by Young, Tom
Parson’s shivering eased some, and he began digging away the snow on the ground just inside the entrance. He piled snow to close the cave’s opening down to a narrow slit. Moving the snow also served another purpose—by digging a second, slightly lower layer of floor, he created a sump for the coldest air. Once, when he was seventeen, a surprise blizzard caught him miles from his family’s Colorado ranch while he hunted elk. He dug as his father had taught him. When the deputies found him walking out of the trees the next day, his Winchester slung over his shoulder, they told him they hadn’t expected to find anyone alive.
“Anybody spent last night on top of the snow,” the sheriff had said, “we’d have carried them out frozen in the position they died.”
Gold’s voice brought Parson back to the war.
“Can we take the gag off him?” she asked.
“Yeah, tell him we’ll let him drink some water and sleep without the gag,” Parson said, “but if he speaks above a whisper, it goes back on.”
Gold clicked on her own light, shading it with her glove. She spoke to the mullah as Parson unknotted the gag. When the handkerchief came away, the man exhaled hard and worked his jaw and chin. Then he began speaking softly.
“He says the lions of jihad clawed you from the sky, and Allah sent a mighty storm to ground all your aircraft,” Gold said.
“So he fancies himself a poet?” Parson said.
“He probably does. The Pashtuns love to recite poetry and tell each other stories.”
“Well, good for them.” Parson wasn’t interested. Gold seemed to want him to know there was more to Islam than terror. He knew she was right, but cold and pain and anger made it hard to care.
Parson handed Gold a water bottle from his pack and pulled out his NVGs again. He looked through the slit he’d left open as an air vent. He saw nothing moving but snowflakes seemingly energized and pulsating in the electronic image of the goggles. The trees and rocks and stream appeared as varying shades of green, the world viewed through a glass of absinthe.
He’d either lost his pursuers or he hadn’t, simple as that. He could go no farther tonight. And if he hadn’t lost them, they’d probably kill him and Gold within the hour. He’d have to work with stealth and wits, since his circumstances sure as hell denied him speed. And all because of whatever was in this old man’s head. Parson remembered how the intelligence officer at the mission brief had been vague about why the mullah was so important. The intel guy said only that the old man’s followers would do anything he said, and he had some pretty scary ideas.
Parson thought he heard voices. It was just the creek’s gurgling, water whispering in the gliding vowels of Pashto as it purled into eddies and pools. Calm down, he told himself.
At the edge of his field of view he caught some flicker through the trees, then another and another. His pulse rose. The movement came nearer, and he saw the beam of a flashlight sweeping right and left. Parson held his breath. He wanted to signal Gold to keep the mullah quiet, but he didn’t dare so much as blink. Better the prisoner not know, anyway.
Two men. No, three. Four, five, six. Parson held faint hope they were coalition until he saw the ragged clothes and AK-47s. Some wore the flat-topped Chitrali cap seen everywhere in Afghanistan, and others wore what Parson took to be Taliban turbans. Black ones, he guessed. In night vision, everything was green. And that damned flashlight was not a good sign. Either this area was so securely Taliban that they didn’t need to be careful, or they wanted their mullah bad enough to take crazy chances.
One carried something that didn’t look like an AK. The man walked more slowly than the others, emerged last from the emerald gloom. He stepped deliberately, seemingly intent on a different task. As he drew nearer, Parson recognized his weapon. A Russian-built Dragunov sniper rifle topped with a PSO-1 scope. In the right hands, that thing could place a 7.62-millimeter bullet within a five-inch circle out to a thousand yards.
Parson hoped to hell that guy didn’t know how to use such a weapon. But the Taliban wouldn’t waste a rifle like that on any moron. Based on what he had seen in the news, those bastards usually killed cruelly, publicly stoning people for various offenses, or mortaring whole villages deemed insufficiently pious, raking survivors with automatic fire. Death by long-range precision represented a new level of artistry.
Parson could find no advantage in his situation, even though he saw the insurgents and they didn’t see him. The element of surprise would disappear with the first shot from his pistol, and then there would still be five or six AKs against his handgun and Gold’s M-4. No winning that firefight.
The mullah coughed. Parson silently cursed him and all his tribe and all his religion. But the guerrillas wandered past, the noise absorbed by the snow walls and the distance. Parson sighed slowly, not wanting even his breath visible.
After a time, he turned away from the air vent.
“An insurgent patrol just came by,” he whispered. “Maybe a half dozen of them.”
Gold nodded, didn’t seem surprised.
“If you want to sleep,” Parson added, “I’ll take the first watch.”
Gold leaned against the stone slab that made one wall of their sanctuary, and she passed her rifle to Parson. The mullah slept in a fetal position. Parson touched the prisoner’s back, not out of sympathy but to check for shivering. No movement, and that was good. Didn’t want to lose him to hypothermia. Parson felt the snow cave getting warmer with body heat.
He continued scanning outside, saw nothing but snow coming down as though it always had and always would. The red low-battery light began blinking, so Parson turned off the goggles. He decided not to flip the power switch the other direction and use the backup battery. No telling when and how often he’d need these again. Instead he decided to call home.
Again working by shaded flashlight, he turned on his GPS receiver. The screen read ACQUIRING SATELLITES for several minutes, then displayed his position, not by his present coordinates but in relation to a fixed, secret reference point. Parson could transmit that in the clear and still not give away his position to the wrong people.
He plugged in the earpiece to his radio and rolled the thumb-wheel switch. Static fried in his left ear as he extended the antenna.
“Bookshelf, Flash Two-Four Charlie,” he whispered. No answer. He called again, and they heard him this time.
“Flash Two-Four Charlie, Bookshelf. Have you weak but readable. Go ahead.”
Parson gave his location and asked, “Advise status of search-and-rescue.”
“Bagram weather is zero-zero and they can’t launch helos. Meteorology advises this front has turned stationary, so we don’t know how long it will be. Buddy, I wish I had better news.”
Parson ground his teeth. “Tell Bagram command post I have my cargo intact,” he said.
“Copy that. Anything else we can do for you?”
“Have you had any other calls from Flash Two-Four?”
“Negative.”
Parson turned off the radio, closed his eyes. Never should have let Fisher make me do this, he thought. We’d have beaten the enemy or died together. You don’t leave your comrades.
Much of the night passed in silence until Gold nudged him. “I’m not really sleeping,” she said. “Want me to take watch for a while?”
Gold unlocked her end of the chain and fastened it on Parson’s good wrist. They traded places, bumping into each other’s limbs and gear. Parson made sure Gold still had the night-vision goggles he gave her, and he told her to use them sparingly. Then he leaned against the stone and tried to rest.
He fell asleep immediately, but not for long. The pain in his wrist woke him whenever he moved his hand. Sleep came in intermittent moments instead of hours, and Parson’s waking thoughts and fears mingled with dreams and nightmares. Through both sleep and wakefulness, the stream outside spoke to him in a language he could not understand. Its currents murmured of wars long past and wars ongoing. You’re hallucinating, Parson thought, s
till listening to the water.
CHAPTER THREE
Parson hovered in the murky consciousness between sleep and waking, the logical part of him trying to separate nightmare from reality. You will wake from this and go have an omelet, some corner of his mind reasoned. Then he came to full awareness, as if rising from the bottom of a pool. He opened his eyes to the gray light of the snow cave and inhaled air stale with body odor. For a moment he fought panic. You’re an officer of the United States Air Force, he told himself. Deal with it. Deal. He worked the fingers of his right hand, and the cracked wrist still burned.
The mullah sat cross-legged, chained to Gold. He spooned food from a brown packet marked: BEEF STROGANOFF.
“Hope you don’t mind me going into your pack,” Gold said. Her voice had a resin in it, either from cold or fatigue, though she sounded better than last night. Parson thought she might have been attractive in more normal circumstances, but even before the crash she’d seemed all mission: shoulder-length hair tied tight, no makeup, no nail polish. No tattoo that Parson could see. Eyes deep gray as a whetstone.
“Can’t let him starve,” Parson said, “but I’d have given him the pork.”
He looked outside and saw only a few light flakes falling. But in the distance, veils of snow trailed from looming clouds the color of a deep bruise. He considered whether to move or stay put. Neither held much to recommend it. He knew the insurgents were looking for him in the immediate area. But any movement would leave tracks and make the three of them easier to see.
The shivering tipped Parson’s mind toward moving. He had no more handwarmers, and his wet clothes still clung to his limbs, sapping away heat. Gold and the mullah could be no better off. Parson decided they had to find better shelter somehow. Probable death by gunshot versus certain death by cold.
He unfolded a tactical pilotage chart and marked his location by creasing the map with a thumbnail. No dots of towns appeared anywhere nearby—just the curving contour lines of rising terrain, along with the notation “Numerous Scattered Villages.” The map told him little of use. It was meant for fliers moving five or six miles a minute, not foot soldiers slogging through snow.
Parson wanted to find an abandoned village. He’d seen enough of them from the air, the tic-tac-toe patterns of roofless mud walls where mortars or Katyusha rockets had exploded. The ruins stood as silent, shrapnel-scarred witnesses to hardscrabble lives cut short in places that did not even merit a name on an American map. Parson needed just one roof, or part of a roof still intact, to get out of the weather and wait for the clouds to lift.
Peering out, Parson watched and listened for any sign of pursuers. He saw no one, so he kicked away the snow from the entrance and crawled outside. He looked around and saw nothing moving but snowflakes, swirling fog, and stream water flowing clear as vodka. By the creek, he found what he needed.
The limbs of a leafless shrub reached over the water like a claw. Using his left hand, Parson broke away some branches and shook off the snow. Then he sat by the cave entrance, drew his boot knife, and shaved away twigs and bark until he had two smooth sticks as big around as his fingers and about ten inches long. He rummaged through his pack for a first-aid kit, unzipped it, unrolled a bandage. Holding the cloth with his teeth, he cut off a three-foot strip. Parson tried to wrap the sticks over his injured wrist, then realized he didn’t have enough hands.
“Gold, can you help me?” he asked.
The sergeant spoke softly in Pashto, and she and the mullah emerged from the snow cave.
“I need to splint my wrist,” Parson said.
Gold admired the splint sticks he’d improvised and said, “I’d have done this for you.” She wrapped a layer of bandage over his wrist and forearm, then arranged a stick on top of his arm and a stick underneath, leaving his fingers and thumb free to move. Gold wrapped more cloth over the sticks and secured the splint with medical tape.
“Good work,” Parson whispered. “Let’s go. We’ll try to stay in the trees. If we run into villagers, we’ll just have to take our chances.”
“Charlie Mike,” Gold said.
“How’s that?”
“Army talk. CM, for continue mission.”
“You got it,” Parson said, trying to sound better than he felt. He realized this soldier Gold was, professionally, a distant cousin. The Army and the Air Force had different cultures and lingo. However, as a C-130 crewman he’d had more contact with the Army than most blue-suiters. He had air-dropped many loads of paratroopers in exercises, and he admired their warrior spirit. Sometimes on the run-in, doors open, red light standing by for green light, he’d heard them psyching themselves, chanting and growling. Nowadays it wasn’t unusual for a load of about sixty airborne troops to have one or two women. They weren’t infantry; they were admin, medical, or interpreters. But they were all part of the airborne division. And he noticed Gold wore jump wings.
He took his handkerchief from his pocket, still wet with the prisoner’s spit.
“Tell him to open his mouth again,” Parson said.
The mullah obeyed, and Parson tied the gag, this time not so roughly.
“He seems cooperative today,” Gold said.
“Wonder why?”
“Maybe inshallah. Whatever happens is the will of God. Or maybe he thinks what we’re trying to do is hopeless.”
Or maybe he’s seen enough of his own captives made to suffer, thought Parson, that he knows he doesn’t want to be on the receiving end.
Parson took a compass bearing, surveyed his surroundings. Tendrils of mist ghosted through the trees, branches laden with snow. He heard nothing but his own breathing and the faint clink of chains as Gold and the prisoner moved. Well, navigator, he said to himself, find your way.
He walked uphill from the stream, hoping to disappear into woods and underbrush. Boulevards of pines provided some cover, but little other vegetation grew in the crumbling shingle rock beneath the snow. When the three had gained some elevation above the creek, Parson looked back on where they had spent the night. He felt relieved to see that the snow cave did not stand out at all, though the tracks leading from it were pretty apparent. But the placement of other tracks across the stream unnerved him. The insurgents he’d seen through his night-vision goggles had come a lot closer than he’d realized. Inshallah.
The three continued up the rise until it flattened into a narrow plateau. The pines gave way to terraced fields now left to nature, planted in what Parson guessed were apricot or mulberry trees. Survival instructors had briefed him about food sources in country, but most of those sources came in summer. The old fruit trees stood bare like ranks of skeletons, broken branches glazed with ice. Parson could hardly imagine them ever sprouting leaves and bearing fruit. This Afghan winter seemed permanent, designed to extinguish life in all its forms.
The heavier snow he’d seen in the distance advanced across the valley and began showering the orchard. The flakes blurred the vista across the fields, and it seemed to Parson as if he were looking through gauze. He avoided the open mulberry grove and kept to the woods. The pines gave way to junipers at the edge of the field, and the junipers grew in stands closer together and provided better concealment. Parson headed northeast, roughly back toward Bagram. He held little hope of walking that far, but he thought it made sense to go in the direction of a big American base. The nearer they got to it, the more likely they’d run into friendlies.
After a time they stopped to catch their breath and let the mullah rest. It was snowing so hard now that the flakes made a hissing sound as they sheeted against Parson’s coat. He leaned against a poplar and looked through the binoculars. At the edge of visibility through the snow and fog, he saw a large, dark mass, something clearly out of place. He rolled the binoculars’ focus knob with his middle finger, but he still could not identify the thing. He turned to Gold and placed an index finger to his lips, then pointed two fingers to his eyes, then gestured toward the object.
They kneeled in the co
ver of the evergreens, and Parson watched the black shape from less than a hundred yards away. He worried that it was a Taliban truck or maybe a mobile rocket launcher. Parson passed the binoculars to Gold. She raised them to her eyes for a full minute, then handed them back and shrugged.
Silently, Parson mouthed, “Stay here,” and Gold nodded. He drew his Beretta from his survival vest. His right hand still hurt and the splint felt awkward, so he held his pistol with both hands as he crept forward. The weapon could fire double action, one trigger pull both cocking the hammer and firing at a stroke. Still, Parson clicked back the hammer with his thumb, to fire a tenth of an instant faster.
Whenever he gained ten feet or so, he hid behind trees or drifts and scanned the object and the woods. The shape lay in a clearing that seemed part of a disused road, or more like a goat path. Eventually the object materialized as a T-72, a Soviet tank left rusting for more than two decades. One of its tracks had been blown off, the metal links tangled like some fossilized reptile frozen at the moment of violent death. Parson stood and motioned with his arm. Gold pulled the mullah along, and she held her M-4 pointed up at a ready angle, her index finger inside the trigger guard.
They caught up with Parson, and Gold loosened the prisoner’s gag to give him water. The mullah mumbled something in Pashto.
“He says his people defeated the Russians with American weapons, and now they will defeat Americans with Russian weapons,” Gold said.
“Tell him to go to hell,” Parson said, as he uncocked and holstered his pistol. He imagined what must have happened to the tank and its crew. He had seen an old videotape taken by the mujahideen, the good guys then, as they ambushed a Russian truck on a road like this. Dust flew from under the vehicle as a land mine exploded and the truck jerked to a stop. A voice off-screen, perhaps the cameraman himself, shouted, “Allah-hu akbar!” Then the quick thumps of AK-47 fire. The picture shook as the cameraman ran forward. For a moment, a close-up of dirt and rocks became visible, maybe the camera held at the operator’s side. The final image showed a Soviet soldier crawling in a ditch, dirty and stubble-cheeked, eyes wide, one hand raised against the inevitable.
