Chapter 69
Cutting through side streets and racing down service roads, the drive to Pattani Hospital took less than ten minutes, but it felt like twenty.
Like Bangkok before it, the city had been turned completely upside down.
Scooters drove against traffic. People stood on sidewalks with their phones out, filming the plume of black smoke rising above the market district.
Sirens could be heard everywhere. Police and military came from all directions and in ever-increasing numbers.
Once again, Harvath replayed Tevy’s intel—bags as the delivery mechanism, responders being dealt with in the parking lot.
He’d understood it wrong. The bus terminal, the train station, the airport—none of that was germane.
The intel had never been about where the first strike would happen.
It was about where the city would send its wounded once the first strike had taken place.
“You think he’s going to be somewhere in the lot?” Morrell asked, conducting a press check on his pistol to reassure himself, yet again, that a round was indeed chambered.
“No,” Harvath replied. “That’d be too close and way too risky.”
“But somewhere within line of sight. An overwatch position.”
Harvath nodded. “That’s what I’d do.”
Jira glanced at him in the mirror. “The hospital is just ahead.”
They shot through an intersection as an ambulance came screaming past them from the opposite direction, lights flashing and klaxon blaring. Another ambulance followed. Then a police pickup. All racing to the market district.
“He’ll wait until the lot is full,” said Harvath, watching them zoom past. “He’s going to aim for the biggest body count that he can get.”
Jira turned onto the road in front of the hospital and the place was already coming apart.
People were abandoning cars along the curb and on the shoulders, many of them having brought the wounded in themselves because it was faster than waiting for medics.
Pickups, taxis, private cars, and even tuk-tuks were disgorging bloodied victims into the hands of hospital staff.
Uniformed police were trying to establish a perimeter, but it was piecemeal and incomplete. Civilians crowded the sidewalks, carrying the hurt wherever they could, yelling for medical attention.
A man on a motorcycle nearly clipped the SUV’s front bumper as he tried to squeeze through with a badly injured woman.
Jira hit the brakes. “This is the closest I can get.”
Harvath and Morrell leapt out before the man had thrown the SUV into park.
Neither of them looked at the chaos unfolding outside the hospital. As far as their job was concerned, that was a distraction. If Koebler had proven anything, it was that he was both disciplined and careful. He would be watching the lot and the flow of vehicles.
For the follow-on attack to carry real weight, Harvath knew it couldn’t be more bombs hidden in bags. Not against a hospital parking lot filling with ambulances, police, private vehicles, and civilians unloading the wounded themselves.
It had to be something bigger. It had to be a car bomb.
The thought pulled Harvath back to the RBSC bombing. Koebler had already hidden behind a fake official vehicle once. If he had done it there, he could do it here.
As they neared the lot that fed the emergency room entrance, Harvath’s eyes swept the area. What would Koebler use for camouflage? In the aftermath of such a horrific attack, what would people not even think twice about?
A pair of ambulances screamed through the gate, one right after the other, as doctors and orderlies rushed to meet them. Random cars were everywhere, some with doors still hanging open, others still with their back seats slick with blood.
That was what legitimate vehicles looked like. Motion. Panic. Unattended for a reason.
Then, Harvath saw it.
One row back sat another ambulance. No lights. No crew. No movement whatsoever. Harvath stopped.
“What is it?” Morrell asked.
“That,” he replied, nodding toward the vehicle. “Every working ambulance in a scene like this should be coming, going, or unloading.”
Harvath kept his eyes on the ambulance. There was zero activity around it. In the middle of everything that was happening, it sat there untouched. As if it were waiting.
Shifting his gaze, Harvath scanned the buildings across the road. Koebler would want the best view possible, but also enough distance to survive the blast.
To the south, beyond a pharmacy and a row of retail storefronts, stood an unfinished concrete shell wrapped in green construction mesh.
The upper floor was open to the air. With the sun beginning to dip toward the horizon, there were plenty of shadows and plenty of spots where a man with a cell phone detonator and a pair of binoculars could hide himself.
Harvath turned his back to it. “See that building over my left shoulder?” he asked Morrell. “The one under construction? If I were him, that’s where I’d be.”
The CIA man noticed at once. “Good sight line.”
“And a clean view of the lot.”
As if on cue, another ambulance, with its lights strobing and its klaxon screaming, hurtled through the gate and was waved toward the entrance, where two orderlies sprinted to meet it. Right behind it were more civilian vehicles.
The lot was filling fast. Too fast.
Harvath turned to look back at the unfinished building. There was no movement, no obvious shape in the shadows he could pick out at this distance.
Then the lowering sun caught something along the top floor and flashed. Just once. Glass.
But not a window. Not at that angle. Optics.
Harvath felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Looking back at Morrell, he asked, “Did you see that?”
The CIA man nodded, adjusted the pistol beneath his shirt, and prepared to cross the street. “That’s going to be the last mistake that asshole ever makes.”