Authors: Tom Young
Silent Enemy (25 page)
Parson switched away from that frequency. Three aircraft lost. And it would probably be four before it all ended. How could this happen? He knew that a lot of TCNs, Third Country Nationals, worked at Bagram. They were vetted, sure. But if they’d never done anything wrong, there was nothing to find. Terrorists, at least the smart ones, were patient. They could tell their people to get the right kind of job and stay out of trouble for years. When the time is right, they’d say, we’ll be in touch.
U.S. servicemen planned from deployment to deployment, Parson thought. American politicians planned from election to election. But this enemy thought in terms of the next several centuries. Letting a sleeper cell sleep for a few years meant nothing to them.
We used to call this the Long War, Parson recalled. We don’t know from long.
He tried another freq: “Mainsail, Air Evac Eight-Four.”
“Air Evac Eight-Four, Ascension Island. Go ahead.”
Whatever, Parson thought. If that rock is where they can hear me, I’ll talk to that rock.
“I’d like to get some weather data,” he said. “My satcom is down, so you’re going to have to read it to me.” He explained his situation and where he was headed.
“Absolutely, sir,” the radio operator said. “Anything we can do for you, just ask. I’ll call you back when I have your weather.”
He sounds like he’s heard of me, Parson thought. Probably not much to do on shift there but watch CNN. Parson didn’t mind waiting as long as the guy seemed helpful. At Ascension, they’d have local weather at their fingertips, but not the kind of information he needed. To get Caribbean and Pacific forecasts, they’d need to get on their computers and dig for it.
While Ascension gathered data, Parson dimmed his panel lighting and looked up at the stars. The Pleiades glowed above him. On land, light pollution often made that star cluster difficult to find, but here Parson had no trouble distinguishing it. Something permanent, always there whether you could see it or not.
Unlike us, Parson thought. He wondered what would be left of him and his crew and passengers when this was over. Not much, most likely. He remembered something he’d noticed during his last flight physical, just a couple months ago. His bulging folder of medical records bore a stamp on the manila binder: DNA COMPLETED. That meant somewhere in a Defense Department storage facility there was a card stained with his blood. The same file also contained his fingerprints and footprints. This medical data would do him no good in life but might help identify him after a particularly violent death.
Parson felt grateful when Ascension interrupted his gloomy train of thought. “We don’t have a terminal forecast for Johnston anymore because the field is closed,” the radio operator said, “but satellite photos indicate fair weather. Your problems are all en route.”
Tell me about it, Parson thought.
“In the northeastern Caribbean, you have Tropical Storm Arlene,” the radio operator continued. “Maximum sustained winds of sixty-eight miles per hour. We expect it to attain hurricane strength over the next eight hours.”
Parson took notes as the operator gave coordinates for the storm’s eye and its predicted track. “Is that it?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not, sir. On Montserrat, Soufrière Hills is erupting. You’ve got an ash cloud building and spreading east.”
Son of a bitch, Parson thought. Fire and rain. He wrote down coordinates for the volcanic ash, and he pulled his pocket atlas from his helmet bag. Hardly the ideal nav chart, but it would do for the big picture. He swiveled his utility light over the atlas and found the pages for the Caribbean and South America. With a stubby pencil, he marked the rough positions of the storm and the ash. It looked like he had two choices: Divert south and shoot the gap between them. Or divert even farther south and avoid the whole mess. He’d wanted to fly a more northerly route, perhaps cross over the U.S., and have easier communications with people who could help. But the damned storm was moving northeast.
He tried to think logically, to force a sensible decision through the mental quicksand created by lack of sleep. No matter what he did, he’d need another refueling. And a lot of luck. Parson wondered whether good fortune came in finite supplies. If so, he must have used up his share long ago and gone deep into some cosmic debt.
He looked up again at the Pleiades. The seven sisters, daughters of Atlas. Transformed into stars to comfort their father, who was condemned to hold up the sky.
THE AIR IN THE CARGO COMPARTMENT
felt oily and close. Gold wondered if any hydraulic mist remained or if the mere memory of it was making her uncomfortable. Tension fouled the air as well. Some of the aeromeds snapped at one another as they tended the wounded. Everybody was tired and frightened, and getting more so by the hour. A few glared at the Afghan patients with open malice.
felt oily and close. Gold wondered if any hydraulic mist remained or if the mere memory of it was making her uncomfortable. Tension fouled the air as well. Some of the aeromeds snapped at one another as they tended the wounded. Everybody was tired and frightened, and getting more so by the hour. A few glared at the Afghan patients with open malice.
Gold looked up at two of the aeromeds. They had their backs to her. One of them placed a fresh bag of IV solution over a patient’s stretcher.
“We got only three more liters of this,” he said.
“We ought to cap all these fuckers,” the other medic added. “How do we know another one won’t try to kill us?”
“Hell, yeah. Maybe not all Muslims are terrorists, but damned near all terrorists are Muslims.”
“Watch what you say,” Gold warned. “Some of the Afghans can understand you.”
“I don’t give a—” a medic said as he turned, and then he saw Gold’s rank insignia. “Sorry, Sergeant Major.”
Gold didn’t think he was really sorry, but maybe he’d at least keep his mouth shut. She could understand how he felt, given what Fawad had done. And he was trying to do his job while trapped in the world’s largest pipe bomb.
Still, Gold expected him to keep a professional bearing. Nobody was pulling out his fingernails.
The other medic looked at her with—what? Suspicion? They keep hearing me speak Pashto, Gold thought. They probably wonder whose side I’m on. All they know is that I talk in the strange language and I led Fawad to the flight deck.
She could do nothing about that now. And she began to feel that all she’d ever done amounted to nothing. Even if everyone survived this flight, what future would her Afghan students have? Perhaps a short one, hunted down by the Taliban. They might live defenseless under a Kabul government too weak and corrupt to protect itself, let alone its citizens.
Gold looked around at the Afghans. Baitullah lay on his litter, gripping the stanchions so hard his knuckles whitened. She went to his side and asked, “What is wrong, Baitullah?” Stares from the Americans.
“My feet hurt, teacher. It is insane, I know. I have no feet. But I pray to Allah to take away this pain.”
“You are not insane, friend. Amputees can suffer phantom pain that is quite real. I will ask the nurses to help you.”
She found the MCD and asked if Baitullah could have more morphine. The lieutenant colonel examined his chart, checked her watch, uncapped a needle, and filled the syringe.
“Tell him to give me his arm,” the MCD said.
Gold spoke, and Baitullah lowered his right arm to his side. With his left, he still gripped the stanchion as if it were his only hold on life. The MCD wiped his right tricep with an alcohol prep pad and gave him the injection. Baitullah let go of the stanchion and closed his eyes.
“We don’t have a lot of morphine left,” the MCD said. She tossed the needle into a plastic container marked CAUTION—MEDICAL WASTE—SHARPS.
Baitullah’s chest rose as he took a deep breath, and he smiled at Gold as he let it out. “Do you remember when you taught me to shoot?”
“I enjoyed that day,” Gold said. Not entirely true. She’d enjoyed helping Baitullah, but what she’d seen had disgusted her. She had accompanied a group of police trainees to the rifle range just to provide translation for the American contractors paid to provide small-arms training. When they’d arrived at the range, they could not conduct training because all the ammunition had disappeared. Thirty cases of 7.62-millimeter ammo, a thousand rounds each, just gone. Sold on the black market, no doubt, and probably to insurgents.
The next day, a Black Hawk helicopter had thudded and beat onto the training site and off-loaded more ammo. Finally, the training could begin. An instructor of unknown qualifications, with the physique of a bag of doughnuts, asked her to have the students line up on the range. He passed out magazines, then told them to fire. Not a word about sight picture. Nothing about breath control, trigger squeeze, or follow-through. Just burn through the ammo and get it over with.
At a hundred yards downrange, the safest place to stand would have been in front of a bull’s-eye. Most trainees placed few rounds on paper at all, let alone anywhere near the black circle. The instructor passed out more magazines and repeated the drill. No advice, just more bullets. Gold began to wonder if his company’s contract measured success in rounds expended.
“Wudregah,”
she called. Stop. Then she said to the nearest recruit, Baitullah,
“Tupak. Daa maa tah raakrah.”
Give me the rifle.
she called. Stop. Then she said to the nearest recruit, Baitullah,
“Tupak. Daa maa tah raakrah.”
Give me the rifle.
She did not consider herself an expert marksman, but anybody who’d completed Basic Training could give a better class than this lazy civilian. Baitullah hesitated; he probably resented having to surrender his weapon to a woman. But he handed it over.
Gold kneeled, aimed, and pressed the trigger. A puff of dust erupted below the target and to the right, then vanished in the breeze. The rifle wasn’t even sighted in. She ordered all the targets moved up to the fifty-yard mark, and she explained how to aim for center and watch where the bullet went.
Then she talked the recruits through adjusting range with the rear sight and drift and elevation with the front post. She gave the rifle back to Baitullah and used him as an example. Round by round, tweaking the sights, he walked his bullets out of the dirt, onto the target, and left toward the center. When he’d shot a respectable group at fifty yards, she moved his target back out to a hundred. He put all of his rounds on paper, and a few within the black. Not exactly Olympic performance, but at least his AK was more dangerous to the enemy than to himself.
Only at the end of the day did Gold realize she’d nearly made an awful mistake. By taking Baitullah’s rifle, she’d publicly emasculated him. It was one thing to take direction from her in a literacy class but quite another to defer to a woman about weaponry. But because he’d had the good sense to listen, he became his unit’s top shooter, right then and there, and just as publicly. Maybe her very presence on the rifle range was so strange to him that he just went with it. The outcome could have been far worse. The more she thought about it, the more she respected Baitullah. And he seemed to respect her as well.
But look what he’s come to, Gold thought. Even if the insurgents left him alone, how would a double amputee make a living in Afghanistan? Sit on a hillside with his Kalashnikov and protect somebody’s goats from the wolves? That bomb in the tail section would probably make it all moot, anyway.
She admired the composure shown by Baitullah and Mahsoud. The men had zero control over their fate, and the situation required courage of an unusual alloy. In a firefight, you could at least see the enemy, and the battle normally lasted just minutes or even seconds.
Here, the enemy had already escaped after laying a minefield with no exit. The passing hours scraped like a grindstone at sanity and will.
19
T
he winds were costing Parson some groundspeed. The FMS screen showed them streaming from two hundred and forty degrees at ninety knots. Flying wasn’t levitating from point A to point B; it was navigating a river of air, with all its currents and eddies.
he winds were costing Parson some groundspeed. The FMS screen showed them streaming from two hundred and forty degrees at ninety knots. Flying wasn’t levitating from point A to point B; it was navigating a river of air, with all its currents and eddies.
And that tropical storm in the Caribbean was one big-ass eddy. Parson decided to give it the widest berth possible while running between the storm and the volcano. By his calculus, Arlene’s turbulence posed more danger than the ash of Soufrière Hills. At this altitude, he hoped he’d remain above most of the volcano’s ejecta. He felt like a mariner of ancient myth, beset by monsters and snares thrown in his way by spiteful gods. He just wondered what he’d done to piss them off.
Maybe he’d pissed them off simply by remaining alive at all. In the years since the shoot-down, Parson had been haunted by the loss of his crewmates. Why had he survived when they had not? God knows, he was no more deserving. The only way he could begin to justify his continued presence on this earth was to be a good officer and aviator. And he had no idea if he was good enough to handle all this.
Right now he needed to coordinate a course change. “Ascension Island,” he called. “Air Evac Eight-Four for phone patch.”
The response came in no form he could understand. Just pops and warbles in the static, nothing discernible as human speech. The Ascension radio operator was trying, but whatever shortwave alchemy had worked before wasn’t working now.
“Mainsail,” he called. “Air Evac Eight-Four.”
Now the static came as pure white noise, no squelch break at all. Like radio astronomy, with signals traveling for parsecs and bouncing off nothing. The C-5 had been aloft now for about seventeen hours; Parson was so tired, he began to doubt his ability to carry out the simplest tasks. He double-checked the radio’s frequency and settings. He called one more time and got the same result.
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