The Renegades (9 page)

Reyes was still talking on the radio. He reached for his transmit switch again and said, “Fever Eight-Niner, we got a mass casualty event. Advise when you’re ready to copy the nine-line.”

From a pouch in his vest, Reyes withdrew a GPS receiver. He thumbed its controls with one hand and read off the coordinates of the refugee camp. Then Reyes transmitted the other items required in a 9-line medevac request, though Parson knew the PJ guessed at some of it. The number of patients: still undetermined. Dozens at least. Special equipment: ventilators, oxygen, everything. Security of pickup site: Well, we’re not under fire at the moment.

After Reyes relayed all the medevac information, he said, “Roger that, Fever. Tell ’em I got at least two sucking chest wounds, probably a lot more than that. We copy you’re inbound with jumpers.” The PJ wrapped bandaging on his first patient, then moved to the man Gold was helping. Gold took her hands off the man’s wound, and they came up bloody.

She stood up and said a few words in Pashto. Uninjured refugees crowded around her, gestured with their arms, shouted. A woman in a blue burka wailed and pointed until she collapsed at Gold’s feet.

Rashid entered the camp at a jog. He was by himself, and Parson felt glad Rashid had told the rest of his crew to guard the helicopter. Rashid had removed his flight helmet, but he still wore his body armor, and he carried two first-aid kits from the aircraft. Both of the green canvas pouches bore a red cross.

“What to do?” he asked.

“Just find—” Parson said, but Gold interrupted him with a stream of Pashto. Rashid joined her. Both of them talked with the refugees as Rashid opened one of the first-aid kits.

Parson took the other kit from Rashid. As he unzipped it and unwrapped a dressing, he asked, “What are they saying?”

“Men came in two pickup trucks,” Gold said. “They shot all the Westerners, and they captured some of the boys. At least four, I think.”

Parson had wondered why no camp staff appeared. But it hardly surprised him that they’d been among the first killed.

Gold and Rashid conversed in Pashto again. Then Gold said, “They demanded to know the time. When a man told them, they eviscerated him with a sword. They killed everyone wearing a watch.”

“What?” Parson asked. Terrorists could always find excuses to murder, but he wondered what malign creed had produced this new twist.

“Not many Afghans need to know the exact time,” Gold said. “Insurgents assume anyone with a watch is working with the Americans or with the government.”

“Son of a bitch,” Parson said. He thought of his old man’s stories from Southeast Asia. The Khmer Rouge had killed anyone wearing glasses because intellectuals presented a threat. This shit just never ended.

7

F
lies buzzed around Gold’s face. The flies kept landing on her cheeks, tickling her skin with their legs, trying to drink the water in her eyes. She shook her head to scatter them. She couldn’t brush them away because she had both hands busy. With her left, she held a QuikClot pad on a woman’s forearm. A bayonet or machete had cut to the bone and slashed downward, peeling away a shank of flesh like a butcher carving a fillet.

The pad wasn’t big enough to stanch all the bleeding, so Gold kept her right thumb clamped around a pressure point on the inside of the woman’s upper arm. From Gold’s combat first-aid training, she knew she held the pressure point correctly, because below that point the pulse stopped. She just hoped she could keep the woman from bleeding to death until Reyes took over. Right now he worked twenty yards away, checking a man’s pulse at the wrist.

Parson and Rashid were busy with other patients, both officers now following instructions from the enlisted pararescueman. Gold watched Parson tape down a bandage on an old man’s foot. Then he moved to a woman lying motionless in the dirt. Two young girls clung to her, crying. Gold could not see what wounds the woman had suffered.

“Don’t waste your time on that one, sir,” Reyes said.

“But—”

Gold felt the same as Parson.
Please let that one be okay.

“I already checked her,” Reyes said. “Apneic and no heartbeat. She’s dead. Three entrance wounds.”

Amid the flies, Gold heard another buzzing in a lower register. The sound grew louder, and she recognized the turboprop groan of a C-130. She looked up and squinted, and she saw the Herk thousands of feet above her, inching into the sun. The brightness hurt even through her shaded glasses. She shut her eyes, but not soon enough. The glare left a yellow corona that remained visible even with her eyelids closed.

She looked at the ground and blinked. The hot spot still burned on her retinas, but now the circle was red. When it finally faded and she looked up again, the C-130 appeared on the other side of the sun as if it had flown through it.

The noise of engines and props dropped half an octave, and Gold knew the aircraft was slowing for the drop. She tried to discern the ramp coming open, but the C-130 flew too high for her to see that. After several seconds, the engine noise rose again.

She knew some PJs should have just exited the aircraft. Yet she saw no one falling through the sky. If you found a last-second problem with your rig, then of course you wouldn’t jump. But that was rare.

A few seconds later, she spotted them: three specks dropping toward the earth at terminal velocity. She’d seldom seen a HALO jump from this perspective. Watching from the ground, it became obvious why this was such an effective way to insert troops covertly. You could hardly see them even if you knew they were coming.

For a moment she wished she were with the jumpers. But parachuting was just transportation. She was doing her real job now, blood up to her wrists, comforting the wounded in their own language.

One by one, the jumpers’ main chutes fluttered, inflated. The pararescuemen used that new Special Operations Vector rig that was so maneuverable. Two of the PJs began steering toward the refugee camp, but the third appeared in trouble.

His chute took on the shape of a bow tie, and it began to spin.

A line-over. One of his suspension lines had wrapped itself over the canopy. The resulting bulges imparted a rotation to the parachute and left the jumper little control.

He spun down below his two teammates. Gold couldn’t gauge his rate of descent except to see it was somewhere beyond lethal. The refugees looked skyward and pointed. Even they knew something was wrong.

“Cut away,” Gold said under her breath. “Cut that thing.”

Now the PJ drew close enough that Gold could make out his flailing boots, his ruck, and the individual shroud lines. The offending line seemed to tighten its choke on the canopy, and the spin grew faster. The man moved his hand toward his harness, and he grasped the cutaway pillow. He yanked hard.

The misshapen canopy collapsed. It twisted around itself and fell away as the reserve parachute billowed.

The riggers had packed the reserve canopy well. The reserve snapped open like the crack of a whip, and the jumper pulled a steering toggle to make a smooth turn into the wind.

“Allah-hu akbar,”
whispered the woman whose arm Gold held. Gold hadn’t realized she’d been watching.

“Yes, He is,” Gold said.

“I did not wish to see more death today,” the woman said in Pashto.

“God willing, you will not,” Gold said. “Those are men of medicine.”

The pararescueman under the reserve canopy landed first, and the other two touched down a few seconds later. Once they were on the ground, Gold could not see them; the camp’s sandbag walls blocked her view. But a few minutes later they strode inside, rucksacks over their shoulders.

All three gathered around Reyes. As he briefed them, he pointed to Gold. One of the men came over to her and put down his medical ruck.

“Nice work,” he said. “We can probably save that arm.”

“You want me to let go now?” Gold asked.

“Hold the pressure point, but let go of the wound itself.”

Gold took her hand away from the pad, and the pararescueman wrapped fresh dressings over it. “Okay,” he said. “I got it now.” Gold released the woman’s upper arm and stood back to let the PJ do his job.

She took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her fingers. The effort left bright red blotches on the white cloth. She shuddered, then folded the handkerchief into a neat square and put it away.

“Was that you with the line-over?” she asked.

“Yeah, that was a little more excitement than I wanted.”

“Good save.”

“Thanks,” the PJ said. He inserted an IV needle into the woman’s good arm, then glanced up at the badges on Gold’s ACUs. “I bet you’ve had one or two malfunctions yourself.”

“One or two.” Gold switched languages and said to the woman, “I will leave you with this medical man. He thinks you will not lose your arm.”

“Peace be upon both of you,” the woman said.

With the injured now in the hands of four pararescuemen, Gold decided to see what she could learn. She wanted to talk to more of the people in the camp, but first she needed to get an idea of the damage. In front of a row of tents, she found the man the refugees had spoken of—the one gutted for wearing a watch.

The witnesses had not exaggerated. The man’s blue entrails coiled about his waist and legs, covered with flies. He lay on his back, staring with dead eyes into the sky. To Gold, his expression seemed to ask whether any ultimate authority had seen what had happened to him. His blood dampened the ground around him as if someone had poured oil to settle the dust, and the blood turned the soil the color of copper. His left hand had been hacked off at the wrist. The hand rested in the dirt beside him, palm up, callused by whatever had been his work.

She turned away, tasted bile at the back of her throat. A deep breath helped fight her retching reflex. She took hold of a tent rope with both hands and tried to steady herself.

What manner of human being could do this to another? Gold was starting to believe a certain amount of evil always existed in the world. Like matter, it could not be destroyed. Only moved around and changed in form.

And those young boys, Fatima’s brother, were in the hands of the men who did this. What would those kids turn into?

Gold kneeled and closed her eyes. Asked a higher command for strength and composure. Skill and judgment.
If there’s a right thing to do here, please help me find it.

For a moment, she concentrated on sounds. That infernal buzzing of flies. In the distance, the chirps of a starling. The crunch of footsteps.

She felt a hand on her shoulder. Before she opened her eyes, she knew it was Parson.

“These sights don’t get any easier, do they?” he asked.

“No, they don’t. Will you please help me up?”

Her joints still felt stiff from sitting in an awkward position while holding on to that wounded woman’s artery. Parson took her hand and pulled her to her feet. Through his flight glove, she felt the grip of his fingers and remembered that frostbite had shortened some of them. He had a way of showing up at her lowest moments, like during her capture in that winter storm. Parson had called on all his survival training and outdoor experience to keep the two of them from freezing to death. Now it wasn’t the elements she faced, but the cold, thin edge of despair.

“Intel will need all we can find out,” Parson said.

“I know,” Gold said. “We have work to do.” She took her writing pad and one of the pens from her MOLLE gear, clicked the ballpoint pen.

“I guess we better find the people who ran this place,” Parson said.

“The refugees say they’re all dead.”

And they were. Gold and Parson found three American men and two women lying in a row, shot execution-style, close range. Each had taken a bullet to the head. On the ground just a few feet away, five cartridge casings gleamed in the dust.

The victims still wore their ID cards on lanyards around their necks. Gold flipped up one man’s card so she could read it. He’d been a USAID employee, part of a Disaster Assistance Response Team.

All of them looked to be in their late twenties. Gold thought she knew the type. During a six-month TDY tour at the Pentagon, she’d seen them every day on the Metro. Fresh out of Ivy League graduate schools, idealistic enough to choose government over Wall Street, hoping to change the world. Not a bad sort by any means, just naive. Riding to work carrying leather briefcases and bottles of spring water, texting with iPhones, talking on Bluetooth. Looking at her uniform with the proper dose of respect, but way too much pity. And never expecting to meet an end like this.

—

P
arson had never seen Gold in such an intense conversation. She spoke to a group of women gathered around her, taking notes, gesturing with her pen.

Though Parson did not know Pashto, he usually had some idea of what Gold said just from the context and the expressions. Not this time. When she wasn’t making eye contact with the women, she seemed to gaze into distant hills, looking at something not visible to him. At every pause, he wanted to jump in and ask her what was happening. But he told himself that would be stupid; just let her do her job. Moments like this were why the Army had spent so much to teach her what she knew.

Rashid came over, and even he kept a polite distance from the discussion. If there was something those women had a hard time discussing with Gold, Parson figured, they sure as hell wouldn’t tell a man. Maybe they recounted sexual assaults, and Gold was trying to get the women to report it. Rashid reached into a leg pocket of his flight suit and took out a nearly empty pack of unfiltered Camels. The cellophane crinkled as he fished out a cigarette.

“Can you hear what they’re talking about?” Parson asked.

“Not all of people live . . .” Rashid struggled for the word. “Near,” he said. “Not all live near. Some flown in from other damage place. Some from Taliban village.”

“So?”

“Some women say other women know something. Know where bad men hide.”

Go on, girl, Parson thought. If she could find that out, it would be the best intel victory since the Navy SEALs dropped in on Osama bin Laden.

“Is she getting anywhere?”

“I cannot hear. She say, ‘Do you not want more for childs than to die?’” Rashid placed the Camel between his front teeth. In the breeze, he had to flick his lighter three times to get the cigarette burning.

“Sounds like a good approach to me.”

“Those women very afraid,” Rashid said. He exhaled blue smoke and removed a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. “They have need to be afraid.” He swept his arm across the camp, across the dead and wounded.

Rashid had a point. No wonder Gold needed to make such a hard sell. Parson decided to change the subject. “I think once the PJs get the worst patients ready to go, they’ll call some HH-60s in here for medevac,” he said.

“There are more than we carry on Mi-17,” Rashid agreed.

“How do you like those two new crew members?”

“Sergeant Sharif very good,” Rashid said. “Lieutenant Aamir not talk much.”

“How’s his flying?”

“I do not know yet. I fly all way here. I let him fly back to Mazar.”

Good idea, Parson thought. You couldn’t make a new guy a good copilot if the aircraft commander was a stick hog.

Parson monitored not just the individual talents of these Afghan fliers, but how they worked together. They came from different regions and tribes, which could be a big issue. To apply for enlistment, they needed two letters from village elders affirming their identity and their fitness for service. That certification meant Afghan crew members carried the honor of their families with them on every flight. They faced all the challenges of any student trying to earn wings—and they did it in a combat zone under constant terrorist threat. Parson wished he could buy every one of them a round of beers every day, but that high compliment shared among American aviators wasn’t the thing to do here. Culture and faith banned alcohol for Afghans, and General Order Number One forbade it for Americans.

The knot of women around Gold began to break up. Parson thought he recognized the blessings of parting, syllables he’d heard Sophia say before. After the last two women drifted away, Gold reviewed her notes, folded the writing pad closed. She zipped the pad and pen into her MOLLE rig, took off her helmet, retied her blond hair. As she replaced the helmet she looked at Parson in a way that suggested she wasn’t satisfied with what had just gone down.

“Sounded like you touched a nerve,” Parson said when she joined him.

“I don’t know,” Gold said.

“Rashid said it seemed like some of them might know where these bastards hang out.”

Gold adjusted her rifle sling across her shoulder as she looked over the camp. “It’s not that simple,” she said. “You know how it goes—somebody knows somebody who might know.”