The Renegades (14 page)

“Insurgent have his son. He want trade for you.”

“Who has his son?” Parson asked.

“Bad men. Maybe Black Crescent. Maybe no.”

Parson had no children. He’d never even been married. But he knew how it felt to be responsible for someone else. He shook Aamir by the collar.

“Why didn’t you tell somebody, shithead?” Parson asked. Shoved the copilot onto a troop seat. “Don’t you fucking move.”

Rashid climbed from the cockpit, removed his helmet. Gave orders in Pashto, and the crew chief found duct tape and parachute cord in his tool box. Rashid took the cord.

“We tie him,” Rashid said.

“Damn straight we tie him,” Parson replied. He grabbed Aamir’s hands, yanked them together behind the copilot’s back, held them tight as Rashid bound them with the parachute cord.

Parson tore off a strip of duct tape, nearly slipped in Sharif’s blood on the floor. Slapped the tape over Aamir’s mouth.

“Sir,” Reyes said, “if he’s congested, that’ll keep him from breathing.”

Parson started to tell Reyes to mind his own damned business. But the man was right. Parson tore the tape from Aamir’s face. The copilot cried out.

“Quit whining,” Parson said. He wadded up the length of duct tape, threw it down. Tore off a longer strip and taped Aamir’s boots together.

Reyes had been tending to Sharif’s injuries; now the PJ opened an Israeli bandage. The device consisted of a length of elasticized cloth with sterile pads on one side and a closure bar on the other. Reyes adjusted the pads to cover Sharif’s wounds, then wrapped the cloth leader several times until he locked it down with the closure bar.

The uninjured civilian spoke up again: “We’ll need a medevac for that gunshot wound.”

Who the hell was this guy to be putting in his two cents? For a moment, Parson wanted to tape the civilian’s mouth, too. But at least the man’s advice made sense. Seemed to know the lingo, too. Maybe the guy wasn’t a complete idiot.

“Yeah,” Parson said. “I know it.”

All he really wanted to do was beat Aamir to death. But other things needed doing. He tried to think past his anger. Regaining his self-control was like recovering an airplane from a spin. Part of you wanted only to pull the nose up. But if you wanted to live, you had to put the nose farther
down
. You had to use your head, not your gut.

Parson ducked through the crew door to look outside. Nobody had installed the boarding ladder, but he didn’t need it—the landing gear had collapsed on impact, and the helicopter’s deck rested only about a foot off the ground. Parson’s knees hurt from falling during the hard landing, and that made his limp worse. Instead of jumping right out, he stepped down from the aircraft one boot at a time.

Small cumulus raced overhead. But other clouds remained stationary. Roll clouds, like long cigars, formed over the ridges. Far above them, Parson saw a layer of mother-of-pearl. Not good. Signs of severe turbulence, with updrafts and downdrafts approaching five thousand feet per minute.

So the winds were picking up, but at least the visibility stayed decent. He reached inside the Mi-17 and pulled the satphone out of his helmet bag. Somehow his laptop still worked, still set up with the moving map display, so he jotted down the coordinates it showed. Then he turned off the computer and punched the number for command post at Mazar.

“This is Parson,” he said when the duty officer answered. “Golay One-Eight is down.” He gave coordinates for the rock ledge where the helo had crash-landed.

“Do you have casualties?”

“One gunshot wound to the thigh. Maybe one broken leg.” Parson reported Aamir’s attempt to commandeer the Mi-17, the struggle for control. Relating the story made him angry all over again. He wished his brain could work like some aircraft systems, that he could put his emotion switch on
BYPASS
.

“Oh, shit,” the duty officer said. “Not again.”

Parson knew what the guy was thinking. The year before, an Afghan officer had opened fire on American advisers during a meeting at the Kabul Airport. He’d killed eight USAF troops and an American contractor before taking his own life. The Taliban had claimed him as an agent, but his family denied it and said he’d had money problems. Other reports suggested the officer may have been involved with suspected opium trafficking.

Nearly all members of the Afghan Air Force were like Rashid—competent, committed, hardworking, and trustworthy. Their vetting included a family background investigation, drug screening, and record reviews. Recruits even had their biometric data checked against a criminal database. But this was a different situation, and Parson knew no amount of background checks could have prevented it. In Afghanistan, nothing was simple and nothing was safe.

So where exactly had Aamir hoped to land? The Mi-17 hadn’t gone down where he wanted it, but he’d tried to put it somewhere around here. Parson realized the bad guys who’d waited for Aamir to deliver him might be close.

He heard Rashid in the helicopter, interrogating Aamir.

“Did you find out where he was trying to go?” Parson asked.

“A bandit camp four kilometers north,” Rashid called.

“So they might have seen where we crashed.”

“Yes,” Rashid said. He gave a command in Pashto, and the crew chief began to work at the hardware that attached the door gun to the aircraft structure. The weapon represented a blend of Russian and American technology: a PKM automatic weapon installed on a Dillon Aero mount. The crew chief detached the PKM from its pintle, wrapped a belt of ammunition across his shoulder. He and Rashid carried the weapon out of the helicopter. They spoke, pointing to terrain beyond the aircraft, apparently considering how best to set up a field of fire.

The lay of the land both hindered and helped, Parson judged. The Mi-17 had come down fairly high along the mountainside, on a flat shelf. The ledge overlooked a steep draw studded with gullies, scrubby hawthorns, and stones the size of aircraft tires. Bad guys would most likely attack from below. Infantry troops always loved the high ground, to fire on the enemy from an elevated position. Though Parson had never been a grunt, he knew any rifleman would call this a good spot.

But from an airman’s perspective, it sucked. A helicopter coming to pick them up would have to fly into the wind cascading over the ridge. Mountain wave turbulence could roll a helicopter inverted. The rescue might have to wait until the wind calmed.

“Hey, Reyes,” Parson called.

“Yes, sir,” Reyes answered from inside the cabin.

“We’re thinking we might have the wrong kind of company pretty soon. I know you got patients to treat, but keep your rifle close.”

“Always, sir.”

The passenger who’d spoken up earlier climbed out of the helo and stood beside Parson. The man had short-cropped brown hair tinged with gray. Salt-and-pepper stubble on his cheeks. He wore a beige equipment vest like the ones Parson had seen on photographers, except this one read
USAID
across the back. A shoulder patch said
VIRGINIA TASK FORCE ONE
.

“Do you know how to shoot?” Parson asked.

“Gulf War,” the man answered. “First Cav.”

So maybe this guy was useful. Parson stuck out his hand. “Michael Parson,” he said. The man gave a firm handshake.

“Jake Conway.”

Parson briefed Conway on the situation with the weather and the chopper pickup. Then he climbed back inside, found Aamir’s pistol on the aircraft’s center console. After checking the chamber and magazine of the Russian-built weapon, he handed it to Conway.

“This will have to do,” Parson said.

“At least we know it works,” Conway said. He placed the Makarov in a vest pocket.

While Parson and Conway spoke, Rashid toiled silently. He helped the crew chief pile stones around the PKM to set up a better fighting position. Occasionally he looked inside the helicopter, regarded Aamir.

“May I let the dog out and give her some water?” Conway asked.

“Up to you,” Parson said. “If it runs off, we can’t go chasing it.”

“She won’t do that.”

Conway disappeared inside the Mi-17. He emerged a few minutes later with the Belgian Malinois on a leash. He also carried a bowl and a bottle of water. The fur on the animal’s back remained bristled, but the dog made no sound. The Malinois looked at Parson, wagged its tail once, and lay on the ground, head upright, ears perked.

“Here you go, Ingrid,” Conway said as he placed the bowl in front of the dog. He cracked open the water bottle, poured some into the bowl, took a swallow. The dog lapped as Conway handed the bottle to Parson.

Before Parson could take a sip, the dog stopped drinking. It looked up, muzzle dripping, at something downslope. Parson shaded his eyes with his hand, saw nothing but shale, dust, and gnarled vegetation.

The animal kept staring. Wind tousled the hair raised along its spine. The dog emitted a low growl.

12

G
old and the Marines remained inside their two Cougars and watched the village, especially the house flying the Taliban flag. She half expected gunfire to chatter from the stone huts. But she heard only the Cougars’ idling engines, the flag’s fluttering, and the rush of wind whipping dust across the path.

“Sergeant Blount,” she said. “Let’s not dismount your men just yet.”

“What do you want to do?” Blount asked.

“I guess I better go ring the doorbell,” Gold said. “Let’s not look any more threatening than we have to.”

It was pretty hard for two armored vehicles full of Marines not to look threatening, Gold knew, but she could at least not make things worse. She put down her rifle and removed her helmet. Taking an idea from Ann and Lyndsey, she even untied her hair.

“You’re walking out there unarmed?” Lyndsey asked.

“If they open up on me from the inside, my rifle won’t help,” Gold said. She realized she was taking a chance. But the whole point of counterinsurgency was not to intimidate the locals. The bullets you didn’t fire were the most important.

Blount seemed to get it. “Hey, gunner,” he said. “Lower your weapon.”

“Sergeant?” the gunner asked.

“I didn’t say take your hands off it. Stay ready to shoot. Just don’t point it at the houses right now.”

“Aye, aye, Sergeant.”

“Let us go with you,” Ann said.

Gold thought for a moment. “Watch me go to the door,” she said. “If it seems safe, then you two follow me.” In her work as an interpreter, she had visited many Afghan villages, but she’d never sauntered right up to a hut flying the enemy’s flag. She felt she’d entered some gray area between brave, creative, reckless, and stupid.

“I don’t like this one bit,” the gunner said.

“Nobody asked you,” Blount said.

“I don’t like it, either, for what that’s worth,” Gold said. “Let me out.”

The ramp at the back of the Cougar whined open. Lyndsey raised her gloved fist, and Gold tapped it with her own. Gold added one more instruction: “If it looks
real
good, bring the bag of sugar.”

The sun hurt Gold’s eyes as she stepped down the ramp and onto the ground. She’d left her shades in a pouch on her MOLLE gear, one more little thing to look a bit less formidable. Also, she wanted to make eye contact when she spoke with the villagers.

At the back of the Cougar, she took a deep breath and scanned her surroundings. No one in sight. Just more chickens. Another cat, sleeping on a doorstep. She began walking toward the house with the flag.

Gold tried to move as casually as possible. Too fast a pace might have appeared aggressive. Too slow might have seemed like stealth.

This could be a trap, she knew all too well. Back in 2009, she’d served at a base in Khost where CIA spooks planned to meet with a hot contact. A Jordanian doctor claimed to have access to al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Gold wasn’t in on the meeting; the Jordanian spoke Arabic, not Pashto, and so her services had not been required.

She was walking to the chow hall when the doctor detonated himself. Gold knew what had happened the instant the blast wave took her breath away. The suicide bombing killed seven agency people. For her, not being needed on that day meant not needing to die.

Now she wondered if her next step might bring an explosion or the crack of a tracer. The wind felt good against the back of her neck; the day was bright but cool. Her head had cleared from the IED blast earlier, and she felt focused on her mission. Not bad for a last moment, she considered, as long as the end came quickly.

It did not come at all. She reached the door, glanced back at the MRAPs, and knocked.
“Salaam,”
she said.

Shuffling sounds came from inside. Whispers in Pashto. Gold could not make out the words. She listened hard for anything metallic—rifle safeties, fire mode selectors, or grenade pins—but she heard none of that. Finally a female voice said, “
Assalamu alaikum.
But why do you defile our village with these machines?”

“Only to talk, my sister,” Gold said. “I believe we have a common enemy.”

“You are not my sister. And we all have enemies.”

“Then let us discuss them,” Gold said.

Inside the house, a long silence. Gold breathed just a little easier. If a burst of automatic weapons fire was going to come through that door, it would have happened by now. She thought she heard whispers within. A vast chasm of culture and religion stretched between her and the women inside; Gold wondered what common reference points she could call on if the conversation continued.

She thought of only one: The taproot of every faith, the core of every philosophy, was human suffering. Maybe the women here had seen so much of it, they’d want to try something different to stop it.

“My sister,” Gold said, “I am still here. If you wish to talk, I would like to meet you. If you wish me to go, I will leave you in peace.”

After several seconds, the door unbolted, swung open. A woman in a blue burka stood at the entrance. Gold could see only her eyes. They were black, surrounded by creased skin. In the room behind her stood two other women dressed the same way.

“Thank you,” Gold said. “Peace be upon you. May two of my colleagues enter? They bring a small gift.”

The woman at the door peered outside at the MRAPs.

“No men may enter.”

“They are two women,” Gold said.

The Afghan woman looked at Gold in apparent surprise. “They may come inside,” she said.

Gold motioned with her arm, and in a few seconds Ann and Lyndsey came from the back of the Cougar. Lyndsey carried the sugar. Suddenly Gold had second thoughts about the gift. Would it seem patronizing? Too late now.

When Gold and the Lionesses entered the home, Gold said, “We have sugar for your tea.”

“That is generous,” the woman at the door said. “Times are hard. We have not had that luxury in a while.” From her tone, she didn’t seem especially impressed, but neither did she seem insulted.

“May we be seated?” Gold asked.

“You may.”

Gold gestured to Ann and Lyndsey, and all three sat cross-legged on jute rugs spread across the stone floor. What little light entered the room came from glass mounted at an angle in an irregular-shaped window. Daylight showed at the top edge of the ill-fitting sash. In the ceiling, Gold saw rafters cut from birch trunks, bark still peeling, thatch of grass and brush stuffed between them. A fire burned in a corner hearth.

The woman who’d been doing the talking sat and removed her head covering. Her gray hair was tied tightly, and her lined face was dark and leathery, a record of a difficult life. The other two women kept their faces hidden.

“Why have you come to us?” the elderly woman said.

“Children have been taken for soldiers,” Gold said. “Refugees from the shaken earth have been killed merely for accepting help. I am told that even among the Talibs, some do not approve.”

“I know of these things, but they are the business of men.”

“Indeed,” Gold said. She paused, considered whether to press further. Well, she had come this far. “Perhaps it is the business of a Mullah Durrani. Do you know him?”

The woman looked down at the rug on which she sat. In the colors of its jute strands, Gold saw the pattern of a mosque, dome and minarets.

“We shall have tea,” she said, “with your gift of sugar.” The woman gave orders to the other two. They dipped water from a pail and placed a kettle over the fire.

When steam rose from the kettle, the women added green tea leaves. After the tea had brewed, they poured it into clay cups and added sugar.

“Hamdillah,”
Gold said. Literally,
Praise be to Allah
, but often used as a thank-you.

The two women who gave out the cups never uttered a word. Daughters, perhaps. Only the older woman spoke, and she never offered her name. She sipped her tea silently. Finally she said, “I am one of Mullah Durrani’s wives. My husband has retired from jihad and all public matters.”

Despite the burning hearth, Gold shivered. She hadn’t expected to get this close to Taliban leadership. One of the daughters rose to add dry sticks to the fire. The flames sizzled into the twigs, flared yellow to orange.

Gold watched the fire for a moment, then asked, “Does your husband know of Black Crescent?”

“I am certain he does. He keeps informed in his retirement.”

“Do you believe he would speak with us?”

The woman stared straight at Gold. “Never,” she said. “He will not hold counsel with infidels.”

Two steps forward and one step back, Gold thought. If this never went further, she’d accomplish little.

“I would like to talk with my colleagues in English,” Gold said. “They do not understand your language well. We do not mean to be rude.”

“You may speak among yourselves,” the woman said.

Gold briefed Ann and Lyndsey on the conversation so far. Like Gold, they had expected to meet a distant cousin of Durrani’s at best. A lucky break to find a wife. But if she wouldn’t help, then so what?

“I have an idea,” Ann said. “Appeal to the maternal instinct.”

“Maybe so,” Gold said. That approach had worked when she talked to the women at the refugee camp attacked by Black Crescent. Perhaps it would work here, too.

“What mother wants her child taken from her?” Ann said.

Gold sipped her tea while she gathered her thoughts. The tea was not too sweet; the Afghan women apparently intended to make that bag last a while. Steam rose from the liquid, and it burned going down.

“My sister,” she said in Pashto, “I know your husband has waged jihad. I know your family has produced warriors. But do you not want something more than war for your children? At least until they are old enough to fight as men?”

The wind strengthened outside. A gust shifted some of the thatch overhead and made the birch poles creak. Gold wondered if this was a freak event or some seasonal wind. She’d heard of a dry northwesterly called the
Bad-i-Sad-O-Bist-Roz
, but she couldn’t recall if it came this time of year. Parson would know.

“We do not carry sons for nine months only to see them disappear,” the older woman said. “Jihad is blessed by God, but for fighters old enough to wear the beards of Muslim men.”

“Then will your husband speak with us?” Gold asked. “When the Talibs came to power, they punished pederasts. Your husband can still protect Afghan children, despite our differences.”

“How could he help you, if he so wished?”

“Perhaps he or his contacts know something of Black Crescent, where its leader hides.”

That was pushing it, Gold knew. But now she’d laid it out, exactly what she wanted. Either she would get it or not. If not, better to find out now.

“Call on me in two days,” the woman said. “I will have an answer by then.”

“That is all I can ask,” Gold said. She placed her right hand over her heart.
“Hamdillah.”

“Assalamu alaikum.”

Gold rose to leave. The two Lionesses stood up with her. When she opened the door, the wind nearly tore it from her hands. The gust filled the room behind her. She looked back at Ann and Lyndsey and saw ashes swirl from the hearth. Banked embers glowed and crackled. Gold sensed she had set new forces into motion, on courses yet unclear.

—

R
ashid lit a Marlboro. Parson started to tell him he knew better than to smoke that close to a downed aircraft. But the fuel tanks hadn’t ruptured, and Parson figured the poor guy needed a cigarette. Rashid pulled the filter from his lips and exhaled. The wind whipped the smoke away instantly. He hunkered beside his crew chief in the fighting position they’d built up with rocks in front of the helicopter. Both of them stared down into the draw and across the valley, where the dog kept looking. The Malinois lapped at its water dish, then looked up again.

Nothing down there that Parson could see. Maybe the dog had spotted or sniffed some animal it didn’t like. A wolf or something.

Parson had experienced his own encounter with Afghan wolves. A starving pack had stalked him and Sophia as they trekked through the snow after the shoot-down of their C-130. When the wolves had finally attacked, the first one hit Parson like a linebacker, all teeth and muscle, hard enough to knock him off his feet. He’d used his rifle, his pistol, even his knife to fight those damned things off. Sophia killed a couple of them, too.

And now he found himself forced down in Afghanistan again. The air itself felt heavy, more like currents of water than gusts of wind. He forced himself to concentrate, to think about the tactical situation. Parson wondered if he lived his life like a timberline spruce in his native Colorado, clinging to existence at the ragged edge, holding on to alpine soil that just barely kept it alive. Such a tree survived one day at a time, through adaptation and perseverance. Parson knew he had to do the same.

“I’ll build a little defilade for us,” Conway said. The Gulf War vet began piling stones and slabs of shale in a semicircle near the Mi-17’s broken tail boom. “Too bad not to have sandbags,” he said.

“How do you think we should set up?” Parson asked.

“If we put the M4 back here with me, and the crew chief’s weapon up front, we’ll have an interlocking field of fire.”

“Sounds like you’ve done this before,” Parson said.

“A little bit. Are those the only two rifles we have?”

“Yeah. But maybe we won’t need them. Task Force is sending helos out to us. The question is can they get to us in this wind.”

“Can’t we just hump it down to a flat spot in the valley?” Conway asked. “Maybe the choppers would have an easier time landing down there.”

“They would,” Parson said. “I’ve been thinking about that. But I’d rather not leave a defensible spot to go traipsing over ground with no cover.”

“Hmm.” Conway placed his hands on his hips, looked at the terrain below him and above him. “Me neither,” he said.

Reyes stepped from inside the helicopter and surveyed the preparations going on around the aircraft. Dried blood stuck to his hands; he’d worked without latex gloves. Parson had heard pararescue guys talk about what they called “dirt medicine.” In a combat zone, you had bigger problems than germs. If your patient bled to death through a clean wound, you hadn’t done him much good.