Silent Enemy

by Young, Tom

  GOLD TOOK AN OLIVE, offered on the tip of Parson’s knife. Ate it without tasting. She watched the F-15s float alongside like Grim Reapers in solid form. Death itself, always there, never far away, only now you could see it.

  She had thought the most dangerous part of her career was over. No more translating for combat patrols, no interpreting for interrogations. She had a school to run. A way to help undo the damage from a regime that had banned learning from the time it took power in 1996 until the U.S. military blew it away in 2001. The Army, of all institutions, had introduced her to the life of the mind. Educated her in a foreign language. Funded additional courses in a culture and history so rich she could study it all her life and not learn it all.

  But what had it gotten for her and her students? Fire and pain, fear and loss. More of the same if there was anything to this bomb threat.

  She knew she had to change her line of thinking. Fear was like a virus. It could always find its way in, but it hit you harder if you allowed yourself to become vulnerable. And it was contagious. You’re a senior NCO, she told herself, and you’re supposed to set an example.

  Parson and his men still seemed pretty focused. They were lucky they had things to do, Gold thought. Something to keep their minds from wandering. Tweaking knobs, examining charts, checking weather sheets. Their instrument panels, with yellowed lettering and round gauges covered by scratched glass, looked old enough to belong in a history museum. The engineer had some book of graphs with lines like spaghetti, and he kept running his pencil through the graphs and worrying at his calculator.

  That’s what she needed: a job. When she and Major Parson had trekked through the mountains of Afghanistan, her language skill had made her a functional leader despite rank. Among the Afghans, she had been in her element while Parson, a grounded flier, was robbed of his. Now those roles were reversed, and Gold felt useless.

  “Can I help with anything?” she asked.

  “If there’s still coffee in the galley,” Parson said, “I could use a cup.”

  “Me, too,” Dunne said. “Appreciate it.”

  Waitressing wasn’t what she had in mind, but it was better than nothing. She took off her headset and went aft, down the hallway to the relief crew area. The galley had a small oven and a refrigerator. Overhead cabinet, cup dispenser. She found the coffeemaker against the galley’s back wall, poured two cups and brought them to the cockpit. She placed Dunne’s on the engineer’s table, handed Parson’s to him. When he took the cup, for an instant she saw herself reflected in his sunglasses. He expects me to be professional, she thought. Don’t let him down.

  She regarded him as he sipped and spoke inaudible words into the boom mike on his headset. Beige desert flight suit, like the one he had been wearing four years ago, only this one was clean. American flag on the left shoulder. Below the flag, another little patch, one that had to be unauthorized. It showed a gauge with ranges in green, yellow, and red. The needle pointed into the red. The label said SUCKMETER. Some of these Air Force flyboys personalized their uniforms in ways you could never get away with in the Army.

  So this is Major Parson’s world, she thought. His machine and crew far above the ground, nations and cultures passing underneath his wings by the hour. She had come to know him in vastly different circumstances, fleeing from the enemy during the worst blizzard Afghanistan had ever recorded. Parson saved her life with his outdoor skills and marksmanship, talents not always associated with fliers. She gathered that he’d spent a lifetime hunting, fishing, and camping. Elemental pastimes, she supposed, that helped him escape the technology filling his working hours. She wondered if he still liked to hunt after all that had happened.

  Gold went back to the galley. She found a Ziploc bag filled with sugar packets, creamer, and coffee. It also contained a few tea bags. That gave her an idea for something she could do for Mahsoud and the others.

  She looked around until she noticed the watercooler behind her. Gold filled the galley’s hot cup and plugged it in, scanned the knobs and switches until she found the timer for the hot cup, then turned the dial to set it for five minutes.

  While she waited, she climbed halfway down the cargo compartment ladder so she could see her students. Mahsoud and Baitullah were awake; the others were asleep or unconscious.

  Back at the galley, she put tea bags and sugar into two cups. Not the chai the Afghans were used to; Lipton would have to suffice. When the timer stopped, she poured the hot water. Once the tea had brewed, she took one of the cups and eased down the ladder, holding on with her other hand. The retractable ladder creaked and shifted; it occurred to Gold that if she weren’t used to jumping out of airplanes, simply descending these steps would seem dangerous.

  She carried the first cup of tea to Baitullah. He smiled at her, but he looked rattled. No wonder. He was two litters away from the American sergeant who had been shouting and moaning. Now the sergeant was whispering, “I have to get out of here . . . I have to get out of here.”

  Gold knew Baitullah spoke not one word of English. But to understand the sergeant’s mental state, he wouldn’t need to. Gold patted Baitullah’s shoulder and wished she could move him. But the aeromeds had him hooked up to monitors, and he was missing both feet.

  After another trip up and down the ladder, Gold brought tea to Mahsoud. He had raised up on one elbow, perhaps to see better out his window. Blue sky above, but the weather had changed below. A cloud layer like rumpled linen obscured the ground completely. There was no sense of distance or perspective, as if the planet consisted of nothing but its atmosphere.

  “How do you feel?” Gold asked in English.

  “It hurts to—” Mahsoud looked puzzled, made a sweeping motion across his chest.

  “Breathe,” Gold said.

  “Yes. It hurts to breathe.” Mahsoud adjusted the cannula in his nose, took the foam cup. “Thank you,” he said. He took a sip, and Gold could tell from his expression that he wasn’t impressed. Or maybe he was just too uncomfortable to enjoy tea. He drank again, and seemed to watch the steam rise from the cup.

  Gold thought about what she might do to ease his mind. Things for her were hard enough, but she could at least move around. What if you were confined to a litter with nothing to do but wonder if the end was . . . soon? Or now?

  She went to the baggage pallet and found her pack. Gold considered giving Mahsoud her book of poetry, but he had already read it. Three times, that she knew of. She had another book, one about which she had once written a term paper. She’d even thought of it as a topic for some future master’s thesis.

  It was a Falnama, a book of omens. Not a holy book like the Quran but something perhaps once appended to the Quran, containing Muslim lore and legends consulted for advice and predictions. Gold had a reprint of one from the Safavid dynasty, during the sixteenth century.

  She dug the Falnama from her backpack and opened it. The pages fell to fortune-telling so ironic it made her shake her head:If you have taken this augury for travel or trade, prospects are good.

  No help there. Gold leafed through the book, unsure of what she was looking for. She stopped on another augury:Beware, a thousand times beware, not to let trouble reach you.

  Well, it’s a little too late for that, she thought. Trouble certainly reached us at the training center. And it may not be finished with us yet. So much for the Falnama. She left it in her baggage and took her book of Rahman Baba’s poetry to Mahsoud in case he wanted to read it a fourth time. He thanked her in Pashto. Going through the motions of politeness, Gold supposed, but he was probably beyond any morale boost she could offer. Failed again.

  Gold decided to leave him alone so he could rest. She climbed the ladder to the flight deck and slid open the door. The crew appeared in deep discussion, but without her headset she could not hear their words. The flight engineer had his computer on a page that looked a lot like common e-mail. Gold bent to see the message:TO: ALL MOBILITY ASSETS

  FROM: 618 TACC

 
A C-130 THAT DEPARTED BAGRAM HAS EXPLODED

  EN ROUTE BAHRAIN.

  4

  Parson swallowed some of his coffee, felt the heat all the way down. So this shit is for real, he thought. He felt his palms go clammy.

  He started to imagine what it would feel like at the moment of explosion. Thrown down in a fury of smoke, flame, and debris like a fire bucket of charcoal dumped from a high place. Then he told himself, Stop this. You don’t have the luxury of falling apart. The citizens of the United States have entrusted you with the lives of fifty-seven souls on board.

  “Souls on board.” One of the aviation terms borrowed from the older traditions of mariners. Rescuers used to refer to people on a foundering ship as “those poor SOBs.” For public consumption, the phrase got changed to a more palatable version. Well, we’re not dead yet, Parson thought. He felt his pulse in the crook of his thumb as he held on to the yoke.

  Parson wondered if there was anything he could do, anything more he could learn about his situation. He turned his wafer switch to HFI.

  “Hilda,” he called, “Air Evac Eight-Four.”

  “Eight-Four,” came the reply. “Go ahead.”

  “Received your latest on the C-130. What happened?”

  Long pause. Then: “ATC says it disappeared from radar as it descended through ten thousand feet. They got down to minimum fuel.”

  And that model of C-130 couldn’t take fuel in the air, Parson knew. Probably a barometric bomb, then. So descent was the enemy and not time. At least he could refuel in flight, unlike that Herk. And if the bomb was set to go off at ten thousand feet, he could still drop to rendezvous altitude when it came time to get gas. He’d meet the tanker at around twenty-five thousand.

  “Hilda,” he called, “do you know where that C-130 was based?”

  “Affirmative, sir. Al Udeid.”

  “No,” Parson said. “I mean, its home base.”

  “Dyess, I believe.”

  Parson swore under his breath, shook his head. He had done a tour at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas. He wondered if anyone he knew was on board.

  He looked around at his own crew. Dunne seemed all right, but he tapped his pencil on the engineer’s table like he was ticked off. Colman looked pale. Gold had put on her borrowed headset and sat again at the nav station. Parson knew that stricken look in her gray eyes. He’d seen it before, right after he’d killed the insurgents who held her hostage. She was the strongest woman he knew, maybe the strongest person he knew, but everybody had a limit. Parson felt glad to see her back on the flight deck and sorry she was on board at all.

  “Sounds like they set the bombs to throw debris onto whatever place the planes were flying to,” Colman said.

  That made a sick kind of sense to Parson. Bombs set to blow on descent might cause ground damage in countries supporting the war effort. The terrorists would get the airplanes, and maybe more.

  “Reminds me of the Bojinka plot,” Dunne said.

  “The what?” Colman asked.

  “Back in the nineties, al-Qaeda had this plan to blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific. I think they got a bomb on one plane, and the plotters were arrested.”

  “When they get an idea they like,” Gold said, “they tend to stick with it. I was thinking of Bojinka, too.”

  So up to twelve planes might have bombs on board? We’re going to lose a lot of friends today, Parson thought.

  He was glad a tanker was on the way. No telling how much gas he’d need now, and the aerial refuel would keep him and the rest of the crew busy. With too much time droning on autopilot, his mind was beginning to wander, to think about things he might never experience again: the fragrance of a woman’s hair, the smell of autumn woods on opening day of deer season, the smoky burn of single malt when he bought a round for the crew.

  None of that, he told himself. You’re about to fly tight formation with another big airplane at about three hundred miles an hour. Keep your mind on what you’re doing, your eyes on your instruments.

  “Crew,” Parson called over the interphone, “still not finding anything?”

  “Negative in the troop compartment.”

  “Negative, aft flight deck.”

  “Cargo’s got nothing.”

  Maybe we’re all right, Parson hoped. But if the terrorists were hitting planes departing Bagram today, it was hard to imagine they’d overlook the biggest thing on the ramp, the thing with the most hiding places. Where else could it be? If Dunne said he’d checked the wheel wells, he’d checked the wheel wells. And nobody has found anything inside.

  Parson tried to think of any other part of the plane where bad guys might plant a bomb. Mentally, he walked the flight deck, the cargo compartment downstairs, the troop compartment upstairs. The lavatories, galley, closets. The loadmasters had checked all that. Where else? Oh, shit. The back end of the airplane, in the tail cone.

  “All right, crew,” Parson said, “listen up. We’re about to conduct an aerial refuel. To do that, we’re going to descend to two-five-oh. While we’re down there, we’re going to check the tail cone section. I need a volunteer to go through the negative pressure relief valves and look around. It’s going to suck because it’ll be loud and cold.”

  “How can somebody get back there in flight?” Colman asked.

  “After we take on gas,” Parson said, “we’ll depressurize. Then you can open those valves.”

  Parson knew that even inside the manned sections of the plane, depressurizing at that altitude would be no fun. Ears would pop, sinuses would hurt. Everybody would need to be on oxygen. Normally, if you depressurized in flight for something like an airdrop, you did it at a much lower altitude, and even then you might prebreathe pure oxygen. However, descending farther was out of the question if planes were exploding at ten thousand. Parson wanted as wide a margin as possible above any bomb’s trigger altitude. Even if one bomb had been set for ten thousand, another might be set at eighteen thousand. And at two-five-oh, you could probably avoid decompression sickness as long as you prebreathed.

  The interphone broke into his planning.

  “Pilot, MCD.”

  “Go ahead, ma’am,” Parson said.

  “Did I understand you to say you’re going to depressurize at twenty-five thousand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You can’t do that. I have two patients with head injuries. If the air expands inside their cranial cavities, it could kill them or cause permanent brain damage.”

  Parson hadn’t transported wounded since his C-130 days and he’d forgotten how complicated that could get. It took a few minutes to get his mind around the enormity of the decision facing him. Perhaps sacrifice two lives to save the other fifty-five. This wasn’t taking the life of an enemy; it was killing someone who had served honorably and suffered for it enough already. He didn’t know if those two patients were U.S. or Afghan, but it didn’t matter. They were either Americans or allies.

  He wondered what it was like to die of an embolism inside your brain. And what if there was nothing back in the tail? How likely was it that a terrorist would know enough about airplanes to put something in the empennage section of a C-5? Well, terrorists had learned to fly once upon a time.

  Damn it all to hell. Parson knew firsthand how military service could put a crushing burden of responsibility on certain people. Sometimes it was unpredictable, like right now. Sometimes it came all out of proportion to rank, like right now. I’m a major, he thought, not God.

  I’ll just think about it for a while, Parson decided. First we’ll get through the AR and then we’ll either depressurize or not. One crisis at a time.

  He entered a frequency on his CDU for the tanker’s beacon. As if on cue, the tanker called up on UHF.

  “Air Evac Eight-Four, Shell Two-One.”

  “Shell Two-One,” Parson called, “Air Evac Eight-Four. Go ahead.”

  “Shell Two-One is a KC-10 standing by for an emergency AR. How do you want to do this?” />
  “Let’s set up a point parallel at two-five-oh,” Parson said. “We’ll take about a hundred and fifty thousand pounds if you have it.” Hell, why did it have to be a KC-10? The tail-mounted engine on that monster always beats you to death with its jet wash, Parson thought. It was tricky enough to stay in position behind a KC-135. But at least the KC-10 should have plenty of gas.

  “Roger that, Eight-Four,” the tanker pilot called. “See you at two-five-oh.”

  Parson entered 25,000 into the altitude alerter and hooked his fingers over the throttles. Eased the power back until the vertical speed indicator showed a gentle descent. Hoped he wouldn’t make the wounded too uncomfortable until he moved into precontact behind the tanker. Then there wouldn’t be anything he could do about the bumps. By the time we climb again, he thought, I’ll have made a life-and-death decision.

  During his cross-training to the pilot’s seat, Parson had experienced all manner of emergencies in the simulator: fires, missile strikes, hydraulic losses. On a night flight, he had suffered an electrical failure that darkened the cockpit. Made an instrument approach with a penlight in his mouth. But there was no sim scenario, no regs, no guidance whatsoever for a bomb on board. He thought that was because no one expected it to happen to a military plane. Or maybe because if it did, the only procedure was to kiss your ass good-bye.

  GOLD LOOKED OUT THE COCKPIT WINDOWS, over Parson’s shoulder, as the airplane descended. The undercast had broken up enough to reveal what appeared as a sheet of iron down below. The Black Sea, she guessed. Above the water, higher clouds rose many thousands of feet. The airplane flew through towering cumulus that rocked the jet with turbulence. Bulbous fists boiled out from the main body of each white mass, seemed to punch the aircraft. The cloud formations were so laden with moisture that they sprayed the windscreen like ocean spume. The droplets froze when they touched the glass, then dwindled away. The blast of cold, high-speed air sublimated the ice directly into vapor.