by Tom Young
Rashid throttled up. Parson felt a rocking motion as the Mi-17 lifted itself off the ground. As Rashid climbed and banked onto a heading to follow the gunships, Parson could not help trying to watch the instruments. He was not able to see much of the panel over the flight engineer’s shoulder, but when the engineer leaned forward, Parson noted the HSI’s compass card spinning with the turn. The helicopter lacked the modern computer displays found in newer American aircraft. It had old-fashioned round dials—steam gauges, as pilots called them—set into a panel painted that shade of barf green the Russians liked so much for aircraft interiors. Every switch was labeled in Cyrillic.
Rashid leveled off just underneath scattered clouds that were dissipating rapidly. The forecast called for clear conditions the rest of the day. The remaining clouds obscured a few of the mountaintops, but that didn’t matter. Parson and Rashid planned a route that cut through passes instead of overflying ridgelines. The course would avoid the known threat areas, or at least minimize exposure to them.
The tactics binder showed where the enemy might have shoulder-fired missiles, antiaircraft artillery, or rocket-propelled grenades. For each weapon, the classified text gave odds with a cold algebraic symbology: P(h). P(k). Probability of hit. Probability of kill.
Parson knew better than most what those weapons could do to an aircraft. But he did not dwell on that now. He wanted to keep Rashid’s confidence level up. So Parson focused on what went well, which included decent weather and a smooth ride. With no wind roiling across the slopes, the chopper flew as if sliding along sheets of silk. Such lack of turbulence was rare in Afghanistan. Parson pressed his talk button and said, “A good day to fly, huh, buddy?”
“A good,” Rashid said.
As the helicopter flew over a dry, uninhabited plain, the crew chief peered out and swiveled his door gun. Reyes leaned back in his seat with his eyes closed, dozing as if he had not a care in the world. He propped his feet, one boot crossed over the other, on a stack of rice bags labeled UN WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME. Gold looked through the circular window above her seat and watched the terrain roll past. She wore a pair of dark sunglasses with a Smith & Wesson logo on the frame. On her right shoulder, her infrared-feedback U.S. flag patch gave off a slick sheen. The Army-style flag patch had its star field to the upper right, which looked backward to Parson. But its main purpose was to show up on night vision devices, not to look spiffy.
After a few minutes, the barrens below gave way to tended land. A wheat field flowed underneath, followed by a walled compound, then a well, then a cemetery with three open graves. A mound of freshly turned soil stood by each pit. Shadows filled the graves themselves; the holes in the earth appeared to contain nothing but blackness of infinite depth.
Rashid banked over a valley. Parson remembered that crease in the terrain as one of the turn points they’d marked on the VFR chart. Movement caught his eye: Down at treetop level, a pair of F/A-18s flew low through the valley like two pintails swooping along a river channel. Parson wondered what target they sought.
Gold turned away from the window and looked to Parson. “What can you tell me about this refugee camp where we’re going?” she asked.
“Civilian agencies set it up just a few days ago,” Parson said. “I haven’t even been in this province before.”
After what he’d seen in Ghandaki, he hoped the camps would provide some security for quake victims. Perhaps there would be safety in numbers by gathering refugees together instead of letting them fend for themselves in remote villages. If the camps needed to stay in operation for more than a week or two, maybe the Afghan National Army could guard them. Like the Afghan Air Force, the ANA still had a lot to learn, but Parson figured they ought to be able to handle sentry duty.
The flight continued through a mountain pass, along another valley, down a stream cut. Parson caught glimpses of the Hinds as they flew close escort. The gunships made S-turns along the route ahead of the Mi-17. The aircraft riding shotgun in front of him reminded Parson of C-130 missions he’d flown here, as well as in Iraq and Bosnia. Warthog attack jets would fly alongside and ahead of the Hercules, crisscrossing and banking in a show of force. The tactic usually intimidated bad guys into keeping their heads down, but occasionally some knucklehead would be dumb enough to shoot at the jets. The Warthogs would roll into a hard turn, come back around with nose guns spinning and smoking. No more bad guys.
Rashid’s voice on the interphone brought Parson back to the present. “Ten minutes,” the Afghan pilot said in English.
“Copy that,” Parson said.
“Leader cannot talk camp,” Rashid added.
“How’s that?”
Gold spoke in Pashto, and Rashid answered. Then Gold said, “The lead Mi-35 pilot can’t raise the refugee camp radio.”
He’s probably on the wrong frequency, Parson thought, or maybe they just can’t understand him. Parson unzipped a lower leg pocket of his flight suit and pulled out a comm sheet. He looked up the call sign and freq for the new camp. From the call sign, he guessed USAID or some other American agency manned the radio.
“Put me on UHF, will you?” Parson asked.
Rashid gave a command in Pashto, and the flight engineer reached forward to one of the panels. Parson pressed his talk button. The whine of his headset’s sidetone told Parson he was transmitting on air and no longer just on interphone.
“Clara Barton,” he called, “Golay flight is two Hinds and an Mi-17 inbound your station. How copy?”
No answer. Only the whine of radios, the rush of wind, the pounding of rotors.
“Clara Barton, Clara Barton,” Parson transmitted, “Golay flight is ten minutes out.”
Nothing but static. Parson met Gold’s eyes, shrugged. The corners of her mouth shifted in a gesture Parson took for puzzlement or worry. He tried the call again.
Still no answer.
Finally the squelch broke, and Parson heard voices off mike. Babbles of Pashto. Shouts. Then a click, and dead silence.
6
Sweat beaded on Gold’s upper lip as she considered what she’d just heard. Please let it be an aftershock, she thought. But the panic in those transmitted voices suggested something worse. The only words she’d made out were no, Allah, and mercy.
“Do we land?” Rashid asked in English.
“Let’s take a look first,” Parson said. Then he added, “Sophia, tell the gunship pilots something’s wrong at the camp. I don’t know if they heard what we just heard.”
Parson put her on UHF, and she pressed her talk button. “Golay lead,” she said in Pashto, “this is Colonel Parson’s interpreter. The camp may be under attack. He wants to recon before we land.”
“Golay lead copies,” the pilot answered. “What are our rules of engagement?”
Gold pulled her boom mike away from her mouth. She shouted to Parson over the wind and engines, “They want to know the ROE.”
“Weapons tight,” Parson said.
Good call, Gold thought. It meant the gunships wouldn’t fire unless they identified a clearly hostile target. There were a lot of friendlies and civilians down there. She put her mike back into place and relayed Parson’s order.
“Roger,” the gunship pilot said in a thick accent. Then, in his own language, “We copy weapons tight.”
These gunship guys spoke even less English than Rashid. Gold knew that in the Mi-35 training program, the Afghans talked with their Czech instructors in Russian. She considered it a small miracle that any of them managed to communicate anything at any time, let alone while flying high-performance aircraft armed with deadly weapons.
The Mi-17 turned and descended. “I see camp,” Rashid said.
Gold stood, tried to see what she could through the windows and front windscreen. One of the Mi-35s flashed by. It flew just a few feet lower than the Mi-17, and Gold saw the helmeted pilots, one seated behind the other in the tandem cockpit. The gunship banked and descended, then disappeared from view.
Rashid tur
ned as well. Gold didn’t know much about helicopter tactics, but she guessed the changes in heading and altitude would make the choppers harder to hit with a missile or RPG. During the turn, the refugee camp appeared in the windscreen. People ran among the tents. Smoke churned upward from a blackened spot on the ground. As the smoke rose, breeze caught it and stretched it into a black arc across the sky. Gold looked down at the flames; she couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw a truck or some other kind of vehicle burning.
“Clara Barton, Clara Barton,” Parson called, “Golay flight.”
Still no response.
Gold braced herself at the side window nearest her. The other Mi-35 streaked low across the ground.
“Golay Two, break left!” the lead gunship called in Pashto.
An instant later, Gold saw why. The smoke trail of a shoulder-launched missile corkscrewed a diagonal path in front of the M-35 below. Brilliant globules of light, so bright they hurt Gold’s eyes, rippled from the gunship. Defensive flares, she realized, hot enough to confuse a heat-seeking missile.
The heat-seeker missed by mere yards. The Mi-35 banked hard and punched off more flares. The aircraft spewed fire, looked vaguely like a giant spawning insect. Gold watched the gunship climb and turn. She heard one of its pilots ask, still in Pashto, “Did you see where that came from?”
“Ho,” the other Mi-35 called. Yes. “I have them,” the pilot added.
Gold did not see the other gunship. She struggled to follow the air-to-ground battle developing around and beneath her, but she couldn’t keep all the combatants in view. Ground forces usually fought in two dimensions, but aircraft fought in three.
Reyes stood up. Like Gold, he moved to one window, then another to watch the fight.
Rashid turned his helicopter again and then said on interphone, “There. Some men on the road from the camp.”
Gold moved to a window on the opposite side of the helicopter and saw about a dozen insurgents on a dirt path. They had apparently jumped out of the two white pickup trucks stopped nearby. She still couldn’t see the other gunship, but the insurgents could. They tried to scatter. Too late.
The second Mi-35 came into Gold’s view, flying so low it seemed nearly on the ground, guns smoking.
Geysers of dust erupted among the enemy fighters. Some insurgents emerged from the dust cloud running. Others, caught by the rounds, disintegrated into flying limbs. The gunship zoomed across the road, and its rotor wash swirled the dust kicked up by its own fire.
“All right!” Parson said. “Get some.”
Rashid seemed to watch something intently. He leaned toward his side window, nearly touched the glass with his helmet.
“Cease fire,” Rashid said in English. Then he repeated the call in Pashto.
“What?” Parson asked.
“Say again,” the lead gunship called.
“Cease fire,” Rashid said. “There are childs with them.”
“You gotta be shitting me,” Parson said.
“Look,” Rashid said. He banked left and pointed. Gold moved again, this time to see through the windscreen. Two small figures sprinted away from the road. Larger men ran behind them. Just before the Mi-17 flew over them, Gold saw one of the men chase down a boy and grab him by the shirt. Instant human shield.
“We are off the target,” the gunship lead said. “Weapons safe.”
Even through the official terminology and the warble of UHF, Gold could hear the pain in that voice. Had he just blown up some children?
“I come around,” Rashid said. He began descending, and he turned until he had reversed course. Ahead, insurgents and at least three boys ran for cover.
“What are you doing?” Parson asked.
“I fly past,” Rashid said. “Make them run. Maybe childs escape.”
The Mi-17 leveled just a few meters above the ground. The helicopter flew so fast now that the bare earth underneath it flowed like molten iron. The bad guys out in front threw themselves into the road ditch.
Except for one. The man raised an AK and fired as he disappeared under the nose. Gold heard three impacts on the underside of the helicopter like stones striking the wheel wells of a Humvee speeding down a mountain path.
She looked forward at the crew, over to the side at Parson, toward the back at Reyes. All appeared okay. The bullets, she supposed, had penetrated the floor and buried themselves in the rice bags.
Rashid climbed, then began another turn.
“That’s enough,” Parson said. “We won’t get that lucky again.”
“What can we do?” Rashid asked in Pashto. Gold translated for Parson, though she suspected Rashid asked a rhetorical question.
“Damn little,” Parson said. “They’ll disappear before we can get a Quick Reaction Force in here. Just watch which way they go.” The Mi-35s broke off their escort, flew among the mountains in an apparent effort to track the insurgents.
Reyes leaned across a stack of rice bags to look through a window. “I bet they hurt some civilians at the camp,” he said. “Sir, let’s get on the ground. Somebody might be bleeding out right now.”
“Okay,” Parson said. “Rashid, give me a flyover of the camp. Put it down right outside the perimeter if it looks safe.”
Rashid rolled the Mi-17 toward the collection of tents. Two ravens, black as the inside of a rifle muzzle, wheeled over the camp. They soared out of sight to the left. When the birds came back into view, they almost filled the windscreen. Gold nearly ducked; for a second it appeared the ravens would hit the glass. But in the last instant they folded their wings and dropped like shards of obsidian. She remembered Parson’s stories of bird strikes: If birds see you in time, they’ll dive. If they don’t, they’ll splatter themselves across your windscreen or even punch through.
Gold’s mouth tasted faintly of stale milk; her stomach churned. Her palms grew moist. All the banking, climbing, and diving made her a little airsick. And she worried about what she’d seen on the ground.
She sat on a troop seat and buckled in. She put her rifle across her lap and held on to the steel tubing of the seat frame, then inhaled a long breath through her nostrils. She didn’t want to throw up in the helicopter and subject everyone to the odor, and she hadn’t brought an airsick bag. Most chopper flights in the past just took her straight from point A to point B, firebase to firebase. Sometimes the helo flew a low-level run, but none of this tactical maneuvering stuff.
Gold swallowed hard, exhaled. Her gut began to settle, and she thought she could manage not to vomit if Rashid didn’t yank the chopper around anymore.
Fortunately, Rashid flew straight and level for a few minutes. Parson leaned toward the windscreen, and she heard him say on interphone, “I don’t see any bad guys down there.”
The chopper slowed, and Gold figured Rashid was looking for a place to land. She wondered what they’d find on the ground. It seemed pretty clear Black Crescent had just carried out another raid. And this was miles from Ghandaki, the site of the first attack. The terrorists must own some resources, Gold thought, vehicles and drivers. Either that or they operated a number of separate cells around the country.
Now some civilians who’d already lost their homes had just lost so much more. With terrorism overlaid onto natural disaster, misery squared and cubed itself like explosives in a roadside bomb. Four times the compound, sixteen times the hurt. Exponential suffering.
Gold felt a queasiness at the back of her throat. Not airsickness now, but a trace of that old anxiety again. Brought on by the needless cruelty she witnessed. When people got hurt through an act of God, she could reconcile it. Chalk it up to mysterious ways, things beyond her understanding. But here was an act of man.
* * *
Rashid landed upwind of the burning truck. Through the flames, Parson saw the flatbed carried bags of something, but he could not identify the cargo. When one of the bags burned open, the contents spilled and ignited. The stuff flowed out in a glittering cascade of fire. Flour, maybe.
Parson saw no driver in the cab, but anyone inside that truck would have been dead by now. Flames boiled through the broken windshield, over the hood, around the fenders warping in the heat. The tires melted off the rims. Parson wondered how those bastards started the fire. Maybe with an RPG.
The smell reminded him of his own burning aircraft, damaged by a terrorist bomb the year before. He’d managed to crash-land more or less in one piece, but a lot of the patients and crew on that aeromedical flight never got out.
That fire still burned inside his soul. Now he was angry. Attacking a refugee camp violated every custom, every law and tradition of every culture. To Parson, a natural order extended to all things, even man-made objects. His own profession provided examples: An airplane always sought the speed for which its controls were trimmed. Let go of the yoke, and the plane would fly that speed. Didn’t matter if the plane had to climb or dive to achieve that speed. Some rules allowed no exceptions. So Parson could hardly assign words to the crime unfolding before him. It was something, quite literally, unspeakable.
Reyes grabbed his rifle and medical ruck. He bounded from the helicopter before the crew chief even installed the boarding steps. The PJ hit the ground flat-footed, and he left deep boot prints in the soil. Gold got out behind him, and the two ran along coils of concertina wire at the camp’s perimeter until they found an opening.
When Parson caught up with them inside the camp, it seemed the concertina encircled some earthly cantonment of hell. Bodies lay scattered among the tents. Wounded men and women writhed and screamed. Laments pierced Parson’s eardrums in languages he could not understand. He had seen brutal acts before, individual crimes, but never a visitation of atrocities like this.
Reyes kneeled beside an Afghan man who’d apparently taken a round in the chest. The pararescueman donned a headset connected to the PRC-152 radio in his tactical vest. With one hand he held a wad of hemostatic dressing on the Afghan’s wound, and with the other he pressed a push-to-talk switch already tacky with blood.
