The Renegades Read online

  After gliding for several minutes, the raptor struck. It rolled into a bank of almost ninety degrees, folded its wings, and dropped like a bolt of black lightning. Parson could not see the bird’s target, perhaps a mouse or a small snake. The bird did not pull up. It remained on the ground, probably eating its prey. Idly, Parson wondered if he’d been watching a falcon or a hawk. From some corner of his mind he remembered the difference: Falcons killed with their beaks, and other raptors killed mainly with their talons. A distinction by weapons system.

  He wished he could see his own target and hit it like that right now. From a distance, he’d once watched an air strike in Iraq with a JDAM launched from a B-52. At the moment of impact, the ground rippled. An orange flash appeared for an instant, followed by the roil of smoke. A beat later came the sound, more thud than blast. And another high-value target answered to Allah.

  But this flight was purely recon. These video images came from an unarmed drone. An armed version, the Reaper, carried Hellfire missiles, but a Reaper had not been available. CENTCOM probably assigned killer drones to missions with a greater chance of finding something to shoot.

  After full nightfall, Parson and Gold took a break from watching the video and went to dinner in the chow tent. The place smelled like all deployed location dining facilities: the scent of gravy under heat lamps, whiffs of hand sanitizer, with an aftertaste of the morning’s bacon grease. At a clipboard just inside the doorway, Parson wrote his name on the sign-in sheet, and he put O-5 in the column for rank. He had no idea why they needed his name and rank to feed him, but he filled out the form just the same.

  Third-country nationals from Bangladesh dished out food in the serving line. The TCNs looked out of place with their white uniforms and black bow ties. Gold said little; Parson knew she was probably disappointed not to have seen anything on the video. He sat with her at a long table draped in vinyl, took a few bites from a warmed-over veal patty, and sipped weak iced tea. The food was better than the group rations the chow tent had served earlier in the relief operation, but not by much.

  “You said Durrani wasn’t even sure himself,” Parson said.

  “He wasn’t,” Gold said. She picked at a salad of wilted lettuce. Ranch dressing covered it—her apparent effort to give it some taste.

  Parson had seen Sophia a lot of different ways: engaged and in control; frightened and hypothermic; exhausted but still in command of her skills. However, he’d never seen her depressed. He tried to think of the right thing to say. Parson knew his own skills had never included a gift for just the right words.

  “So the worst that happens is we waste some gas in the Predator,” he said. “Won’t be the only time we’ve acted on bad intel. Remember Saddam’s chemical weapons that weren’t there?”

  Gold pushed away her salad. “I hate to think I got you into trouble with Task Force when I should have been the one on the carpet.”

  “Not the first time a colonel’s chewed my ass,” Parson said. “Probably not the last, either.”

  He tried to think of more words of comfort, but the growl of a C-130 takeoff overwhelmed his thoughts. Parson excused himself, went to the refrigerated dessert carousel. The trays stopped turning when he opened the door. He took out two pieces of chocolate meringue pie.

  Back at the table, he stuck a plastic fork into one of the pie sections and shoved it toward Sophia.

  “Eat something, Sergeant Major,” he said. “That’s an order.”

  She gave that half smile of hers. He had rarely seen her grin broadly or laugh out loud. He knew she wasn’t down all the time; open mirth just wasn’t part of her nature. But she’d seemed different, a little sadder perhaps, during this entire deployment. Sometimes the best way to keep a crewmate in the game was the little things, small favors to remind them you had their back.

  Sophia withdrew the fork, stabbed it into the tip of the pie wedge. She didn’t say anything, but she finished the dessert.

  “You want to go back and check the video again?” Parson asked.

  Gold sighed. “It’s like watching paint dry,” she said, “but we might as well.”

  When they returned to the Air Operations Center, they found the intel officer still staring at the screen. But he didn’t look bored. He was on his feet. Without any word of greeting, without taking his eyes off the video, he motioned to Parson and said, “Come here and look at this.”

  The sensor operator had zoomed in so far, it looked like the lens was at treetop level. At the center of the crosshairs was a pickup truck. Two more were parked near it. Men wandered around the trucks, stepped among stone ruins. Some of the men disappeared inside the mountain.

  “How long ago did those vehicles show up?” Gold asked.

  “Ten minutes,” the intel officer said.

  “Did they take anything out of the trucks?” Parson asked.

  “Not that I’ve seen.”

  Gold pulled up a metal folding chair, sat near the screen, crossed her legs. She took a pad from her cargo pocket, scribbled some notes, and put her pen behind her ear. Now Sophia looks more like herself, Parson thought.

  He knew the trucks alone weren’t reason enough to lob a bunker buster onto those coordinates. It took more than a hunch to turn a point of interest into a target. The officers who made those decisions would need to see weapons, hear radio traffic about enemy operations, or gather some other information to make sure whoever was there needed killing.

  But maybe this vindicated Gold’s wild-goose chase. At the very least, CENTCOM would probably put up another Predator. Or maybe they’d launch one of those Rivet Joint birds to listen in on any communications coming from that barren spot in the mountains. With just a bit more intelligence, somebody somewhere could push a button and solve this problem.

  “Smile,” Parson said. “You’re on Candid Camera, you sons of bitches.”

  22

  When the Predator ran low on fuel early the next morning, an MC-12 took its place. Gold didn’t care what aircraft watched that mountain; she was just glad something of value had resulted from what Parson called her temporary insanity. But he told her the MC-12 Liberty was a manned airplane—a heavily modified Beechcraft flown by a crew from the Mississippi Air National Guard.

  Like the Predator, the small twin-prop aircraft carried video cameras and other sensors. According to Parson, using little planes to gather intel was a fairly new mission for the Air Force, driven by a new kind of war. The military needed a lot of surveillance in a lot of places, and it made sense to take a relatively inexpensive civilian plane off the shelf and stuff it full of electronic gear.

  Gold spent the morning with Parson in the Air Operations Center, sipping coffee and watching the downlink. The trucks they’d seen the evening before were gone. But now the flight crews knew exactly where to look. The video mostly turned in a constant circle over the same spot, the lenses not so much searching as lying in wait. Occasionally the sensor operator would slew the camera across the ridge, over the valley. But clearly, after the trucks had shown up, somebody pressed the STORE function on a nav computer, and now those coordinates were locked in.

  “Is that boring for the pilots?” Gold asked.

  “Probably,” Parson said. “But it beats the hell out of taking fire on a low-level run.”

  Parson watched the screen with obvious interest. Since last evening he had put on a fresh flight suit. On his left sleeve he wore the usual U.S. flag. But on the same sleeve, over the pen pockets where Air Force fliers often put tiny unofficial patches, he had a little black, red, and green Afghanistan flag. Solidarity with the Afghan crews, evidently. He’d come a long way since hating this whole country and everyone in it, and Gold liked to think she had something to do with that.

  Right now Parson seemed engaged with the problem at hand, fascinated with the challenges of an assignment outside his normal role as an airlifter. If he still felt any anger toward her for what she’d done, he did not show it.

  Gold tried to think of
anything else she could do, any other way she could contribute. She was a language specialist, not an investigator or an intel spook. But she knew one thing about investigators: They worked their sources.

  Gold excused herself and went to the field telephone in the flight planning room. She lifted the receiver and punched in the number for Sergeant Baitullah with the Afghan National Police. This time it rang on the first try. Maybe the phone service had made repairs since the quake. A police recruit answered, and in Pashto Gold asked for Baitullah. The recruit did not place her on hold, but simply put down the receiver. Through the line she heard discussions and then the clomping footsteps of someone walking on poorly fitted prosthetics: Baitullah coming to the telephone.

  “Salaam, my teacher,” he said.

  “Good morning, my friend. I am sorry I have not called you again before now, but much has happened.”

  “Not bad things, I pray.”

  “Neither good nor bad,” Gold said. “We have more information about Black Crescent. Much of it I cannot discuss on a nonsecure telephone. But I wanted to ask if your own investigation on the kidnappings has borne any fruit.”

  Baitullah paused as if searching his mind. Gold wondered if he was considering what he should say over an open line, or perhaps what he should say when other officers knew he was talking to an American. She trusted him because she knew him. But she did not trust the Afghan National Police. The U.S. military, along with British forces and the German Bundespolizei, had worked to professionalize the ANP. Success had been slow and spotty.

  “The investigation has shown little progress, I fear,” Baitullah said. “Witnesses will not talk to us. Some of the parents do not even report the crimes.”

  “That is unfortunate,” Gold said. “They probably received night letters warning them not to go to the police.”

  “Quite likely.”

  The thought of letters from terrorists gave Gold another idea. Had there been any more communication from them?

  “Sergeant Baitullah,” she said, “Black Crescent has released some statements on video. Do you know of any more messages from them in recent days? Video, audio, anything?”

  “Not recently,” Baitullah said. “They release their statements to news agencies in Pakistan and—”

  Baitullah stopped himself in midsentence. But he remained on the line. Gold could still hear the ambient noise of the room: coughs and conversations, smatterings of Dari and Pashto. Why had he grown quiet?

  “My teacher,” Baitullah whispered, “do you have access to a secure telephone?”

  “There is one here in command post,” Gold said.

  “Let me call you on that phone in one hour,” Baitullah said. “What is the number?”

  “I’ll have to check.”

  Gold put down the receiver and went to command post. She asked a sergeant for the number, returned to the field telephone, and read the number to Baitullah.

  “I thank you, my teacher,” Baitullah said. Without another word, he hung up.

  A strange turn, but a hopeful one. Maybe he’d thought of something important to tell her. But Gold wondered where he could get to an STU. Secure Telephone Units weren’t lying around everywhere, especially not in ANP offices. At any rate, she’d find out in an hour. In the meantime, she could see if the surveillance plane had spotted anything else.

  She found Parson still in the intel section, still intent on the video screen. The downlink showed no activity, but the video was zoomed in tight. The circling lens gave a clearer view of the entrance to what was apparently a cave bunker or underground complex, similar to what Durrani had described. Some of the mountain’s rock formations ran in straight lines—a clear sign of man-made reinforcement. Defilades, perhaps, defensive fighting positions just outside the entrance. Part of the masonry looked like crumbled fort ruins, but some of it seemed newer, more intact.

  “Seen anything?” Gold asked.

  “A couple more trucks a little while ago,” Parson said. “They pulled up, and four guys got out. Looked like they had AKs.”

  Interesting, Gold thought, but still not quite enough. Practically half the population of Afghanistan had AK-47s. She told Parson about her conversation with Baitullah.

  “I remember that guy,” Parson said. “One of the lucky ones who got out after we landed on fire.”

  A day Gold tried not to think about. She could still see the flames raging through the wreckage of Parson’s C-5 Galaxy, black smoke boiling into a clear blue sky. A funeral pyre for too many of her comrades. That scene sometimes woke her up in night sweats.

  When the hour had nearly passed, Gold returned to command post and sat by the STU. The phone rang exactly on time, and Gold answered with her name and rank.

  “It is I, my teacher,” Baitullah said.

  “I didn’t know your office had a secure phone,” Gold said.

  “Alas, it does not,” Baitullah said. “I am engaging the function now.”

  “Same here,” Gold said. She pressed the SECURE button. The phone’s digital screen read GOING SECURE. The receiver hummed and buzzed like a fax machine answering, and Baitullah’s voice came back on the line.

  “I am in the office of an army friend,” he said.

  So Baitullah had to go to an army facility to find someone he trusted. The Afghan National Army hardly represented the military ideal, Gold knew, but the army was way ahead of the police in rooting out treason and bribery.

  “That was a good idea,” she said. “Do you have news?”

  “Only a bit. But perhaps it helps complete the puzzle.”

  To Gold, it was a pleasure to hear Baitullah speak, to see him work. When he’d first joined the force, he could barely write his name. A frightened, uneducated kid. Then he’d lost his feet in the attack on the ANP training center. A life of disability and poverty seemed his fate. But now he sounded like a seasoned detective, not just drawing a government check and watching the clock, but actually trying to do the job.

  “Any information will help,” Gold said.

  “We have analyzed the videos released by Black Crescent and this Chaaku,” Baitullah said. He uttered the name with scorn, as if the word carried with it a bad taste. “The media experts believe there was no daylight in the room when the video was recorded—that all the lighting was artificial.”

  “So they shot the videos at night,” Gold said, “or in a dark place.”

  “Perhaps the latter,” Baitullah said. “The analysts also see clues in the masonry on the wall above and beneath the Black Crescent banner. The rough brickwork looks like construction the mujahideen used for bunkers in the 1980s.”

  Gold felt a moment of satisfaction. She had helped teach this man to read, and his literacy had unlocked his talents. His evidence wasn’t conclusive, but it substantiated what Durrani had told her. Just maybe, she and Parson were looking in the right place.

  * * *

  When the MC-12 broke off and landed, a Reaper took its place. Parson still didn’t like the way Gold had made up her own mission to gather intel, but he had to admit one thing: The more information she got, the more horsepower he got with CENTCOM and the decision-makers above him. And now he had firepower, too. The Reaper carried four Hellfires and two GBU-12 Paveway laser-guided bombs. Parson could not give the order to shoot; it wasn’t exactly his firepower. But his assignment as an adviser put him in the midst of what was quickly becoming an offensive operation against a new terrorist threat. Not the usual day’s work for someone originally trained to fly cargo from point A to point B.

  The Afghanistan war had a way of putting U.S. troops into positions outside their normal roles. Parson knew of young officers who found themselves with nation-building responsibilities—captains with budgets of two million dollars. Now it was his turn to face a new kind of challenge, to learn as he went along.

  Gold watched with him as the Reaper circled the Kuh-e Qara Batur. The downlink included audio now—the interphone conversations of the pilot and sensor operator
at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, and radio traffic between the pilot and a mission commander at Bagram, north of Kabul. Parson kept a satphone number for the mission commander, but he didn’t expect to need it. These guys had their procedures and rules of engagement, and Parson looked forward to seeing them do their stuff.

  Killer drones had become controversial in some quarters back home, but not here where bullets were flying. The way Parson saw it, the only difference between a remotely piloted aircraft and a manned bomber was that you didn’t put a crew at risk. Those people who had a particular problem with drones maybe preferred to have a crew get shot at. To Parson, that said a lot about whose side they were on.

  For hours, the Reaper’s sensor showed nothing but trees, rocks, and dirt. Parson and Gold went to dinner in the chow tent, walked back to the Air Operations Center in darkness. The drone had switched to infrared by then, the night imaging clear as day video.

  Parson decided to turn in for the night. He zipped on his flight jacket. Plenty of other eyes would watch this feed, and he could catch up on his issues of Stars and Stripes. Maybe even catch up on his sleep.

  That’s when he heard the voice of the mission commander, reedy on the little speaker:

  “Got some signals intelligence that indicates your high-value target may be approaching.”

  The stateside crew answered:

  “Pilot copies.”

  “Sensor copies.”

  Parson took off his jacket, draped it over the back of his folding chair. No way he could leave now. On the screen, the lens zoomed out to a wider view.

  “What’s this?” Gold asked.

  “Showtime,” Parson said. “Could be, anyway. Maybe our boy got careless with a cell phone and told somebody where he was going.”

  Gold took her seat beside Parson. She showed no anticipation, no elation at what might be about to happen. No doubt she disliked seeing people die no matter how much they deserved it. Parson knew she wasn’t squeamish; he’d seen her trip a trigger more than once. But she would not celebrate a death.