The Mullah's Storm (16 page)

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Authors: Tom Young

BOOK: The Mullah's Storm
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“Windsonde,” Parson said. He told Najib how it transmitted wind data as it fell through the column of air. The data would be fed to the aircraft as the navigator set up a release point.
That navigator better be as good as me, Parson thought.
The sky grew silent again. Parson heard only a bird’s single chirp. Najib and Cantrell looked at him. He circled his thumb and forefinger in an “okay” sign. Just wait, he thought. Give them time to start their run-in. Hope they got wind modeling data for these mountains.
The airplane noise returned. Faint. Growing louder. Parson pursed his lips and nodded, imagined himself on board. Preslowdown checks, complete, navigator. Slowdown, slowdown now. Five, four, three, two, one. Green light.
The engine thrum began fading. Now or not at all, then.
More nylon ripple, along with clicks and whirs. Parson knew that meant inertial reels pulling on parachute risers, making minute adjustments in course.
The chute appeared from the murk overhead as if the clouds themselves had formed it. Beneath the billowing rectangle of cloth, a pallet hung from the risers, several boxes covered in cargo netting.
Parson heard the
whump
when the load hit the ground. The chute collapsed and settled like a blanket.
“It’s down,” Cantrell radioed. “Hold your positions.” Cantrell looked over the barrel of his rifle.
They waited to see if the airdrop had drawn the attention of bad guys. That wasn’t likely. The clouds hung so low that the chute would have been visible for only three or four seconds before it landed.
Cantrell gave Parson a thumbs-up. Parson, Najib, and Cantrell trotted over to the pallet. Parson scanned the tree line even though he knew the troops had the perimeter. For a change, he was glad the weather sucked. If it can’t be good enough for a chopper landing, he thought, let it be bad enough to cover us while we break down this pallet.
Parson gathered up the folds of the parachute and placed the chute beside the load. He tried to detach the cargo netting. His hands were so cold he fumbled with the clips, so he gave up on working the hardware. Instead, he drew his boot knife and cut away the netting.
“Let’s get this stuff into the trees,” Parson said.
The supplies had come in black Pelican cases, except the ammunition in wooden crates and food in cardboard cartons. With his good hand, Parson took the handle of a long box—a rifle, he hoped. He picked up another case with his right hand, but that hurt too much and he put it back down. He carried the long box into the woods. Najib and Cantrell brought the rest.
Parson opened the case. On the black foam padding inside, he found an M-40 rifle with a Schmidt & Bender scope. Noise suppressor at the end of the barrel. The weapon, a military version of the Remington 700, smelled of gun oil. Parson lifted the rifle and felt its familiar heft. He had once owned a 700, though not of this caliber. His own Remington chambered for .243 had taken its share of deer. But for the work ahead of him, he was glad for the heavier 7.62-millimeter. The case also contained a handwritten note:
This rifle is zeroed to five hundred yards. USMC Precision Weapons Section. Semper Fi.
All right, thought Parson. Somebody has my back. Actually, a lot of people do for this drop to have happened.
The load included a laser range-finder, night-vision goggles, and a Hook-112 survival radio. Batteries for everything. Two parkas in winter camo. Snowshoes. Not the traditional type with wooden frames and rawhide decking, but modern ones of stainless steel and Nytex.
“You must have been good this year,” Cantrell said.
“Can’t believe they pulled this together so fast,” Parson said.
The snow fell in tiny motes, settled like sediment. Parson put some of the gear in his pack. He and Cantrell handed out food, ammunition, and batteries to the American and ANA soldiers. Parson placed the radio in an empty pocket of his survival vest. He buckled on a set of snowshoes and gave the other pairs to the troops. Then he took off his filthy desert parka and donned a snow camo coat. He laced a cold-weather sleeping bag to his pack.
Parson opened another box and found a handgun. Not the usual Air Force nine-millimeter, but a .45 Colt. The model 1911 issued to his father and about three generations of GIs. The weapon felt substantial in his hand, solid as a bar of lead.
He picked up a magazine. Cartridges nearly the size of the end joint of his thumb. He placed the magazine into the Colt’s grip, slammed it home with the heel of his good hand. Racked the slide to chamber a round. That hurt and felt good at the same time. Parson put the sidearm in the empty holster on his survival vest, and he picked up the rifle by the sling. With one fluid motion, he let the M-40 ride over his arm to rest across his shoulders.
“All right,” Parson said. “Let’s go get her.”
Najib led the team into some evergreens at the far end of the drop zone. The trees were too sparse to provide much cover. Soon they gave way to scrub and boulders, all with a white coating. Mist floated through the clearing, and through its translucence Parson saw an incline close to vertical.
“Have you the strength for a climb?” Najib whispered.
“Yeah,” Parson said. Don’t ask me if I feel like it, he thought. For God’s sake let’s keep moving. Will we get there one minute after they cut her head off?
“There is a village on the opposite slope,” Najib said. “I know it from childhood. Men on horseback would have approached it through the far valley.”
“So you have us coming from a different direction,” Parson said.
“Precisely,” Najib said. “This Marwan is a cobra. Cold-blooded and deadly. We must become shrewd like the mongoose.”
Parson liked the mongoose comparison. A scrappy creature, all teeth and claws. Permanently pissed off. Mad enough to ignore fangs and venom. Let’s get our mongoose asses up this mountain, thought Parson.
The morphine had worn off and his wrist hurt like hell, but it felt good to be moving with some kind of plan. The slope offered no cover at all, just low brush and big rocks. Stalking across such exposed terrain went against everything Parson had learned in survival school. But now he wasn’t just evading; he was pursuing. And for the moment, the mist provided what the landscape did not. He guessed the visibility at a matter of yards.
The unbroken snow lay flawless across the mountainside, not marred by so much as a goat’s hoof. Even with the snowshoes, the powder came up nearly to Parson’s knees, making it impossible to see the smaller stones on the rough ground. He placed his feet carefully, trying not to fall. Eventually the incline grew so steep the snowshoes hindered more than helped. Parson untied them and stowed them across his pack. He struggled to keep up with the soldiers, and twice they stopped to wait for him.
Najib handled the navigation, and Parson noticed that the Afghan no longer checked his compass as he led. So he really did grow up around here, thought Parson. Maybe he walked these mountains as a hunter like me. If Najib knows the terrain the way Gold knows the culture, no wonder they hooked him up with Special Forces.
Parson twisted the cap from a bottle of water delivered in the airdrop. He drank in gulps, grateful for water that didn’t need chemicals to kill germs. It tasted clean and pure, but he couldn’t really enjoy it. He knew how much Gold probably needed water by now. Parson had three other bottles. He decided to save them for her. He kept the empty bottle, stuffed it with snow, capped it. He placed the bottle in the pocket of his parka.
The light began to fade, and Parson shivered with the drop in temperature. His new coat had a tiny thermometer dangling from the zipper tab. Eighteen degrees Fahrenheit. He made fists inside his gloves to warm his fingers. Snow spat intermittently, and a subtle shift of breeze touched his cheek. For a moment Parson thought the snow might stop. Then the wind rose and a snow squall enveloped the mountain. The whiteout cut visibility so fast it made Parson think of flying into a cloud bank at three hundred knots. Curtains of snow lashed his face so hard that he had to turn his head to breathe.
Najib, now a barely visible wraith, stopped and held up his hand, palm toward the men. The team halted. Najib found a ledge broad enough to pause for rest, and the troops set up their low-slung tents. A few of the soldiers stayed outside. They put on goggles, pulled white ponchos over themselves, and set up security in a triangle formation. The men seemed to vanish except for the thicket of M-4 barrels pointing outward into the gray and white nothingness.
Parson knew little of infantry tactics. He marveled at how the team could stop and, as if a single organism, form itself wordlessly into a stationary strongpoint, lethal and damn near invisible.
He followed Cantrell into one of the shelters. Cantrell snapped a new battery into his satphone and made a call. Parson listened to him report position and situation. When Cantrell finished, Parson took the phone and called Bagram AOC.
“I’m still among the living,” he told the duty officer, “Flash Two-Four Charlie.” Parson gave his coordinates and said the airdrop had worked.
“We got all kinds of pararescue guys standing by to pick you up,” said the duty officer. “Choppers on alert. We just need a break in the weather.”
“How’s the forecast?” Parson asked.
“No better. The weather shop is calling this a hundred-year blizzard. They expect at least four more days of this.”
Parson pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes.
“What’s your altimeter setting now?” he asked.
“Uh, two-seven-five-six.”
Parson had never seen barometric pressure that low. No wonder this squall hit like a fucking train. He wanted to ask to speak with the weather shop for more details, but he decided to end the call. No point using up batteries over what couldn’t be helped.
He unrolled his sleeping bag inside Cantrell’s tent. Kept on his boots and survival vest. He placed his pack at the foot of the sleeping bag and leaned his rifle across it. Unholstered the .45 and placed it beside him. He fell asleep immediately with his hand on the Colt.
 
 
 
PARSON WOKE TO A
shove at his shoulder. He came to consciousness like rising from a frozen lake to crack through ice. His thoughts tumbled and he felt for the pistol.
“Easy, cowboy,” Cantrell said. “We’re moving out.”
“Good.”
Still dark, still snowing, though not so hard now. Maybe five more inches of powder had accumulated. Parson rolled up his sleeping bag, crawled outside, hoisted his rifle and pack. Took a drink of snow water from the bottle in his pocket. Swished the water in his mouth, spat it out.
The land around Parson lay in perfect blackness. No lamp, no sign of habitation. Like the first night on Earth, or maybe the last.
The team struck tents in silence. Najib and his sergeant major led again, and the men followed them uphill in a staggered column. Parson switched on his night-vision goggles. The falling snow glowed and swirled as if it were energized, minute shavings of a pulsar disintegrated and scattered to the ground.
Parson’s wrist hurt some, though not as bad as yesterday. His chest ached, from both the cracked ribs and the frigid air chilling his lungs. The cold seemed to overtake him from the inside out. His cheeks had no feeling. He held his hand over his face and exhaled, but his breath hardly warmed his skin at all.
As he climbed, he thought how the war and the storm had brought him to some primitive state. His multimillion-dollar airplane a pile of scrap. Satellite signals, laser beams, and microwave transmissions reporting his situation around the world, doing him damn little good. Injured and angry, wanting to kill the other tribe. Stripped to my core, he thought, maybe this is just how it is.
The slope grew steeper, and Parson had to pull himself up by the branches of scrub bushes that somehow clung to life on this god-awful rise. He dug through the snow for handholds, an effort that slowed him down and covered his arms in powder. When he grabbed the stems of a brushy evergreen, he noticed a sickening odor. Parson frowned and wiped his gloves on his coat.
“You have found a lipad,” Najib said. “Some of my people believe the plant keeps away evil spirits.”
“I’ll take all the help I can get,” Parson said.
To the east, a smudge of gray lightened the deep black. The grayness spread until Parson didn’t need NVGs to see the snow falling. The cloud ceiling still seemed so low he could touch it. But underneath, visibility had improved a bit overnight.
Up ahead, Najib crouched. Signaled by pressing his open hand toward the ground. The men flattened themselves into the snow. At first Parson wondered if Najib had seen the enemy, but the Afghan didn’t look alarmed. Parson realized they had reached the spine of the ridge. The troops didn’t want to be silhouetted atop the crest.
Parson crept forward and looked down the mountain. He saw only more mountain, more snow and boulders. But Najib seemed to focus on something. Parson pulled out binoculars and glassed the slope.
Perhaps a mile away, a stalk of smoke rose to join the clouds. If not for the smoke, Parson might have missed the village altogether. But on close inspection he made out what looked like facets in the distant snowfield. Flat surfaces of roofs, blanketed. No movement. No animals. Pallid mud walls. The place apparently drained of life and color, as if the village itself had bled to death.

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