Authors: Tom Young
Silent Enemy (28 page)
A nice warm beach might have provided better R & R; the looming Bavarian Alps reminded her of the Hindu Kush. But she decided that was fitting. The things she’d experienced would always loom in her psyche.
She spent her days at the military resort eating good German food and working out in the fitness center and her nights by the fire sipping eiswein and reading the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran, and
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
With holy words and the thoughts of Rome’s emperor and Stoic philosopher, she hoped to make sense of her pain. The Roman seemed to speak to her from across the ages, especially with his caution about vengeance:
The best kind of revenge is, not to become like unto them.
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
With holy words and the thoughts of Rome’s emperor and Stoic philosopher, she hoped to make sense of her pain. The Roman seemed to speak to her from across the ages, especially with his caution about vengeance:
The best kind of revenge is, not to become like unto them.
The gathered wisdom of prophets and sages seemed to run in that vein—it told her what
not
to do. That was helpful as far as it went, and a thirst for payback ran counter to her nature, anyway. She found little guidance on what
to
do. But she was pretty sure Marcus Aurelius would say, “Soldier on.” And so she had, more or less, right up until this moment.
not
to do. That was helpful as far as it went, and a thirst for payback ran counter to her nature, anyway. She found little guidance on what
to
do. But she was pretty sure Marcus Aurelius would say, “Soldier on.” And so she had, more or less, right up until this moment.
Mahsoud was hanging in there, too. With what looked like a detached scientific interest, he watched the last of the antibiotic flow down the tubing and into his arm. His eyes, which earlier had communicated only fear, now moved about with an intelligent wakefulness. The mask obscured his facial expressions, but those black eyes alone conveyed an acceptance, along with the constant undercurrent of a student’s affection for a trusted teacher. The oxygen seemed to do him good. Justin had left the regulator’s diluter lever on 100 PERCENT.
Gold remembered the crew had said they had plenty of oxygen, and she hoped that remained true. It seemed the only thing keeping Mahsoud’s body and soul in the same place.
She stepped out of the bunk room and, over Dunne’s shoulder, examined the flight engineer panel. Maybe something on that wall of instruments would tell her how much oxygen was left. When she couldn’t find it, she put on her headset and asked him.
“Right here,” Dunne said. He pointed to a pair of gauges at the bottom edge of the panel. “We still got about seventy liters.”
“That doesn’t sound like much,” Gold said.
“It’s seventy liters of
liquid
oxygen. That translates to a whole lot more by the time it runs through the heat exchangers and becomes a gas.”
liquid
oxygen. That translates to a whole lot more by the time it runs through the heat exchangers and becomes a gas.”
Liquid oxygen sounded dangerous to Gold. The only reference to liquid oxygen she’d ever heard had to do with exploding spacecraft. But it seemed the one item on board in sufficient quantity, and for that she was grateful.
Outside the cockpit windscreen, the daylight had an odd creamlike quality. It reminded Gold of looking up through the fog of the Green Mountains. But now she was looking down and she could identify no distinct cloud layer, so she thought it strange that she could not see the ocean.
While Gold stood behind Dunne’s seat and watched the crew, Parson tried several radio calls. He never got an answer, and she gathered he was having communication problems. Yet another difficulty. The plane seemed to be falling apart as time went on.
“Guess I’ll have to get one more relay on VHF,” Parson said over interphone. He entered numbers in an electronic box on the center console, keyed his mike and said, “Any aircraft, Air Evac Eight-Four on guard.”
An answer came immediately. “Air Evac Eight-Four, Avianca Six-Two.” Hispanic accent.
“All right,” Parson said over interphone, “the Colombians are listening up.” Then he transmitted, “Avianca, do you have HF or ACARS or some other way to pass along a message for us?”
“Sir, we are an Airbus with HF capability.”
“Excellent. Please contact Hilda and give them our location at”—Parson checked his watch—“eighteen past the hour.” He gave the Avianca pilot his coordinates, along with the frequency for the call. Then he added, “Please tell them we’ll need one more refueling.”
“Stand by,” the Avianca pilot said.
“Seems funny to coordinate this through foreign nationals,” Colman said.
“It does,” Parson said. “But we don’t have a lot of choice. And the Colombians are our friends, anyway.”
As Parson waited, he tweaked a knob on his console, and the plane banked gently to the right. “I’m going to cut north just a few degrees,” he said. “This shit looks like it’s getting thicker.”
“How does number four feel?” Dunne asked.
Parson placed his fingers around one of the throttles. Gold didn’t understand why, but she knew this didn’t bode well. And
what
was getting thicker?
what
was getting thicker?
“It ain’t healing itself, that’s for sure,” Parson said.
Gold sat at the nav table and waited for a break in the conversation. When it seemed okay, she asked, “What’s going on?”
Parson explained that the number four engine was vibrating, number one had oil pressure dropping, Soufrière Hills was erupting to their southwest and Arlene was churning to their northeast. “We’re running the gap between them,” he said, “if there
is
a gap.”
is
a gap.”
Mount Scylla and Tropical Storm Charybdis, Gold thought, but she kept it to herself.
“There she is,” Parson said. He pointed to his radar screen. Along its right edge, green and yellow splotches and crescents shifted and reassembled with each sweep of the radar antenna. “Those are the outer rain bands.”
Out the windows, Gold could see nothing except more of that weird high-altitude haze that she supposed was the volcanic ash. However, as the aircraft continued along Parson’s adjusted course, the sky to the right began to darken. On the radar screen, the greens and yellows took up more space, and some of the yellows turned red. Gold didn’t know if that suggested heavier rain or stronger turbulence, but she did know that in an airplane, red indications probably meant bad things.
Eventually, the Colombian airliner called back. “Air Evac Eight-Four,” the pilot said, “your Air Force is sending another tanker to meet you.” The Avianca captain passed along radio frequencies and coordinates for the tanker rendezvous.
“Avianca, that’s good news,” Parson said. “We need all the help we can get.”
“Our prayers are with you, sir,” the captain added. “Oh, yes, and your people also said escort fighters will accompany the tanker.”
“Copy that,” Parson transmitted. Then he said on interphone, “Bet those fighter jocks are going to get Air Medals just for being a pain in my ass.”
Gold understood his frustration. She didn’t see what good an escort could do; it would only complicate Parson’s flying. The fighters that had joined them earlier seemed just a distraction. But the Air Force had its doctrines, and Gold did not pretend to know them.
“How much gas do we have now?” Parson asked.
Dunne checked his panel and said, “Just under a hundred thousand pounds.”
“Good,” Parson said. “Maybe this time it won’t be so fucking close.”
So fuel might not be an issue, Gold surmised. One less thing for the crew to worry about. She could see they had plenty of other problems.
21
B
y now, Parson thought, the aeromeds would have had enough time to get Mahsoud comfortable in the bunk room. Since the Afghan lay only about five steps aft of the pilot’s seat, Parson wanted to look in on him. That would probably make Gold happy, and the guy had been helpful. Or at least he’d tried. Parson figured the odds of a survivable outcome were still slim.
y now, Parson thought, the aeromeds would have had enough time to get Mahsoud comfortable in the bunk room. Since the Afghan lay only about five steps aft of the pilot’s seat, Parson wanted to look in on him. That would probably make Gold happy, and the guy had been helpful. Or at least he’d tried. Parson figured the odds of a survivable outcome were still slim.
“Take the jet for a while,” Parson told Colman.
“My aircraft, my radios,” Colman said.
Parson unbuckled his lap belt and slid back his seat, and he saw Gold still sitting at the nav table. He’d concentrated so hard on the radio calls and navigation that he’d forgotten she was right behind him.
“How’s your friend doing?” he asked.
“A little better,” she said.
In the bunk room, Mahsoud lifted the oxygen mask and said, “Hello, sir,” in English when Parson nodded to him.
“Relax,” Parson said. “Don’t take off that thing on my account.” Parson supposed that in the Afghan police force, a major would seldom deign to speak to a new recruit. He didn’t want Mahsoud to be intimidated by his rank. “You’ve been a big help,” he added.
Mahsoud looked at Parson blankly for a moment, and then the skin around his eyes wrinkled in the only visible evidence of the smile under his mask. Probably took him a moment to process the phrase “big help.”
Gold said something in Pashto, and Mahsoud placed his hand to his heart.
“What are you two conspiring about?” Parson asked.
“Nothing,” Gold said. “It’s good of you to treat him respectfully.”
“I’m starting to like that guy.”
Parson had learned in his wartime experiences that bravery was like good bourbon: It came in different blends. People showed courage in different ways, and it didn’t always involve running through hails of gunfire. Mahsoud demonstrated his in a quiet way, much like Gold. It really came down to the ability to function under pressure and do the right thing.
As Parson returned to his seat, he stepped into a smear of congealing blood left when they’d dragged Fawad’s body back to the courier compartment. It stuck to his boot like creek bank slime, and he scraped his sole against the floor to get rid of it. He didn’t want a terrorist’s blood on his rudder pedals.
He sat down, put on his headset, and asked Colman, “Any changes?”
“No, but something weird happened. I thought I saw two blips on the TCAS, but then they went away. I’m so tired it could have been my imagination.”
Parson looked at the traffic advisory screen superimposed over a vertical speed indicator. A white diamond meant proximate traffic but no threat. A yellow circle indicated another aircraft a little too close. A red square warned of an imminent collision if you didn’t do something fast. But now the TCAS showed no other planes at all.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Parson said. “Our avionics are all fucked up, anyway.”
Right now, Parson was more concerned about the weather. Tropical Storm Arlene, or maybe Hurricane Arlene by now, lurked to the right. What he had first seen only on radar became plainly apparent out the windows. Sweeps and grandeurs of cumulonimbus reared and heaved, mists at battle with one another. Below them, tumults of rain lashed the sea. Spindrift danced across the whitecaps like phantoms. Winds and wave heights registering toward the bad side of the Beaufort scale, Parson thought.
Somewhere, he knew, a WC-130 crew out of Keesler was deliberately flying through that monster to take meteorological readings, and he envied them. Turbulence would beat the shit out of them, and they might even reach for their barf bags, but they’d live through the day. He doubted he would.
Jolts and bumps began to rock the C-5. So far, nothing as bad as the thunderstorms during the night, but Parson didn’t want to take any more chances with that bomb’s mercury switch. He turned a heading knob and adjusted his course to the left. The ride settled down some.
To the southwest, the ash cloud seemed lighter now. Parson knew he couldn’t accurately measure the concentration by eyeballing it; he had no experience with volcanic events. But he steered a little more to the left, anyway. He could
see
the trouble to the right, so it seemed logical to avoid it.
see
the trouble to the right, so it seemed logical to avoid it.
From a greater distance, Arlene appeared even more intimidating. Shafts of rainfall hung like gray scarves from the storm’s feathered edges. Dark walls of vapor seethed across hundreds of miles.
“Never seen anything like that,” Colman said.
“At some point, you’ll probably see it again,” Parson said. Then he thought, no—you probably won’t.
Ahead, visibility improved. Parson was pretty sure he was at least getting the ash cloud behind him. The air cleared enough for him to make out waves on the water below. They might have been tenfoot seas, but from altitude they appeared as ripples across the surface of a pond.
It occurred to Parson that the ocean was the only changeless thing he’d ever view. Anything on land could burn, crumble, or wear away. But this spot on earth had looked exactly like this a million years ago. If his aircraft took its final plunge right now, it would leave a white splash, gone in seconds. And the ocean would go on looking the same for another million years.
But the next million years aren’t your problem, he told himself. Better focus on the next few hours.
“How’s oil pressure looking on number one?” he asked.
“Still fluxing,” Dunne said. “And down about ten psi from the mean.”
“We’ll let it run,” Parson said. “Just keep me advised.”
Normally, if an engine lost even half that much oil pressure, Parson would have shut it down. But he needed it now, especially given the vibration in number four. If either of those engines failed, his crew and passengers would be in a world of hurt. If both failed, they’d be dead. He could not maintain altitude with only two engines.
As Parson considered his options—or lack of them—he felt a raging sense of violation. Somebody had boarded his aircraft, climbed its steps, and walked its plating with that fucking bomb. He wanted to grab whoever had done it and cut his heart out with a short pocketknife. But he’d never get that chance, and at best he could only channel his anger into foiling the enemy, landing the plane in one piece.
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