"I hate any meeting, but especially this kind." Rapp thought of Sickles running the meeting without him. Why the man worked for the Company was beyond Rapp's ability to comprehend. "I need to make sure a certain idiot doesn't make this shit show any worse than it already is."
Chapter 6
U.S. EMBASSY, KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
"I'VE never even heard of this man," the woman said with obvious frustration. "Who the hell does he think he is?"
Colonel Hunter Poole took a final drag from his cigarette, then tossed it to the gravel and crushed it with the heel of his black jump boot. "I don't know much about him."
"But you've heard of him?"
Poole knew he needed to be careful. Arianna Vinter was a passionate woman whose one glaring weakness was that she thought she could bully her way to any victory, and from what he'd heard about this Rapp fellow, it was probably not wise to attack him in a direct fashion. Poole shrugged and said, "He's a spook. They don't exactly advertise their resumes."
Vinter regarded her military man with a skeptical squint of her hazel eyes. "You're holding back."
Poole played it cool. "I've heard a few things . . . the kind of stuff that doesn't make it into official reports." He lit another cigarette and said, "He's notorious in certain circles."
"Notorious how?" Vinter asked, taking a deep pull off her thin menthol cigarette.
Their liaisons had become increasingly common. The embassy was a crowded, cramped place, and smoking indoors by Americans was strictly forbidden, even in a country where virtually everyone smoked. And then there was the simple fact that they needed to be careful about their relationship. So they came to this corner of the compound where the multicolored shipping containers were stacked. It was the hinterlands, where the workers and the occasional jarhead came to replenish supplies, but never the higher-ups from the embassy, and Poole and Vinter were definitely higher-ups.
Poole placed a hand against a rust-colored Conex container and thought about the various rumors regarding Mitch Rapp. The man, like Poole, was in his midforties. Unlike Rapp, however, Poole had a sterling record. He'd graduated in the top 5 percent of his class from West Point, completed Ranger School, and then blazed a trail through the big Green Machine with stops at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was a platoon leader in the first Gulf War, and by the time the Iraq campaign started he was the company commander of Alpha Company, Second Ranger Battalion. He completed three combat tours with the Rangers, two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. During his second tour in Afghanistan he was serving as an intelligence officer on the Joint Special Operations Command staff when he heard his commanding officer tell a story about a CIA covert officer who had bluffed his way into a detention facility at the Bagram Air Base by impersonating a U.S. Air Force colonel from the Office of Special Investigations.
A week earlier two high-value Taliban commanders had been caught on the battlefield and thus far had refused to talk. In less than an hour Rapp managed to get one of the men to spill the beans on an impending terrorist operation set to target the United States. The rumors about how he pulled this off were varied, but they all circled around some very Orwellian tactics that created a mix of awe and fear among the men at JSOC. There were other stories out there about Rapp, most of them from second- or third-hand accounts of his exploits in Indian country. If they were to be believed, Rapp was a person capable of extreme violence, with little concern for his own mortality and an absolute disregard for the political and legal issues that the men and women in uniform had to wrestle with.
Poole had followed the rules as any smart West Pointer would, and he was now on the doorstep of receiving his first star - a lifelong dream, but that wasn't where it was going to end. Poole felt he had the right stuff. Shooting for the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs was his ultimate goal, and if that worked out, who knew, maybe even the Oval Office was a possibility. Up until recently Poole would have found it difficult to understand a man like Rapp. Poole had been a rule follower,