Parson wondered what was going on. Why hadn’t they been overrun? A lightly armed aircrew on an exposed hillside made for an easy target. But the firefight seemed to have ended, though something was still happening down the hill.
He glanced over his shoulder at the aircraft. The RPG had torn open the right engine cowling, ripped away the accessory gearbox, and damaged the main rotor. The Mi-17 wasn’t going anywhere soon.
“Colonel Parson?” Gold called from the other side of the chopper.
“I’m good, Sophia,” he shouted. “You?”
“Yes, sir. But the flight engineer is dead. The copilot’s wounded.”
Parson checked Burlingame. The injured PJ was trying to pull something out of his medical kit.
“I got gauze pads in here,” he said. “Put some pressure on both sides of the wound.”
Parson found the pads and opened them. He placed them over the entrance and exit wounds, and he pressed down. Blood soaked through the pads and into the fabric of Parson’s flight gloves. The PJ grimaced but did not cry out.
“Reyes,” Parson called. “Your buddy’s hit.”
“How bad?” Reyes shouted from inside the helicopter.
“Shot in the leg.”
“Stop the bleeding as best you can,” Reyes yelled. “The preacher’s hit bad in here.”
Parson found a triangular bandage in Burlingame’s medical ruck. He tied it around the PJ’s leg, over both gauze pads. By now the dressings were saturated with blood.
“Just put fresh bandages over the old ones,” Burlingame said. He spoke like a man overtired. Parson supposed the blood loss was starting to affect him. Red smears darkened the grass beaten down around the PJ. The reddened blades of carostan reminded Parson of the blood spoor he’d once followed when tracking a wounded elk.
He tied on more gauze pads. The bleeding slowed. “Are you going to be all right if I make a radio call?” Parson asked.
“Yeah, just leave me my rifle.”
Burlingame sat up, still in obvious pain. Parson handed him the weapon. Rashid walked up to Parson, removed his helmet.
“Please get help for my men,” he said. The Afghan pilot’s eyes glistened. The lines in his face seemed deeper.
“I will, buddy.” Parson knew all too well how Rashid felt. Years ago, Parson’s C-130 had been shot down in the midst of the worst blizzard Afghanistan had ever recorded. He managed to survive with Gold and their prisoner, but all his crewmates had died. The hurt remained with Parson as if the crash had just happened.
When Parson stepped inside the helicopter, he saw Reyes examining the imam. The old man had been shot in the side, and Gold held a bandage on the wound.
“Don’t die on me, grandpa,” Reyes said. “I worked my ass off to dig you out.”
Gold looked at Parson as he stepped around the flight engineer’s body, but she did not speak. Rashid’s copilot held pressure on a wound to his own arm.
Parson’s boot slipped in the blood on the floor. He nearly fell, but he caught himself against the cockpit bulkhead. He gathered up his headset, lowered himself into the pilot’s seat, and plugged the headset into a comm cord.
On that unfamiliar helicopter panel, it took Parson a second to find the control head for the UHF radio. Blood stuck to the frequency selector. The radio and all the avionics remained powered up as if the Mi-17 still waited to fly. Parson pressed the talk switch on the cyclic.
“Mayday, mayday,” he called. “Any aircraft. Golay Six-Four is down. Enemy fire.”
To his relief, an answer came quickly: “Golay Six-Four, Cyclops One-Eight. Go ahead.”
“Cyclops,” Parson said, “we are an Mi-17 with about ten wounded U.S. and Afghan personnel.” Parson followed up with his location, and he described the injuries. “Who am I talking to?” he added.
“Cyclops is an RC-135 on station.”
A Rivet Joint bird. A Boeing filled with electronic eavesdropping gear. Not the first aircraft Parson expected to reach in the midst of an earthquake recovery, but he’d take any help he could get.
A few moments later, the Rivet Joint called back. “Golay,” the pilot said, “be advised an MV-22 is inbound your position.”
“Golay copies,” Parson said. So the Marines were on the way in an Osprey. Maybe once the wounded got out, he could learn what the hell had happened in the village.
Parson turned off the APU and kept the radio alive with battery power. No sense tormenting the injured with that turbine screaming. And this way, the crew could hear better if those insurgent bastards tried to sneak up on them again.
The silence felt strange. Nothing but the whimpers of the patients and the grainy hum of UHF. In the quiet, Parson thought he heard distant thunder. Then he realized nothing could have come out of that clear sky but an air strike. Around the natural disaster, the war went on both near and far. Pain did not stop for pain.
3
Gold kept direct pressure on the imam’s wound like Reyes had told her. She held little hope for the man’s survival. Judging by the angle of entrance, the bullet might have ripped through his lungs. Pink foam flecked his lips. Reyes performed a chin lift to help the imam breathe. Then he moved on to the other wounded. Triage, Gold realized. He doesn’t think the imam will make it.
The old man’s eyes grew glassy. He stopped bleeding. In a few minutes, Reyes came back, put two fingers to the imam’s throat, shone a light into his pupils. “He’s gone,” Reyes said.
Gold ripped the soaked compress off the wound, slapped it onto the floor. Blood dripped from her fingertips. Some of it had seeped under her nails and formed burgundy stains as if she’d dug barehanded into red soil. She wiped her fingers on her ACU trousers.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I thought the old guy was home free when we got him out,” Reyes said.
There’s no such thing as home free, Gold thought. But why had the insurgents attacked now? Couldn’t they see this was a relief operation?
In her training, she’d studied not just language but religions and cultures. Her own faith and interests led her deeper into philosophy and theology. And as she looked down at the imam, she thought of an old Talmudic teaching: To take one life is to kill the whole world.
Beside him lay two other patients who had died in the RPG explosion. One had no fresh wounds that Gold could see; he was just dead. The other had a metal fragment the size of an ax blade embedded in the flesh under his chin, and the blood had gushed out of him in such quantity that he appeared to have been dipped in red. She looked away, but it was no use. Some things, once seen, could never be unseen.
But she still had a mission to accomplish. The dead needed to be taken back to the village as soon as it was safe. Their families would want to bury them today, if possible. That burial might prove difficult; Gold could already feel night’s approach as shadows climbed the mountains. And until help arrived, Parson and the crew couldn’t leave the wounded.
Gold wondered what they might find in the village. The bad guys should have pressed the attack when they’d disabled the helicopter. They could have murdered all the crew and passengers. But they’d chosen not to, and there had to be a reason.
Up front, Parson stopped fiddling with the radio. He took off his headset, unplugged it, and placed it on the center console. Muttering curses, he climbed out of the pilot’s seat and stood over the flight engineer’s body. To get out during the firefight, Rashid had pushed the engineer off the jump seat. The engineer lay sprawled on his back with a single gunshot wound to the upper chest. The engineer’s helmet remained in place, its boom mike still positioned above lifeless lips. Parson unzipped his jacket and placed it over the dead flier’s face.