by Tom Young
“Are you two sure you’re all right?” Gold asked.
“I’m good,” Ann said.
“Semper fi,” the gunner said.
“Then let’s saddle up,” Gold said. “Thank you.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Blount said. “We don’t stop for no firecracker buried in the dirt.”
Blount and the Marines from the disabled MRAP boarded the other two Cougars. Gold squeezed into the lead vehicle with Ann and Lyndsey. She wanted to keep an eye on Ann and make sure the injured Lioness got a seat. At the moment, though, Ann looked fine. Gold sat on the floor and balanced her rifle on the heel of its stock to keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction. The bag of sugar rested beside her; it had come through the IED blast without breaking open. Gold took a little satisfaction that she’d remembered to bring the sugar from the damaged MRAP.
She couldn’t help thinking about what might have happened if they’d taken lighter vehicles. More than likely, most would have died. The survivors would have been disfigured and maimed for life. Gold had visited blast victims at Walter Reed and Bethesda, and she’d been awed by their grit as they faced years of painful rehabilitation and surgery. She offered a silent prayer of thanks as the two remaining Cougars started moving.
The grade of the road grew steeper, and the vehicles wallowed through another stream that bisected their path. Gold checked her map. She thought that creek might be the one the women had called Goat’s Gut. Beyond the stream, corn grew along both sides of the road so close that the drying leaves and tassels brushed the Cougars’ windows. Gold tensed; the cornfield made another good place for an ambush. But when no ambush came, she relaxed enough for the corn to remind her of vegetable gardens in New England and farms outside Fort Sill and Fort Campbell. It was late in the season, and the rustling field stood ready for harvest.
As the team climbed deeper into the hills, they met no other trucks, encountered no more pedestrians. Gold had never traveled this route before, so she didn’t know if the absence of traffic was unusual. Maybe the IED had scared everybody off the road. By some means Westerners could not understand—not even Gold—Afghan villagers seemed to communicate all events instantly. Most owned no phones or computers, but they always knew what was happening in their districts. Whether they’d tell an American soldier, however, was another matter.
After several more miles of fields, barren rock, and a thinned-out pine forest, the Cougars slowed to a crawl.
“Up ahead,” Blount said.
Gold crouched to look forward through the windshield. Nestled into a cove in the hills she saw a village of about six homes. The wood-latticed structures were made mainly of stone, with rough planking and thatch for roofs. A gray tabby prowled among boulders between two of the huts. A rooster flew from the cat’s approach and alighted atop one of the houses. At another home, a white flag fluttered from a rough-hewn tree limb that served as a pole.
The white flag was not a signal of surrender. It was the banner of the Taliban.
* * *
On his knees in the cabin of the downed helicopter, Parson held his pistol ready. His legs hurt like hell from when he’d fallen during the crash landing. He sniffed again for spilled fuel, smelled only normal engine odors. Rashid killed the battery switch, and the interphone went dead. With not even static on the circuit now, Parson tore off his headset and pitched it onto the troop seats by his helmet bag. The Afghans shouted in Pashto.
“What the hell just happened, Rashid?” Parson yelled.
Rashid barked a command, apparently an order for silence. Then he said, “Lieutenant Aamir want to give you to ransom.”
A chill went through Parson. Not caused by the rising wind, but by stirrings of rage. As a lieutenant colonel, an adviser to the Afghan Air Force no less, he would have made one hell of a prize. The military would not have paid ransom for him, but the insurgents didn’t know that. One group might have sold him to another. Or perhaps they’d have simply murdered him on video. No wonder that bastard flew off course. He’d never been lost; he was just heading for a different destination.
Parson had narrowly escaped a beheading on camera a few years ago. The memory still gave him nightmares. And this son of a bitch had just tried to deliver him to a terrorist’s blade. An animal fury overcame Parson. He scrambled to his feet, pointed the Beretta at Aamir.
“I’ll blow your fucking head off!” Parson shouted. He held the weapon with both hands; his hands shook with anger. The muzzle danced and bounced, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t miss at this range.
Aamir’s mouth dropped open and he froze. Parson began to squeeze the trigger. The hammer was down; Parson was firing double-action. The Beretta’s parts linked up and moved as the hammer began to rise.
“No!” Rashid said.
Damn it, Parson thought. Rashid was right. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Parson released the trigger, holstered his weapon. He couldn’t just blow Aamir’s head off, not if the man wasn’t resisting anymore. But he could sure as hell kick his ass.
Sergeant Sharif, in the flight engineer’s jump seat, sat in Parson’s way. Parson reached over Sharif’s shoulders, popped the quick-release on Sharif’s harness, and pulled him out of the cockpit by the armpits. The flight engineer’s leg left gouts of blood on his seat. Parson put him down in the cargo compartment. Sharif’s face twisted in agony. Blood ran along the canted floor to the crew entrance door and dripped onto the ground. The two civilian passengers stared, one groaning in pain and holding his leg.
Parson grabbed Aamir by the front of his survival vest, dragged him over the jump seat, and threw him to the floor.
“You wanted to let them cut my head off?” Parson yelled. Picked him up by the collar, slammed him against the steel plating. Aamir still wore his flight helmet, so the manhandling did little damage.
That angered Parson even more. He aimed a straight punch, rammed his fist into the copilot’s cheek. That felt a little better. He drew back to hit him again.
Aamir held up his hands toward Parson, pleading gibberish.
“His son,” Rashid said. “He keeps talking about his son.”
Whatever. Parson wasn’t listening. He kneed Aamir in the groin. The copilot gagged, doubled over. Parson pushed him upright. Grabbed him by the collar with one hand, unsnapped his helmet strap with the other. If he could get the helmet off, he could hurt that bastard worse.
One of the civilians spoke up. “Sir,” he said, “what are you doing?”
“I’m gonna bust his head…”
Damn it, Parson thought. A witness. If Gold were here, she’d have stopped him, too. And she’d be translating all this babble.
Parson still held Aamir by the collar. Couldn’t decide whether to beat him up more. “All right, Rashid,” Parson said, “what the fuck is he saying?”
“Insurgent have his son. He want trade for you.”
“Who has his son?” Parson asked.
“Bad men. Maybe Black Crescent. Maybe no.”
Parson had no children. He’d never even been married. But he knew how it felt to be responsible for someone else. He shook Aamir by the collar.
“Why didn’t you tell somebody, shithead?” Parson asked. Shoved the copilot onto a troop seat. “Don’t you fucking move.”
Rashid climbed from the cockpit, removed his helmet. Gave orders in Pashto, and the crew chief found duct tape and parachute cord in his tool box. Rashid took the cord.
“We tie him,” Rashid said.
“Damn straight we tie him,” Parson replied. He grabbed Aamir’s hands, yanked them together behind the copilot’s back, held them tight as Rashid bound them with the parachute cord.
Parson tore off a strip of duct tape, nearly slipped in Sharif’s blood on the floor. Slapped the tape over Aamir’s mouth.
“Sir,” Reyes said, “if he’s congested, that’ll keep him from breathing.”
Parson started to tell Reyes to mind his own damned business. But the man was right. Parson tore
the tape from Aamir’s face. The copilot cried out.
“Quit whining,” Parson said. He wadded up the length of duct tape, threw it down. Tore off a longer strip and taped Aamir’s boots together.
Reyes had been tending to Sharif’s injuries; now the PJ opened an Israeli bandage. The device consisted of a length of elasticized cloth with sterile pads on one side and a closure bar on the other. Reyes adjusted the pads to cover Sharif’s wounds, then wrapped the cloth leader several times until he locked it down with the closure bar.
The uninjured civilian spoke up again: “We’ll need a medevac for that gunshot wound.”
Who the hell was this guy to be putting in his two cents? For a moment, Parson wanted to tape the civilian’s mouth, too. But at least the man’s advice made sense. Seemed to know the lingo, too. Maybe the guy wasn’t a complete idiot.
“Yeah,” Parson said. “I know it.”
All he really wanted to do was beat Aamir to death. But other things needed doing. He tried to think past his anger. Regaining his self-control was like recovering an airplane from a spin. Part of you wanted only to pull the nose up. But if you wanted to live, you had to put the nose farther down. You had to use your head, not your gut.
Parson ducked through the crew door to look outside. Nobody had installed the boarding ladder, but he didn’t need it—the landing gear had collapsed on impact, and the helicopter’s deck rested only about a foot off the ground. Parson’s knees hurt from falling during the hard landing, and that made his limp worse. Instead of jumping right out, he stepped down from the aircraft one boot at a time.
Small cumulus raced overhead. But other clouds remained stationary. Roll clouds, like long cigars, formed over the ridges. Far above them, Parson saw a layer of mother-of-pearl. Not good. Signs of severe turbulence, with updrafts and downdrafts approaching five thousand feet per minute.
So the winds were picking up, but at least the visibility stayed decent. He reached inside the Mi-17 and pulled the satphone out of his helmet bag. Somehow his laptop still worked, still set up with the moving map display, so he jotted down the coordinates it showed. Then he turned off the computer and punched the number for command post at Mazar.
“This is Parson,” he said when the duty officer answered. “Golay One-Eight is down.” He gave coordinates for the rock ledge where the helo had crash-landed.
“Do you have casualties?”
“One gunshot wound to the thigh. Maybe one broken leg.” Parson reported Aamir’s attempt to commandeer the Mi-17, the struggle for control. Relating the story made him angry all over again. He wished his brain could work like some aircraft systems, that he could put his emotion switch on BYPASS.
“Oh, shit,” the duty officer said. “Not again.”
Parson knew what the guy was thinking. The year before, an Afghan officer had opened fire on American advisers during a meeting at the Kabul Airport. He’d killed eight USAF troops and an American contractor before taking his own life. The Taliban had claimed him as an agent, but his family denied it and said he’d had money problems. Other reports suggested the officer may have been involved with suspected opium trafficking.
Nearly all members of the Afghan Air Force were like Rashid—competent, committed, hardworking, and trustworthy. Their vetting included a family background investigation, drug screening, and record reviews. Recruits even had their biometric data checked against a criminal database. But this was a different situation, and Parson knew no amount of background checks could have prevented it. In Afghanistan, nothing was simple and nothing was safe.
So where exactly had Aamir hoped to land? The Mi-17 hadn’t gone down where he wanted it, but he’d tried to put it somewhere around here. Parson realized the bad guys who’d waited for Aamir to deliver him might be close.
He heard Rashid in the helicopter, interrogating Aamir.
“Did you find out where he was trying to go?” Parson asked.
“A bandit camp four kilometers north,” Rashid called.
“So they might have seen where we crashed.”
“Yes,” Rashid said. He gave a command in Pashto, and the crew chief began to work at the hardware that attached the door gun to the aircraft structure. The weapon represented a blend of Russian and American technology: a PKM automatic weapon installed on a Dillon Aero mount. The crew chief detached the PKM from its pintle, wrapped a belt of ammunition across his shoulder. He and Rashid carried the weapon out of the helicopter. They spoke, pointing to terrain beyond the aircraft, apparently considering how best to set up a field of fire.
The lay of the land both hindered and helped, Parson judged. The Mi-17 had come down fairly high along the mountainside, on a flat shelf. The ledge overlooked a steep draw studded with gullies, scrubby hawthorns, and stones the size of aircraft tires. Bad guys would most likely attack from below. Infantry troops always loved the high ground, to fire on the enemy from an elevated position. Though Parson had never been a grunt, he knew any rifleman would call this a good spot.
But from an airman’s perspective, it sucked. A helicopter coming to pick them up would have to fly into the wind cascading over the ridge. Mountain wave turbulence could roll a helicopter inverted. The rescue might have to wait until the wind calmed.
“Hey, Reyes,” Parson called.
“Yes, sir,” Reyes answered from inside the cabin.
“We’re thinking we might have the wrong kind of company pretty soon. I know you got patients to treat, but keep your rifle close.”
“Always, sir.”
The passenger who’d spoken up earlier climbed out of the helo and stood beside Parson. The man had short-cropped brown hair tinged with gray. Salt-and-pepper stubble on his cheeks. He wore a beige equipment vest like the ones Parson had seen on photographers, except this one read USAID across the back. A shoulder patch said VIRGINIA TASK FORCE ONE.
“Do you know how to shoot?” Parson asked.
“Gulf War,” the man answered. “First Cav.”
So maybe this guy was useful. Parson stuck out his hand. “Michael Parson,” he said. The man gave a firm handshake.
“Jake Conway.”
Parson briefed Conway on the situation with the weather and the chopper pickup. Then he climbed back inside, found Aamir’s pistol on the aircraft’s center console. After checking the chamber and magazine of the Russian-built weapon, he handed it to Conway.
“This will have to do,” Parson said.
“At least we know it works,” Conway said. He placed the Makarov in a vest pocket.
While Parson and Conway spoke, Rashid toiled silently. He helped the crew chief pile stones around the PKM to set up a better fighting position. Occasionally he looked inside the helicopter, regarded Aamir.
“May I let the dog out and give her some water?” Conway asked.
“Up to you,” Parson said. “If it runs off, we can’t go chasing it.”
“She won’t do that.”
Conway disappeared inside the Mi-17. He emerged a few minutes later with the Belgian Malinois on a leash. He also carried a bowl and a bottle of water. The fur on the animal’s back remained bristled, but the dog made no sound. The Malinois looked at Parson, wagged its tail once, and lay on the ground, head upright, ears perked.
“Here you go, Ingrid,” Conway said as he placed the bowl in front of the dog. He cracked open the water bottle, poured some into the bowl, took a swallow. The dog lapped as Conway handed the bottle to Parson.
Before Parson could take a sip, the dog stopped drinking. It looked up, muzzle dripping, at something downslope. Parson shaded his eyes with his hand, saw nothing but shale, dust, and gnarled vegetation.
The animal kept staring. Wind tousled the hair raised along its spine. The dog emitted a low growl.
12
Gold and the Marines remained inside their two Cougars and watched the village, especially the house flying the Taliban flag. She half expected gunfire to chatter from the stone huts. But she heard only the Cougars’ idling engin
es, the flag’s fluttering, and the rush of wind whipping dust across the path.
“Sergeant Blount,” she said. “Let’s not dismount your men just yet.”
“What do you want to do?” Blount asked.
“I guess I better go ring the doorbell,” Gold said. “Let’s not look any more threatening than we have to.”
It was pretty hard for two armored vehicles full of Marines not to look threatening, Gold knew, but she could at least not make things worse. She put down her rifle and removed her helmet. Taking an idea from Ann and Lyndsey, she even untied her hair.
“You’re walking out there unarmed?” Lyndsey asked.
“If they open up on me from the inside, my rifle won’t help,” Gold said. She realized she was taking a chance. But the whole point of counterinsurgency was not to intimidate the locals. The bullets you didn’t fire were the most important.
Blount seemed to get it. “Hey, gunner,” he said. “Lower your weapon.”
“Sergeant?” the gunner asked.
“I didn’t say take your hands off it. Stay ready to shoot. Just don’t point it at the houses right now.”
“Aye, aye, Sergeant.”
“Let us go with you,” Ann said.
Gold thought for a moment. “Watch me go to the door,” she said. “If it seems safe, then you two follow me.” In her work as an interpreter, she had visited many Afghan villages, but she’d never sauntered right up to a hut flying the enemy’s flag. She felt she’d entered some gray area between brave, creative, reckless, and stupid.
“I don’t like this one bit,” the gunner said.
“Nobody asked you,” Blount said.
“I don’t like it, either, for what that’s worth,” Gold said. “Let me out.”
The ramp at the back of the Cougar whined open. Lyndsey raised her gloved fist, and Gold tapped it with her own. Gold added one more instruction: “If it looks real good, bring the bag of sugar.”
