The Hunters (36 page)

The Frenchman pointed to what looked like a long scratch in the dirt, maybe five miles out. Just as Parson spotted the airstrip, Gold appeared in the cockpit entrance and put a hand on his shoulder. Parson looked up at her and pulled his headset's boom mike away from his lips, so he could talk to her off interphone. Something about the light in her eyes told him what he most wanted to know: Geedi would make it.

“How's everybody doing back there?” he asked.

“As well as can be expected,” Gold said. She raised her voice over the wind blast through the bullet holes. “We have the bleeding under control. Geedi's conscious, but he's in a lot of pain.”

“Shit, I hate to hear that. We'll get him to a hospital in Kenya.”

Gold pointed to the holes in the windscreen. “What happened here? Looks like our getaway was closer than I realized.”

“You're damn right it was,” Parson said. “There would have been a lot more holes than that, and a lot of holes in Frenchie and me, too, if Ongondo hadn't shown up.”

“You saw Lieutenant Colonel Ongondo?” Gold asked.

“Only for a second. Couple of assholes opened up on us, and
WHAM
, Ongondo and his boys cut 'em down. Cleared a path for us.”

Gold's eyes brimmed. A slight jolt of turbulence dislodged a droplet and sent it sliding down her cheek. “You know,” she said, “Hussein cleared a path for us, too. If not for him, the terrorists would have finished off Geedi and maybe me, too.”

“I heard,” Parson said.

“Yes, and can you guess what he said to Geedi just now?”

Parson shook his head, raised his eyebrows.

“He said ‘peace be upon you,'” Gold said. “That's not just ‘have a nice day.' To a Muslim, that means something.”

Parson looked out at the coastline, white breakers stretching to the horizon. “Frenchie,” he said, “Can you take the plane for a minute?”

“Oui,”
Chartier said. “My aircraft.” Chartier placed his hands on the right yoke.

Parson reached down to his left boot and unfastened the sheath for his boot knife. Passed the sheathed blade to Gold.

“Hussein was admiring my knife the other day,” Parson said. “Give it to him.”

“Michael?” Gold said. “Didn't your dad give you this?”

“Yeah,” Parson said, “he did, when I enrolled in ROTC. He said it was to mark the day when I committed to help fight the good fight. Tell Hussein he's getting it now, for the same reason.”

If Hussein kept Sophia alive, Parson considered, he deserves a hell of a lot more than a fancy knife. I could have just lost her. What if she'd been—?

The thought was more than Parson could handle right now, so he pulled his boom mike back into place and turned his attention to the instruments. Gold wiped her eyes, squeezed his shoulder, then disappeared into the cargo compartment.

“I got the airplane, Frenchie,” Parson said. “Let's get this pig on the ground. Before Landing checklist.”

Chartier picked up the checklist. He moved the cowl flaps into the trail position and placed his hand on the gear lever, waiting for Parson's call to lower the wheels. Parson hooked his fingers over the stubs of the throttles, and he eased the power back to start a gentle descent.

Carolyn Stewart appeared in the cockpit entrance where Gold had stood. She aimed her video camera out the windscreen. Parson decided to let her shoot all the way to touchdown; he'd just warn her to hold on tight with one hand. Not exactly by the book, but she'd get a good closing scene for her documentary.

“When I get this thing in the theaters,” Stewart said, “I'll invite you guys to the premiere.”

For just a moment, Parson imagined himself on the red carpet in his dress uniform with Gold on his arm, wearing that blue gown he liked. Then he scanned his panel again. The vertical speed indicator still worked, and it showed a descent of five hundred feet per minute through nice smooth air. The wind rushing through the holes in the glass ruffled Parson's sleeve and felt good on his face. As he set up his approach, he wondered about the future of his young Somali passenger. He counted it a minor miracle that the boy had lived long enough to get a second chance.

Cats and paratroopers had nine lives, Parson had always believed. Maybe the same held true for Hussein. How many of his nine lives had Hussein already used up? For that matter, how many lives had he taken? And how many lives had he just saved? Geedi's, certainly. Probably Gold's. Maybe everybody's. Parson did not long ponder Hussein's sins and good deeds. For whatever reason, a higher command had decided to give the boy a second chance.

I just provided the airlift support, Parson thought.

In the late '90s, some of my squadron mates approached me with a civilian job opportunity. A charitable group wanted qualified C-130 flight crews. The organization planned to use donations to buy a small fleet of C-130 cargo planes and fly relief missions all over the world.

The group liked my résumé enough to ask me to come in for an interview . . . and the project never went beyond that stage. Perhaps the organization could not raise enough money to buy an airplane, or maybe there were other complications. For one reason or another, the good intentions never got off the ground, literally or figuratively.

But I've always thought:
That was a really cool idea. What could have made it work?

What if they'd settled for a less expensive, less sophisticated airplane? What if they'd recruited unpaid volunteers to fly part-time? Could they have pulled it off with a rattletrap old DC-3?

In
The Hunters
, I send Parson and crew on that flight of imagination, bringing them in for a landing in Somalia. Their fates become intertwined with that of Hussein, a teenage al-Shabaab gunman who comes to face a split-second decision that will set the course for the rest of his life.

The reader has every right to ask: How likely a story is Hussein's?

Certainly, Hussein's decision would not be common for someone in his circumstances; once people become radicalized, it's hard to bring them back. But though Hussein is burdened by poverty, illiteracy, and the loss of his parents, he's blessed with natural intelligence. He thinks for himself.

Occasionally, news reports highlight the journey of a defector from a terrorist group such as ISIS. A common pattern often emerges: A young person seeks escape from bad circumstances and winds up with something even worse. But unlike most of his comrades in terror, he has the sense to question the group's propaganda, and finds himself repelled by pointless brutality.

In Hussein's case, an injury forces him to sit, listen, and observe instead of striking out. What he learns gives his intellect something to work with; he realizes he doesn't know what he doesn't know. He watches a crew of current and former military personnel work in a mutually supportive way, and his mind opens enough to see new possibilities for himself.

Parson's memories of military missions in Somalia are informed by real-world events. My own missions have often taken me to Djibouti, next door to Somalia in the Horn of Africa, and Djibouti provides the setting for some early scenes in
The Hunters
.

Two of those Djibouti missions stand out in my memory.

One day in 2003, my crewmates and I delivered cargo to the air base in Djibouti, then we departed for a return leg to our temporary home base in the Middle East. We lifted off in our C-130, headed out over the Gulf of Aden, and brought up the landing gear. At that moment, the biggest damned seagull in the world appeared in the windscreen.

I pointed and uttered one syllable: “Bird!”

The copilot ducked.

I don't know the seagull's airspeed, but ours was about one hundred and fifty knots. The gull smacked the glass with such force that it rattled the cockpit. The bird splattered all over the cockpit windows. Fortunately for us, the unfortunate gull hit a strong place on the windscreen near a metal post where two sections of glass came together. Somehow the windscreen remained intact, though smeared with blood and viscera.

Normally, when you hit a bird, you land immediately and inspect for damage. However, intel and tactics briefers had warned us of a terrorist threat in the area. Returning to Djibouti would have given the bad guys another chance to take a shot at us, so we flew on to home base. By the time we reached base, the remains of that bird had dried and frozen all over the glass. As we parked the aircraft, we saw the crew chief staring at the mess, arms folded, shaking his head as if to ask:
What have you idiots done to my airplane?
He and his team would be the ones to clean and inspect the plane before it could fly again.

On another trip to Djibouti, we found ourselves in a bit of a scramble. We needed to offload cargo and refuel quickly, then clear the limited ramp space for other aircraft.

Standard refuel procedures called for the installation of a locking pin to keep the nose gear from collapsing on the ground. Over the years, many a C-130 flight engineer had forgotten to remove the pin after refueling—which meant that when the C-130 got airborne, the nose gear wouldn't retract. When that happened, the crew had no choice but to return for landing, so the embarrassed engineer could remove the pin.

To guard against that mistake, I made a habit of placing the pin in a slot on the back of the copilot's seat. I would then hang my helmet bag on the pin. If I saw my helmet bag sitting on the floor instead of hanging from the back of the copilot's seat, I knew I had not removed the nose pin.

You really didn't want to forget the nose pin in Djibouti and have to turn back and land, for the same reason we didn't want to come back after the bird strike: unpleasant characters with AKs and shoulder-launched missiles.

However, on this busy day at Camp Lemonnier, with C-130s zooming in and out, helicopters clattering overhead, and sweat soaking my flight suit, I did something I had never done in thousands of hours of flying: As I strapped in, I failed to glance at the back of the copilot's seat to confirm that my helmet bag was hanging on the nose pin.

We began running the engine start checklist. Purely as a courtesy, not required by any regulation, my good friend Roland Shambaugh called on interphone: “Engineer, loadmaster. You got the nose pin?”

“Got it, load, but thanks—” I looked to my right. My helmet bag was on the floor.

“Uh, I mean thanks so much for asking, Shammy,” I continued. “Ah, can you bring me that damned pin?”

“No problem, Tommy.”

Sharp crew members look after one another, and that's what Hussein observes as he watches Parson, Gold, Chartier, and Geedi interact. He sees another way of living and working. In the final battle scene, he makes a split-second decision that sends his life in a new direction.

Of course, very few young terrorist recruits have the insight, courage, and opportunity to make such a choice. But I'd like to think Hussein represents the spark of good within humanity that allows for hope in a bloody and violent world.

My wife, Kristen, loves to tell this story:

For many years, as I wrote short stories and worked to improve my craft, she'd read the manuscripts and make suggestions—to no avail. “You need to rewrite this scene so I can see it better,” she might say. Or, “That dialogue doesn't work; this isn't how that character would talk.”

I usually blew off her critique. I was the professional journalist and writer; I'd spent a decade with the Associated Press. She had a background in economics and math: What did
she
know about writing?

But Kristen had read books all her life. By osmosis, she had become a good editor. And when I began to write a nonfiction book about my Air National Guard unit, I knew I needed her critical eye. Because I was so close to the subject matter, I couldn't always judge what needed more explanation. Didn't everybody know that to fly an ILS you followed the CDI down to DH and looked for the MALSR?

While completing that book,
The Speed of Heat
, I accepted nearly all of Kristen's edits. The book got published to great reviews, so I also followed her suggestions when writing my first novel,
The Mullah's Storm
. Then came the day when my terrific literary agent, Michael Carlisle, called to say Putnam editor-in-chief Neil Nyren wanted to publish
The Mullah's Storm
.

Kristen's first reaction: “See what happens when you listen to me?”

I like that story because it illustrates how I couldn't do this by myself. This novel comes to you thanks to lots of support from Kristen, Michael, Neil, and many other friends and colleagues. One of my old college professors, Richard Elam, still uses his red pen on my manuscripts. A former commander, retired Brigadier General Wayne “Speedy” Lloyd, provides valuable advice on technical matters. Another squadron mate, retired Lieutenant Colonel Joe Myers, has been a longtime literary confidant.

The commander of my American Legion post, Navy veteran Ken Dalecki, turned a practiced eye to this novel. Ken has been a writer and editor for
The Kiplinger Washington Editors
and
Congressional Quarterly
, among other publishers. Novelist and editor Barbara Esstman has served as a great coach and adviser ever since I took one of her writing workshops years ago, and she critiqued this book as well.

Fellow Tar Heels Jodie Tighe and Liz Lee—along with Liz's French tutor, Agathe Dupré—kept me straight on French expressions as I wrote the dialogue for Captain Chartier.
Merci beaucoup
to Jodie, Liz, and Agathe. Millie Hast, a thriller writer in her own right, read an early draft and offered helpful suggestions. Bobby Siegfried provided help with proofreading. Author and professor John Casey helped me launch this new career when we met at the Sewanee Writers' Conference back in 2008.

My friends at Tony Scotti's Vehicle Dynamics Institute provide valuable resources when it comes to research. Their courses on protective/evasive driving and other security topics teach what counts when the rubber meets the road—literally.

Ultimately, the fine folks at Putnam and Berkley make it all possible. It's always a pleasure to work with Neil Nyren, as well as Putnam president Ivan Held and Berkley executive editor Thomas Colgan. I also owe a word of thanks to Alexis Welby, Michael Barson, Ashley Hewlett, Sara Minnich, Kate Stark, Chris Nelson, Alexis Sattler, and everyone at Penguin Random House.