The Renegades (28 page)

A liquid burning sensation seared Parson’s neck. He dropped his NVGs, let them swing from their lanyard. Placed his palm to his throat. His first thought was blood, but it was too hot for that.

Hydraulic fluid. A round must have punctured a line. Warm, slick ooze covered his hand, dripped down his flight suit.

More babble on interphone, nothing Parson could understand. But he could imagine:
What’s wrong with the aircraft? You’ve lost hydraulics, sir.
An oily odor filled the cabin.

The crew chief let loose another burst of fire. Swiveled his gun left and right. Kept firing. Then he slumped over the weapon as if he’d suddenly grown tired of fighting and had fallen asleep. Parson pulled him by the shoulders. The man’s head lolled back. He’d taken a round through the face and died instantly.

Rashid was having trouble controlling the chopper. The helo yawed, pitched. The standby hydraulic system should have kicked in, but with battle damage, maybe backup hydraulics weren’t working. Pashto chatter grew more heated on interphone. Rashid was fighting an aircraft that was bleeding out, approaching the moment when its controls would lock up and fail.

Two of the Afghan troops unbuckled their seat belts. They helped Parson pull the crew chief out of his harness and away from the gun. The Mi-17 banked left, pitched down.

“Put it on the ground,” Parson shouted. “Land it while you still can.”

Rashid dumped the collective, touched down hard. Gave an order in Pashto. The copilot rose from his seat. Took the crew chief’s place in the door and began firing the PKM.

More orders in gibberish. The APU started, and the engines whined to a stop. The flight engineer got up from his jump seat.

“What the hell are you doing?” Parson asked.

“Engineer fix,” Rashid said on interphone.

The copilot kept shooting, laying down suppressing fire. The flight engineer pulled a flashlight from his helmet bag. He swung himself out the door. When the rotors stopped, he climbed atop the helicopter. Parson heard bangs from overhead; the engineer was using the flashlight as a hammer. Beating a valve into obedience, Parson supposed.

The crew’s actions started to make sense. Standby hydraulics should have engaged but had not. The engineer needed to force the standby system to work and replace the lost fluid. To do that, he had to get up top to the hydraulic reservoir. Which he couldn’t do with blades spinning.

They know their aircraft better than I do, Parson thought.

But now that he understood, he knew how to help. He fumbled in the dark, found the extra quarts of hydraulic fluid. Gunfire chattered as he clawed two aluminum cans out of the bin of spare fluid. Slipped in the spill on the floor, scrabbled back to his feet. Doffed his headset.

He ducked past the copilot firing the PKM and heaved himself, grasping for handholds, up the side of the Mi-17. This job normally belonged to the crew chief, but the crew chief was dead.

Bullets cracked overhead as the engineer flipped open the hydraulic reservoir. Parson drew his boot knife, stabbed two holes into one of the quart cans. Poured the fluid, spilled half of it on himself.

He tossed away the empty can. The heat of the engines burned him through his flight suit and gloves as he spiked holes in the remaining quart. Parson dumped in the fluid and climbed back down for more. Stabbed two cans, handed them up to the engineer.

Tracers speared the night as the engineer poured the rest of the fluid into the reservoir. More tracers cracked around him as he slid down the side of the helicopter. The PKM door gun answered the enemy’s weapons with a rate of fire so rapid, it sounded more like a tornado than a series of shots. Parson figured that door gun was the only reason he and the engineer had come off the top of the Mi-17 alive. The insurgents couldn’t shoot accurately because they’d had to keep their heads down.

Back inside, Parson put on his headset as the engineer scrambled into the cockpit. Parson pressed his talk button and said, “You got more fluid, Rashid, but I don’t know how long it’ll last.”

“Marines call,” Rashid said. “They want Afghan soldiers at bunker.”

Must be getting hot up there, Parson thought. The plan called for the Afghans to provide only a blocking force. But no plan survived contact with the enemy.

Rashid punched the starter buttons. The turbines took forever to spool up again. When they finally reached idle, the engineer leaned over to shut off the APU. Then the engineer took over the gun, and the copilot strapped back into his seat. Rashid opened the throttle, lifted off.

The climb revealed a battle gone to hell. Through his NVGs, Parson saw bullets burning paths all over the hillside. Not from organized lines, but from everywhere. Worse than any shoot-house scenario a trainer could concoct. The Osprey, flying again, orbited the target area. Probably looking for a chance to use its gun from the air.

“Where you gonna put ’em down, Rashid?” Parson asked.

Rashid spoke only in his own language. The PKM quit firing. Too hard to tell Marines from insurgents, Parson thought.

The helicopter began descending. Now Parson could tell where Rashid intended to land. Not much choice under the circumstances.

Right in the middle of the firefight.

26

F
rom her knoll above the target area, Gold watched the Mi-17 touch down. An insurgent crouched behind the remains of a rock wall, sprayed the aircraft with gunfire. The sight turned her stomach. Was Parson hit? Rashid?

“You see that shooter?” she called to the Marine sniper and spotter.

“We’re on him,” the spotter said.

The Barrett rifle barked once, a deep booming slam underneath the cackle of lighter weapons down the hill. Flame spat from the muzzle brake. The expended cartridge flipped through the air, landed with a thud as heavy as if someone had dropped a wrench.

The .50 caliber round did not so much drop the insurgent as flatten him. The bullet stomped the man into the ground. Not a classic sniper head shot, but a round through the back that took him apart. With a bullet that size, where it hit didn’t matter.

The sight revolted her. Through his own choices, the insurgent had asked for it. Gold understood the justice. But even justice looked like murder when delivered through a jacketed round a half inch across, striking with nearly ten thousand foot-pounds of energy.

Troops poured from the helicopter. Two fell as they emerged, did not get up. Through her NVGs, Gold could not tell if Parson was one of them.

The sweating returned, that unfocused anxiety.

She drew in a deep breath, forced herself to think rationally. Gold didn’t know a lot about small-unit tactics; that wasn’t her field. But she did know the best way for Blount’s Marines to straighten out that mess down there was to establish fire superiority.

Gold could help with that. And it was the best way to help Parson, if he remained alive. She could fall apart over this when she got home. But right now, she would tolerate no weakness in herself. She was still a New Englander. God helped those who helped themselves. Tonight on this mountain, certain things needed doing.

She listened closely to the Icom radio hissing in her right ear. Nothing on that freq at the moment. The Barrett rifle slammed again. This time she didn’t see its target, but she heard the spotter say, “Good hit.”

In the green imaging of her night vision goggles, she saw two insurgents firing toward the Afghan troops scrambling for cover. Gold flipped up her NVGs, took aim. Her rifle’s optic put her at some disadvantage; it was a standard ACOG, not a nightscope. But she could see where to aim because the bad guys kept shooting.

All right, she told herself. Mind control, breath control. She inhaled, held the air within her lungs, fired. The trigger break felt crisp, like cracking a matchstick. She fired again, twice more. Scanned through the NVGs. One terrorist down and not moving, the other crawling away.

More fire came from near the base of the knoll, immediately downhill from Gold’s position. Additional ruins there, remains of another wall. Only this wall stood higher than the stone foundations near the cave entrance. Behind such ideal cover, several Black Crescent shooters blasted at will with little exposure to themselves. From a position like that, they could do a lot of damage. Gold saw three figures fall to their bullets.

Blount must have seen the same insurgents at the same wall. In her left ear, through the connection to the MBITR radio, she heard him suggest an air strike. Behind her, the combat controller made it happen.

“Raven,” he called, “Seraphim with a fire mission.”

Gold wasn’t on that channel, so she didn’t hear the answer. But over the gunfire, she heard the controller’s next call.

“Target is riflemen at the base of a knoll to the north of the cave bunker. Target is stationary. Will mark my own position with a buzz saw. Request strafing attack, heading zero-niner-zero, pull out right. How copy?”

Another pause, then, “Friendlies to the immediate north and south, danger close. Don’t fire if you can’t identify that stone wall.”

The whine of jet engines rose almost immediately. The A-10s must have held on station close by. Gold could not see them yet.

The combat controller bent a chem light. Gold heard a pop when its inner vial broke. Blue neon filled the controller’s hands. He tied a length of parachute cord to the light stick and spun the light over his head.

Those pilots can’t miss that, Gold thought, but neither can the insurgents. A calculated risk.

With his free hand, the controller keyed his radio and said, “You’re cleared in hot. Confirmation code Hotel Alpha. Call with target in sight.”

Deepening growls of turbines filled the night. Gold scanned overhead, spotted one of the Warthogs. It rolled into a steep bank and pointed its nose at the earth. The attack jet fell from the sky in such drastic fashion that for a moment Gold feared it had been shot down.

Then it began to fire.

A ripping sound overpowered all other noise, as if the mountains themselves were rending. Flame shot from the nose cannon in an unbroken stream; the weapon appeared to spew burning oil instead of metal. The base of the knoll exploded into a churning mass of dust and smoke. The top of the knoll, where Gold lay, shook so violently that it triggered in her some dormant animal instinct. She dug her fingers into the dirt to hold on, shut her eyes.

When she opened them, dust obscured everything in front of her. She could not assess the results of the strafing, but it seemed impossible that anything under that gun could have survived. The engines screamed a shriller note as the Warthog pulled up, powered away from its target.

“Good hit, Raven,” the controller called. After a pause, he added, “Negative. Just give me a couple dry passes in a show of force.”

The chatter of automatic weapons continued down the hill. The air strike had not ended the battle, just changed its calculus. Gold knew children likely remained among the enemy, perhaps some of them firing. She wished she knew if any could be saved. And she wanted very much to know if Parson was all right.

Clicks in her earpiece, the one from the Icom. Then a voice in Pashto: “What is happening, what is happening?”

“The infidels have struck from the air.”

“Send out the young martyrs.”

“Three of them have their bomb vests on now.”

“Tell them to walk to the infidels with their arms raised as if to be rescued.”

Suicide bombers, Gold thought. Warn the Marines.

She reached for the MBITR’s talk switch. Turned to her left, raised up to better find it.

A hammer blow struck her shoulder. Spun her, hurled her to the ground. Heat scalded her chest as if she’d inhaled boiling water.

Gold wanted to get up, make the radio call. Tried to push herself up with her arms. Her body would not respond. She lay on her back, tried to cry out.

Not even her voice worked. Her throat, her trachea, would not propel her words. She remained fully conscious, but could not make sense of things.

I’ve been shot, she told herself. But why can’t I talk?

She put her lips together to form the word
medic
, but she still could not get enough air to speak.

Why can’t I breathe?

Gold could not understand. She knew she’d been hit in the shoulder by a bullet. But she felt she was drowning. What was happening to her? Interpreting this strange set of agonies was like reading a text poorly translated.

She coughed, felt blood spray into her throat and nostrils.

The A-10s roared over her. Tracers followed them, perhaps from the same rifle that had shot her.

Her chest tightened, wrenched. She opened her mouth, tried to gulp air. Breath would not enter her lungs.

The drowning sensation made no sense. But as her oxygen debt deepened and her vision blurred, she realized the obvious.

This is what it feels like to die.

—

T
hrough air gauzy with smoke, Parson peered through his NVGs. Held the goggles with one hand, his rifle with the other. On night vision, the smoke gave the appearance of a green toxic gas, the atmosphere of a cursed planet devoid of life.

He tried to think clearly, understand what these bastards were doing and where they were. The A-10 had rocked their world, that was for damn sure. But some of them were still firing.

The ruins of some old structure, a wall only inches high, gave him a bit of defilade. Ahead of him, Blount found similar cover. From there, the Marine used that badass weapon of his with deadly effect. His Squad Advanced Marksman Rifle had put down at least three of these sons of bitches.

But his team had taken casualties. When Parson first jumped out of the helicopter, he saw two Marines on the ground. And some of the Afghan troops had been mowed down before they ever fired a shot. Parson remained outside the aircraft, trying to help make up for the loss in firepower.

Rashid should have lifted off by now to get his aircraft out of harm’s way, but the Mi-17 still sat on the LZ. The helo’s rotors turned at idle, stirring that otherworldly smoke. The door gun stood silent.

Someone threw a grenade. When it detonated, the photoflash effect illuminated a still image of the firefight. Parson saw Blount, prone, aiming. Beyond him, an insurgent pulling a boy by the arm. And at the cave mouth entrance to the bunker, a man with an RPG launcher.

Parson fired a burst. The man, now a dim figure in the dark, crumpled. His RPG flew wild, cut a harmless path over the top of the helicopter.

The glare of the rocket’s passage reflected in the windscreen of the Mi-17. Bullets had pocked the glass, round holes with edges crazed white. No wonder the chopper was still there. A dead or wounded crew.

In a crouch, gear rattling in his survival vest, Parson sprinted the few yards back to the helicopter. The engineer lay beside the door gun, one gloved hand over the breech of the PKM. Hard to tell where he’d been hit; black blood soaked most of his flight suit. Parson put down his M4, felt the engineer’s neck. No pulse.

In the cockpit, someone was moving.

“Rashid,” Parson called. “Are you hit?”

“Copilot dead,” Rashid said. His voice was weak, like a man just emerged from sleep.

Parson stumbled over the engineer, kicked the folding jump seat out of the way. The backlighting of instrument panels revealed blood on gauges, bits of glass on the console. The copilot hung in his harness, head twisted at an unnatural angle. Rashid had managed to release his own harness. He turned in his seat.

A bullet had nearly severed his right hand. The hand hung by tendons, bled from exposed arteries and torn muscle. Another round, apparently, had mangled much of his forearm. The night was growing cooler. In the chill, the blood gave off vapor.

Rashid would probably lose the hand. And if the bleeding didn’t stop, he’d lose his life. Parson looked around for a first-aid kit. He didn’t have to improvise a tourniquet; the new kits had specially made combat tourniquets. He found a kit on the cabin wall, pulled it from its mounts. Broke the seal and unzipped it.

The tourniquet amounted to a Velcro band with a windlass rod for tightening. Parson looped the band over Rashid’s arm just below the elbow.

“Damn it, I’m sorry, friend,” Parson said. “I know that hurts.”

Rashid said nothing. Parson fastened the band around itself. Turned the windlass, watched for the bleeding to stop. When no more drops fell from Rashid’s wrist and bloody sleeve, Parson locked down the windlass with a clip.

Outside, gunfire still sputtered. And the cockpit was a bullet magnet.

“Let’s at least get you out of that seat,” Parson said. “Can you stand?”

Rashid didn’t seem to comprehend, so Parson pulled on his good arm. “You need to get down on the floor,” he said.

The Afghan leaned on Parson, pushed himself up, and let Parson back him out of the cockpit, holding him by the armpits.

Parson lowered him to the floor. Hated to put him down on the bloody plating between his dead crew chief and engineer, but that seemed the safest place.

The engines of the Mi-17 still whined, and all of Parson’s instincts told him to let them idle. You didn’t shut down under fire. But Parson couldn’t fly the helicopter, and its running engines with flowing fuel could do little now except start a fire if a slug hit the right place. He leaned into the cockpit, reached overhead, and pulled the stopcocks.

Out the left cockpit window he saw stabs of flame from muzzle flashes. Rounds slapped into the side of the helicopter like thrown gravel.

Now Parson was angry. He might not know how to fly this contraption, but he could damn sure work its gun.

He turned, stepped aft to the door. Pushed the engineer’s hand off the weapon. Released the PKM from its mount, lifted the old-school wooden stock to his shoulder. The belt of ammunition dangled to his feet. Shoot my friends, will you? Maybe shoot at Sophia? He waited for those muzzle flashes again . . . There they were.

Parson pressed the trigger and held it down.