The gesture gave him a warm turn in the pit of his stomach. Parson didn’t know where this relationship was going. But he liked it that a woman he respected so much would treat him with that kind of familiarity.
She still looked good. Parson knew she was pushing forty, though he didn’t know her exact age. But the Airborne kept her fit. The lines around her eyes looked just a little deeper now, but that was all right. Someone so well-conditioned could remain attractive all her life.
The helicopter leveled, and Parson stretched to look over the flight engineer’s shoulder into the cockpit. All three crew members seemed to peer outside. So they were navigating from memory, too. A bad habit. A good way to get lost. And at night, a good way to fly into a mountain.
Parson pressed his talk switch and said, “Charts, Rashid.”
“Sorry.”
Rashid spoke to his copilot in Pashto, and the copilot said something back. Gold smiled. The copilot opened a VFR chart and clipped it to his kneeboard.
“What?” Parson said, off interphone.
“He says you are like a hawk that sees everything,” Gold said.
“They’re good guys. I keep on them because I want them to live.”
The terrain changed as it flowed underneath the chopper. The brown plateau of Mazar gave way to green patches of agriculture. In one field tucked into the cove of a hill, Parson saw scattered purple and white flowers—the telltale blooms of opium poppies. Most of the harvest had already ended. Maybe the guy wanted a late second crop. Sometimes Parson wished he could find an American or European drug user, beat the shit out of him, then show him photos of Taliban atrocities and tell him his money paid for the bullets and blades.
The opium field receded into the distance. It gave way to more hills, then a village.
“That’s Ghandaki,” Rashid said over interphone. The aircraft slowed and banked. Parson saw part of the village flash by under the crew chief’s door gun. He unbuckled his seat belt and rose to look out a window.
It could be hard to assess damage from the air, even from a low and slow helicopter. An exploded home or a cratered courtyard might have been bombed yesterday or in 1984. Parson found it tough to distinguish war destruction from earthquake damage in these mud-brick towns. He had spent his career as an airlifter; he knew little of aerial surveillance. But even Parson could see Ghandaki had just lost its mosque.
He saw the collapsed dome, the toppled minarets. Judging by the brick walls that remained, Parson figured it a crude structure—nothing like the Blue Mosque in Mazar—but surely the best Ghandaki could afford.
Rashid and his crew chattered in their language. Gold furrowed her brow and checked her watch. She got up and looked outside.
“It might have been full of men praying,” she said.
The Mi-17 made a low pass. Below, villagers climbed over the rubble. Some waved their arms. Men wearing pakol berets and white prayer caps pulled at lumber and crumbled masonry. They worked with only their bare hands.
“Put us down there, sir,” Reyes said.
“All right,” Parson said. “Rashid, did you copy that?”
When Rashid didn’t answer, Parson looked to Gold for help. But then Rashid said, “I search for place to land.”
Parson leaned forward to peer out the cockpit windscreen. Rashid had his work laid out for him. The mosque—or what was left of it—lay within the cut of a mountain stream. Mud huts surrounded it. A steep hillside dotted with scrub rose above the town. No spot within a half mile looked clear and level enough to serve as a landing zone.
Rashid twisted the grip throttle on the collective and pulled back on the cyclic. The helicopter cleared the hill, then turned back toward the mosque. Parson didn’t consider the Mi-17 the best-designed aircraft he’d ever seen, but the damn thing had power. And unlike some U.S. aircraft, it wasn’t junked up with electronic components from every congressional district. The Russians clearly intended a simple machine, maintained easily at a forward base by Ivan the mechanic with his vodka hangover. Perfect for Afghanistan.
The PJs looked out, and Reyes sized up the problem. “Sir,” he said, “if they can give us a good hover, we’ll put the REDS kit down on its lowering harness.”
Parson raised his eyebrows at Gold, and she translated. Rashid gave a thumbs-up. The crew did not have much experience with helicopter suspension techniques, but Rashid was qualified, and he seemed game. They all needed to learn to think on the fly, literally, so they might as well start now.
The last time Parson and Gold had flown together, he’d certainly needed to think beyond any normal procedures. He’d mustered all the know-how he and his crew could find to crash-land a jet crippled by a terrorist bomb, and he still carried the scars. Like elderly people whose arthritis got worse when it rained, Parson’s leg ached whenever the altimeter setting was low. He wondered if Gold carried scars, too. She had none he could see, but the invisible ones could be just as bad.
Reyes clipped a carabiner to a tie-down ring on the floor of the helicopter. He attached another to the top of the cage that contained the REDS kit. Then he looped a bight of rope around a figure-eight belay device and attached the figure-eight to the carabiner on the REDS cage. Parson, a lifelong outdoorsman and hunter, remembered mountain climbers used a similar belay system to protect themselves from falls.
The PJs placed suspension harnesses around their waists, and they moved the REDS cage near the door. Rashid pulled into a hover near the collapsed mosque, and dust began to swirl below. The chopper seemed to sway for a few seconds, but then Rashid stabilized his hover. When Reyes was satisfied he had a steady platform, he called, “Ropes.” He and his partner positioned the REDS kit out the door and lowered it to the ground.
Then the two pararescuemen looped lines through their own belay gear. They stood in the door, facing inside the Mi-17, with their boots on the bottom edge of the door frame. Both men braked their rappelling lines by holding the ropes behind their backs. In unison, they brought their hands forward, bent their knees, swung themselves outward, and descended down the lines.
After the men reached the ground, Parson unclipped the lines, dropped them, and said on interphone, “Ropes are clear.” Just as he saw the PJs remove their gloves and unstrap their harnesses, Rashid climbed away.
“There is a field outside of the town,” Rashid said. “I land there.”
“Copy that,” Parson said. “You guys stay with the aircraft, and Sergeant Major Gold and I will walk to the mosque.”
Rashid acknowledged with a double click of his interphone button. Another bad habit, but Parson tolerated this one. It meant I heard you and understand.
2
As the helicopter descended into the field, dry carostan grass undulated in the rotor wash. The wind blast seemed to turn the blades of grass to liquid, flowing in waves the color of mocha. The sight made Gold a little dizzy. She brought her eyes back inside the aircraft to give her brain and inner ear something that made more sense.
The crew chief watched the ground and talked Rashid down. “Ten meters, sir,” he said. Heavy Pashtun accent. Gold wondered if numbers were the only English words he knew. She just hoped he could count down accurately. “Five meters. Two. One.”
The chopper settled tentatively, as if it did not trust the stability of the earth. But when the rotors slowed, the machine finally surrendered to gravity. All pitching and rolling motion ended, and Gold realized Rashid had made as smooth a helicopter touchdown as she’d ever felt.