Authors: Tom Young
Silent Enemy (32 page)
“What’s three-engine ceiling now?” Colman asked.
“Twenty-nine thousand,” the engineer said.
“So we won’t lose any more altitude.”
“Correct.”
“All right,” the copilot said. “I wish Major Parson were up here, but I guess we don’t have any choice.”
“No, we don’t,” Dunne said.
Gold considered whether to break in and say something. Finally, curiosity got the better of her and she pressed her TALK switch.
“Flight deck, this is Sergeant Major Gold,” she said. “The major is back in the tail area, but I can have Justin give him a message.”
“No, thanks,” Colman said. “The book is pretty straightforward on this. Oil pressure’s dropping even more on number one.”
Gold wondered how serious it was, but Colman and Dunne didn’t seem panicked. They sounded like they were following a technical manual that gave clear guidance.
“We need to stop talking about it and do something,” Dunne said. “It’s below ten psi. If we keep screwing around, we’ll have an engine fire on our hands.”
“Okay,” Colman said. “Precautionary engine shutdown on number one. Fuel and start ignition switch to OFF.”
“Confirm one,” Dunne said.
“Off.”
A noise came from out on the left wing that sounded like a sigh as the jet engine spun down. Gold felt no maneuvering, no descent. So maybe this didn’t put the airplane in any more immediate danger. But losing an engine couldn’t help matters.
She looked through the pressure valve and into the tail. The crew chief remained bent to his labor. Justin held a light for the chief, and Parson remained on the ladder. Of Parson, Gold could see only his legs and the dangling strap of his safety harness. From this distance, the three appeared to work with a casual unconcern. An uninformed observer would have no idea that a mistake or a moment of bad luck could touch off an explosion and betray them all to the water below.
More cross talk on headset. This time it was the aeromeds.
“How’s he doing?” a voice asked.
“A little respiratory distress,” the MCD answered. “I switched his oxygen regulator from NORMAL to EMERGENCY.”
That could only mean Mahsoud. God, please let us finish this and land and get him some help, Gold thought. She felt as hollow as the inside of an expended rifle cartridge. There was nothing she could do for Mahsoud now except carry out her little part back here.
Whatever breathing trouble he had, Gold hoped he wasn’t in pain. She knew from experience how agony could make time thicken and clot, drag out seconds into minutes and minutes into infinity. If you let it, pain could drive out all thoughts except the desire to make it stop.
And now pain seemed to fill this aircraft from nose to tail. It would have done so even absent this bomb, given the cargo of wounded. Amid terrorism and war, certain people took the pain for everybody else.
Gold wished she could bear Mahsoud’s discomfort for him. She wished she could lighten Parson’s load of responsibility. But for now, she could only point her flashlight into that crypt of a tail cone and wait for Justin to bring up more empties.
24
F
eathers of frost curled across the sheet metal plating where Parson stood on the tail ladder. He guessed the moisture came from his breath, exhaled through the ports of his oxygen mask. Thicker frost, in whorls and spirals, formed on the aluminum structure nearest the crew chief. The shapes reminded Parson of the patterns of ice on rivers where he’d hunted ducks, the moving water having finally surrendered to the cold, changing its state to a motionless solid, but with the memory of when it flowed free.
eathers of frost curled across the sheet metal plating where Parson stood on the tail ladder. He guessed the moisture came from his breath, exhaled through the ports of his oxygen mask. Thicker frost, in whorls and spirals, formed on the aluminum structure nearest the crew chief. The shapes reminded Parson of the patterns of ice on rivers where he’d hunted ducks, the moving water having finally surrendered to the cold, changing its state to a motionless solid, but with the memory of when it flowed free.
This was taking longer than he’d expected. The seventh bolt gave Spencer a lot of trouble. Parson even wondered if the drill’s battery was running down. The bit seemed to spin more slowly, and Parson heard Spencer’s muffled curses from behind his mask.
The noise of the aircraft and slipstream changed in pitch, almost like that of a car downshifting. Parson was pretty sure that meant an engine shutting down, but he wasn’t used to the sounds back here in the empennage. From the pilot’s seat, he knew the plane by all its tones and vibrations as if he were part of the machine. That’s where he wanted to be now if the crew had lost an engine.
Just let them deal with it, he told himself. A commander has to delegate. Besides, if Colman couldn’t handle an airplane, he wouldn’t be wearing wings.
A rim of daylight gleamed at the rear edge of the access hatch. That’s where the crew chief had removed the first bolts, and there the light shone more brightly than that filtered through the louvers. It was as if Spencer were prying open a door to some brilliant future without that damned bomb.
But it would never happen until he freed those bolts. And now Parson could see the drill
was
running out of power. No doubt the cold sapped the battery. Worse, that cordless drill probably wasn’t meant for this kind of work, anyway. Parson didn’t know what kind of torque it had, but mechanics normally used it for turning screws, not cutting through metal.
was
running out of power. No doubt the cold sapped the battery. Worse, that cordless drill probably wasn’t meant for this kind of work, anyway. Parson didn’t know what kind of torque it had, but mechanics normally used it for turning screws, not cutting through metal.
Justin shuffled back down the catwalk with fresh oxygen bottles. He moved like a spacewalking astronaut, as if only Velcro held his boots to the floor. He swapped out the crew chief’s oxygen bottle and passed the other full cylinder to Parson. As Parson fumbled with the hoses and straps to complete the exchange, he heard Spencer shouting instructions to Justin:
“Go downstairs and get a new battery out of my toolbox,” he said. The chief unsnapped the battery pack from the drill’s pistol grip and handed it to Justin. “Bring me a hacksaw, too.”
“Yes, sir,” Justin yelled. He pocketed the battery, picked up the expended oxygen cylinders, and left the tail section.
Parson fumed while he waited for Justin to return. Until then, he and Spencer could make no progress. Why hadn’t Spencer just brought extra batteries? Parson supposed he wasn’t used to working in this kind of cold, and in more normal conditions the battery would have lasted longer. Everything about this operation lay outside the envelope of his crew’s training and experience.
Parson looked at the bomb, inches from his torso. A device waiting to immolate him and everyone else aboard. What kind of hate lay behind the construction of that thing? The same kind that flew airplanes into buildings, flung acid in the faces of Afghan schoolgirls, stoned people to death.
He remembered the first time he’d encountered that kind of evil. It had happened early in his career, when he was a newly commissioned lieutenant fresh out of navigator school. The old Soviet bloc was coming apart, and Yugoslavia’s self-dissolution uncorked hatreds that had remained bottled up for decades. At the height of the Balkans’ ethnic cleansing, Parson and the rest of his C-130 crew left Ramstein Air Base, Germany, with a load of relief supplies bound for Sarajevo.
When the Herk began descending over Bosnia, it was early afternoon. Forested valleys of the Dinaric Alps unrolled beneath the wings, and the beauty of the terrain put Parson in mind of his native Colorado. But then columns of smoke began to appear, rising from mortared homes along the Miljacka River.
The pilots did not fly a normal straight-in arrival. They overflew the field at five thousand feet above ground level, then racked the aircraft into a sixty-degree bank to start a random steep spiral down. The crew wanted to avoid small-arms fire from the Dobrinja neighborhood. The area that had once hosted the Olympic Village now provided nests for Serb snipers.
After the C-130 touched down, the front-end crew kept the engines running while the loadmasters pushed off five pallets of aid from the UN World Food Program. Parson studied his charts for departure, but he happened to look up in time to see an airport worker step from behind a fuel truck.
A spray of red erupted from the man’s back. Blood spattered the truck’s hood and fender as the worker crumpled to the pavement.
“What the hell?” Parson said. “Did you see that? We need to help that guy!”
The man raised himself with both arms. Another round caught him in the head. He fell facedown and did not move.
“There’s nothing we can do for him,” the pilot said. “And we’ll be casualties ourselves if we don’t get out of here.”
A mortar round exploded in the grass beside the runway. A splinter of steel chipped the C-130’s center windscreen.
“They’ll have this aircraft bracketed in about a minute,” the pilot said. He shoved up the throttles and began to taxi. Propeller blast tousled the dead man’s hair.
The aircraft trundled along past sandbags and razor wire. A shell struck the taxiway. Fragments slammed into the Herk’s fuselage.
Parson had never seen mortar fire before. As he watched the explosion, he marveled that it left only a pockmark in the asphalt, not a wide crater. Then he realized blasting open a big hole wasn’t the point. Those shells were built to throw shrapnel—to sling hot, jagged shards of metal through flesh and bone.
The pilot turned onto the runway and made an intersection takeoff without clearance. After the plane leveled at altitude, the copilot said, “They’re killing each other over shit that happened in the thirteen hundreds.”
In the years since that flight, Parson had come to find it ironic that he logged his first combat time on missions to help Muslims. And now he clung to a ladder, freezing his ass off, sucking oxygen from an MA-1 bottle, in a part of the airplane where he had no business, because of some jihadi’s fucked-up version of Islam.
He checked his cylinder pressure. Ninety psi. Justin better get back soon.
Spencer pounded at the hatch with his hammer and widened the slice of radiance shining from the outside. Parson squinted as he looked through the gap. When his eyes adjusted, he made out the pattern of waves on the ocean far below like a sheet of corrugated steel.
He tried to check his pressure once more, and his daylight-narrowed pupils could not read the gauge. Stupid of me, he thought. He looked away from the hatch, into the dark corners where the bomb and its accompanying packages lay, until he could see again.
Fatigue crept up on him, and his eyes closed. Pressure against his face woke him. As he inhaled, his mask tightened around his mouth and nose. That meant his oxygen cylinder contained nothing but a vacuum. Everything around him went gray, and the light from the hatch dimmed. And there was Justin, just a gray shade, extending a fresh MA-1 toward him.
The tangle of hoses looked so confusing. Which one led where? Parson disconnected a hose from his empty cylinder and held it. Now where did it go? He felt tugs as Justin pulled at him and the hose. Something clicked.
Parson’s lungs filled with oxygen. Colors returned: yellow bottle, blue water, tan uniforms.
“You okay, sir?” Justin yelled.
Parson nodded. Then he thought, All right—let’s not cut it that close again. When Justin climbed down from the ladder, Parson saw Spencer drilling out another bolt. The crew chief put down the drill, held the punch in place with his fist, and swung the hammer. One more bolt gone.
Spencer began drilling again, and he repeated the same process of boring and punching until the drill stopped working. One bolt still held the hatch in place. The chief used the hacksaw, pumping his elbows like a woodsman.
When the last bolt severed, the hatch did not fall away. It just disappeared, snatched by the slipstream. The ocean lit the inside of the tail section as if someone had switched on an arc lamp. Spencer kneeled by the open hatch, gave a high five to Justin and a thumbs-up to Parson. With both arms, the crew chief beckoned toward the opening:
It’s all yours, sir. Drop that damned bomb.
It’s all yours, sir. Drop that damned bomb.
Parson drew a deep breath, lifted the duffel bag ever so slightly. No flash, no heat, no anything. Dear God, he could really do this—drop it out and be long gone before it hit trigger altitude. He raised it with one hand; the thing was lighter than he expected. He pivoted on the ladder, held the bomb over the open hatch. Parson gripped it by a handful of the duffel bag’s canvas, like something annoying that he’d grabbed by the scruff of the neck . . . and he dropped it.
The bomb cleared the hatch. As soon as the wind caught it, it detonated.
THE EXPLOSION SLAMMED GOLD BACKWARD
against the grating around the troop compartment stairway. Debris hurled through the negative pressure valves stung her face. A shock traveled through the frame of the aircraft into the marrow of her bones. The sound of the blast never seemed to stop; a roar like the passage of an unending train came from the tail section.
against the grating around the troop compartment stairway. Debris hurled through the negative pressure valves stung her face. A shock traveled through the frame of the aircraft into the marrow of her bones. The sound of the blast never seemed to stop; a roar like the passage of an unending train came from the tail section.
The aircraft dived, climbed, banked. The wild maneuvers generated forces that lifted her from the floor, then pinned her to it, then slid her sideways across it. The C-5 seemed to writhe in pain. Gold clawed toward the pressure valves to try to see if anyone remained alive in the tail cone.
“Major Parson!” she shouted though she knew he could not hear her.
Her headset had twisted out of place, but its left dome and ear seal remained partially over her ear. She heard Colman and Dunne fighting for control of the jet.
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