Brad Thor - The Apostle

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 heard 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.”

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.

After the kids had disappeared, the owner showed the two Americans into the back of his shop, where he pulled a trap door down from the ceiling and extended an aging wooden staircase that led to the second floor. The men mounted the narrow steps single file and emerged in a warehouse space that smelled faintly of tobacco and damp carpets.

Sitting on a large rug at the opposite end were Inspector Rashid and his two cousins, Marjan and Pamir. In the middle was a pot of tea. Judging from the steam coming from their cups, it appeared to be Afghan and not American.

The shop owner retreated to the first floor, telescoped the stairs back into their hiding place, and closed the trap door to give the men their privacy.

After conducting the customary greetings, the three Afghans invited their American counterparts to sit down and take tea. Harvath wanted to get straight to business, but he knew you never said no to tea, so he sat down and accepted a cup. Fortunately, the Afghans were in no mood for chit-chat. Once the tea was poured, they got right to the point.

Marjan was the first to speak. “Our president is so determined that Mustafa Khan stand trial for his crimes that he wants to watch over him personally.”

“What do you mean personally?” asked Harvath.

“He is going to have Khan moved to the presidential palace.”

“Where are they going to put him? In a guest room?”

Marjan shook his head. “Of course not. There are two cells beneath the palace.”

“When are they going to move him?”

“As early as tomorrow,” replied Pamir.

“Which is why,” interjected Rashid, “we must do this tonight.”

They were right. Grabbing Khan at the old Soviet base made more sense than trying to launch an assault on the presidential palace, but they still didn’t have everything they needed.

“What about a map of the tunnels?” asked Harvath.

Pamir reached into a small shoulder bag that was sitting on the floor behind him and pulled out a medium-sized tube. “Right here.”

Harvath looked at Marjan. “You can sketch the base layout, as well as the interrogation facility?”

The NDS operative nodded.

“Then the only thing we’re missing…” Harvath began to say, but his voice trailed off as Inspector Rashid stood and disappeared behind a pile of carpets.