Page 5 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

D AUGAVPILS , L ATVIA

J OE Gaunt took a mammoth swallow of his Valmiermui?a beer.

The amber lager glided across his tongue before disappearing down his throat in a pleasant rush.

Many, many times he’d questioned his life choices, usually when he was bent over double with a hundred-pound rucksack on his back and boot-deep in mud or snow, with moisture dripping from the brim of his boonie hat.

Those were the days when he wondered why he’d ever thought it a good idea to drop out of law school in favor of earning the coveted Green Beret.

And then there were days like today.

“This ain’t a bad gig.”

Joe nodded and wiped the beer remnants from his lips with the back of his hand. “Almost makes the last twelve months worth it, right?”

His companion, a tall, slender man with a mop of brown hair, paused before answering. “Jury’s still out on that one.”

Joe nodded again and took another swig of beer to hide his smile. His grin was partly because he was pleased that the young recruit had answered correctly, but also due to the man’s thick Bronx accent. His companion could have played an extra in Goodfellas .

At just twenty-one, David McCloskey was barely old enough to drink beer in his native New York.

Had he chosen a normal vocation such as plumbing, David would now be in the third year of his apprenticeship program and still functioning under a master plumber’s watchful eye.

If he’d stayed in college, where he’d been majoring in theater, David might be auditioning for a coveted role on Broadway.

David had chosen differently.

Instead he’d decided to serve his country first in the Navy as a cryptologic technician and then by volunteering for one of the most demanding and least-known units within Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC.

The organization went by several names, each meant to be more confusing than the last, but among its initiates it was simply called the Unit.

The selection process boasted an attrition rate of around 75 percent, while the operator training course, or OTC, that followed graduated less than half the recruits who began.

As Joe had remarked more than once, the training was supposed to be hard because the Unit’s unique mission was equally challenging—something David had learned firsthand over the last ten days.

As Joe’s first team sergeant had told him when he’d first reported to Tenth Special Forces Group as a newbie Green Beret, the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.

But he didn’t say that to David.

This was partly because he was trying to avoid the label of crotchety old team sergeant. But only partly. The real reason was that at that moment he was more interested in something else.

The disagreement brewing in the far corner of the bar.

“What are they saying?” Joe said, nodding toward the group.

The pub in which the pair were seated could most charitably be described as intimate .

A pair of large picture windows at the front of the room helped to disabuse the stereotype of a dimly lit bar, but the rest of the establishment’s features were more traditional.

A freestanding structure of brown, scarred wood served as the room’s centerpiece.

Two busy bartenders dispensed alcohol from behind the island of oak, and serving glasses hung upside down from racks above their heads.

Patrons gathered in twos and threes around circular tables of the sort that would have looked more at home in a drawing room than the neighborhood bar.

Illumination came courtesy of a trio of glittering chandeliers, and music was delivered by a retro turnstile upon which was propped an album cover displaying Bob Marley’s smiling face.

On a good night, the space probably held thirty customers.

Tonight, Joe counted half that.

Most of the customers were quietly talking over glasses of frothy beer.

Most, but not all. In the opposite corner of the bar, four seated men were vigorously arguing with two newcomers standing over them.

Though he couldn’t put his finger on why, Joe had a feeling what they were discussing might be important.

To his credit, David didn’t turn in his chair toward the loud voices.

Instead he set his beer on the table and slouched as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

It was an act.

David might have demonstrated the physical and mental fortitude required to join the ranks of a Tier One unit, but beneath his bushy beard and shaggy hair, he was still a twenty-one-year-old kid.

When he was really concentrating, the former thespian scrunched up his nose.

At the moment, he looked like he’d just bitten into a grapefruit.

“Everyone’s speaking Russian, but I hear two distinct dialects.”

Joe knew they were speaking Russian.

Army Special Forces commandos were unique among the greater special operations community in that every Green Beret attended language school as part of their postselection training known as the Q Course.

Tenth Special Forces Group’s area of responsibility included both Europe and the Soviet Union.

As such, Joe had spent several months studying Russian after completing the Q Course.

He worked hard to maintain conversational proficiency, but he was by no means fluent.

David was in another league altogether.

As the son of a Polish father who’d traded in his ethnic name for one he considered more American and a Russian mother, David had grown up in a home in which multiple languages were spoken.

His family had immigrated to the United States when he was in elementary school, and he’d added English to his repertoire within months of landing in New York City.

As was often the case with first-generation immigrants, David fiercely loved his adopted homeland.

When the money he’d saved for college had dried up, it had been an easy decision to express this love through national service.

He’d disclosed his polyglot abilities to a Navy recruiter, who in turn had pitched him on the job of cryptologic technician interpretive—a billet tasked with collecting and translating foreign communications.

David’s sterling work had brought him to the attention of yet another recruiter.

This one from the Unit. The secretive organization was built around pairing special operators like Joe with linguists who had signal-intercept experience like David.

In a mission that was a Unit staple, the two men had spent the last week emplacing clandestine devices around the periphery of the former Soviet air force base located in the Latvian city of Lociki, about nine miles to the northeast of Daugavpils proper.

The low-profile receivers were designed to intercept radio communications and telemetry transmitted by the Russian fighter-bomber squadron that called the airstrip home.

The MiGs were capable of carrying nuclear weapons and the American intelligence agencies that provided the Unit’s operational taskings wanted to keep tabs on the aircraft in an effort to decipher Moscow’s thinking.

Like many Baltic states, Latvia was still on unsteady ground with its former parent nation.

Tensions had erupted a little over a year prior when Soviet paramilitary forces had attempted to brutally suppress a series of dissident protests that had engulfed the Latvian city of Riga.

After the Soviet Union’s dissolution, Russian paramilitary units continued to attack Latvian border stations, killing several Latvians in the process.

While emplacing the clandestine receivers was his primary mission, Joe’s overall tasking was to develop intelligence.

Many in the West feared that Latvia was on the brink of an armed conflict with its Russian agitators.

As such, Joe’s secondary objective was to gather on-the-ground insight into how the ethnic Russian people who called eastern Latvia home might respond to an armed Russian incursion.

At the moment, his operational sixth sense was telling him that the conversation across the room might be useful in that regard.

Which was where David came in.

“Why don’t you take a leak and see what you can hear?”

The red door leading to the facility’s restrooms was conveniently located near the quarreling group. David nodded before downing half his pint in a single swallow. “What?” he said in response to Joe’s raised eyebrow. “I’m a Method actor.”

True to form, David got to his feet and started toward the bathrooms. His gait was a bit unsteady, and he flashed the bartender a disarming smile as he passed.

Joe had been skeptical about the former thespian at first. The Unit normally had a hard-and-fast rule that no one with less than five years’ military experience could attend selection, but the kid was proving to be a natural.

Maybe JSOC should be recruiting more theater majors.

Joe gave his partner a couple of seconds’ head start, then downed his own beer.

He wasn’t usually one for amber brews, but this one had sucked him in.

He only wished he’d paid a bit more attention to the alcohol content before ordering.

Grabbing his mug, he headed toward the bar for a refill, conveniently arriving at the same moment David drew even with the quarrelsome men.

Joe set his mug carefully on the polished wood and angled his body so he could see as well as hear the action.

David did his part to linger as long as possible as he approached the bathroom door, but he didn’t try to feign a reason to stay.

That was the right play, as things at the table had just escalated.

One of the newcomers shouted a couple of choice epithets that Joe recognized from the crash course his partner had provided on Russian curse words.

The seated man closest to the offender seemed remarkably calm considering what the agitator had just said about his mother.

Without even acknowledging the other man, the seated patron grabbed his beer mug and lifted the glass to his lips.

Joe had heard the phrase patience of Job before, but this was the first time he’d seen it embodied.

Maybe patience was just in the Latvian blood.

A millimeter before the beer’s foamy head touched the seated man’s lips, he had a change of heart.

A considerable one. With an expertly executed flick of his wrist, he rocketed the contents of his mug at the offender.

The standing man pawed at his face, no doubt to clear the burning alcohol from his eyes.

He didn’t quite make it.

The moment his midsection was unprotected, the seated man fired a right hook into his opponent’s liver. Joe cringed in sympathy. The punch’s recipient never stood a chance. One moment he was digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. The next he was on the ground in the fetal position.

As if on cue, the table’s occupants swarmed to their feet.

No weapons had been drawn, but Joe still would have thought twice about mixing it up with the men had he been the offending party.

The four had the heavy shoulders and meaty hands of laborers, and their expressions didn’t speak so much to anger as quiet resignation. They were not bar-fight novices.

The remaining aggressor seemed to share Joe’s assessment.

With hands raised in the universal symbol of surrender, he crouched over his fallen comrade and hooked his hands beneath the unconscious man’s armpits. Then he dragged his companion out the door and into the night.

While Joe was fine with the notion that all’s well that ends well, he was still suspicious.

Very rarely did a drunk retreat from the field of battle with his tail tucked between his legs.

More often than not, the night air revitalized his fighting spirit.

Were he a betting man, Joe would lay odds that the agitators would return with friends or lurk outside in ambush.

Or both.

With this in mind, he reached into his pocket for his stash of currency, dropped a few lats on the bar, pointed to his empty mug, and held up two fingers.

“ Nyet ,” the bartender said. “ Za schyot zavedeniya .”

Joe was a little iffy on the literal translation of the second half of what the bartender said, but he thought it equated to something along the lines of it’s on the house .

The bartender seemed to confirm Joe’s hunch by pushing the bills back across the polished wood before filling two glasses with Valmiermui?a.

After setting the steins in front of Joe the big man said, “ Zah zdah-rohv-yuh .”

“ Zah zdah-rohv-yuh ,” Joe echoed back.

Life was good.

He had a beer in his hand, a completed mission under his belt, and a teammate who was well on his way to earning a permanent spot in the Unit. Latvia might not be Club Med, but Joe had certainly been on assignments that were worse. Much, much worse.

Life was good.

“We’ve got a problem.”

Joe turned to find David at his elbow. For a former theater kid, David was pretty good at moving silently. “Maybe, maybe not. Drink your beer. If those two knuckleheads don’t come back with reinforcements by the time we finish, I think we’re in the clear.”

Joe had intended his words to be reassuring. David didn’t seem to be taking them that way. Rather than grabbing the mug, he gripped Joe’s shoulder and leaned closer. “I’m not talking about the fight. I’m talking about what I found in the bathroom.”

Joe should have known this was too easy.

Latvia was no longer part of the Iron Curtain, but its proximity to Poland and thereby Western Europe made the nation a convenient transit point for black-market goods destined for Russia.

From hashish to heavy weapons, there was literally no telling what David had discovered stashed in the shitter.

Bracing himself for bad news, Joe asked the inevitable question.

“What’d ya find?”

“A bomb.”