Pursuit of Honor

chapter 11

RAPP checked his watch. He had thirty minutes at the most and then he would have to hightail it up to Langley. He wasn't worried about his alibi. Should the feds come knocking, he'd send them to Hurley, and as long as the tough bastard kept breathing, he'd tell them that Rapp had arrived shortly before seven the previous evening and stayed the night. As to what they'd discussed and done during the roughly twelve hours since, they could confidently tell the feds to pound sand. The agents might not like it, but the men and women of the clandestine service had good reason for being tight-lipped with them and the good ones knew it.

What bothered Rapp was the fact that there were more important things for him to be dealing with-like trying to find the three terrorists who had vanished. They had launched a manhunt like nothing he'd witnessed in his nearly twenty years of service. Every law enforcement officer in the country was on high alert, and so far they'd only come up with thousands of false leads. Seven days postattack they finally started looking at different scenarios. At first they'd concentrated on the airports, the borders, and the big ports. The Navy had boarded and searched twenty vessels that were deemed suspicious. Not a single person had been able to explain to Rapp what intelligence had landed those ships in the suspicious category, but he'd learned enough over the years to not try to swim against the current. The Navy was simply doing what they were ordered, and those orders were coming from men and women who would rather look busy and earnest than get thoughtful.

Now they'd moved on to the smaller marinas, airstrips, and remote border crossings. In Rapp's opinion, and he'd voiced it rather loudly, this should have been the area of focus from the beginning. The men who were behind the attacks had shown a discipline and level of sophistication that he was sure would lead them to be every bit as creative and careful in their escape. Despite all the hard-working and devoted individuals who work for it, the federal government is not a precise instrument. In the post-9/11 world the training was better, the equipment was superior, and the ability to share information in real time had improved dramatically, but the alphabet soup of government agencies had also grown. As only Washington could do, layer after layer of bureaucracy was added, all in the name of streamlining the federal government's ability to prevent and respond to a terrorist attack.

Rapp, and a handful of others, had predicted how the politicians would react. The very room he was standing in was proof that they had been right, and that they'd managed to stay one step ahead of the lemmings as they continued to do what they thought would be least offensive to the very men they were fighting. And now, on top of trying to find out where the terrorists were, he had to deal with this sideshow-this little drama with Glen Adams. It was adding undue stress to an already difficult situation. Rapp hadn't liked it when Hurley asked him to bring Adams down to the lake house, but knowing the family history he conceded. Looking back on it now, Rapp wished he'd flown out over the Atlantic and dumped Adams out the rear luggage hatch of the G500 at about five thousand feet. It would have been a lot easier.

Now Rapp and the others had to stand around and watch this painfully slow tragedy unfold in real time. Rapp had been through this enough times to know that once you decided a man had to be killed there was no sense putting it off. The hand-wringing and moral debate had to take place up front. In Adams 's case, that meant before they even picked him up. Once that was done there was no turning back. You couldn't undo the fact that they'd already broken a number of laws. Yet here Nash was making waves. No doubt it had something to do with the strain they'd been under lately, but even so, Rapp expected more from him.

Rapp had seen it before, usually in the military, where despite amazing effort, the use of force was not always as precise as they would like. One too many innocent bystanders blown up by a bomb or killed by an errant bullet, and you were likely to have the occasional foot soldier check out. It wasn't always easy to detect. Everyone acted different in the days immediately following an engagement with the enemy. Especially the first twenty-four hours after combat. It was not unusual, for instance, for one of the men to become quiet. The noncommissioned officers put up with it to a point, but if that brooding turned into questions about the morality of the mission, the noncoms stepped on it quick and hard. If a trooper or Marine couldn't snap out of it, they were gone. Effective fighting units were not the place to debate the ethics of urban warfare. The integrity and effectiveness of the unit could not tolerate it, so the men either snapped to, or were dumped.

Rapp was beginning to question if he would have to do the same thing with some of his men. He would not have guessed that Nash would be one of the problems. He looked across the room at the retired Marine officer who was giving Lewis an earful, and thought it must be the stress of the past week. None of them had slept much, and Nash knew the men and women who worked at the Counterterrorism Center much better than he did. Watching tough men in full combat gear die on a mountain range was hard enough, but was not incongruous with the mission or the surroundings. Watching civilians blown away at point-blank range in an office setting was an entirely different matter, though. Rapp had begun moving toward Nash and the doctor, when he heard his name called from the overhead speaker.

"Mitch, get in here and bring the file."

Rapp stopped. It was Hurley. He would have to wait and talk to Nash in the car on their way back to D.C.