Outside the tents, the medical people had already set up a casualty collection point. A French doctor in blue overalls kneeled among a row of wounded lying on the ground, perhaps two dozen. Farther down the row, Reyes worked with another pararescueman. He held down a screaming man while the other PJ applied a tourniquet above the patient’s elbow. Below the elbow, mangled flesh hung from a few inches of bone that ended in a sharp point.
“Fatima!” Gold shouted. Then some words Parson could not understand, and again, “Fatima!” She stopped, looked around, called once more for Fatima. Checked inside a tent, left it, disappeared inside another one.
“What can I do?” Parson asked Reyes.
“Do you know how to make a splint?”
“Yeah.”
Reyes pointed to an Afghan boy sitting up, crying, and holding his hand. “Splint that kid’s wrist, sir.”
Parson made his way over to the child. His face and arms bled from cuts and scrapes. Flying debris, Parson supposed. The boy’s left wrist displayed an unnatural bulge, and a dark bruise had formed around the bulge. Parson kneeled beside the child and opened the first-aid kit. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The boy turned away, shielded his arm.
“Let me help you, son,” Parson said. “I know how much that hurts.” He knew the kid didn’t understand him, but he hoped it would help to talk anyway. And he knew well the boy’s pain. After getting shot down during a winter storm years ago, Parson had trekked through the mountains with Gold for days, all the while nursing a cracked wrist.
Inside the first-aid kit, he found a roll of KERLIX gauze. Now he needed something with a straight edge to immobilize the wrist. Parson got up and searched among the tents—some collapsed, some torn and burned. One of the fallen tents had a wooden floor. With the toe of his boot, Parson kicked at the splintered planking. He found two lengths of cracked wood he could use for a splint.
As he stooped to pick up the lumber, he noticed a lump of some wet substance on the ground. It took a moment for him to realize it was charred human flesh, blown away from the bone.
Around him, medics and nurses moved among the injured, stopping to treat some, abandoning others. Parson had made hard calls in his life, but he did not envy medical workers the rapid-fire decisions of triage: This one has a chance; give him a tracheotomy. That one won’t make it; just leave him alone.
In the midst of the wounded, Parson heard not just their screams but a steadier undertone of groans through gritted teeth, cries with no syllables, no form but the breath required to utter them. The moans of the dying.
Shake it off, he told himself. He stepped around tent stakes, lumber, and corpses. So much blood smeared the pavement, it looked as if an aircraft had blown a fitting and dumped red hydraulic fluid across the tarmac.
When Parson returned to the casualty collection point, the Afghan boy still cradled his broken wrist. Parson sat beside the child and tore off strips of gauze.
“Let’s see it, now,” Parson said. He wished Gold were with him to talk to the kid, but she was still looking for Fatima. Though he didn’t see Gold, he heard her calling the girl’s name.
Parson placed his hand on the boy’s arm. “Let go,” he said. “You’re a tough kid. You can do this.”
The boy took his hand off the injured wrist, held his arm out to Parson. He sniffed, tried to stifle his crying. Parson felt compelled to keep talking. Maybe it was helping.
“That’s it,” Parson said. “We’re going to make what we call a splint.” Using some of the gauze as padding, he placed one piece of wood under the child’s arm. That must have hurt; the kid cried out but did not jerk away.
Trying to be more careful, Parson put the other board over the arm and secured it with gauze strips. He didn’t want to cause more pain by squeezing the injury between the boards, so he tied down the splint just enough to immobilize the wrist. “You’re doing good,” Parson said. “Tell you what. You study hard in school and then come fly with us. We can use tough guys like you.” The boy looked at Parson with what seemed like interest, as if he actually understood the words.
Just a few yards from Parson, Reyes’s patient had stopped screaming. Reyes gave him an injection, checked his pulse.
“Have you seen Rashid?” Parson asked.
“Flying, sir,” Reyes said. “We’ve already sent some of the most critical to hospitals. He rounded up enough crew to get a chopper in the air.”
“Damn. Good for him.”
Gold still called to Fatima, more distant now. Finally, he heard the girl’s high-pitched shriek: “Sopheeeeeeee-ah!” Thank God for that, at least. He would have hated for the girl to get killed, hated what that might have done to Sophia.
Parson stood, tried to think of words he’d heard from Sophia that he could say to the boy with the injured wrist.
“Salaam,” Parson said. Wondered if he’d said it right.
“Salaam,” the boy answered.
Parson left the child to wait for more expert help. Along the rows of tents he saw some of the Marines. Blount, Ann, Lyndsey, and a corpsman searched for more of the wounded. The corpsman pointed, shouted instructions, dropped his medical bag, and kneeled by an injured man.
Farther into the encampment, Parson found Gold with Fatima. Gold led the girl by the hand, steered her away from the dead and wounded.
“You got your hands full,” Parson said. “Want me to take your M4?”
“Please.” Gold passed the rifle to him, hugged Fatima, said something in the child’s language.
“Is she okay?” Parson asked.
“She’s pretty scared, but she’s all right. When I got her calmed down, the first thing she wanted to know was if the giant black man and my pilot friend were hurt.”
Fatima looked up at Parson. “I’m good, honey,” Parson said. “So’s your buddy Blount.”
“What about the others?” Gold asked.
“Reyes is over there. And Rashid’s in the air. Scrounged up a crew and already flew out some wounded.”
“Thank goodness. Butcher’s bill is high enough today as it is.”
“How bad, do you think?” Parson asked.
“I counted eleven dead, and I wasn’t even looking for them. I was just looking for Fatima.”
Parson noticed Air Force security policemen and Army MPs searching among the refugee tents. The men scanned the ground, seemed to look for evidence. At the edge of the camp, four of them gathered around something they’d found on the pavement.
“You two stay here,” Parson said. “I want to see what those guys are looking at.”
As he neared the four policemen, he began to hear their conversation.
“That’s the most fucked-up thing I ever seen,” one said.
“It happens,” another said. “I’ve seen it in Iraq.”
“Me, too,” said the third. Of the four, he was the most senior. A tech sergeant. “Hajji detonates himself. The head goes flying, but it stays pretty much intact.”
Down at their boots, Parson saw the severed head of the suicide bomber. It rested on its side, cheek to the pavement. Both eyes remained open wide, as if caught in a moment of surprise. No beard stubble. A boy of about twelve.
18
Even before all the wounded were treated, the OSI began investigating the bombing. Inside the air ops center, Gold interpreted for three terrified Afghan gate guards. None looked older than twenty. One trembled as he sat at the table with the other two.
“Will I be imprisoned?” he asked in Pashto. The man looked at Gold with the eyes of a frightened animal.