Chapter 20
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
OF all the changes Rapp had to make over the six months of his training, adjusting to the solitude had been the most challenging. As he became increasingly immersed in his new trade, he drifted further and further away from his friends. The big change was not that he did not see them as much. It was a mental detachment. With each new level of training they had less in common. His new life was far from social.
Rapp’s childhood had been fairly normal. He’d grown up in a nice upper-middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., and pretty much stayed out of trouble. He did well in school, although some subjects, like French, were far easier than math and science. He excelled at every sport, which guaranteed a certain level of acceptance among his peers. There had been just one setback, and it was a pretty big one.
When Rapp was thirteen, his father dropped dead of a massive heart attack. It was a heavy blow, but Rapp didn’t go into a complete free fall, nor did he retreat into a shell. The truth was his dad wasn’t around much. He was a workaholic who golfed on the weekends. He was in no way a bad father. He was fair and honest with his two boys, and as far as Rapp could tell he had been faithful to his mother and treated her with the respect she deserved. It was neither bad or good, it just was.
Rapp had a tight group of friends in the neighborhood, and his father had been wise enough to take out the right amount of life insurance, so very little on the home front changed. The awkward moments came at the sports banquets where he was the only one without a father, and the holidays when the memories of his father inevitably bubbled to the surface, but through it all he was more concerned about his little brother and mother.
There was one area where it definitely changed him. He wanted stability in his personal relationships. His friends became more important than ever. Not that they hadn’t been before, it was just that he had never had to think about it. All he had to do was walk out his front door, get on his bike, and within a block or two he couldn’t help but stumble onto a basketball or stickball game. More than anything, though, his father’s death taught him that the clock was ticking. Everyone was going to die. Some a lot sooner than others, but in the end there was no avoiding it, and since he wasn’t a Hindu, he pretty much figured he’d better make the best of his one shot. This drove him with amazing intensity and focus on fields and courts of his youth.
And then there was Mary. Rapp met her when he was sixteen. He was playing baseball and she was running track. He didn’t know if it was love at first sight, because he hadn’t a clue what love was, but it was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It was like every great emotion he’d ever felt all rolled into one euphoric wave and it scared the crap out of him, because he instantly knew he was not in control. Fortunately, she was, and she had the sense and stability to not jerk him around too much. Her father was a captain in the navy and a huge lacrosse fan. With three daughters of his own, he enthusiastically attended Rapp’s lacrosse matches. Rapp and Mary dated all through high school and then headed off to Syracuse together, where Mary ran track and eventually landed in the Newhouse School of Public Communications. Her ambitious plan was to become a sports announcer. On a chilly December night in 1988 Mary was returning home from a semester abroad when her plane was blown out of the sky, killing 259 passengers and crew and 11 more innocent souls on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland. The terrorist attack that became known as Pam Am Lockerbie hit Rapp like a hammer blow.
They had planned their entire life together. They’d discussed kids, ambitions, and fears, but never once did they think that one of them would be taken. If he’d made it through the death of his father relatively intact, the opposite was true this time. He crumbled. He was already home for Christmas break and planning on picking Mary up at Dulles after she’d connected through JFK. Strangely enough, when he received the news he never questioned it, never challenged it, never asked for proof. The downing of the plane was all over the news and there was no doubt that she was on it. She’d called him from Heathrow right before she’d boarded.
He was a wreck for the first week. He refused to see a soul, including Mary’s parents, and then on the morning of her funeral he emerged from the basement shaved and wearing a suit and tie. His mother and his brother, Steven, accompanied him to the funeral, where he sat stone-faced in a state of bewildered shock. Midway through the service, though, something happened. The shock, the pain, the agonizing self-pity over the fact that he would never see her again, never hold her, never smell her, the list went on, and on, and on like some pounding surf that threatened to drown him.
Sitting in that pew that morning, listening to all of the crying, witnessing all of the pain and loss, made him want to make a break for it. He did not want to share his heartache with these people. None of them knew her the way he did. It was his dreams that had been dashed. His life that had been turned upside down and wrecked. Self-pity was something he had never experienced before, and it sickened him.
Rapp took his pathetic self-absorbed emotion and shoved it as far down in his gut as it would go, and he plugged it with the first and only thing he had available—anger. That anger slowly metastasized into a suit of armor. For the first time since the news had hit him, he saw a way out. A faint light at the far end of the cavern. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew he had to head toward it. It was the only thing that offered him hope. The rest of these people could sit around and feel sorry for themselves and each other, but not him. He wanted to hurt someone. He wanted to make someone pay. He didn’t know for certain that he would achieve his goal, but he knew with absolute certainty that he wanted to kill the men who were responsible for bringing down that plane. Rapp didn’t know if it was right or wrong, and he didn’t care. All he knew was that the anger kept the pain at bay.
Rapp and Hurley had developed a hate-hate relationship. The shrink had told him it didn’t really matter as long as they were united in their hatred for the enemy. It had been a strange six months, and looking back on the journey, Rapp was amazed that he’d made it through without any serious injury. He was young enough going in to be fearless, but coming out on the other end, looking back at what he’d been through, was another story. It was a little like being told not to look down while on the high wire. You just take it one step at a time, and when you get to the other side, and reality sets in, you think you must have been off your rocker to ever try it in the first place.
Rapp could point to a specific date and time when the physical hell and mental abuse had all but vanished. It was replaced by eighteen-hour days that were structured to the minute and more academic than grueling. There were still long runs and lots of push-ups and pull-ups, but they were designed to keep them in peak shape, not to try to get them to quit. The low point was the day after he’d broken Victor’s arm.
For the first week they were rousted at five every morning. Rapp didn’t need an alarm. He was on his feet as soon as the door was opened, but on the morning after the incident with Victor, Rapp found himself thrown from his cot and rolling across the dusty floor. After landing with a thud, he came up swinging. It was still dark and his muscles were tight and he never saw the blow that came out of the darkness. It hit him in the solar plexus, and as Rapp doubled over from the first strike another punch hammered his left eye. Rapp hit the floor and lay there gulping for air like a large mouth bass flopping around on a dock.
The lights suddenly came on, and with them the insults came raining down from the mouth of the mean old cuss. He stood over Rapp, his fists clenched, a look of smug satisfaction on his face. If Rapp had had a gun at that moment he would more than likely have killed the man. The four remaining recruits were ordered outside and for the next four hours were forced to endure unimaginable tortures. One man collapsed from exhaustion and another simply quit. It was now down to just Rapp and Fred. That was when the bastard turned all of his attention on Rapp. By noon they were down to one. It was an unwarranted slap to the back of the head that did Rapp in. As calmly as possible, he turned to face the old man and told him, “If you ever slap me again, I’m going to put you in the hospital.”
The old man ordered Rapp into the barn and they went at it again. This time Rapp lost fair and square. Or so he thought at first. As he lay there on the mat, bloodied and exhausted, he realized what had happened. The old man didn’t think he could take him fair and square, so he ran Rapp into the ground first. He dumped him from his cot at 4:00 A.M. and spent the next eight hours wearing him down and tenderizing him. Rapp never had a chance. The old prick had made it personal, and in Rapp’s mind that did not reflect well on the organization he thought he was joining. The whole thing was starting to look and smell like a shit show. Rapp got to his feet, told the old bastard exactly what he thought of him, and quit.
Rapp packed his stuff and was almost to the gate when the shrink caught up with him. He tried to talk Rapp out of quitting and when that didn’t work he outright asked him to stay. Rapp still didn’t budge, so Lewis put all the cards on the table. He formally introduced himself and admitted that Victor was in fact one of the instructors. He explained that he had vigorously protested using him to infiltrate the recruits. Rapp asked him for the old cuss’s name, but Lewis refused. “If you stay and make it through the rest of the training you will find out who he is, but short of that, I cannot oblige you.”
When Rapp held his ground, Lewis told him only that the old man was not the most likable guy, but he assured Rapp that he was exceedingly good at his craft. He assured Rapp that the nonsense was over and that from this moment forward they would be focusing on tradecraft. Rapp still wavered. He simply couldn’t see how it was possible for the old cuss to change his behavior. Lewis, sensing Rapp’s indecision, said, “You’re one of the best I’ve ever seen. We could really use you. In a way that might explain why he’s so hard on you.”
Rapp finally relented. It was down to just him and Fred. They still began every day with a workout, but the rest of the time was spent either in the classroom, in the barn, on the pistol range, or on field exercises to Richmond and then to Atlanta. They employed their skills against random targets—unwitting businessmen. They followed them, surveilled their every move, and looked for the right opportunity to dispatch them. Everything was analyzed and critiqued by Lewis and the old man.
While at the lake house they were allowed to speak only Arabic. They honed their fighting skills with virtually every conceivable weapon. They focused on knives and guns for the most part, but they were also taught to inventory every room they entered for objects that could be used to defend or kill. A day didn’t go by where the old cuss didn’t remind them of the endgame—he was turning them into killers. They studied physiology until they had an intimate understanding of the best ways to either dispatch or incapacitate an opponent. They became expert marksmen with a variety of pistols, shooting with both left and right hands. They were taught escape and evasion techniques, explosives, and the tricks of the countersurveillance trade.
As a final step, Rapp and Fred were told that if anything went wrong they were on their own. Embassies and consulates were off limits. The United States government didn’t know they existed and it sure as hell wasn’t going to claim them if they landed in hot water. The mean old cuss asked them if they accepted this. If they didn’t, they could walk away right now, no questions asked. After only brief consideration, both men said they fully understood the need for plausible deniability. They were in.
Hurley then formally introduced himself and told Rapp and Fred they were now free to reveal to each other their real identities. Rapp and Fred had already done this several months earlier, but they went through the motions as if it were the first time. After that they were forced to memorize a lengthy list of addresses and phone numbers across Europe and the Middle East. A day did not pass without Hurley’s reminding them that the United States government had no knowledge of their existence. If they were caught doing something illegal in a foreign country they were on their own. There would be no cavalry or diplomatic effort to gain their release. As often as Hurley brought it up, Rapp did not dwell on it, for the simple reason that he did not plan on getting caught.