Order to Kill by Vince Flynn and Kyle Mills

With all the pre-release publicity of the latest Mitch Rapp book (Enemy of the State), I learned I was one behind the curve. Somehow I'd missed 2016's Order to Kill. Not wanting to skip over any book in this series, I had to read this one while waiting for my name to rise up the wait list at the library.

This picks up where The Survivor left off. In an effort to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists, the Pakistani government has been moving pieces of its arsenal around to keep any would-be thieves off guard. Problem is that the politicians and the military are routinely at odds with each other. Knowing what could happen, the US tries its best to keep tabs on the whereabouts of Pakistan's nukes.

The Russian's hadn't been active participants in the war on terror and in The Survivor, Rapp learns that Moscow might be brewing up some bizarre plans. The current Russian president is hanging by a thread because the economy sucks and a cabal of businessmen aren't pleased that their cut of the economic pie is shrinking. Oil prices have tanked because the Saudi's have flooded the market with oil driving down prices. To save his own skin, the Russian president plans to steal some of the Pakistani warheads and set off a string of dirty bombs on Saudi refineries. With no Saudi oil, Russia's reserves will be in extreme demand for decades, enriching the cabal, securing his power and legacy.

Mitch Rapp and colleagues have been tracking the Pakistani nukes, but he has to run on an emergent assignment in South Africa to save a friend (from The Survivor). While successful, Rapp comes to realize it was all a ruse to get him off the Pakistani nuke assignment for a time. When he returns, his team ends up in a firefight at a warehouse where one of the nukes was being temporarily stored.  During the firefight, one of Rapp's most trusted warriors is bested by an adversary who was definitely not from Pakistan.

The hunt now takes on two dimensions. Where are the nukes (six are now missing) and who is that non-Muslim? It's a safe guess that the Russian who is overseeing the assignment won't want to hang on to the nukes for too long so the hunt on both fronts ramps up into high gear via both sigint and humint sources. Rapp has to infiltrate ISIS and the CIA has to delicately induce the Saudi's that they are under a real threat and that it's in their best interest to help in the takedown.

As with all Flynn/Rapp books, Rapp is the lethal bull in a china closet. Fail to give him the answer he wants will likely lead to a bullet in the forehead. Odds and logic are not in Rapp's wheelhouse. It's his way or the highway. Some may be disappointed in the ending. But I see it as just another way to continue characters across successive books. I'm on the wait list at the library for Enemy of the State so I shouldn't have to wait long to see which characters surface.

ECD