Footsteps crunched on the dirt around the vehicle where Gold sat blindly. She heard the driver’s door and the rear right passenger door open. Someone sat beside her and someone else up front. The doors slammed. The engine started. The vehicle began to move.
Gold sensed a left turn, and she made a mental note of it, reminded herself to keep track of the turns. Then she realized that was pointless; they would no doubt take a circuitous route to make it more difficult for her to know where she was. The blindfold itched a little. She sat on her hands to resist any temptation to touch it.
The Land Rover rolled smoothly for a while until a rut bottomed out its suspension. Then more smooth road, then a washboard surface. No one spoke for a half hour.
“Where are your homes, gentlemen?” Gold asked. Couldn’t hurt to try to make conversation.
No answer for a moment. Then the older man, sitting beside her, said, “We are not your friends, American. We will not engage in banter.”
The rebuke didn’t surprise her, so she just sat quietly. But it did surprise her when the older man apparently became bored after another thirty minutes. He said, “You speak Pashto well, American. I detect almost no accent.”
“Thank you, sir,” Gold said. “For a Westerner, Pashto is difficult to learn. But it is a language filled with poetry.”
She let that sink in, take whatever effect it would. No response.
Another hour passed without conversation. The Land Rover slowed, bounced, spun its tires. Then it stopped.
“Remove your blindfold,” the older man said.
Fear and anger. Familiar emotions for Parson, but never like this. Had Gold disobeyed his instructions? The thought made him furious. He didn’t like giving her orders, anyway. He’d always thought her professionalism put her above direct orders. Now she might have betrayed that trust. Or worse, something else might have happened. She was well-known to the enemy. What if they’d finally caught up with her?
Parson found Rashid in flight planning. The Afghan officer was drawing a course line. He looked up from his charts and said, “We are scheduled—”
“Have you seen Gold?” Parson asked.
“No.”
“She’s disappeared.”
Rashid stared. Confused look on his face.
“I think she might have gone to meet that mullah guy,” Parson said.
The pencil fell from Rashid’s hand.
“She go alone to Mullah Durrani?” he asked.
“It’s the only thing I can think of. We had that bombing yesterday, and maybe she decided— Shit, I don’t know.”
“Do you report her disappeared?”
Parson thought for a moment. That would ring alarm bells from here to the Pentagon. Not the kind of attention he wanted, but he saw no other choice. He thought he had an idea of what Gold was doing. But all he knew for sure was that someone under his command was missing in a hostile area.
He picked up a phone and called command post, told them what he knew. Then he called the security police and the OSI. Several minutes later, the security forces commander—a captain—called him back.
“Sir,” he said, “the gate guards say a woman in a Humvee drove out early this morning.”
Parson slammed his fist down onto the flight planning table.
“Why the fuck didn’t they stop her?” Parson asked.
“They had no authority to do so, sir. She’s an E-9, after all.”
Lame-ass excuse, Parson thought. “Do they have authority to use some fucking common sense?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the captain said. “We’ll do all we can.”
“You do that.” Parson slammed down the phone.
The next call came from flight scheduling. Rashid would get to keep the copilot, engineer, and gunner he’d rounded up yesterday, but the supply sortie they were to have flown today was canceled. Now they would fly a search mission.
“I’m going with them,” Parson told the scheduler. A statement, not a question.
He gathered up his flying gear. Parson slipped on his flak vest, donned a survival vest over it. Strapped on his thigh holster, checked that his Beretta was loaded. He got to the helicopter before anyone else.
To help the crew get ahead on the preflight checks, he looked around for hydraulic leaks. Examined the five blades of the main rotor and the three blades of the tail rotor. Though Parson was not a qualified Mi-17 crew member, he’d know a crack if he saw one. The rotors looked good. When Rashid and the rest of the crew showed up, they started the APU and began powering up the aircraft’s systems.
Parson plugged his headset into an interphone cord, listened to the crew run through their checklists. He fought the urge to press his talk button and say something like Hurry the fuck up. At this point, rushing would serve no purpose except to make them miss something and cause an accident.
Finally, Rashid hit the starter buttons one at a time. Parson looked over the flight engineer’s shoulder and watched temperatures and pressures come up, saw the engineer put the generators on line. He knew the crew was working as efficiently as possible, but the start-up procedures had never seemed to take so long.
With the engines on speed and the rotors turning, Rashid spread a VFR chart across his knees. He looked up at Parson and asked on interphone, “Do you think she go back to village?”
“That’s the only spot I know to look,” Parson said.
“Mullah Durrani may live other place,” Rashid said.
“Maybe so,” Parson said, “but we gotta start somewhere.”
Rashid called for his takeoff clearance, lifted off from the airfield. The walnut-brown expanse of Balkh Province’s plain stretched beneath the aircraft, at the foot of the mountains where seasonal streams drained toward Mazar. As the Mi-17 circled over the field, Parson scanned below for a lone Humvee. Nothing there. Rashid leveled on a heading for Samangan.
Cool wind whipped past the door gun and throughout the cabin. Parson closed his eyes and felt the air, tried to settle his mind. Then he adjusted the stems of his sunglasses under the ear seals of his headset. The seals were filled with gel, and if he found the right spot, the headset could clamp his shades into place. That way he could scan outside on a bright day like this without having the wind rip away the glasses. He stood in the rushing air, found a place where he could see over the crew chief sitting at the door gun.
Down below, two dirt roads twisted into the hills. No traffic moved on either of them.
“Rashid,” Parson asked, “which of those roads goes into Samangan?”
Rashid checked his chart, conferred in Pashto with the copilot. “The one to left,” he said. “It lead to village where Marines go with you and Sergeant Major.”
“Let’s just follow it. Maybe she’s still on it somewhere up ahead.” The village was less than an hour’s flying time away, but Parson wanted to be there now.
Rashid nudged the cyclic to the left, banked slightly. He spoke again in his language and transferred control to the copilot. With his hands free now, he took off his gloves and held his right palm in front of the fan mounted on the top of his panel. Sweating hands, Parson noted, nervous pilot. Maybe he didn’t like what this could turn into. If they found Gold, who else would they find?
Parson turned his attention back outside. From this altitude, he had a much better view of the region than during the drive with Gold earlier. Green ribbons of irrigated agricultural land stopped abruptly where terrain rose into knolls and crests, brown and lifeless. Scattered villages and compounds dotted with goats put Parson in mind of the Old Testament. Crumbling ruins also passed underneath, remains from deep antiquity. And still no sign of a Humvee.