The Last Man (2 page)

Rapp had a long and somewhat complicated history with Rickman. He respected the man, but it had taken a while. Rapp was considering how he would handle a possible order to eliminate Rickman when the towering Hubbard approached.

“This shit is really bad.”

Rapp nodded.

“It’s about as bad as it could get.” Hubbard rubbed his bald head and asked, “How in the hell are we going to find him?”

“At this point I’m not sure.” Rapp knew their chances for success were remote, but they had to start somewhere. “This is going to get really nasty, and if you don’t have the stomach for it, Hub, I suggest you go back to the base and lock yourself in your office.”

Hubbard studied Rapp for a moment and then nodded. “You don’t have to worry about me getting all sensitive on you. I’ve been over here for two years. I’ve seen all kinds of crazy shit.”

Most of that “crazy shit” was stuff done by the enemy. This time they would be the ones crossing the line. “I know you have,” Rapp said, “but trust me, if we’re going to get him back we are going to have to be more ruthless than you can imagine, and if at any point you start to have doubts, that’s fine, step aside, but I need you to promise me you’ll stick your head in the sand and keep your mouth shut.”

Hubbard gave him a nervous smile. “I can do a Sergeant Schultz when I need to.”

“Good,” Rapp replied, even though he had his doubts.

“So where do you want to start?”

Rapp returned his attention to the row of dead men.

“The bodyguards.”

Hubbard turned his six-foot-five-inch frame toward the row of men and pursed his lips. “I think we can rule these four out.”

Rapp focused on the man with the cratered face. An inside job was the obvious conclusion, but the bodyguards were all hardened Northern Alliance types. It was possible that one of them could have been bribed into giving up the crucial information on the security system, but unlikely. If one of them had turned, however, it was also possible that the Taliban, or whoever was responsible for this, had decided to kill the inside man as soon as they got what they wanted. The wrench in the works was that Rapp was pretty certain the Taliban had nothing to do with this. He pointed at the man missing part of his face. “Focus on this one. I want to know everything there is to know about him . . .especially his family. Do his parents or wife or kids have medical problems? Does he have a drug problem? Anything you can find.”

“And the other eight?”

A team of interrogation experts from D.C. were in flight but not expected to land for another thirteen hours. “If you have the manpower, you can get started with them, but I doubt they’d hang around after something like this. What would you do if someone gave you a pile of cash to betray your buddies and a man like Rick?” Rickman’s first name was Joe, but everyone who worked with him called him Rick.

“I’d run.”

“That’s right.” Rapp pointed to the man who’d been shot with a .45 caliber. “Focus on this one for now.”

“So you think the Taliban turned him?”

Rapp ignored the question for the moment and asked, “Who moved these bodies?”

“What do you mean?”

“The bodies,” Rapp said as he pointed at the row of four. “They weren’t shot here. Look at the blood on the floor. They were dragged here after they were killed.” Rapp pointed at the stairs. “One of them was dragged down from the second story.”

Hubbard shrugged. “They were lined up like this when I got here.”

“Did the bodyguards move them?”

“Not that I know of. Do you want me to find out?”

“In a minute.” Rapp looked toward the front door where one of the bodyguards was standing post with an AK-47 gripped in both hands. “The neighbors . . . did they hear or see anything last night?”

“No. Not a thing.”

“No signs of forced entry?”

“Not that we’ve discovered, but they wouldn’t need to force their way in if one of these guys were helping them.”

“So no forced entry . . . four bodyguards . . . four headshots . . . four dead men. Anything about that seem unusual to you?”

Hubbard thought about it for a moment and said, “Not sure what you’re driving at.”

Rapp pointed at the bodies one after another, saying, “Nine millimeter, nine millimeter, nine millimeter, .45 caliber, and my bet is they were all fired from suppressed weapons. Pretty accurate work. Good fire discipline. Look at the walls.”

Hubbard did a 360–degree turn and said, “What about them?”

“You see anything?”

“No.”

“That’s the point. You ever seen the Taliban operate like this? Four shots, four hits, and not a shot more. The Taliban likes to get the lead out. You know their MO. They would have rolled up on this place with three or four trucks and started unloading RPG rounds at all three buildings. This place would be riddled with bullets. This was done by pros.”

Hubbard made a sour face and then nodded. “Yeah . . . you’re right. The towelheads like to blow shit up. This is more like something our guys would do . . .”

Hubbard kept talking, but Rapp had stopped listening. The idea that U.S. Special Operators had been involved was something he hadn’t considered and something he didn’t want to consider. From the moment Rapp had heard Rickman was missing, there was a gnawing fear that he was about to head down the rabbit hole. Rickman excelled at his job for the simple reason that he could think five, ten, fifteen, even twenty steps ahead of the enemy, and everyone else, for that matter. There had been many times when Rapp didn’t understand what the man was up to because he wasn’t smart enough to follow Rick’s thinking.

“How about those assholes from the ISI?” Hubbard asked. Rapp had considered the less-than-loyal members of the Pakistani Intelligence Service. They would be on the list as well as others. “Don’t forget the Iranians, the Russians, and the Chinese.” And there was one other possibility that Rapp wasn’t quite prepared to mention. “My money’s on the ISI. This is just the kind of bullshit they’d pull.”

A thought occurred to Rapp. “Where’s the dog? That big fricken’ Rottweiler that never left Rick’s side?”

“Ajax . . . he died a month ago.”

Rapp was surprised by the news. “What was wrong with him?”

“Don’t know. Rick was pretty bummed out, though. Dog got sick, he took him to the vet and had to put him down. I think Rick said it was cancer or something like that.”

One of Rapp’s team members came down the stairs with a disturbed look on his face. The man had blond hair and blue eyes and was pushing fifty. “Not good,” was all he had to say.

Rapp looked at Scott Coleman and said, “Please tell me you’re talking about something other than the safe. Tell me the safe is untouched and all the cash, drives, and laptop are safely tucked inside.”

Coleman shook his head. “All gone. Completely cleaned out.”

Even though Rapp had expected it, he had held out some hope that he could give his boss some good news. “Shit, I need to call Irene and let her know.” Rapp reached for his phone, but stopped upon hearing a commotion at the front door.

Chapter 2

Abdul Siraj Zahir admired himself in the mirror. At forty-eight he was an old man in his country. Even among the common people it was difficult to make it to manhood. In Zahir’s line of work the challenge was much greater. He was a warrior, like his father and his father before him. His father and all three of his older brothers were dead. His father and the two oldest brothers had been killed by the Soviets and the third one had died at the hands of the Northern Alliance. Zahir had learned from their mistakes. Afghanistan was a brutal country where the only person you could really trust was someone from your own village. Beyond that, loyalties were an ever-shifting, complicated game.

Zahir had learned that to stay alive he had to be brutal and vigilant. He knew that some described him as sadistic and paranoid, and he wore that as a badge of honor—the more people who feared him the better. In Afghanistan, fear ruled. If you couldn’t get men to fear you, you became a target. Zahir didn’t want his life to end the way it had for his father and brothers, so he stoked the fear. It wasn’t always easy, but had found that he was good at it.

Zahir pulled down on his gray uniform blouse, snapped his fingers, and then held out his arms. His aide rushed forward with Zahir’s shiny black leather service belt. He buckled it around his boss’s ample waist, made sure it was straight, and then stepped out of the way so Zahir could admire himself in the mirror. Zahir smiled at his reflection. His weapon was a still-unfired .40 caliber Smith & Wesson. The fact that Americans had given it to him for free made ownership all that much more delicious. He’d spent most of the last decade killing Americans, and now he was on their payroll.

Zahir noticed something wrong with his beard and moved closer to the mirror. His irritation was directed at a patch of gray that he had missed. He grabbed a bottle of black dye from his desk and inserted a small brush. After a few applications the gray was gone. Zahir smiled at his fine-looking beard and placed his hands on his hips. He looked good in his uniform. It was a little tight around the waist, but in Afghanistan his expanding middle section was a sign that he was a prosperous man.

Afghanistan was a unique place. It was like a petri dish for the survival of the fittest. Historically it had always been a harsh country; hot summers, cold winters, and rugged geography had shaped a breed of extremely tough people. For the last three decades a state of near-constant war had only heightened the selection process. Being physically strong was no longer enough. One had to be adept at reading the ever-shifting alliances that had shaped and reshaped the power structure of the isolated country. The Soviets had to be appeased and then the Americans and their Pakistani partners, who sponsored the crazed Wahhabi fighters from across the Persian Gulf, who in turn led to the Taliban and their enemies the Northern Alliance and a long civil war. Then the Americans and their coalition showed up and swept the Taliban from power in a matter of months.

Abdul Siraj Zahir had been able to look into the future on that day more than a decade ago and understand that the Taliban would be back. American air power and their advanced weaponry had given him doubts along the way, but Zahir knew the Afghan people, and more important, the devout Muslims who represented the base of the Taliban. They would die to the last man before they let these godless people beat them. Zahir also knew that the Americans were too self-conscious to hunt the Taliban down like the dogs that they were and exterminate them.

So Zahir played them all against each other and never forgot the fates of his father and brothers. He held on to his little enclave southeast of Jalalabad and changed sides as many times as he needed to to survive. Zahir neither loved nor hated his country. He didn’t think in those terms. He lived in this particular part of the world, like most of its people, because he had been born here. He considered himself to be an above-average intelligent person with a very good understanding of what motivated people and, more important, what they feared.

Despite his ability to sense the shift, winds of power, the most recent gigantic twist was something that even he had been unable to predict. After he had killed countless Americans, and taken their money, the fools had come to him with a job offer—a legitimate job offer. Not simply a bag of cash as they had done in the past for certain information. They wanted him to become commander of the local police force. He thought it was a trap, of course, but then he learned that other lions like himself had been offered and taken similar positions in the Afghan Police. It was a new push the Americans were calling the reintegration program.

He had been on the job for just six weeks, and he was already lining his pockets with bribes from local businessmen. The Taliban was a concern, of course. They would after all eventually work their way back into power, but not for a few more years, and in the meantime, Zahir would play both sides against each other. He would work for the Americans, take their money, and keep the Taliban informed of what they needed to know.

As always, the most important thing was to stay one step ahead of seen and unseen enemies. Zahir had long ago surrounded himself with fiercely loyal people. There wasn’t a man in his inner circle whom he had known for fewer than ten years, and they were all from his village. They were of his tribe, and in return for their loyalty he protected their families. Zahir never spent more than two nights in the same place, and even with his newfound legitimacy he continued his old ways. Part of the reason was that he had four wives. They all needed his attention, but it was beyond that. The axiom was extremely simple: They couldn’t kill him if they couldn’t find him. Nights were always the most dangerous. That was when the American killers hunted. They used their optics advantage to harass and assassinate his countrymen.

For many years now Zahir had avoided sleeping at night. He always made sure he was awake from midnight until one hour before sunrise. That was the preferred time that the American dogs liked to attack, so he stayed awake and on the move. He would then sleep in the mornings and conduct business in the afternoons and evenings. This morning, however, was different. After only a few hours of sleep, Pamir, one of his most trusted men, had awoken him with a startling piece of news. There was a rumor sweeping through the back alleys of Jalalabad that a notorious American had been snatched from his fortress. Mr. Rickman was a very important man who had made many of Zahir’s countrymen extremely wealthy. Unfortunately, Mr. Rickman had also spent a great deal of his time and money trying to kill Zahir. There had been many close calls, but Zahir had always managed to stay one step ahead of him. Now that Zahir was in a position to finally receive some of the cash that the American was so famous for handing out, someone had grabbed him.

Zahir had been silently berating himself all morning for not coming up with the plan first. With his newfound influence it was just the type of operation he could have pulled off. Having been beaten to the prize, however, he would now be forced to adapt. If the last thirty years had taught him anything, it was that out of chaos came great opportunity, especially to those who were bold and ruthless.