The Triple Agent

The hail of fragments caused the most grievous damage to human tissue. The car’s driver and the five officers with an unobstructed view of the bomber—the three security guards, Darren LaBonte, and Ali bin Zeid—were killed outright. The eleven others standing on the far side of the Subaru were cut down by tiny steel missiles that passed over and under the car and sometimes through it. Shrapnel pierced the compound’s metal gate more than two hundred feet away.

All were hit, though the degree of bodily damage was random. Jennifer Matthews fell with grievous wounds, while a man standing near her was largely spared. Elizabeth Hanson, seemingly unharmed, staggered to her feet and ran between two buildings before collapsing to the ground.

The explosion shook buildings at the far end of the base, a half mile distant, and reverberated against the mountains through which Balawi had just passed. Then there was silence, broken only by the thud of falling debris.

Balawi’s head, blown skyward at the instant of detonation, bounced against the side of a building and landed in the gravel lot. It was the only recognizable piece of him that remained.

Among the witnesses to the explosion was a CIA medical officer who had been summoned to the Balawi meeting to tend to the agent’s leg and other ailments. Knocked briefly unconscious by the blast wave, he recovered to find himself surrounded by carnage and debris.

Though injured himself, he began crawling from body to body, surveying wounds, feeling for pulses, and screaming for assistance. He quickly stumbled upon Jennifer Matthews, moaning and apparently partially conscious with gaping wounds on her neck and one of her legs. Nearby, Elizabeth Hanson, bleeding from a small chest wound, lay motionless on the ground.

More help arrived within seconds as army Special Forces officers, some of them with advanced training in battlefield trauma, sprinted from buildings across the compound at the sound of the explosion, rifles and medical kits at the ready. Their snap assessment was dire in the extreme. The blast victims were so scattered and debris covered that it took minutes to find them all. Six were clearly dead, including the driver, and multiple victims had sustained life-threatening injuries, including penetrating head wounds. The CIA medic checked the badly wounded again as the soldiers applied field dressings and tourniquets. Without immediate surgery, five would die within minutes, he concluded. Matthews and Hanson were among them.

From the airfield across from the compound came the whine of a helicopter’s engine roaring to life. A Russian-built MI-17, property of the Afghan army, happened to be at Khost at the time of the bombing and was immediately pressed into service. A world-class battlefield hospital lay just a few miles north of Khost City, in the U.S. base known as Camp Salerno, but the only way to reach it quickly was by chopper. On many an evening, the CIA officers had watched from Khost as specially equipped Black Hawk helicopters rushed American and Afghan casualties to the base from firefights all across eastern Afghanistan. On this night, the incoming wounded would be Khost’s own.

Once airborne, the MI-17 could make the dash to Salerno in less than five minutes. It was a lucky break, the CIA medic thought as he helped load the stretchers into aircraft.

But would it be soon enough?

Army surgeon Captain Josh Alley was nearing the end of his shift at the Camp Salerno Combat Support Hospital when the word came of an incident at the CIA base across town.

“Chapman just got a direct mortar hit,” one of the medical officers called out as he rushed down the hall. “We’re getting an unknown number of casualties.”

Alley, a veteran battlefield physician who had served in Iraq, changed into his surgical scrubs and started to wash up as details of the attack began trickling in. The first reports had a mortar round striking the CIA base’s gym, news that hit close to home for Alley, who used Salerno’s fitness room almost daily. Like its CIA neighbor, the Salerno base was a frequent target of rocket fire.

Minutes later the doctors learned of the suicide bombing and rushed to prepare trauma beds for as many as six patients. A small team of technicians assembled at each station and listened for the rumble of choppers approaching.

The first casualties arrived at dusk. In the landing zone just steps from the hospital, one of the doctors set up a hasty triage, eyeballing wounds and sorting out the priorities by a numbered code. That’s a two. That’s a three. In field hospital parlance, a “two” is a critical, life-threatening wound. A “one” rating means “expectant,” or not likely to survive.

Two patients were rolled into the surgical prep area, and Alley was questioning one of them, a man who was badly wounded but conscious, when another doctor called out to him with a more serious case.

“She’s got a chest wound,” the doctor shouted.