Fatima shook her head. Gold held her hand, tried to smile at her. No telling how the horrors of yesterday affected the girl. Not even an adult should have to witness the things she’d seen. Gold wasn’t sure what else to say, so she just sat with Fatima to keep her company. After several minutes, Fatima finally spoke.
“Is my brother here?”
The sadness in that question struck Gold with tactile force. Her palms grew clammy. She felt that clutch of anxiety in her chest, the same burning under the breastbone that came when bad memories intruded on the present.
“He is not, Fatima. We do not know where Mohammed is.”
Gold struggled for more words. Then Parson came into the tent. He was dressed to fly. Body armor over his flight suit, survival vest over the armor. The weight of the gear seemed to make his limp more pronounced. Gold felt unaccountably glad to see him at this moment, as if the weapons and gadgets in his pockets offered some kind of deliverance.
“How’s she doing?” Parson asked.
“About like you’d expect. She’s asking for Mohammed.”
Gold rubbed the back of Fatima’s hand, thought her skin was the color of the pistachios that grew in the orchards around Mazar. Fatima looked up at Parson, then at Gold.
“Is that man your husband?” she asked.
Gold half smiled. “No, Fatima.”
“Is he your brother?”
“No. Well, no,” Gold said. “He is a military officer. We work together. He brought you here to keep you safe.”
Parson seemed to realize they were talking about him. He kneeled beside the cot to be at Fatima’s eye level. Gold could see scratches in the back of his neck from the RPG attack yesterday. Shards flung by the blast had left claw marks still red and raw. The wounds weren’t serious, but they had apparently bled a little since Parson’s shower in the latrine trailer that morning. He smelled of soap, though he wore a dirty uniform. Gold knew he’d been busy, and she supposed all his other flight suits were balled up unwashed in a laundry bag.
“Hello, Fatima,” he said.
“Salaam,” Fatima said.
Parson stood and said, “They’ve already assigned Rashid to another aircraft and crew. We’re taking some bags of rice to a refugee camp over in Samangan Province.”
“I’ll get my things,” Gold said.
“Don’t rush. We still have some flight planning to do. Just meet us in command post.”
Gold found one of the UN staff, a French nurse, and told her about Fatima. The nurse agreed to keep an eye on her, but Gold could see the medical workers were busy. The Mazar refugee camp already held about two hundred occupants, and it wasn’t hard to imagine two hundred personal tragedies like Fatima’s. Some refugees wore casts and bandages; some stared at the tent walls as if catatonic; a few wailed aloud.
In her own tent, Gold donned her MOLLE gear, the field vest that carried her hydration pack, ammo, and other equipment. She checked the magazine in her rifle and the three spare magazines that were snapped and Velcroed into pouches of heavy-duty nylon. Gold opened another pocket to make sure she had sunglasses, a rainproof writing pad, and her two black ballpoint pens labeled SKILCRAFT—U.S. GOVERNMENT. She tied her hair in a tight bun, put on her Kevlar helmet, and headed across the tarmac to command post.
In the flight planning room, she found Parson and Rashid poring over a chart spread across a card table. Parson clenched a blue highlighter marker between his teeth. Gold wasn’t trained to use aeronautical charts, but she noticed he’d drawn a course line that zigged and zagged.
“The scenic route to Samangan?” she asked. Samangan was the next province over to the southeast.
Parson removed the highlighter from his mouth and said, “The minimum risk route. A couple of Mi-17s have come back with bullet holes since yesterday.”
“Anyone hurt?”
“Not this time.”
“Anything new on the abductions last night?” she asked.
“Yeah, there’s a video from what looks like a Taliban splinter group.”
When Parson finished telling her about Black Crescent, she felt sick to her stomach. She remembered talking with Afghanistan’s national directorate of intelligence about reports that the Taliban forced teenagers to carry out suicide bombings. Unfathomably heinous—but isolated incidents. A renegade campaign to gather up child soldiers, to create child terrorists in quantity, was another thing entirely. Few people would suspect a ten-year-old was the one wearing a suicide vest in a crowded market.
Worse, terrorist trainers could work with the children well into adulthood, indoctrinating them, teaching them skills. By the time those kids taken last night reached their twenties, they might speak good English with an American accent. They might take jobs in government agencies in Afghanistan or anywhere else. They might learn to make bombs, mix poisons, fly airplanes.
Most terrorists were radicalized in early adulthood, Gold considered. But kids brought up to kill would not come to radicalization; they’d have little memory of anything else. Robbed of their childhoods and the affection of family and friends, the children could be trained to have the remorselessness of psychopaths.
That people could even think of such a scheme ran against all Gold wanted to believe about humanity. Ultimately, this plot could create a new strain of terrorist free of all conscience and empathy, just when coalition forces were drawing down in Afghanistan. Gold didn’t know what it would take to stop it. But she knew somebody had to try.
Two Afghan crew members came into the flight planning room, a sergeant and a lieutenant. Rashid’s new engineer and copilot, Parson assumed. He didn’t know either one of them, but Parson had not yet found time to meet everyone involved in NATO Air Training Command–Afghanistan. Both wore American-style desert flight suits with the black, red, and green flag of their country on the right sleeve. The engineer was a clean-shaven man in his twenties, with friendly, almond-colored eyes. The copilot looked older, closer to Parson’s age. His beard was trimmed close, so wiry it reminded Parson of steel wool, and his thin build bordered on gaunt. The man carried himself with an intensity, not merely looking at his surroundings, but staring. Rashid spoke to them in Pashto, and Gold joined in.
“This is Sergeant Sharif and Lieutenant Aamir,” Gold said. “I’m afraid they don’t speak any English.”
That didn’t surprise Parson, especially with regard to the sergeant. The Afghan military had a problem getting NCOs who could read and write in their own language, let alone speak English. There wasn’t much of an educated class left in Afghanistan after decades of war, and real fluency in English was rare even among the officers.
“No problem,” Parson said. “Are they ready to aviate?”
“They sound like it.”
“Good. Tell them we have some help today, too. A couple of Mi-35 Hinds are going to ride shotgun.” The Mi-35s, Russian-built gunships, would provide armed escort. Parson looked forward to seeing them work.
When Gold spoke to the Afghans, they nodded but said nothing. Parson figured they were old enough to have seen Hinds flying for the wrong side. He put the cap back on his highlighter, folded the chart, picked up his helmet bag, and said, “All right, let’s do this.”
Out on the flight line, the Mi-35s seemed to threaten even when sitting still. Like the Marine Corps Cobras that had escorted the Osprey, something about a helicopter gunship just looked mean. The Hinds had stubby fixed wings in addition to their main rotors. Parson supposed the wings generated some lift at high speed, but they also provided pylons for mounting bombs and rockets. With a nose gun for a beak, the Mi-35s looked vaguely like pterodactyls. Ugliest damned flying machines he’d ever seen, but effective as hell.