by Tom Young
The first joint of his finger on the trigger, Parson nearly squeezed it again. But his target had disappeared. Save ’em, he told himself. Save ’em. He’d been in firefights before, but not like this one. They usually turned on who shot first, shot straightest, and shot most—the volume of thrown metal. But this seemed more like some strange and deadly field sport, in a play to run out the clock.
The enemy must suspect an air strike could be on the way, Parson figured. Their usual countertactic was to fire from occupied homes. They knew the coalition’s own rules about trying to avoid civilian casualties, so they put civilians in front of themselves whenever possible. Not an option today, though. Nobody lived on this mountainside except snakes and scorpions.
Conway ejected another spent magazine from the M4 carbine. “I’m out,” he yelled. Drew the Makarov pistol, fired the handgun until it emptied. Reyes looked up from his radio, patted the pockets of his vest. He ripped open a pouch and withdrew an M4 mag.
“Last one,” Reyes said.
“Thanks.”
Conway dropped his pistol. Reyes tossed the magazine, and Conway caught it one-handed. Smacked it into the M4’s magazine well, released the bolt. Fired two rounds.
“Where’s that gunship?” Parson shouted.
“Five minutes,” Reyes said.
Parson doubted his group could hold out much longer than that. They were armed for survival and evasion, not an extended gunfight to hold a fixed position.
Please let that thing get here, he thought. The Spectre was an armed version of the C-130s he’d flown during his days as a navigator. But the Spectre carried no cargo; armaments were its only payload. It mounted an M102 howitzer and a forty-millimeter Bofors cannon. Parson imagined the crew running attack checklists, ready to press the FIRE button as soon as they arrived overhead. He didn’t know all their procedures, but he did know the flight engineer had a consent switch for firing the guns. The pilot had the trigger, but the FE could break its circuit. Even the gunship’s engineering reflected the moral responsibilities of its crew.
Movement caught Parson’s eye. Something underneath the crumpled tail boom of the Mi-17. He turned with both hands on his pistol, thumbs along the left side of the grip. An insurgent crouched behind the helicopter.
Before Parson could aim, the man opened up with his AK. The burst hit Conway full in the chest. Conway wore no armor. Blood spewed from three exit wounds as he went down. Droplets spattered Parson’s sleeve as he leveled his sights and fired four times. The jihadist crumpled. Parson’s Beretta locked open. Empty.
We’re about to be overrun, Parson realized. He leaned to grab the M4 from Conway. The civilian’s left arm quivered; his body spasmed. Parson snatched the weapon away. He fired at another insurgent sliding downhill toward him. The man held his rifle up out of the dirt, fabric sling swaying, dust rising behind him as he shuffled through the rocks. Parson got off only two shots; the third pull brought nothing. Empty. His target fell, but other insurgents fired down from the ridge.
Parson dropped the M4 and drew his boot knife. He’d fight with that until they shot him; he would not let himself get captured.
Reyes was talking on the radio again. The only phrase Parson could make out was danger close. The PJ picked up his smoke flare and yanked the lanyard. Orange smoke boiled from the end and billowed downwind into the valley.
Parson heard that familiar turboprop thrum. He looked up to see the Spectre over the ridgeline, higher than he’d expected. It came straight on, grew larger. Banked to the left. That’s the side the guns were on.
And then the earth itself came apart.
Stones and soil roared into the air. Blinded by dust, Parson saw only shadows and flashes. The ground trembled and bucked underneath him. A pulsing howl raged in his ears. Grit flailed his skin. An alien force sucked breath from his lungs, burned his throat. His tongue contracted, sensed ashes and steel. The very taste of fire.
Balance left him. Sky and terrain joined, swirled into each other, physical reality gone liquid. Then solid again. He felt something hard against his spine. Parson found himself on his back, but he could not remember falling.
Wind swept away the noise and brought form back to the mountain. The sky returned to its place, and amid the blue, Parson saw the gunship turning.
He rolled onto his stomach and looked up. The ridge above him still smoked, and it had changed form. The outcropping was gone; the profile of boulders and scree had rearranged. Nothing moved but the rising cinders.
Voices echoed below. Parson pushed himself onto his side, sat up, and squinted downhill. Six, seven insurgents ran away toward the canal.
The Spectre completed its turn, leveled its wings. The jihadists sprinted about a hundred yards from Parson, fleeing through the valley with no effort to use cover.
The gunship overtook them in seconds, seemed to float past them. For a moment Parson wondered if the crew had chosen mercy. But then the AC-130 banked left again, and fire speared from the fuselage, long streaks of light. Thunder pealed from a clear sky. The land around the insurgents convulsed, boiled with flame.
When wind cleared the dust, Parson saw no one running. He saw no one at all, not even a corpse. A deep breath filled his chest. The growl of aircraft engines faded, and the mountains grew silent once more.
15
After nightfall a broken cloud layer drifted over the airfield at Mazar, an onyx sky with fissures of stars. Gold lacked an aviator’s sense of weather, but she’d heard Parson talk about meteorology enough to realize a few things. First, if she could see stars so brightly between the clouds, that meant the dust lofted earlier had cleared. Second, the wind still flicked strands of hair around her cheeks, but now she could face into it without her eyes stinging. Both good signs.
Sometimes flyboys like Parson got so wrapped up in their fancy machines that they didn’t think enough about the big picture. But she admired the way they spoke the language of wind and rain, sun and cloud. It drew them more closely to the natural world, the elements of creation. No wonder so many of them spent their off-duty hours with a fishing rod, a hunting rifle, or a hiker’s backpack.
She checked in at command post to see when the rescue flight would launch. Flight orders had already been cut; Gold felt relieved to see the duty officer remembered to put her with the crews. The orders listed her as an MEGP: mission-essential ground personnel.
“When do they go out?” she asked.
“As soon as they get here,” the duty officer said. “A pair of Pave Hawks coming up from Bagram.”
“Have you heard from Michael—I mean, Lieutenant Colonel Parson?” she asked.
“Yeah, he’s okay, but he sounded a little stunned. They had to call in an air strike pretty close, and I think it rang their bells.”
That chill of anxiety went through her again. Memories and fear. Thoughts of knifepoints and frostbite, bomb blasts and blood. Focus, she told herself.
“I didn’t know they’d come under fire,” she said.
“Happened pretty quick. You could hear shooting anytime the PJ keyed his mike.”
“You mean Sergeant Reyes?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Puerto Rican guy. That dude was ice cold on the radio. Gave coordinates like he was talking about math homework.”
“Is he all right?”
“Yeah, but they have a KIA. One of those civilian workers.”
The news of the firefight and the death left Gold feeling unstrung. She wanted to get to Parson, to see with her own eyes he was all right. She thought of the family of the dead civilian, about to get that awful knock at the door. A strong force of dread settled on everything around her—the command post, the tarmac outside, the mountains beyond.
With time to wait before the helicopters came in, she tried to think of something useful to do. But she could only pace and worry, imagine the worst. What if they came under fire again? What if the winds picked up once more, and Parson and the crew had to stay out there all night?
/> She was still waiting in command post when the Pave Hawks arrived. The plywood walls shuddered as the helicopters thudded overhead. After the choppers landed, they shut down only long enough to refuel. Lettering on the metal skin of one of the aircraft, near the tail rotor, read DANGER KEEP AWAY.
A helmeted flight engineer beckoned her aboard, then resumed his place by the right side’s minigun. Another crewman manned the left gun, and two pararescuemen rounded out the enlisted crew. Gold knew none of them, and the pilots did not offer her an interphone cord for her headset. Parson always treated her as a crew member, but she knew she was just a passenger to these guys.
The instrument panel shone dimly as Gold watched from the back. All the crew wore night vision goggles, and green backglow from the NVGs illuminated their faces. She felt the turbulence as soon as the Pave Hawk left the ground. With one especially nasty jolt, her shoulder smacked into the bulkhead behind her, and she understood why the winds had prevented a rescue until now. She wished she could hear the crew’s conversation; that would have provided some distraction. But she could only tighten her seat belt and hold on.
Gold felt heavy in her cloth seat. The webbing pressed into the back of her thighs, and she assumed the chopper was climbing. Beneath the cloud layer, the helicopters fluttered along in almost total darkness. Gold saw no terrain down below, just pure black. Then a break in the overcast admitted a shaft of moonlight bright enough to reveal mountains passing underneath the aircraft.
Inside, she noted crew members pointing, checking charts and a photomap. Someone cranked his interphone volume way up, and Gold overheard squelched voices—pops and hums and commands. But with her own headset not connected, she could make out no words clearly.
The moonlight yielded to the whims of the clouds. Light faded, brightened, and faded once more. Gold felt blind and deaf, suspended between mountains and moon. Almost like a ghost: able to move in the world, but unable to alter physical reality to her satisfaction.
In the next pool of pale light, she noticed a hillside dotted with qalats—mud houses with adjoining stone fences for animals. A lamp shone in one window; otherwise the village was dark. The village had a name, no doubt, though probably not one indicated on U.S. charts. Too insignificant for that.
She considered the inhabitants, wondered about their fates and their pasts. Had they suffered in the earthquake? More than likely. Had they lost loved ones in the wars and coups since 1979? Almost certainly; every family had. Gold felt responsible for each life down there, though she knew that made no sense. Her conscience outweighed her powers, her ability to bring about change.
You’ve spent so much time here, she told herself, that part of you will never leave. Her mind had absorbed the language, the customs, the history, so thoroughly that if a neurosurgeon wanted to separate the American from the Afghan in her, he would not know where to make the cut.
She thought of lines from a poem by Kipling. They had stayed with her because she had lived them:
I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
The deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.
The helicopters crossed a ridge, and the village disappeared behind them. The land grew dark once more. The choppers banked, leveled, banked again. After several minutes of flying in blackness, Gold saw where the cloud layer overhead split wide. Through the opening, moonlight shone like a diffused and filtered sunrise, dawn on some shrouded planet in another galaxy.
The moon held low on the horizon, red and near full. Its peaks and craters, plains and false seas loomed so near that the lunar terrain appeared as if on a relief map.
The sight eased Gold’s mind. The apparent nearness of another world served as a subtle reminder, or perhaps an assurance: Someone is in charge, Sergeant Major. And it’s not you.
She began scanning outside. Gold could see well enough to make out tributary creeks twisting through the network of valleys below. Soon she noticed a change in the tone of engines and rotors, and she felt the Pave Hawk slow down. It banked a few degrees to the left, then made a full left circle. Chatter rose on the interphone and radios, but like before, she could overhear only an unintelligible crackle of voices.
When the aircraft flew straight and level again, she noticed a strange light up ahead. A green glow emanated in a perfectly round shape. The light pulsed and wavered, and Gold imagined it would appear much brighter to the crew members on NVGs. In a moment, she realized what it was: a buzz-saw signal, commonly used to hail aircraft at night. It looked like no other light source, and it was low-tech and dependable. Troops made it by cracking a chemical light stick, tying it to a few feet of parachute cord, and spinning it over their heads.
If they were signaling that way, Gold thought, they must be confident the landing zone was secure. You wouldn’t twirl a light if you thought bad guys lurked nearby. The air strike had probably taken care of all threats.
She wanted to get Parson on board and out of there immediately. Now she knew he was safe, and that was fine. But she’d feel a lot better with him strapped in beside her.
* * *
The Pave Hawks clattered over the valley; Parson could see them in the full moon even with all their lights off. Good thing that Spectre had laid waste to the insurgents so thoroughly. With this much illumination, the helicopters would have made tempting targets for a bad guy with a shoulder-launched missile.
Just to Parson’s left, Reyes spun the light stick. Rashid and the crew chief still manned the PKM, though nothing had moved anywhere near them since the gunship did its work. Sergeant Sharif and the wounded civilian lay inside the Mi-17. Reyes had spread a poncho over Conway’s body. Parson held the radio; he’d been told the Pave Hawks were bringing more pararescuemen, as well as Gold. He took one more call from the lead Pave Hawk.
“Golay,” the pilot said, “we have your buzz saw. Can you confirm the LZ’s still cold?”
“Affirmative,” Parson said. “There’s a flat spot on this ledge big enough for one helo. Surface winds are still gusting, but they’re better than they were.” With nothing to measure wind speed and direction, he could describe the weather only in the most general terms.
“Pedro Two-Four copies all. We’ll come in one at a time.”
That decision made sense to Parson. One chopper could fly overwatch with gunners at the ready as the other picked up downed crew members. Landing would go quicker than having the Pave Hawks hover while taking up survivors on the hoists. Parson didn’t feel like swinging from a damned cable anyway. A wave of fatigue came over him; he was getting too old for this. He thought his years of military service were wearing him away like the brake discs on landing gear, a little less of him left after each mission.
Parson waved his hand under his throat, a signal that Reyes could stop spinning the light stick. The PJ let the stick rattle to the ground. He rolled up the parachute cord over the plastic stick and stuffed it all into a cargo pocket on his leg. As he worked, he looked uncomfortable. He kept pausing, bending forward, adjusting the straps and buckles on his body armor. The armor had saved Reyes’s life, but he probably suffered a deep, sore bruise underneath it, maybe even some cracked ribs.
Been there, Parson thought. He, too, had experienced the sledgehammer of a bullet striking Kevlar. Force equaled mass times acceleration, and acceleration was a bitch.
But soreness beat the hell out of a slug through the chest. A flight surgeon once told him how the gunshot wounds of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars resembled those of Civil War survivors—mainly injuries to the limbs. Back then, if you got shot in the torso you just died. In the present day, you had body armor, and you weren’t seriously hurt. So those who showed up in hospitals, then and now, had taken bullets to the arms and legs. Except the really unlucky ones who got shot in the head or had a bullet get under the Kevlar by entering at the shoulder.
Conway, of course, had become another kind of exception. What
a damnable shame, Parson thought, for him to survive the Gulf War, then come here to help and lose his life in a firefight.
As the first helicopter approached the ledge, Parson wondered if that aircraft carried Gold. The lead Pave Hawk thudded over the ledge and threw billows of grit into the air. Parson turned his face from the stings, waited for the pitch of the rotor blades to change. The other chopper orbited the mountain, its metal skin bronzed by moonlight.
The lead aircraft touched down and throttled back to idle. Two pararescuemen swung themselves out of the HH-60, brought a litter from inside their helicopter. Both wore black knee pads over their fatigues. As they ran toward the Mi-17, Parson saw they had name tags Velcroed to their upper sleeves. The cloth tags carried a straightforward acknowledgment of the dangers at hand: Rank. Last name. Blood type.
The PJs placed the litter on the floor of the downed helicopter, then lifted Sharif onto the litter. As they moved him, the wounded flight engineer clenched his teeth, but said nothing. Parson and Reyes picked up Conway’s partner. The men hauled both patients into the first Pave Hawk. Parson looked around the cabin; Gold was not there.
Rashid and the crew chief unloaded the PKM and lifted it from the fighting position they’d built. “You guys head out on the first chopper,” Parson said. “I’ll put Aamir on the other one.” Rashid did not argue; he seemed to want Aamir out of his presence. He and the crew chief heaved the PKM onto the Pave Hawk. Rashid ran back for his flight bag, then climbed aboard.
Reyes followed them inside. He fussed over his patients, conferred with the other pararescuemen.
The Pave Hawk’s engines whined louder. Parson sheltered himself inside the Mi-17 from the blowing dust. Conway’s dog cowered in its kennel, and Parson felt sorry for her. The dog had lost her master, and she seemed to know it. The animal barked over the noise of the HH-60’s departure. Aamir sat on a troop seat, looking down at the poncho that covered Conway.
