didn't matter how many threats he leveled at her, she refused to answer his questions.
In the end it was the liaison that came through, a pasty little man with too much hair. Wilson thought he looked like a foreigner. Apparently there had been a gunfight with the local police and Rapp. It was causing an uproar in the capital. Early reports had it that Rapp and his men had killed more than twenty police officers and Rapp had been injured in the battle. The liaison discovered that Rapp had been taken to the Cure International Hospital, so Wilson loaded up his team and went to see what they could find out.
The decision proved to be a colossal mistake. Angry relatives and locals had congregated at the hospital, where many of the dead and wounded police officers had been taken. Wilson and his people were pelted with rocks and garbage as they entered the hospital, only to find out that Rapp wasn't there. They wasted two additional hours at the hospital, waiting for a military escort to take them back to the embassy. By then Wilson had heard bits and pieces of what had happened to Rapp and his men. Apparently a corrupt police commander had ordered the attack. Wilson had his own priorities to deal with but this also sounded like an area he might have to look into.
After returning to the embassy, Wilson learned that Director Kennedy was in the country. Wilson became irate over their squandered opportunity. Kennedy could easily insert herself between Wilson and her people, making his investigation nearly impossible. The liaison came to Wilson for a second time claiming to know where Rapp was. Wilson told him if was wrong this time, he would find the worst posting the FBI had and he would make sure he was sent there. The team went back to the Kabul airport, and was ferried by helicopter up to the Bagram Air Base.
Landing at the base was uneventful, as they were met by another contingent of FBI special agents who were assigned to the base. Wilson was pleased to see the stress that his visit had induced. They were transported to the base hospital. And that was where the real problems started. The nearly insurmountable obstacle came in the form of a short Latino Air Force sergeant, who for reasons that Wilson could not grasp, had decided to become his archenemy.
It started out simply enough, the fuzzy liaison from the embassy inquiring at the main desk about a patient named Mitch Rapp. The young man sitting behind the desk had two chevrons and a star. Wilson had no idea what rank that was, but he assumed it was very low because the enlisted person in question had bad acne. The airman first class was a law-abiding, extremely patriotic twenty-one-year-old from Kansas who didn't have it in him to challenge authority, so he simply gave them directions to the ward where Rapp could be found.
It was at that second desk where Wilson ran into immovable Air Force Command Master Sergeant Sheila Sanchez - all four feet eleven inches of her. In hindsight, Wilson realized that his tactics had been wrong, something not easy for him to admit. His five-person entourage had grown to nine special agents by the time they'd arrived at the hospital. These wards were filled with young men and women who'd had their bodies mangled in the most awful ways, typically from explosions. That meant that the people who cared for them conducted themselves almost as if they were cloistered nuns who had taken a vow of silence.
So the mob of agents stumbled upon the ward that among other things handled head trauma. The badges came out and Wilson was both too loud and too firm about what he wanted. The women behind the desk grew horrified as the male agents began looking in open doors to see if they could identify Rapp. Upon hearing the disturbance, Sheila Sanchez quickly removed her reading glasses, spun her chair away from her computer, and waddled at double pace out of her office and into the hallway.
Sanchez ran her ward with an iron fist. The patients came first and the patients on this particular floor needed a great deal of rest, which required peace and quiet. As she was the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer on the floor, even the doctors gave her a wide berth. It wasn't that they feared Sanchez so much as that the woman knew what she was