Brad Thor Collectors' Edition #3

by Brad Thor

“When the president promised to bring change to Washington, I didn’t expect it to include his Marine Corps helicopters.”

  Alden chuckled. “You can thank Mrs. Gallo for your transportation, Mr. Harvath. That was her helicopter you flew here on.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” responded Gallo, not certain whether the man was trying to be charming or if he was being a smart-ass. She didn’t like people she couldn’t read. They tended to be difficult to control, which made them difficult to work with.

  “Why don’t we take a seat?” suggested Alden as he motioned Harvath to one of the couches. On a low table was a silver coffee service. “May I offer you some coffee?”

  “Thank you,” said Harvath.

  Alden filled three cups and once they were all seated with their coffee, the president got down to business. “Mr. Harvath, I’ve asked you here today on a very sensitive matter. Are you familiar with a man named Mustafa Khan?”

  Harvath shook his head. “No. I’m not.”

  The president opened a dossier and read. “Mustafa Jamal Khan. Dual British/Pakistani citizen, age thirty-six. One of Osama bin Laden’s junior lieutenants, Khan was born in the U.K. to Pakistani parents. He attended university in Britain, as well as al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has a degree in finance and worked in insurance, international banking, and at the London stock exchange before giving everything up and moving to Karachi and committing himself to al-Qaeda full-time. He was said to have been moving back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, where he helped plan a series of deadly terrorist attacks, including the assassinations of several high-ranking Afghan government officials. No one had ever been able to pinpoint his exact location until the Afghan National Army captured him just over a week ago. They now have him awaiting trial in Kabul and plan to make an example of him.”

  Closing the folder and handing it to Harvath, Alden then said, “Three days ago, Mrs. Gallo’s daughter, Julia, was kidnapped in Afghanistan.”

  “I’m so sorry about that,” said Harvath as he accepted the folder and opened it.

  The president continued. “The people holding her have agreed to let her go in exchange for Mustafa Khan.”

  At that, Harvath looked up from the file. “Do we know who has her?”

  “Based on our intelligence, we believe we’re dealing with Taliban militants aligned with al-Qaeda.”

  “Do we think Mullah Omar has a hand in this?”

  “Him or someone close to him,” replied the president.

  “What about the Afghan government?” asked Harvath. “What’s their position on this?”

  “When the ANA tracked Khan down, he was being protected by a cadre of more than fifteen al-Qaeda bodyguards. The Afghans suffered heavy losses. More than thirty-five of their soldiers died.”

  “And considering the Afghan government wants to put Khan on trial, I’m guessing they’re not exactly amenable to handing him over to us so we can trade him for Mrs. Gallo’s daughter?”

  Alden gave Stephanie Gallo a glance as if to say, See? I told you this man knows what he’s doing, and then replied, “No, they’re not. And unfortunately, we can’t force the Afghans to cooperate.”

  Harvath sensed that they were beginning to close in on the reason he had been invited to this meeting. “Even though we’re talking about an American citizen, the kidnapping happened in Afghanistan, so that means that the Afghans have authority over this.”

  “Correct,” replied Alden.

  “I assume CIA, FBI, DIA, State, and all of our military assets in the region are at the disposal of the investigation?”

  The president nodded.

  Harvath had been down this delicate road before and knew how to read between the lines. “I’m guessing you want to make sure no options go unexplored, is that correct?”

  “Exactly,” stated Gallo.

  Alden held up his hand to quiet her. “Mr. Harvath, I did my homework before asking you here. While I regret having to close the project you were working on under the previous administration, it was by no means a comment on your exceptional abilities or exemplary service to our nation.”

  Harvath had never been comfortable with fulsome praise and was doubly suspicious when it came from politicians. “Should I assume that the reason I’m here is to assist in the recovery of Mrs. Gallo’s daughter?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Alden.

  There was something the man wasn’t telling him.

  The president took a deep breath, his cheeks filling with air, and exhaled slowly before responding. “The Afghans have not made an acceptable amount of progress on Julia’s kidnapping. In all fairness, I believe the government in Kabul means well, but they . . .” Alden trailed off as he tried to find the right words.

  Gallo had no trouble coming up with them. “The entire government in that shithole of a country is inept and they don’t have control over anything. They can’t even move around Kabul without heavily armored convoys. The Taliban and al-Qaeda, on the other hand, go wherever they like whenever they like. We’ve put billions of dollars and countless lives into that country and what do we have to show for it? Not nearly enough, that’s for damn sure.”

  She had hit the nail on the head and all three of them knew it. Harvath looked at the president, who replied, “Mrs. Gallo is a good friend of mine, and I want to do everything possible to get her daughter back.”

  Harvath looked back down at the file. “It says here that Mrs. Gallo offered a sizable ransom, but it was turned down.”

  “Ten million dollars,” stated the media titan.

  It was an incredible amount of money.

  “They’ve made it very clear,” said Alden, “that they’re interested in one thing and one thing only—the release of Mustafa Khan.”

  “So what is it exactly you want me to do?” asked Harvath.

  “Give him to them,” replied Gallo.

  Harvath looked up at her. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me,” she said. “We want you to travel to Afghanistan, snatch Mustafa Khan out of that prison in Kabul, and exchange him for my daughter.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “This is a pretty dangerous operation we’re talking about,” said Harvath.

  “And from what I understand,” replied Gallo, “you’re not exactly allergic to getting your hands dirty.”

  “Pardon me?” he said, not sure he was hearing this woman correctly.

  “Are you having a problem understanding me, Mr. Harvath?”

  “I think I might be.”

  Gallo looked at the president and rolled her eyes.

  Harvath was growing increasingly displeased with what he sensed was going on here. Friend and major donor or not, it was completely out of bounds for the president to have read a civilian in on his background.

  Alden recognized what was happening and tried to clear the air. “Mrs. Gallo was part of my transition team. She has top-secret clearance. To the degree I felt was necessary, she has been filled in on your background.”

  “Mr. Harvath,” continued Gallo. “I’m not looking to hire a clown to make balloon animals at a child’s birthday party. I need an experienced operator who can and will do everything necessary to bring my daughter back alive.”

  Harvath marveled at the irony of it all. Gallo had rallied the media behind Alden’s candidacy. She and others like her in the “news” industry were anti–U.S. military, anti–extreme interrogation tactics, anti-Gitmo, and pro–terrorist rights on a daily basis. Now she not only needed, but wanted the help of exactly the kind of person she vilified in her papers and on her television stations. Even more ironic was that she had sought out the help of a president who had run on scaling back his nation’s “overaggressive” military and who didn’t know the first thing about the military, intelligence, or foreign policy.

  But the icing on the cake was that they both appeared to want Harvath to reprise his previous job, the
one Alden had just eliminated. It was everything Harvath could do not to laugh out loud. None of the sheep ever wanted a sheepdog around until one of them spotted a wolf. By then, it was often too late.

  Even though he had never met Julia Gallo, he felt sorry for her. From what he could tell of her file, she was a good person, dedicated to serving others, who had gone to Afghanistan to make a difference. Harvath knew the Taliban all too well and what they did to their prisoners. For her sake, he hoped that she actually could be rescued.

  Harvath looked at the president. He already knew what the answer to his next question would be, but he had to ask it anyway. “If I do accept this assignment, what kind of support can I expect from the White House?”

  Alden paused before replying. “Unfortunately, none.”

  Harvath had figured as much.

  “The United States government,” continued the president, “cannot be tied to this, or to you, in any way. At this point, you’re a private contractor who has been employed by a private American citizen, Mrs. Gallo. That would be the extent of it.”

  Harvath was quiet. He had spent the better part of his adult life hunting down and killing terrorists, not breaking them out of prisons. It flew in the face of almost everything he stood for. Even so, he knew that Julia Gallo shouldn’t be made to suffer just because he disliked the terms of her release.

  Gallo sensed hesitancy and tried to pinpoint where it was coming from. “According to what I’ve been told, you’ve operated in Afghanistan before, correct?”

  “I have,” answered Harvath.

  “And you’ve got contacts there.”

  “A few.”

  “Enough to get my daughter back?”

  “Nothing’s ever a slam dunk,” replied Harvath. “A lot will depend on the situation on the ground.”

  Stephanie Gallo placed her cup and saucer on the table. “Let’s talk money.”

  Harvath was uncomfortable with the idea of haggling over the value of saving an American citizen’s life. That said, he did know he was being asked to do a very dangerous job that few were as qualified as he to carry out.

  He also knew that putting together the kind of team he’d need in Afghanistan wouldn’t be cheap.

  “It’s going to be expensive,” he stated as he tried to come up with a rough number in his head.

  “What are we talking about?” the media maven asked.

  “The right people, weapons, vehicles, intel? It’ll run into the six figures very quickly.”

  Without blinking an eye, Gallo replied. “I’ll give you five hundred thousand dollars up front and another five hundred thousand when you get my daughter back. As far as expenses are concerned, I’ll have two million dollars wired to a bank of your choosing within the hour. Do we have a deal?”

  Harvath looked at the file in his lap and studied the photos of Julia Gallo and her slain interpreter once more. Closing the folder’s cover, his eyes met Gallo’s and he gave her his answer.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, after sorting out as many of the details as possible, Harvath climbed back aboard the Super Puma helicopter and lifted off. On the other side of the estate, Elise Campbell, the young Secret Service agent who’d been standing post outside the door to the study, had just finished her shift.

  As she watched the helicopter rise above the trees and recede into the distance, she wrestled with what she was about to do. Making sure no one was within earshot, she punched a number into her cell phone and raised it to her ear. When the call connected, she thought seriously about hanging up, but instead said, “It’s Elise Campbell. We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER 9

  KABUL, AFGHANISTAN

  FRIDAY

  Stephanie Gallo removed the first hurdles to Harvath’s assignment with nothing more than a handful of phone calls. Via a relationship with the board of the international aid organization her daughter worked for, she arranged for Harvath to be listed as a new volunteer and paved the way for an expedited visa for him from the Afghan embassy in D.C.

  When Gallo returned Harvath’s passport, it was accompanied by a large amount of American currency, which he sewed into the bottoms of his two suitcases.

  Gallo arranged to fly him on her Dassault Falcon 7X long-range jet from D.C. to Dubai, and though the aircraft could have easily taken him on to Kabul, he declined. He wanted to attract as little attention to himself as possible when he arrived in Afghanistan. He had even dressed down. In addition to jeans and a long-sleeved Under Armour shirt, he wore a pair of Asolo hiking boots and a low-key Blackhawk Warrior Wear jacket system.

  He boarded his Kam Air flight for Kabul in Dubai, and as he passed the cockpit, he picked up the unmistakable odor of “Russian aftershave.” The former Soviet pilots who made the hop from the UAE to Afghanistan were notorious for their drinking problems. Harvath hoped the man’s drinking wouldn’t impair his ability to fly the plane.

  He spent an extra couple hundred bucks for first class, which meant that his armrests were held together with blue duct tape instead of gray and that five out of a possible twenty screws bolted his seat to the floor instead of the three the poor folks back in coach had.

  Harvath wisely declined the in-flight meal and instead snacked on food he had bought in the duty-free shop before leaving Dubai.

  He had spent a good amount of the flight over to the UAE sleeping. He wanted to get adjusted to the nine-and-a-half-hour time difference between Afghanistan and D.C. as quickly as possible. Even though Stephanie Gallo’s jet was extremely comfortable, his body still felt tired and stiff.

  Had he had the time, he would have preferred a couple of days in Dubai to allow his body to unkink and his internal clock to reset. Going into a place like Afghanistan jet-lagged and off his game was a good way to get killed.

  Harvath stared out the window and tried to relax his mind as some of the most godforsaken territory on the planet slipped beneath the belly of the aging Kam Air 737.

  When they finally came over the jagged mountain peaks just outside Kabul, the sky was a bright blue and Harvath saw that snow remained on many of the mountaintops. It must have still been cold at night, as a thin haze hung over the city from the diesel stoves known as bukharis that Afghans used to heat their homes.

  As the plane made its steep descent and came in on approach, they flew over Kabul’s notorious Policharki prison, where Mustafa Khan was being kept. From above, it looked like a giant wagon wheel surrounded by four very high walls.

  Harvath compared the prison and the area around it to the satellite imagery he had seen before leaving the United States. As he did, his thoughts were interrupted by a slight concern. Though the plane was quickly descending, Harvath had never felt the landing gear lowered.

  Within seconds, the plane reached one thousand feet and there was a blaring siren from the cockpit as the gear horn announced the pilots’ potentially fatal error.

  Harvath gripped his duct-taped armrests as the pilots transferred power to the aircraft’s large engines and tried to abort the landing.

  The Kam Air plane barely missed the rooftops of houses near the end of the runway as it climbed back up, dropped its gear, and came back in for a second attempt.

  Safely on the ground, Harvath peeked inside the cockpit at the Russian pilot on his way off the plane. The man was so covered in sweat he looked as if he’d been thrown in a shower fully clothed. So much for a quiet arrival, thought Harvath. The landing-gear incident was not a good omen.

  Stepping onto the tarmac, Harvath took a deep breath. He’d been on airplanes and inside stale terminal buildings for over twenty-four hours, and though it wasn’t the freshest air in the world, it was still better than the recycled stuff he’d been forced to endure.

  Kabul International Airport was exactly how he remembered it—bland, boring, and indistinguishable from any number of Third-World airports he had passed through over his career. The two-story terminal was constructed of concrete covered with opaque, white plaster and blue tri
m. Though the temperature was somewhere in the forties, airport employees shuffled slowly across the tarmac as if it were three times that. Antennas bristled from every rooftop and a smattering of old planes, many of them Russian, sat off to one side waiting for someone to haul them to the scrap heap.

  Adjacent to the commercial portion of the airport was the international military airfield. It was ringed with razor wire and armed checkpoints. Sleek new jets and helicopters stood in marked contrast to the aircraft Harvath had just disembarked from, and it seemed a fitting metaphor for what side of the fence he was now on in his professional life.

  Making his way across the tarmac, he entered the terminal building and waited for his suitcases. Once he had them, he proceeded to customs, where the Afghan inspectors were even less interested in him than the Emiratis had been. Muslim nations were not exactly known for being bastions of activity and intellectual curiosity. Nevertheless, had he run into a problem in either country, he carried an envelope of currency in his breast pocket that would have smoothed everything over. Baksheesh—the Arabic equivalent for bribe—was the universal lubricant that drove the engine of commerce everywhere, but especially in the Islamic world. Having operated all over it, he had watched Baksheesh work miracles.

  After filling out an entry card and passing through passport control, Harvath stepped into the bustling main terminal area. Though his demeanor never would have suggested it, he was completely switched on. Afghanistan was incredibly dangerous, especially for foreigners—both military and nonmilitary. And not having had the time to grow a beard or to take other steps to blunt his Western appearance, he looked every bit the outsider.

  His eyes scanned the terminal as he made his way toward the front doors. Outside, people waiting to get in stood in line to have their belongings searched and to undergo a pat-down. Watching the absence of skill exhibited by the male and female Afghan National Police officers conducting the physical searches, Harvath guessed it would only be a matter of time before a suicide bomber got inside and detonated near the ticket counter or some other densely packed spot within the airport. As he pushed through the doors, he was glad to leave the building behind.