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Authors: Tom Young

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BOOK: Silent Enemy
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17
 
W
ith the engine noise quieter by half, Parson wiped blood from his eyes and jammed in the two inboard fire handles. “Airstart checklist on two and three,” he ordered. “Now!”
Parson knew everyone would have to do everything right to keep the airplane out of the water, even without the bomb.
He looked at the throttles. Colman had already pushed the outboard engines up to max continuous power. But that was not nearly enough to stop the descent. With the current fuel load, the airplane was too heavy to fly on two engines.
Parson felt his own pulse throbbing in his temples like a pump. The star line that marked the horizon rose higher in front of him. He could not see the ocean below, but he felt it coming toward him.
To set up for a restart, Parson shoved the inboard throttles to the START position. That’s when he noticed the EXTEND light for the number two thrust reverser. The terrorist son of a bitch had yanked that throttle back far enough to deploy the reverser and the damned thing was stuck. No wonder the plane was losing altitude at six thousand feet per minute. Because that bearded jihadi bastard invaded my cockpit, Parson thought.
My
place.
The aircraft dropped through thirty thousand feet as Parson punched the number three START button. He held its ignition switch to AIRSTART.
“Come on, baby,” he said, “light off.”
He heard clicks and snaps behind him as Dunne’s hands played across the flight engineer’s panel. Colman pitched the aircraft for two hundred and fifty knots to get the best glide angle. But the jet was still descending way too fast.
The altimeter scrolled past twenty-five thousand feet. The tone of the slipstream changed from its usual rumble of high-speed cruise. Now it seemed to whisper threats, like the murmur of a tide race drawing sailors to grief.
With his free hand, Parson grasped the emergency RETRACT switch for the stuck thrust reverser. Please, God, let this work, he thought. He held the spring-loaded switch in the RETRACT position as the jet neared twenty thousand feet. Until the reverser retracted, he could not even attempt to restart number two. Meanwhile, he scanned the instruments and saw fuel flow indicated on number three, but no sign of that engine spooling up.
“What’s wrong with number three?” he asked.
“I’m checking,” Dunne said. “Pull out the button before you burn up the starter.”
Parson took the START button by his thumb and forefinger and pulled until the holding relay let go. The starter had to cool down for thirty seconds before he could try again. A loss of another three thousand feet.
The number two EXTEND light winked out. The thrust reverser had finally retracted. Parson released the RETRACT switch and pressed the starter for number two. The tendons in his arm tensed into cords.
“What’s the word on number three?” he asked.
“Ignition control breaker popped,” Dunne said. “That lightning strike fucked us good.” Dunne reached to his right and whacked the circuit breaker with the heel of his hand. “Reset,” he said.
The airplane descended through fifteen thousand feet.
The number two engine started.
“Got ignition on two,” Dunne said. “Stable indications.”
Colman advanced the number two throttle. With that engine running now, the descent slowed to one thousand feet per minute. The aircraft was still dropping toward the bomb’s trip point, only not quite as quickly.
Parson braced for the explosion. Pressed the starter on three. The engine’s turbine temp and rpm began rising.
“Ignition on three,” Dunne said. Now all the engines were running.
The plane leveled at twelve thousand feet. Parson took a breath deep enough to fill his lungs. “All right, damn it,” he said, “we need to climb. Right now.”
Dunne pressed a paddle switch, which moved a marker across the N1 rpm gauges. “I got climb thrust on the bar,” he said.
Colman pushed up the throttles. As more fuel flowed into the combustion chambers, the engines answered with a glissando from bass to tenor. The rpm tapes rose until they touched the bar set by Dunne. The vertical speed indicators and altimeters registered an ascent.
“Watch your deck angle,” Parson said. “Remember that mercury switch.”
“Got it,” Colman said. The ADI showed a five-degree pitch.
“No more than that,” Parson said.
“Yes, sir.”
Parson looked down at the corpse. Fawad’s torso was sprawled across the center console, knees on the floor as if prostrate in devotion. Blood had begun to congeal across the autopilot panel. A spongy lump of tissue clung to the test switch for the emergency locater transmitter. Parson grabbed a fistful of Fawad’s hair and raised the head off the console. Fluid drooled from the mouth and dripped onto the test panel for the cockpit voice recorder. Parson shoved the head onto the floor.
“Somebody get this piece of shit out of my sight,” he said.
“Major Parson,” the MCD called on interphone, “are we okay?”
Parson held his tongue for a moment. “We are now,” he said. “That patient who came up here tried to kill us.”
“We heard the shot. What can we do for you?”
You can keep those bastards tied down, that’s what you can do, he thought. What the hell were you and Gold thinking? Then he said, “Ma’am, just send someone up here to move the body.”
“Roger that.”
The odor of gunshot still hung in the air, pistol smoke drifting in the confines of the cockpit. The altitude alerter chimed to tell the crew they were nearing their selected flight level of thirty-four thousand feet. After the rapid descent and slow climb, Parson thought how their flight path would have looked like some bizarre sine wave. If this were a simulator, the instructor might call up the profile view on his screen and point out the nadir and zenith, note how much altitude they’d lost. But the software to replicate this little piece of hell probably didn’t exist.
The flight deck door rattled open, and the MCD herself appeared. She took Fawad’s body by the arms and pulled him out of the cockpit. The head bounced against the jump seat pedestal and for a moment the open eyes seemed to examine a chart Parson had dropped to the floor.
Gold came forward and helped the MCD drag the corpse to the courier compartment with the other bodies. She did not speak or make eye contact with anyone. Fawad’s remains left smears of blood down the aisleway.
When Gold came back from the darkness of the courier compartment, she entered a bunk room just aft of the cockpit. She slid the door shut. Good, Parson thought. Stay in there. But as his heart rate slowed down and his adrenaline ebbed, he realized he had no right to be angry with her. He shouldn’t have allowed access to the cockpit. It was his fault, too.
Parson tried to imagine what she was feeling. Probably the worst betrayal she’d ever experienced. Overdoses of guilt. He decided just to leave her alone. I’d want to be left alone, he thought. He didn’t count empathy among his strengths. Anything he said would just make it worse.
Nearly an hour went by, and Gold never left the bunk room. Hell with it, he thought. After all she did for me, I need to at least try, even if I screw it up. In a few hours, we’ll all probably be dead, anyway. Doesn’t matter if I screw it up.
“You gonna be all right by yourself for a few minutes?” he asked Colman.
“Sure.”
“Your airplane, your radios.”
Parson took off his headset, climbed out of his seat, and went to the bunk room door. When he slid it open, he saw only blackness. He felt for a reading lamp button and pressed it. The pale light revealed Gold sitting on a lower bunk, arms around her knees, head down. Blond hair loose across her shoulders.
He shut the door and sat beside her. She did not look up. Parson placed his hand on her back. Then he pulled her close, not the way he’d usually embrace a woman but the way he might comfort a grieving relative. Even this was out of order. I’m on thin ice here, he thought. Her hair gave off the scents of conditioner and sweat.
For just a second, Gold let her head rest on his shoulder. Then she sat up and said, “Sir, I’m so sorry. I almost got everyone killed.” Parson wanted to tell her to stop saying “sir,” but he checked himself. She probably took solace in professionalism.
“It’s no more your fault than mine,” he said. “I let him on the flight deck.”
“You did that because you trusted my judgment.”
Parson considered for a moment. Then he said, “I still do, Sophia.” Immediately he wondered if he should have called her that. He hoped she realized he used her name for emphasis, not condescension.
“I should have seen the signs.”
“You’re not a mind reader. You’re a soldier. The best one I know. The best one anybody knows.”
Gold stared at the floor. Parson reached over her and turned on a dome light. Brighter in the bunk room now. Not for the first time, they both had the blood of a terrorist on their uniforms.
“I’m going to retire,” Gold said. “I’ll go to personnel and submit my paperwork. I want to go home to Vermont. I’ll plant a garden and substitute-teach, and I’ll live in that valley for the rest of my life.”
“No, you won’t,” Parson said. Then he realized that didn’t come out right and he added, “You’re going to stay in the service and do what you do because we need you. The politicians, the suits who send us out here, they’re all just fucking political game show contestants. They’re all alike, and they come and go. They think they run the world but they don’t. The people who really make a difference are the ones like you.”
Gold shook her head, gave a weak smile. She stood as if it hurt to move. She straightened her sleeves, buttoned a pocket. Parson noticed the airborne tab, the jump wings, the stack of chevrons. He knew of no rules for this kind of a relationship with a woman—as strong a bond as he’d ever felt with anyone—but she’d always been strictly a colleague. If they managed to live through this, would he want that to change? Or would that just ruin it?
“Thank you for your thoughts, sir,” she said. “You won’t see me behave this way again.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ve seen worse from me.”
Parson hoped she’d say,
Yeah, I have
, or something like that to take a good-natured shot at him. But she just looked at him with what seemed like gratitude.
“I’m going back downstairs,” Gold said. “I better check on Mahsoud and the others.”
“Take your headset,” Parson said as she stepped into the aisleway. “You’re part of this crew.”
She lifted her headset from the nav table and disappeared down the ladder.
 
 
GOLD FELT EVERYONE’S EYES ON HER
as she made her way down the steps. By now they must all know what happened. She couldn’t tell whether those expressions meant reproach, relief, or something else. She decided it didn’t matter.
When she went to Mahsoud, he asked in Pashto, “Is Fawad dead?”
Gold nodded. “I had no idea he was some kind of jihadist,” she said. For a moment, she closed her eyes and leaned on a litter stanchion. The combination of fatigue and adrenaline left her exhausted but unable to rest.
“That was not jihad. That was attempted murder. Jihad happens here.” Mahsoud placed his good hand over his heart. “It is the holy war against one’s own evil impulses. Fawad failed utterly in his jihad.”
“He nearly succeeded in killing us, though.”
“And yet, here we are.”
Gold looked past Mahsoud, out his window into the darkness. “Charlie Mike,” she said in English. Not so much to Mahsoud as to herself.
“What is this phrase?”
“Sorry,” she said. “It is an expression in my Army. The phonetic for ‘continue mission.’”
“Indeed.”
The last time she’d heard that phrase was in Jalalabad. She’d accompanied a colonel who needed her to translate as he spoke to new police recruits. As the recruits lined up to sign their papers, one among them produced a Makarov pistol and began firing. He shot six recruits before a German NATO troop killed him with rifle fire. Four of the recruits died. During the helicopter ride back to Kabul, the colonel’s only words were “Charlie Mike.”
Gold sat on the catwalk that ran along the cargo compartment wall. She thought about lying on the floor and trying to sleep, but she noticed the aeromeds seemed to be in a huddle, looking around. The MCD was talking on headset to the flight deck. Gold found an unused interphone cord and plugged in her own headset. She heard Parson’s voice first.
“What do you mean, you’re missing somebody?” he asked.
“One of my medics,” the MCD said. “Justin Baker. I thought he went to the restroom, but he’s been gone for almost an hour.”
“All right, we’ll check the lav and the bunk rooms up here. I didn’t see anybody come up, though.”
“We’ll search down here.”
Gold wondered if the medic might have passed out somewhere. Easy to imagine, given the changes in cabin altitude, along with extreme stress and maybe dehydration. But you’d think a medic would see the symptoms in his own body before it got that far. She unplugged from the interphone cord to help look for him. Part of her wanted just to rest and let the others deal with it, but it seemed wrong not to help.
BOOK: Silent Enemy
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