by Young, Tom
“Gimme the mike,” Parson said. The captain handed it over. Parson pressed the talk switch and said, “Reach Two Four X-ray, who is the patient?”
“Uh, I don’t have the name in front of me, sir. He’s an Algerian national.”
Parson felt a flood of relief, and then he felt guilty for feeling relief. It was bad when anybody got shot. But he couldn’t deny he was glad Sophia wasn’t hurt. He’d nearly gotten her killed in Afghanistan, and the vision of her bloodied and fighting for her life in a rescue helicopter still haunted him. Parson knew he loved her; he’d admitted that much to himself by now. But none of the in-vogue phrases for these kinds of relationships quite applied. She was not a “work spouse.” She meant far more to him than that. Not a “friend with benefits.” That implied too-casual sex. “Emotional affair” didn’t cut it, either. Their bond—forged under fire and maintained at times by long-distance—defied description.
He keyed the mike again and said, “Kingfish copies all. We’ll have E-MEDS standing by. Do you have current weather for Mitiga? Visibility’s going to hell.”
“Yes, sir, we do. We’ll see you soon if we can get in. Reach Two Four X-ray out.”
Parson called E-MEDS, the Expeditionary Medical Squadron, to make sure an ambulance stood by. That done, he could only monitor the computers and radios, and wait.
A few minutes later, Parson heard the C-130 call in on the VHF tower frequency.
“Mitiga Tower,” the pilot said, “Reach Two Four X-ray is with you on the ILS to Runway Two-Niner.”
Parson glanced at the radio, looked out the window at the swirling dust. The sight made him grimace.
“Reach Two Four X-ray, Mitiga Tower,” the controller responded. “You are cleared to land.”
That made things sound simple, but Parson knew better. Visibility came and went during these storms, and nothing mattered except what the pilots could see when they reached decision height. Depending on the airfield, decision height was usually two hundred feet above ground level for a Category One approach. Very little room for error when you got that low. If the pilots couldn’t spot the approach lights or other parts of the runway environment, they had to go around: shove the throttles, arrest the descent, start climbing away on a predetermined missed-approach path. The situation allowed for no fumbling, no hesitation.
Parson remembered an old instructors’ saying about flying in weather this bad: Don’t consider a missed approach an aborted landing. Consider a landing an aborted missed approach.
He looked out the window toward the runway. The sun had not started to set, but the light—filtered through dust—looked like twilight. He heard the grumble of the C-130’s turboprops. Watched the approach end of the runway. Saw nothing. The grumble grew louder. Parson still saw no part of the airplane, not even landing lights. He could imagine the pilots’ eyes glued to their instruments, watching the altimeter and the localizer and glide-slope needles. Another call came over the tower frequency.
“Reach Two Four X-ray’s on the missed approach.”
Parson cursed under his breath.
“Roger, Reach Two Four X-ray,” the tower said. “Contact Approach Control on one-one-niner point seven.”
“Reach Two Four X-ray over to Approach.”
Parson wondered if they’d divert to another airfield or make another attempt at landing here. Under Air Force rules, they couldn’t even start an approach unless the weather was reported above minimums. And the visibility changed moment to moment in a dust storm.
For long minutes he heard no engines and no more calls on the tower frequency. He considered checking the plane’s flight plan to learn its alternate airport; surely it had headed for Cairo or somewhere. But then another call came on the radio.
“Mitiga Tower, Reach Two Four X-ray’s with you on the ILS to Two-Niner.”
“Reach Two Four X-ray cleared to land.”
Parson stepped outside and again watched the skies above the approach end of the runway. Fine particles stung his eyes. He heard the growl of engines once more. Across the airport, the orange windsock fluttered in a dirty, gusting breeze. Several seconds passed with no sign of the C-130 except its noise signature, and Parson expected to hear it pass overhead in another missed approach.
But one shaft of light penetrated the beige clouds, perhaps a quarter mile from the touchdown zone. Then another appeared. Parson recognized the landing lights of a Herk. The aircraft took shape as if formed from the blowing sand. When the main wheels touched down, puffs of gray tire smoke joined the swirls of dust.
The E-MEDS ambulance began rolling across the tarmac, along with the blue pickup truck of the flight line team. The pickup stopped near an aircraft parking spot. A marshaller got out of the passenger side and stood with two electric wands held above his head. Parson watched the C-130 roll from the runway and lumber along a taxiway, its engines sighing as they shifted into low-speed ground idle. When the Herk reached the apron, the marshaller signaled it to turn left into the parking spot. The aircraft rolled to a halt.
Parson strode across the tarmac to the C-130. After a couple of minutes, the props spun down. The crew door dropped open, a loadmaster stepped out, and Parson climbed aboard. He glanced up at the crew on the flight deck: two pilots, a navigator, and a flight engineer. Clinks and rattles sounded in the cockpit as they unbuckled their harnesses and unplugged their headsets.
“Good job, guys,” Parson said. “After that missed approach, I thought you were headed for Egypt.”
“Well,” the navigator replied, “you said you would kick our asses if anything went wrong.”
Parson laughed. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I? How’s the weather behind you?”
“Varies,” the copilot said. “Sometimes you can see a mile, sometimes you can’t see anything. I almost hit the go-around button again, but right then I saw the approach lights.”
“Yeah,” the pilot said. “We were surprised those helicopters took off in this mess. We heard them talking to tower.”
“Well, there’s a good reason for that,” Parson said. “We made contact with the missing Marines.”
In the cargo compartment, Gold stood with her back to the crew entrance door. She and a tall African Union officer helped a man get to his feet. The man wore some sort of native headdress. He had a bandage across his wrist. Two men—no, two boys—sat in the nylon troop seats. One of them wore a blue headdress, like the wounded man. Gold turned when she heard Parson’s voice.
“That’s wonderful news,” Gold said. “Did you talk to them?”
“No,” Parson said, “but the Mirage crews did. Flew right over them.”
“Thank God. I just hope the choppers can get to them.”
“Tell me about it.”
Parson walked over to Gold, placed his hands on her shoulders. She put one arm around his waist for just a moment, then turned her attention back to the wounded man. The patient stood on his own two feet but looked weak and tired.
“How did he get shot?” Parson asked.
“Long story. I’ll tell you inside.”
“I guess you guys have had a rough day,” Parson said.
“Oh, yeah,” Gold said.
The AU officer began talking to the boys in a language Parson had never heard. They unfastened their seat belts and stood up.
“I suppose that’s the officer you told me about?” Parson said.
“Yes. He’s Major Ongondo. He speaks the Tuaregs’ language, and I think those guys have something to tell you.”
CHAPTER 33
The murky, dust-laden air reminded Blount of the start of the Iraq War in 2003. At one point during the push north from Kuwait, a dust storm turned the sky to ocher, grounding aircraft and fouling weapons systems. If you blew your nose, it looked like you’d smeared your handkerchief with orange paint.
Back then Blount fought alongside fello
w members of a thirty-five-man platoon. Now he’d face whatever was coming with only three other men: Fender, Escarra, and Grayson.
Blount donned a set of dust goggles so he could at least keep his eyes open amid flying grit. The four men lay prone with their weapons, watching the truck at several hundred yards’ distance. Its occupants apparently hadn’t seen the escapees; the vehicle kept moving toward the west. Its direction of off-road travel supported Blount’s suspicion that Kassam had his henchmen driving in wider and wider circles out from the hell house.
“I think it’s leaving,” Fender said.
“Just keep low,” Blount said. “I don’t think they saw us, but they could swing back around. Another truck could come along pretty quick, too.”
The vehicle disappeared. It did not seem to drive out of sight. Instead it simply dissolved into the dust storm.
Blount shifted his weight a bit to keep pressure off the radio at the front of his tactical vest. He reached into a pocket, found a handkerchief colored in the same digital camo as his uniform. Wrapped it around the PRC-148 to give the radio at least a little dust protection. Fender wrapped an identical handkerchief around his nose and mouth, giving him the appearance of an Old West bandit armed with modern weapons.
The weather made it seem less and less likely that rescue forces could reach Blount and his men anytime soon. Had he cheated death—or postponed it just for a matter of hours? He knew stories of American POWs who made heroic escapes only to get recaptured. During the Vietnam War, Air Force pilot Lance Sijan ejected from his burning F-4 Phantom over hostile territory. Despite a fractured leg and a torn-up right hand, he evaded capture for more than a month. After the enemy caught up with him, Sijan coldcocked a guard and escaped. Blount especially liked that part of the story—a man with multiple injuries who could still kick a bad guy’s ass. But the North Vietnamese recaptured Sijan hours later, and he died in prison. In the same war, aviator Bud Day broke his arm when he punched out of his F-100. After his captors found him, they strung him upside down. Day later got away and even made it into South Vietnam. But the enemy found him again, shot him in the hand and leg, and sent him to the Hanoi Hilton.
Those guys had lived up to the Code of Conduct. For Blount, the takeaway from the Code’s several articles came down to this: Resist until you got nothing left. If you’re in command, lead the fight as long as anybody has the means to fight.
Resisting and evading would get a lot easier if Blount could communicate. He decided to try another radio call. He pulled his handkerchief away from the PRC-148 enough to reveal the transmit button. Pressed the switch and said, “Any station, any station, Havoc Two Bravo.”
The only answer came from the wind, lifting powder from the ground so that it looked like the earth smoked. His rifleman’s mind, always calibrated for wind and range, estimated the gusts at better than twenty-five miles an hour. Blount did not know the limitations of helicopters and their crews, but he knew these conditions would push the capabilities of both machine and man. He thumbed his transmit switch again.
“Any station,” he called, “Havoc Two Bravo.”
Static joined the wind in a mixture of blank noise. The absence of any response pulled Blount’s fear onto an elemental plane, a primordial dread of the unknown. Nothing existed in the universe except the lifeless ground beneath him, the three men beside him, and the enemy seeking to kill him, lurking somewhere out there beyond the edge of visibility.
“Keep your eyes open, boys,” Blount said. “We might be here for a while.”
He peered into the beige gloom, searched over the sights of his rifle for any solid objects amid the dust—objects that might signal an enemy’s approach. The other men did the same. Nothing out there but a desert trying to lift itself to the sky.
Blount had pretty much given up on the radio when the PRC’s hiss broke. A pulsing noise replaced the static, a carrier wave without voice but with the ambient sound of a helicopter in flight. Then someone spoke.
“Havoc Two Bravo,” the voice called, “Pedro One-One, do you read?”
The call surprised Blount so much that he nearly let the radio slip from his hand. The other men turned their heads toward him, eyes expectant. Blount gestured toward the open wasteland.
“Keep watch,” he said. Then he pressed his talk button and said, “Pedro One-One, Havoc Two Bravo has you five by five.”
“Roger, Havoc. On what vehicle did you learn to drive?”
An authentication question, Blount realized, taken from a form he had filled out years ago. The form included statements about him no enemy could know. The document became classified as soon as a service member completed it, and it was sent out to rescue forces if the member went missing. Right now, Pedro needed to confirm Blount was really who he said he was.
“A red Farmall tractor,” Blount said.
“That checks, Havoc. Be advised Pedro One-One and One-Two are a flight of two Pave Hawks inbound to you. Do you have an update on your position?”
Blount raised himself on his elbow enough to reach the pouch where he stored his DAGR. Hoped that from a distance he’d appear as but a lump in the sand. Pulled out the device and read off his coordinates to the chopper pilot.
“Pedro copies,” the pilot said. “ETA fifteen minutes. Can you say conditions at your position?”
Blount scanned around, stared into the maelstrom.
“Sir, I think the winds are gusting about twenty-five,” he said. “Visibility’s only several hundred yards. A few minutes ago we spotted a truck, and I’m pretty sure it’s hostile. No vehicles or other personnel in sight at this time.”
“Roger that. See you in a few, if the visibility holds.”
A big if. The storm showed no indication of letting up. Blount wasn’t a pilot, but common sense told him visibility would get worse near the ground, close to the source of the dust. And that’s exactly where visibility became most critical for the aircrew.
“Do you think they can pick us up?” Grayson asked.
“Don’t count on it till it happens,” Blount said. “If those helos get here and they can’t see to land or at least hover over us and drop a basket, they’ll just climb up where the air’s better and fly home.”
Blount strained his eyes, tried to will the blowing sand to part enough for him to see farther. The effort only made him dizzy; for a moment he lost all depth perception and imagined that visibility had dropped to mere feet. Then his eyes focused again and he discerned sand ripples across the ground for several hundred yards.
“Let’s spread out a little bit,” Blount ordered. “Make sure we’re covering a full three hundred sixty degrees.”
The men crawled a few feet left or right, shuffled themselves until a rifle aimed toward each cardinal point of the compass. Escarra seemed to understand without translation; he trained his AK-47 due east and peered into the distance. Several minutes went by. All the while, Blount listened to the wind whip the Sahara, and he kept hoping to hear the pounding of helicopter rotors.
Instead he heard a single word in Spanish. Escarra spoke without emotion, without raising his voice. Two syllables from a language Blount didn’t speak told him all he needed to know.
“Mira,” Escarra said.
Blount looked toward Escarra’s assigned sector.
In that direction, a solid point took form at ground level amid the shapeless eddies of flying grit. At first it seemed motionless, but after a few seconds the point began to enlarge and shift to take on the lines and angles of a pickup truck.
“Good eyes,” Blount said. “Possible target to the east, boys.”
Fender and Grayson rose up slightly on their knees and elbows, turned their eyes and weapons toward the threat. Blount switched his M16 from safe to semiauto, watched the truck approach.
“Keep watch all around us,” Blount said.
“Aye, aye, Gunny,” Fe
nder said.
This could get complicated, Blount thought, with a firefight breaking out just as the Pave Hawks arrive. Better warn the crews. He lifted his radio again.
“Pedro, Havoc Two Bravo,” he said. “Be advised we have a vehicle approaching our position, possibly hostile.”
“Roger that, Havoc. Our gunners copy, too.”
Blount figured his team had one advantage: four men flat to the ground presented a much lower profile than a truck full of dirtbags. Whoever was in the vehicle probably hadn’t seen Blount and his men yet. Now he just needed positive identification of a hostile target.
“I don’t have positive ID yet, fellas,” Blount said. “But if you see a threat, shoot first and shoot straight, but remember we don’t have a whole lot of ammo.”
“Aye, Gunny,” Fender said.
The truck bounced and wallowed through the sand, and when it came within a couple hundred yards, Blount could see six men kneeling in its bed. Scarves covered their heads and faces, leaving only their eyes exposed. Some wore goggles. All carried weapons—mostly AK-47s, but one had a long tube. A launcher for rocket-propelled grenades, Blount realized, or else a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile. Either way, bad news for helicopters.
One of the men in the truck bed stood up and placed an AK across the top of the cab. He took aim as the vehicle continued swerving across the desert.
“They see us,” Blount shouted. “Fire!”
The men opened up. Blount squeezed off two shots at the jihadist aiming over the cab. The man dropped into the truck bed as his weapon slid forward. The AK clattered across the hood and fell into the sand.
Bullets punctured the windshield. The pickup skidded, began to roll over. Five men and one limp body tumbled out onto the desert floor. The truck came to rest about a hundred yards away, on its right side with its open bed oriented toward Blount and his team. Two men remained in the cab. Blount couldn’t tell if those two were hit; they had fallen all over each other.
