The Renegades

by Tom Young

  “Hard days,” Rashid said. Rashid’s English had improved since Gold’s arrival. Parson didn’t know if those two things were related.

  “At least it’s a nice night,” Parson said.

  Rashid stared out the windscreen, scanned his instruments, gazed outside again.

  “It was a night like this that my father…” Rashid paused, perhaps searching for words. “Go away.”

  Parson said nothing for a moment. Go away could mean a lot of things, probably none of them good. Finally he said, “What happened?”

  Rashid did not talk for a moment, just checked instruments again. Then he said, “My father—fight Taliban with General Dostum.” He spoke in halting words. Parson wasn’t sure if emotion or lack of vocabulary caused the frequent pauses. But he got the gist of Rashid’s story.

  During the 1990s, Rashid’s dad served as a subcommander in Dostum’s forces. Like Dostum himself, the old man was an ethnic Uzbek. One night he picked up his rifle and never came home. Rashid was fourteen.

  Years passed before Rashid could piece together what happened. As he matured, he found witnesses and survivors. Their stories varied in some details, but in others they were consistent. Within the consistent parts alone, Rashid learned a story he wished he did not know.

  In the summer of 1998, the Taliban pushed north and met Dostum near Maimana. The Talibs routed Dostum’s army, but Rashid’s dad managed to escape with a small combined force of Uzbeks, Hazaras, and some Tajiks. They hid out in the mountains for a few days, but eventually got caught in a U-shaped ambush.

  The Taliban captured dozens of prisoners in the ambush. They loaded some of them, including Rashid’s father, into a steel shipping container and drove them south into the desert. There they left the container, chained and padlocked.

  When other captives were made to open the container three days later, the stench that rolled out put some of them on their knees, vomiting. All the men were dead, skin blackened by the heat. And they were the lucky ones. The Talibs skinned the Hazara prisoners alive.

  Parson could not imagine what it was like to carry such knowledge of your father’s fate. How could you think straight, focus on anything other than vengeance, feel anything other than rage? His own dad had died in the Gulf War, one of the relatively few U.S. casualties of Desert Storm. A jet crash, fiery but quick. A painful memory. But Rashid’s kind of memories, Parson thought, would have a more caustic effect, corrode you from the inside.

  The crew spent the rest of the flight in silence broken only by radio calls and checklists. Parson watched the stars crystallize into pinpoints of ice over ridgelines. As an old navigator, he knew how to use celestial bodies to find his way. Gold had told him how the fifteenth-century astronomer Ulugh Beg had built an observatory in Samarkand. His tables of stars held up pretty well even today. Such heights of learning and depths of brutality, Parson considered, all in the same corner of the world.

  When the Mi-17 arrived over Kabul, all the city’s lights were back on. The glow illuminated the valley that sheltered the capital. Rashid let the copilot take the landing, and the chopper descended toward Helistrip B1 near the terminal.

  Parson had not visited Kabul since the earthquake, and from the look of the airport, supplies were still pouring in. The airport’s ramp was sectioned into aprons with designations that made little sense to him. Apron 7A was right beside Apron 1. Pallets stretched across both of them and continued all the way down to Apron 6 at the far end of the field. Tarps covered most of the pallets, but as the helicopter touched down Parson could see some of the cargo included bags of cement, stacks of drywall. He wondered how much would go to rebuild villages and how much would get sucked up by graft. Someone else’s problem, he told himself. You have enough of your own.

  A bus with a red cross on the side met the aircraft. The aeromed team based at Kabul helped Parson and Reyes carry the wounded from the Mi-17 into the bus. All four patients appeared unconscious.

  “Will they make it?” Parson asked Reyes as the bus drove away.

  “Three of them might,” Reyes said. “I’ll be surprised if the other one lives through the night.”

  Rashid let his crew take a smoke break inside the terminal. Parson and Reyes remained with the aircraft. They spoke little, and Parson stared up into a sky turned jade by the glow of the airport lights.

  By the time Rashid and his men returned, Parson was dead tired. He napped on the flight back to Mazar, went straight to his tent after they landed. Parson made a mental note to tell Gold about Rashid’s father. But he did not see her in the mess tent at breakfast the next morning. At first that didn’t concern him. He’d slept late and got to the chow line just before it quit serving. But after he ate, he saw no sign of her at her own tent or at the refugee tents. Gold was gone.

  19

  Gold started the morning tired. She had hardly slept the night before, thinking of all that could go wrong with what she was about to do. When she’d finally drifted off, the nocturnal sweats and bad dreams returned. But this time she’d not dreamed of captivity and torture. Instead, it was the parachute dream again.

  That dream happened the same way every time. She exited the C-130 on a HALO drop, entered a perfect free-fall arch. When she pulled the rip cord she got a streamer: a mass of flapping nylon bound up so that it would not inflate. She reached for the cutaway pillow—and it wasn’t there. She had no reserve chute.

  As the sun rose now, she drove through the airfield gate in a Humvee checked out from motor pool. Outside the perimeter, alone and without her rifle, she knew she was jumping without a reserve. She had no backup plan, no options if this turned bad.

  Diwana, she told herself. This is crazy.

  Even if I get some good intel and make it back, she thought, they’ll say PTSD skewed my judgment. Well, so what if it has? I do what I do because of things I’ve seen, things I’d like others not to have to see.

  Gold turned off the blacktop and steered the Humvee on the same rutted path the Cougars had taken on the first trip. The vehicle had been upgraded with an Armor Survivability Kit, but it wasn’t nearly as blast-worthy as a Cougar. If she hit an IED she’d have less protection—and no way to call for help. Given the Talib’s warning about tracking devices, she’d signed out a Humvee that did not have a radio installed, and she did not carry a handheld radio. She had just her body armor, helmet, and MOLLE rig. The rig’s pouches contained only writing pads, pens, and bottled water. Not even a knife. Diwana.

  She drove past a dust-blown village of five homes. At one house, a child of about eight sat in the doorway. The boy wore a soiled brown vest and black pants, and he scraped in the dirt with a stick. Gold waved. The kid waved back but did not smile, then scratched in the dirt again. She wanted to believe he was drawing numbers or letters, perhaps doing arithmetic. But she realized he was probably playing with ants.

  Whatever he’s doing, Gold thought, he’s as good a reason as any for what I’m doing. She considered the Talmudic teaching that had come to mind a few days ago: To take one life is to kill the whole world. She liked its inverse better: To save one life is to save the world.

  What Parson would tell her now, she could well imagine. After he stopped yelling for her to turn around, he’d say, You’re not responsible for saving the world. You do your mission to the best of your abilities, you follow lawful orders, you watch out for those around you. If that’s not enough, you can write a check to feed the starving. Maybe even volunteer for the mission to transport the food. But you don’t go all renegade trying to beat a terrorist gang by yourself.

  Still, Gold never considered turning around and driving back to Mazar. Rattling along a back road in Afghanistan, she thought of Edmund Burke. She knew a quote attributed to him that he may or may not have said, but it was a great statement nonetheless: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Well, this might be idiotic, she thought, but I’m doing something.

  The sun climbed higher as she drove al
ong, brightening the blue dome of sky above her. Parson would call it a good day to fly. Maybe he and Rashid would get a mission today that might keep him busy enough not to worry about where she was. But no, she realized, he’ll be angry no matter what.

  Eventually she approached the place where the MRAP had run over the roadside bomb. Little remained of the MRAP but charred chunks of steel. The crater opened by the IED had been blown open wider by more powerful ordnance, whatever had been launched from the air. One of those attack aircraft with threatening names like Cobra or Thunderbolt had obliterated the vehicle. The blast had left the soil blackened and burned. The place still smelled of smoke and fire.

  Gold steered to avoid the hole. Her right-side wheels sank into a ditch at the edge of the path, and for a moment she worried about getting stuck. But the Humvee had a high enough ground clearance to get over the stones on the lip of the ditch. The Humvee crunched over the rocks, fishtailed just a bit, continued along the roadway.

  As Gold neared the village, her heart pounded. Soon enough she’d learn whether she’d entered a baited trap.

  She topped a rise and saw the village in the distance. A pickup and three Land Rovers sat parked under the trees. Gold drove closer and saw the pickup was a Toyota Hilux. Two men and a woman stood beside the trucks. The woman wore a blue burka. The men wore shalwar kameez and striped turbans—not the usual white or black headgear of the Taliban. Today, Gold thought, that really means nothing.

  Both men held AK-47s. They carried them with the muzzles pointed up. Gold slowed, thinking. At least they weren’t aiming at her. She braked, drove the last hundred yards at about five miles per hour. Did not want her approach to look in any way aggressive.

  She stopped about forty feet from the vehicles. Felt staring eyes upon her. Drivers waited in two of the Land Rovers; the other sat empty. Gold turned off her engine, removed her helmet, tied her desert scarf into a hijab. Whispered a prayer, opened the door, stepped out.

  “Salaam,” she said. Hoped they did not hear her voice shaking.

  “Assalamu alaikum,” one of the men said. Same voice she had heard on the phone. He looked at her with an expressionless face. Trimmed black beard flecked with gray. The other man was younger, with no silver in his whiskers or hair. Gold wondered if the younger man was Durrani’s son.

  “You will find I have followed your instructions,” Gold said in Pashto.

  “I hope so,” the older man said. Then he gestured to the woman in the burka. “Search her.”

  Gold held out her arms for the pat-down. The woman looked into Gold’s eyes from time to time but never spoke. She might have been one of the daughters Gold had met earlier, but it was impossible to tell.

  The search was thorough but not rough. The woman took Gold by the arm and turned her away from the men to pat her chest. When Gold turned around again, the woman opened all the pouches in her MOLLE gear. She took Gold’s pad and pens, handed them to the older man.

  He unscrewed both of the ballpoint pens, examined the springs, dabbed the rolling points on the back of his hand. Apparently satisfied that the pens contained only ink, he reassembled them.

  They weren’t kidding about tracking devices, Gold thought. The man kept the pens and paper.

  “You will not take notes today,” he said.

  Gold tried to weigh each action, every word. If he’d thrown her pens to the ground, that would have been a bad sign. But maybe they just wanted her to cooperate until they had her somewhere else.

  The younger man opened the back door of the empty Land Rover. “Sit,” he said. Gold stepped toward the vehicle.

  “You are very brave or very foolish,” the older man said. “For now, I will assume the former. We will blindfold you now. Out of respect for your courage, if it is that, we will not bind your hands. But after we begin driving, if you even touch that blindfold, we will shoot you.”

  “I understand,” Gold said. She took her seat. The Land Rover smelled of sunbaked upholstery. The younger man took a white cloth from his pocket, handed it to the woman in the burka. She folded it lengthwise and stood at the open door of the Land Rover.

  Gold turned in her seat so the woman could tie the blindfold. When the cloth came over her eyes, Gold felt a flush of panic. Now she’d passed the point of no return; the loss of control was complete. Again she began to question her own judgment. Had she lost her mind? Too late to change anything now. Sweat oozed on her back, her neck, under her arms.

  The woman knotted the cloth at the back of Gold’s head, over the hijab. She tied it firmly, but not so tight that it hurt. Gold took deep breaths, fought her rising fear. She turned in her seat to face forward again, and someone closed the door beside her.

  The two other Land Rovers started engines, and Gold realized their purpose. Decoys to head in different directions, in case American drones watched from the air.

  Footsteps crunched on the dirt around the vehicle where Gold sat blindly. She heard the driver’s door and the rear right passenger door open. Someone sat beside her and someone else up front. The doors slammed. The engine started. The vehicle began to move.

  Gold sensed a left turn, and she made a mental note of it, reminded herself to keep track of the turns. Then she realized that was pointless; they would no doubt take a circuitous route to make it more difficult for her to know where she was. The blindfold itched a little. She sat on her hands to resist any temptation to touch it.

  The Land Rover rolled smoothly for a while until a rut bottomed out its suspension. Then more smooth road, then a washboard surface. No one spoke for a half hour.

  “Where are your homes, gentlemen?” Gold asked. Couldn’t hurt to try to make conversation.

  No answer for a moment. Then the older man, sitting beside her, said, “We are not your friends, American. We will not engage in banter.”

  The rebuke didn’t surprise her, so she just sat quietly. But it did surprise her when the older man apparently became bored after another thirty minutes. He said, “You speak Pashto well, American. I detect almost no accent.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Gold said. “For a Westerner, Pashto is difficult to learn. But it is a language filled with poetry.”

  She let that sink in, take whatever effect it would. No response.

  Another hour passed without conversation. The Land Rover slowed, bounced, spun its tires. Then it stopped.

  “Remove your blindfold,” the older man said.

  * * *

  Fear and anger. Familiar emotions for Parson, but never like this. Had Gold disobeyed his instructions? The thought made him furious. He didn’t like giving her orders, anyway. He’d always thought her professionalism put her above direct orders. Now she might have betrayed that trust. Or worse, something else might have happened. She was well-known to the enemy. What if they’d finally caught up with her?

  Parson found Rashid in flight planning. The Afghan officer was drawing a course line. He looked up from his charts and said, “We are scheduled—”

  “Have you seen Gold?” Parson asked.

  “No.”

  “She’s disappeared.”

  Rashid stared. Confused look on his face.

  “I think she might have gone to meet that mullah guy,” Parson said.

  The pencil fell from Rashid’s hand.

  “She go alone to Mullah Durrani?” he asked.

  “It’s the only thing I can think of. We had that bombing yesterday, and maybe she decided— Shit, I don’t know.”

  “Do you report her disappeared?”

  Parson thought for a moment. That would ring alarm bells from here to the Pentagon. Not the kind of attention he wanted, but he saw no other choice. He thought he had an idea of what Gold was doing. But all he knew for sure was that someone under his command was missing in a hostile area.

  He picked up a phone and called command post, told them what he knew. Then he called the security police and the OSI. Several minutes later, the security forces commander—a captain—called him
back.

  “Sir,” he said, “the gate guards say a woman in a Humvee drove out early this morning.”

  Parson slammed his fist down onto the flight planning table.

  “Why the fuck didn’t they stop her?” Parson asked.

  “They had no authority to do so, sir. She’s an E-9, after all.”

  Lame-ass excuse, Parson thought. “Do they have authority to use some fucking common sense?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the captain said. “We’ll do all we can.”

  “You do that.” Parson slammed down the phone.

  The next call came from flight scheduling. Rashid would get to keep the copilot, engineer, and gunner he’d rounded up yesterday, but the supply sortie they were to have flown today was canceled. Now they would fly a search mission.

  “I’m going with them,” Parson told the scheduler. A statement, not a question.

  He gathered up his flying gear. Parson slipped on his flak vest, donned a survival vest over it. Strapped on his thigh holster, checked that his Beretta was loaded. He got to the helicopter before anyone else.

  To help the crew get ahead on the preflight checks, he looked around for hydraulic leaks. Examined the five blades of the main rotor and the three blades of the tail rotor. Though Parson was not a qualified Mi-17 crew member, he’d know a crack if he saw one. The rotors looked good. When Rashid and the rest of the crew showed up, they started the APU and began powering up the aircraft’s systems.

  Parson plugged his headset into an interphone cord, listened to the crew run through their checklists. He fought the urge to press his talk button and say something like Hurry the fuck up. At this point, rushing would serve no purpose except to make them miss something and cause an accident.

  Finally, Rashid hit the starter buttons one at a time. Parson looked over the flight engineer’s shoulder and watched temperatures and pressures come up, saw the engineer put the generators on line. He knew the crew was working as efficiently as possible, but the start-up procedures had never seemed to take so long.