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  Rescue and medical teams were also getting backed up. Parson saw people walking around in official-looking uniforms and jumpsuits of green, khaki, and blue. He saw patches from organizations he’d not run into before: Los Angeles County Search and Rescue Team, Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue Team, Air Force Expeditionary Medical Support Health Response Team. The medical crews could treat patients in the camp here at the airport, but those search-and-rescue guys couldn’t do any good until they got out into the field.

  “Much to fly,” Rashid said.

  “You got that right,” Parson said. He noted that Rashid was looking across the ramp and seeing the big picture, not just his own flight schedule. Another good sign. Senior officer material. The Afghans needed to grow their own leadership class all over again, since so many of the natural leaders had been killed off or chased away. War brought a kind of reverse Darwinism: It eliminated the strongest and the brightest.

  “Let us see where we fly next,” Rashid said.

  “Might as well.”

  In the flight planning room—just a section of the tents that made up the Air Operations Center—they found Lieutenant Aamir poring over a VFR chart. Rashid spoke to him in words Parson could not understand. He got the tone, though. A command voice, though not an unfriendly one. Aamir answered with something that sounded matter-of-fact. To Parson, Pashto had a pleasant ring. It didn’t have the hard edges of German or Russian—or maybe he just liked it because he associated it with Sophia.

  “He say the…” Rashid pointed to the whiteboard.

  “Schedule,” Parson said.

  “Yes, schedule. Aamir say schedule for us to fly tomorrow to village near Kunduz.”

  Short flight, Parson knew. Less than a hundred miles. He leaned over the chart Aamir had spread across a table. The Afghan copilot drew a pencil line along the straight edge of a navigational plotter. He had erased a previous line and started over again. Good planning, Parson thought. Rashid and Aamir would probably just take a radio compass bearing off the Kunduz NDB, but it never hurt to have a backup. And Parson—a navigator before he was a pilot—had preached chart usage from the time he’d become an adviser. Maybe they were finally listening.

  The chart covered the G-6B sector, which included northeastern Afghanistan, parts of former Soviet republics, a section of northern Pakistan, and even a sliver of China. Some of the roughest terrain in the world, with elevations up to twenty-five thousand feet. Arid, too. The color-coded chart wasn’t green; it was brown—except the white parts where snow shrouded the mountains all year long.

  Aamir’s course line ended at a tiny circle without a name. Other nameless circles surrounded it, the grouping of them marked NUMEROUS VILLAGES. The elevation in that area was a little more reasonable—more like six thousand feet. But higher mountains loomed nearby. Not the worst kind of terrain for a helicopter, but certainly not the best.

  “Has he looked at the weather?” Parson asked.

  More chatter in Pashto.

  “He has not,” Rashid said.

  “I’ll get it for you.”

  Parson tried not to give the Afghans too much help; they’d need to operate on their own sooner or later. But he could log on to the weather computer and get more detailed information than they could get in a verbal briefing over the phone. From a laptop placed on a table made of rough planks and cinder blocks, he printed out the text forecast, the surface analysis chart, and a constant pressure chart.

  The text forecast brought lousy news. Winds out of the northwest tomorrow morning at twenty knots gusting to thirty. Moderate turbulence.

  The charts backed up the text. The isobar lines on the constant pressure chart bunched up so tightly that the cheap inkjet printer had blurred some of them together. The lines connected points of equal pressure, just the way contour lines on a terrain map connected points of equal elevation. Close isobars meant rapid changes in pressure, which meant strong wind. If anything, the text forecast was conservative.

  Rashid looked over Parson’s shoulder. “How is weather?” he asked.

  “Buddy,” Parson said, “we’re going to get our teeth kicked in.”

  9

  After the briefing, Gold and Reyes stopped by the mess tent. The cooks there really didn’t cook; they just heated up Unitized Group Rations—MRE food in big tray packs. The turkey cutlets and green beans tasted lousy, but they provided a quick way to feed all the flight crews, relief workers, and refugees at Mazar. The fare might improve as the chow tent got better established, Gold knew, but UGRs would do for now.

  She sat at a folding table with the pararescueman, sipped coffee from a foam cup. The coffee was weak, but at least it was hot. With so much misery around her, Gold felt guilty about every comfort. The warm cup in her hand made her think of the newly homeless in the cold. The food, however tasteless, reminded her of people going hungry in remote villages. She unzipped her field jacket and thought of refugees with only the one set of filthy clothes on their backs.

  “What’s wrong?” Reyes asked.

  Gold gestured toward the mess tent opening, beyond which lay the refugee tents and the flight line. A C-27 took off, turboprops growling. A stray cat slinked across the ramp, the animal’s fur as mottled as a New England snowshoe hare between seasons. Somewhere in the distance, a child cried.

  “We can never do enough,” Gold said.

  “One save at a time,” Reyes said.

  That didn’t make Gold feel any better, but she gathered that it was good enough for Reyes. She noticed the patch on his uniform. It read USAF PARARESCUE—THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE. Not a bad guiding creed, she thought. The patch depicted a winged angel with her arms spread across a globe.

  “Let me tell you about something that happened during Katrina,” Reyes said.

  Reyes described flying over an inundated New Orleans in 2005, fetid water the color of Gold’s black coffee. He and his Pave Hawk crew picked up a half dozen survivors stranded on rooftops and delivered them to a collection point at Louis Armstrong International Airport. On their second pass over the city, the pilots circled above a house flooded up to the eaves, with three people waving from their perch on the shingles. The survivors had chopped through from the attic; the ragged hole looked like it might have been punched by a bunker buster that pierced but failed to explode.

  As the helicopter hovered, its rotor wash whipped the foul water to froth. Reyes strapped onto the forest penetrator, and he let the flight engineer lower him on the hoist. While he rode the cable down, he thought he felt a grinding through the steel braids, but he paid it no mind. On the roof he found an elderly black man and two boys. Grandchildren, Reyes assumed, maybe eight and twelve.

  “Their mama’s down there,” the man said, pointing inside the attic. He shouted over the helicopter’s thudding blades. “She can’t climb out, and we can’t lift her.”

  On his hands and knees, Reyes peered through the hole. Splinters pricked through his flight gloves, and he scratched his wrist on an exposed nail. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness inside, he saw a woman, overweight and very pregnant, lying on the attic floor.

  Reyes plugged his headset into his radio, pressed the transmit switch. “I’m gonna need some help, boys,” he said. “After I send these guys up on the penetrator, put Wilkins down here with the Stokes litter and a crash ax.”

  “Copy that,” the pilot said. “Send ’em up.”

  Reyes unfolded one of the rescue seats on the penetrator. “Sit on this thing,” he told the older boy. “Put this strap around you, and hold on.”

  The child, eyes wide with fear and face dripping with sweat, clung to the penetrator as Reyes cinched down the strap. “Please don’t let me fall out,” the boy said.

  “I’m going up with you,” Reyes said. “All you gotta do is ride, and don’t try to climb into the helicopter. Just let my buddy pull you in.”

  The boy followed instructions better than some adults Reyes had rescued, and so did his brother. When they were both
safely in the HH-60, Reyes rode back down and tried to get the old man to go.

  “I ain’t leaving without my daughter,” he said.

  “There’s nothing you can do to help, sir,” Reyes told him. “Let ’em get you into some air-conditioning at the airport, and we’ll get her out.”

  “I’m staying right here, young man.”

  “Sir, you’re suffering from heat stress. You need some cool water and a fan.”

  “I been hot before.”

  The man’s life wasn’t in immediate danger, so Reyes decided not to argue any further. “He wants to stay,” Reyes called up to the Pave Hawk. “Tell Wilkins to come on down.”

  The grandfather watched as Reyes’s partner rode the hoist. Once Wilkins touched down on the roof, the flight engineer, aboard the aircraft, reeled the penetrator back up and swapped it with the Stokes litter. Reyes and Wilkins went to work with the crash ax, taking turns and widening the hole the old man had chopped. When they climbed down to the attic floor, the woman could barely speak above a whisper.

  “How are my boys?” she asked.

  “They’re fine, ma’am,” Wilkins said. “The helicopter’s taking them to the airport.”

  The woman nodded and closed her eyes. Reyes felt her neck and found her pulse weak and rapid. She had stopped sweating; her neck was dry. Heatstroke.

  “She needs to get out of here,” Reyes said.

  He and Wilkins rolled her into the litter and strapped her in. Sweat dripped off Reyes’s nose and onto the woman’s face, but she didn’t seem to notice. His flight suit was soaked by now, and the stink of filthy water and rotted food was starting to make him a little sick.

  When they lifted her from the wooden floor, Reyes felt light-headed. If the heat was getting to him, he could imagine what it did to her. The two PJs turned the litter upright, and Reyes almost dropped his end.

  “You gonna make it?” Wilkins asked.

  “I’m good,” Reyes said. “On the count of three.”

  Reyes counted, and they heaved the patient through the hole vertically. She must have weighed three hundred pounds. Reyes’s arm muscles burned. Up on the roof, the old man helped lower his daughter to the sloped surface. He was stronger than he looked, and he didn’t let her slip.

  The pararescuemen pulled themselves up through the hole. Even through the leather palms of his gloves, Reyes felt the heat emanating from those shingles, but after the close air of that attic, the rooftop felt almost cool.

  A few minutes later, he heard the rumble of the returning Pave Hawk. The helo hovered over the house, and the crew lowered the cable. Reyes connected the cable to the suspension harness on the Stokes litter, feeling good about this hard-won save.

  “She’s in heatstroke,” he transmitted. “Pour some water on her when you get her aboard.”

  “Roger that. We’ll tell the docs.”

  “Patient’s secure,” Reyes said. “Take her up.”

  The cable didn’t move.

  “I got her strapped in,” Reyes said. “Take her up.”

  No answer for a moment. Then: “The hoist is jammed.”

  Reyes swore under his breath. Then he transmitted, “You gotta be kidding me.”

  The flight engineer answered him: “The motor popped the breakers, and I think it’s burned out.”

  Reyes knew what would come next. They’d want to jettison the cable. He considered just having the helicopter lift the woman externally, swinging from the cable. The pilots were skilled enough to set her down gently. But that was dangerous, especially for a patient in this condition.

  “You gonna cut it?” Reyes asked.

  “Affirmative,” the engineer called. “Tell me when the litter’s disconnected.”

  Reyes removed the cable hook from the litter harness and said, “It’s clear.”

  The Pave Hawk drifted away from the house. The cable dragged across the roof and tangled in a television antenna. “Cable’s fouled,” Reyes called. “Just cut it where you are.”

  When the jettison squib fired, a tiny explosive charge severed the cable. The cable dropped away from the helicopter, writhed like something in death throes until it slapped into the water. The helicopter accelerated away.

  “Where they going?” the old man asked.

  Reyes explained what had happened. As he did so, the flight engineer called back to him on the radio: “Anderson’s crew has a good hoist. They’re coming to get you.”

  “Copy that,” Reyes said.

  While he, Wilkins, and the old man waited, the woman went into cardiac arrest. The two pararescuemen performed CPR until they were both exhausted, but by the time the second helicopter arrived, she was dead. The old man had watched it all from two feet away.

  Reyes asked himself questions for months. What if he’d suggested carrying her externally? What if he’d mentioned the grinding he’d felt in the cable? What if he’d gotten her out earlier and sent her up first? Questions without answers.

  “You have a hard job,” Gold said when Reyes finished his story.

  “I’ve made my peace with it,” he said. “You do what you can do, and that’s all you can do.”

  Gold knew he was right, but she had a hard time making herself believe it. Maybe she had spent so much time in Afghanistan that part of her could never leave the place, never let go. At least she could get her mind around half of Reyes’s philosophy—the part about doing all you could do. And right now, that involved a road trip.

  * * *

  The first mortar hit just as Parson and Rashid left flight planning. A concussive force slammed Parson’s eardrums as if from the inside. Both men dived for cover by the sandbagged wall of the command post. Shouts erupted from the flight line, screams from the refugee tents and the MASF. The bang left a steady hum in Parson’s ears.

  “Sons of bitches!” he shouted. His own voice sounded muffled.

  “Where that from?” Rashid asked.

  “I don’t know.” A pool of halogen light illuminated the area around the command post, but darkness lay beyond, punctuated only by the blue dots of the taxiway edge lights.

  Parson realized he didn’t even know if he was really behind cover. Whether the sandbags protected them depended on where the next mortar landed. He had to wait about five seconds for the answer.

  The next round hit so close that his damaged eardrums registered only a dull thud. But the siss of flying shrapnel, in a different range of sound, he heard well. Something stung the back of his hand. Sand dribbled onto his neck from above him, the result of a fragment that had just missed his head and buried itself in the bags.

  An oddly idle corner of his mind recalled when he’d emptied an autoloading shotgun at a flight of geese, reloaded, and fired again. By the last shot, his ears had numbed to the blasts. When he’d pulled the trigger, there was no explosion at all, but he’d felt the recoil and heard clearly the cycling of the bolt.

  He grabbed Rashid’s arm and pulled him flat to the tarmac. “You all right?” Parson shouted.

  “Yes. And you?”

  “Nothing serious. Stay down.”

  A call-to-arms bugle tone sounded from the base’s loudspeakers. Alarm Red. A helicopter lifted off. Parson could not see it, but he assumed the aircraft was a gunship hunting their tormentors. Maybe the pilots would spot the bad guys on the forward-looking infrared and light them up. Parson had seen gun camera video from the FLIR on Apaches and Cobras, and it was priceless: Jackasses burying an IED by the roadside at night, with no idea anybody could see them. A crisp, understated voice on the radio, saying, “Clear to engage.” A white blob washing out the screen. Fragments of glowing warmth flying—the heat signature of disintegrating bodies.

  Another mortar exploded. This one hit farther down the airfield, near the departure end of the runway. Parson listened for any clues of the damage: moans, cries, curses. He heard nothing, but he knew his hearing was unreliable now and would stay that way for hours.

  A truck engine started. Moments later,
two Humvees sped down a taxiway. Marines and Air Force security police, Parson supposed. Good. Now both ground and air charged after the insurgents. Maybe the attack was over.

  The all-clear came, and he worried about Gold. Where was she now? More Humvees and trucks began rolling around the base—the post-attack recon teams looking for unexploded ordnance and wounded personnel.

  “Let’s go count noses,” Parson said. “I hope everyone’s all right.” Rashid looked confused, but he followed Parson without comment.

  Under a lamp pole, Parson stopped to examine his right hand. Shrapnel had slashed a scratch through the skin over his metacarpal bones, just deep enough for blood to run down his knuckles and drip from his thumbnail.

  “You are hurt,” Rashid said.

  “Not bad.” Parson judged he did not need stitches. He unzipped a chest pocket and took out his handkerchief, dabbed the fabric over the wound. In the pallid light, he could see Rashid was unhurt, and for that he was grateful.

  He pocketed the handkerchief, flexed the fingers of the injured hand. The bleeding had slowed, and it didn’t hurt too much now. Parson was right-handed, so of course that was the hand that always got hurt.

  But this was nothing like last time. When he’d been shot down with Gold years before, he’d cracked his right wrist. Through the frozen hell of evading in a winter storm, he’d endured the pain of that wound. He’d fashioned a crude splint, and he’d gotten by well enough with that. But when they were captured by Marwan’s men, the splint gave away the injury. While Marwan interrogated Parson, another terrorist twisted his wrist. Parson had thought he knew pain—until that day when the blinding agony scarred his mind with permanent marks. He even wondered if a neurosurgeon could open his skull and point to the evidence, the way a botanist might find the record of a wildfire in the growth rings of a redwood.

  They found Lieutenant Aamir and the rest of Rashid’s crew unharmed. But the mortars had damaged more than Parson’s hand. The recon team discovered an Afghan mechanic dead of shrapnel wounds. Inside the MASF, aeromeds were stitching up an American crew chief, a German nurse, and an Italian aid worker. And Parson didn’t hear the loud noises he wanted to hear: the cackle of a chain gun, the whoosh of a Hellfire—anything that sounded like payback. Apparently, the Quick Reaction Force had caught nothing. And Parson had not seen Gold anywhere.