As the sun rose now, she drove through the airfield gate in a Humvee checked out from motor pool. Outside the perimeter, alone and without her rifle, she knew she was jumping without a reserve. She had no backup plan, no options if this turned bad.
Diwana, she told herself. This is crazy.
Even if I get some good intel and make it back, she thought, they’ll say PTSD skewed my judgment. Well, so what if it has? I do what I do because of things I’ve seen, things I’d like others not to have to see.
Gold turned off the blacktop and steered the Humvee on the same rutted path the Cougars had taken on the first trip. The vehicle had been upgraded with an Armor Survivability Kit, but it wasn’t nearly as blast-worthy as a Cougar. If she hit an IED she’d have less protection—and no way to call for help. Given the Talib’s warning about tracking devices, she’d signed out a Humvee that did not have a radio installed, and she did not carry a handheld radio. She had just her body armor, helmet, and MOLLE rig. The rig’s pouches contained only writing pads, pens, and bottled water. Not even a knife. Diwana.
She drove past a dust-blown village of five homes. At one house, a child of about eight sat in the doorway. The boy wore a soiled brown vest and black pants, and he scraped in the dirt with a stick. Gold waved. The kid waved back but did not smile, then scratched in the dirt again. She wanted to believe he was drawing numbers or letters, perhaps doing arithmetic. But she realized he was probably playing with ants.
Whatever he’s doing, Gold thought, he’s as good a reason as any for what I’m doing. She considered the Talmudic teaching that had come to mind a few days ago: To take one life is to kill the whole world. She liked its inverse better: To save one life is to save the world.
What Parson would tell her now, she could well imagine. After he stopped yelling for her to turn around, he’d say, You’re not responsible for saving the world. You do your mission to the best of your abilities, you follow lawful orders, you watch out for those around you. If that’s not enough, you can write a check to feed the starving. Maybe even volunteer for the mission to transport the food. But you don’t go all renegade trying to beat a terrorist gang by yourself.
Still, Gold never considered turning around and driving back to Mazar. Rattling along a back road in Afghanistan, she thought of Edmund Burke. She knew a quote attributed to him that he may or may not have said, but it was a great statement nonetheless: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Well, this might be idiotic, she thought, but I’m doing something.
The sun climbed higher as she drove along, brightening the blue dome of sky above her. Parson would call it a good day to fly. Maybe he and Rashid would get a mission today that might keep him busy enough not to worry about where she was. But no, she realized, he’ll be angry no matter what.
Eventually she approached the place where the MRAP had run over the roadside bomb. Little remained of the MRAP but charred chunks of steel. The crater opened by the IED had been blown open wider by more powerful ordnance, whatever had been launched from the air. One of those attack aircraft with threatening names like Cobra or Thunderbolt had obliterated the vehicle. The blast had left the soil blackened and burned. The place still smelled of smoke and fire.
Gold steered to avoid the hole. Her right-side wheels sank into a ditch at the edge of the path, and for a moment she worried about getting stuck. But the Humvee had a high enough ground clearance to get over the stones on the lip of the ditch. The Humvee crunched over the rocks, fishtailed just a bit, continued along the roadway.
As Gold neared the village, her heart pounded. Soon enough she’d learn whether she’d entered a baited trap.
She topped a rise and saw the village in the distance. A pickup and three Land Rovers sat parked under the trees. Gold drove closer and saw the pickup was a Toyota Hilux. Two men and a woman stood beside the trucks. The woman wore a blue burka. The men wore shalwar kameez and striped turbans—not the usual white or black headgear of the Taliban. Today, Gold thought, that really means nothing.
Both men held AK-47s. They carried them with the muzzles pointed up. Gold slowed, thinking. At least they weren’t aiming at her. She braked, drove the last hundred yards at about five miles per hour. Did not want her approach to look in any way aggressive.
She stopped about forty feet from the vehicles. Felt staring eyes upon her. Drivers waited in two of the Land Rovers; the other sat empty. Gold turned off her engine, removed her helmet, tied her desert scarf into a hijab. Whispered a prayer, opened the door, stepped out.
“Salaam,” she said. Hoped they did not hear her voice shaking.
“Assalamu alaikum,” one of the men said. Same voice she had heard on the phone. He looked at her with an expressionless face. Trimmed black beard flecked with gray. The other man was younger, with no silver in his whiskers or hair. Gold wondered if the younger man was Durrani’s son.
“You will find I have followed your instructions,” Gold said in Pashto.
“I hope so,” the older man said. Then he gestured to the woman in the burka. “Search her.”
Gold held out her arms for the pat-down. The woman looked into Gold’s eyes from time to time but never spoke. She might have been one of the daughters Gold had met earlier, but it was impossible to tell.
The search was thorough but not rough. The woman took Gold by the arm and turned her away from the men to pat her chest. When Gold turned around again, the woman opened all the pouches in her MOLLE gear. She took Gold’s pad and pens, handed them to the older man.
He unscrewed both of the ballpoint pens, examined the springs, dabbed the rolling points on the back of his hand. Apparently satisfied that the pens contained only ink, he reassembled them.
They weren’t kidding about tracking devices, Gold thought. The man kept the pens and paper.
“You will not take notes today,” he said.
Gold tried to weigh each action, every word. If he’d thrown her pens to the ground, that would have been a bad sign. But maybe they just wanted her to cooperate until they had her somewhere else.
The younger man opened the back door of the empty Land Rover. “Sit,” he said. Gold stepped toward the vehicle.
“You are very brave or very foolish,” the older man said. “For now, I will assume the former. We will blindfold you now. Out of respect for your courage, if it is that, we will not bind your hands. But after we begin driving, if you even touch that blindfold, we will shoot you.”
“I understand,” Gold said. She took her seat. The Land Rover smelled of sunbaked upholstery. The younger man took a white cloth from his pocket, handed it to the woman in the burka. She folded it lengthwise and stood at the open door of the Land Rover.
Gold turned in her seat so the woman could tie the blindfold. When the cloth came over her eyes, Gold felt a flush of panic. Now she’d passed the point of no return; the loss of control was complete. Again she began to question her own judgment. Had she lost her mind? Too late to change anything now. Sweat oozed on her back, her neck, under her arms.
The woman knotted the cloth at the back of Gold’s head, over the hijab. She tied it firmly, but not so tight that it hurt. Gold took deep breaths, fought her rising fear. She turned in her seat to face forward again, and someone closed the door beside her.
The two other Land Rovers started engines, and Gold realized their purpose. Decoys to head in different directions, in case American drones watched from the air.