Warriors (9781101621189) (8 page)

Parson nodded to the crew chief, who walked over to the wheel well and poured both cans of hydraulic fluid over a strut assembly. The red liquid oozed across the concrete from underneath the aircraft. The scene put Parson in mind of a harpooned whale.

“What a mess,” Parson said. “Might just take all day to fix this.”

“Might,” the crew chief said.

“Can't even tow the aircraft.”

“Oh, no, sir. That might damage something.”

Cunningham walked around the Stratotanker as if he were inspecting it. As he stepped past Parson, he smiled faintly and shook his head. The OSI agent reached into the crew chief's tool bag and took out a wrench. Found a dry spot between the landing gear struts. Then he put his hand into a cargo pocket and withdrew a camera.

GOLD SAT WITH PARSON
on the ramp underneath the wing of the KC-135. Cunningham watched from the landing gear. Every now and then the OSI agent would pick up his wrench, pretend to work on something, wipe his hands with a rag. Just to make things look right, the crew chief opened a laptop computer and made a show of checking maintenance manuals. He also scattered tools around his computer: a Phillips screwdriver, a speed wrench, and a set of socket wrenches. The rest of the Stratotanker crew went to the chow hall.

“What if the Afghans recognize us?” Gold asked.

“Doesn't matter,” Parson said. “They know I'm the safety officer. I'm supposed to be out here if somebody has an emergency and rejects a takeoff.”

“What about me?”

“They know you work with the safety officer.”

“Fair enough,” Gold said. “So we're hiding in plain sight.”

“That's kind of how a deer stand works.”

Sounded like the Parson she had always known. A hunter at heart. An alpha wolf, ready to inflict violence when called for, but only to feed or protect his pack. And if Parson considered you part of his pack, he'd do anything for you. Gold had seen him prove that more than once. But he probably wouldn't like the wolf analogy, Gold thought. She and Parson had fought off starving wolves while downed in Afghanistan during a winter storm. Not one of her better memories.

For two hours, nothing of note took place on the ramp or in the Afghans' open hangar. Inside the hangar, a man swept the floor, then smoked a cigarette. As Gold watched, she felt a stitch of pain in her ribs. The bullet wound from her last mission. Afghanistan had left its mark on her. But the mission that had nearly killed her worked to heal her in some ways. She and Parson had helped rescue kids from a Taliban splinter group that used child soldiers. A mission worth her life. And one that made her feel her efforts had not been in vain. In a way, her physical agony eased some of her mental torments. More than a fair trade, in her view.

While they waited for something to happen, they used the time to continue catching up. Gold appreciated that Parson asked about Fatima, an Afghan girl they'd found orphaned. After Gold was shot, Parson had picked up where she'd left off and used information she'd gathered to find a good orphanage for Fatima and her brother, Mohammed. Though Gold and Parson had never been intimate, she thought of Fatima almost as their daughter.

“When's the last time you saw her?” Parson asked.

“About a month ago. She's reading so well now. She even tutors her brother.” As part of Gold's work with the UN, she had toured schools and orphanages throughout Afghanistan. Fatima and Mohammed lived in one of the better facilities.

“I'm glad she's learning,” Parson said, “but there are people in Afghanistan who won't like that.”

Gold knew all too well what Parson meant. The Taliban opposed any education for girls. Terrorists blew up schools, threw acid in girls' faces, murdered teachers. In Pakistan, the Taliban had shot a teenage girl who had campaigned for girls' education. Gold offered a silent prayer for Malala Yousafzai, who survived the bullet wounds to her head and neck.

The growl of turboprops interrupted Gold's thoughts. She looked up, shielded her eyes with her hand. Parson had told her the distinct sound of a turboprop came not from its turbine engines but from the propellers spun by the turbines. A pure jet made more of a whistling noise.

And there came the plane, a C-27 Spartan approaching through a clear sky. The aircraft banked to the left.

“Hey, Cunningham,” Parson whispered. “We're gonna have company in a minute. A C-27 just turned downwind.”

“I see it,” Cunningham said.

Gold took a pair of foam earplugs from her pocket; she knew the noise of the Spartan's engines would grow painfully loud when the aircraft taxied into parking. She twisted the earplugs, inserted them into her ears, and she watched Parson do the same thing. As the foam untwisted and expanded, her world grew quieter.

After a few minutes, the Spartan's wheels barked onto the runway. Puffs of blue tire smoke erupted where the C-27 touched down. The aircraft rolled toward the far end of the runway, and three Afghan ground crewmen strolled from the hangar and onto the ramp. One carried a pair of yellow wooden chocks, each with a three-foot length of rope attached. The men looked at the Stratotanker, gestured and spoke among themselves. Gold removed one of her earplugs for a moment so she could hear better. The Afghans pointed at the tanker jet, and one of them said in Pashto, “He will have room to get by the wings.”

“Are they worried about us?” Parson asked.

“No,” Gold said. “They're talking about wingtip clearance.”

Parson nodded, apparently satisfied his plan was working. The C-27 rolled along the taxiway now, growing larger and louder. Gold replaced the earplug, and she smelled the exhaust whipped by propeller blast. The aircraft lumbered past the Stratotanker, and Gold noted the green, black, and red roundel of the Afghan Air Force. Through the cockpit windows she saw the pilots—one clean-shaven and one bearded—both wearing headsets and brown flight suits.

The C-27 made a right turn into the parking apron, and the move placed the exhaust and prop wash directly over Gold and Parson. The hot wind burned her eyes and tousled her hair, and the fumes of burning jet fuel stung her nostrils. She and Parson retreated to the other side of the tanker. After a minute or two, the Spartan's engines finally hushed, and the acrid gale subsided. Parson walked under the tanker's tail, feigned interest in the KC-135's boom assembly. From there, he gained a better vantage point to watch the ramp. Still hidden by the wheels, Cunningham began snapping photos.

The ground crew unloaded three pallets. Gold noticed nothing unusual, and Parson and Cunningham didn't seem to, either. She saw that Parson stayed away from the KC-135's gear struts to avoid drawing attention to Cunningham's hiding spot.

Gold joined Parson in the shade of the tail. She faced the runway, her back to the C-27, and whispered, “See anything suspicious?”

“Not really,” Parson said, “other than that they're here at all. Can't think of any legitimate reason for them to ship out this much stuff.”

“So what do we do now?”

“That's really up to Cunningham and the OSI. But I imagine they'll be more interested in who takes that stuff out than who brought it in.”

“Where's Colonel Webster today?” Gold asked. “He might have enjoyed our little jaunt down the runway.”

“He would have,” Parson said. “But I think he's doing the lawyer thing. Checking manifests or something.”

The Afghans left the C-27 unattended for more than an hour. Gold supposed the fliers and ground crewmen had gone to lunch. When they returned, one of the pilots walked around his airplane. He examined the underside of the wings, opened panels along the fuselage and then closed them, checked tires.

“What's he doing?” Gold asked.

“Through-flight inspection,” Parson whispered. “We advisers and instructors all used to harp on good procedures. Maybe he listened.”

The pilot climbed aboard, followed by the other two crew members. A few minutes later the auxiliary power unit howled up to speed, and one of the propellers began to turn. As the second engine started, Parson retreated to the far side of the Stratotanker. Gold followed him, sat beside him near the crew chief, who continued reading manuals on his computer. Probably not just acting, Gold guessed, but using the time to study. Warm wind from the C-27's props flowed around and under the KC-135, and Gold felt the smoky breeze on her cheek.

The engine noise made conversation difficult, so Gold and Parson did not speak. But Parson met her eyes, nodded, patted her back. She took his hand, closed her fist around two of his fingers shortened by frostbite years ago. Funny how we can communicate, Gold thought, even when we can't talk.

She released his hand, and he looked away from her. Parson unzipped a pocket, pulled out a datebook, and opened it. Back to business as usual. As he worked, Gold noticed his scars. When he pushed up his flight suit sleeve, the effort revealed a mark left by a terrorist's sword, of all things.

The Spartan taxied out of the parking apron. Its wings rocked with each dip in the pavement. The aircraft rolled down the taxiway, turned onto the runway, took off. Banked to the south and eventually vanished.

“The Poppy Express rides again,” Parson muttered.

“Maybe,” Gold said. “Hey—you're going to have a long day out here. Why don't I go get some food for you guys?”

“Thanks,” Parson said. “That's a good idea. When you come back, just call my cell, and I'll escort you back onto the flight line.”

Gold crossed the parking apron, hoped the Afghans would not see her. No big deal if they did, she imagined. They'd just think she was running an errand for the boss. But she preferred not to call attention to Parson's aeronautical deer stand. She made it to the flight line's entry and exit control point, waved to the security police as she walked through the opening in a chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire.

In the chow hall, she found Webster finishing a late lunch. Across the table from him, she put down her bowl of potato soup, cracked open a can of Diet Coke. Ripped a cellophane packet that contained a napkin and a plastic knife, fork, and spoon.

“So how's the deer hunt going?” Webster asked.

“Good, sir,” Gold said. “Or at least I think so.”

“I saw we had a C-27 come in from Afghanistan.”

“Yes, sir. They just left.”

Gold took a spoonful of the soup. A little too salty, but better than eating MREs in the field. A group of soldiers, about twenty, entered the chow hall. Gold watched them as they signed in and took their plastic trays. Junior enlisted, mainly. Their camo bore a striped patch on the sleeves—the insignia of the Third Infantry Division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia. Each soldier carried an M4 carbine with the magazine removed. As they shuffled along the serving line, they slid open glass refrigerator doors to pick up apples, prepackaged salads, boxes of Parmalat milk.

From their faded and worn fatigues, from their tired smiles, Gold surmised they were on the way home from Afghanistan and not the other way around. She knew well what they might have seen and done. These troops would return to their communities aged beyond their years. No one, not even their spouses or parents, would ever truly understand what they had gone through. Most of their old high school classmates experienced war merely as reality TV, an interruption to computer games and online shopping, with no personal stakes, no hard decisions, no consequences, no responsibilities.

Webster's voice brought Gold back to more immediate problems. “I checked some shipping records,” he said, voice low. “Most of what those C-27s bring here goes on to Belgrade. I just called Cunningham to let him know.”

“Belgrade?” Gold said. “Not what I would have expected.”

She didn't know what she would have expected, but she hadn't thought the capital of Serbia served as a big transshipment point for opium. Dealers, she supposed, would ship anywhere and any way that made them money.

“Belgrade surprised me, too,” Webster said. “They have some organized crime, but the State Department rates Serbia as only a medium-crime-threat country.”

“Have you ever been there?” Gold asked.

Webster sipped his Mountain Dew, gave a wry smile. “Kinda,” he said. He explained how he'd flown a tanker back in 1999 during the Kosovo air campaign. When ethnic Albanians in Kosovo tried to gain independence from what remained of Yugoslavia, a war ignited between Kosovo rebels and the Serbian military. NATO feared a genocidal campaign similar to what had happened in Bosnia, and the alliance launched air strikes. Webster refueled stealth fighters and other attack aircraft that hit targets all over Kosovo and Serbia, including Belgrade.

“I've heard Lieutenant Colonel Parson talk about that,” Gold said. “He flew in Bosnia and Kosovo, too.”

“We thought we were salty old veterans after that thing ended,” Webster said. “Of course, we had no idea what was coming.”

Gold made no comment, just looked around her at the veterans of the post-9/11 world. Most of these troops would have been children when Webster and Parson flew over the Balkans. She finished her soup, thanked Webster for letting her join him. Then she made her way down the chow line again, built roast beef sandwiches for Parson, Cunningham, and the crew chief. As she gathered packets of mustard, a jet landed outside. Sounded like a big one.

Carrying a paper bag of sandwiches, chips, and soft drinks, Gold pushed open the chow hall door, squinted against the sunlight. She called Parson from her cell phone when she arrived at the flight line's entry control point. He asked her to wait a few minutes. An Antonov had just taxied into parking. Parson shouted over the scream of its engines. In the distance, Gold could see the wings of the Russian aircraft looming across the tarmac, dwarfing everything else on the ramp.

PARSON HOPED THAT HE
and Cunningham looked like maintenance guys taking a break as they ate their sandwiches underneath the KC-135. They saw Afghan ground crewmen load several pallets into the Antonov's cargo bay. As the ground crew worked, a man in civilian clothing stood outside the aircraft.

“Can you just roll those guys up right now?” Parson asked.

“I'm not sure we have enough to make an arrest,” Cunningham. “They could claim they had no idea about the smuggling. We might not have the authority to arrest, either.”

“How's that?”

Cunningham explained how Kyrgyz officials had the final say. If an American airman got caught trafficking drugs, the USAF security police or OSI could arrest him, no problem. But it got sticky with third-country nationals. What was America's status of forces agreement with Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan? Who had jurisdiction? You could clap the cuffs on somebody at the wrong time, blow the whole operation, and watch the suspects walk.

“I'm not even sure this is our case anymore,” Cunningham added.

“Why's that?”

“OSI's mission is to deal with threats to the Air Force and the U.S. government,” Cunningham said. “Anything else is off my radar.” Cunningham's brogue twisted “radar” into “rador.” He explained that sticking to the main mission fit right in with what his elders had taught him as he grew up on North Carolina's Outer Banks. You defended your island, and you protected your town and your family. But the world beyond the breakers could tend to itself.

As he spoke, the OSI agent kept eyeing the man by the Antonov.

“Your boss feels differently, though,” Cunningham added.

“Why's he so interested?”

“I don't know, exactly. But when he learned this thing had a Belgrade connection, his ears perked up.”

The man in civvies hovered over the ground crew like a supervisor. Parson could think of no legitimate reason for a civilian to keep such close watch on Afghan military cargo. The guy pulled out his cell phone, dialed a number, and spoke for several minutes. Parson strained to listen amid the noise of aircraft coming and going. Sometimes the man's words got drowned out, and Parson could hear nothing. What little he did hear sounded like Russian at first. He understood none of it. But then he heard one word that he recognized:
porucnik
.

Many years ago, in a very different world with very different threats, he'd attended intel briefings on the Serbian military. Among other things, he'd learned the ranks. In Serbo-Croatian, a
porucnik
was a lieutenant. He told Cunningham what he'd heard.

“Oh, boy,” Cunningham said. “If this is Serbian military running drugs—or maybe some gang of ex-military types—that's damned dangerous.”

Cell Phone Guy finally ended his call. The man looked European, and Parson guessed Serbo-Croatian was his native language. He certainly wasn't an Afghan.

Near the end of the day, the Afghans closed the doors to their hangar. Parson called the KC-135 crew to tell them they could move their jet. He felt he was climbing down from a deer stand, having bagged important information. When Parson and Cunningham left the flight line, Cunningham headed in the direction of Webster's office. The OSI agent disappeared for the rest of the afternoon.

Parson found Gold in the coffee shop, and he quietly told her about the out-of-place civilian he and Cunningham had seen. Gold sipped an espresso, and she'd clearly made friends with the resident cat. The Green Beans mascot lay in her lap, purred as she stroked its back. On the wall behind Gold's chair, Parson noticed the coffee shop's main decor feature: propaganda posters from the Soviet era. One showed a cosmonaut staring into the future, chiseled face shielded by a helmet visor. Red star on the side of the helmet. Another depicted a Young Pioneer wearing the red neck scarf of the Soviet youth group. In one hand the boy held a Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle. In the other he displayed a paper target with five holes punched in and around the bull's-eye. If I had grown up here, Parson admitted to himself, I would have wanted to be that boy, and later that man.

“Webster will want to know about those phone calls, especially if there's some kind of military connection,” Gold said, “I suspect he'll be talking to the NSA.”

“What about?”

“Well, the National Security Agency handles signals intelligence,” Gold said.

“Ah,” Parson said, “like cell phone signals.” He raised his eyebrows, turned the thought over in his mind for a moment. “So they can listen to our boy out there.”

“If they get approval.”

Parson didn't know much about cryptology. As an airlifter, his contact with the intelligence world consisted mainly of background data like the ranks he'd just recalled, and pre-mission briefings before going out to fly:

Bad guys have mortared airfields here, shot at airplanes there. Foreign agents like to hang out in bars where you're going, so watch what you say. These guys in this village have given up their weapons. These guys in that other village have said, “No, I like my AK-47, and I like to shoot it. At you.”

Good luck. Please file a report when you get back.

He had once taken a War College course that mentioned NSA capabilities. He couldn't remember all the details, but he did recall the NSA seal: an eagle clutching a key in its talons. For unlocking secrets.

Until Webster and those above him decided how to proceed from here, Parson found nothing to do except wrap up his safety investigation. The lab reports had come back; Parson had printed them out and stuck them in a lower leg pocket of his flight suit. The reports were unclassified, so he didn't need to study them in a secure facility. Parson unfolded his papers and perused them while Gold petted the cat to sleep.

Nothing unexpected in the autopsies. The crewmen had died of blunt force trauma and smoke inhalation. The C-27's flight data recorder offered no surprises, either. At the moment of impact, both engines showed max fuel flow and redline torque. Oil pressures and temperatures, hydraulic quantities and pressures, all within limits. Flight control surfaces and trim settings where they should have been. When the glass faces of gauges smacked against instrument needles, the positions of those needles reflected the expected values. In other words, not a damned thing wrong with the airplane. Just lousy airmanship, as Parson had suspected all along. He folded the lab reports and, in disgust, jammed them back into his zippered pocket. The open zipper scraped his hand, and that pissed him off.

Gold looked up from her book. “What's wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Parson said. “Just the data analysis on that stupid-ass crash.” He rubbed at the scratch across his knuckles. The zipper had cut deep enough to make the capillaries bleed.

Parson needed something to change his mood, so he got up and ordered a cup of coffee. The barista, a dark-eyed Kyrgyz woman who spoke fluent but accented English, brought him his usual: dark roast, black, no shot of anything. He also bought a slice of carrot cake.

When he returned to his seat, the cat had moved from Gold's lap to the table and appeared to have gone back to sleep. Parson broke the cake slice in two, handed half to Gold. A dollop of icing stuck to his frostbite-shortened middle finger. He wiped the icing onto a napkin, slid the napkin under the cat's nose. The animal woke up and licked away the icing. Gold laughed, rare for her.

“I bet that's how he got so big,” she said.

Two aviators from the United Kingdom entered the coffee shop. Parson knew their nationality from the style of their flight suits and the design of their wings. Both wore the chevrons of RAF flight sergeants. The cat leaped from the table and ran to the Brits.

“There goes our protocol officer,” Parson said.

One of the flight sergeants picked up the animal and said, “Hello, mate.”

Behind the RAF crewmen, Webster and Cunningham came through the door. Parson waved, and the two pulled up chairs and joined him and Gold.

“Anything new?” Webster asked.

“I was about to ask you that,” Parson said.

“You first.”

“Well, the lab reports confirmed what we already knew. Dumb son of a bitch flew a perfectly good aircraft into a microburst and didn't have the power to get out of the downdraft.”

“A jet fighter might not have had enough power to recover from that downdraft.”

“I know it. And our Captain Careless should have known it, too.”

“Damned shame.”

“So what have you two been so Secret Squirrel about today?” Parson asked.

“Can't talk about it here,” Webster said, “but I think they're sending me some help.”

“Really?” Parson said. He started to ask what kind of help. But before he could even begin the sentence, Webster shook his head. The commander apparently would not discuss it in public, even in the vaguest terms. Cunningham changed the subject.

“How long have you been flying?” he asked.

Parson explained how he'd begun his career as a C-130 navigator back in the '90s, then cross-trained to pilot and flown C-5s. He left out a lot of what came in between. Gold said nothing, only met his eyes and gave that half smile of hers.

“My grandfather was a pilot,” Cunningham said.

“Air Force?” Parson asked.

“Civil Air Patrol.”

The Air Force's civilian auxiliary. They wore Air Force–style uniforms and flew light airplanes for stateside emergency services such as search and rescue. The CAP also ran cadet programs to educate kids about aerospace.

“Good program,” Parson said. “Did your granddad work with young folks?”

“Actually, no.”

Then Cunningham described a corner of military history Parson never knew. Most people believe World War II combat never touched American shores, the OSI agent explained. But it did, quite literally. During the long-running Battle of the Atlantic, German U-boats targeted Allied shipping. Partly due to the course of the Gulf Stream, shipping lanes ran close to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Perfect hunting grounds for the
Kriegsmarine, where sub commanders could silhouette freighters and tankers against the lights of shore. Punch off torpedoes and vanish into the depths.

Cunningham said his grandfather recalled seeing fires burning offshore at night. Not just a distant glow but towering flames fed by diesel or crude, flickering as the stricken vessel flooded, heeled over, hissed and groaned through its descent to the continental shelf. By day, oil, life jackets, even corpses, would wash up onto the sand. CAP pilots patrolled from the air, reporting any sightings of the German wolf pack. In a move unimaginable today, the military even gave live ordnance to a civilian auxiliary, and the CAP destroyed or damaged at least two subs by itself. All for defending home turf, as his granddad had put it.

“After the war,” Cunningham said, “my grandfather joined the North Carolina Highway Patrol, and he flew helicopters for them. That sort of led me into law enforcement.”

Webster raised his eyebrows, apparently impressed. So was Parson. A lot of people told a story about how family history brought them into their careers, but few told a story like that. Family had also influenced Parson's career. His father had flown as an Air Force navigator, too. Not on big transports, but as a backseater in fighter jets. The elder Parson died in the first Gulf War, in the crash of his F-4G Wild Weasel. Never got to see his boy wearing wings.

Parson spent the next two days writing his report on the C-27 accident. He interviewed three more witnesses, just for the sake of completeness. But their statements presented nothing new. He typed the report into his computer and showed it to Gold. She moved around a few paragraphs, took out some unnecessary commas, and shortened some of his sentences. After Parson handed the report to Webster, the colonel complimented him on his writing. They sent the document to the Air Force Safety Center, to U.S. Central Command, and to the Afghan Air Force.

That afternoon, Parson got to see what Webster meant by extra help. Reinforcements came in a form Parson never expected: an RC-135 Rivet Joint bird landed at Manas. Parson had heard of Rivet Joints, but he'd never seen one of the Air Force signals intelligence planes up close. A four-engine jet that looked a lot like the old Boeing 707, the aircraft flew as part of the 55th Wing, based at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. Antennas studded the underbelly and the top of the fuselage. When the crew climbed down from the aircraft, they needed a bus to get them off the flight line: two pilots, a navigator, and twenty-five other crew members. Parson knew some of them were electronic warfare officers and intel types, but he had no idea what the rest of them did.

Webster and Cunningham briefed the crew in the air operations center. Parson didn't understand all the details of this unfamiliar mission, but he got the gist: Fly around in circles and find out what all this has to do with a Serbian lieutenant.

After the meeting, Parson and Gold struck up a conversation with one of the crew members. The young woman looked about twenty. Her name tag bore the wings of an enlisted flier. Beneath the wings, lettering read
AIC IRENA MARKOVICH
. An airman first class, one of the lowest ranks in the Air Force. Airman Markovich had just begun her career. Trim and in good condition, with a cold-cream complexion and deep-black eyes. Hair so black it shone, even tied up in a bun. Parson found her so attractive, he had to force himself not to stare.

“So what's your crew position?” Gold asked Irena.

“I'm an airborne cryptologic linguist,” Irena said.

“What language?” Parson asked.

“Serbo-Croatian, sir.”

“So you must have just graduated from the Defense Language Institute,” Gold said.

“Actually, ma'am,” Irena said, “I didn't have to take the course. My folks speak Serbo-Croatian at home, and I placed out when I took the proficiency tests.”