus on Rapp. Instead, his gaze swept over the assassin and continued past him, marking the dark corners of the square along with Rapp’s fellow pedestrians. The guy was well trained, probably ex–special operations. Former soldiers who chose poorly when it came to accepting postmilitary gigs did not get a free pass, but it did change Rapp’s calculus.
Slightly.
He pulled out the phone and examined the caller ID, hoping that the call was from someone else.
Anyone else.
Though the corresponding series of digits didn’t have the 202 indicative of a Washington, DC, area code, Rapp still recognized their significance. If redialed, the call would probably go to the last remaining public phone in America, but Rapp knew who had actually originated the call.
“Allo?” Rapp said, turning his body away from the bodyguard as he spoke.
Rapp wanted to ensure that the bodyguard didn’t hear an English reply.
“Your warning was correct,” Irene said. “A helicopter full of special operations forces was just shot down. Recovery operations are ongoing, but initial casualty estimates are quite high. The pilots of the trail helicopter said that the aircraft was brought down by a missile. A missile at night. Do you understand?”
Rapp clenched his jaw.
He did understand.
He counted many members of the special operations forces community as colleagues and friends. The operator fraternity was both small and tightly knit. Odds were that his friends had just lost comrades in arms, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
A helicopter had been brought down by a shoulder-fired missile at night.
Rapp had spent enough time in Afghanistan and Iraq to understand a helicopter’s inherent vulnerability to shoulder-fired missiles. While great advancements had been made in the countermeasures department, the easiest way to mitigate the danger posed by man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, was to fly at night. A shoulder-fired missile used infrared sensors to home in on a helicopter’s hot engine, but the sensor’s acquisition window was very narrow. To target a helicopter, the gunner first needed to visually identify the aircraft before he could point the missile’s seeker head at his desired target and achieve the necessary prelaunch lock-on. The adage that you couldn’t kill what you couldn’t see was the reason why American aircraft operated indiscriminately once the sun set. The cloak of darkness didn’t make helicopters invulnerable, but it did render the threat posed by MANPADS largely moot.
Until tonight.
Rapp had thousands of questions, but now wasn’t the time to ask them. An Islamabad police car trimmed in the force’s distinctive yellow and blue color scheme approached from the southeast and turned into the parking lot. The vehicle’s light bar remained dark, and the cruiser departed after taking a turn around the pedestrian area, but Rapp wasn’t mollified. The officers could have been on a normal patrol, or they might have been canvassing the area in response to two dead thugs recently discovered in a trash-strewn alley.
Rapp was on borrowed time.
“Tamaan,” Rapp said.
Okay.
The call ended.
His noncommittal response hadn’t communicated anything specific because further words were unnecessary. Irene understood him better than anyone. She’d passed along her message.
The rest was up to him.
Rapp glanced at the hookah bar. As if he could feel Rapp’s gaze, FAIRBANKS shifted in his chair and squinted at the window. The darkness outside combined with the bar’s bright interior meant that the businessman most likely couldn’t see Rapp.
He probably didn’t need to.
Predators had a way of sensing other predators.
Turning his back on FAIRBANKS, Rapp pulled Ruyintan’s business card from his pocket. The precise handwriting taunted him. As demonstrations went, shooting down an American helicopter was pretty effective.
Shooting one down under the cover of darkness was a game changer.
The loss of life was tragic, but if the Iranians really had discovered a way to target helicopters at night, the consequences to the American war effort would be devastating. Until the targeting mechanism was better understood, the tons of equipment and personnel that moved across Afghanistan and Iraq by air would be at risk. Getting to the bottom of this took priority over everything.
Even FAIRBANKS.
Rapp punched in the digits from the business card and hit the send button. The phone rang and a familiar voice answered.
“It’s Farid,” Rapp said in Arabic.
