Warriors (9781101621189) (4 page)

“Opium,” he said.

AS THE KYRGYZSTAN AIRLINES
Yak-40 descended toward Manas, Sophia Gold felt a little airsick. Rough air rocked the commuter jet, and in the tight confines of her seat, she could not find a comfortable position. A jolt of turbulence sloshed hot coffee out of her paper cup and onto her khaki trousers. The liquid dripped from her fingers and, lacking a napkin, she wiped her hand on her Barbour field jacket. Gold had not yet grown used to working in civilian clothes, and her attire still tended toward military.

She wasn't used to flying like this, either. She'd spent her professional life as a translator/interpreter with the U.S. Army, mostly with the 82nd Airborne Division. Gold would have felt more at home in the cargo compartment of a C-130 with a parachute strapped to her back. Or in an Afghan helicopter, on headset with the crew.

Two things had led her to leave the Army she loved: One, the United States was winding down its presence in Afghanistan; inevitably the Americans would withdraw altogether, and the Pentagon would need fewer Pashto speakers. If she wanted to continue working with the Afghan people—whom she'd also grown to love—she'd have to find another way. And two, on her final military mission, while working as an interpreter for Lieutenant Colonel Parson, she'd suffered a bullet wound that nearly killed her. Gold had healed well enough to continue to pass the Army physical. But after seeing more than her share of combat, she felt she could best continue to serve as a civilian. When she contacted the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UNHCR, they hired her over the phone without asking for a résumé. As a reservist, she kept a current military ID card.

The Yak touched down hard enough to send a stab of pain through her torso. Those pains still happened from time to time. The enemy bullet about a year ago had done a lot of tissue damage, and the soreness never completely left her. Gold had experienced other kinds of wounds as well. She'd suffered the night sweats and intrusive memories of post-traumatic stress disorder even before she was shot. Ironically, the PTSD symptoms eased after the nearly fatal bullet wound.

As the aircraft decelerated, it rolled past a blackened spot on the pavement. The crash site, Gold assumed.

Inside the passenger terminal, she found Parson waiting, along with a gray-haired man who looked older than Parson. Gold could not tell the man's rank; he wore a Bass Pro Shops baseball cap and a Vanderbilt University sweatshirt. Parson also wore civilian clothes—jeans and a wrinkled shooting shirt with a pad on the right shoulder. It was nearly six p.m. local time. Evidently, new base regs permitted civvies after duty hours.

Parson had aged little in the months since she'd last seen him. And his old limp seemed less pronounced, old scars on his arms and fingers less noticeable. Eyes still alert, but without that hint of hypervigilance. The years might have eroded his youth, but maybe they'd given something back in healing. Gold hoped so, anyway.

She embraced him. Parson held her tightly enough that it hurt her chest. She uttered a little inadvertent cry of discomfort. He let go.

“Sorry, Sophia,” he said. “Stupid of me.” She took a step back from him but held on to his arm long enough to let him know it was all right. “This is Colonel Webster,” Parson added.

“Terry,” the colonel said. He shook Gold's hand.

“Good to meet you, sir,” Gold said. “Thank you for your e-mails. How did you know people at the UN?”

“Let's talk about it over a beer,” Webster said.

“We'll take you to Pete's Place,” Parson added.

Whose place? Gold wondered, until she saw that the bar in the Manas rec center was named for Peter Ganci, the New York City fire chief who died on 9/11. A sign read
THIS BAR DEDICATED TO
COALITION MEMBERS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE WAR ON TERROR.

Gold and Webster sat in metal folding chairs at a wooden table. Parson went to the bar. She smiled when he brought her a glass of red wine; he hadn't even had to ask. He handed a Guinness to Webster and opened a Bud for himself.

She tried to gauge Parson's manner, as well as the colonel's. Gold had made a life of communicating, of reading people. Something worried these guys. The crash, of course, provided reason enough to feel down. To witness untimely deaths, she knew far too well, unhinged you a little, even if you didn't know the deceased. But Gold sensed Parson and the colonel had something else on their minds. She didn't know how to approach the topic, so she stayed on safe territory by asking Webster about his background.

“I'm playing hooky from my day job,” Webster said. “My law firm back in Knoxville does some international work. UN, ICC, that sort of thing.”

“Interstate Commerce Commission?” Parson asked.

“International Criminal Court,” Gold said.

“Oh.”

“So when Michael said he needed you,” Webster explained, “I called in some favors. But I told everybody not to lean on you.”

“They didn't,” Gold said. That was true. Her superiors had said only that she could go if she wanted. And of course she wanted to help Parson.

“Thanks again for coming,” Parson said. “I hoped this would amount to a little break for you, but it's getting more complicated.”

“How's that?” Gold asked.

“We found opium in the wreckage,” Webster said. He took a sip from his Guinness.

The news saddened Gold, but it did not surprise her. About ninety percent of the world's opium came from Afghanistan. And the Afghan military had a long way to go toward rooting out corruption.

“How were they hiding it?” Gold asked. “Or could you tell?”

“We could,” Parson said. He explained how the smugglers disguised the opium as packing material. Drug-sniffing dogs would have found it in an instant, but if the Afghans had brought dogs to this cargo at all, the animals would have been bomb-sniffing dogs. Somebody in the narcotics operation knew something about military air cargo.

Gold wondered if the crew's last words on the cockpit voice recorder would reveal any hints about the contraband. She doubted it, but she intended to translate anything she heard on that recording, no matter how trivial it might seem.

“When do you think we'll have the recording back?” Gold asked.

“We've shipped some evidence, including the CVR, back to the States,” Parson said. “They'll send us the audio file over the SIPRNet.”

Parson's reference to the classified computer net made Gold doubly glad she'd maintained her top secret clearance. She hadn't expected to need it with her new job, but both the government and civilian employers valued anyone with a TS, so you didn't let such a clearance expire if you could help it. Gold considered for a moment whether she and the two men should even be discussing this in the rec center if any part of the matter was classified. No one else was listening, and a Toby Keith tune blasted over the speakers. But just to be safe, she decided to steer the conversation to more routine aspects of the problem.

“So how do you piece together what happens in a crash?” Gold asked. She took a sip of the wine Parson had brought her. She'd expected cheap stuff, but the red tasted rich and smoky. Not what she thought she'd find in a prefab building with country music on the CD player.

“You try not to make any assumptions,” Parson said, “and you listen to what the evidence tells you.”

“Sounds like prosecuting a case,” Webster said.

“I saw the crash,” Parson said, “so that helps, and a wind shear event is pretty simple. But you still have to look at stuff like why they didn't go missed-approach early enough to make it.”

He's in his element, Gold thought. She admired competence, and though Parson certainly had his rough edges, he spoke the language of aviation as if he'd invented it himself. She'd watched him fly a crippled C-5 Galaxy while badly hurt and in terrible pain. Gold remembered how he'd marshaled the combined skills of his crew to save his passengers—some of them, at least. This time, however, Parson could not save anyone; he could only try to keep other crews from making the mistakes that had killed the three fliers.

“You look at all the links in the chain,” Webster said.

“Yeah,” Parson said. “When something bad happens, it's almost never because of just one thing. You get a chain of errors and missed opportunities and bad attitudes, and they link up to cause a damned disaster like we just had out there.” Parson gestured toward the runway with his beer hand, sloshing a little over his fingers. “Shit,” he said.

“We teach aviators to look for accident chains as they form,” Webster said. “If you remove one link, then there's no disaster.”

“How do you do that?” Gold asked.

“You change what's happening,” Webster said.

“Like if you just heard the tower give a wind shear warning,” Parson said, “and you see you're coming down at about eight thousand feet per minute, you don't just sit on your ass and ride it in. You push up the throttles and go the fuck around.”

Gold could feel Parson's anger over the accident. He had not trained this crew himself, but he'd helped train many other Afghan fliers, and he'd put a lot of sweat and even some blood into helping them create a professional air force. To see an Afghan crew die in what he appeared to regard as a preventable crash—while smuggling drugs, no less—must come as an awful disappointment.

She couldn't do much for Parson until the CVR recording came back, so she decided to change the subject. Maybe get everyone's mind off the destruction that had happened only steps away.

“Colonel,” she said, “it sounds like you have an interesting job.”

“Sometimes,” Webster said, “but at other times it's boring as hell. At least the Guard lets me get out from behind that desk and do something different.”

“Like trying to keep Michael Parson out of trouble?”

“Exactly,” Webster laughed.

“Good luck,” Gold said.

Parson smiled thinly and took a pull from his beer. He started to say something—probably to give her a good-natured retort—but jet noise drowned him out. The streak-scream of a jet fighter taking off rumbled in waves across the base, followed by the identical sound of a second aircraft. Lead and wingman, Gold supposed, heading out to hit a target in Afghanistan. Nice to be out of there for a little while, she had to admit.

“So what about you, Sophia?” Parson asked. “I thought you'd be working on a doctorate in philosophy or religion by now. Just can't stay away from the garden spots?”

“Something like that,” Gold said. She took a sip of wine while she thought about the rest of her answer. “It's hard to let go when there's so much need.”

“You've earned a break. I thought you wanted to go back to school.”

“More than you know. And I did get accepted at Duke and Maryland.”

“Congrats. Use that new GI Bill. Nobody deserves it more than you.”

“Someday,” Gold said. Someday.

•   •   •

IN THE TWO DAYS
that went by while she waited for the cockpit recording, Gold had no official duties. Parson got away from his own duties as often as he could to spend time with her. They began both days with a run around the base, Parson wearing his blue-and-silver Air Force PT uniform, and Gold still using her old workout clothes with
ARMY
embroidered on the gray jacket. For most of her life, she'd nearly always led the pack on platoon runs. However, the insurgent's bullet had cost her some lung capacity, and Parson ran ahead. But in their five-mile runs, neither of them ever slowed to a walk. They shared every meal together in the dining hall, each going through the ritual of signing the roster and rubbing a dollop of hand sanitizer across their fingers. Gold had spent so much time in deployed locations that she associated the antiseptic smell of hand sanitizer with food.

Between meals, Gold passed the hours in the Green Beans coffee shop, delving into the wisdom of John Locke's
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
. She was sipping an espresso, enjoying the company of the cat lounging on her table, when Parson came in and told her he had the CVR file.

“Let's listen to it in the intel vault,” he said.

The intel vault amounted to a room in the command building with some extra soundproofing. In her career, Gold had seen intel facilities ranging from a tent with an armed guard to a high-tech SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility, with alarms and coded locks.

Following the usual protocol, Gold left her cell phone outside the room in a designated wooden box. Parson steered her to a computer reserved for her. She slid her ID card into the reader and signed on. An intel officer showed her how to pull up the audio file. Before she played it, she also opened a word processing program and donned a set of earphones.

“Are you ready for this?” Parson asked.

Gold thought for a moment, then nodded. But no, she wasn't ready for this, nor would she ever be. How did one prepare to listen to people die? Still, she appreciated Parson's question. He had the decency to realize how jarring it was to pull her away from a moment of leisure and sit her down to something like this. She took a deep breath and clicked
PLAY
.

In the first several seconds, she heard only noise: the hum of electronics, the rush of the slipstream over the hull of the aircraft. Parson had explained how she'd be listening to various inputs, including the radios, ambient sounds from an area microphone mounted in the cockpit, and chatter over the interphone from the pilot, copilot, and loadmaster. The area mike picked up a lot of extraneous sounds that mixed with everything else.

Gold listened for fifteen minutes, tapping into the keyboard everything she heard. She wrote the words in English, whether they were spoken in that language or in Pashto. Soon she realized the crew used English on the radios and Pashto over the interphone. So far, it all seemed routine. The pilots discussed the weather.