The Renegades

by Tom Young

  In all the hours of watching this spot on the surveillance feeds, she’d never seen this many vehicles. They looked like cargo trucks, with tarps over steel frames. Figures began to jump down from the tailgates. All looked like full-grown men. All carried weapons. Gold began to count them: four, six, ten, fifteen, twenty.

  “Are you seeing this?” Gold whispered.

  “Got ’em in the reticle,” the Marine nearest her said, sighting through his nightscope. “I’d love to start firing, but we’ll let ’em be surprised when Gunny Blount shows up.”

  Gold keyed her MBITR. “Golay flight,” she called, “Seraphim is in position at Objective Sword.”

  The Marine commander in the Osprey answered immediately. So they were airborne and inbound. “Golay has you five by five, Seraphim. What do you see?”

  “Approximately thirty armed personnel. They just arrived in four trucks.”

  “Copy that, Seraphim. Keep us advised.”

  The commander did not sound startled by the news. That Predator was probably still up there, its infrared eye unblinking.

  In Gold’s left ear, where she monitored the Icom, the squelch broke. A voice spoke in Pashto: “Chaaku has returned with more holy warriors.”

  * * *

  Through his NVGs, Parson saw the lobe of ridgeline that marked Kuh-e Qara Batur. Taller mountains loomed beyond it, vast folds of rock that knew no national border, undulating until they flattened into the steppes of Russia. Rashid flew a path dictated by terrain, dipping into valleys when he could, crossing peaks when necessary.

  Ahead, the Osprey cruised like an airplane, with its rotors in the forward position. In Parson’s goggles, the blades appeared to turn almost languidly, not caring if they generated propulsion or not. Just an illusion, he knew, but it looked strange as hell. A flying machine invented by crazy men.

  Near the target, the Osprey rotated its nacelles to place the rotors overhead. Banked and descended.

  Rashid said something in Pashto, and the Afghan troop commander repeated it. The troops gripped their rifles more tightly, placed hands over their seat belt buckles. Then Rashid said in English, “Two minutes.”

  As the Osprey overflew the fort ruins, ground fire erupted. Tracers spat upward, burning needles directed at the aircraft. The Osprey’s gunner returned fire with a cascade of light. Still on night vision, Parson watched scintillating particles slam against the hillside, a storm of air-to-ground tracers. He could not tell what damage it did to the enemy, and the Osprey itself did not seem to be hit.

  The Mi-17 descended toward a dirt path that led to the ruins and bunker complex. Rashid touched down smoothly. The troop commander shouted, “Zah, zah, zah!” and half his men leaped from the helicopter. Parson pressed himself against the cockpit bulkhead, gathered up his interphone cord to let the men get by him. With a twist of the throttle and a tug on the collective, Rashid lifted off again to place the rest of the soldiers on the other side of the target area.

  Aloft once more, Parson strained to see the Osprey. It was on the ground now, gun blazing from its open ramp. So much for catching the enemy asleep. Ground-to-ground tracers flashed singly and in threes—Blount and his Marines opening up on semiauto or with short bursts. Seen through NVGs, the bullets cut brilliant vectors, a bizarre geometrical show of illuminated angles.

  The Mi-17 banked. Figures ran among the trees and rocks below. Some looked to be armed; with others it was hard to tell. Were they insurgents attacking the troops who’d just disembarked? Captors chasing kids trying to escape? Parson struggled to think, to make sense of what was happening. It was an officer’s job to understand in the midst of confusion, to bring order to chaos. But the scene below him defied understanding: random gunfire, innocents among enemies.

  He heard Pashto chatter on the interphone. The crew chief began firing the PKM door gun. Expended brass dropped away, tumbling green cylinders in the pixels of Parson’s NVGs.

  Dear God, Parson thought, I hope he knows what he’s shooting at. And he hoped Gold stayed safe, unseen up on that knoll, with nothing to do but observe.

  The landscape blurred as Rashid accelerated. He flew an arc around the southeastern end of Kuh-e Qara Batur, descended for another landing. Metallic cracks echoed inside the aircraft. Bullet strikes.

  A liquid burning sensation seared Parson’s neck. He dropped his NVGs, let them swing from their lanyard. Placed his palm to his throat. His first thought was blood, but it was too hot for that.

  Hydraulic fluid. A round must have punctured a line. Warm, slick ooze covered his hand, dripped down his flight suit.

  More babble on interphone, nothing Parson could understand. But he could imagine: What’s wrong with the aircraft? You’ve lost hydraulics, sir. An oily odor filled the cabin.

  The crew chief let loose another burst of fire. Swiveled his gun left and right. Kept firing. Then he slumped over the weapon as if he’d suddenly grown tired of fighting and had fallen asleep. Parson pulled him by the shoulders. The man’s head lolled back. He’d taken a round through the face and died instantly.

  Rashid was having trouble controlling the chopper. The helo yawed, pitched. The standby hydraulic system should have kicked in, but with battle damage, maybe backup hydraulics weren’t working. Pashto chatter grew more heated on interphone. Rashid was fighting an aircraft that was bleeding out, approaching the moment when its controls would lock up and fail.

  Two of the Afghan troops unbuckled their seat belts. They helped Parson pull the crew chief out of his harness and away from the gun. The Mi-17 banked left, pitched down.

  “Put it on the ground,” Parson shouted. “Land it while you still can.”

  Rashid dumped the collective, touched down hard. Gave an order in Pashto. The copilot rose from his seat. Took the crew chief’s place in the door and began firing the PKM.

  More orders in gibberish. The APU started, and the engines whined to a stop. The flight engineer got up from his jump seat.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Parson asked.

  “Engineer fix,” Rashid said on interphone.

  The copilot kept shooting, laying down suppressing fire. The flight engineer pulled a flashlight from his helmet bag. He swung himself out the door. When the rotors stopped, he climbed atop the helicopter. Parson heard bangs from overhead; the engineer was using the flashlight as a hammer. Beating a valve into obedience, Parson supposed.

  The crew’s actions started to make sense. Standby hydraulics should have engaged but had not. The engineer needed to force the standby system to work and replace the lost fluid. To do that, he had to get up top to the hydraulic reservoir. Which he couldn’t do with blades spinning.

  They know their aircraft better than I do, Parson thought.

  But now that he understood, he knew how to help. He fumbled in the dark, found the extra quarts of hydraulic fluid. Gunfire chattered as he clawed two aluminum cans out of the bin of spare fluid. Slipped in the spill on the floor, scrabbled back to his feet. Doffed his headset.

  He ducked past the copilot firing the PKM and heaved himself, grasping for handholds, up the side of the Mi-17. This job normally belonged to the crew chief, but the crew chief was dead.

  Bullets cracked overhead as the engineer flipped open the hydraulic reservoir. Parson drew his boot knife, stabbed two holes into one of the quart cans. Poured the fluid, spilled half of it on himself.

  He tossed away the empty can. The heat of the engines burned him through his flight suit and gloves as he spiked holes in the remaining quart. Parson dumped in the fluid and climbed back down for more. Stabbed two cans, handed them up to the engineer.

  Tracers speared the night as the engineer poured the rest of the fluid into the reservoir. More tracers cracked around him as he slid down the side of the helicopter. The PKM door gun answered the enemy’s weapons with a rate of fire so rapid, it sounded more like a tornado than a series of shots. Parson figured that door gun was the only reason he and the engineer had come off the top of the Mi-1
7 alive. The insurgents couldn’t shoot accurately because they’d had to keep their heads down.

  Back inside, Parson put on his headset as the engineer scrambled into the cockpit. Parson pressed his talk button and said, “You got more fluid, Rashid, but I don’t know how long it’ll last.”

  “Marines call,” Rashid said. “They want Afghan soldiers at bunker.”

  Must be getting hot up there, Parson thought. The plan called for the Afghans to provide only a blocking force. But no plan survived contact with the enemy.

  Rashid punched the starter buttons. The turbines took forever to spool up again. When they finally reached idle, the engineer leaned over to shut off the APU. Then the engineer took over the gun, and the copilot strapped back into his seat. Rashid opened the throttle, lifted off.

  The climb revealed a battle gone to hell. Through his NVGs, Parson saw bullets burning paths all over the hillside. Not from organized lines, but from everywhere. Worse than any shoot-house scenario a trainer could concoct. The Osprey, flying again, orbited the target area. Probably looking for a chance to use its gun from the air.

  “Where you gonna put ’em down, Rashid?” Parson asked.

  Rashid spoke only in his own language. The PKM quit firing. Too hard to tell Marines from insurgents, Parson thought.

  The helicopter began descending. Now Parson could tell where Rashid intended to land. Not much choice under the circumstances.

  Right in the middle of the firefight.

  26

  From her knoll above the target area, Gold watched the Mi-17 touch down. An insurgent crouched behind the remains of a rock wall, sprayed the aircraft with gunfire. The sight turned her stomach. Was Parson hit? Rashid?

  “You see that shooter?” she called to the Marine sniper and spotter.

  “We’re on him,” the spotter said.

  The Barrett rifle barked once, a deep booming slam underneath the cackle of lighter weapons down the hill. Flame spat from the muzzle brake. The expended cartridge flipped through the air, landed with a thud as heavy as if someone had dropped a wrench.

  The .50 caliber round did not so much drop the insurgent as flatten him. The bullet stomped the man into the ground. Not a classic sniper head shot, but a round through the back that took him apart. With a bullet that size, where it hit didn’t matter.

  The sight revolted her. Through his own choices, the insurgent had asked for it. Gold understood the justice. But even justice looked like murder when delivered through a jacketed round a half inch across, striking with nearly ten thousand foot-pounds of energy.

  Troops poured from the helicopter. Two fell as they emerged, did not get up. Through her NVGs, Gold could not tell if Parson was one of them.

  The sweating returned, that unfocused anxiety.

  She drew in a deep breath, forced herself to think rationally. Gold didn’t know a lot about small-unit tactics; that wasn’t her field. But she did know the best way for Blount’s Marines to straighten out that mess down there was to establish fire superiority.

  Gold could help with that. And it was the best way to help Parson, if he remained alive. She could fall apart over this when she got home. But right now, she would tolerate no weakness in herself. She was still a New Englander. God helped those who helped themselves. Tonight on this mountain, certain things needed doing.

  She listened closely to the Icom radio hissing in her right ear. Nothing on that freq at the moment. The Barrett rifle slammed again. This time she didn’t see its target, but she heard the spotter say, “Good hit.”

  In the green imaging of her night vision goggles, she saw two insurgents firing toward the Afghan troops scrambling for cover. Gold flipped up her NVGs, took aim. Her rifle’s optic put her at some disadvantage; it was a standard ACOG, not a nightscope. But she could see where to aim because the bad guys kept shooting.

  All right, she told herself. Mind control, breath control. She inhaled, held the air within her lungs, fired. The trigger break felt crisp, like cracking a matchstick. She fired again, twice more. Scanned through the NVGs. One terrorist down and not moving, the other crawling away.

  More fire came from near the base of the knoll, immediately downhill from Gold’s position. Additional ruins there, remains of another wall. Only this wall stood higher than the stone foundations near the cave entrance. Behind such ideal cover, several Black Crescent shooters blasted at will with little exposure to themselves. From a position like that, they could do a lot of damage. Gold saw three figures fall to their bullets.

  Blount must have seen the same insurgents at the same wall. In her left ear, through the connection to the MBITR radio, she heard him suggest an air strike. Behind her, the combat controller made it happen.

  “Raven,” he called, “Seraphim with a fire mission.”

  Gold wasn’t on that channel, so she didn’t hear the answer. But over the gunfire, she heard the controller’s next call.

  “Target is riflemen at the base of a knoll to the north of the cave bunker. Target is stationary. Will mark my own position with a buzz saw. Request strafing attack, heading zero-niner-zero, pull out right. How copy?”

  Another pause, then, “Friendlies to the immediate north and south, danger close. Don’t fire if you can’t identify that stone wall.”

  The whine of jet engines rose almost immediately. The A-10s must have held on station close by. Gold could not see them yet.

  The combat controller bent a chem light. Gold heard a pop when its inner vial broke. Blue neon filled the controller’s hands. He tied a length of parachute cord to the light stick and spun the light over his head.

  Those pilots can’t miss that, Gold thought, but neither can the insurgents. A calculated risk.

  With his free hand, the controller keyed his radio and said, “You’re cleared in hot. Confirmation code Hotel Alpha. Call with target in sight.”

  Deepening growls of turbines filled the night. Gold scanned overhead, spotted one of the Warthogs. It rolled into a steep bank and pointed its nose at the earth. The attack jet fell from the sky in such drastic fashion that for a moment Gold feared it had been shot down.

  Then it began to fire.

  A ripping sound overpowered all other noise, as if the mountains themselves were rending. Flame shot from the nose cannon in an unbroken stream; the weapon appeared to spew burning oil instead of metal. The base of the knoll exploded into a churning mass of dust and smoke. The top of the knoll, where Gold lay, shook so violently that it triggered in her some dormant animal instinct. She dug her fingers into the dirt to hold on, shut her eyes.

  When she opened them, dust obscured everything in front of her. She could not assess the results of the strafing, but it seemed impossible that anything under that gun could have survived. The engines screamed a shriller note as the Warthog pulled up, powered away from its target.

  “Good hit, Raven,” the controller called. After a pause, he added, “Negative. Just give me a couple dry passes in a show of force.”

  The chatter of automatic weapons continued down the hill. The air strike had not ended the battle, just changed its calculus. Gold knew children likely remained among the enemy, perhaps some of them firing. She wished she knew if any could be saved. And she wanted very much to know if Parson was all right.

  Clicks in her earpiece, the one from the Icom. Then a voice in Pashto: “What is happening, what is happening?”

  “The infidels have struck from the air.”

  “Send out the young martyrs.”

  “Three of them have their bomb vests on now.”

  “Tell them to walk to the infidels with their arms raised as if to be rescued.”

  Suicide bombers, Gold thought. Warn the Marines.

  She reached for the MBITR’s talk switch. Turned to her left, raised up to better find it.

  A hammer blow struck her shoulder. Spun her, hurled her to the ground. Heat scalded her chest as if she’d inhaled boiling water.

  Gold wanted to get up, make the radio cal
l. Tried to push herself up with her arms. Her body would not respond. She lay on her back, tried to cry out.

  Not even her voice worked. Her throat, her trachea, would not propel her words. She remained fully conscious, but could not make sense of things.

  I’ve been shot, she told herself. But why can’t I talk?

  She put her lips together to form the word medic, but she still could not get enough air to speak.

  Why can’t I breathe?

  Gold could not understand. She knew she’d been hit in the shoulder by a bullet. But she felt she was drowning. What was happening to her? Interpreting this strange set of agonies was like reading a text poorly translated.

  She coughed, felt blood spray into her throat and nostrils.

  The A-10s roared over her. Tracers followed them, perhaps from the same rifle that had shot her.

  Her chest tightened, wrenched. She opened her mouth, tried to gulp air. Breath would not enter her lungs.

  The drowning sensation made no sense. But as her oxygen debt deepened and her vision blurred, she realized the obvious.

  This is what it feels like to die.

  * * *

  Through air gauzy with smoke, Parson peered through his NVGs. Held the goggles with one hand, his rifle with the other. On night vision, the smoke gave the appearance of a green toxic gas, the atmosphere of a cursed planet devoid of life.

  He tried to think clearly, understand what these bastards were doing and where they were. The A-10 had rocked their world, that was for damn sure. But some of them were still firing.

  The ruins of some old structure, a wall only inches high, gave him a bit of defilade. Ahead of him, Blount found similar cover. From there, the Marine used that badass weapon of his with deadly effect. His Squad Advanced Marksman Rifle had put down at least three of these sons of bitches.

  But his team had taken casualties. When Parson first jumped out of the helicopter, he saw two Marines on the ground. And some of the Afghan troops had been mowed down before they ever fired a shot. Parson remained outside the aircraft, trying to help make up for the loss in firepower.