The fliers shut down the engines. The only noises that remained were the metallic clinks of harness buckles unlocked and dropped to the floor. The crew chief and flight engineer rose from their seats, climbed down the boarding steps, and stood guard outside the helo with their AK-47s. Ghandaki wasn’t considered particularly dangerous, but Gold appreciated that they took no chances.
Rashid removed his helmet and took off his gloves. The helmet left his black hair matted, and he ran his fingers through his hair. He placed the heel of his hand on the edge of the main panel, pushed himself out of his seat, and sat in the back with Gold and Parson.
“Have you known Lieutenant Colonel Parson for a long time?” Rashid asked in Pashto.
“We have been through much together,” Gold said.
“If you are his friend, then you are my sister.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Rashid unzipped a leg pocket on his American-style flight suit. He withdrew a half-empty pack of Camels, shook out a cigarette, and held it between his fingers.
“Rashid,” Parson said, “you guys just hang out—I mean, stay here. Gold and I will go to the mosque.”
“We stay,” Rashid said.
Parson took his Beretta out of his thigh rig. He checked the weapon, holstered it, then picked up his helmet bag and satphone. The helmet bag didn’t look particularly heavy, and Gold realized it didn’t actually contain a helmet since Parson preferred to use a headset. She noticed all the patches sewn onto the bag’s nylon exterior: OPERATION JOINT FORGE, OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM, OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM, OPERATION UNIFIED PROTECTOR. Missions in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. An unofficial patch, too: TERRORIST HUNTING PERMIT. He tromped down the boarding steps and into the grass. His limp was a little more apparent, maybe because he’d just stood up. Gold lifted her rifle, exited behind Parson, and slung the M4 across her shoulder. Rashid came out last, placed the cigarette between his teeth, and fired it up with a Bic lighter.
“Tell him those things will kill him,” Parson said.
Gold translated, and Rashid said, “Something else will get me first.” He exhaled twin plumes of smoke from his nostrils and looked into the distance.
His fatalism saddened Gold, but didn’t surprise her. So many Afghans adopted that same outlook. Yet they got up every day and did whatever they did.
“Let’s go see what we got down there,” Parson said.
Parson led the way through the field of knee-high carostan. The mere sight of him walking ahead of her brought back a particular helclass="underline" Following Parson through the snow, pursued by the Taliban, dragging along a prisoner. Fear and pain twisting through her like a chronic sickness.
She stopped. Looked around at the mountains. Parson looked back at her. “You coming?” he said.
“I’m all right.”
She glanced at the finger she’d injured in the HALO jump. The nail was starting to grow back. Parson said nothing else, just waited for her to catch up.
At the edge of the field, Gold saw a group of women by the stream. The women were wrapping a body in a white shroud. Afghans did not embalm their dead, and they preferred to conduct the burial by sundown on the day of death. Gold supposed the women had just washed the corpse. The deceased must have been female; otherwise, men would have done the job.
Two of the women looked over at Gold. When she met their eyes it felt like regarding a person’s reflection in a pool of water, staring at someone not really there. She wondered about their stories; everyone in Afghanistan had lost someone to war and disaster. And to whatever extent Afghan life was hellish, it was doubly so for females. Gold knew mullahs who preached that a woman found her place in the home or in the grave.
The grind of an electric saw rose from the mosque. From a distance of a couple hundred yards, Gold saw only the outer courtyard walls. Apparently the pararescuemen had opened their gear and gone to work. When Gold and Parson entered the courtyard, they found Reyes cutting into a wooden beam amid the jumble of bricks and stones. Nearby, Burlingame shone a light into the eyes of a man lying on the ground.
Nothing remained of the mosque’s structure. The building had collapsed so completely that Gold could not distinguish one room from another. Only the courtyard walls survived, and not without damage: Chunks of stone and mortar had fallen away, and one section appeared warped, as if the earth had somehow exerted torque from underneath.
Villagers dressed in shalwar kameez climbed through the rubble. Several small boys wandered among the adults, along with one girl who looked about eleven. Wails came from underneath the rocks, audible even over the cordless saw. The cries of the unseen trapped carried special poignancy. Discarnate voices of pain.
The locals showed no open hostility. Infidels were forbidden to enter a mosque, but nothing remained to enter. And the Americans had obviously come to help. Still, Gold felt a few hard glares when the Afghan men noticed her hair tied in a bun.
“Salaam,” Gold said to the girl. The child’s almond eyes widened as she stared. It wasn’t likely she’d met a foreigner before, Gold thought, let alone a foreign woman who spoke her language. Gold asked, “May we speak to the imam?”
“God willing, you may,” the child said. “But he is trapped. Are you an American?”
“I am,” Gold said. “My name is Sophia. What is your name?”
“Fatima.”
Fatima’s shoulder-length hair shined a deep black. Evidently someone cared enough about her to wash and cut it. The girl seemed to be uninjured, and she moved with the grace of an ibex. Another of Afghanistan’s special tragedies: The girls could look so beautiful, but then age hit them early like a sudden illness. Gold marveled that Fatima was so well-spoken. A candle flame of intelligence that some here would like to extinguish.
“Where are your parents?”
“My mama is at home. My papa died a long time ago. My brother is over there.” She pointed to the boys lifting stones out of the ruins.
Gold expected the girl to run off and join the other children. Most Afghan kids were painfully shy. But Fatima followed Gold around at a respectful distance, perhaps trying to understand the strange sight of a blond woman dressed like a man, carrying a rifle, and walking around as if she had every right to appear outside her home.
More cries came from within the rubble. “How many people are in there?” Parson asked. He had to shout over the noise of the saw.
Reyes eased off the trigger, and the saw hushed. “I’ve heard five or six,” he said. “The locals have pulled one out already.”
“You guys are going to need some help,” Parson said.
“Yes, sir.”
Parson took out his satphone and began punching numbers. Reyes went back to work with the saw, and its cacophony filled the courtyard again. Beyond him, three dead lay under blankets. Gold felt sick to her stomach; the scene appeared like a vision of hell from some woodcut image out of the Dark Ages: crushed bodies, slicing blades, religious symbols broken.
Some of Gold’s own nightmares looked a bit like that, and recently the bad scenes even came during waking hours. Intrusive memories, the counselors called them. Remembrances of things past with a motive force of their own, returning unbidden and unwanted. Things like Parson’s beheaded crewmate, found in an insurgent hideout. Her favorite student, Mahsoud, getting a field amputation in the ruins of the police training center.
She forced it all back into that deep place where she kept such memories, and she tried to get to work.
“What can I do?” she yelled to Reyes. He released the saw’s trigger again. His cut went only about halfway through the wooden beam, more than a foot thick. A dark slot in the lumber and a dusting of sawdust beneath it marked the blade’s progress.