by Tom Young
She forced it all back into that deep place where she kept such memories, and she tried to get to work.
“What can I do?” she yelled to Reyes. He released the saw’s trigger again. His cut went only about halfway through the wooden beam, more than a foot thick. A dark slot in the lumber and a dusting of sawdust beneath it marked the blade’s progress.
“Come up here where I am,” he said. “Watch your step, and don’t put your weight on that slab there.” He tipped his chin toward a wall-size section of concrete; with his hands on the DeWALT saw, he could not point. “Somebody’s under it.”
Gold climbed what amounted to a slag pile. Bricks and debris shifted under her boots and caused her ankle to twist. She regained her balance and tested with her heel for better footing. When she reached Reyes, she saw a hole that revealed the head and torso of an elderly man. The half-cut wooden beam loomed above him. Dust covered his gray hair and beard. His cheeks looked like wrinkled, dirty leather. He gazed up at Gold and Reyes with pleading eyes.
“Kum zai de dard kawee?” Gold asked. Where are you hurt?
“Laingai,” he said.
“He says his leg is hurt,” Gold said.
“I gotta cut this lumber out of the way before I can even get to him,” Reyes said. “I think part of the ceiling fell across his legs. Tell him to turn his face down. I don’t want to get sawdust in his eyes.”
Gold explained in Pashto, and the man said, “Do not let that piece of wood fall on me.”
“We will catch it when we cut it,” Gold said.
“Allah’s blessings upon you.”
The saw roared. Gold noticed Parson talking with the satphone in his right ear. He put his finger over his left ear and turned away from the noise.
The blade cut deeper into the wood, and sawdust settled into the rubble like snow. Gold adjusted her rifle sling over her shoulder. Then she took gloves from her pocket, put them on, and grabbed the end of the beam. She saw Fatima watching it all from just a few feet away.
“It’ll be heavy when it comes loose,” Reyes said. “Their masonry is shit, but that’s good lumber.”
“I got it,” Gold said.
Parson turned off the satphone and put it back in its case. Gold hadn’t heard the conversation, but from the look on Parson’s face, it hadn’t gone well. He climbed the rubble and took hold of the crossbeam with Gold.
“Get ready,” Reyes said as the saw bit down to the last inch. The severed section splintered away, and Gold and Parson held it suspended over the trapped man. Despite Reyes’s warning, it was heavier than Gold expected. Newly sawn edges dug into her palms. She and Parson shuffled down the debris pile and dropped the beam. As it tumbled among the bricks, Gold slipped and fell.
Her wrists stung as she caught herself with the heels of her hands. Shifting stones pinched her fingers. The stock of her M4 dug into her side.
“You all right?” Parson asked. He extended a hand and helped her get to her feet.
“I think so.”
Gold felt a flush of anxiety she could not explain. The villagers seemed harmless, or at least not openly threatening. They kept glancing up at her as they pulled at masonry and hauled debris, but the stares could have come from curiosity alone. I’m just tired, she thought. My body clock hasn’t adjusted to crossing all those time zones.
She forced her mind back to the job. “So what did you learn in your phone call?” she asked.
“There aren’t any more pararescue guys available. They’re all tied up in other places. The aftershock hit Mirdshi real bad, and a lot of Kariz is on fire.”
Reyes sighed. “We’ll just deal with it, then,” he said. Then he called out, “Hey, Burlingame. Let’s try the spreader to get this slab of ceiling off this guy’s legs.”
“I’ll set it up,” Burlingame said. He left the patient he’d been helping and lifted a gasoline-powered pump from the REDS case. Then he hooked up lines leading to a tool that appeared vaguely like a tremendous set of shears with the blades closed.
Burlingame yanked a cord to crank the pump engine as if he were starting an old lawn mower. The pump coughed, belched blue smoke, and then settled into a steady hum. The noise bothered Gold, and she hoped they wouldn’t need to run the equipment for long.
“Okay,” Burlingame said over the engine’s racket, “we got pressure.”
Reyes took the spreader and groped his way into the crevice where the old man lay trapped. The man’s eyes widened, and he demanded to know what the pararescueman planned to do.
“He’s worried you’re going to cut him with that thing,” Gold said.
“I’m going to pry the concrete off him,” Reyes said.
Gold explained in Pashto. The man stopped talking, but he still looked scared. Reyes jammed the spreader underneath the slab and twisted the tool clockwise.
“Ma’am,” he said, “tell him to let us know if this hurts.”
Gold spoke to the man, and he replied, “It already hurts, my daughter.”
“Tell us if it gets worse,” Gold said.
She was starting to like the old man. Some Afghan clerics considered her very existence a blasphemy. Gold remembered one in particular, the mullah she and Parson had dragged through a winter storm. But this imam didn’t seem to despise Americans, and he had called her daughter. Not words you’d expect from a hate-monger, even one in need.
“All right,” Reyes said, “here goes.” He adjusted something on the spreader tool, and its jaws began to move apart. The slab over the man’s legs shifted. He cried out.
“My foot,” he said in Pashto.
“Watch out for his foot,” Gold explained in English.
“I can’t see his feet,” Reyes said. “Can he move at all now?”
Gold asked the imam if he could try to pull out his legs. He twisted his mouth as if in intense concentration. Veins emerged under the skin of his neck, and he groaned through gritted teeth.
“No, my daughter.”
“He still can’t move,” Gold said.
“Let me see if I can help brace him,” Parson said. Parson slid down into the crevice where the old man lay. He held the imam by the shoulders.
“Thank you, my son,” the old man said in Pashto.
“We’ll probably have to do him a little more damage just to get him out,” Burlingame said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Reyes said.
“Can I get down there and help you?” Burlingame asked.
“There’s no more room,” Parson said. “Go see who we need to work on next.”
“Yes, sir.” Burlingame began searching the debris, looking where the locals pointed.
Down in the hole, the imam stared at the spreader with an apparent mixture of fear and fascination. Looked up at Gold, then at Parson and Reyes.
“Tell him to hold on,” Reyes said to Gold. “I’ll have him out in a minute.”
The spreader jaws separated farther, and the slab moved. The old man screamed. Blood ran from underneath his legs and dripped from stone to stone. When the blood flowed through dirt, it separated into rolling, burgundy beads.
The sight of blood never used to disturb Gold, but it did now. She began to sweat. Saliva flooded the back of her mouth like she was about to throw up.
She looked away, tried to regain her composure. Her eyes focused on small details within the scene of destruction: A comb missing half its teeth. A toy car without wheels. No telling how those things came to be in a mosque.
Reyes put down the spreader, and Parson heaved the man up by his arms. Reyes helped pull the imam from the hole in the debris, and they laid him down in the flattest spot they could find. Blood had soaked his clothing from the thighs down. One foot was mangled, and the other had twisted around nearly backward. Gold figured he’d probably lose both of them.
“I’ll see if I can stop this bleeding,” Reyes said. He turned off the pump and went for his medical ruck.
With the rattle of the small engine hushed, Gold could
hear the imam praying. She kneeled beside him, and when he finished, she said, “You are in good hands. We will get you to a hospital.”
“Some of my people are still inside,” he said.
“We will do all we can.”
Gold looked around for Fatima; she worried about the girl seeing blood. But the child had disappeared.
In the meantime, Burlingame apparently found someone else alive and trapped. He repositioned the pump and spreader tool, and he started the engine again. That’s when Gold noticed three men on the hill beyond the mosque. They wore black turbans, and they seemed to be the only people not doing anything. All three stood watching, and the sight of them made Gold’s skin grow clammy. They did not speak. Their eyes conveyed nothing but maledictions. Their inactivity seemed even more hostile than their cold expressions.
* * *
Parson had known people who couldn’t stop talking when they were drunk. Apparently, morphine had the same effect on the imam. He kept yammering away with Gold. Parson almost wished they’d shut up. But he knew nothing could help the cause more than a chatty cleric who had bonded with Sophia. He’d seen her have that effect on people. Most of the Afghans she met wanted to tell her their life stories—unless they were trying to kill her. He figured the talking would do Gold good, too. She seemed a little rattled.
Reyes and Burlingame loaded the old man into the helicopter. He lay on the floor of the Mi-17, still speaking with Gold. His face bore scars that looked like he’d been burned by grease splashed from a frying pan. Parson had wondered why so many Afghans suffered kitchen accidents. But then he learned the disfigurement came from leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease spread by the bite of a sand fly.
The PJs put nine other patients on the aircraft, even though the helicopter’s cargo compartment was not configured for a medical flight. It carried no stanchions for mounting stretchers, but at least it had plenty of room: The passenger version of the Mi-17 seated twenty-eight people. Reyes and Burlingame spread their patients on the floor and tried to make them as comfortable as possible. In all, they’d pulled six from the ruined mosque and treated a dozen other villagers for contusions and broken bones. Ten needed a doctor, so Parson decided to fly them back to Mazar.
He suspected a lot of other chopper crews were making the same decision, and he hoped the MASF wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Nothing he could do about that, though.
The setting sun glowed a burnt orange just above a distant ridge. Dying light deepened the reddish tint of mineral deposits along the slopes. The air grew chillier by the minute; coolness at dusk marked the hinge of seasons. And though the village seemed relatively safe, Parson did not want to remain here after dark.
Rashid stood outside the front of his aircraft, smoking. The crew chief and flight engineer waded through the carostan grass, looking up and inspecting the rotor blades. The copilot studied a chart.
“Let’s get the hell out of Dodge, Rashid,” Parson said. He’d used that Americanism often enough that the Afghan officer understood it.
Rashid flicked the cigarette butt with his thumb and middle finger. It arced away like a tracer round. Rashid put on his helmet, and with a vertical index finger, he made a rotary motion to signal his men. A good sign, Parson noted. When guys could communicate without talking, they were becoming a tight crew.
Gold strapped in beside Parson as the igniters started clicking inside the APU. It lit off with a turbine howl, and its exhaust wafted into the chopper.
“So what did you two find so much to talk about?” Parson shouted over the noise.
“He says he hates the Taliban,” Gold said.
“I bet they all say that when we save their asses.”
“Well, he says he hates the Taliban because they made him stop raising pigeons.”
“A man’s gotta have his pigeons,” Parson said. Then he put a gloved hand over hers for just a second, and he said, “Hey, are you all right?”
Gold pursed her lips and nodded her head. Parson didn’t buy it, but he chose not to press her further. Yelling in a helicopter probably wasn’t the way to have a conversation about post-traumatic stress. He wouldn’t have wanted careless questions about his own issues: Hey, flyboy, still seeing your loadmaster with his head cut off?
The main rotor began turning. Parson noted the rotor’s shadow moving across the ground just outside: one blade, two, three.
Suddenly:
“RPG!” Reyes shouted.
Parson felt a cracking boom. The blast seemed to crush his eardrums. Something knocked away his headset.
The world went white.
Stings nettled the back of Parson’s neck. The helicopter bounced, rocked. For a moment he heard nothing. But he knew there had been an explosion.
In blurred images, he saw the crew chief depress the trigger on his door gun. A cascade of brass rattled from the automatic weapon. The Afghan patients screamed and called to Allah.
Gold snapped open the clasp of her seat belt buckle. In a single motion, she brought up her M4 and clicked the fire mode selector. She jumped out the door without touching the three steps of the boarding ladder. Reyes and Burlingame leaped from the aircraft with their own rifles.
Parson’s bearings came back like gyroscopes reinitializing after a power loss. He unbuckled, drew his Beretta. Pops of gunfire sounded far, then near. Attackers shooting, the PJs returning fire.
He scrambled for the door. Something soft under his boots; he’d stepped on a patient. He ducked through the doorway and stumbled outside into the grass. He kneeled among the blades of carostan, tried to make himself invisible.
Rashid remained inside the cockpit, shouting orders in Pashto. Through the glass, Parson saw the crew struggling out of their harnesses. A bullet punched through the center windscreen. Minute cracks instantly spread outward from the hole, and the crazed glass went cloudy. Blood streaked across the inside of the windscreen. The flight engineer slumped forward.
Gold, Reyes, and Burlingame lay prone, firing. The carostan concealed them well. Parson saw little of Gold except her boot heels, her rifle muzzle bouncing with each round, and her ejected cartridges spinning end over end.
“Cover the other side of the helo,” Reyes told Burlingame. As Reyes spoke, he fired two rounds at a turbaned figure running toward the helicopter with an AK. The man went down.
Burlingame rose and dashed around the aircraft. Parson followed. The PJ dropped into the grass and did not fire. Blood spurted from an exit wound at the back of his thigh.
Not this again, Parson thought. Dear God, not again. He pressed himself as low against the ground as he could, scanned for the enemy. A man with a grenade launcher kneeled in the grass down the hill. Maybe forty yards away. Long shot for a handgun.
Parson fired three rounds from his pistol. Pulled the trigger a fourth time. Nothing happened. Jammed.
The jihadist with the grenade launcher was down in the grass. Hit, maybe. Parson struggled to clear his weapon. Slapped the bottom of the magazine. Racked the slide. Fired again.
Rounds whacked into the side of the Mi-17. From where, Parson couldn’t tell.
Grenade guy raised up on unsteady knees. Still not disabled, then. Parson dropped his Beretta, reached for Burlingame’s M4. The jihadist leveled the grenade launcher.
Parson opened up with the rifle. The terrorist in his sights crumpled, fired the grenade launcher. Smoke wisped from the launcher’s breech as the man fell. The grenade flew wild, arced over the helicopter, and exploded behind it.
Rashid appeared under the tail boom. He shot at two insurgents approaching from the rear of the Mi-17. One dropped. The other turned back.
The shooting died down. Parson held his breath, kept his weapon raised, waited for another attack. None came. But under the whine of the APU, Parson heard screams from within the town. One shot echoed from among the houses. A moment later, two more.
Parson wondered what was going on. Why hadn’t they been overrun? A lightly armed aircrew on an exposed hillside m
ade for an easy target. But the firefight seemed to have ended, though something was still happening down the hill.
He glanced over his shoulder at the aircraft. The RPG had torn open the right engine cowling, ripped away the accessory gearbox, and damaged the main rotor. The Mi-17 wasn’t going anywhere soon.
“Colonel Parson?” Gold called from the other side of the chopper.
“I’m good, Sophia,” he shouted. “You?”
“Yes, sir. But the flight engineer is dead. The copilot’s wounded.”
Parson checked Burlingame. The injured PJ was trying to pull something out of his medical kit.
“I got gauze pads in here,” he said. “Put some pressure on both sides of the wound.”
Parson found the pads and opened them. He placed them over the entrance and exit wounds, and he pressed down. Blood soaked through the pads and into the fabric of Parson’s flight gloves. The PJ grimaced but did not cry out.
“Reyes,” Parson called. “Your buddy’s hit.”
“How bad?” Reyes shouted from inside the helicopter.
“Shot in the leg.”
“Stop the bleeding as best you can,” Reyes yelled. “The preacher’s hit bad in here.”
Parson found a triangular bandage in Burlingame’s medical ruck. He tied it around the PJ’s leg, over both gauze pads. By now the dressings were saturated with blood.
“Just put fresh bandages over the old ones,” Burlingame said. He spoke like a man overtired. Parson supposed the blood loss was starting to affect him. Red smears darkened the grass beaten down around the PJ. The reddened blades of carostan reminded Parson of the blood spoor he’d once followed when tracking a wounded elk.
He tied on more gauze pads. The bleeding slowed. “Are you going to be all right if I make a radio call?” Parson asked.
“Yeah, just leave me my rifle.”
Burlingame sat up, still in obvious pain. Parson handed him the weapon. Rashid walked up to Parson, removed his helmet.
“Please get help for my men,” he said. The Afghan pilot’s eyes glistened. The lines in his face seemed deeper.
