The Renegades

by Tom Young

  The knot of women around Gold began to break up. Parson thought he recognized the blessings of parting, syllables he’d heard Sophia say before. After the last two women drifted away, Gold reviewed her notes, folded the writing pad closed. She zipped the pad and pen into her MOLLE rig, took off her helmet, retied her blond hair. As she replaced the helmet she looked at Parson in a way that suggested she wasn’t satisfied with what had just gone down.

  “Sounded like you touched a nerve,” Parson said when she joined him.

  “I don’t know,” Gold said.

  “Rashid said it seemed like some of them might know where these bastards hang out.”

  Gold adjusted her rifle sling across her shoulder as she looked over the camp. “It’s not that simple,” she said. “You know how it goes—somebody knows somebody who might know.”

  “Good job,” Parson said. “All we can do is tell intel what they said.”

  “Yeah.”

  Parson thought it a little odd that she hadn’t said Yes, sir. Not that he cared. She’d long since earned the right to speak with him casually. But Gold was usually wrapped so tight, so professional and regulation, that she observed military courtesy by instinct. Something was on her mind.

  He had mixed feelings about having brought her back to Afghanistan. From a command perspective the assignment was a masterstroke. No male interpreter could have pulled off whatever she’d just accomplished. The last twenty minutes alone justified detaching her from the 82nd Airborne and flying her halfway around the world. But now Parson didn’t know if it was best for her.

  The throb of distant helicopters interrupted his worrying about Sophia. He scanned a sawtooth ridge to the west and could not find the choppers. Parson adjusted his aviator’s glasses, shaded his eyes with his hand.

  There they came, three dots moving in unison. Parson caught them as they emerged from behind a pinnacle of shale. Two of them were Air Force HH-60 Pave Hawks. Their refueling probes jutted forward like the proboscises of moths. Behind them flew an Osprey tilt-rotor.

  All three aircraft banked toward the camp and began descending. Parson watched for smoke trails or tracers coming up at them, but for now at least the sky remained clean and tranquil. The blue stretched all the way into China; he knew that from the morning’s weather brief. Not ideal tactical conditions, but better than having turbulence knock the fillings out of your teeth. He’d once flown a low-level mission on a gusty day during the first months of the Afghanistan war. One particularly evil downdraft slammed the C-130 with so many negative Gs that the oil pumps cavitated in all four engines. The Herk damn near scraped the ground as the oil pressure needles drooped. But then the pressure climbed and so did the airplane, and the crew lived to fly again. For a while.

  The Pave Hawks fluttered toward landing. As they skimmed low to the ground, dust billowed behind them and churned in the air rent by their blades. Helmeted gunners manned M134 miniguns that protruded from the sides of the choppers. Parson watched the crewmen as the HH-60s touched down and shrouded themselves in dust.

  The Osprey drew nearer and tilted its rotors to vertical. When it turned, the word MARINES became visible, painted in light gray on the aft end of the fuselage. The twin tail fins bore the letters EH. Parson had to think about that squadron code for a moment: It was the Black Knights of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. Parson hoped it was that same TRAP team he’d met in Ghandaki; he liked that big gunnery sergeant.

  Grit swirled as the Osprey landed. Dust collected on Parson’s sunglasses; its chalky taste irritated his throat with every breath. The aircraft dropped its ramp. From Parson’s view, tan combat boots appeared at the ramp crest, camo trouser cuffs bloused over the tops of the boots. Sure enough, the first man off the Osprey stood a head taller than the others.

  Blount waved to Parson. He did not salute; in a combat zone a salute could identify an officer as a valuable target for a sniper. The gunnery sergeant barked orders to his men, and the TRAP team helped the pararescuemen load patients onto the helicopters. Parson briefed him beside the body of a woman shot through the head.

  “They took some more kids, Gunny,” Parson said.

  For a moment, Blount did not speak. A vein bulged along the side of his neck, underneath scar tissue that looked like a burn.

  “Sir, I thought I seen some shit,” he said, “but I never seen nothing to beat this.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “If them sumbitches want seventy-two virgins, I’ll be their date counselor.”

  Blount took a camera from one of his cargo pockets, and he snapped a photo of the woman at his feet. Parson led him through the camp, and Blount shot more images. Outside the fence, they found Rashid’s crew bringing the rice out of the Mi-17. Blount carried the last of the hundred-pound bags, one over each shoulder. At the camp’s mess tent, he swung them off his back like they were pillows. Then he took one last photo of the man gutted by sword.

  The stain was already fading as the dry dirt soaked it up. Afghanistan’s soil knew how to do that, Parson thought. Afghan soil had absorbed blood from the Soviet 40th Army, from the troops of Queen Victoria, from the hoplites of Alexander the Great. From women, children, and rescue workers. And from too many of Parson’s friends.

  8

  The rescue team landed back at Mazar under a dusk sky the color of wine. Gold helped Reyes and the other PJs take the wounded from Rashid’s Mi-17, the Osprey, and the two Pave Hawks. She worked in silence, pondering her talks with the refugees. She hadn’t briefed Parson on all of what the women had told her; she was still trying to make sense of it herself.

  There was a village in Samangan, the women said, just north of a stream they called Goat’s Gut. Maybe the creek’s twists and turns resembled the intestines of an animal. Whatever the name’s origin, Gold doubted she’d see it on anything produced by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

  In that village—just a collection of a few mud-brick homes—lived an elderly woman who knew things. Was she connected to the insurgents? Yes, one refugee said. No, she hates the Taliban, another said. Still others claimed she was the mother of an important cleric, one who had laid down arms.

  Gold didn’t feel much encouraged about that business of a former Talib putting away his guns. In Afghanistan, loyalties and peace agreements came with price tags and expiration dates. She remembered attending a reintegration ceremony for some ex-insurgents in Paktika Province. You couldn’t kill all the lower-level fighters, the reasoning went. So you needed an amnesty program for those willing to come back into the fold. That amnesty was part of the overall COIN strategy: counterinsurgency, as opposed to counterterrorism. Easier to take away reasons to join the insurgency than to take out every terrorist.

  With a group of U.S. officers and Afghan politicians, she had ridden to the reintegration ceremony in a convoy of MRAP vehicles. Gold watched the MRAPs’ antennas sway with every bump in the dirt road, and she thought it ironic to have to travel to a peace ceremony in a truck engineered to be mine-resistant and ambush-protected. At the reintegration, the Talibs stacked their AK-47s, magazines removed. They stood in a line, wearing their flat-topped hats, field jackets of old Soviet bloc camo, and white shalwar kameez. An imam offered a prayer and said, “May God reward you for joining the peace process.”

  The government in Kabul gave them jobs, and in some cases new identities. Within months they started turning up captured in night raids on insurgent hideouts, or dead on the battlefield from firefights with American troops. For coalition forces, ISAF soldiers, or NATO training command advisers, staying alive meant learning not to trust.

  Gold still thought about that as she went to a briefing with Parson, Rashid, and Reyes. In just the time they’d been gone at the refugee camp, the Air Force had set up a forward command and control center at the Mazar airfield. The facility amounted to a small Air Operations Center in a tent. Parson called it the C2-Forward.

  Inside, live video feeds, radios, and satphones hummed. The p
lace looked like every other deployed ops center Gold had seen: laptops glowing, electrical cords snaking across the floor into power strips, plastic water bottles and yellow Post-it notes everywhere.

  The intel officer displayed one of Blount’s digital photos on a computer screen. The photo showed the remains of the five Americans executed at the camp. Gold sat next to Parson at a folding table, and she looked down at the table’s aluminum surface. She didn’t feel like seeing these images again, though she knew she had to explain each one to intel.

  She described the victims, gave every detail she could remember about all the dead and injured—the flies and the blood, the slash wounds, the hacked wrists. Parson and Rashid told what they’d seen from the air—the abducted boys, the pickup trucks. Then they filled out a SAFIRE report, jotted down the particulars of the surface-to-air missile fired up at the helicopters.

  “You got some good stuff in your interviews, didn’t you?” Parson asked Gold as he scribbled on the SAFIRE form.

  “Maybe,” she said. She still could not decide how much of her informal shura with the women was worth reporting. Might as well let intel do its job, she figured. So she told the officer everything she’d heard.

  “There’s a mullah in that region who served in the Taliban government,” the intel officer said. “Or at least there used to be. He hasn’t turned up on the radar in a long time.”

  “Who is he?” Gold asked.

  “Name escapes me,” the intel officer said. “Hang on a second.”

  The officer began tapping on his laptop. Searching the SIPRNET, Gold supposed. Like doing a Google search of classified information. The intel officer opened a document and began reading.

  “It might be a guy named Durrani,” he said. “None of this stuff is recent, though.”

  “Did he reintegrate?” Gold asked.

  “Nope,” the officer said. “He just quit. Or maybe he got so smart, we just stopped picking up his comms.”

  Entirely possible, Gold thought. The Taliban were brutish, but unfortunately not stupid. If they moved around with cell phones at all, they’d keep them turned off with the SIM card removed. They knew the infidels had big airplanes with funny-looking antennas that could pick up everything.

  “What do we know about this guy?” Gold asked.

  “Very little,” the officer said. “He ran some of the Taliban’s madrassas up until 2001. After Operation Enduring Freedom kicked off, we had some SIGINT reports: his voice on the radio, that kind of thing. I got nothing after 2006.”

  “But at that time he was in Samangan?”

  “That’s where this says the radio traffic came from.”

  “So you’re telling me our intel supports what I heard at the camp,” Gold said.

  “It’s so sketchy, I’m not sure it supports anything, but it doesn’t dispute what you heard, either.”

  Gold rubbed her thumb across her fingernails, thought for a moment. Why would the women point her in this direction? Did they think this mullah, or his family, or anyone else up there would help? It probably wasn’t a setup—not by people who’d just been shot at by extremists.

  But acting on tips carried all kinds of perils. People settled old scores by fingering their enemies as insurgents. Some Afghans gave worthless information in hopes of getting paid. On top of that, anything that happened in Afghanistan had a lot to do with who was smuggling what to whose relatives and which officials took bribes from where. Sometimes Gold felt more like a cop in a bad neighborhood than a soldier.

  “I wouldn’t puzzle over it too much,” Parson said. “If you want to go up to that village and ask around, we’ll just fly you up there.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Gold said, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea to fly. If we go in with choppers slamming around, the whole world will know we’re there.”

  “You wish to go on ground?” Rashid asked.

  “I think it might be best.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” Parson said.

  Gold answered by way of a half smile—the nearest she’d come to mirth in a long time. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed out loud.

  “I’ll see if they’ll give me a squad and an up-armored vehicle,” she said.

  “Bullshit,” Parson said. “The Army assigned you to me. I’m not letting you go get yourself killed on some wild-ass goose chase. You know how dangerous the roads are.”

  She let Parson’s point hang in the air. Of course she knew the roads were dangerous. If she wanted safety, she could get her doctorate in international studies or comparative literature and go teach somewhere. Maybe someday. But now she had responsibilities bigger than herself.

  “Sir, I know I’m supposed to be here as your interpreter,” she said. “But you said yourself we might have gathered some important intel at the camp. It’ll get wasted if we don’t act on it.”

  “I don’t want you to get wasted,” Parson said.

  This would be a tough sell, Gold realized. Parson meant every word he said. Lord knew he had his flaws, but you didn’t need to guess what he was thinking. He didn’t want her to go, at least not by road. That was that. And the man was as loyal as a German shepherd. If he liked you, and especially if he felt responsible for you, he’d do anything to protect you. And that was the problem. Protectiveness was about to get in the way of the mission.

  * * *

  Now Parson worried. The best thing about Sophia—as a soldier, as a leader, and as a senior NCO—was her judgment. But this was the craziest damned idea he’d ever heard. Let my interpreter, my dearest friend in the— Well, anyway, let a sergeant major with a bazillion dollars’ worth of training and experience get KIA while she’s on my watch? Look at my name tag, girl. Does it say stupid under those wings?

  He felt glad she didn’t argue. Gold had earned so much respect—from him and from everybody else—that he didn’t want to pull rank on her, and certainly not in front of people. But damn, why not just fly in and fly out? Fuck ’em if they don’t like helicopters.

  Parson considered the matter settled, so he changed the subject. “Anything else for us,” he asked the intel officer, “like some info on this bastard who thinks he’s Zorro?” He was curious about this new terrorist leader. Who the hell used a sword nowadays?

  “Maybe,” the officer said. “Remember that video he released?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, he referred to his ‘former Taliban brothers.’ But he might not have ever been Taliban.”

  “Come again?” Parson asked. He began to wonder if this intel guy really knew the score.

  “Not all the insurgents are Taliban. You have other groups like the Haqqani network and HIG. And then among the Taliban there are younger members more hard-line than the founders.”

  Parson looked at Gold, who nodded. Apparently all this sounded right to her. But so what? The insurgents had factions that went by names Parson could not pronounce. Hairsplitting, as far as he was concerned. Bad guys were bad guys.

  “As soon as the communist government fell in the 1990s,” Gold said, “the mujahideen began fighting among themselves. Some have had blood feuds for years.”

  “Fine,” Parson said. “Let ’em kill one another till there’s one left, and then I’ll shoot that one.”

  “The point is that all this might mean some rift among the insurgents,” the officer said.

  Parson could see the idea interested Gold, but he was starting to lose patience. Historians could sort this out later, if anybody cared. But he was tired and hungry and wanted to finish the briefing.

  “So who is he?” Parson asked.

  “No one we’ve ever seen before this month,” the officer said. “In some of his communiqués, he goes by the nom de guerre of Chaaku.”

  “Pashto word for knife,” Gold said.

  Figures, Parson thought. What’s the Pashto word for asshole?

  “But we think his real name is Bakht Sahar. Middle thirties, educated at Darul Uloom Haqqania madrassa
in Pakistan.”

  “Jihad University,” Gold said.

  Pakistan again. Some ally. Gold and Parson—shot down and captured—had appeared in a video with another terrorist from Pakistan named Marwan. Parson could still feel the dread, the sick fear, waiting for the blade.

  And now there was another Marwan. Parson had given up hoping for sweetness and light in Afghanistan. That kind of hope was like flying an instrument approach through the fog down to minimums: watching the localizer and glide slope needles, your thumb poised over the go-around button, thinking I’ll see the approach lights at any moment. And if you kept hoping long enough, you could fly your ass right into the ground.

  Parson looked over at Rashid. “What do you think about all this, buddy?” he asked.

  “I think words of my grandfather,” Rashid said.

  “How’s that?”

  “He say how Allah make Afghanistan. When Allah create world, he have things left over. Mountain. Desert. Rock. All the rubbish left over from world go to make Afghanistan.”

  Parson didn’t know what to make of a story that described Afghanistan and everything in it as an afterthought. It was one thing for him to give up on Afghanistan, but to hear Rashid lose heart was something else. But who could blame Rashid if he did? The man had just lost part of a crew, and there was no telling what other friends and family he’d lost over the years. You couldn’t ask about that sort of thing, so Parson didn’t know Rashid’s family history. He just hoped Rashid could keep his head in the game, since he and all the other Afghan fliers had plenty of work cut out for them.

  That became even more clear after the briefing, as Parson walked along the flight line with Rashid. Pallets of food, blankets, and other relief supplies were piling up on the ramp. The C-130s brought it in faster than the helicopters could distribute it. If the Mi-17 crews didn’t catch up, pretty soon the Mazar airfield would get mogged out—maximum on ground—and there’d be no room for anything else.