Lethal Agent (Mitch Rapp #18)(29)
“I’m as frustrated and angry as you are, Scott. And I’m doing everything I can.”
“I know. Keep me posted,” he said and then disconnected the call.
He lowered himself into the chair behind him and looked down at the useless photos scattered across the floor. That was it. Mitch Rapp had been abandoned. And not just by the American and Saudi politicians. By him. He should have told Rapp to shove his orders up his ass. He should be out there fighting with him. And if necessary dying with him. One last charge into a barrage of ISIS bullets would be a hundred times better than sitting in this room doing nothing.
His sat phone rang and he declined the call when he saw that it was Claudia. What could he tell her? That Mitch was somewhere in the desert with every ISIS fighter in Yemen either searching for him or on their way to search for him? That instead of helping, his team was sitting around with their thumbs up their asses?
“You should talk to her.”
Joe Maslick was sitting on a stool in the corner of the tiny room, feeling as helpless as he was. The others were checking their weapons or catching some shut-eye on the building’s bombed-out second floor, waiting for word that they were going back into action.
Coleman nodded and was about to reach for the sat phone when the door leading to the office started to swing inward. Instead of the phone he grabbed the SIG P226 next to it, while Maslick retrieved a similar weapon from his holster.
The man standing in the threshold had a bearded face almost completely obscured by the scarf wound around his head. Only two bloodshot eyes and the sun-damaged skin around them were visible. He was dressed in traditional Yemeni garb but it was so caked with dirt that it was impossible to even guess at the original color of the cloth.
He ignored the two men aiming guns at him, fixating on the bottle of water on the desk. Coleman watched as he pushed the scarf away from his mouth and drained the bottle in one long pull.
It took the former SEAL a few seconds to conjure the expected nonchalance. “What took you so long?”
Rapp tossed the empty container on the floor and used the back of his hand to wipe the mud from his lips. “Stopped for lunch. Can I assume we’re blown here?”
“Yeah. Four Americans in camo showing up at the restaurant hasn’t been great for Karman’s cover.”
He nodded. “Tell him to gather up his people and get us some vehicles. We’ll wait until dark and then make a run for the Saudi border.”
CHAPTER 13
WESTERN YEMEN
SAYID Halabi began to stand, but the pain in his damaged spine prompted him to abandon the idea. Instead he settled back behind the desk that dominated the room. A Panasonic Toughbook computer sitting in front of him was connected to a series of satellite dishes that beamed signals horizontally for kilometers before finally pointing skyward. Maps of the Middle East, Europe, and America hung on the walls, allowing him to visualize how the world would be affected by his plans.
Thousands of miles to the west, Irene Kennedy was sitting at a similar desk, with a similar computer, considering similar maps. All more grand and sophisticated, of course. But fundamentally the same. If he was going to defeat America, he would have to learn to think like the woman charged with protecting it. Strategize like her. Use the high-tech tools at her disposal with equal dexterity.
During his time convalescing from the injuries Mitch Rapp had inflicted on him, he had come to accept that ISIS would never be a military force to rival the West. With that acceptance, though, had come the realization that it wasn’t necessary. The era of traditional armies was over and had been for decades. For all its size and sophistication, even the American military was capable of little more than a lengthy string of elaborate failures.
The world was now defined by a complex web of interrelated cold wars. External battles between the Europeans, Americans, Russians, and Chinese raged just beneath the surface. But even more important were the internal battles—between the individual countries that made up the EU, between political parties, between races and economic classes.
The United States was as weak as it had been in human memory. Its people were unconcerned with anything but their own selfish needs and had turned their political system into just another source of cheap entertainment. Its defenses were still built around standing armies that had become little more than a way for the military-industrial complex to enrich itself. America’s ability to adapt and reinvent itself had been stripped away by politicians who had trained their constituents to view change with fear and anger.
God had provided him with the right weapon at the right moment in history. Now his primary mission was to use America’s internal tumult to keep Irene Kennedy and Mitch Rapp blinded, and to ensure that when the moment came, America would be too fractured to react. The world would be left rudderless.
So far, it had been child’s play. Christine Barnett had latched on to the anthrax videos immediately, using them to attack her political opponents and the CIA instead of concerning herself with defending her country. Even more interesting was her willingness to go beyond accusations of incompetence and to insinuate that the Alexander administration’s activities in the Middle East had brought about this attack.
Halabi had thought Barnett was going too far and might suffer backlash, but he’d been proven wrong. In an America trained to react only to partisanship, her message was finding an audience. It was human nature to hate the traitor more intensely than the enemy, and in America the two parties were increasingly using the language of treason when referring to each other. It had gone so far that an enterprising businessman was printing T-shirts that read “I’d Rather Be ISIS Than . . .” and then finished half with “Republican” and half with “Democrat.” To Halabi’s great amusement, he was having a hard time keeping them in stock.