Brad Thor - The Apostle

“How far out is West?” asked Harvath, as he tried to help position Gallagher so he didn’t have to breathe the fumes.

Fontaine spoke into his radio and replied, “They’ve got two LAVs securing the LZ and the other two coming up the road right now.”

Harvath collected both IR strobes and used one to mark their exact position; he crept out from behind their cover and placed the second in the middle of the road.

Less than a minute later, he heard the roar of the enormous Canadian LAVs as they thundered up the road.

All of West’s men were switched on and ready to fight. The LAV gunners watched for any sign of movement, while the rest of the soldiers poured out onto the road and took up defensive firing positions.

A stretcher was rushed over and Gallagher was placed upon it. Immediately, the medic went to work assessing his injuries. He then took his vitals while another Canadian soldier started an IV.

The medic studied the makeshift tourniquet and, as it was doing its job, decided to leave it in place. He then turned his attention to Baba G’s other wound.

Cutting away Gallagher’s jacket and tunic, they then removed his armor and the medic cut through his T-shirt beneath, fully exposing Baba G’s left side. Though his pulse was thready, the medic gave him a couple of cc’s of morphine anyway and then applied a topical anesthetic to the space between his ribs where he was going to need to open him up.

“This is going to hurt,” he said to the Marine, and then asked Harvath and Fontaine as well as two other Canadian soldiers to help hold him down.

When the medic used the scalpel to slice between Gallagher’s second and third ribs, the man’s body seized. He was on minimal morphine, and though the procedure was incredibly painful, he didn’t cry out.

The medic worked quickly, inserting the chest tube and feeding it into Gallagher’s collapsed lung. As soon as the tube was in place, the medic began his “9 Line” medevac procedure, calling out the patient details to a radio operator, who fed them to the inbound helicopter pilots over the medical freq and told them everything they needed to know about their landing zone, as well as the patient they were going to be transporting.

Once the medic had Gallagher’s lung reinflated, he informed his superior that they were ready to move the patient.

The LAVs were an extremely tight squeeze, but they managed to get everyone inside and once the hatches were closed, they took off for the landing zone at the bottom of the road.

Sitting atop a marker panel with twin door gunners, the two other Canadian LAVs and the balance of Captain West’s team for added security, was a UH-60Q Black Hawk. Its rotors were hot and its crew ready to transport Gallagher to the trauma bay of the Craig Joint-Theater Hospital at Bagram Air Base.

Fontaine and Harvath helped load Gallagher aboard the bird. As they did, Baba G opened his mouth and tried to speak. Harvath had trouble hearing him over the roar of the helicopter blades chopping up the night air. He bent down so his ear was just above the man’s mouth.

“Get Asadoulah back to his village. Fayaz too,” said Gallagher.

“I will,” said Harvath as he took his friend’s hand and gave it a squeeze.

Baba G squeezed back and added, “Don’t be a cowboy. If you can’t get Gallo out safely, make the trade.”

“Sir,” interrupted the flight medic, addressing Harvath. “We need to get going.”

Harvath let go of Gallagher’s hand and said to the medic, “You take care of him.”

“Will do, sir,” said the man.

Harvath flashed Gallagher a final thumbs-up and stepped away from the chopper.

Joining Fontaine near one of the Canadian LAVs, he watched as the Black Hawk medevac lifted off and headed toward Bagram. They never saw anyone else from the village. No matter how honorable its inhabitants were, they all knew better than to involve themselves in a Taliban firefight.

Once the chopper was clear, Captain West approached and, pointing at Harvath and Fontaine, said, “I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but unless you two have a phone number for a Taliban taxi service, you’d better start talking or I’m going to leave both of your asses right here.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Elise Campbell had several pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how she spun them, she still couldn’t get them to fit together.

The night Nikki Hale died, she might or might not have been drinking with the president. Whatever the case, when she left, according to Max Holland, she didn’t appear drunk. Todd Hutchinson was the next to see her, and he claimed the same thing. She might have been a little flushed when she left, but she didn’t tumble down the stairs or weave on her way out the door, so according to him, he had no way of knowing if she was drunk. This despite the fact that she had apparently been drinking with the first lady.

But the most inexplicable pieces of the puzzle were Porter’s accusation that Hutchinson and Hale had something going on between them and the fact that Hutchinson had looked Elise right in the face and lied to her. She was certain of it. Those microexpressions hadn’t been a figment of her imagination.

Porter claimed to have seen them groping each other by the garage that night, just as Nikki Hale was leaving. He’d also seen them exchange a very intense kiss. Setting aside the fact that such behavior from a Secret Service agent, especially while on duty, was incredibly unprofessional, if Porter was telling the truth, then Hutchinson had to have known how wasted she was. Even so, he still let her go that night. Why?

And what was the president’s role in all of this? What had he done that Stephanie Gallo could threaten to bring down his presidency with?

Somehow, he had not been honest about the events of that night. Elise had hoped she could ferret out the information from witness statements in the police reports, but with Hale dead, none had been taken.

Elise’s attention then shifted to the people who could fill in the blanks. As she couldn’t directly confront the president, she had approached Max, and he had pointed her toward Hutch, and because of that, another piece of the puzzle had been set on the table by Matt Porter.

Still, Elise’s intuition kept drawing her back to the president. Gallo had accused him of being involved in Nikki Hale’s death and participating in a cover-up. A cover-up by definition was an attempt to obscure or divert attention from the facts. In the absence of any statements made to the police, there was only one other way Elise could imagine the president might have attempted to conceal what had happened that night.

A forty-five-minute meeting with Nikki Hale, regardless of what they had been doing and even if they had been drinking, would not be enough to lose Alden the presidency. And as damaging as an affair’s becoming public might be, it wouldn’t be enough to force him from office. To lose the presidency, a crime would have to have been committed, and even then, it might not be enough to completely shove him out. For that to happen, the crime would have to be so scandalous that even someone as masterful with the press as Alden was couldn’t spin it.

But Elise Campbell still believed that President Alden was a good man. Despite what people wanted to pin on him and the aspersions they loved to cast, having an attractive woman in charge of your Internet campaign wasn’t a crime, nor was having a beautiful and powerful donor cum media ally. Just because he had working relationships with attractive women didn’t mean he was sleeping with them.

Elise looked down at the telephone number Christine De Palma had texted her from East Hampton. Along with it was a five-word message; He’s waiting for your call.