“Put me on UHF, will you?” Parson asked.
Rashid gave a command in Pashto, and the flight engineer reached forward to one of the panels. Parson pressed his talk button. The whine of his headset’s sidetone told Parson he was transmitting on air and no longer just on interphone.
“Clara Barton,” he called, “Golay flight is two Hinds and an Mi-17 inbound your station. How copy?”
No answer. Only the whine of radios, the rush of wind, the pounding of rotors.
“Clara Barton, Clara Barton,” Parson transmitted, “Golay flight is ten minutes out.”
Nothing but static. Parson met Gold’s eyes, shrugged. The corners of her mouth shifted in a gesture Parson took for puzzlement or worry. He tried the call again.
Still no answer.
Finally the squelch broke, and Parson heard voices off mike. Babbles of Pashto. Shouts. Then a click, and dead silence.
6
Sweat beaded on Gold’s upper lip as she considered what she’d just heard. Please let it be an aftershock, she thought. But the panic in those transmitted voices suggested something worse. The only words she’d made out were no, Allah, and mercy.
“Do we land?” Rashid asked in English.
“Let’s take a look first,” Parson said. Then he added, “Sophia, tell the gunship pilots something’s wrong at the camp. I don’t know if they heard what we just heard.”
Parson put her on UHF, and she pressed her talk button. “Golay lead,” she said in Pashto, “this is Colonel Parson’s interpreter. The camp may be under attack. He wants to recon before we land.”
“Golay lead copies,” the pilot answered. “What are our rules of engagement?”
Gold pulled her boom mike away from her mouth. She shouted to Parson over the wind and engines, “They want to know the ROE.”
“Weapons tight,” Parson said.
Good call, Gold thought. It meant the gunships wouldn’t fire unless they identified a clearly hostile target. There were a lot of friendlies and civilians down there. She put her mike back into place and relayed Parson’s order.
“Roger,” the gunship pilot said in a thick accent. Then, in his own language, “We copy weapons tight.”
These gunship guys spoke even less English than Rashid. Gold knew that in the Mi-35 training program, the Afghans talked with their Czech instructors in Russian. She considered it a small miracle that any of them managed to communicate anything at any time, let alone while flying high-performance aircraft armed with deadly weapons.
The Mi-17 turned and descended. “I see camp,” Rashid said.
Gold stood, tried to see what she could through the windows and front windscreen. One of the Mi-35s flashed by. It flew just a few feet lower than the Mi-17, and Gold saw the helmeted pilots, one seated behind the other in the tandem cockpit. The gunship banked and descended, then disappeared from view.
Rashid turned as well. Gold didn’t know much about helicopter tactics, but she guessed the changes in heading and altitude would make the choppers harder to hit with a missile or RPG. During the turn, the refugee camp appeared in the windscreen. People ran among the tents. Smoke churned upward from a blackened spot on the ground. As the smoke rose, breeze caught it and stretched it into a black arc across the sky. Gold looked down at the flames; she couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw a truck or some other kind of vehicle burning.
“Clara Barton, Clara Barton,” Parson called, “Golay flight.”
Still no response.
Gold braced herself at the side window nearest her. The other Mi-35 streaked low across the ground.
“Golay Two, break left!” the lead gunship called in Pashto.
An instant later, Gold saw why. The smoke trail of a shoulder-launched missile corkscrewed a diagonal path in front of the M-35 below. Brilliant globules of light, so bright they hurt Gold’s eyes, rippled from the gunship. Defensive flares, she realized, hot enough to confuse a heat-seeking missile.
The heat-seeker missed by mere yards. The Mi-35 banked hard and punched off more flares. The aircraft spewed fire, looked vaguely like a giant spawning insect. Gold watched the gunship climb and turn. She heard one of its pilots ask, still in Pashto, “Did you see where that came from?”
“Ho,” the other Mi-35 called. Yes. “I have them,” the pilot added.
Gold did not see the other gunship. She struggled to follow the air-to-ground battle developing around and beneath her, but she couldn’t keep all the combatants in view. Ground forces usually fought in two dimensions, but aircraft fought in three.
Reyes stood up. Like Gold, he moved to one window, then another to watch the fight.
Rashid turned his helicopter again and then said on interphone, “There. Some men on the road from the camp.”
Gold moved to a window on the opposite side of the helicopter and saw about a dozen insurgents on a dirt path. They had apparently jumped out of the two white pickup trucks stopped nearby. She still couldn’t see the other gunship, but the insurgents could. They tried to scatter. Too late.
The second Mi-35 came into Gold’s view, flying so low it seemed nearly on the ground, guns smoking.
Geysers of dust erupted among the enemy fighters. Some insurgents emerged from the dust cloud running. Others, caught by the rounds, disintegrated into flying limbs. The gunship zoomed across the road, and its rotor wash swirled the dust kicked up by its own fire.
“All right!” Parson said. “Get some.”
Rashid seemed to watch something intently. He leaned toward his side window, nearly touched the glass with his helmet.
“Cease fire,” Rashid said in English. Then he repeated the call in Pashto.
“What?” Parson asked.
“Say again,” the lead gunship called.
“Cease fire,” Rashid said. “There are childs with them.”
“You gotta be shitting me,” Parson said.
“Look,” Rashid said. He banked left and pointed. Gold moved again, this time to see through the windscreen. Two small figures sprinted away from the road. Larger men ran behind them. Just before the Mi-17 flew over them, Gold saw one of the men chase down a boy and grab him by the shirt. Instant human shield.
“We are off the target,” the gunship lead said. “Weapons safe.”
Even through the official terminology and the warble of UHF, Gold could hear the pain in that voice. Had he just blown up some children?
“I come around,” Rashid said. He began descending, and he turned until he had reversed course. Ahead, insurgents and at least three boys ran for cover.
“What are you doing?” Parson asked.
“I fly past,” Rashid said. “Make them run. Maybe childs escape.”
The Mi-17 leveled just a few meters above the ground. The helicopter flew so fast now that the bare earth underneath it flowed like molten iron. The bad guys out in front threw themselves into the road ditch.
Except for one. The man raised an AK and fired as he disappeared under the nose. Gold heard three impacts on the underside of the helicopter like stones striking the wheel wells of a Humvee speeding down a mountain path.
She looked forward at the crew, over to the side at Parson, toward the back at Reyes. All appeared okay. The bullets, she supposed, had penetrated the floor and buried themselves in the rice bags.
Rashid climbed, then began another turn.
“That’s enough,” Parson said. “We won’t get that lucky again.”
“What can we do?” Rashid asked in Pashto. Gold translated for Parson, though she suspected Rashid asked a rhetorical question.