by Tom Young
Rashid and Aamir had to navigate the old-fashioned way, with a paper chart, NDB bearings, and VOR radials. Parson felt tempted just to hand up the computer, but that would have turned into a crutch. He was supposed to let them use what was installed in the aircraft.
When the helo lifted off, it flew smoothly for several seconds, and Parson began to hope the forecast and his instincts were wrong. Then a gust slammed the aircraft as if it had flown into a wall. Parson’s seat belt dug into his gut. His headset slipped, and he had to readjust it over his ears. The Mi-17 rose through air filled with stones and potholes.
Aamir was flying, and not doing a bad job for the conditions. He held attitude and rotor pitch for the climb, and he didn’t try to chase a certain speed. If you couldn’t stay out of turbulence, at least you shouldn’t make it worse by yanking around your aircraft.
When the chopper leveled, still rocked by a tormented sky, Parson noticed a whiskey-stained haze softening all shapes on the ground. At lower altitudes, enough dust rode the wind that it colored the air itself.
The Mi-17 flew as a single ship; the Hinds were escorting other missions deemed higher risk. That was too bad. Parson liked having the gunships close by—not so much for their guns as for their cabins. If one chopper got forced down, another could land and pick up its crew. Good insurance when you could get it, but making do in less-than-ideal situations was just part of military life.
Parson waited for the opaque chatter to clear from the interphone and radios. Then he pressed his talk switch and said, “Good job, copilot.” He knew Aamir spoke no English, but he wanted to encourage him anyway. Rashid uttered about four words in Pashto. Translating the compliment, Parson assumed. Aamir did not respond.
A lunar landscape passed below. Dry seams and folds of hills flowed underneath the helicopter. Eventually, a ribbon of green relieved the lifelessness on the ground; grass and brush marked the course of a mountain creek that meandered along a valley.
Rashid had his chart out now. Good. And Aamir fiddled with the nav radios. Not so good. He should have let Rashid do that for him. Sometimes these guys didn’t make enough distinction between the pilot flying and the pilot monitoring. The PF was supposed to fly the aircraft; nothing else. The PM was supposed to do everything else: handle the radios, navigate, work out systems problems with the engineer.
Parson decided not to say anything. Aamir wouldn’t understand him anyway, and Rashid should take care of it himself. Parson wanted to do his job as an adviser without undercutting Rashid’s authority as aircraft commander. And rattling along in this damned turbulence didn’t make it easier to work on the fine points.
The two urban rescue guys looked sick. Reyes twisted in his seat to scan outside, his rifle sling wrapped around his arm, the weapon’s muzzle pointed to the floor. Rashid and his crew kept talking in Pashto. Although Parson had no idea what they were chatting about, he hoped Rashid was saying “Keep your paws off the radios.” However, that shouldn’t have taken this much discussion.
Parson checked his moving map. The airplane cursor crawled in an easterly direction, but not quite the heading he would have expected. He hadn’t plugged in all the waypoints; Rashid knew how to navigate, and Parson didn’t want to insult his intelligence.
Rashid and Aamir were still talking. Sharif, in the flight engineer’s seat, fell silent. In the back, the crew chief kept looking toward the cockpit. He seemed more worried about the pilots than about manning his gun. What the hell was all the yammering about? Parson knew the Afghans had a joke about advisers like him: If you speak three languages, you’re trilingual. If you speak two, you’re bilingual. If you speak only one, you’re American. Now he wished he’d never let Gold out of his sight. A bonehead idea from the start.
“Hey, Rashid,” Parson asked on interphone. “What’s wrong?”
No answer for a moment. Then Rashid said, “Wrong radial, I think.”
He had to be kidding. To Parson, an old navigator down to his marrow, the first step toward not being an idiot was knowing where you were. Now he was ticked off at those two—and at himself for not backing them up. They should have worked out an MRR—minimum risk routing—and done a good study of that route. Rashid knew how to do that; he’d done it a hundred times.
“They gotta be bullshitting me,” Parson said, off interphone. “Whiskey tango foxtrot.”
Reyes turned around. “What’s the matter, sir?” he asked.
Still off interphone, Parson answered him: “I think they’re lost.”
Reyes frowned. It occurred to Parson that you didn’t need to be a pilot to know this wasn’t supposed to happen. Ever. But if it did, there was only one thing to do—climb and confess. He unbuckled his seat belt, got up, and looked over the flight engineer’s shoulder.
“Rashid,” Parson said, this time on interphone, “tell him to leave the radios the fuck alone and get some altitude.”
In the next instant, the helicopter banked so aggressively, Parson felt himself grow light in his boots. The crew shouted phrases that told him nothing. His mind struggled to understand what was happening.
Rashid grabbed the cyclic on the pilot’s side. He was fighting his copilot on the controls.
Aamir gripped the cyclic on the copilot’s side with his left hand, drew a Makarov pistol.
“Tah yaw bandee yeh,” he yelled.
Sharif grabbed Aamir’s pistol arm, pulled it down toward the floor. The helicopter turned hard to the left. Parson lost his footing and stumbled to his knees. Felt his kneecaps whack against steel. Then the Mi-17 veered right.
The Makarov fired. Sharif screamed as blood spewed from his thigh.
Parson groped for a handhold. Struggled against the turbulence and the pain in his knees to get up.
The chopper skimmed just above a rock chimney that towered over a gorge. More stone spires loomed ahead. Rashid punched at his copilot, wrested the cyclic away from him. Then Rashid banked to avoid the rock formation. Sharif slammed Aamir’s arm into the center console, and the Makarov clattered to the floor.
The two pilots were fighting over which direction to fly, Parson realized. Aamir wasn’t trying to crash the chopper; he could have done that pretty quickly. He apparently wanted to commandeer it. Without Gold here, Parson couldn’t tell what exactly was going on. A jihadist had once tried to bring down Parson’s C-5 Galaxy. The man was a patient on that aeromedical flight with Gold, an Afghan thought to be a trustworthy police officer. When allowed into the cockpit, he’d pulled fire handles to shut down the engines.
But this was something else. Parson could figure out the details later, but whatever it was, this madness had to stop right now. He unsnapped his pistol holster, tried to stand. Turbulence punched the chopper again and sent Parson reeling backward.
The nose of the Mi-17 dipped. Aamir grabbed the cyclic and tried to yank it to the left. The aircraft skimmed along a valley floor as the pilots fought. Ahead, an evergreen stood by a bend in a stream.
Parson fell against the cargo of food. He drew his Beretta and pushed himself away from the stacks of rations. Behind him, one of the civilians shouted, “What’s happening?” The dog yowled.
The helicopter banked left, turned hard right, yawed. Something smacked into its chin. Absurdly, Parson caught a whiff of Himalayan cedar. He realized they’d skimmed the top branches of that tree.
He braced himself against the flight deck bulkhead, brought up his pistol with both hands. Parson leveled the weapon at Aamir, thought to punch a round right through that bastard’s helmet, through his brain, and out the other side. But just as he placed the joint of his finger to the trigger, the copilot did a strange thing. He took his hands off the controls, raised his arms. Tears streamed down his face. He uttered syllables in Pashto that sounded like pleading.
Parson took his finger off the trigger but still pointed his pistol at Aamir. Maybe the man had just gone crazy.
Whatever the hell had just happened, Parson knew Rashid couldn’t explain it now.
The Mi-17 teetered on the ragged edge of controlled flight, and Rashid fought to recover it. The chopper pitched down, banked, and then climbed. It veered toward the valley wall, a steep rim of mountains. Rashid pulled up hard to avoid an outcropping.
Too hard. The Mi-17 shuddered and pitched up higher. Rashid dropped the collective lever. The helicopter leveled and slowed, just above a rock ledge. It began descending toward the ledge.
Rashid twisted the grip throttle on the collective, adding power. The engines screamed. The chopper kept descending.
What the hell was the problem? At this moment Parson couldn’t help Rashid, could only stay out of his way and try to hold the weapon on Aamir. He wasn’t even sure what was wrong, until he remembered an aerodynamic weirdness about helicopters: settling with power. If a helo descended too quickly, the chopper’s own downwash kept the rotor blades from generating lift.
Satan himself might have designed this special hell for pilots. All your instincts told you to add power. And more power made it worse. Right now the aircraft had the flight characteristics of a brick. The only way to recover was to fly out of the vortex. And that required altitude Rashid didn’t have.
The Mi-17 hit the rock ledge so hard, Parson collapsed to his knees. His kneecaps still hurt from the first time he’d fallen, and the pain made him nauseated. Rotor blades disintegrated as they crashed into a wall of stone just above the ledge. Metal splinters and rock chips gouged the windscreen.
Parson turned to his right, scanned for fire. No flames, no fuel odor. He still held on to his Beretta. His headset cord coiled around his shoulder. He could see Rashid and Sharif reaching across the panels, shutting down the aircraft, jabbering in Pashto.
One of the civilian passengers held his leg, cursed. The other civilian peered outside, perhaps worried about enemy nearby. The crew chief looked stunned. He leaned on his weapon, swiveled the door gun on its mount. The engines’ turbines whined down to silence. Parson heard groans and profanities. Reyes unbuckled his seat belt, checked his rifle. The dog whimpered in its kennel, trembling.
Then for a moment, no one spoke. No sound but the moan of wind as it coursed over the ridge and swirled around the wreckage. A gust rocked the bent cabin of the Mi-17. Parson felt it shear through the open door. The wind caressed his cheek and tousled his hair.
An unseen specter seemed to touch him, mock him, whisper threats and condemnations. He had heard Gold talk about Muslim mythology, jinns and spirits. Now one of them swept through the Russian-built helicopter, and its passing left Parson amid his worst memories and greatest fears.
11
All five of Gold’s senses worked, but not together. The inputs did not compute. She heard muffled shouts, grinding noises. The Cougar filled with dust. The dust carried a burning smell, but Gold saw no fire. She had a metallic, chemical taste in her mouth. Where did that come from? She held on to her seat; she could feel its frame through her gloves. She felt pain from… somewhere. Her head. Her head hurt.
She realized her helmet had slammed against a bulkhead inside the vehicle. Her mind began to clear, the facts to connect. They’d run over a roadside bomb. Would an ambush follow?
Now she recognized the voices. The loudest was Blount’s: “Gunner, you all right?”
No answer, but the gunner’s boots moved around on the turret stand. He was still on his feet.
More voices on the radio: “IED! Two’s hit.”
“Cover the left!”
“Got it.”
The Cougar rested at an angle. It must have rolled into the ditch. Lyndsey got up. Ann appeared unconscious. Gold unbuckled, clicked the fire selector on her rifle.
She looked out the window, saw no enemy. From the radio, she knew the gunners on the undamaged vehicles watched for bad guys. She heard no firing, so she went to the back of the vehicle, pulled a quick-release pin, and kicked open the ramp.
The blast had carved a crater that could have swallowed a small pickup. The pit of stones and fresh soil looked almost like something at a construction site. Sometimes insurgents used a particularly evil type of bomb known as an explosively formed penetrator, which could send molten copper right through armor. Gold doubted this bomb had been an EFP. Still, she was amazed the Cougar hadn’t overturned. More importantly, the interior hadn’t been breached. Evidently the V-shaped hull had divided and deflected the force of the blast.
Gold stepped down the ramp, still a little unsteady on her feet. She felt numb, tried to gather her thoughts. Glanced up at the gunner. He remained at his weapon, but he looked woozy. The man leaned back in the turret. Blood ran from his temple. He wiped at it and examined his fingers.
Marines from the other two vehicles ran toward Gold. Others stopped, pointed their rifles left and right of the road. Still no shots fired. So it could have been a lot worse, she thought. Occasionally, terrorists would rain fire on a vehicle after the bomb had hit it. Gold supposed this road was so seldom traveled that insurgents didn’t bother to man a kill zone. They probably hadn’t planted a command-detonated bomb, just a pressure plate left waiting for something to drive over it.
“Are you all right, Sergeant Major?” a Marine asked.
“I think so,” Gold said. “Check the gunner. One of the lance corporals inside might need some help, too.”
More grinding and crunching came from underneath the vehicle. Sounded like a blown-out transmission. The wheels didn’t move at all. Even if they had moved, the Cougar could not have gone far. Some of the tires were burned and torn away.
“Shut it down,” Blount said to the driver. “This thing ain’t going nowhere.” The engine clattered to a stop.
A corpsman walked up the ramp and entered the vehicle. He was the same medic who’d treated the wounded when Rashid’s helicopter got hit at Ghandaki.
Gold placed her weapon back on SAFE, then followed the medic back in to check on Ann. She sat up now. No blood, no obvious injury. The corpsman kneeled in front of her. He shone a light into her eyes, then held up two fingers on his left hand.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Lance Corporal?” he asked.
“Two.”
“What day is it?”
“Monday.”
“Good. Keep your head still. Follow my fingers with your eyes.”
He moved his hand up, down, left, right. Ann’s eyes, a little bloodshot but apparently working, tracked the movement.
“TBI?” Gold asked.
“Too early to tell,” the corpsman said. “She’s all right from what I can see now.”
Gold realized he was right about diagnosing too early. She knew of soldiers who’d had their bells rung by roadside bombs but escaped with no immediate impairment. Weeks later, however, traumatic brain injury cropped up. Problems with memory and concentration, headaches, depression.
The gunner climbed down from the turret. The corpsman cleaned the cut on the Marine’s head and placed an adhesive bandage over it. Then he checked the gunner’s responses the same way he’d checked Ann’s.
“I think you’ve had a concussion,” the corpsman said. “You’re lucky that’s all you got.”
“I know it,” the gunner said.
“We’ll get you guys back to Mazar,” Gold said. “You need to take it easy after a knock on the head like that.”
“I’m good to go, Sergeant Major,” the gunner said.
“Me, too,” Ann said. “Let’s get this thing done.”
Gold looked at the Marines around her. She admired their willingness to press on, but she wondered if it was smart. The corpsman had done his best, but if Ann and the gunner suffered from concussions, a doctor needed to look at them.
“Can you hang with it?” Blount asked. He twisted around in his seat, looked at the gunner, the Lionesses, and Gold. Clearly, he wanted to keep going.
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant,” Ann said.
“Affirmative,” the gunner said.
Was it worth the risk? Gold knew she’d have to make the decision herself. She’d re
ceived approval for this mission because Parson and officers above him trusted her judgment. The whole point of combat: Stop the enemy—and not let him stop you. If this mission was worth starting, it was worth finishing.
“It’ll be tight,” Blount said, “but we can get everybody in the two good Cougars.”
A jingle truck sputtered toward the three halted MRAPs. The truck was the only vehicle Gold had seen since they’d turned onto this road. To her, the flatbed looked bizarrely festive with its ribbons, decorative chains, plastic flowers, medallions, and reflectors that adorned the sides. For whatever reason, truck drivers in this part of the world dressed their vehicles like automotive clowns. Blue smoke chugged from a corroded exhaust pipe that nearly dragged the ground. Tarps covered its cargo. For all Gold knew, the truck could have carried canned goods, bricks, or artillery rounds for the Taliban.
The driver stared straight ahead as he steered around the MRAPs. He seemed to want no eye contact with any of the Americans. The jingle truck rocked on its rusted, leaf-spring suspension as it receded into the distance.
“You can bet our boy there will tell somebody we’re here,” Blount said. “I suspect he’s picking up a radio right now.”
Blount had a point. Whether the team turned back or pressed on, Gold thought, they needed to do one or the other quickly. And after this morning, the bad guys would know they’d come this way. The route back might present more danger than the way forward.
She hoped she wasn’t making people take chances for a fool’s errand. But the tip from the women at the refugee camp represented her best hope for progress. It might actually lead to something useful. Gold remembered the car bombing of a hospital in Logar Province back in 2011. She’d been stateside at the time, but she’d followed the intel reports. Not only did the Taliban deny responsibility, they condemned the attack. Very unusual. Had that been Black Crescent’s debut? If rifts existed among the insurgents, the coalition needed to exploit them. Now.
