“The words coming out of your mouth,” Rapp said. “I’m sure you’re doing your best to bring unicorns and rainbows to the children of Afghanistan, but I don’t give a shit. I’m here to fight a war, not nation-build. I need you to un-ass this conference room so the grown-ups can talk.”
“No,” Tim said.
This was not a word Rapp often encountered.
Between the early part of his career in which he’d answered only to Kennedy and the later portion in which he was afforded great latitude by the president of the United States, Rapp was used to getting his way. On the rare occasion when he encountered someone naïve enough to erect a roadblock in his operational path, Rapp either bulldozed his way through or went around the person. Having the White House on speed dial was a kind of institutional laxative all its own. Even the most self-important bureaucrat quickly found religion after a call from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Usually.
But today might just be the exception that proved the rule.
After returning to J-Bad from the rescue operation, Rapp had found himself at a crossroads. His efforts to save Saxton had proven successful, but not much else had gone right. The HIG commander, CYCLONE, had drowned during the chaos surrounding the rescue, and the data from his waterlogged phone had proven to be unrecoverable.
The Chinook shootdown had confirmed Ruyintan’s tip, but Rapp was still no closer to understanding what the Iranian Quds Force colonel was planning. At present, Rapp knew only that CYCLONE had been equipped with missiles capable of targeting American helicopters at night. It stood to reason that Ruyintan had probably provided those missiles, but Rapp didn’t know this for certain.
To be fair, Rapp knew very little for certain.
He had no idea how the missiles’ targeting system worked, whether more missiles existed, and if so, what Ruyintan intended to do with them. Presumably, Ashani would have been able to answer at least some of these questions, but Rapp had also missed his window to meet with the MOIS officer.
After landing back at Jalalabad with a wet but otherwise no worse-for-wear Ranger Fred Saxton, Rapp had been the recipient of more bad news, this time from the CIA’s Kabul chief of station. A name trace had yielded a hit on one of Ashani’s known aliases. The MOIS officer had been listed on the manifest for a passenger flight that had recently departed Kabul International Airport for Islamabad. A review of hacked CCTV feed from inside the airport confirmed the worst—Ashani had boarded the flight.
With Ashani gone and CYCLONE dead, Rapp had intended to concentrate his efforts on finding and interrogating the Iranian he’d encountered in the cave complex. The man was more than likely one of Ruyintan’s minions, and even if he wasn’t directly linked to Ruyintan, the Iranian certainly wasn’t in Afghanistan to sightsee. At a minimum, he would be able to provide Rapp with another piece of the Ruyintan operational puzzle. But to locate the missing Iranian, Rapp would need to cast a wide net. This could only be accomplished with boots on the ground.
Lots of them.
While the JSOC folks were hell on wheels when it came to capturing high-value targets, they were not equipped for house-to-house and village-to-village searches. This would be the law enforcement equivalent of sending a SWAT team rather than patrol officers to conduct a neighborhood canvass. The rugged section of Afghanistan that Rapp needed to search offered ample places for the Iranian to hide or, worse still, disappear across the porous border with Pakistan. To lock down the likely avenues of escape while conducting an organized manhunt, Rapp would need help from an organization he didn’t often work with—conventional military forces.
With this in mind, Rapp had left the JSOC compound after finishing the mission debrief and crossed the street to make the acquaintance of Colonel Petrie. Special operations and the CIA worked together on a regular basis, but this was not the case with conventional units. Their chain of command was much broader and more unwieldy and often institutionally averse to working with three-letter agencies.
That said, Rapp knew that regular infantry units enjoyed getting after the enemy just as much as their special operations brothers in arms. He might have spent the majority of his career with spooks, spies, and snake eaters, but Rapp deeply respected the conventional military. The special operations community was sexy, but winning a war required gaining and holding terrain, and that could only be done by massing soldiers on the battlefield. Colonel Petrie commanded an infantry brigade, and the operation Rapp was proposing should have been right up the warfighter’s alley.
Should have been.
Unfortunately, Colonel Petrie didn’t seem to be much on warfighting at the moment.
Ignoring the troublesome USDA civilian, Rapp instead focused on Colonel Petrie. In addition to the requisite eagle denoting his rank of colonel, Rapp noticed two things that did not bode well. One, the section of uniform above the colonel’s right shoulder that should have been occupied by a combat patch was empty. Two, the unit patch on his left shoulder indicated that his brigade was part of the National Guard. Petrie was on his first combat tour, and he was not an active-duty officer. While neither of these indications was a disqualifier per se, it could go a long way toward explaining the deference the military officer was showing to his Department of Agriculture contemporary. Someone who had risen to the rank of colonel without ever going into harm’s way was bound to be cautious on his first combat deployment.
By the same token, while the majority of Reserve and Guard units had served with distinction in both Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes the familiarity of fighting alongside people who were your civilian neighbors and coworkers could manifest in unhealthy ways. A commander should never commit the lives of his or her troops needlessly, but death was often the unfortunate outcome of combat. A leader who focused on their subordinates to the exclusion of the mission did a disservice to both. An infantryman’s job was to close with and kill the enemy.
Leaders who forgot this did so at their own peril.
“Colonel Petrie, what is your mission in Afghanistan?” Rapp said.
The colonel’s thin brown eyebrows bunched together in confusion as if Rapp had asked a trick question.
Not a good sign.
“What do you mean?”
“Your mission,” Rapp said, spacing out the words as if speaking to a toddler. “What are your standing orders?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with—” Tim interrupted.
“If you speak again without permission,” Rapp said, turning to the Department of Agriculture bureaucrat, “I will physically remove you from this room. Got it?”
The flush that had begun in the man’s cheeks had now enveloped his face and was creeping down his neck. Tim opened his mouth but then slowly closed it. Rapp had changed out of his local garb and into a flight suit. The tan one-piece overalls were devoid of insignia or organizational markings and featured no name tag. No rank bestowed instant authority and no skill badges afforded immediate respect. Even so, there must have been something about Rapp’s presence. The bureaucrat might have murder in his eyes, but Tim’s mouth remained closed.
Progress.
“My mission is to secure and hold the area of operations assigned to my brigade,” Petrie said.
“Good,” Rapp said with a helpful nod. “I’m offering you a chance to do just that. The Iranian I have to find is a foreign intelligence officer bent on destabilizing not just your area of operations but all of Afghanistan. I need your subordinate battalions to conduct a search for this man, going house-to-house if necessary. Once you find him, I will assume custody of the Iranian, and you will never hear from me again. Okay?”
“No,” Tim said, slapping his palm against the table. “It’s not okay, and I don’t give a shit who you are. The bullshit raids your JSOC friends conducted over the last twenty-four hours have already done enough damage. In one fell swoop, you have undone weeks of bilateral talks between the HIG, the village elders, and other local leaders. I will not sit here and allow this farce of a conversation to continue.”
Rapp sighed before turning to the bureaucrat.
On this point, he agreed.
The time for talking was over.
CHAPTER 48
“DID you have to hit him?” Coleman said.
“Absolutely,” Rapp said.
Coleman paused to consider his friend. The conviction in Rapp’s voice gave even him pause. Maybe there was a rational explanation for the storm of violence that had just engulfed an otherwise placid brigade headquarters.
