Authors: Tom Young
Silent Enemy (2 page)
Gold tried to remove the concrete slab on his left thigh. She pushed so hard she thought her spine would crack. No movement. She pushed again. The slab moved a quarter inch, and Mahsoud screamed.
“Zeh mutaasif yum,”
she said. I’m sorry. Then she shouted, “Medic!” The helicopter had shut down now. Gold assumed it carried medical help.
she said. I’m sorry. Then she shouted, “Medic!” The helicopter had shut down now. Gold assumed it carried medical help.
She could not lose Mahsoud. Her favorite student. Unlike many young men his age, he had somehow managed to learn to read during Taliban rule. So Gold was teaching him English while she taught the other police recruits to read their own language.
He reached out to her with his left hand. His right was mangled. She took his hand, and he squeezed so hard it hurt. The grip of a blacksmith, his father’s occupation.
“You’re going to be all right, buddy,” she said.
He took two labored breaths, then said, “What is this word you call me?”
“Like friend. Companion.”
“This is good English word.”
“Medic,” Gold yelled. “Now!”
A Navy corpsman appeared and kneeled beside Gold and Mahsoud. The petty officer put a stethoscope to his ears and listened to Mahsoud’s chest. Shone alight into his eyes. Felt his abdomen, arms, ribs.
“Does it hurt to breathe?” asked the corpsman.
Gold thought Mahsoud would understand, but she repeated the question in Pashto, anyway. Mahsoud nodded.
“Do you have other pain?”
Mahsoud nodded again. The corpsman uncapped a needle, gave Mahsoud an injection. Then the corpsman shone his light under the concrete that trapped Mahsoud. Gold leaned to look. When she saw, she hoped Mahsoud did not notice her shock.
His lower left leg was bent back toward his thigh at an impossible angle. A section of rebar, twisted and sheared into a meat hook, had spiked the knee. A horror of torn flesh. But not much blood.
“Can we get this concrete off him?” Gold asked.
“Even with the right equipment, this would be a tough extrication,” the corpsman said. “That concrete is trapping him, but it’s also keeping him from bleeding to death.”
“He can’t stay here forever. What are you going to do?”
“I’ll have to let my skipper handle this. He’s a surgeon.”
Gold didn’t like the sound of that. “Will he amputate?” she asked.
“If you put aside the problem of moving the patient, that leg still looks bad. I think he has some lung injury, too.”
He’s not “the patient,” Gold thought. He has a name. He wants to help his fellow Afghans. God knows, their police need people who are trainable and honest.
“What about my leg?” Mahsoud asked in Pashto.
“They will do all they can,” Gold said.
“You must not let them take my leg. You know I want to be a policeman.”
The corpsman’s radio barked. The man pressed a TALK switch and said, “Yes, sir. Second floor. Be careful coming up. Severe trauma to the left leg, probable smoke inhalation. Entrapped patient, conscious and alert.”
Gold surveyed the mess around her. Smoke still rising here and there. Tangled pipes and conduits. Pools of reddish water. Wailing of the wounded. Lives ruined by terrorists who thought they would launch themselves to paradise on a load of fertilizer and diesel fuel, or maybe a trunk full of daisy-chained 105s. Again.
The corpsman kneeled, twisted open a water bottle. He dribbled water onto the burned part of Mahsoud’s face. Then he tore open a foil package and took out a dressing wet with some compound. Placed it across Mahsoud’s cheek.
The doctor arrived, peeled off bloody latex gloves, and put on fresh ones. He clicked on a light to see Mahsoud’s leg. Looked around at the fallen concrete. Sighed hard.
“Tell him I’m going to have to take off that leg,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry.”
“He understands you, sir,” Gold said.
Mahsoud began to cry. “I was going to be a bomb technician,” he said. “Now I will become a street beggar.”
“I do not know what you will become,” Gold said in Pashto. “But you will never be a beggar.”
“I wanted to help stop these apostates.”
“You will, my friend. You will find another way.”
The surgeon scissored Mahsoud’s trousers. Then he injected three syringes and waited for the anesthetic to take effect.
“Look at me, Mahsoud,” Gold said. “I want you to look at my face.” Look at anything but the cutting.
“Do not let go of my hand, teacher.”
“I won’t. I’ll stay right here.”
The surgeon opened a case and took out a long stainless steel knife.
AT BAGRAM AIR BASE NORTH OF KABUL,
Major Michael Parson peered out the cockpit windows of his C-5 Galaxy. He was waiting for aerial port to load several old Humvees into the aircraft’s cargo compartment. The worn-out vehicles were supposed to be going back to Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar. Parson wanted to take off as soon as possible. Get the hell out of this godforsaken country. But when he’d checked in at the Air Operations Center, the intel guys were talking about a major explosion nearby. There was no telling how that might affect flight operations.
Major Michael Parson peered out the cockpit windows of his C-5 Galaxy. He was waiting for aerial port to load several old Humvees into the aircraft’s cargo compartment. The worn-out vehicles were supposed to be going back to Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar. Parson wanted to take off as soon as possible. Get the hell out of this godforsaken country. But when he’d checked in at the Air Operations Center, the intel guys were talking about a major explosion nearby. There was no telling how that might affect flight operations.
Static crackled from loudspeakers on the steel lamp poles along the ramp. Then, an announcement on Giant Voice: “Attention on base. Bagram is at Force Protection Condition Delta. MASF personnel stand by for a mass casualty event.”
The flight engineer, Sergeant Dunne, sat at the engineer’s panel. He wore his headset over salt-and-pepper hair a little longer than regulation. He unwrapped the foil on a stick of Wrigley’s and chewed it with a frown, as if the gum tasted strange. Dunne took off his headset, interrupted his preflight checks.
“What the hell’s going on?” he asked. “There’s all kinds of chatter on the tower frequency.”
Parson looked out the cockpit windows. A pair of F-16s launched, the streak-scream of their takeoff rumbling over the base in waves. The jets rode the orange-and-blue flames of their afterburners in a near-vertical climb, and they vanished from sight as they soared higher.
If they’re putting up fighters for a combat air patrol, Parson thought, this must be bigger than the usual suicide bombing. Coordinated with other attacks, maybe? He looked to the south, where the fighter jets had disappeared.
“Just keep your preflight going,” Parson said, “but watch your back.”
“Will do,” Dunne said.
“I’ll check in at ops and see what’s happening.”
As Parson jogged across the ramp, he heard the whine of aircraft turbines, then felt the wind from helicopter rotors. On the Army flight line, blades spun on three H-60s, red crosses on their sides. One by one, the Black Hawks lifted off, hover-taxied from the apron, and fluttered away to the south. Going to pick up wounded, Parson guessed.
Inside flight ops, the babble of voices mixed with the squelch and pop of radios, the jangle of telephones. Parson found the air base commander, a full bird colonel. The sleeves were rolled up on his ABU fatigues. Beretta in a holster across his chest. Handset to his ear.
“At the police center?” he said. “Yes, sir. We have an aeromed team ready to go. Yes, sir, I’ll hold.”
“Colonel, I’m the aircraft commander of Reach Three-Four-Six,” Parson said. “Is my mission on schedule?”
“You’re not a Reach call sign anymore,” the colonel said. “We’re putting you on an Air Evac mission to Germany. We’re going to get a shitload of patients. Most of them will need to fly to Landstuhl.”
There had to be some mixup. Other planes, like the C-130, were far better configured for patients. Easier to get the wounded on and off. More reliable pressurization. Parson had done plenty of aeromedical flights during his days as a C-130 navigator. But this was his first mission as a C-5 aircraft commander. The last thing he needed was a task neither he nor his crew had ever done on a C-5, a plane never meant for air ambulance flights.
“I want to help,” Parson said, “but are you sure this is a good idea?”
“We don’t really have a choice,” the colonel said. “You’re all we have to work with at Bagram. There are some patient support pallets in storage at one of the hangars here. Once your loadmasters install them, the aeromeds will take it from there.”
Not ideal, Parson thought, but we can make it work. Install the pallets, run some drop cords to power the aeromeds’ equipment, and we’ll have ourselves a flying hospital. A damned big one, too. Parson was proud to fly the largest aircraft in the Air Force fleet. Nearly two hundred and fifty feet long, with a max weight of more than four hundred tons, the C-5 could transport outsized cargo that nothing else could carry. But the A-models were older than many of the crew members who flew them. And with all those miles of wiring and tubing, in a mix of technology from two different centuries, a lot could go wrong.
When Parson got back to the tarmac, choppers were already returning with wounded. Dust and exhaust mingled in their rotor wash, stung his eyes, abraded his throat.
At the C-5, his four loadmasters were sliding the patient support pallets into place. Each pallet had stanchions for mounting stretchers. The loadmasters had expected to chain down ten Humvees, but now they were setting up for about forty wounded.
“Do you guys have everything you need for this?” Parson asked the senior load.
“I think so, sir. We had to break out the books to make sure we did this by the T.O. I used to carry patients on the C-141 all the time, but I ain’t never done it on this thing.”
Parson watched the crewmen slide the last pallet across the rollers. The loadmasters flipped cargo locks up from recesses in the floor, kicked the locks into place. An industrial scene of clanking metal, grease-stained checklists, commands shouted over the whine of the auxiliary power units.
Once the aircraft was configured, a bus with a red crescent on the side backed up to the open aft ramp. A loadmaster stood on the ramp, guided the bus driver with hand signals. The loadmaster crossed his fists, and the bus stopped next to a stair truck positioned against the ramp. The aeromed team—two commissioned flight nurses and three enlisted flight medics—began hoisting their litter patients up the stairs.
Other crew members continued their preflight checks. Dunne stood under the number four engine, looking up at the cowling.
On the way into Bagram, the MADAR computer had spat out a fault code for abnormal vibration on number four. Parson had thought he was going to have to shut down an engine and declare an emergency. Turned out not to be necessary, but now he was suspicious of that engine.
“Is that one going to be all right?” Parson asked.
“As long as you keep her out of the vibe range,” Dunne said.
Of course
I’ll keep it out of the vibe range, Parson thought. Flight engineers seemed to think all pilots were idiots.
I’ll keep it out of the vibe range, Parson thought. Flight engineers seemed to think all pilots were idiots.
With his flight suit sleeve, he wiped sweat from his face. Unlike his last trip, today it was hot at Bagram. Clear and a million, too: unlimited visibility. You could see all the way into the Panjshir Valley. Bagram lay in the flat part of a bowl: scrubby vegetation dotted rocky soil that stretched into a rim of gray mountains.
It would be cooler at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, Parson’s new destination. Close to the military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, one of the few hospitals in the world prepared to handle so many trauma patients at one time. Poor bastards. Most had probably never been out of Afghanistan. They had to get blown up and burned in numbers beyond what Afghan hospitals could handle to get out of this hellhole.
Parson climbed the crew ladder into the cargo compartment. The aeromeds hovered over their patients, some hooked up to monitors, a few with chest tubes, some apparently unconscious, many wide-eyed with apprehension. Human wreckage. A medicine smell like rubbing alcohol overpowered the usual airplane odors of grease and hydraulic fluid.
He found the medical crew director and introduced himself. Her flight suit bore the wings of an aeromedical nurse and the insignia of a lieutenant colonel. She wore rimless eyeglasses with a lanyard attached to the stems.
“Ma’am,” Parson said. “My crew isn’t used to this kind of thing, but we’ll do the best we can.” Though Parson was the aircraft commander, he still owed courtesies of rank to the MCD.
“And we’re not used to this airframe,” she said, “but a lot of these patients are in very bad shape, and they need to fly out on anything that’s available.”
She sounded as though she didn’t like the arrangements any more than Parson did. But sometimes in war you had to improvise, make do with the resources at hand.
A loadmaster handed Parson some paperwork.
“Form F and manifest, sir.”
Parson signed the weight-and-balance sheet, then scanned the passenger-and-patient manifest. Afghan names, mainly, blanks for Social Security numbers. A few Western names, perhaps advisers and trainers. He stopped on one: GOLD, SOPHIA L. SGT. MJR. No, not her—please. Not blown up, too, after everything else she’d been through. He had not seen her since that day at the Pentagon when they’d both received Silver Stars.
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