on the back door. When no one answered, he raised his boot and kicked it in.
The frame splintered and the door gave way. Pushing the pieces of wood back in place to hide the damage, he gathered up his rucksack and shotgun and then hurried inside, carefully closing the door behind him.
For several moments he stood and listened. There was no one there but him.
The heat must have been turned down for the night. It was quite chilly inside. Locating the thermostat, he turned it way up. Somewhere, an old furnace groaned noisily to life. The place reeked of antiseptic.
There were two examination rooms, a small procedure suite, a break room, a waiting room, and a front office. Starving, Harvath hit the break room first. He helped himself to a yogurt and a bottle of Sprite Cucumber he found in a small refrigerator.
In a cabinet above the sink were tea, coffee, sugar, and two tins of cookies. He grabbed all of it and stuffed it into his pack. Then he headed for the procedure room.
Careful not to alert anyone outside to his presence, he kept the lights off and used only the dull-beamed flashlight he had taken from the trapper’s cabin. It was enough to see by, and that was all that mattered.
Along the near wall was a medical storage cabinet. He gave the handle a try, but it was locked. Removing a screwdriver from his rucksack, he pried it open and shined his light over the contents.
Reading the contents of canned goods or IRPs was the absolute outer limit of his Russian vocabulary. That meant deciphering the Cyrillic names of medicines was completely out of the question. He didn’t have a clue what he was looking at.
The last thing he wanted to do was ingest or inject himself with something that not only wouldn’t help but could very well make things worse. There had to be some way to figure this out. Picking up the shotgun, he headed toward the front office.
It was an enclosed space that sat behind the counter facing the waiting room. It looked like any other doctor’s office or minute clinic he had ever been to. And like those places, it had a computer.
As backward as it was, Russia had a high level of connectivity to the Internet, even in some of its most remote areas. If he could get online, he could not only search for the correct spelling of the drugs he needed but also send a covert message back to the United States for help.
The moment he sat down at the computer he realized that he was out of luck. The keyboard was completely in Cyrillic. Damn it.
Leaning back in the chair, he tried to come up with a plan. He knew how to read a handful of words only because he had memorized them, not because he had learned the Cyrillic alphabet. But maybe, like a Rosetta stone, it might be enough. He had to give it a shot.
Pressing the Power button, he waited for the decades-old computer to boot up.
Once it had, he was greeted with another disappointment—a password request.
He tried 0000 and 1234, neither of which worked. He turned the keyboard over, hoping to find a sticky note with the password. There was nothing there. He opened the desk drawers. Nothing still. He ran his hand under the desk and came up empty.
It was a doctor’s office, albeit a Russian one, so he shouldn’t have been surprised that they took computer security seriously. He was going to have to figure out another plan.
Standing up, he walked over to a long bookshelf and, aided by his flashlight, studied the titles. In the era of Google Translate, the likelihood of finding an English-Russian dictionary to help with translating medical articles was basically zero.
His pessimism was proven correct. Every book, textbook, journal, and manual was in Russian. There was only one other thing he could think to do.
Unlike clinics back in the United States, this one still relied on paper charts. Opening one of the many office file cabinets, he grabbed a stack of charts, carried them over to the desk, and set them down.
There was a particular word he knew the Cyrillic for. His friend Nicholas, who had grown up speaking Russian, used it all the time: собака. Dog.
The only reason he could imagine the word appearing in a medical file would be because a patient had been bitten. Nine out of ten times, oral antibiotics would be prescribed. Only in