The Renegades Read online

  After the phone call, Parson found Rashid and his crew. “They want us to check Ghandaki,” he said. “We have some American PJs we can take with us, and I got an interpreter you’re gonna like.”

  “PJs?” Rashid asked.

  “Pararescue jumpers,” Parson explained. “Badass medics.”

  Parson reminded himself to stop throwing acronyms at Rashid. The guy was smart, but he had a hard enough time with standard English, let alone Air Force jargon. Rashid probably didn’t know what badass meant, either.

  Reyes and another PJ, Sergeant Burlingame, brought a wheeled cage filled with equipment out to the Mi-17. Parson helped them lift it into the chopper. When he raised his end of the cage, it felt like it weighed at least a couple hundred pounds. Inside it, he saw a crash ax, a sledgehammer, a power saw, and some other items he did not recognize.

  “What the hell is this?” Parson asked.

  “A REDS kit,” Reyes said. “Rapid extrication tools. We use it for pulling you flyboys out of wreckage. But it’ll help get people out of collapsed buildings, too.”

  Rashid looked on with a puzzled expression. Gold spoke in rapid-fire Pashto, and Rashid said in English, “That is very…” Then he and Gold had another exchange in Pashto.

  “Impressive,” Gold said finally.

  “Yes,” Rashid said. “That is very impressive.”

  “If you ever need a PJ,” Parson said, “it means you’re in a world of hurt.”

  Rashid nodded, but he didn’t look like he really understood until Gold translated. Then he said, “I fear many Afghans are in hurt.”

  “Yeah,” Parson said. “We might as well go find out.” He pulled on his flak vest, clicked its snaps into place. Then he put his arms through the sleeves of his Nomex jacket and zipped it over the vest. Now he wore protection from both fire and shrapnel.

  Rashid and his copilot and flight engineer strapped into the cockpit and donned their white helmets. Parson, Gold, and the two PJs buckled into troop seats in the back.

  The Afghans spoke just a few words on interphone, and the two Klimov engines spun up. Parson did not understand the terse conversation, but it didn’t sound like enough talk for a proper engine start checklist. He’d have to work on their checklist discipline: Someday these guys might go on to fly more advanced aircraft, and you didn’t just jump into an Apache and fire it up from memory like starting a Chevy. But for now, the fine points would have to wait.

  As the rotors increased speed, Parson felt the vibration in his molars. He’d never get used to that. He’d spent his career in machines that rode the air. This one beat it into submission.

  The Mi-17 lifted off, lowered its nose, gathered speed, climbed. Through the door on the left side, Parson could see the refugee camp and then the city of Mazar as Rashid made a turn to the southeast. The helo’s shadow flew across the ground ahead of the aircraft like its own disembodied spirit.

  Wind whipped a few strands of blond hair across Gold’s face. She raised her right hand and brushed them away with her index finger. When she caught Parson looking at her, she did not change her expression, though he felt her lean into his side. Perhaps she was just cold, but he took it as a gesture of affection—one she could get away with here.

  The gesture gave him a warm turn in the pit of his stomach. Parson didn’t know where this relationship was going. But he liked it that a woman he respected so much would treat him with that kind of familiarity.

  She still looked good. Parson knew she was pushing forty, though he didn’t know her exact age. But the Airborne kept her fit. The lines around her eyes looked just a little deeper now, but that was all right. Someone so well-conditioned could remain attractive all her life.

  The helicopter leveled, and Parson stretched to look over the flight engineer’s shoulder into the cockpit. All three crew members seemed to peer outside. So they were navigating from memory, too. A bad habit. A good way to get lost. And at night, a good way to fly into a mountain.

  Parson pressed his talk switch and said, “Charts, Rashid.”

  “Sorry.”

  Rashid spoke to his copilot in Pashto, and the copilot said something back. Gold smiled. The copilot opened a VFR chart and clipped it to his kneeboard.

  “What?” Parson said, off interphone.

  “He says you are like a hawk that sees everything,” Gold said.

  “They’re good guys. I keep on them because I want them to live.”

  The terrain changed as it flowed underneath the chopper. The brown plateau of Mazar gave way to green patches of agriculture. In one field tucked into the cove of a hill, Parson saw scattered purple and white flowers—the telltale blooms of opium poppies. Most of the harvest had already ended. Maybe the guy wanted a late second crop. Sometimes Parson wished he could find an American or European drug user, beat the shit out of him, then show him photos of Taliban atrocities and tell him his money paid for the bullets and blades.

  The opium field receded into the distance. It gave way to more hills, then a village.

  “That’s Ghandaki,” Rashid said over interphone. The aircraft slowed and banked. Parson saw part of the village flash by under the crew chief’s door gun. He unbuckled his seat belt and rose to look out a window.

  It could be hard to assess damage from the air, even from a low and slow helicopter. An exploded home or a cratered courtyard might have been bombed yesterday or in 1984. Parson found it tough to distinguish war destruction from earthquake damage in these mud-brick towns. He had spent his career as an airlifter; he knew little of aerial surveillance. But even Parson could see Ghandaki had just lost its mosque.

  He saw the collapsed dome, the toppled minarets. Judging by the brick walls that remained, Parson figured it a crude structure—nothing like the Blue Mosque in Mazar—but surely the best Ghandaki could afford.

  Rashid and his crew chattered in their language. Gold furrowed her brow and checked her watch. She got up and looked outside.

  “It might have been full of men praying,” she said.

  The Mi-17 made a low pass. Below, villagers climbed over the rubble. Some waved their arms. Men wearing pakol berets and white prayer caps pulled at lumber and crumbled masonry. They worked with only their bare hands.

  “Put us down there, sir,” Reyes said.

  “All right,” Parson said. “Rashid, did you copy that?”

  When Rashid didn’t answer, Parson looked to Gold for help. But then Rashid said, “I search for place to land.”

  Parson leaned forward to peer out the cockpit windscreen. Rashid had his work laid out for him. The mosque—or what was left of it—lay within the cut of a mountain stream. Mud huts surrounded it. A steep hillside dotted with scrub rose above the town. No spot within a half mile looked clear and level enough to serve as a landing zone.

  Rashid twisted the grip throttle on the collective and pulled back on the cyclic. The helicopter cleared the hill, then turned back toward the mosque. Parson didn’t consider the Mi-17 the best-designed aircraft he’d ever seen, but the damn thing had power. And unlike some U.S. aircraft, it wasn’t junked up with electronic components from every congressional district. The Russians clearly intended a simple machine, maintained easily at a forward base by Ivan the mechanic with his vodka hangover. Perfect for Afghanistan.

  The PJs looked out, and Reyes sized up the problem. “Sir,” he said, “if they can give us a good hover, we’ll put the REDS kit down on its lowering harness.”

  Parson raised his eyebrows at Gold, and she translated. Rashid gave a thumbs-up. The crew did not have much experience with helicopter suspension techniques, but Rashid was qualified, and he seemed game. They all needed to learn to think on the fly, literally, so they might as well start now.

  The last time Parson and Gold had flown together, he’d certainly needed to think beyond any normal procedures. He’d mustered all the know-how he and his crew could find to crash-land a jet crippled by a terrorist bomb, and he still carried the scars. Like elderly people wh
ose arthritis got worse when it rained, Parson’s leg ached whenever the altimeter setting was low. He wondered if Gold carried scars, too. She had none he could see, but the invisible ones could be just as bad.

  Reyes clipped a carabiner to a tie-down ring on the floor of the helicopter. He attached another to the top of the cage that contained the REDS kit. Then he looped a bight of rope around a figure-eight belay device and attached the figure-eight to the carabiner on the REDS cage. Parson, a lifelong outdoorsman and hunter, remembered mountain climbers used a similar belay system to protect themselves from falls.

  The PJs placed suspension harnesses around their waists, and they moved the REDS cage near the door. Rashid pulled into a hover near the collapsed mosque, and dust began to swirl below. The chopper seemed to sway for a few seconds, but then Rashid stabilized his hover. When Reyes was satisfied he had a steady platform, he called, “Ropes.” He and his partner positioned the REDS kit out the door and lowered it to the ground.

  Then the two pararescuemen looped lines through their own belay gear. They stood in the door, facing inside the Mi-17, with their boots on the bottom edge of the door frame. Both men braked their rappelling lines by holding the ropes behind their backs. In unison, they brought their hands forward, bent their knees, swung themselves outward, and descended down the lines.

  After the men reached the ground, Parson unclipped the lines, dropped them, and said on interphone, “Ropes are clear.” Just as he saw the PJs remove their gloves and unstrap their harnesses, Rashid climbed away.

  “There is a field outside of the town,” Rashid said. “I land there.”

  “Copy that,” Parson said. “You guys stay with the aircraft, and Sergeant Major Gold and I will walk to the mosque.”

  Rashid acknowledged with a double click of his interphone button. Another bad habit, but Parson tolerated this one. It meant I heard you and understand.

  2

  As the helicopter descended into the field, dry carostan grass undulated in the rotor wash. The wind blast seemed to turn the blades of grass to liquid, flowing in waves the color of mocha. The sight made Gold a little dizzy. She brought her eyes back inside the aircraft to give her brain and inner ear something that made more sense.

  The crew chief watched the ground and talked Rashid down. “Ten meters, sir,” he said. Heavy Pashtun accent. Gold wondered if numbers were the only English words he knew. She just hoped he could count down accurately. “Five meters. Two. One.”

  The chopper settled tentatively, as if it did not trust the stability of the earth. But when the rotors slowed, the machine finally surrendered to gravity. All pitching and rolling motion ended, and Gold realized Rashid had made as smooth a helicopter touchdown as she’d ever felt.

  The fliers shut down the engines. The only noises that remained were the metallic clinks of harness buckles unlocked and dropped to the floor. The crew chief and flight engineer rose from their seats, climbed down the boarding steps, and stood guard outside the helo with their AK-47s. Ghandaki wasn’t considered particularly dangerous, but Gold appreciated that they took no chances.

  Rashid removed his helmet and took off his gloves. The helmet left his black hair matted, and he ran his fingers through his hair. He placed the heel of his hand on the edge of the main panel, pushed himself out of his seat, and sat in the back with Gold and Parson.

  “Have you known Lieutenant Colonel Parson for a long time?” Rashid asked in Pashto.

  “We have been through much together,” Gold said.

  “If you are his friend, then you are my sister.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Rashid unzipped a leg pocket on his American-style flight suit. He withdrew a half-empty pack of Camels, shook out a cigarette, and held it between his fingers.

  “Rashid,” Parson said, “you guys just hang out—I mean, stay here. Gold and I will go to the mosque.”

  “We stay,” Rashid said.

  Parson took his Beretta out of his thigh rig. He checked the weapon, holstered it, then picked up his helmet bag and satphone. The helmet bag didn’t look particularly heavy, and Gold realized it didn’t actually contain a helmet since Parson preferred to use a headset. She noticed all the patches sewn onto the bag’s nylon exterior: OPERATION JOINT FORGE, OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM, OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM, OPERATION UNIFIED PROTECTOR. Missions in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. An unofficial patch, too: TERRORIST HUNTING PERMIT. He tromped down the boarding steps and into the grass. His limp was a little more apparent, maybe because he’d just stood up. Gold lifted her rifle, exited behind Parson, and slung the M4 across her shoulder. Rashid came out last, placed the cigarette between his teeth, and fired it up with a Bic lighter.

  “Tell him those things will kill him,” Parson said.

  Gold translated, and Rashid said, “Something else will get me first.” He exhaled twin plumes of smoke from his nostrils and looked into the distance.

  His fatalism saddened Gold, but didn’t surprise her. So many Afghans adopted that same outlook. Yet they got up every day and did whatever they did.

  “Let’s go see what we got down there,” Parson said.

  Parson led the way through the field of knee-high carostan. The mere sight of him walking ahead of her brought back a particular hell: Following Parson through the snow, pursued by the Taliban, dragging along a prisoner. Fear and pain twisting through her like a chronic sickness.

  She stopped. Looked around at the mountains. Parson looked back at her. “You coming?” he said.

  “I’m all right.”

  She glanced at the finger she’d injured in the HALO jump. The nail was starting to grow back. Parson said nothing else, just waited for her to catch up.

  At the edge of the field, Gold saw a group of women by the stream. The women were wrapping a body in a white shroud. Afghans did not embalm their dead, and they preferred to conduct the burial by sundown on the day of death. Gold supposed the women had just washed the corpse. The deceased must have been female; otherwise, men would have done the job.

  Two of the women looked over at Gold. When she met their eyes it felt like regarding a person’s reflection in a pool of water, staring at someone not really there. She wondered about their stories; everyone in Afghanistan had lost someone to war and disaster. And to whatever extent Afghan life was hellish, it was doubly so for females. Gold knew mullahs who preached that a woman found her place in the home or in the grave.

  The grind of an electric saw rose from the mosque. From a distance of a couple hundred yards, Gold saw only the outer courtyard walls. Apparently the pararescuemen had opened their gear and gone to work. When Gold and Parson entered the courtyard, they found Reyes cutting into a wooden beam amid the jumble of bricks and stones. Nearby, Burlingame shone a light into the eyes of a man lying on the ground.

  Nothing remained of the mosque’s structure. The building had collapsed so completely that Gold could not distinguish one room from another. Only the courtyard walls survived, and not without damage: Chunks of stone and mortar had fallen away, and one section appeared warped, as if the earth had somehow exerted torque from underneath.

  Villagers dressed in shalwar kameez climbed through the rubble. Several small boys wandered among the adults, along with one girl who looked about eleven. Wails came from underneath the rocks, audible even over the cordless saw. The cries of the unseen trapped carried special poignancy. Discarnate voices of pain.

  The locals showed no open hostility. Infidels were forbidden to enter a mosque, but nothing remained to enter. And the Americans had obviously come to help. Still, Gold felt a few hard glares when the Afghan men noticed her hair tied in a bun.

  “Salaam,” Gold said to the girl. The child’s almond eyes widened as she stared. It wasn’t likely she’d met a foreigner before, Gold thought, let alone a foreign woman who spoke her language. Gold asked, “May we speak to the imam?”

  “God willing, you may,” the child said. “But he is trapped. Are you an American?”


  “I am,” Gold said. “My name is Sophia. What is your name?”

  “Fatima.”

  Fatima’s shoulder-length hair shined a deep black. Evidently someone cared enough about her to wash and cut it. The girl seemed to be uninjured, and she moved with the grace of an ibex. Another of Afghanistan’s special tragedies: The girls could look so beautiful, but then age hit them early like a sudden illness. Gold marveled that Fatima was so well-spoken. A candle flame of intelligence that some here would like to extinguish.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “My mama is at home. My papa died a long time ago. My brother is over there.” She pointed to the boys lifting stones out of the ruins.

  Gold expected the girl to run off and join the other children. Most Afghan kids were painfully shy. But Fatima followed Gold around at a respectful distance, perhaps trying to understand the strange sight of a blond woman dressed like a man, carrying a rifle, and walking around as if she had every right to appear outside her home.

  More cries came from within the rubble. “How many people are in there?” Parson asked. He had to shout over the noise of the saw.

  Reyes eased off the trigger, and the saw hushed. “I’ve heard five or six,” he said. “The locals have pulled one out already.”

  “You guys are going to need some help,” Parson said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Parson took out his satphone and began punching numbers. Reyes went back to work with the saw, and its cacophony filled the courtyard again. Beyond him, three dead lay under blankets. Gold felt sick to her stomach; the scene appeared like a vision of hell from some woodcut image out of the Dark Ages: crushed bodies, slicing blades, religious symbols broken.

  Some of Gold’s own nightmares looked a bit like that, and recently the bad scenes even came during waking hours. Intrusive memories, the counselors called them. Remembrances of things past with a motive force of their own, returning unbidden and unwanted. Things like Parson’s beheaded crewmate, found in an insurgent hideout. Her favorite student, Mahsoud, getting a field amputation in the ruins of the police training center.