The Renegades Read online

  “I visual you,” the lead pilot called.

  Sometimes low-tech’s the way to go, Parson thought. He put down the mirror and keyed his radio again. “Copy that, Lightning,” he said. “We’re on the south end of a ledge. There’s room for one of you to land just north of our aircraft.”

  “Understood.”

  “The surface winds are real squirrelly,” Parson added. “Be careful.”

  Long pause. Then the Mi-35 pilot said, “We careful.”

  Gotta remember to avoid American slang when Gold’s not around, Parson noted. That poor guy just took part of his mind away from flying to wonder what squirrels had to do with wind.

  Parson stuffed the pen-gun launcher back into his survival vest. He pulled himself inside the Mi-17 and helped Reyes put Sharif on the Skedco litter. Bloody bandages swathed the engineer’s leg. Sharif propped himself up on his elbows, but kept his eyes closed.

  When Parson stepped back outside, the Hinds were close, setting up their approach so near that he could feel the pounding in his ribs, see the pilots’ helmets through the canopies.

  One chopper began descending. The other stayed high for overwatch. Maybe this will actually work, Parson thought.

  Now the lower aircraft descended so close that Parson could read its tail number, see the Afghan roundel. Its exhaust shimmered and blurred the terrain behind it. Then the chopper entered the mountain wave wind effect as if it had flown into an unseen waterfall.

  The Mi-35 dropped so quickly, Parson thought for a moment both engines had failed. But they hadn’t quit; they screamed at full power. The aircraft rolled hard to the left. Parson felt in his chest a twist of horror. He expected the helo to hit the rocks and explode, but the pilot pulled up just above the ground. The chopper rattled away across the valley floor, then climbed. The twist behind Parson’s breastbone released. He took in a deep breath.

  “We try again,” the pilot called over the radio.

  Parson keyed his radio once more, thinking to tell the helicopter pilots to approach from a different angle. But he took his thumb off the switch. These guys knew what they were doing; he’d just let them do it. They couldn’t express themselves well in English, but that didn’t mean they were stupid. The helo circled, descended, approached again, this time parallel to the ridge.

  That turned out even worse. The helicopter entered the mountain wave and rolled almost ninety degrees.

  In that attitude the helo had the aerodynamics of a rock. The Mi-35 plunged toward the mountainside. The aircraft swept over Parson’s head so near, he felt the heat. Its tail rotor clipped a sapling just yards below the downed Mi-17. Then the winds released the chopper, and the pilot recovered so low that the rotors left a plume of dust.

  “Lightning,” Parson called, “pull off.” Then he added every phrase he could think of, official or not, to make himself understood: “Abort, Lightning. Retrograde. Return to base. Get the hell out of here.”

  The Mi-35 climbed. Parson expected to see it grow smaller, but it turned and headed back again. Beside Parson at the rock wall, Conway said, “That dude has more balls than sense.”

  “Yeah, he does,” Parson said. He jogged over to Rashid, handed him the radio, and said, “Tell him to stop being a hero before he kills himself.”

  Rashid spoke into the radio. A long answer in Pashto. Rashid spoke again, looked at Parson.

  “Tell him it’s a damned direct order,” Parson said.

  Rashid made another transmission. Finally the Mi-35s climbed together, joined up in formation and turned on a heading toward Mazar. Another crackle of words on the radio. Rashid smiled.

  “What did he say?” Parson asked.

  “He say protection of Allah upon us until helicopters come back and land.”

  The beat of rotors grew fainter until only the sound of wind remained, rushing over peaks, eddying around passes, resonating in long, low notes of an ancient mountain anthem.

  13

  As Gold and the Marines pulled away from the village compound, she watched through the Cougar’s side window. No one appeared in front of the homes. But from the back, a kite lifted into the air. The diamond-shaped kite consisted of two crossed sticks and rough brown paper, with a knotted rag for a tail. Clouds raced above it, and the wind swept it ever higher.

  “Sergeant Blount,” Gold said, “I think you should see this.”

  Blount stared back at the village. “All right, people,” he shouted, “look alive. Gunner, keep your head on a swivel.”

  “I thought the Taliban frowned on kite-flying,” Lyndsey said.

  “They do,” Gold said, “except when they use it as a signal.”

  “Oh, hell,” Ann said.

  The kite soared so high, Gold lost sight of it. She supposed a strong gust had snapped its string. The women at the village had obviously sent a message, but what? Gold kept the tip of her thumb on the fire mode selector of her rifle, but she hoped she wouldn’t need the weapon. The Cougars were taking a different route on their return to Mazar, so insurgents would find it hard to set up an ambush even if they knew when the team left the village. Best case, the kite signaled that the woman needed to talk to her husband.

  Whatever the message, Gold knew the Taliban never had a problem communicating. They used computers, phones, and Icom radios when they had them. But they could also send signals perfectly well by flying kites or releasing pigeons.

  The road—another rutted, rock-infested dirt path—led through a gorge so deep, it blocked the wind. Near the bottom of the gorge, with the Cougar headed downhill on a quiet idle, Gold heard a different kind of signal: distant, evenly spaced rifle fire in a kind of iambic pentameter. Five shots and their echoes.

  “What the fuck is that?” the gunner asked.

  “A message,” Gold said. Probably some kind of answer.

  “This is really giving me the creeps,” Ann said.

  Gold didn’t like it, either. What had she gotten herself—and these Marines—into? The very air around her felt strange, as if it were made of some element not on the periodic table. The war had taken weird twists and turns for her, but this was uncharted territory: a parley with the wife of an enemy leader, or at least a former enemy leader. Perhaps a shura with Durrani himself. Or maybe an ambush around the next bend.

  But you didn’t make peace by talking only with your friends, Gold reminded herself. And you didn’t win a war by never taking chances.

  No ambush took place. The two Cougar MRAPs traveled winding paths where they met no other traffic, and they made it back to Mazar safely. At command post, Gold and Blount briefed an Air Force intel officer on what they’d seen and done. The officer made a phone call, and the Marines launched a Cobra to destroy the crippled MRAP left by the roadside on the journey to the village.

  “I’ve never seen us blow up so much of our own stuff,” Blount said.

  “Welcome to Afghanistan,” Gold said. “By the way,” she asked the intel officer, “where is Lieutenant Colonel Parson? I thought he’d get back before we did. He’ll want to know all this.”

  “There’s been a problem,” the officer said. He told her about what Aamir attempted, the downed Mi-17, the failed rescue attempt.

  “Oh, my God,” Gold said. A spike of panic churned through her. Sweat began to pop on her forehead. The bad news came on like an illness, a first flush of fever. She crossed her arms and leaned her elbows on her knees. Here came another of those moments. At least Gold recognized the feeling when it happened. The phenomenon had carried different names in different eras, but its nature remained the same: soldier’s heart, shell shock, combat fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder.

  And she would control her stress. Or at least delay it. Put it in a box somewhere and wrestle with it later.

  “It’s all right, Sergeant Major,” the officer said. “Parson has been talking to rescue forces. They’ll get him as soon as the wind dies down.”

  “When will that be?” Gold asked.

  “Sometime
tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Nothing, really. They’ll be okay.”

  Don’t patronize me, Gold thought. They’re outside the wire in a hostile area. That’s not okay.

  But she kept all that in. She said only, “Is there anything else?”

  “We do have another video from Black Crescent,” the officer said. “Are you up for watching it?”

  Gold only nodded, so worried about Parson that she didn’t bother to say “Yes, sir.” She really didn’t want to see the video, especially if it depicted some horror, but she had a job to do.

  The intel officer slid his laptop so Gold and Blount could see the screen. He clicked to open a file, then clicked on PLAY. A song in Arabic emitted from the computer’s tinny speaker, something about the warriors of jihad. A green flag fluttered on the screen, bearing the Black Crescent symbol.

  The flag faded to reveal a horror, though not one of blood. The Black Crescent leader, Chaaku, sat brandishing a sword in his left hand, a Quran in his right. Ten boys stood around him, their ages maybe six to fourteen. Each child held an AK-47 or a bayonet, and the boys wore bandannas emblazoned with verses from the Quran. The verses meant the wearer was ready to die.

  “Somebody needs to take away his camera,” Blount said.

  “No,” the intel officer said. “The more he runs his mouth, the more we know about him.”

  The terrorist leader began speaking. From the cadence of his English, Gold judged him a fluent speaker, and not reading from a script.

  “As you can see,” he said, “the numbers of our young martyrs are growing. We teach them the principal duty of a Muslim is to pray and to fight. Mortal life has no other purpose than to vanquish the infidels and win the earth for the people of Allah.”

  At the word Allah, the boys raised their weapons. Only the youngest of them smiled. Gold supposed he’d been orphaned a while back and thought this an elaborate game of make-believe by his latest caretakers. Most of the other children looked frightened.

  The diatribe continued: “Some of these lion cubs will strike in the coming days. Others will grow to manhood and ever more fearsome capabilities. The spirit of Sheikh Osama bin Laden lives on in the youthful hearts that surround me. You will know their acts when you see them.”

  The screen went blank; the music rose and faded. Gold wondered if Fatima’s brother had stood among the kids on the video. She also wondered if the ten boys were all Black Crescent had, or if there were more. Chaaku, or whatever he wanted to call himself, had not given numbers.

  Intel analysts, she knew, would scrutinize every pixel of that video for clues. The wall behind Chaaku, made of baked mud—did its color suggest a possible location? The choice of music—had the same song appeared in other videos? The boys—could any be identified? She considered letting Fatima watch the video to point out her brother, if he was there, but Gold dismissed the idea. It would upset the girl and serve little purpose.

  Gold cared more about the big picture—if she could just get herself to concentrate. She found it hard to stop worrying about Parson and imagining how those kids must feel. But she realized this new jihadist leader intended a masterstroke, some way to occupy the pedestal that once belonged to bin Laden.

  Nearly all these terrorists said they acted purely out of religious piety, but Gold knew ego had a lot to do with it. This guy wanted to be the new Amir-ul-Momineen, the Commander of the Faithful. But other Islamists might not like him to claim that mantle, at least not this way. And maybe that was a wedge she could use.

  * * *

  With little to do but wait and watch, Parson surveyed the valley below him. Scattered birch and pine bowed to each gust. The strongest winds lifted dust from the swales and hills as if the ground smoked. If any insurgents stalked nearby, Parson could not see them.

  He was getting hungry. This mission was supposed to be a short out-and-back, and he’d not brought any food of his own. But the crashed Mi-17 had carried relief supplies. Maybe there was something he and the others could eat.

  “Keep a good lookout,” Parson told Conway. “I’ll see if there’s any food in the helicopter.”

  “Yes, sir,” Conway said.

  “You’re a civilian now. You don’t have to ‘sir’ me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Old habits, Parson thought. Once you’ve worn the uniform, you don’t ever completely take it off.

  Inside the helicopter, Aamir remained sitting on a troop seat, staring at the floor. He looked as if he took no interest in anything happening around him. His hands remained tied behind his back, his feet taped together.

  Conway’s partner lay with his back propped against the cockpit bulkhead. Every few seconds he would close his eyes tight and reopen them; Parson took that as a sign of pain. Reyes had given the man a plastic bottle of water. The injured civilian drank the last of it and dropped the empty to the floor.

  Sharif was stretched out on Reyes’s litter, apparently unconscious. Reyes fussed over him, checked vital signs.

  “How is he?” Parson asked.

  “I think he’ll make it,” Reyes said, “as long as this doesn’t drag out too long.”

  Parson wanted to assure him that wouldn’t happen, but he’d learned not to make those kinds of promises. He stepped around the two men lying on the floor and made his way back to the stacked relief supplies.

  What he found disappointed him. When he looked closely, he saw the cargo had not been daily rations or Meals Ready to Eat, but bags of rice and even Unimix. Conditions in some of the villages must be getting bad if they were shipping that stuff.

  Parson turned to go back outside, but then he realized he was hungry enough to try the Unimix. He picked up the empty water bottle Conway’s partner had dropped. Sitting on a troop seat, he raised the left leg of his flight suit and unclipped his boot knife. The Damascus steel blade amounted to a long razor, and it sliced into the bottle so effortlessly that Parson used no sawing motion at all.

  He cut off the top of the bottle to create an open cup. Then he went to a bag of Unimix and lopped off the corner.

  The dry, cereal-like substance poured from the opening, and Parson caught some of it in his makeshift cup. He found a full bottle of water, opened it, and poured some into the Unimix. Parson stirred it with his finger until it formed a lukewarm slurry.

  Lacking utensils, he looked around for something to use as a spoon, but found nothing. With no other options, he tipped the cup toward his mouth and drank, chewed. The Unimix tasted like coarse, unsweetened oatmeal.

  “How is that?” Reyes asked.

  “It sucks,” Parson said, “but it’s food.” He imagined his primitive manner of eating the Unimix was probably how the stuff usually got eaten. But even in his present circumstances, he was better off than most people who’d ever tasted it. “Do you want some?” he asked.

  “I’ll pass,” Reyes said.

  “There’s plenty if you get hungry enough.”

  Parson supposed, after having delivered tons of Unimix in relief missions gone by, there was a strange irony that he wound up eating it. But he didn’t have time to ponder that.

  He went back outside to resume his watch. The valley below still looked empty. Just a few stunted trees growing along a narrow stream. A canal extended from the stream at a right angle. Difficult to tell at a distance of a mile or so, but it seemed the weed-choked canal irrigated no crop. The Army Corps of Engineers had built dams and canals in Afghanistan during the 1950s, but most fell into disrepair. Maybe this was one of those relics.

  Though Parson saw no threat, something still bothered the dog. She kept staring in the same direction, growling and whining. When Conway stroked her ears, it did little to calm her.

  “Something’s down there,” Conway said. He held Reyes’s rifle. Parson noted that he always kept the muzzle pointed in a safe direction.

  “Your dog’s not happy, that’s for sure,” Parson said. He envied the anima
l’s simple existence—fully aware of dangers within its view but with most forms of evil beyond its knowing. Living moment to moment with no plans and no concept of time.

  Parson shaded his eyes with his hand, wished he’d brought binoculars. His hunter’s eye caught a ripple in the canal, and at first he thought of ducks feeding among the weeds. Were there ducks here? He couldn’t remember seeing any flying around. Their rapid wing beats would have distinguished them from other birds. And that stagnant canal water probably could not support fish big enough to create ripples like that.

  “We got company,” Parson said. “Down in the canal. Right where the dog’s looking.”

  Rashid gave an order in his native tongue. He and his crew chief swung their machine gun where Parson pointed.

  “The dog is unclean, but is useful,” Rashid said.

  “Reyes,” Parson called. “Gimme your radio.” Parson had his old-school survival radio in his vest, but the pararescueman’s newer PRC-152 had encryption and wider frequency capability. Reyes clambered out of the Mi-17 and handed Parson the radio and his headset. Parson dug his comm card from a flight suit pocket, ran his finger down the list of call signs and frequencies. He punched in the channel for the AWACS surveillance aircraft.

  “What’s up?” Reyes asked.

  “Hostiles down in the canal.”

  “How do you know they’re hostile, sir?”

  “Because they’re sneaking through that nasty water. They wouldn’t get in that shit without a reason.” Parson put on the headset, pressed the transmit button, and called, “Bandsaw, Bandsaw, Golay One-Eight.”

  Several seconds went by. Just as Parson started to press transmit again, he got an answer: “Golay One-Eight, Bandsaw Three-Six, go ahead.”

  So the AWACS was listening up, Parson thought, just like it was supposed to. At least that much was going right.

  “Bandsaw,” he called, “Golay One-Eight is a downed Mi-17. Search-and-rescue is aware of our position, but they’re not the only ones who know where we are. Can you vector some close air support our way?”