Brad Thor Collectors' Edition #3

by Brad Thor

  Hoyt leaned back and grabbed the pot. After he had poured for Gallagher, he held it up to inquire if Harvath wanted more. When Harvath nodded, Hoyt smiled and put it back, out of Harvath’s reach.

  “I want to pay a visit to the CARE International Hospital,” said Harvath as he took his plate with him and walked over to the coffeepot to top off his mug.

  “Are we doing recon on the Soviet base or background on Julia Gallo?”

  “Both,” said Harvath as he sat back down. “How soon can we leave?”

  Gallagher looked at his watch. “I’ve got a squash game in a half hour. Then there’s my Rotary Club meeting.”

  “Don’t forget the Kabul Junior League luncheon,” added Hoyt.

  “I almost did forget,” replied Gallagher as he ticked off his “appointments” on his fingers. “I’m sorry, but it looks like I’m booked solid all day.”

  Harvath picked up his fork and, scooping up a large bite of omelet, replied, “I’ll see you out front in fifteen minutes.”

  “So much for our bake sale.”

  * * *

  When Harvath exited the compound, he found Gallagher sitting in the Land Cruiser with his Jackie Collins book. About seven or eight wisecracks raced through Harvath’s mind, but he kept them to himself and just shook his head as he hopped in the passenger seat and closed the door.

  “Don’t start with me,” Gallagher warned.

  Harvath shook his head again and reached over to turn up the heater. It seemed to be twice as cold today as yesterday.

  Gallagher pulled to the end of the short street and then turned left onto the main road. When he turned the radio on to his Afghan Bollywood station, Harvath was ready for him. Removing a CD he’d burned on his laptop, he slid it into the player.

  As “Apache” by the Sugarhill Gang began to play, Harvath settled back into his seat and smiled.

  “What the hell are we listening to?” Gallagher demanded.

  “Classic American funk music.”

  “I want my radio back on.”

  “You’ve been in-country too long. You’ve gone native.”

  “I’m going to go medieval if you don’t turn that crap off,” he threatened.

  “Sorry, brother,” replied Harvath. “This is an intervention. It’s for your own good. After we work on your musical taste, we’re going to cowboy you up in the reading department.”

  Five songs and a litany of curses from Gallagher later, they arrived at the CARE hospital on Darulaman Road. It was fronted by blast barriers and an eight-foot-high stone wall that ran the length of the road.

  Unauthorized vehicles were not allowed inside the main gate, so Harvath and Gallagher parked near the perimeter wall. They were given a cursory pat-down by a male guard, who failed to notice that both men were carrying pistols, and were waved inside. Harvath could only hope that the man’s sole job was to discourage suicide bombers. If it entailed anything else, CARE had some big problems on its hands.

  The hospital was a narrow, whitewashed two-story building with single-story wings sprouting off it. The grounds were typical Third World—hard-packed brown earth with little to no vegetation. The only hint of color came from the occasional woman who decided to wear a blue burka rather than the ever-popular black. Cultural sensitivity be damned, it was a practice Harvath found demeaning to Muslim women. Walking around with a bag over your head was walking around with a bag over your head. It made no difference how apologists for Islam tried to bullshit it as liberating and empowering for women. No matter where he encountered them, they reminded him of aliens that had just climbed off a spaceship from some strange planet far, far away.

  He and Gallagher walked up the drive to the main entrance and stepped inside. Though there were some women right behind them, Harvath knew the laws of polite Western society didn’t always translate well in Muslim nations.

  His instinct was to hold the door for them, but doing so would not only have confused them, it could have drawn the ire of any of the men they were most likely traveling with. While he thought it was stupid and didn’t like acting that way, Harvath knew it was often best to pretend the women weren’t there at all.

  In the corner of the lobby was a registration desk. Harvath greeted the young man sitting behind it and gave him the name of the doctor he had come to see. The man picked up his phone and, as he dialed, handed Harvath a pen and asked him to sign the log book.

  With Gallagher standing next to him, Harvath printed the names Samuel Colt and Jack E. Collins. Though he couldn’t be sure, he thought he heard Gallagher sling the F word at him under his breath.

  After hanging up the phone, the young man pointed to the waiting area and said, “Please, five minutes.”

  “Tashakor,” Harvath replied. He and Gallagher grabbed seats along the wall and sat down. The waiting area was packed, especially for a Saturday.

  “Best medical care in Afghanistan,” said Gallagher. “Lots of volunteer docs from the West. This is a first-rate hospital.”

  Harvath looked around. Everything was clean and there was a faint odor of antiseptic. It was better than most of the hell-hole medical centers he’d seen across the Third World. Even so, it still wasn’t someplace he’d want to have to undergo a procedure.

  The waiting area was filled with families. All of their women were shrouded in burkas, so the only adult faces he could see belonged to the men.

  Afghanistan was a hard place to live, and that was reflected in their countenances. They looked drawn and haggard, their faces as weather-beaten and craggy as the jagged mountains that surrounded their country. Dark, solemn eyes stared off in different directions. The only vitality in the room came from the children, who were running and laughing.

  Sitting near Harvath and Gallagher was a family of adults who did not speak. An older man peeled an orange and silently offered slices to the other men sitting near him. Harvath couldn’t tell if they were waiting to go in or waiting for someone to come out.

  His question was soon answered when a young Afghan doctor in a white lab coat entered the waiting area and asked the man at the reception desk a question. The man leaned forward and pointed in Harvath’s direction.

  Harvath gave Gallagher a jab with his elbow and nodded at the approaching doctor. While he wasn’t the American medical director they had come to see, Harvath assumed the young doctor had been sent to collect them.

  As he neared, Harvath began to stand, but then noticed the doctor’s eyes were not on him, but on the family sitting next to them.

  Easing himself back into his chair, Harvath watched him. He could tell by the young man’s face and his body language that he wasn’t bringing good news.

  When the family saw the doctor, the men quietly rose, their faces masks of apprehension.

  As the young Afghan spoke to them in Pashtu, Baba G translated as best he could. The patient—a woman—had died. Several of the men seemed to have expected this. One of the men, though, became angry.

  As the doctor tried to calm him down, Gallagher told Harvath that he was the woman’s husband.

  The doctor explained that the hospital had done everything it could for her, but that she had arrived with injuries that were beyond treatable.

  Gallagher translated the words “comfortable” and “no pain.” Despite the doctor’s reassurances, the husband flew into a rage.

  Everything in the waiting room came to a complete stop as the husband raged at the doctor. Every pair of eyes, even those of the staff, was watching the commotion unfold.

  The husband was well over six feet tall and quite broad-shouldered. Standing behind him were two more relatives, who were equally broad and almost as tall. Harvath’s instincts, as well as his Secret Service training, told him that this situation had the potential to go bad very quickly.

  Nevertheless, it wasn’t his problem. There was no need for him to get involved.

  To the young doctor’s credit, he kept calm, even with the husband right in his face. Everyone could see, th
ough, that he was slowly losing control over the situation. The highly agitated husband’s anger, along with the volume of his voice, continued to rise.

  Someone at the registration desk must have made a phone call because a hospital security guard armed with an AK-47 suddenly appeared.

  Approaching calmly, the guard politely asked the husband to relax and lower his voice. In response, the husband shoved him backward.

  Harvath was tempted to do something, but reminded himself that this wasn’t his fight. The doctor now had backup, and together with the security guard, the two of them could take care of themselves. He watched as the husband continued screaming at the doctor for letting his wife die.

  Showing exceptional restraint, the guard once more stepped in and politely asked the husband to calm down. This time, though, the husband did more than just shove. In the blink of an eye, he had snatched away the guard’s AK-47. Harvath had just become part of this fight.

  Launching out of his chair, he came in on the edge of the husband’s peripheral vision. He struck hard and fast. Grabbing the weapon with his left hand, he pointed the muzzle in a safe direction while he popped the giant Afghan behind his left ear with his right.

  It was a simple yet effective move that completely short-circuited the Afghan’s brain and dropped him onto the floor.

  Harvath spun to engage the two large relatives, but discovered that Baba G already had it taken care of. Even though he could have said several things to them in Pashtu, the look on the Marine’s face was all that was necessary. The Afghans wisely decided not to tangle with the two Americans.

  Instead, they bent down, picked the giant up off the floor, and helped carry him out the door. When they were gone, Harvath handed the AK-47 back to the poorly trained security guard.

  The shaken young doctor looked at him and said, “Thank you,” before turning his attention back to the remaining family members and carrying on with his duties.

  “Well, I think that certainly calls for a Red Bull,” Baba G joked as he and Harvath retook their seats. “There’s a canteen outside and I’m buying. What do you say?”

  “I think my heart rate’s high enough,” said Harvath with a laugh. “That’s probably about the last thing I need right now.”

  Gallagher smiled and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You could have really put the boot to that guy and no one in this room would have blamed you.”

  Harvath imagined the husband’s grief, and while grabbing the guard’s weapon had been a stupid thing to do, he didn’t deserve to have the shit kicked out of him on top of everything else.

  “You were right there ready to mix it up,” Harvath said, shifting the focus off him. “I’m glad to see you’ve still got it.”

  “We all think we’ve still got it,” replied Gallagher. “The key is in knowing how much is really left.”

  He was right. One of the secrets of survival in this business was knowing your limitations.

  Harvath nodded, and as he did, an American doctor in his early fifties appeared in the waiting room and began heading in their direction.

  “It looks like we’re up.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Dr. Kevin Boyle, Medical Director for the CARE Kabul hospital, was an amiable, balding, five-foot-ten general surgeon from Omaha, Nebraska. He had been in Afghanistan since 2005 when the Afghan Ministry of Public Health asked CARE, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to transforming the lives of sick, wounded, and disabled children and their families throughout the developing world, to take over the former Soviet one-hundred-bed hospital and health clinic.

  After getting the rundown on what had happened in the waiting area, Boyle thanked Harvath and Gallagher and then took them on a tour of the facility. As they walked, he told stories about not having any heat when they started out, as well as how badly ravaged the buildings had been from years of war and neglect. He pointed out burn marks on the floors in the hallways where the Taliban had set up campfires during their siege of Kabul.

  Harvath asked Boyle to detail the training their doctors received before leaving for Afghanistan, especially as it related to kidnappings. And though it wasn’t as thorough as Harvath would have liked, it was considerably more than most organizations offered their staff. If Julia Gallo could remember to do what she had been taught, she had a much better chance of staying alive.

  Boyle led them up a flight of stairs, past a seated Afghan security guard, and through an iron gate to the main building’s second floor. Here, he explained, were all of the hospital’s administrative offices and lecture rooms.

  In the middle of the corridor was a door marked Surgeons, which he unlocked and held open for his guests.

  The surgeons’ office was a large square room with windows on the far side that looked out toward the main gate and the old Soviet military base across the road. There was a metal desk in each corner with extra chairs in front. Only two of the desks had computers.

  Stuffed bookcases and mismatched file cabinets lined the perimeter of the room. There was a small door that led to a private bathroom. Upon it was a single hook overloaded with white coats.

  Boyle introduced the only other person in the room, an Afghan surgeon named Dr. Hamid, who was busy at one of the computers. After shaking hands, Boyle led his guests to a couple of chairs in front of a desk on the other side of the room. He disappeared into the bathroom and returned with three clean coffee cups, which he filled with hot water from a dispenser next to one of the file cabinets.

  Dropping a tea bag into each one, he then set the mugs down on the desk, pulled up a chair, and said, “Thank you again for what you did downstairs.”

  Harvath was about to respond when the young Afghan doctor from the waiting room entered with a thick stack of folders tucked beneath his arm. Boyle waved him over and introduced him as Dr. Atash, one of their family medicine residents. He still looked shaken by what had happened.

  He shook hands with Harvath and Gallagher, then excused himself to discuss his charts with Dr. Hamid.

  When Atash had walked away, Gallagher turned to Dr. Boyle and said, “You should think about hiring additional security. Next time, you may not be so lucky.”

  “True,” he replied, “but unfortunately, we need a new ultrasound machine more than we need additional security. But that’s not important. We’re here to talk about Dr. Gallo.”

  “We are,” said Harvath. “And as Mrs. Gallo explained to you in her email, Mr. Gallagher and I have been brought in to help secure Julia’s release.”

  “Well, the hospital is ready to help in any way we can.”

  “That’s good. So let me ask you, when Dr. Gallo came to work here, did you know who she was, or more important, who her mother was?”

  “I did. Julia’s mother is friendly with one of our board members, but she wanted to be treated like every other doctor we have, not like the daughter of Stephanie Gallo.”

  “In other words, no special treatment.”

  Dr. Boyle nodded as he took his tea bag out of his cup and dropped it in the wastebasket. “She also didn’t like talking about her mother or her family much. She was real tight-lipped about it.”

  “But did people know who she was?” asked Harvath as he tossed his tea bag too.

  “If you’ll pardon the graveyard humor, doctors like to say that the only way three people in a hospital can keep a secret is if two of them are dead and the other is in a coma.”

  Harvath had read copies of all the reports dealing with Julia Gallo’s kidnapping. He knew that all of her colleagues at the hospital had been thoroughly questioned. Unfortunately, hospitals weren’t the only places with thriving gossip mills; so were expat communities. Add in the fact that gossiping was the Afghan national pastime, and Julia Gallo was all but guaranteed to have caught the attention of the Taliban. It was just a matter of time.

  “She didn’t trade on the family name,” continued Boyle. “That was for sure. She didn’t need to. She was a damn good doctor and really cared
about the Afghans she treated. Maybe even cared too much.”

  “What do you mean by too much?” asked Harvath.

  Boyle showed him an official reprimand that had been placed in Julia’s file. Proselytizing, whether it was religious or political, was strictly against CARE’s rules, especially in Afghanistan. They expected their doctors to lead by example, not by persuasion.

  The medical director detailed their rural medicine program and how Julia had jumped at the chance to travel to remote villages outside Kabul. It was dangerous work, made even more so by allegations that she was encouraging women to do things like go to school, report abusive husbands and fathers, and refuse to enter into forced marriages.

  Looking back, Boyle realized he should have forbidden her from making any more trips outside the hospital, but because of her family’s VIP standing within the organization, he had looked the other way. Instead, he had written up the reprimand, provided Julia with a copy, and put the original in her file. He had hoped it would show her how serious what she was doing was, but it didn’t seem to have worked.

  Kevin Boyle was a good person, and Harvath could see that. He believed in what he was doing for the people of Afghanistan and he cared very much for his staff. He felt guilty about what had happened to Julia Gallo, but what he didn’t know was that her kidnapping had nothing to do with what she was encouraging the women of Afghanistan to do. It had everything to do with her mother and her mother’s close ties with the new president of the United States.

  If the Taliban hadn’t been able to snatch her in the countryside, they might have eventually come to the hospital to grab her. And if that had happened, Harvath knew that it would have been much worse than what had transpired in the waiting room that morning.

  He asked Boyle to fill in several blanks from the reports he’d read about the kidnapping and then asked a few additional questions about hospital security. Gallagher also asked one or two of his own.

  When they were finished, the men stood and shook hands. As if it was an afterthought, Harvath said, “I heard you’re a Navy man?”