by Tom Young
Now she had some control. She pulled a steering toggle to turn toward the drop zone. But she had too much distance ahead of her and not enough beneath her. She gave up on the DZ and prepared for a rough landing in the trees.
She placed one foot on top of the other to keep branches from striking between her legs. Bent her knees slightly. Folded her arms and cupped her gloved hands inside her armpits to shield the arteries there. Shut her eyes tight.
In the next moment, terrorists beat her with truncheons. A blow to the feet. A punch to the thigh. To the chest. To the back of her head. A slap to the face. All amid the weirdly pleasant scent of evergreen.
For a moment, the assault sent her back in time. She’d been hit like that only once before, and then the terrorists had been real, when she’d been taken hostage in Afghanistan. Her ordeal had begun with a beating, and the beating was nothing compared with what came later. The blows from tree limbs laid open emotional wounds. Fear and panic, the certainty that an awful death awaited her. She saw the faces of her tormentors. Her skin flushed instantly with sweat. She fought the urge to cry out.
Then the beating stopped. Gold opened her eyes. Dappled shade, pine needle floor. She hung from her risers about a foot off the ground. The chute remained tangled in the tree, ripped in several places. She felt her arms and legs. No broken bones, but lots of scrapes and scratches from bark.
She fumbled for the cutaway pillow, a soft red handle that would release the main canopy. When she pulled it, she dropped to the ground and collapsed to her hands and knees. Struggled to control her breathing. Willed her heart to stop racing.
How did I let that happen? she asked herself. The sound of running boots interrupted her dark thoughts. She saw the DZ control officer and two of the Special Forces guys, who had, no doubt, landed right on target.
“Sergeant Major, are you okay?” one of them asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
She walked out of the woods with them, and a Humvee picked her up at the DZ. She supposed some private would have to go back and recover her chute, or what was left of it. On the ride back to the base, no one criticized, but she imagined what they were all thinking: HALO is not women’s work.
And it usually wasn’t.
“I’ve never seen a woman on a HALO drop before,” the DZCO asked. “What’s your career field?”
“I’m a Pashto interpreter/translator,” Gold said.
“So how does a translator get a slot at HALO school?”
Gold had come to expect that question on every jump. The Army didn’t consider the interpreter/translator specialty a combat job; that’s why it was open to women. But if the Army needed noncombat jobs done in combat zones, then women went into combat. Simple as that.
The military even wanted a few women who could accompany special ops forces—purely as interpreters in a noncombat role. As a Pashto expert with the 82nd Airborne, Gold qualified as an obvious choice for HALO training. Now if the boys needed a woman who spoke the language, she could go with them no matter how they got there.
“So far it’s just been training,” Gold added. “I’ve never done this in combat.”
“Let’s hope you don’t have to.”
There were a couple different ways to take that comment, but Gold assumed he meant well. She wasn’t sure why her risers had twisted; a twist could happen even with a well-packed parachute used with perfect technique. The malfunction reminded her she could never let her guard down, never get distracted, never take anything for granted. Especially with another deployment to Afghanistan coming up. Counselors had told her to expect symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from time to time: difficulty concentrating, depression—and in worse episodes, nausea and sweats.
The night sweats had started after Parson had rescued her from her Taliban captors and still happened at least once a week. Five years. The sweats always came with dreams of the sneering men and their knives in that bombed-out village in the mountains. The blades inserted under her fingernails, the pain and blood, the nails ripped off. One by one.
With each fingernail, the insurgents reminded her: “You suffer alone. You are a harlot. You will die, and you will go to hell.”
But she hadn’t suffered alone. Somewhere in the ridges above, Parson had waited, watched through the finely ground glass of a precision rifle scope. A downed aviator out of his element, he could have given up on her. At that moment, her chain of command certainly had. But Parson refused to let her die.
He’d brought her back alive. Alive but damaged, trace elements of toxin in her psyche. And now she prepared to return to the source of it all, where the bleak terrain matched the bleakness of spirit Afghanistan had brought her.
She told herself she could hack it. She was a professional. Her career had included interpreting for interrogations, serving with Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and running a literacy program for Afghan police officers. She and Parson had received Silver Stars for keeping an important Taliban prisoner alive and in custody after they’d been shot down.
The thought of working with Parson during her new deployment brought mixed feelings. Gold wanted very much to see him again, yet she could not look at him without recalling the worst moments of her life. He had arranged for the Joint Relief Task Force to assign her as his interpreter, however, and she could hardly tell him no. And Afghanistan needed her again.
She still ached all over from the tree landing. She knew she’d be sore in the morning. One of her fingers hurt, and she pulled off her glove to inspect it. Despite the glove, the nail on her left middle finger had somehow torn off. The blood and exposed flesh sickened her.
Gold closed her eyes, breathed deeply. The injury reminded her of things best not remembered.
1
It took Gold three days to reach Mazar-i-Sharif. In that time, a refugee camp sprang up. The collection of blue-and-white tents on the airport grounds sprawled across the tarmac. The tents’ entrance flaps bore stenciling that read UNHCR. Big, Russian-built helicopters pounded in and out of the airfield. Each helo displayed the roundel of the Afghan Air Force—a circle enclosing a triangle of green, red, and black. Gold saw a few American Black Hawks, too.
A familiar odor filled her nostrils: trash fires and sewage, along with the smell of dust. Even if she’d been blind, she would have recognized the location. The scents filled her with both dread and familiarity, almost a homecoming. She’d left part of herself here, and that part now belonged to Afghanistan.
Gold had talked to Parson by Skype when her plane made a fuel stop in Kuwait; as an individual augmentee, she’d made some of her own arrangements to get to her duty station. He’d told her he’d meet her at the MASF—the Mobile Aeromedical Staging Facility. No sign of him yet, though. Just doctors and nurses moving among patients lying on green cots set up in brown tents.
An Afghan helicopter landed. Though its rotors quit turning, some sort of power unit inside continued to operate. The chopper emitted a jetlike howl, and exhaust gases shimmered from a port.
Crew members opened clamshell doors in the back and began unloading patients. The injured lay on stretchers, and crewmen lifted them out of the aircraft and lined them up on the tarmac. All the fliers looked like Afghans, except one who was taller than the rest. From his short hair and clean-shaven face, Gold knew he was probably an American. He carried a faded green helmet bag covered with patches. When she noticed the slight limp and the way he pulled at his flight suit sleeve to check his watch, she knew it was Parson.
Gold found a set of foam earplugs in a pocket of her ACUs, and she twisted them between her fingers and inserted them into her ears before approaching the helicopter. As Gold strode toward the aircraft, Parson looked up and smiled at her. She waved, and when she reached him he extended his right hand, and she took it in both of hers. She wanted to embrace him, but not in front of the other troops, and certainly not in front of the Afghans.
He looked tired. The skin below his eyes sagg
ed, and grime gathered in the creases of his neck. He wore his usual desert tan flight suit, only this one had blue oak leaves on the shoulders. The command patch over his right chest pocket read US CENTAF. He had a few flecks of gray in his hair now, but he looked pretty good for someone who’d once been blown up. Since their flight through hell last year, they had kept in touch, and she’d last seen him about two months ago. That was before his deployment, and he’d still worn a major’s brown leaves then.
“Damn, it’s good to see you,” Parson shouted over the noise.
“Likewise,” Gold said, “but I’m sorry about the circumstances.” It seemed in Afghanistan, there was always reason to be sorry about the circumstances.
Parson nodded, then leaned inside the helicopter’s crew door. “Hey, Rashid,” he yelled, “kill the APU.”
Indistinct words came from the cockpit, and Parson repeated: “APU. Turn it off.” Then he slashed his finger across his throat. The screaming whine subsided. Parson turned back toward Gold and said, “It’s not always that easy to communicate. That’s why I need you.”
“Where did you just fly from?” Gold asked.
“Balkh. It’s pretty rough up there.”
Gold looked at the patients. Dust covered some of them, as if they’d just been pulled from rubble. A girl with a bloody bandage around the stump of her arm stared up at Gold. Her hair shone with an auburn tint, and her eyes were blue. The sight nearly brought Gold to tears. She wished she could take the child in her arms and carry her to a better time and place for a little girl. Gold figured she was probably a Tajik, but those eyes and hair could suggest Russian, British, or even Macedonian. A lot of armies had entered Afghanistan and then retreated, but they’d left their chromosomes. Two medics picked up the child’s stretcher and carried her into the MASF.
Another patient, a young man, moaned and kept rocking from side to side. He wore a bloody T-shirt and black trousers. He had a tennis shoe on his right foot, but his left foot was bare, and a broken bone protruded from the skin. The man clutched at his abdomen as he cried out.
“What’s wrong with him?” Gold asked.
“Internal injuries, maybe. I think a ceiling fell on him.”
“I’ll help you get him inside.”
Gold took one end of the stretcher by its wooden handles, and they brought the man into the medical tent. As they put him down, Gold asked in Pashto, “Does your stomach hurt?”
In addition to the broken foot, she could see bruises and scrapes all over the man’s face and arms. The blood on his shirt appeared to come from those injuries. His midsection seemed to pain him more than anything else, but the cause was not apparent. The man did not respond to Gold’s question.
“Where does it hurt, my friend?” Gold asked. “Pohaigay?” Do you understand?
“I cannot say to you,” the man said.
“Whatever is wrong,” Gold said, “let us help you. Meh daarigah.” Do not be frightened.
Inside the MASF, flight nurses and medics tended rows of patients lying on cots. Murmurs of conversations babbled through the tent in several languages. Amid the usual English, Pashto, and Dari, Gold heard snatches of French, German, and Russian. Some of the medical workers wore uniforms, and others wore civilian clothes. Several countries had contributed help from their military services, and Gold assumed the civilians came from the UN and from NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders. Gold retained a special fondness for people who worked to ease pain; she had spent so much time fighting those who inflicted it. But right now she just wanted to get this guy to talk.
“We have doctors for you,” she said in Pashto. The man still did not respond.
A medic kneeled by the man’s stretcher. The medic wore MultiCam fatigues with flight crew wings and airborne jump wings, along with badges for combat diver and free-fall parachutist. A sleeve patch from the 83rd Expeditionary Rescue Squadron. The five stripes of a technical sergeant. Close-cropped black hair. Rolled-up sleeves bulged around muscles that looked hard as Kevlar. His name tag read REYES.
“Are you pararescue?” Parson asked.
“Yes, sir,” Reyes said. He did not look up at Parson and Gold. Instead, he pulled medical shears from his pocket and began cutting away the patient’s shirt.
“He’s been holding his stomach, but he won’t tell us what’s wrong,” Gold said.
Reyes touched the man’s abdomen. “It’s not hard or discolored like you’d have with a bad internal injury,” he said. Reyes’s accent suggested someone whose first language was Spanish. Puerto Rican, perhaps.
The patient continued moaning, and sweat beaded on his forehead. Reyes took a multitool from a sheath on his belt and opened the blade. “These guys don’t like to be stripped,” he said, “but I gotta examine him.” The pararescueman cut the man’s rope belt and checked his groin area. Gold saw blood there, and she turned away. She knew the patient wouldn’t want an American woman to see him like this.
“Poor guy,” Parson said. “That’s a bad place to get hit by debris.”
“He’ll need surgery,” Reyes said, “but I don’t think he’ll lose anything.”
“So what’s with his stomach?” Parson asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Cover him and let me talk to him,” Gold said.
Reyes left and came back with a towel that he draped over the patient. The man still looked sick and uncomfortable. Gold kneeled beside him and said in Pashto, “These people can treat you, but you must talk to us. Your injury is not a punishment from God; it is merely an accident. You have no reason to feel shame.”
The man looked at her with moist eyes and said, “I—I cannot urinate.”
Gold translated what the man said. “I sure hope his bladder hasn’t ruptured,” Reyes said. He touched the man’s abdomen again. “Yeah, the bladder area’s distended.”
“What can you do?” Gold asked.
“I’ll be right back.”
Reyes returned with a plastic container, a small needle and syringe, a larger needle, and an IV cannula with a length of tubing.
“What’s that for?” Gold asked.
“He’s going to get a suprapubic needle cystotomy. Talk to him. See if you can get him not to look at what I’m doing.” Reyes pulled back the towel, then ripped open a Betadine pad and rubbed it on the man’s skin. With the small needle, he injected something just under the skin.
“What are you giving him?” Gold asked.
“Local anesthetic,” Reyes said. “Lidocaine.”
Gold tapped the man on the shoulder and said in Pashto, “Where are you from?”
“Balkh,” the man said.
Reyes raised the large needle and uncoiled the tubing. He left one end of the tubing in the plastic container.
“I have never seen Balkh,” Gold said. The man glanced down at his waist, and Gold asked, “Is it a pretty place?”
“No.”
Reyes inserted the needle straight into the patient’s bladder. The man cried out and clutched at the towel. Even if he didn’t feel the pain, Gold imagined, he knew something cold and metal had just pushed inside him. Yellow fluid began to flow into the container. Reyes taped the IV cannula into place. The man closed his eyes and sighed.
“Tashakor,” he said.
“He says thank you,” Gold said.
“Glad I got that right the first time,” Reyes said. “I’d hate to stick him like that twice.”
“Tashakor,” the man repeated.
“Will he be okay?” Parson asked.
“Yeah, but I think it would have ruptured before the end of the day if you guys hadn’t brought him in.”
Gold looked down the rows of patients. Some had suffered amputations. Some cried out in agony. Some looked near death. Only the man Reyes had just treated showed any sign of relief. A drop of mercy in an ocean of pain.
Just then, the lightbulb fixtures suspended overhead began to sway. Gold felt a strange rolling sensation through the soles of her boots, as if for a m
oment the earth had turned to jelly. Patients cried to Allah.
“Aftershock,” Parson said.
* * *
Parson reached into his helmet bag and took out his satphone. He dialed a duty officer with Joint Relief Task Force at Bagram Air Base. When the officer picked up, Parson said, “Felt like we just got hit again up here. What kind of damage reports do you have?”
“A few more buildings down in Mazar. Other than that, we don’t know much. A lot of the outlying villages didn’t have phone service to begin with, and those that did have lost their cell towers.”
“I’m in Mazar with an Afghan flight crew,” Parson said. “What do you need us to do?”
“The ops commander wants all available helicopter crews to survey the villages. Find out how much worse it is now.”
“There are some PJs up here with us,” Parson said. “Can I get some of those guys on board the Mi-17s?”
American pararescuemen didn’t normally fly with Afghan crews, but in the aftermath of the quake, a lot of regs had been waived. Parson hoped he could bend one more rule.
“Stand by,” the duty officer said. When he came back on the line, he said, “Commander says okay. We’ll cut the flight orders and fax them up there.”
With more people probably hurt, headquarters wanted him to wait for paperwork? Parson started to swear into the phone, but then he caught himself. He looked at Gold, decided to stay on his best behavior.
“Fine, fax the flight orders when you can,” Parson said. “But can we go ahead and launch on the commander’s verbal approval?”
“Stand by, sir.”
Parson waited, fuming. It seemed the most common phrase in the Air Force was stand by. When the duty officer came back, he spoke a less common phrase—one Parson liked better: “That’s approved.”
“Roger that,” Parson said. So somebody showed some sense down there at Bagram. He cradled the phone against his shoulder while he pulled a Tactical Pilotage Chart from his helmet bag. He unfolded the TPC across an empty cot. “All right, then,” he said. “Which villages?” Parson jotted in the margins as he listened, circled a dot on the chart.
