Authors: Tom Young
Silent Enemy (24 page)
The aeromeds looked under the litters, behind crates of equipment. The MCD spoke into her headset mike, then announced, “Well, the crew says he’s not anywhere on the flight deck.”
“I’ll check the troop section,” Gold said.
She climbed the ladder to the troop compartment. The compartment appeared empty. She kneeled and peered under the seats, saw no one. Gold walked the aisle and knocked at the lavatory door, the same lav where Fawad had performed his final ablutions. No answer. She knocked again.
“Leave me alone,” a voice called from inside.
“Are you all right?” Gold asked.
“Yes. Can I get a little privacy?”
“This is Sergeant Major Gold. Is that any way to address an E-9?”
Gold had never thrown her rank around, and she didn’t plan to start now. She just wanted to get the guy to talk. If he were just airsick, he’d have said so. Everybody on board was probably near an emotional breaking point, especially someone hiding in a lav.
“We’re all about to become E-nothings, so what does it matter?”
“Your friends are worried about you.”
“Ma’am, just tell them to leave me alone.”
“Why don’t you come out here and talk to me?”
The sliding lock on the lav door snicked into place. The indicator flipped from VACANT to OCCUPIED.
Now Gold began to worry. Was he about to inject himself with a morphine overdose? Had dread and fear overcome hope and reason?
“I really want you to come out and talk to me,” Gold said. “I’m scared, too. Maybe we can help each other.”
No response.
“Airman,” Gold said, “don’t make me kick down this door.”
“Leave me alone. You’re not even in my chain of command.”
That didn’t matter to Gold, especially if the guy was about to kill himself. She stepped back from the lav door and braced herself against a troop seat. Then she raised her right leg and slammed her boot heel against the door. She struck where the slide engaged its latch, and the wood splintered around the lock assembly. After two more blows, she was able to pull open the broken door. She found the man sitting on the floor of the lav.
Gold recognized Airman Baker as the medic who’d been working with Mahsoud early in the flight. Everybody called him Justin.
She looked to see if he had a weapon or a needle. To her relief, she saw nothing in his hands. The next thing she noticed was his youth. With his smooth cheeks, he appeared more like a schoolboy than a serviceman. Until he looked at her. His reddened eyes were those of someone much older. It reminded Gold of young Afghans she’d met, teenagers who’d witnessed things most Western adults would never face. A lot of Afghans started to look old before they were thirty, and the accelerated aging always started with the eyes. It was as if a soul could advance in years well out of sync with the body it inhabited.
“Airman Baker,” Gold said, “are you okay?”
“Um, yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am. I just came up here to use the lav, and I guess I fell asleep.”
“Funny place to fall asleep, Justin.”
He didn’t answer for a moment. Gold noticed the EVACISTAN patch on his flight suit. It bore a red cross. Superimposed over the cross was a map of Afghanistan and Pakistan, along with the letters OEF, for Operation Enduring Freedom. The embroidery along the patch’s edge bore a rust-colored stain. Gold wondered if it was the grime of a military airplane or dried blood that wouldn’t wash out.
“I’m just not—” Justin paused. “I’m just not doing any good down there. Our patients are dying. We don’t have the things they need. And we can’t even land to get them help.”
Gold had witnessed people breaking from stress before. At one of the forward operating bases, she knew a soldier who’d spent a day and a night beside a dead buddy, pinned down by Taliban fire. The trooper seemed all right at first, but later in the same week he lost his hold on reality. One morning he woke and picked up a squad automatic weapon, pointed it at his comrades. He could no longer tell whether he was among friends or enemies. He tried to fire but a round wasn’t chambered. His buddies piled on him and took him down, and he was sent home.
Justin didn’t seem that far gone, but the strain was clearly getting to him. Perhaps it was all too much for someone probably just a couple years out of high school.
“We’re working the problem,” Gold said. “The aircraft commander has a plan.” Sort of. She decided not to go into detail.
“So is he some kind of bomb expert? I heard that stuff on the radio. Every plane they put a bomb on got blown up when it tried to land.”
“We’re not dead yet, Justin. And you know your patients need you.”
He appeared to think for a moment. Maybe he’s listening to me, Gold thought.
“I don’t think I’m helping them very much,” Justin said.
“Of course you are.”
“Let me tell you about the last time I did this.”
Justin described a mission he’d flown only three days before. He and the rest of his aeromed crew got alerted after an unarmored Humvee carrying four soldiers hit an IED. Two died instantly. One lost both legs. The other lost a leg and an arm. The two survivors also suffered third-degree burns over most of their bodies, including disfiguring ones on the face.
At the Bagram MASF, the staging facility for wounded, the doctors had to perform escharatomies: They sliced into the leathery burns to relieve pressure on what living tissue remained. At every touch of the scalpel, the charred, swollen flesh split open like a watermelon.
During the flight to Germany, the soldiers’ pain was uncontrollable. Morphine didn’t seem to touch it. One moaned for hours; the other made no sound but could not stop trembling. The patient who’d lost his legs died en route. As far as Justin knew, the other one remained alive at Landstuhl, and Justin wasn’t even sure that was a good thing.
“That’s not all,” Justin said. “I transported a guy younger than me with his jaw shot away. And you should see the kinds of injuries the CCAT teams bring through, the ones who have to travel sedated and intubated.”
Gold thought she understood how he felt. Once you’d seen certain things, you could not make those images go away. They became part of your mind’s home page, whether you liked it or not. There was no right-click to delete. As Justin finished his story, the rattle of boot steps sounded from the troop compartment ladder. The MCD appeared at the top of the steps.
“I found him, ma’am,” Gold said. She hoped the MCD wouldn’t berate him. Gold explained what Justin had just told her. The MCD took off her glasses, kept silent for a while.
“Son,” she said finally, “I’d like to tell you it gets easier. But I won’t lie to you.”
Gold admired wisdom even more than she admired courage. The head nurse’s words gave her just a moment of peace. Gold felt you could learn a lot about human nature from situations where one person had nearly complete power over another. Usually, what you learned wasn’t good. Maybe this would be an exception.
“If you work in medicine,” the MCD continued, “especially combat medicine, you’re going to get your heart broken every week.”
“I believe it,” Justin said.
“You’d have to be inhuman for it not to hurt,” the MCD said. “But somebody has to do what we do.”
Justin drew his knees up to his chest and buried his face in his arms. Gold wondered if he would start weeping, but he was dry-eyed when he looked up again.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Just remember it’s never about us,” the MCD said. “It’s about your patients, and then it’s about your team.” She leaned into the lavatory and extended her hand. Justin took it, and she helped him to his feet. “We need your help down there, Airman,” she said. “Let’s get back to work.”
18
T
he moon had reached its apogee, hanging high in the night and burning so brightly it hurt to look at it. Cobalt water heaved below. Parson felt as if the ocean were waiting to swallow his aircraft, as it had so many ships and planes. In the impenetrable darkness of depth, an unknown, uncharted international cemetery lay on the seafloor.
he moon had reached its apogee, hanging high in the night and burning so brightly it hurt to look at it. Cobalt water heaved below. Parson felt as if the ocean were waiting to swallow his aircraft, as it had so many ships and planes. In the impenetrable darkness of depth, an unknown, uncharted international cemetery lay on the seafloor.
He checked his watch. More than twelve hours since takeoff, or was it sixteen and a half? He couldn’t remember whether he was keeping track in GMT or Afghanistan time. Then he realized it had to be closer to sixteen and a half; Dunne had run out of columns on his fuel log and started another sheet. When you started getting tired, mental math was one of the first skills to go. And the hardest part of the flight lay ahead.
“You guys need to get some rest when you can,” Parson said. Then he told Colman, “Why don’t you snooze in the bunk room for a while? I’ll take the plane, and we’ll switch out later.”
“I don’t think I can sleep now, sir. You can nap first, if you’d like.”
Might as well, Parson thought. The airplane seemed stable enough, and the radar showed no bad weather up ahead. Good a time as any for the new-bie to take over. Parson was starting to feel more charitable toward Colman. Some ring knockers right out of the Academy seemed to think they knew better than anybody commissioned through ROTC, but this kid was listening.
“Get me up if anything happens,” Parson said. He draped his headset over the tiller for the nosewheel steering, and he slid back his seat.
In the bunk room, he flipped a green toggle to supply oxygen to a regulator, and he took two whiffs from the mask to make sure it worked. Now he had a ready oxygen supply in case a rapid decompression occurred while he slept.
Parson stretched out on a bunk and closed his eyes. He did not expect to rest well, but he drifted off immediately. Sleep took him outdoors, to a wooded lakeshore. He cast a spinner lure with a bucktail and treble hook, and he gave it a quick retrieve. No fish struck, so he cast again and again, watching the ripples emanate from each splash. He had no obligations, nothing to do but enjoy a summer afternoon by the water, watching the ospreys glide. They could soar for so long without a single flap, with their high aspect ratio wings. He watched them for the rest of the day, admiring their precise management of kinetic energy. Always at the perfect pitch angle for max lift over drag. Something he had to study so hard existed purely as instinct in the primitive mind of a raptor. The sun went down and the night music began, the chirring of cicadas and the songs of tree frogs.
But as Parson returned from the depth of sleep and neared wakefulness, his mind recognized the sounds as only the rush of the slipstream and the hum of avionics.
He opened his eyes and checked his watch again. Its luminous hands and numerals glowed like phosphorus in a night ocean. Two hours of sleep. Not enough, but better than nothing. He picked up the mask and inhaled deeply from it. Maybe the pure oxygen would help stave off the effects of sleep deprivation and preserve some of his reaction time and mental function.
Parson returned to the pilot’s seat and buckled the lap belt, donned his headset. His fingers fell naturally to the yoke and throttles, and he scanned instruments and switches more familiar than those of his car. A place of awful responsibilities, but where he belonged.
“I got it,” he said to Colman. “Go to sleep.”
“I’ll try,” Colman said. “Copilot’s going off headset.” He unbuckled, unplugged, and went aft.
The radar still showed no precipitation, but Parson worried about what lay between him and Johnston Island. Hurricane season had begun; that had become painfully clear. And there were thousands of miles of warm water ahead. Ordinarily for an ocean crossing, he’d have all kinds of weather information in his mission folder: severe weather outlook charts, constant pressure analysis charts, winds and temperatures aloft data, even satellite photos. This time he had only outdated forecasts for airports behind him, a dead satcom, and damaged radios.
At least the radar worked. In the worst case, he could dial it out to maximum range and pick his way around the edges of a big storm. But that would be dangerous, and a huge pain in the ass. He decided to try for some specifics.
“Mainsail, Mainsail,” he called. “Air Evac Eight-Four.”
No answer. He tried again and still got nothing. Maybe another frequency would work better. As he rolled the freq selector, he crossed a Voice of America channel. Parson stopped to listen to the broadcast:
The Pentagon confirms the loss of three U.S. Air Force planes to terrorist bombs, all apparently planted at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. A Defense Department spokesman says at least forty crew and passengers were killed. That number is expected to rise as details come in. The attacks have resulted in a worldwide grounding of coalition military aircraft until each plane can be searched.One American transport aircraft remains aloft, and it has been directed to a remote island in the Pacific. Sources say the crew of that C-5 Galaxy has located a bomb on board. No word on any attempt to defuse it.In other news, border tensions are escalating between Colombia and Venezuela. The Venezuelan president says . . .
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