by Brad Thor
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. Tho
ugh 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 trim. 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.
The muddy parking lot was a mass of people dodging dingy minibuses, soiled SUVs, and derelict sedans. Off to the right, on the edge of the parking lot, was a pair of heavily armored Suburbans surrounded by a group of equally well-armed and armored men whose appearance screamed “private security contractor.” The locals referred to the American contractors as “the Gunmen of Kabul” and the Afghan president had been working hard to get as many of the companies closed down as possible.
He claimed that many of the contracting companies were corrupt and had been using their guns and power to commit murders, smuggle drugs, deal drugs, rob banks, and conduct extortion.
While a handful of contractors had most likely gone rogue and deserved the contempt of both the government and their peers, the majority were honorable, professional outfits that believed in their mission in Afghanistan. They also believed that the Afghan president was on a bogus witch hunt and charged contracting firms exorbitant licensing fees. There were also rumors that the firms being hounded the hardest were those who neglected to pay off the right government bureaucrats in return for administrative protection. The net effect was that the smaller contractors had to get very creative in order to make ends meet, especially with license fees now north of seventy thousand dollars.
On the other side of the lot, leaning against a dented Toyota Land Cruiser, reading a paperback, was one such contractor.
Greg Gallagher, or Baba G, as the Afghans had nicknamed him, which meant Grandfather G, was a fifty-year-old Force Reconnaissance Marine. He and Harvath had been assigned to the same Amphibious Ready Group in the Persian Gulf early in Harvath’s career as a SEAL. They had been good friends ever since.
Gallagher had come to Afghanistan four years ago after taking early retirement from the Corps. Most assumed he had come in search of adventure and easy money, and very few people knew the real reason he was there.
Force Recon Marines were similar to SEALs in that they conducted deep reconnaissance operations, carried out strikes and other small-scale offensive actions in hostile or politically sensitive environments, captured and destroyed enemy targets, and engaged in the sophisticated world of direct action. In short, they were the special operations forces of the U.S. Marine Corps and Greg Gallagher was one of their best operators. At least he had been until he shot a young child whose father had charged a roadblock in Iraq.
It was a textbook example of how when everything can go wrong it does. Gallagher and his men were augmenting a checkpoint during a time of heightened violence in Iraq. There was intelligence stating that four different vehicle-borne explosive devices, or VBEDs, were going to attempt to infiltrate downtown Karbala, which was sixty miles southwest of Baghdad and considered by Shia Islam as the second-holiest city after Mecca.
One of Karbala’s most popular attractions was the tomb of the prophet Mohammed’s grandson, Husayn ibn Ali. Known as the Masjid Al-Husayn, the tomb was believed to be one of the gates to paradise and was a popular Shia pilgrimage location. According to U.S. military intelligence, it was also the bombers’ primary target.
The vehicle that Gallagher had fired upon was a white Chevy Caprice. It had swung out from behind the line of cars waiting to be inspected and rushed the checkpoint despite repeated commands to halt. Not even warning shots had deterred its driver. Based upon his rules of engagement, and fearing for the safety of his Marines and the civilians clustered near the checkpoint, Gallagher engaged the vehicle and painted a racing stripe up the center of the hood and right through the windshield of the car.
When the vehicle skidded to a stop just before the checkpoint, everyone braced for impact. Within seconds, the driver leaped from his vehicle and pulled his bloody child from the backseat. He sat down on the road cradling his little boy and wailing in Arabic. When he had ascertained that the car posed no threat, Gallagher—an accomplished medic—personally attended to the boy while the team’s interpreter translated for the father.
The boy was very sick and the father had been trying to get him to the hospital. He had no idea there was a checkpoint, and when he had seen the long line of vehicles, he feared his son wouldn’t survive the wait, so he had decided to risk coming up the shoulder to ask the Americans if he and his son could be granted permission to pass.
Gallagher called in a helicopter for transport, but it arrived too late. The little Iraqi boy bled out in his father’s arms.
Though the father was clearly to blame, Gallagher didn’t see it that way. He had pulled the
trigger and his bullets had killed that little boy. It made no difference to him that the investigation had absolved him of any wrongdoing and that the vehicle could very well have been carrying an explosive device instead of a sick child.
Tactically, he had done the right thing, but Gallagher couldn’t get beyond the fact that he had killed a little boy. Finally, he had left the Corps.
At six-foot-four and 225 pounds, Baba G was a big bear of a man and still looked every inch the Marine. He had an intense pair of dark eyes, a full head of gray hair kept at an acceptable length, and a short, wispy beard that, no matter how hard he tried, refused to come in fuller.
He was wearing jeans and hiking boots, along with a denim shirt and a black Duluth Trading Company carpenter’s jacket.
As Harvath neared the truck, Gallagher tossed his book onto the front seat and smiled. “Mister. Mister,” he shouted, mimicking the swarm of Afghan cabbies that had been dogging Harvath since he had come out of the terminal. “You need ride?”
“No thanks,” replied Harvath as he drew alongside Baba G’s Land Cruiser and dropped his bags. “I was told to wait here for a big, handsome Marine. You haven’t seen one, have you?”
Gallagher looked over both shoulders. “There was one here a few minutes ago, but he heard some squid was in town and ran home to lock up his goats.”
“Those Marines,” chuckled Harvath, “always so protective of their women.”
Gallagher pretended to go for his gun, but then stopped and extended his hand. Harvath grasped it and Baba G pulled him in for a hug. “It’s good to see you, brother.”
“You too,” replied Harvath.
Breaking off the hug, Gallagher bent and grabbed Harvath’s suitcases. “You’re just in time for rush hour,” he said as he opened the back of his truck and tossed the bags inside. “Depending on how fast the donkey carts are moving, it could take us at least fifteen minutes to get to the compound.”
“I hate Friday traffic in Kabul.”