Silent Enemy (12 page)
Authors: Tom Young
Up on the flight deck, the crew seemed intent on their tasks, but their motions conveyed little urgency. Without hearing the conversations on headset, Gold considered, one might think this all looked routine. Parson was talking on the radio, looking back at Dunne’s panel. Dunne scanned gauges, read from a manual the size of the Boston phone book. Colman sipped water from a bottle.
Gold didn’t want to interrupt them, so she just raised her camera and took a photo. When the shutter clicked, Dunne looked at her as if she had lost her mind, but he did not object. He was probably wondering why anyone would take photos at a time like this, Gold thought.
The aircraft was over land now. On the ground below, Gold saw a black ribbon of highway. Cars like ants. A train inched along, a brown caterpillar on rails.
Gold snapped another photo, then another and another: the view out the windscreen. Parson, with his hand turning a knob on the center console. Colman, backdropped by cockpit windows. Dunne at his flight engineer panel, with its scores of switches and indicators.
As long as they don’t mind, Gold thought, it doesn’t matter if they think it’s weird. Mahsoud would enjoy seeing the photos if he felt like sitting up. But Gold was starting to worry about the pain he sometimes had breathing.
He’d probably have to talk about the photos in Pashto, since his English wasn’t yet fluent enough to cover higher concepts and unfamiliar objects. It always amused her the way he’d switch between English and Pashto in the middle of a conversation. He’d pause to reset his mind, then continue. It was like watching the hourglass symbol on a laptop screen as the computer searched its files. Gold understood why he did that. A foreign language wasn’t just a different set of words; it was a different way of thinking.
Back downstairs, Gold found Mahsoud raised up on his elbow. Wide awake apparently, perhaps feeling better. She pressed the REVIEW button on her camera and showed him the shot of the ground.
“That’s what Spain looks like,” she said. “Or maybe it’s southern France.”
“Beautiful,” he said in English.
Gold advanced the camera and showed him the photo of Parson. Mahsoud studied it with interest. Then the photo of Colman and his side of the cockpit.
“A marvelous piece of machinery,” Mahsoud said. Pashto now. “But can you go back to that photograph of the earth?”
Gold returned to the first photo.
“It is so very green,” Mahsoud said. “Is it always this way?”
“No. In the winter it is brown, but before that comes the fall. The leaves turn red and orange. It is even more beautiful. My home, called New England, is known for these colors.”
“I cannot imagine anything finer than this green.”
At first, Gold was surprised that Mahsoud showed more interest in the photo of the ground than the pictures of the cockpit. But she remembered he was from Helmand province. Though northern Afghanistan was mountainous and somewhat green in summer, southern Afghanistan’s desert, including parts of Helmand, could look like the moon.
“This place you are from in America,” Mahsoud asked, “why is it called New England?”
“The first settlers came from England and that is what they named it.”
“And your pilot friend. Where is he from?”
“Major Parson is from the American West. A state called Colorado.”
“Ah,” Mahsoud said, “a cowboy.”
“Exactly.”
“And what about the other fliers? Where are they from?”
“I do not know.”
Mahsoud looked at her strangely. She thought she knew why. To an Afghan, home and tribe defined you. Anyone you met on friendly terms would tell you about his home. Mahsoud could no more imagine American rootlessness than she could imagine a life of illiteracy spent under a burka.
The sunset came around again. Mahsoud looked out at it and said, “It is time to pray.” Then he added, “May I ask a favor, Sergeant Major? Could you bring my Quran?”
“Certainly.”
Gold found Mahsoud’s duffel bag and brought the silk-wrapped book, careful to hold it with her right hand. She knew Mahsoud could read only a little of its Arabic, but he seemed to enjoy merely running his eyes and fingers over words given to Muhammad directly from God. Perhaps now he might find in its suras something he could understand well enough to bring him comfort.
Gold gave Mahsoud a few feet of space for privacy and watched him while he prayed. She had no trouble reconciling her own religious beliefs with her admiration for traditional Islam. God revealed himself to different people in different ways. Gold loved the English prose of the King James Bible, translated from Greek and Hebrew. And though she was not fluent in Arabic, she knew enough to grasp some of the Quran’s poetry. How marvelous it must be to a native speaker.
When Mahsoud finished praying, he began to leaf through the Quran. Then he stopped, looked down, and picked up Gold’s camera. He began reviewing the photos again, and Gold moved closer to see. Now he was looking at the cockpit shots. He stopped on the one with Dunne at the flight engineer’s panel.
“What is that on his table?” Mahsoud asked. “It looks like the portable computers all you Americans carry.”
“I do not think it belongs to Sergeant Dunne,” Gold said. “It is part of the airplane, and I believe it is affixed to that table.”
“Can it send and receive things on electronic mail?”
“It can. It has brought us a lot of bad news today.”
“Teacher,” Mahsoud said, “I have an idea.”
9
T
he fighters flew above and ahead of Parson now. They appeared so small he could hardly distinguish them from blemishes on the windscreen until they turned in their own holding pattern. Then their wing flash revealed them as a pair of scythes arcing through the sky.
he fighters flew above and ahead of Parson now. They appeared so small he could hardly distinguish them from blemishes on the windscreen until they turned in their own holding pattern. Then their wing flash revealed them as a pair of scythes arcing through the sky.
“Air Evac Eight-Four,” the lead fighter called. “Gunfighter’s bingo fuel again. We’re going to have to drop into Rota for gas. Somebody will catch up with you later. Best of luck, sir.”
“Copy that,” Parson said. “Thanks.” For nothing.
The F-15s began to descend. To Parson, it seemed they were dropping to an ocean floor he could never reach.
He wondered if they would see anything of the C-17 that had disappeared. A column of smoke or dark smears on the ground. All that remained of thirty-one passengers and the crew. Rota command post interrupted his thoughts.
“Air Evac Eight-Four, Matador,” called a voice on the radio.
“Go ahead, Matador,” Parson said.
“Sir, I’m sorry to tell you this, but the Spanish authorities don’t want you landing here. TACC is working on a reroute.”
Parson shook his head, muttered, “Son of a bitch,” before pressing his TALK switch. Then he said, “Do they understand we’ve already diverted from Germany?”
“I think they do, sir.”
“Do they understand this airplane is coming down somewhere sooner or later? Or are they going to revoke gravity, too?”
“Our base commander says he’s doing all he can. He’s even contacted the embassy.”
Parson looked across at Colman, back at Dunne. “Can you believe this shit?” he said over the interphone. Then he transmitted: “Air Evac Eight-Four copies all.”
What is wrong with these people? Parson wondered. Fifty-six lives on the line up here, and all those suits can think about is how to make the problem go somewhere else. That’s why the world is so fucked up.
Parson switched over to HF and called Hilda. The latest dip clearance problem wasn’t TACC’s fault, but he was annoyed enough that he dropped the “sirs” when the DO came on the air.
“Where do you want us to go?” Parson asked.
“We’ve found you a good place not too far from where you are now. We want you to divert to the old space shuttle abort landing site in Morocco.”
“Isn’t that field closed?” Parson asked.
“It is, but the runway’s still there, and it’s nice and long.”
Parson reached down into his publications bag and thumbed through a listing of airfields. “It doesn’t seem to be in the IFR Supplement,” he said. “Can you get us any data?”
“We’ll send you something on satcom,” the DO said.
Parson looked out at the sinking sun. He took off his aviator’s glasses. The horizon glowed red like a bar of iron heated on a forge.
“Do you at least know if the runway lighting there is still operative?” he asked. “It’ll be getting dark soon.”
“The flight manager is checking on that.”
“What about some guidance from EOD?” Parson said. “We can’t descend for landing until we deactivate this thing.”
“They’re still working on a course of action. We’ll get something to you as soon as we can.”
“Understood,” Parson said. He shook his head. Check’s in the mail, he thought.
Parson called ATC and received a clearance south toward Morocco. The Spanish controller sounded glad to be rid of him. The coastline glided past underneath, and the late-day sun turned the water to a rose color. A cutter plowed a pink wake toward Africa. It felt to Parson that the world outside the windscreen was already something apart from him, a world that would very likely go on without him before that sun came up again.
A rattling noise caught his attention. He turned to see that Dunne had thrown down his pen onto the flight engineer’s table in frustration.
“What’s the matter?” Parson asked.
“Computer trouble,” Dunne said. “Again.”
Parson squinted to read the message across the top of Dunne’s screen: COMMUNICATIONS CONTROLLER FAILURE. “I’ll see if I can get it back,” Dunne said.
Parson hoped he’d do it quickly. The crew needed that computer to receive satcom messages, among other things. He started to remind Dunne of that, but decided not to state the obvious.
Dunne shut down the computer, then pressed buttons on the panel behind it to depower the processor. After it all went dark, he turned the system back on. The screen remained blank for more than two minutes, but it finally booted up.
“Got it working?” Parson asked.
“For now, I reckon,” Dunne said. “Last mission I flew this plane, I fought with the communications controller all the way over the Atlantic. I wrote it up and it got signed off, but it’s doing it again.”
The computer restart came just in time for a box to appear in the middle of Dunne’s screen: YOU HAVE I NEW MESSAGE. Dunne opened it, printed it out and passed the strip of paper to Parson. It was what fliers called the Giant Report, for the former Ben Guerir Air Base, Morocco.
Parson skimmed through the data: Runway 36, 13,720 feet long, with more than two thousand feet of dirt overrun. Built for the old Strategic Air Command with its Stratojets standing alert for World War III. General Curtis LeMay had left his mark on the world permanently, with runways more than two miles long for launching bombers armed with nuclear weapons. Perfect for catching a space shuttle that had to make a transoceanic abort. And it would have been perfect for catching a C-5, even heavier than the biggest bomber.
But the Cold War was over and so was Ben Guerir, deactivated in 2005. Not used anymore by NASA. The Giant Report said negative ATC, negative weather services, negative runway lighting. EOD will have to come up with a real quick solution for this to work, Parson thought. Even during the day, a disused runway dusted by grit could be hard to pick up visually if the light came from the wrong angle.
They aren’t trying to find me a landing field, Parson thought. They’re looking for a good crash site.
As the aircraft flew south, the Mediterranean yielded to the Sahara and its waves of dunes. Past the coastline, Parson noticed something in the fading daylight on the earth below. Though the air at altitude was clear as branch water, a dust storm was making its way across the ground, the leading edge so distinct it looked like a taut rope being dragged over the sand, whipping it aloft.
Parson knew these wild desert winds had several names, depending on their location and direction: the Scirocco, the Simoon, the Haboob. Like different names for the devil in various cultures, depending on the form he took. And whatever the name, it always meant bad news. Visibility at Ben Guerir was about to go to shit.
The moon began to rise behind a veil of dust low on the horizon. It glowed red like torchlight, near to full. In an optical illusion created by the high altitude, it appeared the C-5’s flight path would take it over the moon. Parson looked down at it as if it were some final gift, like the cigarette and shot of rum for the condemned man facing a firing squad.
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