Capture or Kill: A Mitch Rapp Novel by Vince Flynn & Don Bentley

Author:Vince Flynn & Don Bentley [Flynn, Vince & Bentley, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller
ISBN: 9781668045831
Amazon: 1668045834
Barnesnoble: 1668045834
Goodreads: 207297065
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 2024-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 47

JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN

“I’M telling you, he was Iranian.”

Mitch Rapp made the statement in a tone that brooked no argument. The tone of a person who spoke Farsi and knew a Persian accent when he heard one. From an evidentiary perspective, this should have been one of Rapp’s less controversial statements.

It was not.

“I’m not saying he wasn’t,” Colonel Nick Petrie said, his patronizing tone suggesting that he was doing exactly that. “We’ve certainly had our share of dustups with Iranian special operations types and intelligence officers smuggling weapons and fighters, but that was in the Western theater. We’re in RC East.”

While Rapp did not concern himself with the overall strategy of the war in Afghanistan, he could certainly see that things weren’t progressing according to plan. He hadn’t devoted much brainpower to reasoning out the cause of the current morass. Rapp was an intelligence officer, not a military strategist. But with men like this in charge, it wasn’t hard to understand why America was doing little better than treading water as the Taliban and other unsavory elements solidified their hold on the populace.

“This is not a debate,” Rapp said, his expression challenging the colonel to say otherwise. “Besides the HIG shitbird, there were three other men in that cavern bidding for Ranger Saxton. Two spoke Arabic with Saudi accents, and the other one was Iranian. An Iranian who said he knew me from a prior dustup I had with some Quds Force and Hezbollah douchebags. If I were in your shoes, I might devote more energy to finding out why that collection of talent was huddled together in a cave thirty minutes south of here and less to trying to explain away a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist.”

As much as he’d hoped for a different response, Rapp had expected this reaction from Petrie. September 11, 2001, was a tragedy of unspeakable magnitude, and it had galvanized the military and intelligence services in a manner not seen in Rapp’s lifetime. For the first time since December 8, 1941, America’s populace, politicians, and the men and women who carried out kinetic diplomacy on their behalf had been fused with a unity of purpose. The initial invasion into Afghanistan had been facilitated and controlled by CIA Jawbreaker teams with Army Special Forces A-teams providing the muscle. Those days had been the Wild, Wild West, but shit had gotten done. Within two months of the American invasion, the Taliban had been on the run, Al Qaeda was all but destroyed, and US-backed forces had taken control of the majority of Afghanistan.

That had been a decade ago.

Many of the brave men and women who’d thrown caution to the wind while executing some of the most audacious operations since the Normandy landing were long gone, replaced by careerists who often seemed more concerned with gaining their next star or setting up a lucrative postmilitary career than with winning the war.

Petrie was Exhibit A.

“We won’t be conducting operations in the vicinity of the Spin Ghar mountains. Period.”

The rejoinder came from a lean man dressed in civilian clothes who was seated to the colonel’s right.

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