by Brad Thor
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, though, 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?”
“I am,” replied Boyle with a smile. “They’re the ones who sent me to medical school. How about you?”
“I was in the Teams.”
The medical director was impressed. “Well, I can understand why Mrs. Gallo wanted you on board.”
“If I had known there was another Navy man in Kabul, I wouldn’t have had to bring a Marine on the team,” Harvath said, pointing his thumb over his shoulder at Gallagher, who rolled his eyes.
Removing his Afghan cell phone and opening up the address book, Harvath added. “If I need to call you, where can I get hold of you?”
The medical director dictated a number he said was good day or night, and Harvath entered it into his phone.
Boyle accompanied the men to the bottom of the stairs, where they all shook hands one more time, and after Harvath assured the surgeon they could find their own way out, said good-bye.
Despite having seen most of the small hospital on their tour, Harvath wanted to poke around a little bit more before they left. He was particularly interested in locating the mechanical room and any other below-grade facilities. As they looked around, he took a mental inventory of everything he saw.
A half hour later, they were nearing the double doors that led into the waiting area when a voice from down the hallway called for them to stop.
The men turned to see Dr. Atash jogging in their direction.
“I need to speak to you, please,” he said, slightly out of breath.
“If this is about what happened earlier,” replied Harvath as the young doctor drew closer, “it’s okay. You don’t need to say anything.”
“No. This is about something that happened in Nangarhar.”
“Nangarhar?”
“Yes,” he said. “At the Nangarhar Hospital in Jalalabad.”
As Jalalabad was home to the other ISS compound and had been his stomping ground the majority of time he’d been in Afghanistan, Gallagher was interested immediately. “What happened?” he asked.
“I had been working there for the last month as part of my residency program. I was taking care of a boy, a teenager actually, who had been struck in a fight. His jaw was fractured. As I came into the exam room, I overheard his father talking with him in Pashtu about a woman, an American, who had been kidnapped.”
“Were they from Jalalabad? Which neighborhood?” asked Gallagher.
Dr. Atash shook his head. “No, they were from a village in Khogyani.”
“Did they mention her by name? Did you overhear a description or anything that could prove they were talking about Dr. Gallo?” asked Harvath.
“No they didn’t.”
“Did you tell anybody about this?”
Atash shook his head once more.
“Why not? Why keep this to yourself?”
“I assumed it was another aid worker. These things happen all the time. The organization they work for pays the ransom and the worker is returned. It’s not my job to get involved in these things. I could put the entire hospital at risk.”
“So why are you telling us?”
“I apologize for not saying something upstairs, but it wasn’t until I finished reviewing my charts with Dr. Hamid that he told me who you were. He didn’t know that I hadn’t heard about the kidnapping.”
“Did you know Dr. Gallo?”
“Not well. She taught obstetrics here to my class. But she’s my colleague and I want to help her. Besides, I’m also Pashtun and it’s my duty to repay you for what you did for me this morning.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, Harvath and Baba G walked out of the CARE hospital and headed for the main gates.
“How do you want to play this?” asked Gallagher. “Should we get the military involved?”
“We don’t even know if Dr. Gallo is being held in that village.”
“If we can roll up this Elam Badar and his son Asadoulah, it might not matter. Get to them, and we may just get to Julia Gallo.”
“We could also end up spooking whoever has her.”
“That’s a possibility, but at the very least,” responded Gallagher, “somebody has got to get eyes on that village.”
“I agree,” said Harvath. “I think we ought to take a drive to—”
Gallagher cut Harvath off as he pulled his vibrating cell phone out of his pocket and, looking at the caller ID, said, “It’s Rashid.”
Baba G raised the phone to his ear and listened. After a short conversation, he flipped it shut. Looking at Harvath, he said, “We’ve got bad news.”
“What is it?”
“Rashid just h
eard from his cousins. The Afghans are going to move Khan again. They say that if we’re going to grab him, we have to do it tonight. They want to meet with us in half an hour.”
CHAPTER 24
Gallagher made the drive from the CARE hospital to Kabul’s famed “Chicken Street” in just under twenty minutes. As it was one of the city’s most popular shopping districts, it wasn’t unusual to see foreigners walking up and down the street, and as it was only a block away from the headquarters of the Afghan National Police, it also wasn’t unusual to see high-ranking ANP and even NDS officials doing their shopping here. It was therefore an excellent location to hold a clandestine meeting.
The small shops of Chicken Street’s rug merchants sat cheek by jowl with antique dealers and jewelry shops. Anything could be had on Chicken Street, from traditional Afghan carpets, vintage rifles, and ivory-handled knives, to gold necklaces, silver earrings, or bracelets studded with one of Afghanistan’s most prized gemstones, the intensely blue lapis lazuli.
Gallagher parked a block away and paid a group of street kids, who materialized out of nowhere, a buck apiece to keep an eye on the Land Cruiser.
As Harvath stepped out of the truck, he was accosted by a new group of children, who shouted, “Mister, mister. I’m your bodyguard, okay?”
Gallagher had warned him about this, as well as the burka-clad women who trolled Chicken Street with phony prescriptions, begging naïve Westerners to give them money to buy medicine for their “sick” children. Kids who begged to be bodyguards were harmless, in his opinion, and even respectable, as they were actually willing to work for their money, but the women with the bogus prescriptions were simply scam artists.
Harvath looked at the bright faces of all the kids gathered around him. “Yak dollar, mister. Only yak dollar,” they said, yak being the Dari word for “one.”
“Okay, yak dollar,” Harvath relented, and the children all cheered. The gaggle of boys tagged along until they reached a nondescript rug shop, where Harvath gave them each a dollar and the shop’s owner shooed them away.
