“Damn little,” Parson said. “They’ll disappear before we can get a Quick Reaction Force in here. Just watch which way they go.” The Mi-35s broke off their escort, flew among the mountains in an apparent effort to track the insurgents.
Reyes leaned across a stack of rice bags to look through a window. “I bet they hurt some civilians at the camp,” he said. “Sir, let’s get on the ground. Somebody might be bleeding out right now.”
“Okay,” Parson said. “Rashid, give me a flyover of the camp. Put it down right outside the perimeter if it looks safe.”
Rashid rolled the Mi-17 toward the collection of tents. Two ravens, black as the inside of a rifle muzzle, wheeled over the camp. They soared out of sight to the left. When the birds came back into view, they almost filled the windscreen. Gold nearly ducked; for a second it appeared the ravens would hit the glass. But in the last instant they folded their wings and dropped like shards of obsidian. She remembered Parson’s stories of bird strikes: If birds see you in time, they’ll dive. If they don’t, they’ll splatter themselves across your windscreen or even punch through.
Gold’s mouth tasted faintly of stale milk; her stomach churned. Her palms grew moist. All the banking, climbing, and diving made her a little airsick. And she worried about what she’d seen on the ground.
She sat on a troop seat and buckled in. She put her rifle across her lap and held on to the steel tubing of the seat frame, then inhaled a long breath through her nostrils. She didn’t want to throw up in the helicopter and subject everyone to the odor, and she hadn’t brought an airsick bag. Most chopper flights in the past just took her straight from point A to point B, firebase to firebase. Sometimes the helo flew a low-level run, but none of this tactical maneuvering stuff.
Gold swallowed hard, exhaled. Her gut began to settle, and she thought she could manage not to vomit if Rashid didn’t yank the chopper around anymore.
Fortunately, Rashid flew straight and level for a few minutes. Parson leaned toward the windscreen, and she heard him say on interphone, “I don’t see any bad guys down there.”
The chopper slowed, and Gold figured Rashid was looking for a place to land. She wondered what they’d find on the ground. It seemed pretty clear Black Crescent had just carried out another raid. And this was miles from Ghandaki, the site of the first attack. The terrorists must own some resources, Gold thought, vehicles and drivers. Either that or they operated a number of separate cells around the country.
Now some civilians who’d already lost their homes had just lost so much more. With terrorism overlaid onto natural disaster, misery squared and cubed itself like explosives in a roadside bomb. Four times the compound, sixteen times the hurt. Exponential suffering.
Gold felt a queasiness at the back of her throat. Not airsickness now, but a trace of that old anxiety again. Brought on by the needless cruelty she witnessed. When people got hurt through an act of God, she could reconcile it. Chalk it up to mysterious ways, things beyond her understanding. But here was an act of man.
Rashid landed upwind of the burning truck. Through the flames, Parson saw the flatbed carried bags of something, but he could not identify the cargo. When one of the bags burned open, the contents spilled and ignited. The stuff flowed out in a glittering cascade of fire. Flour, maybe.
Parson saw no driver in the cab, but anyone inside that truck would have been dead by now. Flames boiled through the broken windshield, over the hood, around the fenders warping in the heat. The tires melted off the rims. Parson wondered how those bastards started the fire. Maybe with an RPG.
The smell reminded him of his own burning aircraft, damaged by a terrorist bomb the year before. He’d managed to crash-land more or less in one piece, but a lot of the patients and crew on that aeromedical flight never got out.
That fire still burned inside his soul. Now he was angry. Attacking a refugee camp violated every custom, every law and tradition of every culture. To Parson, a natural order extended to all things, even man-made objects. His own profession provided examples: An airplane always sought the speed for which its controls were trimmed. Let go of the yoke, and the plane would fly that speed. Didn’t matter if the plane had to climb or dive to achieve that speed. Some rules allowed no exceptions. So Parson could hardly assign words to the crime unfolding before him. It was something, quite literally, unspeakable.
Reyes grabbed his rifle and medical ruck. He bounded from the helicopter before the crew chief even installed the boarding steps. The PJ hit the ground flat-footed, and he left deep boot prints in the soil. Gold got out behind him, and the two ran along coils of concertina wire at the camp’s perimeter until they found an opening.
When Parson caught up with them inside the camp, it seemed the concertina encircled some earthly cantonment of hell. Bodies lay scattered among the tents. Wounded men and women writhed and screamed. Laments pierced Parson’s eardrums in languages he could not understand. He had seen brutal acts before, individual crimes, but never a visitation of atrocities like this.
Reyes kneeled beside an Afghan man who’d apparently taken a round in the chest. The pararescueman donned a headset connected to the PRC-152 radio in his tactical vest. With one hand he held a wad of hemostatic dressing on the Afghan’s wound, and with the other he pressed a push-to-talk switch already tacky with blood.
“Fever Eight-Niner,” he called, “I need some help from you guys or from Pedro.”
Parson could hear only half the conversation, but he knew Fever was the call sign of HC-130s flown by rescue units. Pedro meant their choppers, HH-60 Pave Hawks. The rescue assets were stretched pretty thin; Reyes would need luck to get any assistance.
The PJ seemed to listen closely. He said nothing, and he looked over at Gold. She stopped beside a man lying on his stomach. Blood pooled underneath him. She rolled him over to reveal slashes across his torso, as if giant talons had clawed into him. Shrapnel wounds from an oblique angle, Parson guessed, probably from a grenade. Without a word, Reyes unzipped a black pouch strapped to his thigh, pulled out a gauze pad, and threw it to Gold. Parson walked over and held out his open hand, and Reyes slapped a dressing into it.
“Sir, don’t waste it on someone who won’t live,” he said.
Parson looked around for a person he could help. A few yards away he saw a woman sitting up, holding her left hand over the mangled remains of her right. She didn’t look like an Afghan, and it took a moment for Parson to piece it all together. When he sat beside her, she said in clear English, “Please help me.” Then she began to sob. Her hair was black, and she looked east Asian.
Parson gently lifted her left hand from the bleeding hamburger meat that had been her right hand. It wasn’t a clean tear; blood vessels and strands of torn muscle hung like roots from her wrist. He wondered what weapon inflicted such a wound. Grenade shrapnel, probably. Parson couldn’t quite decide how to apply the dressing, so he just wrapped it around the entire mess.
The woman wore a cream-colored correspondent’s jacket, now dusty and spattered with blood. On the ground beside her lay a broken video camera with a placard that read NHK. A Japanese reporter in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“I know that hurts,” Parson said. “We’ll get you out of here.”
“My sound technician’s dead,” the woman said. “Cameraman killed, too.” Then she sobbed again.
Reyes was still talking on the radio. He reached for his transmit switch again and said, “Fever Eight-Niner, we got a mass casualty event. Advise when you’re ready to copy the nine-line.”