Code red, p.1
Code Red, page 1
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I bring the Mitch Rapp era of my career to a close, I find myself thinking back on all the people who made it possible. My agent, Simon Lipskar, for first pondering the possibility. Sloan Harris and Emily Bestler for their confidence, support, and unwavering professionalism. David Brown and his team for their inexhaustible energy and creativity. Lara Jones for keeping all the moving parts working in harmony. Ryan Steck for his unparalleled knowledge of the Rappverse and for giving me the benefit of the doubt. Rod Gregg for patiently explaining the complexity of firearms and keeping me out of the sights of the aficionados. Elaine Mills for all her critiques and encouragement. And, finally, my wife, Kim. The woman who puts up with me, talks me down, and gives it all purpose.
Most of all, though, I want to thank Vince’s fans. I was overwhelmed by your enthusiasm for this project, the speed with which you welcomed me into the fold, and your passion for the character and the world he inhabits. Taking over for one of the leading lights in the genre was terrifying, and it was the people out there rooting for me that kept me going.
My undying gratitude to you all. It’s been an amazing decade, and there’s a lot more to come.
PROLOGUE
SALERNO
ITALY
THE mist that had blurred the sunset was becoming more oppressive as the night wore on. Visibility was still passable thanks to the powerful lights of Salerno’s commercial dock, but Absaar Mousa wondered if that would last.
Only if Allah willed it.
He wiped the condensation from his binoculars and once again glanced behind him. The first few trees glowed green, but beyond that the darkness was impenetrable. The steep slope had been difficult to descend even in daylight and now the journey would be too treacherous for even the drug addicts and graffiti artists who normally haunted this section of ancient wall. Still, it would be unwise to rely too heavily on that assumption.
He put the binoculars back to his eyes and swept them slowly across his field of view. The verdant mountains and artistically lit castle ruin. The modern city and dark sea beyond. Finally, he focused on what had brought him there: the city’s port.
Mousa had become something of an expert on intricate operations over the past year, but the scale and complexity of this one still astounded him. He examined a docked transport ship as a series of cranes plucked brightly colored containers from its deck. From this distance, the impression was that of a swarm of highly specialized insects carrying away the toys of some unseen child.
This, as much as anything, encapsulated Western society. The constant flow of goods that fed their materialistic frenzy. The meaningless possessions that they used to fill the place that Allah—and only Allah—had the right to occupy.
He backed a few paces into the trees, searching for relief from the intensifying rain. After finding a bit of protection, he focused on a garish yellow container stacked on a dock to the east. The smugglers he’d contracted had taken great care to make sure that it was in no way remarkable, and they had done their job flawlessly. Even knowing what he did, it seemed so insignificant. So unworthy of the effort that had been expended to get it there.
Ostensibly, it was full of parts used in the repair of farm equipment. Less known was the fact that hidden inside them were fifteen metric tons of captagon, a narcotic rarely seen in Europe, but extraordinarily popular in the Middle East. He himself had taken it while fighting for the Islamic State in Syria and had later become involved in its manufacture and distribution. The small white pills stamped with two crescents had served a surprisingly pivotal role in the fight to spread God’s law. They provided billions in hard currency to finance jihad and suppressed fear and fatigue in the men carrying it out.
The drug in that container, though, was nothing like the substance he’d handled during his days as a warrior. It was a unique formulation powerful enough to change the tide of the war against the West. To tip the scale back in the direction of God’s army.
Under the direction of unseen benefactors, Mousa had spent the last twenty months developing a European distribution network made up exclusively of Believers. It hadn’t been difficult to find disaffected immigrants unable to integrate into the societies they found themselves surrounded by. Young men thirsting for someone to blame for their misery. A cause to give their lives meaning. Purpose. All things that Mousa had become an expert at providing. He’d learned from the imams of his youth to speak with unwavering certainty about discrimination and corruption. Imperialism and heresy. To describe in the most lurid and visceral detail the eventual seduction of these men’s daughters and wives by the easy pleasures of the West. And if those lofty ideas failed, Mousa simply offered the money that his shadowy masters seemed to have in unlimited supply.
The army that Mousa had built was now complete. European government officials had been bribed, clandestine distribution centers had been set up, weapons had been secured, and devoted personnel had been put in place.
Finally, after so many failures, the war had begun anew. But on a very different battlefield. It was time to admit that the followers of Islam would never be a match for the West’s military. His movement would never be victorious trying to penetrate the armor of its enemy directly. No, they had to be hit where they were weak. In the soft flank that had been ignored by his brothers as they became more interested in glory and vengeance than victory.
The phone in his pocket began to vibrate, but he didn’t bother to read the text. He knew what it would say. His man had reached the port’s entry.
Mousa adjusted his gaze to the trucks passing through the initial security checkpoint, seeking out a bright blue one hauling a white container. He felt his stomach clench as it pulled up to the guardhouse and the driver—a particularly faithful young man named Ja’far Saeed—handed his identification through the window. Not that the act was visible with the intervening glare and rain, but Mousa had become so familiar with the dock’s rhythms that it was hard to differentiate between what he actually saw and what was playing out in his mind’s eye.
Mousa let out a relieved breath when the truck cleared security and started toward the area where it would be relieved of its empty container. Satisfied it was safe, he redirected his attention to a crane moving along a stack of containers that included one originating in the Syrian port of Tartus. The one that he’d spent almost two years of his life preparing for.
Everything progressed as he’d come to expect during the endless hours spent surveilling the port. Over that time, its repetitive efficiency had become strangely soothing. Today, that meditative spell had been broken by a trickle of adrenaline.
With its chassis unloaded, the truck set out toward the crane that had closed its grip around the container in question. Mousa watched as it was lowered to the ground and retrieved by a loader. His man stopped in the designated area and the lumbering machine placed the metal crate on his chassis.
The rest should have been little more than formality. A brief mechanical inspection followed by a check of his driver’s paperwork. Instead, two service cars parked nearby suddenly accelerated and blocked the truck front and back. Hidden spotlights sprang to life, casting a piercing glare over a series of port workers, who were revealed to be armed with everything from handguns to assault rifles.
Mousa barely managed to keep from vomiting. It wasn’t just the last two years. In reality, he had labored his entire life for this moment. The madrassas of his youth. Deadly battles fought across the Middle East. His infiltration into Europe and recruitment into the organization he now directed.
The leak that led to this disaster hadn’t come from his team. Of this he was certain. He’d attended to every detail. He’d chosen only the most fanatical and obedient men. He’d compartmentalized information in a way that provided no one person with enough to create a failure on this scale.
The only plausible explanation was that he’d been betrayed. One of the unseen men he worked for had been compromised by the European authorities. It had to be.
Mousa’s initial shock transformed into a mix of rage and despair as he used his cell phone to send a brief text. While the army of the godless had undoubtedly won this battle, their victory would come with a price. The Italians were about to learn that they were no longer dealing with the old women who made up their mafia.
A new kind of drug demanded a new kind of criminal.
* * *
Ja’far Saeed squinted through the windshield, examining the vehicle blocking his path and the armed men who grew in number with every passing second. The spotlights, initially blinding, were made even more disorienting with the swirling light bars of police vehicles.
A trap.
He looked in his side mirror and saw men moving cautiously toward his door, staying close to the container he had been charged with hauling to safety. A ping sounded on the phone mounted to his dashboard and he read the message as someone began shouting Arabic instructions into a megaphone.
Roll down the window!
Put your hands through it so they can be seen!
But now the mission had failed, and his orders had changed. There was only one thing left to do. One final act that would carry him to Allah’s embrace.
Saeed put the truck in gear and rammed the vehicle in front of him. It rocked on its wheels and began skidding sideways, hopping awkwardly until its tires were torn from the rims. The pitch of shouted orders rose, but no one fired their weapons. They wanted him alive. They wanted to torture him. To force him to give up his brothers and turn his back on God.
Sparks began to fly from the back of the vehicle stuck to his grille, and then, suddenly, he was free of it. He moved through the gears, increasing his speed as the people on the dock tried to escape. He clipped one and managed to hit another head-on, pulling him beneath the truck’s wheels and causing the suspension to jerk satisfyingly.
The gunfire finally started when he wrenched the wheel left and accelerated toward a fleeing man dressed as a dockworker. Holes appeared in his windshield, but he paid no attention. Something impacted the window next to him, embedding glass in the side of his face and blinding him in one eye. Despite this, there was no pain. Only hate and elation.
Saeed twisted the wheel again as his quarry cut right, but this time the trailer lost traction and the weight of the container began pulling it over. He threw his door open and leapt out, enthralled by what he knew would happen next. He’d been given authorization for one last act of vengeance against his people’s oppressors, and now he’d use it.
His feet hit first, but the momentum was too much to overcome, and he found himself rolling uncontrollably across the dock. His position on the ground was enough to save his life when the bomb at the back of the truck’s cab detonated, but not enough to keep his clothes from igniting. Again, there was no pain. Only the yellow firelight visible in his still-intact eye.
Saeed fought his way to his feet and saw the vague outline of a human a few meters ahead. The bullets impacting him were barely noticeable as he charged forward and dove at the figure, holding on with what strength he had left as the flames enveloped them.
By that point, he could no longer see but, praise be to Allah, he was still capable of hearing his victim’s screams.
CHAPTER 1
HINDU KUSH MOUNTAINS
AFGHANISTAN
MITCH Rapp raised a fist before crouching next to a jumble of boulders. The men behind him would do the same, melting into the darkness and scanning for threats.
Sometimes, though, those threats were hard to see.
To the north, the Hindu Kush mountain range was outlined against the stars. A few of its taller peaks were still holding on to snow that shone dully in the celestial light. They dominated everything in this region, providing mortal dangers to the local inhabitants as well as the means for their survival. Even the shallow canyon Rapp found himself in was the result of ancient glaciers that had made their way across the valley floor.
Water was scarce, but the fact that the ditch to his left was lined with low grass and scrub hinted at its presence just beneath the surface. Not enough to sustain anything that most people would recognize as civilization, but sufficient for a few hearty souls to eke out an isolated existence. And for all their faults, no one could say that the Afghans weren’t hearty souls.
A broad agricultural plot ahead suggested that they were closing in on their target and that’s what had prompted the stop. Confirming what he’d seen on the reconnaissance photos, it appeared to have gone fallow some time ago. A few stone barriers and terraces were all that was left of what was once probably not much former glory. Most likely a family poppy operation with a few goats thrown in. Afghanistan the way it had been before and now was again.
The war was finally over, and it had ended pretty much how Rapp had always expected. To some extent, America was a ceaseless victim of its own success. Over the course of a couple hundred years, it had gone from a British colonial backwater to the most powerful country of the modern era. It had developed the ultimate secret sauce and was happy to pass out the recipe to anyone interested. Who wouldn’t want that? When the US military rolled across your border, it wasn’t to subjugate your country, it was to deliver you from oppression, provide education and health care, and build infrastructure. To create a pothole-free path to peace, freedom, and prosperity.
With all those rainbows and unicorns, what could possibly go wrong?
Same answer as always. Everything.
The Americans had never managed to assemble an Afghan government that wasn’t a combination of the Three Stooges and Dr. Evil. That had created an environment in which the US military had to take over the administration of the country’s affairs, while Afghan officials focused on stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down. Ironically, what had kept Afghanistan on a reasonably even keel during the occupation wasn’t their confidence in their own government, but rather their confidence in the American one. Much like the Romans of the distant past, the US could be more or less counted on to live up to their agreements, pay people on time, and generally get shit done.
When that abruptly ended, the locals had a choice to make, and they’d chosen the Taliban. It was something Rapp had warned Washington about more times than he could count. While the Taliban were brutal and repressive, they were also predictable. And in this part of the world, predictability was about the best facsimile of stability anyone could hope for.
Back in the US, the mess of a war was inevitably followed by the mess of a pullout and then a mess of finger-pointing. Generals at politicians, politicians at the intelligence community, officers at generals, enlisted men at officers. The truth was that it was a failure at every level. One that the exhausted American people now preferred to pretend never happened.
All of which had combined to bring him to this place at this moment.
There were still a little over twenty Americans trapped in-country under various circumstances. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a story anyone wanted to tell. It didn’t fit into the former president’s image of godlike master of the universe, and the media didn’t see any profit in giving airtime to a subject that made Americans reach for the remote. Fortunately, with a new occupant in the Oval Office and Irene Kennedy back in control of the CIA, the clandestine services were finally able to start tackling the issue.
Or at least that was the theory.
After two minutes of motionlessness, Rapp hadn’t heard anything that couldn’t be attributed to the air filtering through the mountains. He motioned for his men to follow and continued along the degraded trail.
They’d already managed to get eight hostages out the easy way—with money. Taliban rule had plunged much of the country into poverty so abject that even the tough-as-nails Afghans were having a hard time hanging on. Famine was on the horizon and reports of people being forced to sell their children just to survive were becoming increasingly common.
It was a level of desperation that made even the most hardened jihadist forget about revenge in favor of finding the means to feed their families. With one exception, every kidnapper they’d contacted had been happy to just take the cash. And now Rapp had returned to Afghanistan to deal with that exception.
Based on the Agency’s network of informants, the two American nationals in question were being held in a village not far from there. Negotiations carried out by a local intermediary had gone nowhere, and after an offer of a million US dollars hadn’t even rated a response, Kennedy decided it was time to extract the hostages by a more direct method.
The question was, why didn’t this group want the money? Why were they looking to start a fight they were destined to lose? Based on the best intel available, they weren’t even Taliban. Just an extended family group consisting of maybe forty individuals living in the middle of nowhere. They had no dog in this race. Hell, there was no race anymore.
