Silent Enemy (40 page)
Authors: Tom Young
The fire found more of Parson’s aircraft to devour, perhaps an engine’s oil tank or a line full of hydraulic fluid. The blaze crackled like a rifle on full auto, and debris shot skyward. The burning pieces tumbled in seeming slow motion, trailing pennants of smoke. Colman wandered in search of the MCD as Gold stepped from litter to litter.
A SHORT WAY DOWN THE BEACH,
in the dry sand just beyond reach of the waves, Gold found Justin on a stretcher, conscious now. He raised his hand in a languid gesture. Baitullah sat up against a hummock of sand and grass. Gold did not see Mahsoud or the MCD.
in the dry sand just beyond reach of the waves, Gold found Justin on a stretcher, conscious now. He raised his hand in a languid gesture. Baitullah sat up against a hummock of sand and grass. Gold did not see Mahsoud or the MCD.
She went to Baitullah. He wore a stricken look, though he seemed to have no new injuries.
“Are you all right?” Gold asked in Pashto.
“I am, teacher. But we have lost a friend.”
It took a moment for his meaning to sink in. When it did, she imagined Mahsoud’s final moments with horror.
“We landed hard,” Baitullah continued. “I thought the Americans would leave us, but they took me out right away and rushed back in to save more patients. I kept looking for our friend. . . .”
He stopped, seemed unable to say Mahsoud’s name. Gold searched for words of comfort but felt only loss. With her handkerchief, she wiped sweat and soot from Baitullah’s forehead. When his tears began, she turned away and went toward the water. The surf foamed around her boots, then retreated. She sank to her knees in the wet sand, placed her fingers in the damp coolness, and closed her eyes.
To her, Mahsoud represented his country’s potential. But he came from a hard place where bullets, stones, ropes, and bombs made quick work of thoughtful minds and gentle spirits. To build, to educate, came with such great exertion, over such long stretches of time. Destruction came effortlessly, instantly. What was the point?
The combers rolled up the beach again. The water sissed as it advanced, frothed white over Gold’s burned hands, held still for one heartbeat, then slid back into the sea. She got up and continued counting the living: fifteen crew, twenty-five patients and passengers, including herself. The MCD was gone.
Cracks and booms reverberated from the flaming aircraft. The tanks in the left wing cooked off. The wing blew up, then crumbled away from the fuselage like ash.
Gold found Parson raised up on one elbow. He shaded his eyes with his hand, still wearing a beige flight glove darkened by fire. He was watching the C-5 burn. Little of it remained recognizable as an aircraft except the tail. Colman was at his side, seeming frustrated, trying to get his attention.
Finally, Parson said, “Look, Lieutenant, the MCD is dead, and I might pass out any minute. You have to take charge, here.”
“I don’t know how to take care of patients, sir,” Colman said. Gold thought he looked frightened, unprepared. He’d handled himself so well in the airplane, but now he was out of his element.
“You can do it,” Parson said. “The medics will take care of the wounded. And when the C-17 gets here, you’ll have plenty of help. Just don’t ever stop leading.”
As Parson coached, Gold recalled her first desperate moments with him four years ago: downed in Afghanistan, facing deadly challenges for which they weren’t prepared. But he’d seen her through. He’d made mistakes, but he never stopped leading. And now, perhaps, Colman would learn what Parson seemed to understand instinctively. When you took on responsibility for the lives of friends and family, those lives became more important than your own.
PARSON FELT HIS AIRCRAFT HAD BECOME A FUNERAL PYRE
. He thought of Dunne, the MCD, Spencer, Mahsoud, the patients who died during the flight, and those who died in the flames. He felt no triumph over the lives he had saved. Parson wasn’t even sure he’d really saved any lives, depending on what spores or chemicals drifted in that smoke. His mind drifted back to that time he’d come in from drinking at Ramstein and found Dunne strumming that funny all-silver guitar. As the slide passed over the strings, the instrument seemed almost to cry. Dunne said it was a Civil War song called “The Vacant Chair.”
. He thought of Dunne, the MCD, Spencer, Mahsoud, the patients who died during the flight, and those who died in the flames. He felt no triumph over the lives he had saved. Parson wasn’t even sure he’d really saved any lives, depending on what spores or chemicals drifted in that smoke. His mind drifted back to that time he’d come in from drinking at Ramstein and found Dunne strumming that funny all-silver guitar. As the slide passed over the strings, the instrument seemed almost to cry. Dunne said it was a Civil War song called “The Vacant Chair.”
The fronts of tropical trees brushed the sky. Seabirds wheeled and squawked, protested the fiery invasion of their refuge. No structures remained on the island, just the concrete outlines of their foundations. Paved roads led to nowhere.
Parson had begun this flight with fifty-seven crew and passengers. Only forty, including himself, survived. What could he have done differently? How many of the dead might still be alive if he’d commanded better?
The same questions had dogged him four years ago, had dogged him ever since. In war, people lived and died by decisions to turn right or left, to speed up or slow down, to pull the trigger now or to wait.
Parson thought of the friends who had died around him in Afghanistan. He doubted he could ever form bonds like that again. That part of him had sheared away, left behind in the snows of the Hindu Kush. Nothing mattered but the people you loved, and they could be taken so quickly.
He still had bad dreams about having to leave his crewmates behind in their wrecked C-130. Those images even came to him, unbidden, when he was awake: Jordan with a snapped neck. Luke talking to him one moment, shot through the throat the next. Lieutenant Colonel Fisher immobilized with two broken legs, waiting to be overrun.
And then he’d found Nunez with his head sawed off. The aftermath of that medieval execution—the putrefying blood, the decapitated corpse, the stench of death—seemed to decompose Parson’s very sanity. The memory moldered inside him, colored everything else in his mind. The scene replayed itself over and over when he saw Nunez’s closed casket at a Catholic church in East Los Angeles. After the funeral, Nunez’s sister had held on to him and would not let him go. To his surprise, the family held no resentment that he had survived when Nunez had not. To his relief, they’d asked no questions.
Fisher’s family wanted to know everything. At the grave site in the Gettysburg National Cemetery, an EC-130 from the Pennsylvania Air National Guard had flown over in tribute. Then Parson had explained how Fisher had ordered him and Gold to take to the mountains with the prisoner they’d been transporting.
Parson had missed Luke’s service. But later, at the cemetery by a cotton field in Mississippi, Luke’s father gave Parson his old Air Medal from the Vietnam War. And after Jordan was laid to rest in Iowa, the local VFW held a memorial. The VFW post commander offered Parson a salute.
He’d worried about how the families might receive him, whether they’d blame him for leaving the rest of the crew. But they seemed to understand the importance of the mission. He supposed they had to believe in the mission.
This time, he didn’t know most of the dead, but somebody knew them. Those dreaded knocks on doors would begin soon. The fire’s black smoke mocked him as it rose from the cremating flames. It seemed to signal the futility of his efforts and carry it across the Pacific and around the world.
He watched Gold talking to one of the Afghans, moving among the wounded. At least she was still here. People could still learn things from her, just like he had. Maybe that was worth something.
If she went on with her work, that might bring a little salve to his wounds. Through his years of military service, Parson knew the value of joint effort. When you did your best to help the team, you became part of something more important than anything you could manage by yourself. Perhaps his biggest contribution, the reason for all his skill and training, was to keep her alive to make her contribution.
The breeze freshened, brought with it a hint of salt. Some part of Parson’s mind never quit analyzing the wind and sky, and he noted that the zephyrs bent the smoke and shifted it about twenty degrees. Not a big change, perhaps the result of frontal movement two hundred miles out. The odor of blazing jet fuel remained, though not as noxious as before. The flames had already consumed most of the gas, and now they had to content themselves with oil, tires, metals. It might take days, but eventually the fire would burn itself out.
GOLD COULD SEE COLMAN
and the aeromeds had things under control, the wounded calm and still. She assured Baitullah and the other patients that an aircraft was on the way. Then there was little left to do but wait. She sat beside Parson in the sand, but she did not look at him. Her eyes were dry now. Gold picked up an amber cowrie shell, smooth and perfect like petrified sap. She wondered about the life that had once inhabited it.
and the aeromeds had things under control, the wounded calm and still. She assured Baitullah and the other patients that an aircraft was on the way. Then there was little left to do but wait. She sat beside Parson in the sand, but she did not look at him. Her eyes were dry now. Gold picked up an amber cowrie shell, smooth and perfect like petrified sap. She wondered about the life that had once inhabited it.
Then she considered some alternate future, one that included Mahsoud. She imagined him an older man, standing on his prosthesis in a lecture hall, expounding on some point of literature.
The tears returned silently. Parson sat up, winced with the pain it caused him. He put his hand on her shoulder.
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” Gold said.
Parson didn’t speak for a while. A tern landed in the flat sand left by the tide. It regarded them with apparent curiosity, then flapped across the atoll toward a lagoon.
“What do you think Mahsoud would want?” he said finally.
“I don’t know.” Gold looked at the cowrie. The sun hit it at an angle that illuminated it like a nugget of opal.
“I think you do.”
Gold didn’t feel like hearing that now, but she liked it that Parson cared. If Mahsoud mattered to him, then he must have learned something since the days when all he wanted was payback for his dead crewmates.
“We have a long way to go to get to the kind of world Mahsoud would have needed,” Gold said.
“There are others like him,” Parson said. “You’ll find them. Or they’ll find you.”
Gold looked out at the ocean. On the horizon, a line of distant clouds took the shape of a snow-covered mountain range. A dot appeared in the sky, just above a line of palms. At first it seemed not to move. After a few minutes, it took the shape of an airplane. It expanded until Gold could make out its wings and hear its engines.
“That’s the C-17 out of Hickam,” Parson said.
Gold knew it would take her to a place of rest, but she despised the thought of getting back on an aircraft. The jet overflew the island, banked into a turn. A loadmaster ran up the beach to Parson, carrying a handheld radio. “They want to talk to you, sir,” the loadmaster said.
“Where’d you get that PRC-90?” Parson asked.
“I grabbed a survival vest on the way out.”
“Good job.” Parson took the radio, pressed a switch on the side, and said, “Reach Two-Zero, Air Evac Eight-Four Alpha.”
“Air Evac Eight-Four Alpha, Reach Two-Zero,” the C-17 pilot called. “Good to hear you got out of that thing.”
“Some of us did,” Parson said. “Please tell me you have morphine on board.”
“I’m sure we do,” came the answer. “We also got a flight surgeon who’s going to run a bunch of tests and have you guys starting popping Cipro.”
“Copy that,” Parson said. “Hey, don’t fly through the smoke.”
“We won’t, Air Evac. Where are you?”
“On the beach, about five hundred yards upwind of the fire. Lieutenant Colman will be in charge down here.”
“See you when we get on the ground.”
Gold watched the C-17 make its approach. For a moment she could imagine it came from a netherworld, that nothing else existed but this crust of coral and sand and the infinite Pacific that surrounded it. The reverie lasted only a second or two; Gold had experienced too much reality to indulge in fantasy. That jet didn’t come from the world Mahsoud would have needed. It came from the one that failed him.
“Sophia,” Parson said. “Sit beside me on the ride to Hickam, will you?”
“All right.”
She looked at Parson, the bags under his eyes, the scratches on his face, the bloodstains and scorches on his flight suit. Back then in Afghanistan, she had helped him keep focused on the mission. Now he seemed intent on returning the favor.
She wanted to say more, but the C-17’s whistling howl drowned out conversation. Its wheels barked onto the pavement, left puffs of gray smoke. The aircraft shimmered in heat waves rising from the asphalt as it rolled to the far end of the runway. The engine noise hushed with the distance. The jet came to a full stop, then began a slow, ponderous turn. Aeromeds and loadmasters on the beach started standing, collecting gear, talking to patients.
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