Silent Enemy

by Young, Tom

  Colman closed his fingers around the throttle knobs.

  “You’re a hell of a pilot,” Parson said. “You guys are a hell of a crew. Now ditch this aircraft.”

  At that moment, Parson became aware of a presence behind him. Gold stood with her hands on the back of his seat. She pointed and said, “Birds.”

  Four white petrels glided above the water at about two o’clock low. One veered away, and the others held themselves in a broken V pattern, a perfect missing man formation.

  “The island has to be close,” she said.

  “I see it,” Colman said.

  Parson saw nothing. He removed his sunglasses and still saw nothing. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Colman said. “I have the island.”

  Perhaps Colman’s younger eyes were right. Those birds had to come from somewhere.

  “Let me try to make it, sir,” Colman said. “Please.”

  A commander has to trust his crew, Parson thought. If you lead them well, they’ll do the right thing. You can’t do it all yourself.

  Ahead, a shadow on the ocean lingered, became motionless. As the aircraft grew nearer, the shadow turned to a white lozenge in the distance.

  “I got it,” Parson said. “Eleven o’clock.”

  “Yes, sir,” Colman said.

  “You’re only going to get one chance at this,” Parson said. Then he switched to PA and said, “Disregard the ditching order. Stand by for landing.”

  The waves flashing by below seemed smaller now. Perhaps the surface winds were calming.

  “Give me a nice flat approach,” Parson said.

  “No steeper than three degrees,” Colman said. He’s on it, Parson realized. At ten miles out, he should be at three thousand feet.

  Colman cracked the throttles just slightly. The aircraft began a descent, its right wing a meteor burning to earth in a fury of smoke and flame. Parson hoped he’d not chosen wrong.

  The C-5’s descent rate increased. Johnston Island rose higher in the windscreen. Colman pulled back on the yoke. The aircraft did not respond.

  “I can’t get the nose up,” Colman said.

  Parson placed his hand on the spoiler handle, hesitated only a moment, then tugged it as gently as he could. The nose climbed one or two degrees, but not enough.

  “You’re way above approach speed,” Dunne said. “And above tire limit speed.”

  “Fuck those tires,” Parson said. “They don’t need to work but one more time.”

  The vertical speed indicator showed a descent of two thousand feet per minute. Far too much. The Pacific rose toward the burning airplane. Parson pulled the spoiler handle harder.

  The C-5 pitched up as if launched. Stall warning tones shrieked. The stick shaker rattled the control columns.

  “Power, power,” Parson said.

  Colman shoved the throttles. The jet climbed, leveled. Its nose fell, rose, fell again.

  “We’ve got to make it stop doing this shit,” Parson said. “When the nose comes up, give me just a little more thrust.”

  The jet flew at about three thousand feet above the water now. As its deck angle rose, Colman advanced the throttles. Parson held the spoiler handle, moved it by fractions, more with his mind than with his hand.

  The nose stabilized at zero pitch. Not good for landing. Better to have a few degrees up.

  “I think we’ll have to make do with that,” Colman said.

  “Yeah,” Parson said. “Just hold what you got.”

  In the clear water rushing by, reefs appeared as if viewed through molten glass. Each coral formation seemed shot through with specks. For an instant, Parson wondered if they were niches in the coral or fish actually visible from the air. Or perhaps a trick of a sleepdeprived mind.

  The island widened in front of the aircraft, white sand like a crust of salt. Now Parson made out the disused runway, its cracked pavement with an X painted on the end.

  “We’re fast,” Dunne said.

  “Best we can do,” Colman answered.

  “Come a little left if you can,” Parson said. Colman moved the yoke, lined up with the ribbon of asphalt.

  “You can use the thrust reversers on the inboards when we touch down,” Dunne said.

  Parson turned his comm switch to PA. “Brace for impact,” he said.

  At about one hundred and ninety knots, the aircraft carried far too much speed. Parson knew this would be more a controlled crash than a landing. Just below, the atoll reeled out its breakers, then surf and sand, then gravel and a fallen wire fence. Then asphalt splattered white with bird droppings.

  Colman yanked the throttles to IDLE. With its excess speed, the aircraft floated above the runway. The end of the pavement hurtled toward the jet.

  “Spoilers,” Colman called.

  Parson pulled the handle. The C-5 pitched up, lost its hold on the air, slammed to the earth.

  Utility lights broke from their overhead mounts and dangled by coiled cords. The nose gear collapsed. Parson felt the fuselage grinding along the pavement. The impact hurt his leg so much, his visioned silvered and darkened. Pain flowed from the broken bone like a liquid, a hot magma that threatened to overcome him. He gripped his armrests, gritted his teeth, and hissed, “Stand on ’em.”

  Colman stomped the brakes. Parson pulled the inboard throttles into REVERSE THRUST. The jet swerved off the runway and into the sand, mowed down a copse of palm trees. Dust and smoke billowed over the windscreen. When the right wing’s main tanks ignited, the land and sky bled orange and black.

  THE FLIGHT DECK DOOR JOLTED OPEN, and smoke began to roll into the cockpit. Through stinging eyes, Gold saw that the crew remained in their seats.

  “Evacuate to the left and aft,” Parson called. “We’ll use the slide.” He flipped switches on his overhead panel, and the engine noise whined down.

  “Negative,” a loadmaster reported from downstairs. “You got a brake fire on the left side and it’s spreading forward. Your slide will burn right up.”

  So they’d have to take Parson down the ladder. Gold removed her headset. She coughed, held her breath, pulled the activation knob on her EPOS. She forced her chin through the neck seal and yanked the hood over her head. Now she could breathe, but she could hardly see as the smoke thickened.

  Despite the oxygen flowing in the EPOS, Gold felt she was drowning. The hood confined her, brought forth the primal terror of an animal restrained. Part of her wanted just to head down the flight deck stairs and out through the first opening she could find. Only her concern for Parson held her on the flight deck. She admired the military discipline that kept the crew at their stations, completing some kind of shutdown or firefighting procedure.

  The myriad of warning lights on the panels around her went dark. Screams and shouted commands emanated from the cargo compartment, over the rumble of flames and the creaks of burning metal. The pops of tortured aluminum sounded to Gold like distant artillery fire. The smoky cockpit grew hot.

  She unharnessed and went to Parson. As he donned his own EPOS, she unbuckled his straps and tossed them aside. Dunne stumbled toward them through the smoke. He groped for a lever and slid Parson’s seat aft. Colman struggled to slide back his own seat, which was jammed in its tracks. He gave up, opened the quick-release buckle on his harness, and climbed over the center console.

  Gold took Parson under his left arm as Colman took his right. Parson’s body felt impossibly heavy to her until he placed a stockinged foot on the center console and levered himself up with his good leg. As Gold helped drag him from the seat, something outside blew up. Through the EPOS hood, she felt a surge of baking heat against her face.

  Flames billowed into the hallway by the bunk rooms. Puddles formed on the floor as plastics melted. Through the smoke, Gold saw Dunne lift a fire extinguisher from its wall mount and pull the pin.

  She and Colman began dragging Parson down the flight deck ladder. Each step presented a new obstacle: a turned knee, an awkward handhol
d. Any torque on Parson’s broken leg brought shouts and curses of pain, muffled by his hood.

  “Leave me,” he yelled. “Get out!”

  Gold and Colman ignored the command and muscled him down one more rung. From her place on the ladder, above the cargo compartment, Gold glanced toward the patients. She saw little but smoke. She could tell, however, the aeromeds and loadmasters were fighting to get the wounded through the fire and to the open ramp at the back of the aircraft. She did not see Mahsoud or Baitullah. Plumes of white split through the black smoke. The MCD was blasting at the flames with a fire extinguisher, trying to cut a path.

  At the bottom of the flight deck ladder, a crew member fumbled with a lever to open the door to the outside. The door unlatched and extended downward until its ladder reached the ground. The crew member turned to help an ambulatory patient stumble out.

  Claws of flame raked the walls and ignited a fluid leaking from a ruptured reservoir. The burning ooze dripped fire onto the floor. In the blazing aircraft, the fire did things Gold had never seen fire do before. Flames splashed across the cargo compartment as the fluid reservoir failed altogether. A length of tubing broke open. Whatever it contained ejected, under pressure and on fire, and lunged at Gold in an incandescent spray of vapor. A rivulet of fire torched its way underneath the ladder. Spatters lit the suede and canvas of Gold’s boots. Parson twisted free and beat them out with his gloved hands.

  She pulled him by the arm again, but Colman held back. Fire blocked both the crew door and the aft ramp.

  “Move!” Dunne shouted from higher up the ladder.

  Dunne pointed his extinguisher at the flames below and squeezed the lever. White spray battered the tongues of fire enough for Gold and Colman to reach the crew door with Parson.

  For just an instant, Gold hesitated, looked around. She wanted to know if Mahsoud needed help.

  There wasn’t time. She felt a hand grab her by the collar and shove her through the door, onto the steps that led to the ground.

  “Out, Sergeant Major,” Dunne yelled. “I got it.”

  Dunne loosed another blast from his extinguisher. It beat back the flames long enough for Gold to see more flames—in the form of a thrashing human enveloped in fire. Gold could not tell who it was. Dunne advanced toward the burning figure, sweeping with his extinguisher.

  Then the fire in the cargo compartment exploded as if the air itself had turned flammable. It singed Gold’s hands as she held on to Parson. Despite the pain in her hands and ribs, she worked with Colman to hoist Parson down to the ladder’s lower rungs.

  Parson pushed himself off, tumbled to the ground. Gold jumped after him. She landed hard and scraped the heel of one hand on the coral surface where the C-5 had skidded from the runway. Colman dropped to the ground beside her. Gold took Parson by the legs, and Colman grabbed his arms. They lifted him in a two-man carry and ran.

  30

  The fire had reached the converters for the liquid oxygen. Parson knew nothing else would make the blaze accelerate so aggressively. His leg hurt so much he felt faint. As Gold and Colman ran with him, each step seemed to pound in a hot spike. They took him upwind of the smoke, across the abandoned tarmac. His own perspiration and breath created an unbearable humidity inside his EPOS hood.

  They put him down on a beach, several hundred yards from the burning airplane. His EPOS collapsed against his face, its cylinder depleted. Fighting the panic of suffocation, Parson placed his fingers under the neck seal and tore the hood off his head.

  He gasped, filled his chest with sea breeze. Sweat dripped from his matted hair. Colman removed his own EPOS, then helped Gold out of hers. Heat stress flushed her face, which streamed with moisture. Her eyes had that look he’d seen when he rescued her in Afghanistan: like they had peered into an abyss and still saw it. He noticed red wet burns on the backs of her hands.

  Parson raised himself to look at his aircraft. It was like asking if hell existed and getting the answer. He could see its radome and wingtips. Fire and smoke blotted out the rest. Flames towered above its tail, and smoke churned a black arc over the water.

  He tried to assess the evacuation. An aeromed and a loadmaster bearing a patient on a stretcher ran from behind the aircraft. The stretcher itself was smoking until the loadmaster ripped away a burning blanket and left it in a smoldering heap on the beach. No one else came out the aft ramp or the crew door.

  “Where’s Dunne?” Parson asked. Hadn’t the flight engineer been right behind him?

  Colman gazed back at the C-5. He appeared overheated like Gold, and his desert tan flight suit bore dark streaks and splotches. Though the flameproof fabric would not burn, fire could discolor it. Sweat beaded on Colman’s face, and he looked as if he were about to throw up.

  “Dunne didn’t get out,” he said.

  The realization invaded Parson’s body with a physical presence and circulated straight to his pain centers. The edges of the broken bone in his leg sharpened. His eyes scorched from the sun and the smoke, and even his minor burns and cuts deepened and seared. The hurt took up most of his awareness; it became difficult to concentrate on anything else. He tried to direct his consciousness toward only the essential, like narrowing the sweep of a radar to nothing but the storms in front.

  “See if you can help the MCD,” he told Colman.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gold looked up. “I’ll go help with the patients,” she said.

  “Good,” Parson said. “Can you count the survivors for me?”

  Gold shook her head, as if she weren’t able to face a final tally. Parson looked back at her, shrugged. What had happened had happened. They might as well know. She sighed and followed Colman down to the beach, where the aeromeds were setting up a makeshift casualty collection point.

  The fire found more of Parson’s aircraft to devour, perhaps an engine’s oil tank or a line full of hydraulic fluid. The blaze crackled like a rifle on full auto, and debris shot skyward. The burning pieces tumbled in seeming slow motion, trailing pennants of smoke. Colman wandered in search of the MCD as Gold stepped from litter to litter.

  A SHORT WAY DOWN THE BEACH, in the dry sand just beyond reach of the waves, Gold found Justin on a stretcher, conscious now. He raised his hand in a languid gesture. Baitullah sat up against a hummock of sand and grass. Gold did not see Mahsoud or the MCD.

  She went to Baitullah. He wore a stricken look, though he seemed to have no new injuries.

  “Are you all right?” Gold asked in Pashto.

  “I am, teacher. But we have lost a friend.”

  It took a moment for his meaning to sink in. When it did, she imagined Mahsoud’s final moments with horror.

  “We landed hard,” Baitullah continued. “I thought the Americans would leave us, but they took me out right away and rushed back in to save more patients. I kept looking for our friend. . . .”

  He stopped, seemed unable to say Mahsoud’s name. Gold searched for words of comfort but felt only loss. With her handkerchief, she wiped sweat and soot from Baitullah’s forehead. When his tears began, she turned away and went toward the water. The surf foamed around her boots, then retreated. She sank to her knees in the wet sand, placed her fingers in the damp coolness, and closed her eyes.

  To her, Mahsoud represented his country’s potential. But he came from a hard place where bullets, stones, ropes, and bombs made quick work of thoughtful minds and gentle spirits. To build, to educate, came with such great exertion, over such long stretches of time. Destruction came effortlessly, instantly. What was the point?

  The combers rolled up the beach again. The water sissed as it advanced, frothed white over Gold’s burned hands, held still for one heartbeat, then slid back into the sea. She got up and continued counting the living: fifteen crew, twenty-five patients and passengers, including herself. The MCD was gone.

  Cracks and booms reverberated from the flaming aircraft. The tanks in the left wing cooked off. The wing blew up, then crumbled away from the fuselage l
ike ash.

  Gold found Parson raised up on one elbow. He shaded his eyes with his hand, still wearing a beige flight glove darkened by fire. He was watching the C-5 burn. Little of it remained recognizable as an aircraft except the tail. Colman was at his side, seeming frustrated, trying to get his attention.

  Finally, Parson said, “Look, Lieutenant, the MCD is dead, and I might pass out any minute. You have to take charge, here.”

  “I don’t know how to take care of patients, sir,” Colman said. Gold thought he looked frightened, unprepared. He’d handled himself so well in the airplane, but now he was out of his element.

  “You can do it,” Parson said. “The medics will take care of the wounded. And when the C-17 gets here, you’ll have plenty of help. Just don’t ever stop leading.”

  As Parson coached, Gold recalled her first desperate moments with him four years ago: downed in Afghanistan, facing deadly challenges for which they weren’t prepared. But he’d seen her through. He’d made mistakes, but he never stopped leading. And now, perhaps, Colman would learn what Parson seemed to understand instinctively. When you took on responsibility for the lives of friends and family, those lives became more important than your own.

  PARSON FELT HIS AIRCRAFT HAD BECOME A FUNERAL PYRE. He thought of Dunne, the MCD, Spencer, Mahsoud, the patients who died during the flight, and those who died in the flames. He felt no triumph over the lives he had saved. Parson wasn’t even sure he’d really saved any lives, depending on what spores or chemicals drifted in that smoke. His mind drifted back to that time he’d come in from drinking at Ramstein and found Dunne strumming that funny all-silver guitar. As the slide passed over the strings, the instrument seemed almost to cry. Dunne said it was a Civil War song called “The Vacant Chair.”

  The fronts of tropical trees brushed the sky. Seabirds wheeled and squawked, protested the fiery invasion of their refuge. No structures remained on the island, just the concrete outlines of their foundations. Paved roads led to nowhere.