Protect and defend (27 page)

The man opened his eyes for only a second, and then, unable to shield them from the overhead light because his hands were strapped at his sides, closed them. Rapp pointed the camera at the guy’s face and snapped a shot. The Polaroid clicked and then whirled as it spit out the developing photo. Rapp leaned over and used his head to block the overhead light.

“Open your eyes.” Rapp spoke in English this time.

The man slowly opened his eyes.

“Where did they take her?”

The man started to purse his lips like he was going to spit.

Rapp was ready this time. His right fist came crashing down and hit the man square in the mouth. The guy coughed and turned his head to the side, spitting out blood and a tooth. Rapp let a moment pass and then in a very congenial tone said, “All right, I guess we’ll have to do this the hard way. You do know you’re gonna tell me where she is, though.”

The man spit a gob of blood from his mouth and then said, “Fuck you.”

Rapp laughed and leaned in a little closer. “Let me tell you how this is gonna go. I’m gonna start by slicing off your left nut…and then I’m gonna slice off your right nut.”

The man closed his eyes.

“And if you manage to make it that far without telling me,” Rapp continued, “you won’t get much further. Because trust me on this one…you’re going to tell me what you know, because no man in his right mind wants to have his dick cut off and shoved down his throat.”

Rapp stood up and when the man opened his eyes, he took another photo. Almost as if on cue, the voice of a man screaming in pain erupted from somewhere beyond the door. Without saying another word, Rapp turned and left.

Halberg sat in his elevated chair, an elbow on each armrest, his hands bridged under his chin. They were halfway through the channel and so far there had been no sign of the
Yusef.
Not that Halberg expected any. With a constant stream of supertankers coming and going the acoustics were horrible. Add to that freighter traffic of all shapes and sizes, fishing boats, and pleasure craft, and his sonar men were left with a din that was comparable to trying to listen to your cell phone while sitting in the front row of rock concert. Still no one complained. They simply did their best to sort it all out and make sure they didn’t run into anything.

Halberg got up from his chair, walked into the sonar room and noticed a concerned look on the face of one of his operators. Each of the five men was wearing noise-canceling headphones so they wouldn’t be distracted by the other conversations taking place in the CACC. The captain took a sip of coffee. His eyes stayed trained on Louis Sullivan, or Sully as he was called by the rest of the crew. He was by far the best sonar operator on the boat. If he looked concerned, that meant something unusual was going on outside the hull and that meant Halberg needed to be concerned too. He waited for Sully to start nodding. Waited for the smile to form on his thin lips. That’s what Sully always did when he classified a particularly difficult contact.

One minute passed. Then two. Halberg remained motionless, other than to take an occasional sip of coffee. He noted the time, decided on how long he would wait, and then returned his attention to the tactical display. Before entering the Persian Gulf, the shipping channel turned almost due west forcing vessels to turn hard to port. Halberg had set a course for the inside edge of the channel. If the
Yusef
was trailing the first ship by 200 feet or more they stood a good chance of picking her up as she executed her turn and came out in front of the tanker that separated them.

Halberg glanced over at the sonar station just as Sullivan was looking over his shoulder back at him. This was not a good sign. Halberg stared intently at Sullivan who had moved the large, bulky headphone from his left ear.

“What’s up, Sully?”

“We picked up the
Sabalan
heading out of port.”

Halberg nodded; he’d already noted the ship on the broadband sonar. The
Sabalan
was a British-made Vosper Mark V–class frigate that had been commissioned in 1972. Back in 1988 an A-6 Intruder from the U.S.S.
Enterprise
dropped a 500-pound bomb on her in retaliation for an Iranian mine that had blown a fifteen-foot hole in the side of the U.S.S.
Samuel B. Roberts.
Instead of allowing the navy to finish her off, then–secretary of defense Frank Carlucci decided to spare the
Sabalan.
The ship was then towed back into port and repaired. By surviving the attack the ship had become an Iranian national treasure.

“Nothing unusual. Just cruising along at the standard fifteen knots. About five minutes ago, her Rolls-Royce turbines started howling. She’s been steadily picking up speed, and if she holds her current course it looks like she’s going to try and slide in between the two container ships.”

“You think she’s going to sit on top of the
Yusef
and help screen her when she clears the channel?”

“That’s what I thought until a few minutes ago. It’s hard to be sure, Skipper, with all that noise out there, but I think the
Yusef
has been blowing ballast. In fact I think her sail might be out of the water.”

Halberg could not hide his surprise. “You’re serious?”

“I know I’m a bit of a screwball, Skipper, but I would never joke about something like this.”

Halberg glanced around the CACC. Strilzuk and the navigator were watching them. The captain looked back down at Sullivan and said, “Keep me posted.” As he walked over to Strilzuk he wondered why in the hell the
Yusef
would be showing the top of her sail. Strilzuk glanced at the fire control panel and noted the assumed position of the other sub. In forty more seconds she would be clear of the container ship, and they could get a glimpse of her. Halberg was about to order the photonics mast raised when Sullivan called for him.

“Skipper, I’ve got her! She’s taking on ballast and increasing speed.”

Halberg quickly moved his attention back to the sonar monitor. He looked down at the updated location. She had been right where they thought she was. Halberg was in the midst of trying to figure out if he could pass the container ship on the inside turn when he noticed a commotion among the sonar operators.

The man to Sullivan’s left announced, “Sir, the
Sabalan
is pinging the
Yusef.
”

Before Halberg could absorb the comment, Sullivan announced, “The
Yusef
is flooding tubes.”

“You’re sure?”

Sullivan didn’t bother to answer the question. “The
Yusef
is opening rear torpedo doors, sir.”

Strilzuk joined Halberg at the tactical. “Strange place to be running a drill.”

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

“Torpedo in the water!” Sullivan said loudly.

“Battle stations,” Halberg said without wasting a second. The order was repeated throughout the ship in a matter of seconds. Halberg was about to order the sub to flank speed when the bearing of the torpedo showed up on the tactical. The torpedo was clearly headed for the Iranian frigate
Sabalan.

“Sully,” said the captain, “confirm that bearing.”

Sullivan reconfirmed the bearing of the torpedo. Strilzuk said, “Are we sure that’s the
Yusef
?”

“It isn’t one of ours.”

“Twenty-one seconds to impact,” Sullivan announced.

Halberg looked at Strilzuk. “I want visual.”

Strilzuk ordered the photonics mast raised and joined Halberg in front of the color monitor. Sullivan began counting down from ten. As he reached two all five sonar men took off their headsets. Halberg increased the magnification on the camera and the
Sabalan
went from a spec to a clearly visible ship plowing through the water. As Sullivan’s countdown reached zero, Halberg watched a geyser erupt from under the
Sabalan
’s bow. For a moment it looked like the entire ship had been lifted out of the water. As she settled down her back broke and the front third of the frigate started sinking.

“Send a flash message to CTF 54,” Halberg said. He paused to look at the sonar monitor. The
Yusef
was passing the container ship in front of her and sprinting toward the Persian Gulf. “Set course to follow the
Yusef.”

Rapp walked through the short sandbag tunnel and into the trailer that housed the offices. He was looking at the last of the six photos he’d taken. The colors were growing more vivid with each step. The castration speech had gone over swimmingly. He’d delivered it to each of the three men, and they all took it differently. The first one, the one who Rapp had punched in the mouth, went into shutdown mode. Before the speech the man had been cussing up a storm and acting as defiant as a teenager. As Rapp described how he would dissect the man’s groin, he watched the fight drain out of him. He had either decided it was not wise to antagonize Rapp any further, or he was working to come up with a plan. More than likely a lie that would keep him firmly in the sexual category of his choice.

The second man, the policeman, was either a great actor or an absolute crazed lunatic. With each increasingly descriptive word about what Rapp planned to do, the man only laughed harder. He had a kind of crazy, bring-it-on attitude that Rapp had seen before. He was the type that either cracked right away or never did. There was very little in between. Rather than waste time, Rapp decided to find out if the guy was a pretender or a crazed, true believer.

The army medics had cut away the man’s pants so they could bandage the bullet wounds to his knee and butt. He was still on a stretcher, his lower body covered with a drab green army blanket over which he was bound by restraints. Rapp yanked the blanket out from under the straps, exposing the man’s genitals. He drew his knife and held it in front of the man’s face.

“What’s your name?” Rapp asked in an easy, even tone.

The man laughed hysterically and refused to answer. Rapp placed the tip of the knife against the man’s left testicle and repeated the question. The man’s laugh turned into a crazed cackle. Rapp forced the knife downward, twisted it and jerked it back up. A hunk of flesh flew from the tip of the knife and smacked against the cold, steel wall of the cell.

The man twisted back and forth on the gurney, struggling against his bonds and screaming at the top of his lungs. After ten seconds the man stopped his wailing, looked at Rapp through moist eyes, and continued to laugh maniacally.

Rapp looked down and simply said, “I’ll be back for the other one in five minutes.”

With that he left the cell and went to find the last prisoner. This was the one Rapp had knocked out rather than kill. Rapp guessed since he was younger than the other two by at least ten years he would be the easiest to break. After delivering the castration speech, Rapp stood, took a second photo, and told the man he’d give him a few minutes to think about life without a pecker and then left.

Rapp entered the reception area and found Stilwell and Ridley standing behind a desk looking at a large flat-screen monitor. Rapp held up a photo of the man whose left nut he had just cut off and said, “There’s no way in hell this guy is a cop.”

Ridley pointed at the screen and said, “I just got off the phone with Chuck O’Brien, and I think he’s right.” Ridley pointed at the screen. “You’ve lost it.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about,” Ridley pointed at the screen in front of him, “you cutting off that guy’s testicle. You think we’ve only got one work station to keep an eye on the prisoners?”

“Oh…don’t tell me you’ve gone soft too.”

“It has nothing to do with going soft, although I’m not so sure about your methods…it’s about the fact that this is a U.S. military base. This isn’t some dark facility in the Stans. The military keeps records, they keep track of who comes and who goes, and these GIs gossip more than a bunch of goddamn sorority sisters. Then there’s the press, and I don’t even want to think about what’s going to happen when that guy ends up with a lawyer someday.”

“That guy is never going to end up with a lawyer,” Rapp said forcefully.

“You don’t know that.”

“Oh, I sure do, because after I’m done cutting his dick off, I’m going to drag him into one of those other cells and I’m going to blow his brains out right in front of the other two.”

“Mitch,” Ridley screamed, “you can’t do that. We have a team of interrogators on the way up from Baghdad. These guys are the best in the business. They will get every last ounce of information out of them.”

Rapp folded his arms across his chest. “Great, why don’t we just grab some lunch and a cup of coffee, kick back, shoot the breeze, and give these pros some room. That sounds like a hell of a plan. Then a week or a month from now when they finally squeeze the information out of these guys we can try to get Irene back. In the meantime I’m sure they’ll treat her like a queen.”

“It’s not going to take them a month.”

“It’s not going to take me more than an hour.”

“Mitch,” Ridley sighed, “I personally don’t care what you do, just so long as you don’t leave any permanent marks on these guys.”

“I personally don’t give a shit what you think, Rob. We’re not in Washington. We’re in a fucking war zone where our boss, the director of the CIA, the person who knows every damn spy we have in every damn country, has just been kidnapped. You think those guys are flying in a team from Damascus. A team that’s going to make sure they won’t leave a mark.” Anguish gripped Rapp’s face and he screamed, “They’re going to torture the shit out of her, Rob, and I’m not going to sit here and debate with you what I can and can’t do.”

Rapp took the six Polaroid photos and threw them down on Stilwell’s desk. “Scan those into the system and see if you can find a match. Where’s Marcus?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find him.”

Stilwell picked up the photos just as the phone started to ring. He grabbed the handset with his other hand and said, “Chief of base, Mosul.” He listened for a moment and then looked at Rapp. “Yeah, hold on.” He held the phone out for Rapp. “It’s the White House…the president wants to talk to you.”