The Renegades (5 page)

Parson turned off the APU and kept the radio alive with battery power. No sense tormenting the injured with that turbine screaming. And this way, the crew could hear better if those insurgent bastards tried to sneak up on them again.

The silence felt strange. Nothing but the whimpers of the patients and the grainy hum of UHF. In the quiet, Parson thought he heard distant thunder. Then he realized nothing could have come out of that clear sky but an air strike. Around the natural disaster, the war went on both near and far. Pain did not stop for pain.

3

G
old kept direct pressure on the imam’s wound like Reyes had told her. She held little hope for the man’s survival. Judging by the angle of entrance, the bullet might have ripped through his lungs. Pink foam flecked his lips. Reyes performed a chin lift to help the imam breathe. Then he moved on to the other wounded. Triage, Gold realized. He doesn’t think the imam will make it.

The old man’s eyes grew glassy. He stopped bleeding. In a few minutes, Reyes came back, put two fingers to the imam’s throat, shone a light into his pupils. “He’s gone,” Reyes said.

Gold ripped the soaked compress off the wound, slapped it onto the floor. Blood dripped from her fingertips. Some of it had seeped under her nails and formed burgundy stains as if she’d dug barehanded into red soil. She wiped her fingers on her ACU trousers.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I thought the old guy was home free when we got him out,” Reyes said.

There’s no such thing as home free, Gold thought. But why had the insurgents attacked now? Couldn’t they see this was a relief operation?

In her training, she’d studied not just language but religions and cultures. Her own faith and interests led her deeper into philosophy and theology. And as she looked down at the imam, she thought of an old Talmudic teaching:
To take one life is to kill the whole world.

Beside him lay two other patients who had died in the RPG explosion. One had no fresh wounds that Gold could see; he was just dead. The other had a metal fragment the size of an ax blade embedded in the flesh under his chin, and the blood had gushed out of him in such quantity that he appeared to have been dipped in red. She looked away, but it was no use. Some things, once seen, could never be unseen.

But she still had a mission to accomplish. The dead needed to be taken back to the village as soon as it was safe. Their families would want to bury them today, if possible. That burial might prove difficult; Gold could already feel night’s approach as shadows climbed the mountains. And until help arrived, Parson and the crew couldn’t leave the wounded.

Gold wondered what they might find in the village. The bad guys should have pressed the attack when they’d disabled the helicopter. They could have murdered all the crew and passengers. But they’d chosen not to, and there had to be a reason.

Up front, Parson stopped fiddling with the radio. He took off his headset, unplugged it, and placed it on the center console. Muttering curses, he climbed out of the pilot’s seat and stood over the flight engineer’s body. To get out during the firefight, Rashid had pushed the engineer off the jump seat. The engineer lay sprawled on his back with a single gunshot wound to the upper chest. The engineer’s helmet remained in place, its boom mike still positioned above lifeless lips. Parson unzipped his jacket and placed it over the dead flier’s face.

The wounded copilot looked on from a troop seat. He said in Pashto, “The lieutenant colonel is still like a hawk. He sees what must be done.” Gold nodded in agreement but said nothing.

“Let’s go keep Rashid company,” Parson said to Gold.

At that moment, she didn’t feel like facing someone else’s pain. But it was part of her job. She picked up her rifle and followed Parson outside. The copilot came with them and sat in the grass beside Burlingame. The wounded PJ was sitting up, wrapping a new bandage around his leg. His bleeding seemed to be under control, so Gold figured the bullet must have missed his femoral artery. Rashid stood and stared into the hills, his helmet in his left hand and his pistol in his right.

“I am very sorry about your crewman,” Gold said to Rashid in Pashto.

“When he first enlisted he could barely read,” Rashid said. “He came to know this machine the way a mullah knows the Quran.”

“Perhaps he has found paradise,” Gold said.

“God willing. But we need him here.”

Gold wanted to say something by way of consolation. Before she found the words, a rhythmic pulsing rose in the distance, like the beat of a helicopter, but with a slightly higher frequency. The thrumming grew louder.

“What is that?” Rashid asked in English.

“Our Osprey,” Parson said. “The jarheads are here.”

“Must be a TRAP team,” Burlingame said.

“They are trapped?” Rashid said.

“No,” Parson answered. “Tactical recovery of aircraft and personnel.”

“Almost as good as pararescue,” Burlingame said. He shifted his weight onto one hip, shut his eyes for a moment.

When the Osprey appeared just above a ridgeline, its twin rotors made Gold think of the wings of a dragonfly skimming a millpond back home in Vermont. The aircraft began descending toward the field. Two helicopter gunships accompanied it: wasps guarding the dragonfly. Gold eventually recognized them as Cobra attack choppers.

The gunships remained aloft as the Osprey landed. They circled the village and the field in a show of force, but they did not fire. Dust and blades of dry grass swirled through the air as the Osprey settled to the ground. On its open ramp, a crew chief manned a machine gun mounted on a pintle. A belt of ammunition fed into the weapon from one side, and a black hose for catching empty brass extended from the other.

Gold squinted and turned her head from the blast of wind. When the gale subsided, she looked up to see Marines pouring off the Osprey’s ramp. She knew they’d make no assumptions about who was friendly, so she pointed her rifle away from them and kept her hand off the trigger.

The TRAP team set up a perimeter: Riflemen dropped to the ground in a semicircle around the Mi-17, weapons aimed out at anything that might approach it. A few of the Marines trotted over to the helicopter.

“What do you have, sir?” a gunnery sergeant asked Parson. The gunny was the biggest human being Gold had ever seen. A black man well over six feet, maybe just shy of three hundred pounds, and none of it fat. Fingers the size of .50 cal cartridges. Arms like the cypress roots in the lakes near Fort Bragg. Accent of the Deep South. His name was Blount.

“Four dead Afghan nationals inside the Mi-17,” Parson said. “That American PJ over there has a gunshot wound to the leg. The Afghan flier sitting next to him is also hurt. More wounded in the aircraft.”

“Aye, sir,” Blount said.

“There’s something else,” Gold said. She explained about the gunfire and screams heard from down in the village.

“We’ll evac the wounded, and we’ll leave some Marines to do a recon down there,” Blount said.

“This is my interpreter, Sergeant Major Gold,” Parson said. “We’ll go into the town with you. I tried to get some help in here even before we got lit up, but nobody was available.”

“There’s problems all over the place with the aftershocks,” Blount said. “We were headed somewhere north of Mazar, but we got diverted when y’all called in under fire.”

One of the TRAP members examined Burlingame’s leg wound. The medic wore the chevrons of a Navy petty officer—a hospital corpsman. His sleeves were rolled up in the Marine Corps style, and as he treated Burlingame, Gold saw a blue tattoo on the inside of his forearm: a column of names, all of them sergeants and lance corporals. Fallen comrades, Gold supposed. Nine of them.

The corpsman rolled Burlingame onto a litter, and Gold helped carry him into the Osprey. As she maneuvered her end of the litter up the steel ramp, she noticed the inside of the aircraft still smelled like a new car. Strange, modern war.

Gold and the corpsman, along with Parson and Reyes, loaded the wounded Afghans aboard the Marine aircraft one by one. Rashid’s copilot walked on board, assisted by the crew chief.

“We will fly together again,” Rashid told the two Afghan fliers.

“Inshallah,”
the copilot said.

With all the patients transferred to the Osprey, Parson went forward into the cockpit and conferred with the pilots. Gold couldn’t follow the conversation, but the pilots also seemed to be talking on the radio. Then they’d speak to Parson again. He shrugged, then nodded. Finally he gave a thumbs-up.

When he returned through the back of the Osprey, he said, “If you have anything left in the helicopter, go ahead and get it now.”

“Why?” Gold asked.

“The Cobras are going to blow it.”

Gold understood. She’d heard from air cav and medevac soldiers about helicopters disabled by enemy fire. If you couldn’t fix it quickly and fly it out, you destroyed it. That way the enemy wouldn’t get any use out of the parts or intel out of the electronics.

Parson retrieved his headset and helmet bag from the chopper, and Gold picked up her rucksack. Reyes gathered the medical gear he’d scattered while working on the wounded. Rashid never spoke as they moved the dead well away from his aircraft, and he never entered the helicopter. Parson picked up Rashid’s checklist binder and flight bag. When they were finished, nothing lay on the floor of the Mi-17 but smears of blood.

“The snake drivers want us way down the hill,” Parson said. “That’ll keep us away from any debris that goes flying.”

Blount and four other Marines led the way out of the field, toward the village. Gold, Parson, Rashid, and Reyes followed. Gold looked back over her shoulder to see the Osprey’s crew chief jog over to the Mi-17. Still wearing his flight helmet, cord dangling from his shoulder, the Marine flier climbed aboard and satisfied himself that no one remained inside. Then he ran back to his own aircraft.

A few moments later, the Osprey’s rotors picked up speed. Gold felt the staccato beat vibrate through her rib cage as the MV-22 levitated into the air like a helicopter. The Osprey rocked slightly, rotated into the wind, and accelerated. As the aircraft climbed and gathered speed, its nacelles tilted forward until the rotors positioned themselves like giant propellers. Now the tilt-rotor flew as a fixed-wing airplane. It grew smaller and smaller until absorbed by the cumulus that cloaked the horizon to the north.

The thick grass made for difficult walking even downhill. Blount bulldozed through it more easily than the rest; the rustling blades came up above Gold’s knees but only to Blount’s calves. The Marine wore a combat utility uniform in MARPAT digital camo. He carried a Squad Advanced Marksman Rifle, a scoped M16 larger than Gold’s M4 carbine.

Parson followed close behind the Marines. From the set of his jaw, Gold could see he was angry—at the loss of Rashid’s flight engineer, at the destruction of an aircraft. She knew how deeply he felt the loss of his own crew years ago, and she could imagine what must be going through his mind.

Reyes seemed to take it all in stride. He scanned to the left and right, held his index finger across the trigger guard of his rifle, took long steps through the grass. Gold didn’t know him, and she’d had little contact with Air Force pararescuemen; she’d met them only on a few HALO training jumps. But she knew PJs were taught to expect anything and assume nothing when they parachuted or rappelled to reach a downed pilot or wounded soldier. A patch Velcroed under the flag on his left sleeve displayed his blood type:
AB POS
.

Rashid held his pistol and kept looking down at the village. Gold thought that was a good thing. She knew he was upset about his crewmates, but at least he seemed to have his mind on what was happening now.

“This is probably far enough,” Parson said eventually. The carcass of the Mi-17 was at least a half mile away, silhouetted by the rising terrain behind it. He stopped, turned to look at the stricken helicopter.

Gold supposed Parson wanted to see the fireworks; she felt too heartsick to care. The run of events, the big picture, haunted her now. Things would get worse before they got worse.

A spray of sparrows settled into a birch by a low stone wall at the edge of town. One of the Cobras orbited overhead while the other rolled onto its firing run. It descended at a steep angle, then lined up on its target. Everything about the gunship—its hard edges, stingerlike shape, smudged trail of exhaust—seemed to threaten. Gold thought that even someone from centuries past could look on that thing and know it was a weapon.

Smoke boiled from underneath the Cobra. A dot of light—Gold could make out no more than that—shot from within the smoke. It corkscrewed for an instant and then straightened itself on a direct path to the Mi-17.

When the projectile struck, the helicopter swelled with fire. The entire mass lifted off the ground. Then, in apparent slow motion, its components disassociated from one another. The main rotor spun free like a flaming pinwheel. The tail boom danced end over end through flickering billows. Sparks arced away like embers kicked from a banked campfire, bounced as they fell back to the ground. A half beat later came the noise. Not a blast, more like a hard crump from the very inside of Gold’s head. The sparrows exploded from the birch.

“What in God’s name?” Rashid asked in English.

“A TOW missile,” Parson said.

Not in God’s name, Gold thought. All these things around us man has brought on himself, claims for God notwithstanding.

The helicopter and the grass around it burned. The flames and towering smoke made Gold think of old-time New England farmers firing their fields. But the smell wasn’t the same. Too much odor of oil, fuel, and high explosives.

—

W
hat kind of stance to take going into the village—that was Parson’s next decision. Ground tactics weren’t his field, but he was the highest-ranking officer present. And this wasn’t the first time circumstances had forced him to take command without the preparation he’d have liked.

He could go in soft: Knock on doors and let Gold make introductions. Or go in hard: Let the Marines kick down doors and, if they found nothing threatening, let Gold smooth it over.

Parson chose the latter. They’d taken fire. If some bad guys remained behind to set a trap, no sense making it easy for them to spring it. Later, somebody might say he should have been nicer. But Parson knew an old joke about that kind of thing:
How many stateside second-guessers in air-conditioned offices does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Two: One to screw in the bulb and one to kiss my ass.

He explained his plan to his de facto team. “I don’t know what we’re going to find,” he said. “I’ve seen those sons of bitches massacre a whole village. But I don’t think I heard enough shooting for that to have happened here.”