Silent Enemy

by Young, Tom

  “Are you depressurizing?” Parson asked.

  “Not all the way,” Dunne said. “Not if I don’t have to.”

  Parson waited a few moments to give Dunne’s procedure time to work. He looked outside, and the moon was higher. He could no longer fly over it. At altitude, the evening sky was so clear it seemed the cockpit windows were lenses with an infinite depth of field.

  “How’s it look down there now?” Parson asked.

  “It’s about gone,” the loadmaster said.

  “What about the patient with the scissors?”

  “The aeromeds are working on him. A spurt of that fluid cut right into his neck.”

  “That guy’s fucked,” Dunne said.

  “Looks that way,” the loadmaster said. “He ain’t even moving now.”

  “Okay,” Parson said. “Can you still smell the mist?”

  “Not much,” the loadmaster said. “It’s all over the floor down here, so you’re still going to have a little odor.”

  “I’m back in AUTO now,” Dunne said.

  That relieved Parson. Dunne had managed to get rid of the mist without completely depressurizing. Otherwise, Parson would have had to dive back down to twenty-five thousand feet. Might have killed another patient. He knew he’d have to descend and depressurize at least one more time to deal with the bomb, but he wanted to keep pressure changes to a minimum.

  He took a deep breath, considered his situation. The plane’s mechanical condition was deteriorating. No one wanted to let him land. Still no specific guidance about that bomb. Patients were losing their lives and losing their minds.

  The cascading problems threatened to overwhelm his know-how and his situational awareness. When he’d gotten shot down with Gold back then, he’d faced the basic challenge of survival on the ground in a winter storm. It had been difficult, God knew, but in a way uncomplicated. Just him and the elements and the enemy. Now he juggled all kinds of technical problems while flying what amounted to a chess piece in some global game. And, oh yeah, the chess piece was rigged to explode.

  Parson felt his consciousness on the edge of a survival knife, the membranes of his sanity about to sever. Think straight, he told himself. All these people got nowhere to turn but you.

  “Listen up,” he said. “Let’s go over the status of the aircraft.”

  Dunne lifted the flight manual from his pubs bag and opened to Section Three. Parson could tell he was in the emergency section because of the crosshatched page margins.

  “We’ve lost an aileron actuator and half the ground spoiler actuators,” Dunne said, index finger on a chart.

  “I see the warning lights,” Parson said. They foretold of control problems: less roll response in the air—and, after landing, less help getting the jet stopped.

  “Go ahead and take the POWER switches to OFF where you’ve lost hydraulics,” Dunne said.

  Parson reached overhead, flipped a switch everywhere he saw a SYS OFF light. There were several of them.

  “We’ve lost normal brakes,” Dunne said. “Give me alternate brakes, please.”

  Colman moved the BRAKE SELECT switch, and Parson watched the brake pressure needle rise. A hopeful gesture, he thought. We’re assuming we’re going to get as far as needing brakes.

  “The air refuel door won’t work now,” Dunne said. “If we need gas again, I’ll have to crank it open manually.”

  “Let’s hope that’s not necessary,” Parson said. “Anything else?”

  “The reverser on the number four engine won’t work, either,” Dunne said, “but it doesn’t matter. That’s the one with the vibe, and we’ll have to shut it down before we land.”

  “How’s it doing now?”

  Dunne pressed keys on his MADAR computer. “Eleven mils,” he said.

  “Borderline,” Parson said. He rested his right palm across the throttles. Come on baby, he thought. Keep it together for me a little while longer.

  The precarious condition of the aircraft reminded him of another emergency he’d experienced three years ago. He’d rented a single-engine Cessna to scout some hunting territory from the air. On the way back into Colorado Springs, he ran into unforecasted icing. The mist over the mountains consisted of supercooled droplets: water below freezing temperature but still in liquid form. It froze instantly when it touched his wings, spoiling their aerodynamic shape and making them heavier. Much heavier. Even at full power, the aircraft began to descend. Unlike larger aircraft, the Cessna had no anti-icing system. Parson expected to impact a ridge; he could only hold the wings level and hope for the best. But as he dropped out of the cloud layer and into warmer air, the ice began to sluff off, and the aircraft handled better. He still had to carry extra rpm on landing, and when the Cessna smacked onto the airfield, the remaining ice shattered like crystal. The shards bounced and jangled along the pavement, left a spill of granules to mark Parson’s touchdown point.

  He realized he’d made it because he’d kept flying even after his wings had lost their grip on the sky. His life’s mission had continued from that scattering of white along the runway centerline at Peterson Field. And now he flew on into nightfall over Africa, with options narrowing by the moment.

  Landing at Ben Guerir in the dark was out of the question, even absent a dust storm. Parson called ATC and set up another holding pattern. He requested clearance for landing at Marrakesh or Rabat. Before the answer came, the MCD called up on interphone.

  “Major Parson,” she said. “I don’t know how much damage the patient did to the airplane, but we shouldn’t have let it happen. I take full responsibility.”

  Parson thought for a moment before responding. The MCD had been quick to point a finger at him when he ordered the plane depressurized, but she’d come around when she saw the big picture. And now she was stepping up to take the hit for her own mistake: not blaming her troops, not making excuses. That’s what officers were supposed to do. She was all right.

  “It’s not your fault, ma’am. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just our little corner of the war.”

  There came a pause before the lieutenant colonel pressed her TALK switch again. Then she said, “Roger that.”

  Parson scanned his instruments, some almost too dim to read. He turned up the panel lighting just as Dunne brought up his own instrument floods. A yellow glow bathed the faces of the crew. After three more turns in holding, the controller called.

  “Air Evac Eight-Four,” he said. “Negative on landing at Marrakesh at this time.”

  Parson muttered curses, pressed fingers to the bridge of his nose. But he waited before using the TALK switch. If diplomatic clearances were the problem, diplomacy was the solution. Not Parson’s strong suit.

  “What about Rabat?” he asked. “Or any of the Moroccan military fields?”

  “Stand by,” the controller said. “Call you back.”

  “I swear, I believe that’s the first thing they learn in English,” Parson said to his crew on interphone. “‘Stahndbye. Callyoobahk.’”

  He thought he could see Marrakesh in the distance. The city’s reflected light illuminated dust clouds from below as if the air itself were electrified. The billowing sand occasionally obscured part of the glow completely, and the effect made the town seem to pulse and shimmer. For all intents, Marrakesh had become a mythical place to Parson, of no more use to him than Atlantis.

  “Guys,” Dunne said, “we got another satcom message.” He pressed keys on his computer.

  “Good,” Parson said. “Maybe it’s instructions from EOD.”

  “Ah, I’m afraid not,” Dunne said. He tore paper from his printer and frowned at it, as if he couldn’t quite believe what it said. Then he passed it to Parson. It read: AIR EVAC EIGHT-FOUR—

  MOROCCAN AUTHORITIES HAVE DENIED LANDING.

  DUE TO THE UNKNOWN NATURE OF THE MATERIAL

  PLACED ABOARD YOUR AIRCRAFT, YOU ARE DIRECTED TO

  PROCEED TO JOHNSTON ISLAND. WAIVER GRANTED TO

  LAND ON CLOSED RU
NWAY.

  Parson let the paper slip from his fingers. It fluttered onto the center console. Colman picked it up.

  “They have got to be bullshitting me,” Parson said.

  “What’s the matter?” Colman asked.

  “Do you know where Johnston Island is?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s on the other side of the fucking world.”

  GOLD WATCHED AS TWO LOADMASTERS and that crew chief, Spencer, cleaned up the mess. They unrolled absorbent pads across the floor to soak up the hydraulic fluid and blood. All of them wore gloves, and they seemed careful not to let the liquid touch their skin.

  Mahsoud kept coughing, and that worried her. If the crew members didn’t want that stuff on their hands, what would it do to the inside of your lungs? And though Gold was no doctor, she knew Mahsoud’s respiratory system was already in rough shape from the smoke, dust, and heat of the explosion. He’d complained of painful breathing even before the hydraulic leak.

  “How do you feel?” she asked in Pashto.

  “I will recover,” Mahsoud said. But with the rasp in his voice, Gold was starting to wonder. She wanted the head flight nurse to look at him, but she was busy talking on headset.

  One of the aeromeds began performing CPR on the injured sergeant. Gold could see his life was ebbing away, either from blood loss or from the poison intermingled with what blood he had left. His head injury, perhaps worsened by the depressurization, had brought him to what amounted to suicide. And the damage he’d done to the airplane could have killed a lot of people, despite whatever good intentions he may have once had.

  Gold thought there should be some lesson here about how people come to do evil things, but she could not quite wrap her mind around it. Because of what had happened to this sergeant, no one would hold him responsible for his actions. But what about people with other kinds of wounds, scars on the soul? At what point does wickedness become an act of will?

  The MCD checked the sergeant, then shook her head. She pulled a blanket over his face.

  The aircraft banked, and the stars shifted in Mahsoud’s window. Gold wondered what the change in direction meant. She looked outside and saw the coastline as the C-5 headed out over the ocean. Breakers in the surf shimmered in the moonlight like lines of gold inlay along the shore. No landing in Morocco, presumably. And if Gold’s mental map was correct, this heading meant no landing anywhere in Africa. She wanted to know what was happening, but she thought she should leave Parson and his flight crew alone for a while.

  Mahsoud began to cough again, in spasms of hacking he could not seem to stop. The head nurse listened to his chest.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Gold asked.

  “Pulmonary edema,” the MCD said. “He had it to begin with, and now it’s worse.”

  “What can you do?”

  “We’ll try some albuterol sulfate.”

  The MCD went to a roll pack hanging on the wall. From one of its pouches she took a nebulizer. The device had a mouthpiece with a small bottle attached to it. The MCD connected an oxygen hose to the nebulizer and brought it to Mahsoud. He looked at Gold with a puzzled expression. She realized he had no idea what to do with it.

  “Place it in your mouth,” Gold explained in his language. “Breathe through it.”

  Mahsoud followed her instructions, inhaling and exhaling with his eyes closed.

  “I wish to goodness we had a CCAT team with us,” the MCD said. “Then we’d have a doctor and a respiratory therapist, but the CCATs were all tapped out on other flights.” She went to a cooler and took out a bottle of water. “Let’s at least keep him hydrated,” she said.

  Gold took the bottle and opened it for Mahsoud. He put down the nebulizer and drank. At first, the act of swallowing seemed to make his coughing worse. But then the hacking eased, and he tried to clear his throat with what sounded like deep growls. His eyes watered with the effort, and Gold placed her hand on his shoulder.

  “Take care not to strain your voice,” she told him in his own language. “One day you will need it to speak in your classroom.”

  “God willing,” he said.

  Gold wanted somehow to distract him from his discomfort, so she went to her books and picked up the Falnama again. As she flipped through it, she finally found something appropriate:No matter how powerful your enemies may be,

  Do not let the whisperings of Satan

  Cause you to worry.

  When she read it to Mahsoud, he said in English, “I like that one.” She liked it, too. It reminded her of the Twenty-third Psalm, something she had often recited to herself.

  She hoped Mahsoud would focus on positive thoughts. Otherwise, his physical and mental wounds might lead him into some unrecoverable spiritual fatigue. And if that happened, who could blame him? Suffer enough, and events leave a residue on your mind that never comes off.

  Gold knew about that firsthand. Four years ago, when she’d been captured by jihadists after the shoot-down, her captors had come up with the idea to remove her fingernails. One by one. All ten, over a period of hours. They used a tactical knife and a pair of pliers. They asked questions, some of which she could not possibly answer: How do your planes find us? When will your president visit Afghanistan, and where?

  The ridiculous nature of the interrogation, along with their initial laughter, suggested they sought entertainment more than intelligence. They got from her screams, curses rare for her, the Psalm, the Code of Conduct, the Soldier’s Creed.

  Whenever she uttered any line or verse that gave her strength, it angered them, and the blade went in again. They seemed unsure what to expect of her, but they certainly didn’t expect faith. When they found her belief system at least as strong as theirs, it confused them. Their response was greater cruelty, and another fingernail would come off. It was as if their knife could penetrate nail and flesh pretty easily, but then it hit tungsten.

  Her tormentors apparently wanted to break her for the sake of breaking her, and she did give up a little information: when she had arrived in country, her assigned unit, its home base. But those weren’t things they could use to do any damage.

  She wondered if they’d resort to rape. A committed Islamist probably wouldn’t do that, but a criminal using religion as an excuse wouldn’t hesitate. Before they got around to it, though, Parson arrived.

  He did it by himself, too, without support or authorization. Just a downed airman alone in a blizzard. Sometimes when she remembered Parson, she thought of an essay by her fellow New Englander Emerson. She doubted Parson had ever read “Self-Reliance,” but he certainly lived it.

  After her ordeal, it surprised her how quickly her nails grew back. Just a matter of weeks. Little visible scarring remained. Although Gold had dressed modestly all her life, now sometimes when she wore civilian clothes she would paint her nails a deep glossy red. At the moment, however, they were unpolished and clipped short.

  In the months that followed her capture and rescue, she had needed as much strength to resist falling into despair as she’d needed to resist the torture itself. But the same values she had called on at knifepoint gave her perspective, and eventually even a start at forgiveness. That, however, she was finding to be a process rather than a single act.

  Gold glanced at her fingertips, rubbed them with her thumb. Then she looked outside. On the ocean below, she saw the lights of ships like diamonds glittering on black velvet.

  11

  Parson steered his aircraft out over the water, two fingers of his left hand curled around the yoke. Then he decided to let the flight director and autopilot take over, so he reached down to his right and pressed two push buttons labeled PITCH and LATERAL. The first thing he needed was a clearance, to set up part of the route to Johnston Island. He needed a lot of other things, too, including at least one more aerial refueling. It would be a long night now literally, flying west as darkness moved west. The stars spread before him, a host of trembling silver points.

  “Take the airp
lane,” he told Colman. “My radios.”

  Parson detached his utility light from over his head. He pulled on its coiled cord and shone it onto the pages of the Flight Information Handbook. He looked up a frequency and rolled it into the number one HF radio.

  When he pulled up HF1 audio, he could hear the shifting crackles of radio waves bouncing across great distances of atmosphere. He pressed his TALK switch and called, “Santa Maria. Santa Maria. Air Evac Eight-Four.” In sidetone through his headset, his own voice sounded far away. After just a few seconds, a woman answered him from an oceanic air traffic control center in the Azores.

  “Air Evac Eight-Four, Santa Maria,” she said. “Say your request.”

  Parson told her his coordinates, then said, “New destination is Johnston Atoll. Yes, the one in the Pacific. Request oceanic clearance, ma’am.”

  “Santa Maria is aware of your situation,” the controller said. “You are cleared to three-three degrees north, two-two west, then two-four degrees north, three-seven west. Rest of route to follow later. Maintain flight level three-four-zero. How copy?”

  “Air Evac Eight-Four copies all,” Parson said, “but we’d like to amend that altitude. We’ll need to descend for aerial refueling and some other things. May we have a block altitude between two-five-oh and three-four-oh?”

  Static hissed for just a moment, and then the Portuguese-accented woman said, “That’s approved.”

  “Well, at least somebody finally wants to cooperate with us,” Parson said on interphone. Then he flipped his TALK switch the other way and said, “Thank you, ma’am. Do you have any weather information for our route of flight?”

  “Ah, Air Evac Eight-Four, we expect widely scattered convective activity across that region of the Atlantic.”

  Parson would have liked more detail, but for an area not covered by land-based radar it was the best he could expect. “Understood,” he said. “Air Evac Eight-Four will maintain a listening watch on this frequency.”