The wounded copilot looked on from a troop seat. He said in Pashto, “The lieutenant colonel is still like a hawk. He sees what must be done.” Gold nodded in agreement but said nothing.
“Let’s go keep Rashid company,” Parson said to Gold.
At that moment, she didn’t feel like facing someone else’s pain. But it was part of her job. She picked up her rifle and followed Parson outside. The copilot came with them and sat in the grass beside Burlingame. The wounded PJ was sitting up, wrapping a new bandage around his leg. His bleeding seemed to be under control, so Gold figured the bullet must have missed his femoral artery. Rashid stood and stared into the hills, his helmet in his left hand and his pistol in his right.
“I am very sorry about your crewman,” Gold said to Rashid in Pashto.
“When he first enlisted he could barely read,” Rashid said. “He came to know this machine the way a mullah knows the Quran.”
“Perhaps he has found paradise,” Gold said.
“God willing. But we need him here.”
Gold wanted to say something by way of consolation. Before she found the words, a rhythmic pulsing rose in the distance, like the beat of a helicopter, but with a slightly higher frequency. The thrumming grew louder.
“What is that?” Rashid asked in English.
“Our Osprey,” Parson said. “The jarheads are here.”
“Must be a TRAP team,” Burlingame said.
“They are trapped?” Rashid said.
“No,” Parson answered. “Tactical recovery of aircraft and personnel.”
“Almost as good as pararescue,” Burlingame said. He shifted his weight onto one hip, shut his eyes for a moment.
When the Osprey appeared just above a ridgeline, its twin rotors made Gold think of the wings of a dragonfly skimming a millpond back home in Vermont. The aircraft began descending toward the field. Two helicopter gunships accompanied it: wasps guarding the dragonfly. Gold eventually recognized them as Cobra attack choppers.
The gunships remained aloft as the Osprey landed. They circled the village and the field in a show of force, but they did not fire. Dust and blades of dry grass swirled through the air as the Osprey settled to the ground. On its open ramp, a crew chief manned a machine gun mounted on a pintle. A belt of ammunition fed into the weapon from one side, and a black hose for catching empty brass extended from the other.
Gold squinted and turned her head from the blast of wind. When the gale subsided, she looked up to see Marines pouring off the Osprey’s ramp. She knew they’d make no assumptions about who was friendly, so she pointed her rifle away from them and kept her hand off the trigger.
The TRAP team set up a perimeter: Riflemen dropped to the ground in a semicircle around the Mi-17, weapons aimed out at anything that might approach it. A few of the Marines trotted over to the helicopter.
“What do you have, sir?” a gunnery sergeant asked Parson. The gunny was the biggest human being Gold had ever seen. A black man well over six feet, maybe just shy of three hundred pounds, and none of it fat. Fingers the size of .50 cal cartridges. Arms like the cypress roots in the lakes near Fort Bragg. Accent of the Deep South. His name was Blount.
“Four dead Afghan nationals inside the Mi-17,” Parson said. “That American PJ over there has a gunshot wound to the leg. The Afghan flier sitting next to him is also hurt. More wounded in the aircraft.”
“Aye, sir,” Blount said.
“There’s something else,” Gold said. She explained about the gunfire and screams heard from down in the village.
“We’ll evac the wounded, and we’ll leave some Marines to do a recon down there,” Blount said.
“This is my interpreter, Sergeant Major Gold,” Parson said. “We’ll go into the town with you. I tried to get some help in here even before we got lit up, but nobody was available.”
“There’s problems all over the place with the aftershocks,” Blount said. “We were headed somewhere north of Mazar, but we got diverted when y’all called in under fire.”
One of the TRAP members examined Burlingame’s leg wound. The medic wore the chevrons of a Navy petty officer—a hospital corpsman. His sleeves were rolled up in the Marine Corps style, and as he treated Burlingame, Gold saw a blue tattoo on the inside of his forearm: a column of names, all of them sergeants and lance corporals. Fallen comrades, Gold supposed. Nine of them.
The corpsman rolled Burlingame onto a litter, and Gold helped carry him into the Osprey. As she maneuvered her end of the litter up the steel ramp, she noticed the inside of the aircraft still smelled like a new car. Strange, modern war.
Gold and the corpsman, along with Parson and Reyes, loaded the wounded Afghans aboard the Marine aircraft one by one. Rashid’s copilot walked on board, assisted by the crew chief.
“We will fly together again,” Rashid told the two Afghan fliers.
“Inshallah,” the copilot said.
With all the patients transferred to the Osprey, Parson went forward into the cockpit and conferred with the pilots. Gold couldn’t follow the conversation, but the pilots also seemed to be talking on the radio. Then they’d speak to Parson again. He shrugged, then nodded. Finally he gave a thumbs-up.
When he returned through the back of the Osprey, he said, “If you have anything left in the helicopter, go ahead and get it now.”
“Why?” Gold asked.
“The Cobras are going to blow it.”
Gold understood. She’d heard from air cav and medevac soldiers about helicopters disabled by enemy fire. If you couldn’t fix it quickly and fly it out, you destroyed it. That way the enemy wouldn’t get any use out of the parts or intel out of the electronics.
Parson retrieved his headset and helmet bag from the chopper, and Gold picked up her rucksack. Reyes gathered the medical gear he’d scattered while working on the wounded. Rashid never spoke as they moved the dead well away from his aircraft, and he never entered the helicopter. Parson picked up Rashid’s checklist binder and flight bag. When they were finished, nothing lay on the floor of the Mi-17 but smears of blood.
“The snake drivers want us way down the hill,” Parson said. “That’ll keep us away from any debris that goes flying.”
Blount and four other Marines led the way out of the field, toward the village. Gold, Parson, Rashid, and Reyes followed. Gold looked back over her shoulder to see the Osprey’s crew chief jog over to the Mi-17. Still wearing his flight helmet, cord dangling from his shoulder, the Marine flier climbed aboard and satisfied himself that no one remained inside. Then he ran back to his own aircraft.
A few moments later, the Osprey’s rotors picked up speed. Gold felt the staccato beat vibrate through her rib cage as the MV-22 levitated into the air like a helicopter. The Osprey rocked slightly, rotated into the wind, and accelerated. As the aircraft climbed and gathered speed, its nacelles tilted forward until the rotors positioned themselves like giant propellers. Now the tilt-rotor flew as a fixed-wing airplane. It grew smaller and smaller until absorbed by the cumulus that cloaked the horizon to the north.
The thick grass made for difficult walking even downhill. Blount bulldozed through it more easily than the rest; the rustling blades came up above Gold’s knees but only to Blount’s calves. The Marine wore a combat utility uniform in MARPAT digital camo. He carried a Squad Advanced Marksman Rifle, a scoped M16 larger than Gold’s M4 carbine.
Parson followed close behind the Marines. From the set of his jaw, Gold could see he was angry—at the loss of Rashid’s flight engineer, at the destruction of an aircraft. She knew how deeply he felt the loss of his own crew years ago, and she could imagine what must be going through his mind.
Reyes seemed to take it all in stride. He scanned to the left and right, held his index finger across the trigger guard of his rifle, took long steps through the grass. Gold didn’t know him, and she’d had little contact with Air Force pararescuemen; she’d met them only on a few HALO training jumps. But she knew PJs were taught to expect anything and assume nothing when they parachuted or rappelled to reach a downed pilot or wounded soldier. A patch Velcroed under the flag on his left sleeve displayed his blood type: AB POS.