The real damage had been done by a bullet. At thirty-two Rapp was a beat-up old man. He had barely taken a break since graduating from college. For years he had been obsessed with the fight against Islamic terrorists, obsessed with killing as many of them as he could before they had the chance to do the same to innocent people whose only crime was that they disagreed with the zealots' bastardization of Islam.

There were days when Rapp wondered if he had really made a difference. After all, the crazies were still out there threatening to bring Armageddon to America. In his rare moments of self-pity, he thought it was all for naught. He knew deep down inside, though, that he'd made a huge difference. He had never bothered to count each and every person he'd killed. The obvious reason was that he preferred not to know, and the more practical one was that there was no way he could ascertain the actual number. Machine guns and explosives, the indiscriminate weapons of war, made the tally impossible, but the number was large. Rapp knew it was well over fifty and possibly one hundred, and those were only by his hand alone. If he counted the times he'd helped lead Special Forces units on take downs or the times he painted a target so U. S. jets could drop laser-guided bombs, the number was easily double if not triple.

Those days were behind him, or at least he hoped they were. It was not going to be easy to walk away from the action after all these years. He was extremely good at what he did. And what he did when you stripped everything away was kill. Yes, he had great intelligence. He spoke Arabic, French and Italian fluently. He had keen analytical abilities and organizational skills, but when you stripped it all away he was an assassin. He was America's assassin, though. He was the very tip of the U.