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“That’ll be a pleasure,” the pilot said, flipping a few switches above him. “Tell Scott we’re pulling for him.”
Rapp jogged toward the plane as the dust kicked up and the helicopter started rising into a darkening sky. The C-17’s four jet engines were already spooling and the cargo bay door was on its way up. Rapp grabbed its edge and flipped himself onto it, rolling to his feet inside.
He ignored Maslick and the corpsman trying to strap the nuke into a bunk and walked forward. There was a dividing wall near the front and he skirted around it before stopping at its edge. Coleman had five people working on him. IVs and oxygen were in place and his clothes were gone. Bloody rags that had been used to clean him up enough to search for hidden wounds were piled on the floor.
Rapp wasn’t sure how long he watched. How long he listened to the voices go from commanding to desperate and back again. The details of what they were doing, the meaning of what they were saying, was lost on him.
A scalpel flashed in the overhead lights and Rapp saw it slide between Coleman’s ribs. He just lay there like a piece of meat.
“Mitch?”
Rapp ignored the voice behind him and continued to watch the medical team work on his friend.
“Mitch? Dr. Kennedy is on the phone for you.”
Rapp turned slowly toward Maslick, who was sheepishly holding out a satphone.
Instead of taking it, he grabbed the man by the throat and drove him back into the fuselage. “I told you to get that nuke out of there! Were my orders not clear or are you just too stupid to understand them?”
“I’m sorry,” Maslick managed to get out past the pressure on his windpipe. “Dr. Kennedy overrode you. She sent us back.”
Rapp could hear her tinny voice shouting unintelligibly from the phone lying at his feet. The plane started to taxi and he finally released Maslick, shoving him toward the back of the plane. The former soldier retreated unsteadily as Rapp scooped up the handset.
“Mitch!” Kennedy said. “Are you there? Mitch!”
“I’m here.”
“Joe went back on my express orders. He tried to talk me out of it.”
“Not smart, Irene. The cops were moving in and we had no idea what their capabilities were. They could have taken down Fred’s bird.”
“There was no other option. I contacted President Chutani but he said there was nothing he could do to pull them back. General Shirani wouldn’t even take my call.”
“Then you should have left us.”
“I guarantee you that Shirani was going to force a fight. Video of you gunning down a bunch of soldiers before getting taken out by an RPG is just what he needs to stoke Pakistan’s anti-American elements. It might have been enough to turn the tide against the civilian government.”
She was probably right, Rapp knew. Her grasp of the intricate power struggles from Washington to Beijing to Islamabad was second to none. The nuke was safe, he was alive, and Coleman was in the hands of the best combat trauma people in the world. It didn’t help, though. His anger just kept building.
“So this was about Pakistan, not about me and Scott.”
“Of course,” she said, not bothering even to try to be convincing. “I consider both of you completely expendable.”
• • •
The plane’s wheels touched down and the engines roared as the massive aircraft came to a stop. Rapp didn’t move from his position on a cot bolted to the fuselage. He watched silently as Coleman, utterly still and surrounded by his medical team, was wheeled out the back.
It wasn’t their planned stop in Europe. The docs had told him that Coleman wasn’t going to survive long enough to get there. This U.S. air base in Afghanistan was the closest thing that had the surgical capabilities they needed.
He continued to sit, staring at the wall in front of him, until an air force colonel came stalking up the open loading bay.
“Who’s in charge here?”
When Rapp didn’t react, Maslick subtly pointed.
“Who the hell are you?” the man said, putting his hands on his hips and positioning himself in front of Rapp. “I got a call saying that a plane was coming in with a medical emergency. Nothing about on whose authority, where it was from, who was on—”
He suddenly fell silent and it was obvious why. The blanket had slipped off the nuke strapped into a bunk to his left.