The Renegades Page 26

  Parson wasn’t so circumspect. He didn’t like killing, either. But some people needed killing real bad. If not for General Order Number One, he’d crack a beer right now, dig his hand into a bowl of popcorn, and put up his feet to watch. Fuck these bastards.

  The image on the screen zoomed in, zoomed out, slewed east and west, north and south. Nothing there. Just night in Afghanistan, with its centuries of ghosts. Beautiful and calm and silent, waiting for the next spasm of violence.

  Several minutes ticked by, and Parson began to feel a little disappointed. Maybe they’d been wrong about their sigint. But eventually the mission commander came on the net again:

  “Got a confirmation on your HVT. He’s in one of two pickup trucks heading roughly southwest to northeast on a dirt path.”

  “Pilot copies. Sir, do we know which truck?”

  “Negative. If I give you clearance to engage, it will apply to both vehicles.”

  The video zoomed and panned, found the trucks.

  “You’re starring in your own reality show now, you son of a bitch,” Parson said. Gold did not respond.

  “Designate target,” the mission commander said.

  “Pilot copies.”

  “Sensor confirms.”

  Parson slid his chair for a better angle. This was going to be good.

  The Reaper crew began their prelaunch checklist. Parson didn’t know all their terminology, but as an aviator he understood enough to realize they were configuring weapons systems and running BITs—built-in tests—for last-minute function checks.

  “Spin up a weapon for me, please,” the pilot said.

  “Yes, sir,” the sensor operator said. They continued their checklist as the crosshairs tracked the first truck.

  “AEA power.”

  “On.”

  “AEA BIT.”

  “Passed.”

  The vehicles labored uphill. Parson thought about the occupants. Smug sons of bitches, probably planning their next raid. Maybe thinking about cutting somebody’s head off on camera. With no idea they were on camera themselves.

  “Weapon power.”

  “On.”

  “Weapon BIT.”

  “Passed.”

  This technology was just fucking fabulous. Parson recalled a lecture he’d once attended. A retiring general gave the audience an overview of basic Air Force doctrine. “The Air Force’s gift to the nation,” he said, “is that sometimes we can defeat an enemy from on high, so we don’t have to hurl eighteen-year-olds at him.”

  And here was a perfect example.

  “Code weapon,” the Reaper pilot said.

  “Coded,” the sensor operator said.

  “Weapon status.”

  “Weapon ready.”

  “Prelaunch checklist complete.”

  The trucks neared the spot where they’d been parked last time. Parson had stared at that location so long, he remembered the pattern of trees and scrub, masonry walls. Four or five figures stood outside, presumably waiting for their boss. Cool. Maybe that Reaper would blow Chaaku’s ass to hell and get a few of his henchmen as a bonus.

  “Clear to engage,” the mission commander said. “Your discretion.”

  “Pilot copies.”

  “Sensor copies.”

  The video zoomed out, zoomed close. The crosshairs still tracked the first truck. Probably waiting for them to stop, Parson thought. That’s what I’d do.

  He thought of times when he’d watched a deer or an elk—or a terrorist—through his own crosshairs. You waited for the perfect moment to fire, but you couldn’t wait too long. The Reaper crew began their launch checklist.

  “MTS auto track.”

  “Established.”

  “Laser selected.”

  “Arm your laser, please.”

  “Armed.”

  “Master arm is hot.”

  The trucks stopped. The video zoomed in. More figures, now maybe a dozen, appeared around the bunker entrance.

  “Give me laser guidance.”

  “Lasing.”

  Parson couldn’t see the laser on video, but he knew the weapon would ride that beam straight down to Chaaku’s lap. If anything, it was too good for him. Too quick.

  The video zoomed out wider. Now maybe twenty people appeared. Some of them lined up in a row. They were shorter than the others.

  “Those are kids,” Gold said.

  Parson’s anticipation turned instantly to dread, as if he’d swallowed some fast-acting poison.

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “You’re right.”

  He stood and grabbed a yellow adhesive note from the table in front of him, checked the number written across it. On his satphone, he punched in a call for the mission commander. In the eternal seconds before the call connected, Parson thought, Stop, stop, stop, stop. The phone at the other end began ringing, but no one answered.

  “Clearance canceled,” the commander said over the net. “Hold your fire, hold your fire.”

  “Pilot copies.”

  The commander picked up the phone. “We see ’em,” he said. Hung up.

  “Master arm off.”

  “Weapon safe.”

  The truck doors opened. Men got out. Some of the figures gathered around one who seemed to be in charge. He gestured and pointed with his left hand, held something in his right.

  It was a sword. Chaaku and his toy. The crosshairs centered on his head, guidance for weapons now disarmed.

  Parson kicked over his chair.

  “Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck this whole fucking war.”

  He put his hands on his hips, walked in a circle. Looked up at the cloth ceiling, down at the floor.

  “We had that bastard,” Parson said. “We had him.”

  “There could have been children in the trucks. They could always be anywhere around him,” Gold said.

  “I know it.”

  He met Gold’s eyes, glanced back at the screen. The Reaper circled, still watching the men put the boys through some kind of drill or exercise. One man passed out rifles to the kids standing in a row.

  Parson looked into her eyes again. Neither spoke. But he knew they were both thinking the same thing: We’re going to have to do this the hard way.

  23

  The operation would go down like a hostage rescue. Except Gold feared some of the hostages would be hostile. There was no way to know how many of the abducted kids had been indoctrinated enough to fire on their rescuers. The thought of returning fire at children sickened her. Yet she wanted to take part, to do anything in her power to help bring this thing to a close.

  Joint Special Operations Command took control of the op. When Gold first heard about that, she wondered if she and Parson might get left out of the action. Neither of them had ever been a special operator. But JSOC wanted Afghan involvement, and that brought Rashid and his crew—and their adviser and the adviser’s interpreter.

  Parson sat next to Gold in the mission brief at the Air Operations Center, a faded Air Mobility Command emblem on his flight suit. Blount and his Marines attended the meeting, along with Reyes and a few other Air Force types Gold had not met. A colonel led the briefing on video conference from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

  “We’re going to come at them in two ways,” the colonel said. “The Marines will make an Osprey-borne assault, along with some Afghan troops, and we’re also going to airdrop an Air Force Special Tactics Team.”

  “Sir, what are the blue-suiters for?” Blount asked. Glanced at Parson and Reyes. “No offense,” he added.

  “Air support will be limited due to the nature of the target,” the colonel said. “But we will have air assets on station just in case. You’ll have a combat controller to call down fire if it’s warranted, and Sergeant Reyes will handle the medical contingencies.”

  Medical contingencies. The military jargon pointed up the dangers of the mission. Gold wondered how many of the people around her would be dead or wounded tomorrow night.

  “If you can get Chaaku,�
�� the colonel said, “take him dead or alive. If you take him alive, Pakistan wants to extradite him.”

  “And then what happens?” Blount asked.

  “We don’t know,” the colonel said.

  “Probably release him,” Parson whispered.

  “We’d like to give Sergeant Major Gold a key role,” the colonel continued. “She’s done some fine work as Lieutenant Colonel Parson’s interpreter, but JSOC wants to borrow her.”

  Gold didn’t know what to make of that. Was she in trouble for her visit with Durrani? Probably not, if she was getting some key role, whatever that was. Parson looked at her. From his puzzled expression she knew he had no idea, either.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” Gold asked.

  “Sergeant Major, you are still HALO qualified and current, are you not?”

  “Yes, sir, I am.” Apparently, he’d checked her records.

  “We would like for you to jump in with the Special Tactics Team. You will carry an Icom radio like the ones used by Black Crescent and other insurgents. You will relay anything useful you hear.”

  Gold could hardly believe what she’d heard. It gave her new… purpose.

  Purpose.

  Something in life more important than contentment, than wealth. Even more important than happiness, to Gold. In certain moments of her career, she’d believed she understood exactly why her Maker had sent her here. Those moments had come less often of late. She’d questioned her role, her judgment, even her sanity. But now, as Parson might put it, she felt as if someone had pressed her master reset button.

  “I’d—I’d be honored, sir.” Parson wouldn’t like this, she knew. But it came from a JSOC full bird colonel, so even if Parson fought it he wouldn’t win. And it made operational sense. He’d come around to see that eventually, if he didn’t see it already.

  With a combat jump, Gold would earn a star on her jump wings. Though most paratroopers coveted that star, she gave little thought to decorations. But the opportunity to put all her skills into play gave her a sense of fulfillment she’d not felt in a long time. The mission still seemed dangerous; terribly so. But her awareness of the danger shrank in her consciousness the way pain shrank after a dose of Percodan. It was still there, but the proportions had changed.

  “You can draw whatever equipment you need from the Special Tactics Squadron there at Mazar,” the colonel said. “Just save your hand receipts for everything.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any questions, Sergeant Major?”

  “Uh—no, sir. Thank you for the opportunity.”

  “All right,” the colonel said, “let’s talk a little about tactics.” The colonel’s face disappeared from the screen, replaced by a topographical map of Kuh-e Qara Batur. “You’re going in a little after midnight.”

  Gold, Reyes, two Force Recon Marines, and an Air Force combat controller would begin the operation by parachuting from twenty thousand feet. On night vision goggles, they would observe the target area. Unless they saw something to speed up or delay the mission, the main force would come in by chopper and by Osprey a short time later. The spot where the trucks had parked now had a new name: Objective Sword.

  The colonel gave few specifics on what to expect after the main force landed. No intelligence agency possessed a layout of the bunker complex at Kuh-e Qara Batur. No way to tabletop what would happen next. As the colonel put it, the Marines would try to minimize hostage casualties in a kinetic action of unpredictable nature. Tear gas and flash-bangs. More lethal stuff when necessary.

  Gold understood what that meant, and it darkened her previously good mood. For the abducted kids—for Fatima’s brother, for Aamir’s son—the raid would be dangerous, too. Those who fired on the assaulting force would become combatants, lawful targets. Terrible even to think about it. Their captors might kill them. The whole place might be wired to explode.

  When the briefing ended, Gold went to check on Fatima. She couldn’t tell the child anything, of course, but she wanted to see her one more time before she left.

  Shadows were spreading through the rows of refugee tents. Gold felt the temperature dropping as darkness approached, and she thought how tomorrow night would answer prayers or shatter lives. Probably some of both.

  She found Fatima lying on her cot, drawing on a notepad. Apparently some well-traveled UN staffer had given her pencil and paper. The pencil bore the logo of the Hotel Splendide Royal in Rome.

  “You look very busy, Fatima,” Gold said in Pashto.

  “Sophia!” the girl cried. She stood up and hugged Gold. They sat together on the cot.

  “What brings you to work so hard?” Gold asked.

  “I am drawing pictures of the people here I know.” She flipped forward to the first page. “This one is you.”

  The drawing looked like those done by children all over the world. Little distinguished it from the refrigerator art of American kids, except it was all done in pencil for lack of crayons. The picture showed Gold holding a rifle, and the drawing emphasized her hair—depicted in a bun. Apparently Fatima had an eye for detail. She’d put in lines of scribble everywhere Gold wore an insignia: wavy circles for her jump wings and free-fall badge, bigger scrawl where the tapes read GOLD and U.S. ARMY. The face wasn’t smiling; Fatima had drawn a straight line for the mouth. Points for accuracy there, too, Gold had to admit. But she smiled now.

  “That is very good, Fatima,” she said. “I am flattered.”

  “What means this word, flattered?” Fatima asked.

  “It means you have honored me.”

  Fatima beamed, turned the page. “I also drew the giant soldier,” she said.

  Blount’s picture filled the sheet. Fatima had put tiny stick figures behind him, an exaggerated show of relative height. She had turned the pencil lead on its side and shaded the face to represent his dark skin. Clearly the girl remained fond of the gunnery sergeant who had carried her away from Ghandaki that awful night.

  “Do you remember his name?” Gold asked.

  Fatima shook her head.

  “Blount. Gunnery Sergeant Blount.”

  “Bloo-anht.” Two syllables.

  “Blount.”

  “Blutt.”

  “Close enough.”

  Fatima turned one more page. “I made a picture of your pilot friend, too,” she said.

  The girl had drawn a smile on Parson’s face. Now, why did he rate that? Well, he usually looked happy if he was flying and nothing went wrong. And in the picture, perhaps he was about to fly. Beside him, Fatima had drawn a rough helicopter—just an egg shape with a big sideways X for a main rotor and a small upright X for a tail rotor.

  After Parson’s drawing, the pad was clean. No pictures of her brother, her murdered mother. Too painful to think about, Gold imagined. Instinctively, the girl compartmentalized. A natural coping strategy for post-traumatic stress. That’s what Gold’s counselors had said, anyway.

  Gold thought of the remaining pages in that pad as the rest of Fatima’s life, unwritten. The shapes and colors to mark the unused sheets were impossible to predict. But tomorrow night would turn one more page.

  * * *

  In the twilight outside the Air Operations Center, Parson found Rashid sitting on a stack of sandbags. The Afghan pilot had the kneeboard he kept for making notes in flight. Its leg strap dangled, unbuckled. Rashid was using the kneeboard as a lap desk. He held a pen in his right hand. The heel of his left hand rested on his thigh, a lit cigarette between his fingers.

  “Can you see to write?” Parson asked.

  Rashid looked at him, maybe thinking through the casual American construction of Parson’s English sentence.

  “No longer,” Rashid said. He looked away. Put the cigarette in his mouth and took a drag. Across the entire apron, not a single aircraft ran engines. The red ember at the tip of Rashid’s cigarette brightened. Amid the deep quiet, Parson heard a crackle as the fire burned deeper into the tobacco.

  “What are you working on?�
��

  Rashid took the cigarette between his fingers again, exhaled the smoke. Stared beyond the tarmac. He waited so long to answer, Parson wondered if he’d heard the question.

  “Words to wife.”

  Parson knew Rashid was married, but the Afghan pilot had seldom spoken of family. Just that story about his father. And Parson had never known Rashid to write a letter to anybody. It took a moment for Parson to realize what his friend was doing.

  “That’s not a death letter, is it?”

  Rashid took another drag, nodded once.

  “Come on, man. Those things are bad luck.”

  Parson had known crew members to write those letters before. They would leave the letters in their quarters, or perhaps give them to someone on another crew. But he had never written one himself. Whenever he went on a mission, no matter how risky, he had every intention of coming back. Parson was more than willing to sacrifice himself for his friends, and he’d nearly done so more than once. But he started every new operation with the expectation of success and survival. Unlike Rashid, he didn’t have a wife. But he doubted he’d ever write such a letter even if he were married.

  Self-analysis had never been one of his skills. However, as he considered what he should say to Rashid, he felt the wide gulf of experience and culture that separated him from his Afghan friend. Most Americans, including Parson, were hardwired for optimism. It twisted through the double helix of their DNA.

  But in Afghanistan, each family had suffered the losses of conflict. And the deaths went back a lot further than the Soviet invasion. Parson remembered Sophia mentioning that a tribal war had taken place in just about every recorded decade. What would that history do to your view of life? Probably not incline you to assume everything would be all right.

  “If writing that letter settles your mind,” Parson said, “then do what you have to do.” He paused, let Rashid run through his internal translation. “Because tomorrow night,” he continued, “you and I are going to kick some ass.”

  Rashid dropped his cigarette. The glowing tip bounced onto the pavement, scattered sparks that burned out one by one. When only a single cinder remained, he crushed it out with the toe of his boot.