The knot of women around Gold began to break up. Parson thought he recognized the blessings of parting, syllables he’d heard Sophia say before. After the last two women drifted away, Gold reviewed her notes, folded the writing pad closed. She zipped the pad and pen into her MOLLE rig, took off her helmet, retied her blond hair. As she replaced the helmet she looked at Parson in a way that suggested she wasn’t satisfied with what had just gone down.
“Sounded like you touched a nerve,” Parson said when she joined him.
“I don’t know,” Gold said.
“Rashid said it seemed like some of them might know where these bastards hang out.”
Gold adjusted her rifle sling across her shoulder as she looked over the camp. “It’s not that simple,” she said. “You know how it goes—somebody knows somebody who might know.”
“Good job,” Parson said. “All we can do is tell intel what they said.”
“Yeah.”
Parson thought it a little odd that she hadn’t said Yes, sir. Not that he cared. She’d long since earned the right to speak with him casually. But Gold was usually wrapped so tight, so professional and regulation, that she observed military courtesy by instinct. Something was on her mind.
He had mixed feelings about having brought her back to Afghanistan. From a command perspective the assignment was a masterstroke. No male interpreter could have pulled off whatever she’d just accomplished. The last twenty minutes alone justified detaching her from the 82nd Airborne and flying her halfway around the world. But now Parson didn’t know if it was best for her.
The throb of distant helicopters interrupted his worrying about Sophia. He scanned a sawtooth ridge to the west and could not find the choppers. Parson adjusted his aviator’s glasses, shaded his eyes with his hand.
There they came, three dots moving in unison. Parson caught them as they emerged from behind a pinnacle of shale. Two of them were Air Force HH-60 Pave Hawks. Their refueling probes jutted forward like the proboscises of moths. Behind them flew an Osprey tilt-rotor.
All three aircraft banked toward the camp and began descending. Parson watched for smoke trails or tracers coming up at them, but for now at least the sky remained clean and tranquil. The blue stretched all the way into China; he knew that from the morning’s weather brief. Not ideal tactical conditions, but better than having turbulence knock the fillings out of your teeth. He’d once flown a low-level mission on a gusty day during the first months of the Afghanistan war. One particularly evil downdraft slammed the C-130 with so many negative Gs that the oil pumps cavitated in all four engines. The Herk damn near scraped the ground as the oil pressure needles drooped. But then the pressure climbed and so did the airplane, and the crew lived to fly again. For a while.
The Pave Hawks fluttered toward landing. As they skimmed low to the ground, dust billowed behind them and churned in the air rent by their blades. Helmeted gunners manned M134 miniguns that protruded from the sides of the choppers. Parson watched the crewmen as the HH-60s touched down and shrouded themselves in dust.
The Osprey drew nearer and tilted its rotors to vertical. When it turned, the word MARINES became visible, painted in light gray on the aft end of the fuselage. The twin tail fins bore the letters EH. Parson had to think about that squadron code for a moment: It was the Black Knights of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. Parson hoped it was that same TRAP team he’d met in Ghandaki; he liked that big gunnery sergeant.
Grit swirled as the Osprey landed. Dust collected on Parson’s sunglasses; its chalky taste irritated his throat with every breath. The aircraft dropped its ramp. From Parson’s view, tan combat boots appeared at the ramp crest, camo trouser cuffs bloused over the tops of the boots. Sure enough, the first man off the Osprey stood a head taller than the others.
Blount waved to Parson. He did not salute; in a combat zone a salute could identify an officer as a valuable target for a sniper. The gunnery sergeant barked orders to his men, and the TRAP team helped the pararescuemen load patients onto the helicopters. Parson briefed him beside the body of a woman shot through the head.
“They took some more kids, Gunny,” Parson said.
For a moment, Blount did not speak. A vein bulged along the side of his neck, underneath scar tissue that looked like a burn.
“Sir, I thought I seen some shit,” he said, “but I never seen nothing to beat this.”
“That makes two of us.”
“If them sumbitches want seventy-two virgins, I’ll be their date counselor.”
Blount took a camera from one of his cargo pockets, and he snapped a photo of the woman at his feet. Parson led him through the camp, and Blount shot more images. Outside the fence, they found Rashid’s crew bringing the rice out of the Mi-17. Blount carried the last of the hundred-pound bags, one over each shoulder. At the camp’s mess tent, he swung them off his back like they were pillows. Then he took one last photo of the man gutted by sword.
The stain was already fading as the dry dirt soaked it up. Afghanistan’s soil knew how to do that, Parson thought. Afghan soil had absorbed blood from the Soviet 40th Army, from the troops of Queen Victoria, from the hoplites of Alexander the Great. From women, children, and rescue workers. And from too many of Parson’s friends.
8
The rescue team landed back at Mazar under a dusk sky the color of wine. Gold helped Reyes and the other PJs take the wounded from Rashid’s Mi-17, the Osprey, and the two Pave Hawks. She worked in silence, pondering her talks with the refugees. She hadn’t briefed Parson on all of what the women had told her; she was still trying to make sense of it herself.
There was a village in Samangan, the women said, just north of a stream they called Goat’s Gut. Maybe the creek’s twists and turns resembled the intestines of an animal. Whatever the name’s origin, Gold doubted she’d see it on anything produced by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
In that village—just a collection of a few mud-brick homes—lived an elderly woman who knew things. Was she connected to the insurgents? Yes, one refugee said. No, she hates the Taliban, another said. Still others claimed she was the mother of an important cleric, one who had laid down arms.
Gold didn’t feel much encouraged about that business of a former Talib putting away his guns. In Afghanistan, loyalties and peace agreements came with price tags and expiration dates. She remembered attending a reintegration ceremony for some ex-insurgents in Paktika Province. You couldn’t kill all the lower-level fighters, the reasoning went. So you needed an amnesty program for those willing to come back into the fold. That amnesty was part of the overall COIN strategy: counterinsurgency, as opposed to counterterrorism. Easier to take away reasons to join the insurgency than to take out every terrorist.
With a group of U.S. officers and Afghan politicians, she had ridden to the reintegration ceremony in a convoy of MRAP vehicles. Gold watched the MRAPs’ antennas sway with every bump in the dirt road, and she thought it ironic to have to travel to a peace ceremony in a truck engineered to be mine-resistant and ambush-protected. At the reintegration, the Talibs stacked their AK-47s, magazines removed. They stood in a line, wearing their flat-topped hats, field jackets of old Soviet bloc camo, and white shalwar kameez. An imam offered a prayer and said, “May God reward you for joining the peace process.”