The Apostle

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 ru

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 reco

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 specifically 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 do

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 tu

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.