The Renegades (26 page)

First, he turned a knob on his goggles to adjust interpupillary distance. Rashid’s eyes were set wide apart, and he had to open the gap between the two tubes of the NVGs nearly to the limit. Next, he moved another knob to adjust eye relief. Parson worried the language barrier might make it difficult to remind Rashid how to set the NVGs a comfortable distance from his eyes. But the Afghan needed no help. Parson took that as a sign of good mechanical comprehension.

He pulled the conex door shut behind him, which locked in full darkness except for the green backglow reflected around Rashid’s eyes. The Afghan peered into the viewing screen on the Hoffman tester. He rolled the diopter rings on his NVGs, fine-tuning them by degrees. People new to the technology always took forever to focus the goggles. Rashid was trying to bring into clarity a set of bars and lines, and he kept turning the diopters, searching for that perfect spot. You never really found precise focus; it was a limit of the equipment. Eventually Rashid satisfied himself and turned off the goggles.

“Now, don’t forget,” Parson said, “those things rob you of some of your depth perception. You gotta be careful about that.” He didn’t know if Rashid understood him, but he felt better having said it.

Rashid stood, bumped his way back from the chair. Parson turned on his own NVGs and used them, unfocused, to find the chair and sit down. Since he wasn’t occupying a crew position in the Mi-17, he didn’t have to use his NVGs on a helmet. In his flying as an adviser, he preferred to wear them around his neck on a lanyard, the way an elk hunter might wear binoculars. But that meant the lenses were not at a fixed distance from his eyes, so the adjustments were even less precise.

He turned on the goggles, held them in front of his eyes. Two quick turns of the diopters brought the bars into reasonable focus. Not the sweet spot, really. More like the good-enough spot.

Setting up equipment on the eve of battle put Parson in mind of some unknown ancestor sharpening a saber, running a ramrod down the bore of a musket. Procedure and ritual. You had to get your gear ready; if you failed to prepare, you prepared to fail. But the work carried with it a psychic purpose, too. Somehow, focusing the hardware focused the mind as well. Helped dial in the set of thoughts and attitudes you needed when you knew you might have to take a life or give your own. An indefinable mix of determination and acceptance.

Parson switched off the Hoffman tester, rose to his feet. Through the NVGs he found the door handle for the conex, and he pushed open the door. The lights illuminating the airfield ramp had a pink glow now, the result of his eyes’ exposure to unnatural night vision. In a few minutes the lights would return to their true white.

“We’re as ready as we’ll ever be, buddy,” Parson said.

Rashid stepped out of the conex, helmet in hand. He did not smile or respond in any way to Parson’s comment. But he wore a placid expression, as if somewhere in his mind, amid all the anger and sadness and bad memories, he’d discovered a corner of tranquility.

Parson knew the place Rashid had found. The Afghan pilot was ready to look into darkness.

24

G
old managed to adjust her sleep schedule. It was already dark by the time she woke up, but still hours from launch time. At least she wouldn’t have to rush as she put together her rig.

The Air Force Special Tactics folks issued her an MC-4 ram air parachute. Four equipment rings carried her oxygen bottle, an MBITR radio, an attachment for her rifle, and the Icom radio for monitoring the enemy. The Special Tactics people also gave her a wrist altimeter, Nomex gloves, knee pads, and an aircrew-style helmet with brackets to accept the bayonet clips of her oxygen mask. They didn’t have a flight suit to fit her, so she’d have to jump in her ACUs. No problem there—she’d just fold the collar inside so it wouldn’t slap at her neck during free fall. A Parachutist Drop Bag would carry her body armor, Kevlar helmet, extra ammunition, NVGs, and water.

She stuffed her gear into the PDB, hoisted the parachute over her right shoulder. Outside, she found a cool evening, maybe ten degrees Celsius. No wind at the surface. No clouds above. She figured the current conditions boded well for good weather at the drop zone.

Gold placed her equipment beside the sandbag wall that protected the Air Operations Center. Sat cross-legged and leaned against the sandbags. Closed her eyes and tried to focus, to get herself into that zone where her mind could zero in on the task and let all else fall away. She started with a prayer—for skill and alertness, for competence and strength.
Please let me get this right.
Gold never prayed for safety; that wasn’t . . . seemly. Or even practical, given the circumstances. She asked only for help to perform well.

Parson would be asking for the same thing, she knew, in his own rough way. They had eaten breakfast together earlier in the day—right before she went to bed to rest up for the mission. He had changed the unauthorized pen sleeve patch on his flight suit. The new one read
DFU
. She asked him what it meant. The answer was vintage Parson:
Don’t Fuck Up.

When she opened her eyes, she felt a little more assured that things would go according to plan. Not necessarily
her
plan, or even the JSOC frag order she’d been given, but a concept of operations from higher command. The notion untangled some of her worries and distractions, put her at ease enough that she actually dozed, caught a few more minutes of precious sleep.

The cool, calm evening brought a dream of home in Vermont. Perhaps because Gold was about to fly into darkness herself, she saw night-flying woodcocks migrating south from Canada, silent as death in their passage. They’d rest in bogs during the day, resume their mission after sundown. The russet-colored, long-billed birds flitted overhead in twos and threes. When Gold saw them no more in the black sky above her, she realized she was awake.

A while later, Reyes and the Air Force combat controller showed up. Both nodded to Gold as they entered the AOC. When they emerged, they carried armloads of bags and equipment. Reyes clenched a pencil between his teeth. He put down his gear next to Gold, flipped through a spiral-bound manual.

“We’ll have to prebreathe oxygen for thirty minutes,” he said.

“Are you going to be the jumpmaster?” Gold asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

That worked for Gold. When translating, when communicating, she was at the height of her powers. But parachuting, as much as she enjoyed it, was an ancillary skill. Especially free fall. Reyes, by contrast, had probably logged hundreds more HALO jumps than Gold. Pararescuemen joked that skydiving was just a way to commute to work, something embedded in their culture. It was even half their job title.

The two Marine Corps Force Recon men—a sniper and spotter—checked in half an hour before scheduled showtime. They looked more than a little surprised to see a woman on the jump stick with them, but they said nothing about it. With all five of the jumpers assembled, Reyes declared it was time to suit up.

He and Gold donned their parachutes using the buddy system. First, Gold leaned forward as Reyes held the MC-4 by its main webs. He placed it on her back, and she threaded and fastened the chest strap. They worked together to tighten the leg and shoulder straps. She stood up straight, stretched, pulled at her sleeves to try to get more comfortable. The weight of the canopy felt good on her shoulders.

She picked up Reyes’s rig, held it for him. He put it on in half the time she’d taken. The cinching of straps seemed to draw up cords within him, as if the rig had become some natural part of him. The pararescueman’s ease with his equipment gave Gold even more confidence about following his lead through the jump.

The two Force Recon guys geared up together, and Reyes helped the combat controller. They attached their kit bags, double-checked security of rifles, oxygen bottles, and radios. Though the jumpers represented three different services—Marines, Army, and Air Force—their procedures for HALO drops were nearly identical. Reyes glanced at his watch, led the way to the flight line.

An MC-130 Combat Talon had flown up from Kandahar for them. Gold had jumped out of C-130s many times, but this special ops variant, named for the talons of a bird of prey, had a strange look. It sported a funny-looking nose, or radome, as she knew Parson would call it. Probably contained some kind of super terrain-following radar used during the insertion of special ops forces. In the world of special ops, Gold had worked only around the edges, advising and interpreting. Now she found herself in the middle of it.

She walked up the Talon’s open ramp with her fellow jumpers. The aircraft’s loadmaster had already installed a six-man prebreather, a green metal box marked
AVIATORS’ BREATHING OXYGEN
. The prebreather was secured to the floor with five-thousand-pound-test cargo straps. Six hoses extended from the device. Two Air Force physiological technicians checked the hoses and fittings. The phys techs would not jump, but would ride along to make sure no one showed signs of hypoxia or other problems.

“It won’t take much more than half an hour to get to the DZ,” Reyes said. “We’ll have to start prebreathing on the ground. Go ahead and arm your CYPRES and get all your gear set before you start on oxygen.”

Gold checked the control unit for her Cybernetic Parachute Release System, mounted on her right-side lift web. It was a silver box not much bigger than a lipstick container, with a single button and a numerical screen. If a jump went very, very badly, with an unconscious parachutist plummeting toward earth, the CYPRES would automatically deploy the canopy when the parachutist passed through a certain altitude beyond a certain speed. The latest generation of what old-school jumpers called AODs, or Automatic Opening Devices.

Gold remembered an instructor at Fort Bragg who liked to say, “Don’t depend on an AOD. Because what’s AOD spelled backward?” Still, Gold felt safer knowing her chute would probably deploy even if she couldn’t open it herself.

She pressed the button on the control unit. After one second a red light glowed. She pressed the button again, repeated the sequence two more times. That put the CYPRES into a self-test mode. The device checked good.

The drop zone at
Kuh-e Qara Batur
was at about a five-thousand-foot field elevation. Gold intended to open four thousand feet above that. She programmed the CYPRES to fire at twenty-five hundred feet above ground level if she was still falling faster than sixty-five miles per hour. So many details to remember, procedures to get right. If you missed something and got yourself killed, you were just doing the enemy’s job for him.

Next, Gold strapped the altimeter to her left wrist and checked its internal light. The face of the instrument glowed yellow with the electricity from a fresh battery. She switched off the light to save power.

When she looked up, she saw the Talon’s aircrew gathering in the cargo compartment.

“Who’s the jumpmaster?” the aircraft commander asked.

Reyes stepped forward. The aircraft commander and navigator briefed the takeoff time, time over target, and emergency procedures. Reyes nodded, wrote a couple of numbers on the heel of his hand. To Gold’s relief, the mission required no last-minute changes.

She sat on a troop seat and strapped in. Gold seated the hose from her oxygen mask into a connector on the prebreather. Her four fellow jumpers also plugged in as she placed her mask over her face and fastened its bayonet clips. One of the phys techs connected his own mask to the six-man prebreather, and the other phys tech hooked up to an oxygen regulator mounted on the wall of the aircraft.

The pure oxygen felt like a tonic as it filled her lungs. It went down a little cold, and Gold could almost sense it reddening her blood cells and flowing through to her brain. But though the oxygen woke her up fully and made her feel alert, that wasn’t the reason for prebreathing.

By saturating her bloodstream with oxygen, Gold could prevent decompression sickness. When a parachutist or aviator flew to high altitude in an unpressurized aircraft, the effect resembled a diver surfacing from deep water. As air pressure decreased, nitrogen in the blood could come out of solution and form bubbles. Very painful and potentially lethal. But not an issue if pure oxygen replaced the nitrogen.

She checked her watch. Now that she’d started prebreathing, she could not take off the mask. If she inhaled ambient air, which consisted mostly of nitrogen, she’d have to start the thirty minutes all over again.

Boot steps thudded up the ramp, which remained open to the airfield’s stadium lighting. In the glare, she saw Parson greeting the Talon aircrew, backslapping like old friends. Probably former squadron mates from his days as a C-130 navigator. After handshakes and happy words Gold could not quite make out, he pulled himself away from the fliers and sat beside her. The crew headed for the cockpit, presumably to begin their own prebreathing from hoses on the flight deck.

“Keep your mask on,” Parson said. “Don’t start over on my account.”

Gold nodded, tried to shout hello. Her verbal communication couldn’t go much beyond that, so she debated what gestures were appropriate. Settled on a thumbs-up.

“Everything’s good on our end,” Parson said. “Rashid’s ready to launch with some Afghan troops, and I’m flying with him. Blount and his Marines are coming in the Osprey.”

He paused, as if he wanted to say more but could not find the words. Finally, he spoke again.

“Be careful, Sophia,” he said. “You’ve done a lot of good work on this deployment. Maybe too good. If anything happens to you now, I’m going to be really, really pissed off.”

Gold smiled inside her mask, realized he couldn’t see that. Then Parson did a surprising thing: He lifted her hand off her right knee, held it in both of his—all three hands gloved in Nomex and leather.

“Give ’em hell, Sergeant Major,” he said.

He squeezed her hand slightly and released it. Stood up and walked down the ramp, silhouetted in the severe light of halogen lamps. Tonight, his limp was hardly noticeable, more like a rolling gait.

A loadmaster flipped a switch, and a hydraulic pump began whining. The man wore a flight helmet and oxygen mask as he worked, trailing a long extension hose. He moved a lever, and the ramp groaned closed. Thunks echoed from underneath as the ramp locks engaged.

The lights in the cargo compartment dimmed. Gold listened to the sounds of an aircraft preparing for engine start: the whooshes of bleed air and the hum of electronics. Outside, a propeller began to turn. It occurred to Gold that if she survived the next several hours, the Form 1307, her parachutist’s record, would carry all kinds of notations for this jump:
N
for
night
,
L
for
HALO
,
O
for
oxygen use
,
F
for
free fall
. And
C
for
combat
.

—

P
arson watched the Talon lift off into the night. The aircraft flew with all its lights off, so darkness swallowed it immediately. The rumble of turboprops continued long after the plane had vanished. The disembodied engine noise gave Parson a vague unease that did not square with his knowledge of tactics. The aircrew and jump team were safer, of course, if bad guys couldn’t see them; Parson had done a hundred such blacked-out departures himself. But he’d seldom seen one from the ground, and the effect unsettled him.

His anxiety, he knew, had more to do with who was on board than anything else. He didn’t know if he could handle losing any more friends, especially Sophia. The rational part of his mind recognized emotion worming its way into his judgment, or at least his assessment of risk.

The Air Force’s psychologists and grief counselors might call it a form of delayed stress. But so what if it was? Parson still had a job to do. He didn’t have time to sit around talking about his feelings; he had time only to suck it up and press on.

Inside the Air Operations Center, he found Blount and a Marine captain watching the video downlink. Parson guessed the captain was a commander from Blount’s unit, trying to glean any last-minute intel. Blount had grabbed some food from the midnight chow line. He sipped from a half-pint carton of milk and chewed on a fried potato cake. His rifle hung from a sling around his shoulder. Unfamiliar shapes bulged from his web gear: canisters and cylinders. Nonlethal weapons, Parson assumed. Tear gas and flash-bangs the team hoped to use to incapacitate rather than destroy.

On the screen, an image of the target zone streamed from the sensors of the Predator orbiting on station. Two figures, ghostlike on infrared, moved about the ruins and masonry structures outside the bunker complex. With nothing for size comparison, Parson couldn’t determine their height with any accuracy, but he took them for grown men. They moved like adults, held their rifles in a manner that suggested long practice. Sentries, maybe. If those sentries stayed put, Parson imagined, they probably had about an hour to live.

Blount studied them without comment. His eyes betrayed no emotion as he watched the feed, but Parson could guess what he was thinking. The big Marine had made clear how he felt about Black Crescent and its abductions.