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Rapp grabbed the general’s sleeve and ripped it from his uniform. The man resisted but couldn’t prevent Rapp from stuffing the starched fabric in his mouth.
“Mitch,” Chutani cautioned from behind. He sounded scared. “Perhaps you should—”
“Shut up,” Rapp said without looking back. “You signed on for this.”
Fucking politicians. They were all the same. Tough as nails when they were barking orders from a distance. But if there was any danger of blood splashing on their five-thousand-dollar suits, they shrank away.
“How many?” Rapp said, pulling the sleeve from the man’s mouth.
“What? I don’t know what you’re—”
The sleeve went back in and Rapp reached for the man’s ring finger, snapping it at the middle joint. The sound of shattering bone was surprisingly loud in the concrete cube of a room. Shirani screamed through his gag, but Rapp didn’t immediately remove it. Better to let the pain work on him for a while.
Kennedy was increasingly convinced that fissile material had been taken from more than just the warhead Craig Bailer had examined. And Rapp found it hard to swallow that Shirani would be completely in the dark about terrorist groups tinkering with his nukes. The man was a scumbag and a thug but not a complete idiot. If he’d gotten even an inkling that his arsenal might be compromised, he’d order a comprehensive assessment.
“How many of your warheads are missing their fissile material?” Rapp repeated, pulling the sleeve out again.
“I don’t—”
He replaced the gag and this time targeted Shirani’s index finger. He needed to get this moving. The Pakistani had more fingers than Rapp did time.
“Mitch . . .” Chutani said. “He may not know. We—”
“I said, shut up!”
Rapp pulled the gag out again and the man coughed violently, apparently on the verge of vomiting. He’d undoubtedly done much worse to people who had opposed him over the years. Based on the look in his eyes, though, he didn’t much like being on the receiving end.
“You can make this stop, General. How many?”
“Six!” he managed to get out. “There are six including the one you have.”
“Who’s responsible?”
“We don’t know. I didn’t bring in the ISI, so we’re doing the investigation internally. Not Taliban. We know that. My people suspect ISIS. We don’t have much penetration into their network.”
“Where are they? Where are the nukes that have been compromised?”
“We’ve moved them to a nearby missile facility in order to examine them.”
Rapp pressed the barrel of the gun harder against Shirani’s forehead.
“No! I told you what you wanted to know. If you kill me, you and Chutani will never get past my men alive.”
“You should have never agreed to let Chutani’s people take the east side of the runway, General. I’ve got five drones circling overhead and they’re going to rain hell down on your forces while the president’s men take cover behind the buildings. Then it’ll just be a matter of cleaning up the mess.”
The story was only partially true. The drones were there, but Rapp had no idea if the wrecked buildings would hold up to the firestorm they were capable of unleashing.
“There is an alternative,” Rapp said.
“What?”
“You take me to those nukes and resign.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t be stupid, General. You have what? A hundred and twenty million dollars squirreled away in accounts all over the world? Take your family and your mistresses to London. Buy a mansion and live the good life. Or die here. Now. In this shithole.”
Shirani looked at the president. “Are you sure about this? Are you sure that your position is strong enough to survive the retaliation of the army?”