“I’ll fly with you,” Parson said.
Rashid brightened a little. “Very good,” he said. Then he climbed out of his helicopter, joined his crew at the fence, and fired up his Marlboro.
A few minutes later a fuel truck rolled up to the Mi-17. The truck had TS-1 painted across the tank. TS-1 was a Russian jet fuel similar to American Jet A-1. Didn’t really matter, Parson thought. Those Klimov engines would burn anything.
Rashid’s crew chief dropped a cigarette butt, stepped on it, and walked back to the helicopter. Parson watched as the man connected the truck’s hose to the aircraft and began pumping fuel.
After the truck drove away, an ambulance brought over the wounded. Reyes supervised as medics loaded the patients through the clamshell doors at the back of the aircraft. When Reyes closed the doors, Rashid and his crew strapped in. Parson and Reyes rode in the back with the patients as the helicopter lifted off into twilight.
In the soft light of early evening, the foothills seemed to anchor the mountains below. The pressure gradients that had kicked up such nasty winds earlier had gone away, and now the air lay calm. The Mi-17 flew as smoothly as a simulator set for zero turbulence, and Parson felt safe unbuckling his seat belt and standing at the rear of the cockpit.
Terrain flowed underneath, shadowy in clear night air lit by moonlight and stars. In the reflected glare of instrument lamps, Parson noticed what he thought was a crack in the windscreen. He stared at it until he realized it wasn’t a crack but a strand of spiderweb, clinging to the glass at well over a hundred knots. Maybe someday, he mused, we’ll figure out how to fabricate material as light and strong as spiderweb. Then we’ll build airplanes with it.
Rashid leveled off at altitude and turned over the controls to his copilot. He slumped in his seat a bit, adjusted his helmet’s boom mike. Parson reached over the flight engineer and patted Rashid’s shoulder. That guy was turning into a good officer.
“Tough week, huh?” Parson said on interphone. Helicopters didn’t spend much time in cruise flight like this. He’d had almost no chance for small talk with Rashid in days. Parson held his interphone cord loosely with his right hand, the talk button between thumb and middle finger.
“Hard days,” Rashid said. Rashid’s English had improved since Gold’s arrival. Parson didn’t know if those two things were related.
“At least it’s a nice night,” Parson said.
Rashid stared out the windscreen, scanned his instruments, gazed outside again.
“It was a night like this that my father…” Rashid paused, perhaps searching for words. “Go away.”
Parson said nothing for a moment. Go away could mean a lot of things, probably none of them good. Finally he said, “What happened?”
Rashid did not talk for a moment, just checked instruments again. Then he said, “My father—fight Taliban with General Dostum.” He spoke in halting words. Parson wasn’t sure if emotion or lack of vocabulary caused the frequent pauses. But he got the gist of Rashid’s story.
During the 1990s, Rashid’s dad served as a subcommander in Dostum’s forces. Like Dostum himself, the old man was an ethnic Uzbek. One night he picked up his rifle and never came home. Rashid was fourteen.
Years passed before Rashid could piece together what happened. As he matured, he found witnesses and survivors. Their stories varied in some details, but in others they were consistent. Within the consistent parts alone, Rashid learned a story he wished he did not know.
In the summer of 1998, the Taliban pushed north and met Dostum near Maimana. The Talibs routed Dostum’s army, but Rashid’s dad managed to escape with a small combined force of Uzbeks, Hazaras, and some Tajiks. They hid out in the mountains for a few days, but eventually got caught in a U-shaped ambush.
The Taliban captured dozens of prisoners in the ambush. They loaded some of them, including Rashid’s father, into a steel shipping container and drove them south into the desert. There they left the container, chained and padlocked.
When other captives were made to open the container three days later, the stench that rolled out put some of them on their knees, vomiting. All the men were dead, skin blackened by the heat. And they were the lucky ones. The Talibs skinned the Hazara prisoners alive.
Parson could not imagine what it was like to carry such knowledge of your father’s fate. How could you think straight, focus on anything other than vengeance, feel anything other than rage? His own dad had died in the Gulf War, one of the relatively few U.S. casualties of Desert Storm. A jet crash, fiery but quick. A painful memory. But Rashid’s kind of memories, Parson thought, would have a more caustic effect, corrode you from the inside.
The crew spent the rest of the flight in silence broken only by radio calls and checklists. Parson watched the stars crystallize into pinpoints of ice over ridgelines. As an old navigator, he knew how to use celestial bodies to find his way. Gold had told him how the fifteenth-century astronomer Ulugh Beg had built an observatory in Samarkand. His tables of stars held up pretty well even today. Such heights of learning and depths of brutality, Parson considered, all in the same corner of the world.
When the Mi-17 arrived over Kabul, all the city’s lights were back on. The glow illuminated the valley that sheltered the capital. Rashid let the copilot take the landing, and the chopper descended toward Helistrip B1 near the terminal.
Parson had not visited Kabul since the earthquake, and from the look of the airport, supplies were still pouring in. The airport’s ramp was sectioned into aprons with designations that made little sense to him. Apron 7A was right beside Apron 1. Pallets stretched across both of them and continued all the way down to Apron 6 at the far end of the field. Tarps covered most of the pallets, but as the helicopter touched down Parson could see some of the cargo included bags of cement, stacks of drywall. He wondered how much would go to rebuild villages and how much would get sucked up by graft. Someone else’s problem, he told himself. You have enough of your own.
A bus with a red cross on the side met the aircraft. The aeromed team based at Kabul helped Parson and Reyes carry the wounded from the Mi-17 into the bus. All four patients appeared unconscious.
“Will they make it?” Parson asked Reyes as the bus drove away.
“Three of them might,” Reyes said. “I’ll be surprised if the other one lives through the night.”
Rashid let his crew take a smoke break inside the terminal. Parson and Reyes remained with the aircraft. They spoke little, and Parson stared up into a sky turned jade by the glow of the airport lights.
By the time Rashid and his men returned, Parson was dead tired. He napped on the flight back to Mazar, went straight to his tent after they landed. Parson made a mental note to tell Gold about Rashid’s father. But he did not see her in the mess tent at breakfast the next morning. At first that didn’t concern him. He’d slept late and got to the chow line just before it quit serving. But after he ate, he saw no sign of her at her own tent or at the refugee tents. Gold was gone.
19
Gold started the morning tired. She had hardly slept the night before, thinking of all that could go wrong with what she was about to do. When she’d finally drifted off, the nocturnal sweats and bad dreams returned. But this time she’d not dreamed of captivity and torture. Instead, it was the parachute dream again.
That dream happened the same way every time. She exited the C-130 on a HALO drop, entered a perfect free-fall arch. When she pulled the rip cord she got a streamer: a mass of flapping nylon bound up so that it would not inflate. She reached for the cutaway pillow—and it wasn’t there. She had no reserve chute.