From a pouch in his vest, Reyes withdrew a GPS receiver. He thumbed its controls with one hand and read off the coordinates of the refugee camp. Then Reyes transmitted the other items required in a 9-line medevac request, though Parson knew the PJ guessed at some of it. The number of patients: still undetermined. Dozens at least. Special equipment: ventilators, oxygen, everything. Security of pickup site: Well, we’re not under fire at the moment.
After Reyes relayed all the medevac information, he said, “Roger that, Fever. Tell ’em I got at least two sucking chest wounds, probably a lot more than that. We copy you’re inbound with jumpers.” The PJ wrapped bandaging on his first patient, then moved to the man Gold was helping. Gold took her hands off the man’s wound, and they came up bloody.
She stood up and said a few words in Pashto. Uninjured refugees crowded around her, gestured with their arms, shouted. A woman in a blue burka wailed and pointed until she collapsed at Gold’s feet.
Rashid entered the camp at a jog. He was by himself, and Parson felt glad Rashid had told the rest of his crew to guard the helicopter. Rashid had removed his flight helmet, but he still wore his body armor, and he carried two first-aid kits from the aircraft. Both of the green canvas pouches bore a red cross.
“What to do?” he asked.
“Just find—” Parson said, but Gold interrupted him with a stream of Pashto. Rashid joined her. Both of them talked with the refugees as Rashid opened one of the first-aid kits.
Parson took the other kit from Rashid. As he unzipped it and unwrapped a dressing, he asked, “What are they saying?”
“Men came in two pickup trucks,” Gold said. “They shot all the Westerners, and they captured some of the boys. At least four, I think.”
Parson had wondered why no camp staff appeared. But it hardly surprised him that they’d been among the first killed.
Gold and Rashid conversed in Pashto again. Then Gold said, “They demanded to know the time. When a man told them, they eviscerated him with a sword. They killed everyone wearing a watch.”
“What?” Parson asked. Terrorists could always find excuses to murder, but he wondered what malign creed had produced this new twist.
“Not many Afghans need to know the exact time,” Gold said. “Insurgents assume anyone with a watch is working with the Americans or with the government.”
“Son of a bitch,” Parson said. He thought of his old man’s stories from Southeast Asia. The Khmer Rouge had killed anyone wearing glasses because intellectuals presented a threat. This shit just never ended.
7
Flies buzzed around Gold’s face. The flies kept landing on her cheeks, tickling her skin with their legs, trying to drink the water in her eyes. She shook her head to scatter them. She couldn’t brush them away because she had both hands busy. With her left, she held a QuikClot pad on a woman’s forearm. A bayonet or machete had cut to the bone and slashed downward, peeling away a shank of flesh like a butcher carving a fillet.
The pad wasn’t big enough to stanch all the bleeding, so Gold kept her right thumb clamped around a pressure point on the inside of the woman’s upper arm. From Gold’s combat first-aid training, she knew she held the pressure point correctly, because below that point the pulse stopped. She just hoped she could keep the woman from bleeding to death until Reyes took over. Right now he worked twenty yards away, checking a man’s pulse at the wrist.
Parson and Rashid were busy with other patients, both officers now following instructions from the enlisted pararescueman. Gold watched Parson tape down a bandage on an old man’s foot. Then he moved to a woman lying motionless in the dirt. Two young girls clung to her, crying. Gold could not see what wounds the woman had suffered.
“Don’t waste your time on that one, sir,” Reyes said.
“But—”
Gold felt the same as Parson. Please let that one be okay.
“I already checked her,” Reyes said. “Apneic and no heartbeat. She’s dead. Three entrance wounds.”
Amid the flies, Gold heard another buzzing in a lower register. The sound grew louder, and she recognized the turboprop groan of a C-130. She looked up and squinted, and she saw the Herk thousands of feet above her, inching into the sun. The brightness hurt even through her shaded glasses. She shut her eyes, but not soon enough. The glare left a yellow corona that remained visible even with her eyelids closed.
She looked at the ground and blinked. The hot spot still burned on her retinas, but now the circle was red. When it finally faded and she looked up again, the C-130 appeared on the other side of the sun as if it had flown through it.
The noise of engines and props dropped half an octave, and Gold knew the aircraft was slowing for the drop. She tried to discern the ramp coming open, but the C-130 flew too high for her to see that. After several seconds, the engine noise rose again.
She knew some PJs should have just exited the aircraft. Yet she saw no one falling through the sky. If you found a last-second problem with your rig, then of course you wouldn’t jump. But that was rare.
A few seconds later, she spotted them: three specks dropping toward the earth at terminal velocity. She’d seldom seen a HALO jump from this perspective. Watching from the ground, it became obvious why this was such an effective way to insert troops covertly. You could hardly see them even if you knew they were coming.
For a moment she wished she were with the jumpers. But parachuting was just transportation. She was doing her real job now, blood up to her wrists, comforting the wounded in their own language.
One by one, the jumpers’ main chutes fluttered, inflated. The pararescuemen used that new Special Operations Vector rig that was so maneuverable. Two of the PJs began steering toward the refugee camp, but the third appeared in trouble.
His chute took on the shape of a bow tie, and it began to spin.
A line-over. One of his suspension lines had wrapped itself over the canopy. The resulting bulges imparted a rotation to the parachute and left the jumper little control.
He spun down below his two teammates. Gold couldn’t gauge his rate of descent except to see it was somewhere beyond lethal. The refugees looked skyward and pointed. Even they knew something was wrong.
“Cut away,” Gold said under her breath. “Cut that thing.”
Now the PJ drew close enough that Gold could make out his flailing boots, his ruck, and the individual shroud lines. The offending line seemed to tighten its choke on the canopy, and the spin grew faster. The man moved his hand toward his harness, and he grasped the cutaway pillow. He yanked hard.
The misshapen canopy collapsed. It twisted around itself and fell away as the reserve parachute billowed.
The riggers had packed the reserve canopy well. The reserve snapped open like the crack of a whip, and the jumper pulled a steering toggle to make a smooth turn into the wind.
“Allah-hu akbar,” whispered the woman whose arm Gold held. Gold hadn’t realized she’d been watching.
“Yes, He is,” Gold said.
“I did not wish to see more death today,” the woman said in Pashto.
“God willing, you will not,” Gold said. “Those are men of medicine.”
The pararescueman under the reserve canopy landed first, and the other two touched down a few seconds later. Once they were on the ground, Gold could not see them; the camp’s sandbag walls blocked her view. But a few minutes later they strode inside, rucksacks over their shoulders.
All three gathered around Reyes. As he briefed them, he pointed to Gold. One of the men came over to her and put down his medical ruck.
“Nice work,” he said. “We can probably save that arm.”