Silent Enemy

by Young, Tom

  One of the pressure doors opened, and a gloved hand reached through it. At first, Gold did not recognize the flight-suited figure, face covered by an oxygen mask, as it emerged into the empennage. Loose strands of graying hair tangled around the straps of the face mask. It was the MCD.

  She balanced her way down the catwalk. A loadmaster came through the pressure doors and followed behind her. When they reached Gold and Justin, they lifted the wounded aeromed by the arms and pulled him farther from the hole in the tail cone.

  “Grab his legs,” the MCD shouted. “I’ll take his arms.”

  Gold got up on her hands and knees. She took Justin’s right leg. The loadmaster held him by the calf of his shattered left leg. Arterial spurts from the stump of Justin’s foot reddened the loadmaster’s flight suit. Justin gave no sign of consciousness. He was dead weight. Gold could find little reason to hope for his life except that the dead didn’t bleed.

  They carried him forward, dripping spatters of blood onto the catwalk. When they put him down by the pressure valves, the MCD opened the lower door. From inside the aircraft, two medics pulled him through. Exposed veins and tendons dangled from his stump like tentacles. They left red trails as they dragged across the valve seal.

  “Stop that bleeding,” the MCD yelled to her troops.

  “Parson’s hurt, too,” Gold said.

  The MCD nodded, and the three of them took half steps down the catwalk toward Parson. A rumble of turbulence put Gold on her knees again. The MCD and loadmaster pulled her to her feet. It felt a little warmer now. Maybe the aircraft really had descended quite a way, but as Gold looked out through the rip in the tail the water seemed no closer.

  Parson stared up at them. So he was still conscious. The dark stains on his flight suit had all widened, but Gold saw no sign of severe blood loss anywhere.

  The MCD reached into one of her leg pockets and withdrew a pair of medical shears. She cut through the strap of Parson’s safety harness. Wind caught the loose end and sucked it through the opening. Whipping in the slipstream, it beat against the outside skin of the airplane until it frayed into silence.

  “Can you stand?” the MCD shouted.

  Parson shifted his torso and bent his left knee. He raised his upper body by his arms, and Gold held out hope his injuries were minor. But when he put weight on his right leg, he collapsed and growled through gritted teeth.

  “Broken tibia,” the MCD said. “He’s a big guy. This won’t be easy.”

  The loadmaster grabbed Parson by his armpits. Gold moved to take his left leg, but she hesitated. Could they lift him without hurting him?

  “Let’s pick him up by the thighs,” the MCD yelled. “Don’t put any pressure on his lower leg.”

  The MCD took Parson’s right leg. Gold put her hands around his upper left leg. Parson made that growling sound again, and she felt something sharp through her left glove. In horror, she thought she’d found—and worsened—a compound fracture. But then she realized it was a sliver of metal embedded in his flesh. She moved her hand to avoid driving it in deeper.

  “You got him?” the MCD asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Gold shouted.

  “On the count of three,” the MCD said. “One . . . two . . . three!”

  They lifted and Parson groaned, but they got him onto the catwalk. The three struggled with him, by inches, until they moved him to the pressure valves.

  The MCD opened the lower portal. She shouted a quick diagnosis to the medics waiting on the other side: “Shrapnel lacerations all over. Fracture of the lower right leg.”

  The aeromeds dragged Parson inside the troop compartment, and Gold, the loadmaster, and the MCD crawled through after him. When Gold put her hand down on the troop compartment floor, it came up sticky with blood. Justin lay beside a baggage closet, two medics working on him. They had scissored the legs of his flight suit, and what Gold saw brought bitter fluid up her throat. She forced it back down.

  The medics had placed a combat tourniquet above Justin’s knee. One of them tightened it down with the windlass rod and clipped the rod into place. The burned and torn flesh below the tourniquet looked like something a week dead. The bones were so shattered they gave no form to the muscles and left them a bleeding, shapeless mass. Justin would be lucky to live, let alone keep enough leg to walk easily on a prosthesis.

  Parson sat up against the galley refrigerator. He clenched his jaw as the aeromeds cut open his flight suit and examined his legs.

  “Give me a headset,” he said.

  “Let us treat you, sir,” a medic said.

  “Do what you gotta do, but give me a damned headset,” Parson ordered.

  Gold closed her eyes and offered a silent prayer of thanks. That was the Parson she knew: pissed off and in pain, but still in command.

  25

  Parson took the medic’s headset and plugged it into an interphone cord coiled beside him. His legs felt as if they were bound with barbed wire. Tinnitus rang in his ears continually, like a warning tone for which there was no MUTE button, and he had to turn the headset volume all the way up to hear anything. He adjusted the mike and pressed the TALK switch.

  “Flight deck, troop compartment,” he said. “This is Parson. Tell me what you got.”

  A pause of several seconds. Then Dunne said, “Great to hear you, sir. We lost all the fluid out of systems two and three. We have the shutoff valves closed to a bunch of actuators and we’re going to try to refill the reservoirs. Maybe we can get those systems back.”

  “Good work,” Parson said. “It feels like you have partial control now. What did you do?”

  “I added power whenever we climbed and I wiped it off when we dived,” Colman said. “That seemed to civilize those oscillations, exactly like the book says.”

  “We uprigged the ailerons, too,” Dunne said. “I just told him to turn on the LDCS.”

  “All right,” Parson said. “You boys have been studying.” Parson had never felt prouder of crewmates than now. They deserved to live. He just didn’t know if they had a landable plane.

  “How’s everybody back there?” Dunne asked.

  Parson hesitated. Then he said, “Spencer’s gone. Justin’s fucked up real bad. Gold is okay. I got a broken leg.”

  “I’m sorry,” Colman said.

  “Yeah.” Parson didn’t know what else to say. Could he have prevented the crew chief’s death? He’d have to think about it later. “Repressurize the aircraft,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Dunne said.

  When the medic adjusted Parson’s broken leg, pain shot through his body as if his nerves had turned to acid. He cried out, then closed his eyes hard and muttered curses. It was the worst he’d suffered since an insurgent twisted his cracked wrist four years ago when he and Gold were captured. He felt light-headed. So this is what it’s like to pass out from pain, he thought. But he remained alert. No such luck as a few minutes of unconsciousness.

  Sweat beaded cold on the end of his nose and dropped onto the front of his flight suit. He felt a flutter of panic. For a moment, the agony put him on the ground in the snow in Afghanistan. He forced the memory back down, pushed it into that mental oubliette where he kept all the emotions he could not afford.

  The MCD helped remove his boots and secure the plastic splints, and she managed not to hurt him again.

  “I want to give you morphine,” she said, “but Justin’s going to need what little we have left.”

  “That’s okay,” Parson said. “We still got problems, and I don’t need anything that’ll screw up my judgment.”

  “We have plenty of aspirin.”

  “It’ll do.”

  The MCD went down the steps and came back with two white tablets and a foam cup filled with water. Parson downed the aspirin and gulped all the water. He hadn’t realized he was so thirsty. The aeromeds brought him another cup, and he drank it in three swallows. Part of it ran down the sides of his mouth.

  “Once the aspirin kicks in,” the
MCD said, “we’ll get some of that metal out of your skin. What’s in deeper might have to stay there.”

  “Just get me so you can put me back in the cockpit.”

  “You’re crazy, Major,” the MCD said. “You’re in no condition to fly. Your copilot and engineer have the airplane.”

  “They do,” Parson said. An argument normally would have made him angry, but he was glad to talk about Colman and Dunne. “They did damned good.”

  “So let them fly the plane.”

  “I will,” Parson said. “I can’t fly now. I sure as hell can’t push on rudder pedals. But I can think. So I need to be with my crew.”

  “We’ll see, Major.”

  As Parson spoke with the MCD, he could hear Colman and Dunne on interphone. It sounded like they’d restored some of the lost hydraulic pressure, but not to the control surfaces in the tail.

  “So what do we have?” Parson asked.

  “Nothing to the rudders and elevators but system one,” Dunne said. “It’s real sluggish.”

  Parson knew pilots who had crashed the simulator with lesser malfunctions. He’d thought his crew would be home free if they got rid of the bomb. But now when they tried to maneuver for landing, would the airplane just roll over on its back and die?

  “By the way, sir,” Colman asked, “what made the bomb go off?”

  “Damned if I know,” Parson said. “I cut the mercury switch and moved it, no problem. But when I dropped it out, the son of a bitch exploded.”

  “It went off outside the plane?” Dunne asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess that’s why we’re still flying,” Colman said.

  “If it was triggered barometrically,” Dunne said, “there’s no telling what kind of pressure gradients it hit when it entered the slipstream.”

  Typical flight engineer to want to know how the fucking thing worked, Parson thought. All that mattered was that it had worked. Just not inside the aircraft, thank God.

  “Look,” Parson said, “you guys keep doing what you’re doing. I’d like to get back up there as soon as I can, but the nurses want to work on me first.” At least he felt confident leaving the aircraft to Colman and Dunne a little longer. Despite the Air Force’s endless management courses, Parson felt you couldn’t teach leadership. It was a natural ability, like hand-eye coordination. Either you had it or you didn’t. And those two had enough to get by.

  “No rush, sir,” Dunne said. “I think the worst is over.”

  Parson didn’t know about that. They needed to take an object weighing hundreds of tons, flying at more than four hundred miles per hour, and get it down to landing speed on a narrow strip of asphalt. That required control they might not have.

  “The aircraft’s in bad shape,” he said, “but at least it’s all ours now.”

  “Roger that, sir,” Colman said.

  A small comfort, Parson thought. We’ve traded one crisis for another. He sensed an almost mechanical tightness inside him, something more than muscles tensed by pain. This felt spring-loaded, held by a pawl he could not unlatch. The burden of his duties had become tactile.

  “Should we work on him here or downstairs?” the medic asked.

  “Let’s take Major Parson down the steps,” the MCD said. “He can’t stay up here forever, and he seems to think he’s going back to the flight deck eventually.”

  “I’ll help,” Gold said.

  “Know how to do a seated carry, ma’am?” the medic asked.

  Gold nodded. She kneeled beside Parson and put his arm over her shoulder. Then she and the medic joined their arms under his thighs and stood up with him. That hurt; he felt shards grinding into the meat of his legs. Gold and the medic began easing him down the troop compartment steps one rung at a time. Each step stung, though it was bearable.

  By now, Dunne had restored cabin pressure, and Gold had removed her oxygen mask and cylinder. Her untied blond hair spilled over Parson’s forearm and hand. For a moment, he let the strands flow among his fingers. Then he forced his mind to a different train of thought.

  “Will Justin make it?” he asked.

  “I really don’t know,” the medic said. “He’s lost a lot of blood, enough to cause tachycardia. His heart rate’s way up, trying to pump up the pressure.”

  Just like a machine, Parson thought, like the systems in an aircraft. Everything around me seems to be dying for lack of fluid and pressure.

  GOLD AND THE MEDIC PLACED PARSON on a litter in the cargo compartment. He winced as he lay back. She hated seeing him hurt like that. She wished she could do more for him, but she could only place her hand on his chest and say, “You did well, sir. Thank you.”

  “It’s not over yet,” Parson said.

  “I know.”

  The MCD and another nurse put Justin on a litter beside Parson. The wounded aeromed still showed no sign of consciousness.

  “He needs a transfusion,” the MCD said. “Right now.”

  The other nurse checked Justin’s dog tags. “He’s B negative,” the nurse said. “Rare.”

  “Find out if anybody else on board has that blood type,” the MCD said.

  The aeromeds checked the dog tags and medical records of the less seriously injured patients. They also polled the crew on interphone. Nobody had B negative. When the nurses asked Gold, she said, “I’m O negative.”

  “We can work with that,” the MCD said. “O negative is the universal donor.”

  For the second time in twenty minutes, Gold offered a cosmic thanks. She felt useful again, a functioning senior noncommissioned officer. Without another word, she unbuttoned her ACU top and removed it. The T-shirt underneath bore the white arcs and splotches of salt stains from dried sweat.

  The MCD tied a blue elastic band around Gold’s arm, about two inches above the elbow. Gold felt the pinch of the restricting band, then the cold wet of the alcohol pad and the prick of the needle. The little discomforts gave her a slight glow of satisfaction. Her blood filled the clear tubing connected to the needle and made it look like red cord. The MCD handed her a roll of gauze.

  “Squeeze on this,” the aeromed commander said.

  Gold closed her first around the gauze. She alternately gripped the roll and then relaxed her fingers. At the other end of the tubing, the blood smeared into the folds of a plastic pouch. Slowly, it filled the plastic wrinkles with scarlet. Gold closed her eyes and tried to rest, let the blood flow and her mind wander.

  In all of her travels, studying, and reading, she had yet to understand why people did such awful things as place bombs on airplanes. She sometimes doubted the terrorists themselves believed the stated justifications. But philosophy—and her own experience—had led her to one conclusion: Ultimately, evil was the assertion of self-interest over the greater good. So its opposite had to be self-sacrifice. If she could bleed a little for someone else—in this case quite literally—then perhaps she was pulling in the right direction.

  From across the cargo compartment, Gold watched the aeromeds work on Parson. They slit open the pant legs of his uniform from ankle to hip.

  “Hey,” Parson protested, “I don’t have another flight suit with me.”

  “That’s the least of your problems,” the MCD said.

  “You got that right.”

  Dried blood matted the black hairs of Parson’s legs. Despite the well-defined calf and thigh muscles, the bruises, lacerations, and puncture wounds made his limbs look frail and weak. The MCD painted his injuries with an antiseptic tincture. Then she worked at one of his wounds with a set of forceps. Parson swore, and the MCD apologized. In the jaws of the forceps, she lifted a bloody, twisted shard of metal and dropped it into a trash bag of medical waste.

  “So how bad is it?” Parson asked.

  “I don’t see anything real serious, apart from the fracture,” the MCD said. “Whenever this is over, a surgeon can get more of this stuff out of you than I can.”

  The plane still seemed to ride swells. It worried Gold to
realize the crew did not have the aircraft entirely under control. As a paratrooper, she understood only the very basics of aerodynamics. But she knew an airplane moved in three axes: pitch, roll, and yaw. Right now, pitch seemed to have a mind of its own.

  She could understand why Parson wanted so badly to get back in the pilot’s seat. And she hoped the MCD wouldn’t give him much of an argument. His body was wounded, but his head remained sound. The more aeronautical minds on that flight deck, the better.

  The MCD pulled three more pieces of shrapnel from Parson’s legs. He made no noise, but as she worked he gripped the side poles of his litter so hard that the bones of his hands stood out. Gold had watched him swallow the aspirin. Poor medicine for this kind of pain.

  The ancient Stoics would have approved of him, she thought. Despite the sting of metal barbs under his skin, he wanted to do his job.

  Gold didn’t know what it would take to put this wounded airplane on the ground safely, or if it was even possible. She had a feeling Parson wasn’t even sure himself. Out the windows, she could see puffy fair-weather clouds dotting the ocean like a field of cauliflower. The Pacific was waiting for the aircraft, whether it touched down intact on an island or plunged inverted into the water. The elements, the sea and the sky—just like the forbidding terrain of Afghanistan—took no sides, made no judgments. But neither did they forgive mistakes.

  When Gold had filled the pouch with a pint of her blood, the MCD removed the needle.

  “Will that be enough?” Gold asked.

  “It’ll have to be,” the MCD said. “You’re the only person who can give him blood.”

  The MCD took the pint and connected fresh tubing to it. Then she mounted it on a pole beside Justin’s litter and inserted a needle into his arm.

  “Somebody hack the clock and keep an eye on him for fifteen minutes,” she said. One of the medics pressed a button on his flight watch and stood by Justin. The MCD went back to Parson.

  “What are you looking for?” Gold asked the medic.

  “Hemolytic reaction, anaphylactic reaction,” he said. “But if it happens, there’s not much we can do about it.”