“You can draw whatever equipment you need from the Special Tactics Squadron there at Mazar,” the colonel said. “Just save your hand receipts for everything.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any questions, Sergeant Major?”
“Uh—no, sir. Thank you for the opportunity.”
“All right,” the colonel said, “let’s talk a little about tactics.” The colonel’s face disappeared from the screen, replaced by a topographical map of Kuh-e Qara Batur. “You’re going in a little after midnight.”
Gold, Reyes, two Force Recon Marines, and an Air Force combat controller would begin the operation by parachuting from twenty thousand feet. On night vision goggles, they would observe the target area. Unless they saw something to speed up or delay the mission, the main force would come in by chopper and by Osprey a short time later. The spot where the trucks had parked now had a new name: Objective Sword.
The colonel gave few specifics on what to expect after the main force landed. No intelligence agency possessed a layout of the bunker complex at Kuh-e Qara Batur. No way to tabletop what would happen next. As the colonel put it, the Marines would try to minimize hostage casualties in a kinetic action of unpredictable nature. Tear gas and flash-bangs. More lethal stuff when necessary.
Gold understood what that meant, and it darkened her previously good mood. For the abducted kids—for Fatima’s brother, for Aamir’s son—the raid would be dangerous, too. Those who fired on the assaulting force would become combatants, lawful targets. Terrible even to think about it. Their captors might kill them. The whole place might be wired to explode.
When the briefing ended, Gold went to check on Fatima. She couldn’t tell the child anything, of course, but she wanted to see her one more time before she left.
Shadows were spreading through the rows of refugee tents. Gold felt the temperature dropping as darkness approached, and she thought how tomorrow night would answer prayers or shatter lives. Probably some of both.
She found Fatima lying on her cot, drawing on a notepad. Apparently some well-traveled UN staffer had given her pencil and paper. The pencil bore the logo of the Hotel Splendide Royal in Rome.
“You look very busy, Fatima,” Gold said in Pashto.
“Sophia!” the girl cried. She stood up and hugged Gold. They sat together on the cot.
“What brings you to work so hard?” Gold asked.
“I am drawing pictures of the people here I know.” She flipped forward to the first page. “This one is you.”
The drawing looked like those done by children all over the world. Little distinguished it from the refrigerator art of American kids, except it was all done in pencil for lack of crayons. The picture showed Gold holding a rifle, and the drawing emphasized her hair—depicted in a bun. Apparently Fatima had an eye for detail. She’d put in lines of scribble everywhere Gold wore an insignia: wavy circles for her jump wings and free-fall badge, bigger scrawl where the tapes read GOLD and U.S. ARMY. The face wasn’t smiling; Fatima had drawn a straight line for the mouth. Points for accuracy there, too, Gold had to admit. But she smiled now.
“That is very good, Fatima,” she said. “I am flattered.”
“What means this word, flattered?” Fatima asked.
“It means you have honored me.”
Fatima beamed, turned the page. “I also drew the giant soldier,” she said.
Blount’s picture filled the sheet. Fatima had put tiny stick figures behind him, an exaggerated show of relative height. She had turned the pencil lead on its side and shaded the face to represent his dark skin. Clearly the girl remained fond of the gunnery sergeant who had carried her away from Ghandaki that awful night.
“Do you remember his name?” Gold asked.
Fatima shook her head.
“Blount. Gunnery Sergeant Blount.”
“Bloo-anht.” Two syllables.
“Blount.”
“Blutt.”
“Close enough.”
Fatima turned one more page. “I made a picture of your pilot friend, too,” she said.
The girl had drawn a smile on Parson’s face. Now, why did he rate that? Well, he usually looked happy if he was flying and nothing went wrong. And in the picture, perhaps he was about to fly. Beside him, Fatima had drawn a rough helicopter—just an egg shape with a big sideways X for a main rotor and a small upright X for a tail rotor.
After Parson’s drawing, the pad was clean. No pictures of her brother, her murdered mother. Too painful to think about, Gold imagined. Instinctively, the girl compartmentalized. A natural coping strategy for post-traumatic stress. That’s what Gold’s counselors had said, anyway.
Gold thought of the remaining pages in that pad as the rest of Fatima’s life, unwritten. The shapes and colors to mark the unused sheets were impossible to predict. But tomorrow night would turn one more page.
In the twilight outside the Air Operations Center, Parson found Rashid sitting on a stack of sandbags. The Afghan pilot had the kneeboard he kept for making notes in flight. Its leg strap dangled, unbuckled. Rashid was using the kneeboard as a lap desk. He held a pen in his right hand. The heel of his left hand rested on his thigh, a lit cigarette between his fingers.
“Can you see to write?” Parson asked.
Rashid looked at him, maybe thinking through the casual American construction of Parson’s English sentence.
“No longer,” Rashid said. He looked away. Put the cigarette in his mouth and took a drag. Across the entire apron, not a single aircraft ran engines. The red ember at the tip of Rashid’s cigarette brightened. Amid the deep quiet, Parson heard a crackle as the fire burned deeper into the tobacco.
“What are you working on?”
Rashid took the cigarette between his fingers again, exhaled the smoke. Stared beyond the tarmac. He waited so long to answer, Parson wondered if he’d heard the question.
“Words to wife.”
Parson knew Rashid was married, but the Afghan pilot had seldom spoken of family. Just that story about his father. And Parson had never known Rashid to write a letter to anybody. It took a moment for Parson to realize what his friend was doing.
“That’s not a death letter, is it?”
Rashid took another drag, nodded once.
“Come on, man. Those things are bad luck.”
Parson had known crew members to write those letters before. They would leave the letters in their quarters, or perhaps give them to someone on another crew. But he had never written one himself. Whenever he went on a mission, no matter how risky, he had every intention of coming back. Parson was more than willing to sacrifice himself for his friends, and he’d nearly done so more than once. But he started every new operation with the expectation of success and survival. Unlike Rashid, he didn’t have a wife. But he doubted he’d ever write such a letter even if he were married.
Self-analysis had never been one of his skills. However, as he considered what he should say to Rashid, he felt the wide gulf of experience and culture that separated him from his Afghan friend. Most Americans, including Parson, were hardwired for optimism. It twisted through the double helix of their DNA.
But in Afghanistan, each family had suffered the losses of conflict. And the deaths went back a lot further than the Soviet invasion. Parson remembered Sophia mentioning that a tribal war had taken place in just about every recorded decade. What would that history do to your view of life? Probably not incline you to assume everything would be all right.