A familiar odor filled her nostrils: trash fires and sewage, along with the smell of dust. Even if she’d been blind, she would have recognized the location. The scents filled her with both dread and familiarity, almost a homecoming. She’d left part of herself here, and that part now belonged to Afghanistan.
Gold had talked to Parson by Skype when her plane made a fuel stop in Kuwait; as an individual augmentee, she’d made some of her own arrangements to get to her duty station. He’d told her he’d meet her at the MASF—the Mobile Aeromedical Staging Facility. No sign of him yet, though. Just doctors and nurses moving among patients lying on green cots set up in brown tents.
An Afghan helicopter landed. Though its rotors quit turning, some sort of power unit inside continued to operate. The chopper emitted a jetlike howl, and exhaust gases shimmered from a port.
Crew members opened clamshell doors in the back and began unloading patients. The injured lay on stretchers, and crewmen lifted them out of the aircraft and lined them up on the tarmac. All the fliers looked like Afghans, except one who was taller than the rest. From his short hair and clean-shaven face, Gold knew he was probably an American. He carried a faded green helmet bag covered with patches. When she noticed the slight limp and the way he pulled at his flight suit sleeve to check his watch, she knew it was Parson.
Gold found a set of foam earplugs in a pocket of her ACUs, and she twisted them between her fingers and inserted them into her ears before approaching the helicopter. As Gold strode toward the aircraft, Parson looked up and smiled at her. She waved, and when she reached him he extended his right hand, and she took it in both of hers. She wanted to embrace him, but not in front of the other troops, and certainly not in front of the Afghans.
He looked tired. The skin below his eyes sagged, and grime gathered in the creases of his neck. He wore his usual desert tan flight suit, only this one had blue oak leaves on the shoulders. The command patch over his right chest pocket read US CENTAF. He had a few flecks of gray in his hair now, but he looked pretty good for someone who’d once been blown up. Since their flight through hell last year, they had kept in touch, and she’d last seen him about two months ago. That was before his deployment, and he’d still worn a major’s brown leaves then.
“Damn, it’s good to see you,” Parson shouted over the noise.
“Likewise,” Gold said, “but I’m sorry about the circumstances.” It seemed in Afghanistan, there was always reason to be sorry about the circumstances.
Parson nodded, then leaned inside the helicopter’s crew door. “Hey, Rashid,” he yelled, “kill the APU.”
Indistinct words came from the cockpit, and Parson repeated: “APU. Turn it off.” Then he slashed his finger across his throat. The screaming whine subsided. Parson turned back toward Gold and said, “It’s not always that easy to communicate. That’s why I need you.”
“Where did you just fly from?” Gold asked.
“Balkh. It’s pretty rough up there.”
Gold looked at the patients. Dust covered some of them, as if they’d just been pulled from rubble. A girl with a bloody bandage around the stump of her arm stared up at Gold. Her hair shone with an auburn tint, and her eyes were blue. The sight nearly brought Gold to tears. She wished she could take the child in her arms and carry her to a better time and place for a little girl. Gold figured she was probably a Tajik, but those eyes and hair could suggest Russian, British, or even Macedonian. A lot of armies had entered Afghanistan and then retreated, but they’d left their chromosomes. Two medics picked up the child’s stretcher and carried her into the MASF.
Another patient, a young man, moaned and kept rocking from side to side. He wore a bloody T-shirt and black trousers. He had a tennis shoe on his right foot, but his left foot was bare, and a broken bone protruded from the skin. The man clutched at his abdomen as he cried out.
“What’s wrong with him?” Gold asked.
“Internal injuries, maybe. I think a ceiling fell on him.”
“I’ll help you get him inside.”
Gold took one end of the stretcher by its wooden handles, and they brought the man into the medical tent. As they put him down, Gold asked in Pashto, “Does your stomach hurt?”
In addition to the broken foot, she could see bruises and scrapes all over the man’s face and arms. The blood on his shirt appeared to come from those injuries. His midsection seemed to pain him more than anything else, but the cause was not apparent. The man did not respond to Gold’s question.
“Where does it hurt, my friend?” Gold asked. “Pohaigay?” Do you understand?
“I cannot say to you,” the man said.
“Whatever is wrong,” Gold said, “let us help you. Meh daarigah.” Do not be frightened.
Inside the MASF, flight nurses and medics tended rows of patients lying on cots. Murmurs of conversations babbled through the tent in several languages. Amid the usual English, Pashto, and Dari, Gold heard snatches of French, German, and Russian. Some of the medical workers wore uniforms, and others wore civilian clothes. Several countries had contributed help from their military services, and Gold assumed the civilians came from the UN and from NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders. Gold retained a special fondness for people who worked to ease pain; she had spent so much time fighting those who inflicted it. But right now she just wanted to get this guy to talk.
“We have doctors for you,” she said in Pashto. The man still did not respond.
A medic kneeled by the man’s stretcher. The medic wore MultiCam fatigues with flight crew wings and airborne jump wings, along with badges for combat diver and free-fall parachutist. A sleeve patch from the 83rd Expeditionary Rescue Squadron. The five stripes of a technical sergeant. Close-cropped black hair. Rolled-up sleeves bulged around muscles that looked hard as Kevlar. His name tag read REYES.
“Are you pararescue?” Parson asked.
“Yes, sir,” Reyes said. He did not look up at Parson and Gold. Instead, he pulled medical shears from his pocket and began cutting away the patient’s shirt.
“He’s been holding his stomach, but he won’t tell us what’s wrong,” Gold said.
Reyes touched the man’s abdomen. “It’s not hard or discolored like you’d have with a bad internal injury,” he said. Reyes’s accent suggested someone whose first language was Spanish. Puerto Rican, perhaps.
The patient continued moaning, and sweat beaded on his forehead. Reyes took a multitool from a sheath on his belt and opened the blade. “These guys don’t like to be stripped,” he said, “but I gotta examine him.” The pararescueman cut the man’s rope belt and checked his groin area. Gold saw blood there, and she turned away. She knew the patient wouldn’t want an American woman to see him like this.
“Poor guy,” Parson said. “That’s a bad place to get hit by debris.”
“He’ll need surgery,” Reyes said, “but I don’t think he’ll lose anything.”
“So what’s with his stomach?” Parson asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Cover him and let me talk to him,” Gold said.
Reyes left and came back with a towel that he draped over the patient. The man still looked sick and uncomfortable. Gold kneeled beside him and said in Pashto, “These people can treat you, but you must talk to us. Your injury is not a punishment from God; it is merely an accident. You have no reason to feel shame.”