Gold sniffled, tried to regain her composure. “I do not think he is coming back, Fatima,” she said.
The girl’s shoulders quivered. For a moment she wept so hard, she could not speak. When she found words again, she asked, “Is he dead like Mama?”
“No, Fatima. We do not believe he is dead. But some very bad men took him.”
“Can you bring him back?”
Gold did not know what to say. She wanted to offer the girl some hope, but to offer false hope would be unforgivable.
“We will try,” she said finally. “But we do not even know where they took him.”
“Please bring him back. He wants to come home. He was crying when they took him away.”
Gold released Fatima from the embrace, then held her by the arms. “We will do all we can,” Gold said. “That is all I can promise.”
Even if some miracle brought the boy back, Gold could see little but misery in both children’s futures. Mortal life presented few crueler fates than that of an orphan in Afghanistan. At best, grinding poverty. At worst—Gold hated to think of the abuse that happened to kids of either sex.
“What is your brother’s name, Fatima?”
“Mohammed. He is Mohammed.”
Parson had remained near enough to listen. Gold knew he’d have understood not a word, but the situation required little interpreting. She half expected him to tell her not to get involved with one Afghan child; that wasn’t their mission. But he only watched and listened. A pool of darkness hid his face, so Gold could not judge his expression.
When she’d first met him years ago, he seemed insensitive, even profane. Then she saw how he bonded with friends and crewmates. Like most military men, he didn’t spend a lot of time talking about his feelings. But if he saw a threat to one of his own, he made his feelings clear through action—even violence. In the beginning, he blamed all of Afghanistan, all of Islam, for the loss of his C-130 crew. But now he loved some of the Afghans like brothers, though he’d never express it that way.
Above, the moon glowed bright like a coin of mottled fire. The planets of early evening joined it as cold points of silver. At the edge of the village, a few local men gathered where Reyes, Rashid, and the Marines had brought the dead.
“Do any of you know this child?” Gold asked.
No one answered. Rashid repeated the question, and the men pretended not to hear him. Gold wanted to slam the butt of her rifle into their cheekbones. Then she thought to herself: You’re thinking like Parson. At least they were taking responsibility for burying their imam.
“I guess we’re done here,” Parson said. He sounded tired, disappointed.
“Then I’ll get us a ride,” Blount said.
The Marine took out his PRC-148 and made a call. In his huge hands, the radio looked like a miniature model of itself. He used an antijamming system that hopped frequencies, and the voice that answered seemed to come from within a shaking echo chamber. Gold could make out only one word: “Inbound.”
“I guess the girl’s coming with us?” Reyes asked.
“Yeah,” Parson said.
“Let me tote her up to the field,” Blount said. “She’s been through enough today without having to walk up that hill.”
Fatima cowered, held on to Gold when the Marine bent toward her. “It is all right,” Gold said in Pashto. “He is my friend, and he is your friend.” Then she said in English, “Thanks, Sergeant. Just don’t put your hand on the top of her head.”
Blount searched his pockets until he came up with a Hershey’s bar. He unwrapped it and handed it to Fatima. Then he slung his rifle over his right arm and picked her up so that she sat on his left shoulder.
“I got one about this age back home in Beaufort,” he said.
Fatima ate as Blount carried her up the hill, away from the village. Gold doubted the girl had ever tasted chocolate before, but she showed little reaction to it.
In the grass field, a couple hundred yards from the burned-out hulk of the Mi-17, Blount set Fatima on the ground.
“Just sit tight, honey,” he said. “I gotta get ready for our ride to come in.” Then he added, “I don’t reckon you understand me, do you?”
By now, the girl seemed to have lost her fear of the gunnery sergeant, who must have looked to her like a giant from a fairy tale. Fatima listened to him speak as if she did understand, but when Blount busied himself with something in his rucksack, she moved over to Gold and looked up quizzically.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Mazar-i-Sharif,” Gold said. “Have you ever been there?”
“No.”
Fatima had probably never traveled half a klick out of her village. The rest of the child’s life would turn on this night, and Gold wondered what events were being set into motion.
Blount found what he was looking for in his ruck. He pulled out four chemical light sticks, sliced open their wrapping with his KA-BAR knife. Using his thumb and forefinger, he bent the first one until the glass vial inside the plastic tubing popped. The two chemicals flowed into each other to form a radiance of neon blue, and Gold thought it looked like a tiny molecular re-creation of the pulsars and quasars above. Starlight writ small. Blount repeated the process with the other three chem lights. He walked the field and dropped the light sticks to form an inverted Y landing signal.
After a few minutes, Gold became aware of a distant buzz, like the thrum of a cicada but in a lower key. The sound slipped in underneath the night, and she realized she’d heard it for several seconds before it registered in her mind.
A warbling came from Blount’s radio. He pressed a talk switch and said, “The LZ is cold, sir.”
Gold wasn’t wearing night vision goggles, but in the moon’s glow she could still pick out the shape of the Osprey. It flew with all strobes and nav lights off, a black shadow against the sky.
As the aircraft approached to land, Gold shielded Fatima’s eyes from the blowing grit. The Osprey touched down, and Blount spoke again into his radio, turned up the volume. He gave a thumbs-up to Parson. This time Parson picked up Fatima.
Blount led the way around to the Osprey’s open ramp. Gold walked behind the dim outlines of Parson and Fatima, Reyes and Rashid. She sat on the nylon webbing of a troop seat and turned her rifle muzzle down so any accidental discharge wouldn’t strike a rotor.
The Osprey rose into the air. Closed off in the privacy of darkness and engine noise, Gold fought back tears, managed to compose herself. If she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, she’d make post the operative word. Deal with it later. Now she had a job to do. And it involved a new kind of enemy.
The makeshift command post at Mazar reminded Parson of the early days of the Afghanistan war: plywood walls, folding chairs. Permanent headquarters had grown up in Kabul and at the big air bases. Kandahar airfield, with all its new hangars, would have been unrecognizable to troops who hadn’t seen it since the start of the war.
But with a new crisis centered in the north of the country, the evolution of a military presence started over at the beginning, with tents, cheap wood, and HESCO barriers. The CP door even had a makeshift counterweight to keep it pulled closed: a plastic water bottle filled with sand, strung up by parachute cord.
Parson had made an initial report to intel last night when they’d landed. Now, this morning, he wanted to debrief more thoroughly. He joined Rashid and an American intel officer in a secure teleconference with Task Force at Bagram and with CENTCOM headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. It was seven in the morning at Mazar, and at MacDill, nine and a half hours behind, it was nine thirty at night. Parson had put on the same flight suit he’d worn yesterday, and it smelled like smoke and sweat. The officers on the TV screen in front of him wore clean ABU fatigues.