Parson followed Rashid and his crew into the Mi-17, and he strapped into a troop seat along the side of the cargo compartment. Gold sat next to him on his left. Reyes was already on board with his medical pack and weapon. PJs normally worked in groups of two or three, but the earthquake response had spread medics so thin, Parson felt grateful to get even one for whatever injuries they found at the refugee camp. A three-ring binder with the aircraft’s maintenance forms lay on the seat to Parson’s right. He opened it and leafed through the pages.
The forms showed a fairly new helicopter: only a little more than two thousand hours on the airframe. Inspections up to date, oil serviced in both engines. Recent sheet metal repairs for a hairline crack in the door frame and a bullet hole in the tail boom. Signatures from an American maintenance supervisor and Rashid’s Afghan crew chief.
Good. They were learning to document everything.
He took his headset out of his helmet bag, put it on, and plugged its jack into the interphone system. Clipped commands in Pashto: the crew running checklists and the engines about to start. Parson thumbed a switch on the battery pack connected to his headset cord, and a green indicator light began flashing. Green meant a good battery for the noise-cancellation circuit, so maybe those Russian turbines wouldn’t give him a headache today.
Gold wore her own headset. She pressed the talk button, uttered just a couple words in Pashto. Then she said to Parson, “They have their flight clearance.”
“Good.”
The muscles in Gold’s jaw tightened like she was nervous about something. Parson knew she had no fear of flying, and she’d almost certainly spent more time in helicopters than he had. She was still upset about what she’d seen yesterday, he supposed, especially since it involved kids.
Gold was made of stronger alloys than most people, Parson still believed. But every substance had limits. He thought of the airplanes he’d flown. Each had a performance envelope, and you could fly it to the edge of that envelope with no problem: a certain speed, a certain angle of bank, a certain power setting. But when you demanded more, you could expect consequences.
As Parson looked forward through the cockpit door, he saw gloved fingers punch the start buttons one at a time. The engines above his head ignited, and then he heard the whine of gearboxes as the main rotor began to turn.
The lead gunship called for takeoff clearance in passable English. “Golay flight, cleared for takeoff,” the tower answered. “Wind calm.”
Rashid waited for the Mi-35s to depart ahead of him. Peering out the window, Parson saw the Hinds hover-taxi into position. As they accelerated into the air, a cloud passed over the runway, and the pavement dimmed and brightened as if the gods turned a rheostat.
Rashid throttled up. Parson felt a rocking motion as the Mi-17 lifted itself off the ground. As Rashid climbed and banked onto a heading to follow the gunships, Parson could not help trying to watch the instruments. He was not able to see much of the panel over the flight engineer’s shoulder, but when the engineer leaned forward, Parson noted the HSI’s compass card spinning with the turn. The helicopter lacked the modern computer displays found in newer American aircraft. It had old-fashioned round dials—steam gauges, as pilots called them—set into a panel painted that shade of barf green the Russians liked so much for aircraft interiors. Every switch was labeled in Cyrillic.
Rashid leveled off just underneath scattered clouds that were dissipating rapidly. The forecast called for clear conditions the rest of the day. The remaining clouds obscured a few of the mountaintops, but that didn’t matter. Parson and Rashid planned a route that cut through passes instead of overflying ridgelines. The course would avoid the known threat areas, or at least minimize exposure to them.
The tactics binder showed where the enemy might have shoulder-fired missiles, antiaircraft artillery, or rocket-propelled grenades. For each weapon, the classified text gave odds with a cold algebraic symbology: P(h). P(k). Probability of hit. Probability of kill.
Parson knew better than most what those weapons could do to an aircraft. But he did not dwell on that now. He wanted to keep Rashid’s confidence level up. So Parson focused on what went well, which included decent weather and a smooth ride. With no wind roiling across the slopes, the chopper flew as if sliding along sheets of silk. Such lack of turbulence was rare in Afghanistan. Parson pressed his talk button and said, “A good day to fly, huh, buddy?”
“A good,” Rashid said.
As the helicopter flew over a dry, uninhabited plain, the crew chief peered out and swiveled his door gun. Reyes leaned back in his seat with his eyes closed, dozing as if he had not a care in the world. He propped his feet, one boot crossed over the other, on a stack of rice bags labeled UN WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME. Gold looked through the circular window above her seat and watched the terrain roll past. She wore a pair of dark sunglasses with a Smith & Wesson logo on the frame. On her right shoulder, her infrared-feedback U.S. flag patch gave off a slick sheen. The Army-style flag patch had its star field to the upper right, which looked backward to Parson. But its main purpose was to show up on night vision devices, not to look spiffy.
After a few minutes, the barrens below gave way to tended land. A wheat field flowed underneath, followed by a walled compound, then a well, then a cemetery with three open graves. A mound of freshly turned soil stood by each pit. Shadows filled the graves themselves; the holes in the earth appeared to contain nothing but blackness of infinite depth.
Rashid banked over a valley. Parson remembered that crease in the terrain as one of the turn points they’d marked on the VFR chart. Movement caught his eye: Down at treetop level, a pair of F/A-18s flew low through the valley like two pintails swooping along a river channel. Parson wondered what target they sought.
Gold turned away from the window and looked to Parson. “What can you tell me about this refugee camp where we’re going?” she asked.
“Civilian agencies set it up just a few days ago,” Parson said. “I haven’t even been in this province before.”
After what he’d seen in Ghandaki, he hoped the camps would provide some security for quake victims. Perhaps there would be safety in numbers by gathering refugees together instead of letting them fend for themselves in remote villages. If the camps needed to stay in operation for more than a week or two, maybe the Afghan National Army could guard them. Like the Afghan Air Force, the ANA still had a lot to learn, but Parson figured they ought to be able to handle sentry duty.
The flight continued through a mountain pass, along another valley, down a stream cut. Parson caught glimpses of the Hinds as they flew close escort. The gunships made S-turns along the route ahead of the Mi-17. The aircraft riding shotgun in front of him reminded Parson of C-130 missions he’d flown here, as well as in Iraq and Bosnia. Warthog attack jets would fly alongside and ahead of the Hercules, crisscrossing and banking in a show of force. The tactic usually intimidated bad guys into keeping their heads down, but occasionally some knucklehead would be dumb enough to shoot at the jets. The Warthogs would roll into a hard turn, come back around with nose guns spinning and smoking. No more bad guys.
Rashid’s voice on the interphone brought Parson back to the present. “Ten minutes,” the Afghan pilot said in English.
“Copy that,” Parson said.
“Leader cannot talk camp,” Rashid added.
“How’s that?”
Gold spoke in Pashto, and Rashid answered. Then Gold said, “The lead Mi-35 pilot can’t raise the refugee camp radio.”
He’s probably on the wrong frequency, Parson thought, or maybe they just can’t understand him. Parson unzipped a lower leg pocket of his flight suit and pulled out a comm sheet. He looked up the call sign and freq for the new camp. From the call sign, he guessed USAID or some other American agency manned the radio.