by Brad Thor
Julia collected her clothes and quickly dressed. Affixing her hijab, she looked down and noticed her guard’s new basketball shoes were gone, and in their place he wore a pair of battered boots too big for his feet. When she looked up, she saw that his eyes were red and puffy.
Something had happened to him, and intuitively she knew it had to do with the boys who had come to rape her the day before. Pointing at his feet, she spoke quietly the Pashtu word for shoes, “Botaan?”
The man’s eyes welled with tears and he rubbed his sleeve across his face to try to hold them back. He began stammering and gesturing at his feet. Julia couldn’t understand what he was saying, but it sounded like his shoes were gone and that it had something to do with his brother.
He had been very attached to his shoes and she found it horrible that his own brother would take them away. The Taliban were absolute bastards. Stealing from a mentally challenged man was reprehensible. But if al-Qaeda had no problem using the intellectually disabled as suicide bombers, then she shouldn’t find it difficult to believe that the Taliban would prey on them as well.
Her body was desperate for nourishment, but Gallo poured some tea and held the metal cup out to her guard.
He didn’t know what to do. His captive was offering him tea? Having been steeped in the Pashtunwali his entire life, he understood that he was obliged to accept and so took the cup.
“Sta noom tse dai?” asked Julia. What is your name?
He drank the warm tea in one long swallow and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Zema num Zwak dai,” he replied. His sadness over his shoes temporarily forgotten, Zwak’s broad face broke into a wide smile.
Whether it was his size, his beard, or the pointy sweatshirt hood he always wore, the man reminded Julia of a gnome. “Zema num—” she began, but Zwak interrupted her.
“Doktar,” he said proudly.
Julia smiled back at him. He had heard and understood her yesterday. “Hoo,” she replied. “Doktar Julia.”
“Doktar. Doktar,” Zwak repeated, even prouder of himself.
They were communicating. That was good. If she could bond with him, maybe she could convince him to let her go. She had learned a long time ago that the fastest way to build a bond with someone was to ask them to do you a favor.
“Sarraoh nan shpa,” tonight cold, she attempted in her broken Pashtu. “Sheta brresten? Lutfan.” Do you have any blanket? “Please.”
“Doktar. Doktar,” Zwak repeated. “Soor wextu.”
Julia smiled and nodded. “Hoo, soor wextu.” Yes, red hair. “Sheta brresten?” Any blankets? she asked once more.
Zwak looked at the blanket on Julia’s bed and then back at her. Then without another word, he set down the metal cup and walked out of the room, slamming and locking the door behind him.
He was a strange little man. She wondered if she had offended him. Resigning herself to the fact that there was nothing she could do about it now, she sat down on her bed, tore off a piece of nan bread, and used it to scoop food into her mouth.
She poured more tea and savored the rest of her food. When she was finished, she discovered that Zwak had hidden two more pieces of dashlama, just like the candies he had given her yesterday, under her plate. Julia put one in her mouth and tried to enjoy it. Stay positive, she repeated to herself, but it was so hard.
She wasn’t living day to day. She wasn’t even living hour to hour. It was minute by minute, and she was slowly losing her mind, as well as her will to live. She chastised herself for being so weak. She needed to snap out of it. She had to focus on something worthwhile that she could live for.
She searched herself, but couldn’t come up with much. The one significant person in her life was her mother, and their relationship wasn’t exactly storybook material. Julia had spent a good part of her adulthood trying to find her own sliver of sunshine beyond the mammoth shadow her mother cast. It was that search that had brought her to Afghanistan and, ultimately, to the cell in which she now sat.
If the Taliban killed her today, she felt she wouldn’t have left much of a mark on the world.
A voice deep inside told her she was being too hard on herself, but she refused to listen to it. She didn’t want to be told she was a good person and that her life had value. She had gotten Sayed killed, and who knew how many other Afghan women who had been naïve enough to follow her political advice had been brutalized or killed because of it. Rise up. Take control of your lives. Embrace your rights, she had told them. It was all easy enough for an American woman to say, especially one who could go home to her First World country any time she wanted.
What an idiot I have been, Gallo thought as she broke down.
The tears were flowing down her face when the door to her cell was kicked open. It took her by surprise, as it always did, and her heart leaped into her throat. Looking up, she expected to see Zwak, but instead she saw several of the men who had killed Sayed.
They moved quickly. Two of them jerked her up off the bed while a third approached with a light blue burka and other items.
Once her wrists were bound, her eyes blindfolded, and the burka had been pulled down over her head, she was shoved outside.
She heard several vehicles come to a skidding halt only feet away and she was thrown roughly inside the nearest one.
As it lurched away, she could feel the presence of another person near her. As he began to cry, she knew in an instant that it was Zwak and that wherever they were taking her, it was so they could kill her.
CHAPTER 28
KABUL
Harvath knew enough about surgeons to know they weren’t night owls, and that went double for missionary doctors. He also knew that the best time to get someone to do what you wanted was when they were running for the fence.
In the case of Dr. Kevin Boyle, his fence was sleep, and Harvath waited until just after ten o’clock at night to call him. He had come to the conclusion that the less Boyle knew about what was going on, the better.
He dialed the number the medical director had given him and woke the man out of a sound sleep. Having seen the call schedule while they were walking through the hospital, Harvath knew the resident on duty that night was none other than Dr. Atash. Explaining that he was leaving to follow up a lead in Kandahar Province in the morning and needed to speak with Atash once more before he left, Harvath asked Boyle to call the security team at the hospital and clear him and Baba G as well as their vehicle through the main gate.
Boyle grumbled his assent and hung up the phone without saying good-bye or asking if Harvath needed anything else. He doubted Boyle would bother to try to track down Atash and tell him to expect visitors. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have been a problem. Harvath didn’t say when he would be at the hospital. Based upon how exhausted the surgeon sounded, he was pretty confident that he’d fall back asleep within sixty seconds of placing the call to the guards at the front gate.
From their reconnaissance of the old Soviet military base, Harvath and Gallagher had identified two alternative evacuation points where they would station Flower and Inspector Rashid in two different vehicles. Tom Hoyt would monitor the operation from the ops center back at the compound. And just to make sure he wouldn’t be disturbed, Mei and her girlfriends had taken Fontaine and Mark Midland out drinking and dancing courtesy of a stack of bills Harvath had slipped her. Everything, so far, was right on track.
As the main threat to the CARE hospital was a suicide bomber or an active shooter who tried to walk or drive onto the property, the primary security focus was the front of the property along Darulaman Road. The rear, while secured by a high, gated fence, wasn’t patrolled as heavily, and even less so at night. Electricity was not only expensive, but also unreliable, so the rear of the property wasn’t even lit. This was where Harvath had decided Marjan and Pamir would enter.
When it was time for the operation to begin, Flower led the way in the Land Cruiser while Harvath and Gallagher brought up the rear in a van purchased spe
cifically for the job.
Three blocks later, Flower slowed down as Inspector Rashid pulled out from a side street and took the lead. His job was to navigate them around any checkpoints and make sure Harvath and Gallagher arrived at the hospital without being stopped.
When they reached the Darulaman Road and could see that traffic was moving without any impediments, Harvath grabbed his cooler bag from behind his seat and pulled out another Red Bull. “You want one?” he asked Baba G.
“You got any beer in there?”
“Sure, you want it in a bottle or draft?”
“Forget it,” said Gallagher as he reached behind his seat and withdrew a bottle of water. Unscrewing the cap, he took a long sip, and then put the bottle back.
“When this is all over, I’ll buy you as much beer as you can drink.”
“I want that in writing.”
Baba G might have worn an outward air of confidence and nonchalance, but underneath he was obsessively cautious. He had not only triple-checked all of their gear, he had quadruple-checked it and had made Harvath run through the plan so many more times than was necessary that Hoyt eventually turned on the television back at the ISS compound to drown him out.
Harvath reminded himself of how Gallagher had performed in the hospital waiting area that morning and the way he’d been in the Marines. The man had excellent instincts. He’d have Harvath’s back. The ones he really needed to worry about were Marjan and Pamir.
The NDS operatives appeared professional enough, but there was no telling how they would act under pressure. Even though they were going in as a four-man team, Harvath had designed the entire assault around him and Gallagher doing all of the heavy lifting.
As they neared the CARE International Hospital, Gallagher slowed, applied his blinker, and slapped his warmest American grin to his face as he turned into the main drive. Harvath handed over his ID, which Gallagher added to his own as he rolled down the window.
A bored sentry with an AK-47 slung casually around his neck stepped out of the heated guard shack, checked their IDs, then opened the gate and waved them through.
They drove the van to the main entrance and parked. With its sliding door on the driver’s side, the guard down at the gate couldn’t have seen what Harvath and Gallagher were doing without walking all the way up to the hospital.
After a quick check inside to make sure the coast was clear, the two men unloaded their gear onto a small hand truck and pushed it inside.
Entering the building, Harvath’s Afghan cell phone began to vibrate. Removing it from his pocket, he read the text message out loud to Gallagher. “Flower just handed off the money to Rashid.”
“Which means we ought to be seeing Marjan and Pamir momentarily.”
Harvath nodded as he slipped the phone back into his pocket and continued. Unlike American hospitals, the CARE hospital was very poorly staffed at night. In addition to Dr. Atash, Harvath doubted there were more than two other employees in the building, both of them Western nurses, who were probably either off sleeping or surfing the net in the nurses’ lounge.
The men came to a stop before a doorway marked No Admittance in English, Dari, and Pashtu, which led to the hospital’s mechanical room. Harvath and Gallagher had discovered it on the unguided portion of their tour earlier and now opened the door and pushed the hand truck inside.
As Gallagher unloaded the gear and moved it down the two flights of stairs to the mechanical room, Harvath took off his coat, grabbed his empty backpack out of one of the containers they had brought in, and stepped back out into the hallway.
After rechecking to make sure no one was about, he headed for the operating theater and a small door off to the side that led to the surgeons’ changing room. Inside, he scrounged four white lab coats. He donned one himself, then put the others in his pack.
The theater was composed of three small operating rooms around a central hub where the surgeons scrubbed in. In operating room B, Harvath found a small gurney with a folded blanket atop it. He wheeled it back into the locker room and left it near the door.
Slinging his pack, he stepped into the hallway and walked to the exit door at the very end. When he opened it, Marjan and Pamir were already waiting for him. He handed each of them a lab coat and once they had put them on, they followed him.
They retrieved the stretcher from the surgeons’ locker room and navigated it back down the hallway to the stairwell where he had left Gallagher.
After helping move the rest of the gear down into the mechanical room, Pamir began searching for the access point to the tunnel. In less than two minutes, he had found it.
Harvath had overestimated Soviet ingenuity. The entrance wasn’t hidden behind a false wall or some elaborate blast door, but rather was behind an oversized cast-iron air grate now partially hidden from view by a stack of boxes. It was obvious the hospital’s engineer had no idea what the grate was for or where it led.
As Marjan and Pamir cleared a path to it, Gallagher began laying out the gear. Harvath watched as Pamir produced a rather crude set of picks and went to work on the old Chinese tri-C padlock on the grate. The operative worked quickly and was actually able to get the lock off in a respectable amount of time. The only problem was that even with the lock removed, the grate refused to budge.
Harvath’s first thought was that it had rusted shut. He knew how hard cast iron was to cut. The proper way to do it was with a plasma torch, but he doubted they were going to find that kind of torch in Kabul, especially in the middle of the night. The grate was set in the thick cement wall, so somehow working it free wasn’t an option either. There was the possibility of trying to saw the grate or to blow it out with plastique, but making that much noise was out of the question.
Harvath was about out of ideas when he saw Pamir place his flashlight in his mouth and insert a dental mirror on an expandable wand between the bars of the grate. Ten seconds later, he held his thumb up in the air and handed the flashlight and mirror to Marjan, who held them for him as he went to work on the padlock he had found on the other side.
When Pamir had the second and final lock removed, he held on to the grate while Marjan searched for oil to lubricate the hinges. When they were good and soaked, Pamir slowly pushed the grate in toward the tunnel. It moved without making a sound. Pulling it back toward the mechanical room, Pamir put it back in place and then he and Marjan joined their American counterparts near the gear and began getting ready.
Harvath and Baba G struggled with both their boots and their uniforms, which were a bit on the small side, but would have to do. Next came armor. Rashid had provided four sets of chest rig plate carriers used by the Afghan Special Forces along with the plates. As an added precaution, Tom Hoyt had lent Harvath some Point Blank brand soft body armor which he wore beneath his uniform. Gallagher was doing the same with his.
Hung from the chest rigs were numerous pouches loaded down with everything they saw themselves needing. Baba G then handed out the encrypted Motorola radios and bone mics that would allow them to communicate, albeit only if necessary and only with one another, as the radio signal would not pierce the heavy concrete of the subterranean passage. They did a radio check and then Gallagher handed Marjan and Pamir each an AK-47.
Harvath removed Hoyt’s twelve-gauge Mossberg shotgun and laid it on the table next to Gallagher’s. Both had been outfitted with Blackhawk Breachersgrip–style pistol grips that cut recoil in half and even allowed for the weapon to be fired one-handed.
Opening the Storm case Rashid had presented him with above the rug store, Harvath loaded both weapons and secured six extra rounds of the highly specialized munitions in the sidesaddle of each shotgun.
After divvying up the rest of the equipment, Gallagher slipped into the stairwell to exchange final situation reports via text with Hoyt back at the ISS ops center.
Three minutes later Gallagher returned and flashed the thumbs-up. They were good to go.
Rolling his balaclava down over his face
, Harvath picked up his weapon, pulled open the grate, and gave his team the signal to move out.
CHAPTER 29
The tunnel was pitch-black and Gallagher only had two pairs of night vision goggles, also known as Night Observation Devices or NODs. As he and Harvath were the designated hitters for the operation, the night vision devices and their IR illuminators went to them. This meant that Marjan and Pamir would be quite literally left in the dark.
Going through Gallagher’s gear, Harvath had found two Streamlight Sidewinder flashlights and remembered something a buddy of his had been teaching to high-end tactical units back in the States. For nighttime and low-light operations, the flashlight could be set to emit green light and clipped to an operator’s belt. With the articulating head pointed toward the ground, the Streamlights would throw out just enough illumination to allow the NDS operatives to see where they were going, without alerting anyone farther down the tunnel that they were coming.
The team lined up in a formation known as a “stack,” with Harvath in front, followed by Pamir and Marjan, and then Gallagher in back carrying a small backpack loaded with extra equipment.
The tunnel was wide enough to drive a jeep through. It was constructed entirely of concrete and its walls were covered with peeling paint and faded Cyrillic writing. Harvath hated it. Tunnels were death traps that funneled gunfire and improved the hit rate of even the poorest of shooters. There was no cover or concealment anywhere. If they got into a firefight down here, they were going to be in deep trouble.
