Page 87 of Spymaster

Harvath glanced down at Nyström. He was bleeding through the thick bandages. They couldn’t wait any longer. Harvath had to get him to a hospital.

Though it had taken multiple rounds, the police vehicle was still functional. Haney helped load the Chief Inspector into the passenger seat.

He left the medical kit so that Staelin could tend to Gashi. And, after a brief rundown of what he wanted everyone to do, Harvath lit up the light bar and raced for the hospital in Visby.

•••

In a police car, in the early Sunday morning hours before dawn, with no one on the roads and no fear of being pulled over, Harvath should have been able to make the half-hour trip to Visby in fifteen minutes. The fog, though, had gotten worse, and he was forced to drive more slowly than he would have liked.

On the flip side, it might have been for the best, as the fog provided them with a modicum of concealment. A bullet-ridden police car, driven by an officer no one on the island recognized, would have raised a lot of alarms. As absolutely messed up as everything had been, they still had managed to keep most of the operation “quiet.”

Harvath kept Nyström engaged by talking to him and asking lots of questions. They made it to the hospital in just over twenty minutes, which meant that—for the conditions—Harvath had still been driving way too fast.

Skidding up to the Emergency Room entrance, Harvath saw the redheaded nurse at the desk inside and waved for her to come out and help.

Exiting the vehicle, he came around to the side and opened the passenger door for Nyström.

“We made it,” said Harvath. “You’re going to be okay.”

“Thank you,” the Chief Inspector replied. His voice was weak, his eyes a little glassy.

As the nurse came running out, pushing a wheelchair, she already had two doctors in tow behind her.

“Knife wound. Left arm and left side of the torso,” Harvath said to them. “He has lost a lot of blood.”

They positioned the wheelchair next to the vehicle, carefully lifted the policeman out, and transitioned him over.

The nurse recognized Harvath from earlier, but Nyström hadn’t bothered introducing him. Now he was back, wearing a Swedish police uniform, and speaking in American-accented English, not Swedish. She didn’t really know what to make of it.

“He’s a good man,” said Harvath, interrupting her thoughts. “Take care of him.”

As the doctors rushed the Chief Inspector inside, she nodded and then turned to follow them.

At the doorway, she turned back around, but the American had already gotten back into the patrol vehicle and had disappeared into the mist.

CHAPTER 51

The team met back at the wrecking yard. After the rental house had been compromised, Nyström had agreed to let Harvath and his people use the office there as a secure location until they left Gotland. Neither his uncle nor any employees would show up there until Monday morning.

Harvath had a lot of loose ends to tie up. What’s more, he was only going to get one shot. If he screwed up, he wouldn’t be able to come back and fix them later. It would be too late. He needed to think. In fact, what he really needed was coffee.

Hopping into the Camry, Chase left the yard and drove back to the gas station minimart—one of the few twenty-four-hour places on Gotland—and returned with supplies. They had left the rental house so quickly that no one had packed up the kitchen.

With a cup of hot coffee in his hand, Harvath sat at a battered worktable jotting down notes.

Under the heading of “Absolutely Unbelievable” was the fact that Johansson had survived the shootout. Multiple rounds had pierced the trunk of the police cruiser, but not a single one had touched him. God must have intended for the corrupt cop to a do a very lengthy prison sentence.

Then, in his own category, was Sparrman. He had been trussed up with Flex-Cuffs, hooded, gagged, and left in the minivan up the road from the beach house. At some point, very soon, his mother was going to start looking into what had happened to him.

On top of the treasonous twosome, there were the three surviving Spetsnaz soldiers—also bound, hooded, and gagged at the wrecking yard.

Harvath hadn’t decided what to do with any of them yet. Right now, the only captive whom Harvath cared anything about was Dominik Gashi. Gashi was the key to the next level.

Fortunately, Harvath’s shots had been well-placed and none of Gashi’s injuries was life-threatening. The wounds probably hurt like hell, which was okay, but more important, the Russian would survive. Staelin had done an excellent job of patching him up.

It was likely that Gashi would need surgery to remove the bullets from his left knee and shoulder, but that was so far down Harvath’s list that he couldn’t have been bothered to care. Hell, where Gashi was ultimately headed, he didn’t have a lot of need for healthy knees and shoulders.

Harvath was more concerned with making sure Nyström was covered. Carl Pedersen had already reached out to a colleague at MUST. He replied that, though Harvath’s operation hadn’t been officially sanctioned, if it truly had disrupted a Russian cell intent on promoting a Russian invasion of Gotland, they could handle the cleanup.

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