The Last Man

Chapter 22
BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN

RAPP heard voices. He opened his eyes and looked up at a ceiling he was pretty sure he'd never seen before. His brain didn't seem to be working quite right as the only thing he could figure out was that he was in a bed and his head hurt. The voices were coming from somewhere down by his feet. Moving his eyes caused discomfort, but he caught a glimpse of two men and a woman talking. None of their faces were familiar, but one of the men and the woman were wearing white coats. The other man was in what looked like light-blue pajamas. Rapp didn't know why, but their clothes had some meaning to him that he couldn't grasp.

He closed his eyes and let out a long sigh. Suddenly the three people were standing over him, two on his right and one on his left. He opened his eyes and could see their lips moving, but it was all scrambled. Suddenly the woman shined a bright light in his eyes. Rapp didn't like it one bit, but his limbs felt as if they were encased in concrete, so all he could do was lie there. Thinking of moving them hurt his head, so he gave up on the idea and let the woman move the light from one eye to the other. When she finally clicked the light off he was so relieved he fell back asleep.

Rapp had no idea how long he'd been out, but sometime later he woke to find a familiar face. His head rolled to his right, and there in a chair next to his bed was someone who he knew was very important to him. He couldn't come up with her name, or how he knew her, but he knew he should have known. In a moment of panic he asked himself if he knew his own name. He came up with that one pretty quickly, but when he asked himself where he was, a half dozen cities popped into his head, which got him wondering what he did for a living. Then things got really murky.

"You're awake," the woman said with a warm smile.

Rapp noted the familiar brown eyes, the glasses, and the auburn hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, and then something clicked. "Boss."

Irene Kennedy said, "You had us a bit worried."

"Where am I?"

"Heath Craig Joint Theater Hospital . . . Bagram Air Base."

Rapp frowned and another link popped into his head. "Afghanistan?"

Kennedy looked at him with appraising eyes. "Mitch, what is your last memory?"

Rapp looked past her at the far wall. Some part of his brain was telling him to bluff his way through this, but another part was telling him he needed to tell her the truth. He couldn't remember everything about her, but he knew she was someone he could trust - perhaps the only person he could truly trust.

"Is there any water around here?"

Kennedy grabbed a covered plastic glass with a pink straw sticking out of a round hole in the center of the lid. She raised the elevation on Rapp's bed about six inches and then held the straw to his lips. After he'd had a good gulp, she repeated the question. "So . . . what is the last thing you remember?"

Rapp tried to recall, but nothing was coming to him. He gave a slight shrug and said, "I don't know."

"But you remember who I am? Where you work? Things like that?"

"It took me a moment to remember you . . . it didn't come right away."

"And where you work?"

"Ahh . . . I think it's in Washington, but I'm not sure exactly where."

"My title?"

"You're my boss."

Kennedy nodded. The doctors had warned her that things could be patchy. "I'm the director of the Central Intelligence Agency."

"Oh," Rapp said as something fell into place. "It's coming back to me now."

"Good. Do you remember my son?"

Rapp started to shake his head and then stopped because of the pain. "Sorry."

"That's all right. His name is Tommy. The two of you are rather close."

"What happened to me?" Rapp reached a hand to his head and winced.

"There was an explosion. You hit your head. You have swelling on the brain. They call it a subdural hematoma."

"Explosion?"

She shook her head. "I don't think we want to get into that right now. The fact that you're awake and fairly lucid is a good sign. The doctors tell me all of this is normal and with time you should regain most if not all of your memory." Kennedy smiled and put on a brave face. Rapp was her top operative. Even at 90 percent he could be exceptional, but that depended on which 10 percent was lost.

"How long have I been out?"

"A little over a day."

"A day?" Rapp asked in surprise.

"Yes." And a stressful day at that. Twenty-one dead police officers, all killed by her men and an assassin, which further complicated the entire affair. She was sitting on that particular piece of information for the moment. The facts, as she'd gathered them, showed that Rapp and his men were left with no choice but to defend themselves. Those facts, however, didn't matter to the Afghani people and their political leaders - at least not in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter. The president had ordered Kennedy to Afghanistan to see if she could straighten out the mess before the damage was irreversible. By the time she landed she was in possession of the information she needed. Her people had already identified the corrupt Afghani Police commander who had ordered the attack. The man had simply vanished, his government-sponsored house cleaned out of anything of value. Contacts within the Afghan National Police confirmed that most of the police officers who were killed were former Taliban members whom the corrupt commander had brought onto the force. They were all part of the State Department's vaunted reintegration program. Kennedy gave the go-ahead for her assets to begin sharing this information far and wide.

By the time she landed, the Afghans were firmly split. One camp of hard-liners refused to blame anyone other than America for the catastrophe. It was no shock to anyone who followed Afghan politics that these men were the ones who had pushed reintegration in the first place. The second camp was made up of the various groups that had fought the Taliban for more than a decade and had warned the first group that their scheme of bringing them into the fold was short-sighted and naive.

Kennedy arrived at the U.S. Embassy, and after giving Darren Sickles a very cool reception, she kicked him out of his office and called the president and his national security team. In her typical analytical manner, she relayed the information regarding the corrupt Afghan Police commander. The president asked just two questions. Did we suspect that this commander was a bad egg, and did Kennedy think this was linked to the abduction of Rickman?

The first question was easy to answer. The CIA had a file as thick as a phone book on Lieutenant General Abdul Rauf Qayem. They had warned the State Department that the man was hard-core Taliban and should not be included in the reintegration program. Kennedy relayed this as dispassionately as possible. The secretary of state would get beat up over this, and Kennedy didn't need to pile on. They had a good working relationship and she wanted to keep it that way. The answer to the president's second question was less clear. Kennedy wasn't ready to share the information surrounding Louie Gould until she knew more. It was looking as if the abduction of Rickman and the attack on Rapp were part of a coordinated effort to damage the CIA's ability to operate in Afghanistan. Until she had more information, though, she simply told the president that they were proceeding under the premise that the two events were linked.