Vince Flynn: Protect And Defend

Ask one of those same agents to kill an unarmed civilian and you have now moved into the unknown. Even if guilt is confirmed, and the punishment fits the crime, few law-and-order types relish the role of executioner. The agent is no longer being asked to react to a threat. An entirely new skill set is needed. Essentially you are asking a person who has only played defense to now line up on the other side of the ball and perform with the same level of proficiency. To change one’s role so quickly is nearly impossible. To kill cleanly, and make it look like an accident, was the domain of the rare, tested assassin.

Rapp checked Rivera again. She was sleeping soundly. Slowly, he slid his right arm out from under her neck, pulled back the sheet, and slid out of bed. As he covered her with the sheet her head stirred slightly and then settled back onto her pillow. Rapp backed away and walked across the cool tile floor to the balcony. A soft, humid breeze ruffled the tops of the palm trees below. He looked out across the bay at the bobbing masts of the sailboats and searched for the sleek cruiser that belonged to the man they had come to kill. The boat had arrived late in the afternoon and dropped anchor a convenient 200 feet from the nearest boat. The 63-foot Azzurra with its bright red stripe was easy to pick out among the other white hulls.

The man was scheduled to stay in Puerto Golfito for two nights. He had yet to deviate from his itinerary, which made Rapp’s job all that much easier. The plan for this evening was to watch him, but Rapp was beginning to have second thoughts. He looked up at the quarter moon and the approaching clouds. In an hour the conditions would be as good as they would get. The forecast called for clear skies the following evening. A quarter moon on the water provided more light than most people would think and more light increased the odds that they might be seen.

Rapp glanced back at Rivera. This one was going to be up close and personal. There would be no detachment through distance and the scope of a rifle. Even though the target was no threat physically, this was for many the most difficult kind of kill. The biggest psychological test. Bare hands. No knife. No gun. Just you and the prey wrapped in a death spiral like an anaconda squeezing the last breath from some warm-blooded animal it had plucked from the bank of a stream. She would feel the heat of his body, smell his scent, hear his muffled cries, and quite possibly see the pleading fear in his eyes. No, he decided, it was too big a test for Rivera.

Silently, he walked over to his bag and pulled out an encrypted Motorola radio. He turned it on and left it across the room on the dresser. With the rest of his gear in tow he slid out of the bedroom and made his way down the hall to the living room. The large sliding doors were open, covered only by sheer white curtains. Rapp headed for the middle, found the seam in the fabric, and stepped out onto the patio. He put on a pair of black swim skins and walked down the path to the water. The house sat on five acres and had its own private beach.

Rapp reached the tree line and checked the expanse of sand. It was empty. He slid a Motorola radio and a collapsible headset under the swim skins and strolled casually across the beach with his fins, snorkel, and dive mask. There was no sense in trying to be sneaky at this point. If anyone saw a person in black slinking suspiciously across the beach at this late hour they were likely to call the police. Rapp waded into the water, getting a fix on the boat. He lined it up with a dip in the tree line at the opposite end of the bay, finished putting on his mask and fins, and began slicing through the water toward the boat and its owner. He was going to squeeze the life out of Stu Garret, and he knew from experience that he wouldn’t feel the slightest bit of compassion.

The cigarette smoke hung thick in the air as the three men eyed each other with a mix of contempt and suspicion. Azad Ashani did not want to be here. The fifty-one-year-old head of Iran ’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security knew what was coming. Sooner or later the bombs would fall and the facility where he sat would be destroyed by an American onslaught. There was of course a good chance it would be the Israelis, but in the end would it be any different? The Israelis, after all, would be flying American-made planes and dropping American-made bunker-buster bombs.

Ashani studied the concrete walls and ceiling of the cramped office. They were fifty feet underground in the Isfahan nuclear facility. Ashani had been reassured by engineers and bureaucrats alike that the facility was impregnable. Above them sat a surface building with a rebar, interlaced, two-meter slab of superhard concrete supported by a skeletal frame of massive steel I beams. Ten feet beneath that sat a one-meter-thick span of concrete and rebar and more I beams. Ten feet beneath that the same thing, and so it went all the way down to the fourth subterranean level. The engineers had told him ninety-nine percent of the American arsenal would be stopped by the massive ground level slab. The second floor was touted to be one hundred percent effective against the one percent that just might be able to get past the first barrier.

This may have comforted many of Ashani’s fellow government officials, but Ashani was a born skeptic, not a blind religious fanatic. The American defense industry was constantly churning out new weapons capable of bigger and more amazing feats of destruction. When American ingenuity was pitted against his own government’s boisterous propaganda, a sane man was left with an easy choice of who to believe. On his original tour of the facility he asked the chief engineer, “If the second subfloor is one hundred percent effective, why bother building the third and fourth subfloors?” The question was never answered.

Ashani had no doubt the facility was marked for destruction, and he was increasingly convinced it would happen within the month. He had firmly, though respectfully, argued against its ever being built. The hard-liners had won, however. They had now poured more than a billion dollars into this facility, the one at Natanz and several others, all while the Iranian economy grew increasingly anemic. Officially, the program was for the peaceful development of nuclear energy. The entire world knew this to be a lie, for the simple fact that Iran was blessed with massive oil and gas reserves. Economically, it made no sense to spend billions developing a nuclear program when cheap oil and gas were abundantly available. What they needed were refineries.

With each passing day Ashani felt a greater sense of impending doom. It reminded him of the feelings he’d had as a graduate student back in 1979. He could see the fall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi coming as clearly as he saw the ascension of the religious fanatics. Grounded in math and economics, Ashani was pragmatic. There was no denying the fact that the shah was a puppet dictator who raided the national coffers to pay for his opulent lifestyle. This dislike, however, had to be tempered with an acknowledgment of the fanaticism of Ayatollah Khomeini and his band of blackrobes. While in graduate school at Shiraz University, Ashani had watched the religious zealots draw his fellow students to their cause. In time, they boarded buses and headed to Tehran for the protests. Ashani remembered thinking that they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

Revolutions were a tricky thing, and this one would be no different. Hard-line clerics fanned the flames of the populace’s rage and created in the shah a villain far greater than the facts would support. Young students and professionals who wanted to throw off the censorship and yoke of the shah’s secret police had no idea that they were making an alliance with a group that was no friend of free speech, feminism, and the enlightenment of Persian education. The youth of the country, however, was swept up in the storm of change like an angry uneducated mob. Very few bothered to stop and think what things would be like after the shah was removed. Ashani knew, though. In the end, revolutions were almost always won by whichever group was most willing to slaughter any and all opposition. Nearly three decades, a marriage, and five daughters later it was clear to Ashani that many of those students regretted what they had done.