Silent Enemy (6 page)
Authors: Tom Young
She dug the Falnama from her backpack and opened it. The pages fell to fortune-telling so ironic it made her shake her head:
If you have taken this augury for travel or trade, prospects are good.
No help there. Gold leafed through the book, unsure of what she was looking for. She stopped on another augury:
Beware, a thousand times beware, not to let trouble reach you.
Well, it’s a little too late for that, she thought. Trouble certainly reached us at the training center. And it may not be finished with us yet. So much for the Falnama. She left it in her baggage and took her book of Rahman Baba’s poetry to Mahsoud in case he wanted to read it a fourth time. He thanked her in Pashto. Going through the motions of politeness, Gold supposed, but he was probably beyond any morale boost she could offer. Failed again.
Gold decided to leave him alone so he could rest. She climbed the ladder to the flight deck and slid open the door. The crew appeared in deep discussion, but without her headset she could not hear their words. The flight engineer had his computer on a page that looked a lot like common e-mail. Gold bent to see the message:
TO: ALL MOBILITY ASSETS
FROM: 618 TACC
A C-130 THAT DEPARTED BAGRAM HAS EXPLODED
EN ROUTE BAHRAIN.
4
P
arson swallowed some of his coffee, felt the heat all the way down. So this shit is for real, he thought. He felt his palms go clammy.
arson swallowed some of his coffee, felt the heat all the way down. So this shit is for real, he thought. He felt his palms go clammy.
He started to imagine what it would feel like at the moment of explosion. Thrown down in a fury of smoke, flame, and debris like a fire bucket of charcoal dumped from a high place. Then he told himself, Stop this. You don’t have the luxury of falling apart. The citizens of the United States have entrusted you with the lives of fifty-seven souls on board.
“Souls on board.” One of the aviation terms borrowed from the older traditions of mariners. Rescuers used to refer to people on a foundering ship as “those poor SOBs.” For public consumption, the phrase got changed to a more palatable version. Well, we’re not dead yet, Parson thought. He felt his pulse in the crook of his thumb as he held on to the yoke.
Parson wondered if there was anything he could do, anything more he could learn about his situation. He turned his wafer switch to HFI.
“Hilda,” he called, “Air Evac Eight-Four.”
“Eight-Four,” came the reply. “Go ahead.”
“Received your latest on the C-130. What happened?”
Long pause. Then: “ATC says it disappeared from radar as it descended through ten thousand feet. They got down to minimum fuel.”
And that model of C-130 couldn’t take fuel in the air, Parson knew. Probably a barometric bomb, then. So descent was the enemy and not time. At least he could refuel in flight, unlike that Herk. And if the bomb was set to go off at ten thousand feet, he could still drop to rendezvous altitude when it came time to get gas. He’d meet the tanker at around twenty-five thousand.
“Hilda,” he called, “do you know where that C-130 was based?”
“Affirmative, sir. Al Udeid.”
“No,” Parson said. “I mean, its home base.”
“Dyess, I believe.”
Parson swore under his breath, shook his head. He had done a tour at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas. He wondered if anyone he knew was on board.
He looked around at his own crew. Dunne seemed all right, but he tapped his pencil on the engineer’s table like he was ticked off. Colman looked pale. Gold had put on her borrowed headset and sat again at the nav station. Parson knew that stricken look in her gray eyes. He’d seen it before, right after he’d killed the insurgents who held her hostage. She was the strongest woman he knew, maybe the strongest person he knew, but everybody had a limit. Parson felt glad to see her back on the flight deck and sorry she was on board at all.
“Sounds like they set the bombs to throw debris onto whatever place the planes were flying to,” Colman said.
That made a sick kind of sense to Parson. Bombs set to blow on descent might cause ground damage in countries supporting the war effort. The terrorists would get the airplanes, and maybe more.
“Reminds me of the Bojinka plot,” Dunne said.
“The what?” Colman asked.
“Back in the nineties, al-Qaeda had this plan to blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific. I think they got a bomb on one plane, and the plotters were arrested.”
“When they get an idea they like,” Gold said, “they tend to stick with it. I was thinking of Bojinka, too.”
So up to twelve planes might have bombs on board? We’re going to lose a lot of friends today, Parson thought.
He was glad a tanker was on the way. No telling how much gas he’d need now, and the aerial refuel would keep him and the rest of the crew busy. With too much time droning on autopilot, his mind was beginning to wander, to think about things he might never experience again: the fragrance of a woman’s hair, the smell of autumn woods on opening day of deer season, the smoky burn of single malt when he bought a round for the crew.
None of that, he told himself. You’re about to fly tight formation with another big airplane at about three hundred miles an hour. Keep your mind on what you’re doing, your eyes on your instruments.
“Crew,” Parson called over the interphone, “still not finding anything?”
“Negative in the troop compartment.”
“Negative, aft flight deck.”
“Cargo’s got nothing.”
Maybe we’re all right, Parson hoped. But if the terrorists were hitting planes departing Bagram today, it was hard to imagine they’d overlook the biggest thing on the ramp, the thing with the most hiding places. Where else could it be? If Dunne said he’d checked the wheel wells, he’d checked the wheel wells. And nobody has found anything inside.
Parson tried to think of any other part of the plane where bad guys might plant a bomb. Mentally, he walked the flight deck, the cargo compartment downstairs, the troop compartment upstairs. The lavatories, galley, closets. The loadmasters had checked all that. Where else? Oh, shit. The back end of the airplane, in the tail cone.
“All right, crew,” Parson said, “listen up. We’re about to conduct an aerial refuel. To do that, we’re going to descend to two-five-oh. While we’re down there, we’re going to check the tail cone section. I need a volunteer to go through the negative pressure relief valves and look around. It’s going to suck because it’ll be loud and cold.”
“How can somebody get back there in flight?” Colman asked.
“After we take on gas,” Parson said, “we’ll depressurize. Then you can open those valves.”
Parson knew that even inside the manned sections of the plane, depressurizing at that altitude would be no fun. Ears would pop, sinuses would hurt. Everybody would need to be on oxygen. Normally, if you depressurized in flight for something like an airdrop, you did it at a much lower altitude, and even then you might prebreathe pure oxygen. However, descending farther was out of the question if planes were exploding at ten thousand. Parson wanted as wide a margin as possible above any bomb’s trigger altitude. Even if one bomb had been set for ten thousand, another might be set at eighteen thousand. And at two-five-oh, you could probably avoid decompression sickness as long as you prebreathed.
The interphone broke into his planning.
“Pilot, MCD.”
“Go ahead, ma’am,” Parson said.
“Did I understand you to say you’re going to depressurize at twenty-five thousand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You can’t do that. I have two patients with head injuries. If the air expands inside their cranial cavities, it could kill them or cause permanent brain damage.”
Parson hadn’t transported wounded since his C-130 days and he’d forgotten how complicated that could get. It took a few minutes to get his mind around the enormity of the decision facing him. Perhaps sacrifice two lives to save the other fifty-five. This wasn’t taking the life of an enemy; it was killing someone who had served honorably and suffered for it enough already. He didn’t know if those two patients were U.S. or Afghan, but it didn’t matter. They were either Americans or allies.
He wondered what it was like to die of an embolism inside your brain. And what if there was nothing back in the tail? How likely was it that a terrorist would know enough about airplanes to put something in the empennage section of a C-5? Well, terrorists had learned to fly once upon a time.
Damn it all to hell. Parson knew firsthand how military service could put a crushing burden of responsibility on certain people. Sometimes it was unpredictable, like right now. Sometimes it came all out of proportion to rank, like right now. I’m a major, he thought, not God.
I’ll just think about it for a while, Parson decided. First we’ll get through the AR and then we’ll either depressurize or not. One crisis at a time.
He entered a frequency on his CDU for the tanker’s beacon. As if on cue, the tanker called up on UHF.
“Air Evac Eight-Four, Shell Two-One.”
“Shell Two-One,” Parson called, “Air Evac Eight-Four. Go ahead.”
“Shell Two-One is a KC-10 standing by for an emergency AR. How do you want to do this?”
“Let’s set up a point parallel at two-five-oh,” Parson said. “We’ll take about a hundred and fifty thousand pounds if you have it.” Hell, why did it have to be a KC-10? The tail-mounted engine on that monster always beats you to death with its jet wash, Parson thought. It was tricky enough to stay in position behind a KC-135. But at least the KC-10 should have plenty of gas.
“Roger that, Eight-Four,” the tanker pilot called. “See you at two-five-oh.”
Parson entered 25,000 into the altitude alerter and hooked his fingers over the throttles. Eased the power back until the vertical speed indicator showed a gentle descent. Hoped he wouldn’t make the wounded too uncomfortable until he moved into precontact behind the tanker. Then there wouldn’t be anything he could do about the bumps. By the time we climb again, he thought, I’ll have made a life-and-death decision.
During his cross-training to the pilot’s seat, Parson had experienced all manner of emergencies in the simulator: fires, missile strikes, hydraulic losses. On a night flight, he had suffered an electrical failure that darkened the cockpit. Made an instrument approach with a penlight in his mouth. But there was no sim scenario, no regs, no guidance whatsoever for a bomb on board. He thought that was because no one expected it to happen to a military plane. Or maybe because if it did, the only procedure was to kiss your ass good-bye.
GOLD LOOKED OUT THE COCKPIT WINDOWS,
over Parson’s shoulder, as the airplane descended. The undercast had broken up enough to reveal what appeared as a sheet of iron down below. The Black Sea, she guessed. Above the water, higher clouds rose many thousands of feet. The airplane flew through towering cumulus that rocked the jet with turbulence. Bulbous fists boiled out from the main body of each white mass, seemed to punch the aircraft. The cloud formations were so laden with moisture that they sprayed the windscreen like ocean spume. The droplets froze when they touched the glass, then dwindled away. The blast of cold, high-speed air sublimated the ice directly into vapor.
over Parson’s shoulder, as the airplane descended. The undercast had broken up enough to reveal what appeared as a sheet of iron down below. The Black Sea, she guessed. Above the water, higher clouds rose many thousands of feet. The airplane flew through towering cumulus that rocked the jet with turbulence. Bulbous fists boiled out from the main body of each white mass, seemed to punch the aircraft. The cloud formations were so laden with moisture that they sprayed the windscreen like ocean spume. The droplets froze when they touched the glass, then dwindled away. The blast of cold, high-speed air sublimated the ice directly into vapor.
She had never seen a view quite like this. When she traveled on military transports, it usually felt like a subway ride. Few windows where she rode, and small ones at that. Even when she jumped, it was from a much lower altitude, and she had other things on her mind: check the canopy, pull the risers apart if the shroud lines were twisted, aim for the drop zone.
But this must be what God sees, she thought. So does He see us now? Could He help us now?
Thy will be done.
She left the prayer at that. Didn’t know what else to say. He already knows we want to live. Why state the obvious? Gold believed in prayer—but prayer for its own sake, to let your Maker know you were paying attention. Praying for a sick person, for example, was well and good. But did it actually change the outcome? If it did, that implied God needed man’s help. Impossible.
She left the prayer at that. Didn’t know what else to say. He already knows we want to live. Why state the obvious? Gold believed in prayer—but prayer for its own sake, to let your Maker know you were paying attention. Praying for a sick person, for example, was well and good. But did it actually change the outcome? If it did, that implied God needed man’s help. Impossible.
Gold accepted that was a question she wasn’t meant to answer. She was a finite being, not programmed to comprehend the infinite. Right now the biggest question was whether she and her students would get off this plane alive. She felt she had a right to know. And she knew that question had no answer yet.
Parson was pointing back toward the nav table, and Gold realized he was talking to her. “Put on that oxygen mask,” he said. “Dunne will show you how to hook up your headset to it.”
“Sorry,” Gold said.
“Crew,” Parson called, “I want everybody to put on a mask and prebreathe on one hundred percent in case we depressurize.”
“I have two patients who might not live through that,” the MCD said.
“Understood,” Parson said. “But I have to make the decision, ma’am. I’ll keep you advised.”
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