Gold looked up and checked the rectangular canopy and its risers and suspension lines—so that was the problem. The lines were twisted. She had a good chute, but she couldn’t steer it.
She could see green smoke on the ground marking her aim point on Fort Bragg’s Sicily Drop Zone. The smoke billowed across the drop zone and into the woods. She guessed maybe six or eight knots of wind at the surface, but it was stronger at her altitude. And it was taking her, just like the smoke, over the trees.
She reached above her head, grabbed the risers, and pulled them apart. As they began to untwist, her body rotated under the canopy, and she found herself looking away from the drop zone. Into the forest.
The lines wouldn’t unwind completely. And her steering toggles were still fouled. Green beneath her now. If she couldn’t fix this twist, she would come down through the pines. She wasn’t equipped for a rough-terrain landing. Without the right gear, a tree landing could kill you.
She considered cutting away the main canopy and landing on her reserve, but she was getting a little low for that option. With this malfunction, a cutaway became a judgment call. There was an old saying about your reserve parachute: How long do you have to deploy it? The rest of your life. But using the reserve required some altitude, and she was running out of that.
She unclipped her oxygen mask, checked her altimeter. Less than two thousand feet. Not much time left.
Gold pulled harder on the risers. Her body rotated a quarter turn. Why had the chute wound itself up like that? Had she not held a good arch as she fell?
The lines still had one twist in them. Toggles still fouled. By now the reserve was out of the question. Gold pulled at the risers again with the last strength in her biceps and triceps. The tangle released, and her body rotated all the way around.
Now she had some control. She pulled a steering toggle to turn toward the drop zone. But she had too much distance ahead of her and not enough beneath her. She gave up on the DZ and prepared for a rough landing in the trees.
She placed one foot on top of the other to keep branches from striking between her legs. Bent her knees slightly. Folded her arms and cupped her gloved hands inside her armpits to shield the arteries there. Shut her eyes tight.
In the next moment, terrorists beat her with truncheons. A blow to the feet. A punch to the thigh. To the chest. To the back of her head. A slap to the face. All amid the weirdly pleasant scent of evergreen.
For a moment, the assault sent her back in time. She’d been hit like that only once before, and then the terrorists had been real, when she’d been taken hostage in Afghanistan. Her ordeal had begun with a beating, and the beating was nothing compared with what came later. The blows from tree limbs laid open emotional wounds. Fear and panic, the certainty that an awful death awaited her. She saw the faces of her tormentors. Her skin flushed instantly with sweat. She fought the urge to cry out.
Then the beating stopped. Gold opened her eyes. Dappled shade, pine needle floor. She hung from her risers about a foot off the ground. The chute remained tangled in the tree, ripped in several places. She felt her arms and legs. No broken bones, but lots of scrapes and scratches from bark.
She fumbled for the cutaway pillow, a soft red handle that would release the main canopy. When she pulled it, she dropped to the ground and collapsed to her hands and knees. Struggled to control her breathing. Willed her heart to stop racing.
How did I let that happen? she asked herself. The sound of running boots interrupted her dark thoughts. She saw the DZ control officer and two of the Special Forces guys, who had, no doubt, landed right on target.
“Sergeant Major, are you okay?” one of them asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
She walked out of the woods with them, and a Humvee picked her up at the DZ. She supposed some private would have to go back and recover her chute, or what was left of it. On the ride back to the base, no one criticized, but she imagined what they were all thinking: HALO is not women’s work.
And it usually wasn’t.
“I’ve never seen a woman on a HALO drop before,” the DZCO asked. “What’s your career field?”
“I’m a Pashto interpreter/translator,” Gold said.
“So how does a translator get a slot at HALO school?”
Gold had come to expect that question on every jump. The Army didn’t consider the interpreter/translator specialty a combat job; that’s why it was open to women. But if the Army needed noncombat jobs done in combat zones, then women went into combat. Simple as that.
The military even wanted a few women who could accompany special ops forces—purely as interpreters in a noncombat role. As a Pashto expert with the 82nd Airborne, Gold qualified as an obvious choice for HALO training. Now if the boys needed a woman who spoke the language, she could go with them no matter how they got there.
“So far it’s just been training,” Gold added. “I’ve never done this in combat.”
“Let’s hope you don’t have to.”
There were a couple different ways to take that comment, but Gold assumed he meant well. She wasn’t sure why her risers had twisted; a twist could happen even with a well-packed parachute used with perfect technique. The malfunction reminded her she could never let her guard down, never get distracted, never take anything for granted. Especially with another deployment to Afghanistan coming up. Counselors had told her to expect symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from time to time: difficulty concentrating, depression—and in worse episodes, nausea and sweats.
The night sweats had started after Parson had rescued her from her Taliban captors and still happened at least once a week. Five years. The sweats always came with dreams of the sneering men and their knives in that bombed-out village in the mountains. The blades inserted under her fingernails, the pain and blood, the nails ripped off. One by one.
With each fingernail, the insurgents reminded her: “You suffer alone. You are a harlot. You will die, and you will go to hell.”
But she hadn’t suffered alone. Somewhere in the ridges above, Parson had waited, watched through the finely ground glass of a precision rifle scope. A downed aviator out of his element, he could have given up on her. At that moment, her chain of command certainly had. But Parson refused to let her die.
He’d brought her back alive. Alive but damaged, trace elements of toxin in her psyche. And now she prepared to return to the source of it all, where the bleak terrain matched the bleakness of spirit Afghanistan had brought her.
She told herself she could hack it. She was a professional. Her career had included interpreting for interrogations, serving with Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and running a literacy program for Afghan police officers. She and Parson had received Silver Stars for keeping an important Taliban prisoner alive and in custody after they’d been shot down.
The thought of working with Parson during her new deployment brought mixed feelings. Gold wanted very much to see him again, yet she could not look at him without recalling the worst moments of her life. He had arranged for the Joint Relief Task Force to assign her as his interpreter, however, and she could hardly tell him no. And Afghanistan needed her again.
She still ached all over from the tree landing. She knew she’d be sore in the morning. One of her fingers hurt, and she pulled off her glove to inspect it. Despite the glove, the nail on her left middle finger had somehow torn off. The blood and exposed flesh sickened her.
Gold closed her eyes, breathed deeply. The injury reminded her of things best not remembered.
1
It took Gold three days to reach Mazar-i-Sharif. In that time, a refugee camp sprang up. The collection of blue-and-white tents on the airport grounds sprawled across the tarmac. The tents’ entrance flaps bore stenciling that read UNHCR. Big, Russian-built helicopters pounded in and out of the airfield. Each helo displayed the roundel of the Afghan Air Force—a circle enclosing a triangle of green, red, and black. Gold saw a few American Black Hawks, too.