The Renegades

by Tom Young

  A few minutes after the helicopter leveled at altitude, Gold opened her eyes.

  “You did good,” Parson said.

  She blinked, inhaled and exhaled as if getting ready to expend great effort. Parson leaned close to hear whatever she might say amid the noise of the aircraft. Finally she asked, “The kids?”

  Parson nodded toward Mohammed.

  “That’s Fatima’s brother,” he said. “They got five other boys out, too. You did it. You and Blount and the Marines.”

  Gold closed her eyes, clasped his hand. The strength of her grip encouraged him. She took another deep breath. Then she said, “We did it.”

  Parson shook his head. “I never should have brought you back here, Sophia. It wasn’t fair.”

  She gathered herself to speak again, inhaled deeply. That made Parson feel even more regretful. He realized he shouldn’t encourage her to talk right now.

  “Michael,” she said, “this is what I do. This is what we do.”

  Reyes adjusted the blanket covering her. The effort revealed pallid flesh, heaving torso, and in the pale light, bandages soaked in the color of rust. Loose blond hair spread across her bare collarbone, some of the strands clotted with blood.

  “You do what you can do,” Reyes said, “and that’s all you can do.” He spoke in a soothing tone, like he wanted Sophia to stop thinking and just relax.

  Gold drew a rasping breath. Seemed to summon all of her strength. “One save at a time,” she said.

  “That’s right,” Reyes said. “Now rest, so we can work on saving you.”

  The helicopter banked to the left. Without letting go of Sophia’s hand, Parson looked toward the instrument panel and watched the attitude indicator register the turn. Rashid said something to Mohammed, and whatever it was made Sophia give that half smile. Despite the ravages of a high-velocity round, Gold looked more content than Parson had ever seen her. Because she’d done all she could do, he realized.

  The Pave Hawk rolled out of the bank, onto a heading to Mazar-i-Sharif. Parson gazed through the window and into the night outside.

  A crush of stars overlaid charcoal ridgelines. Among those mountains, villages still needed to rebuild, to recover from the earthquake that had given Black Crescent an opening. Parson hoped the faults beneath the ridges would lie quiet, that those kids would grow to old age without seeing another quake.

  Without seeing another war.

  Not likely, Parson thought, but at least we’ve given them a chance.

  He felt Gold press his fingers together. That brought him back to immediate problems, so he did what he could do. Squeezed her hand back. Thought about what to do once the helicopter landed: Make sure they get her on the first medical flight to Germany. Get his arm stitched up. Then pack up all of Sophia’s stuff and send it to her at Landstuhl. Save her notes about finding a home for Fatima and Mohammed.

  Parson would get started as soon as the Pave Hawk touched down. He looked ahead through the windscreen, watched for the lights of Mazar.

  THE STORY BEHIND The Renegades

  Michael Parson has had some rough missions. In my first novel, The Mullah’s Storm, he evaded capture in the midst of a blizzard while holding on to a Taliban prisoner. In Silent Enemy, he flew a doomed aircraft more than halfway around the world. And in The Renegades, he and his partner, Sergeant Major Sophia Gold, battle a violent Islamist splinter group.

  On these missions, Parson has held different jobs. He began his fictitious career as an Air Force navigator, then cross-trained to pilot, and now appears as an adviser to the Afghan military. Some may think I’ve used artistic license to put him in these varied roles. However, Parson has taken a fairly realistic career path for an aviator and officer.

  Air Force fliers don’t just fly. As their careers progress, they take on different duties such as training managers, safety officers, and diplomatic liaisons. Just like Parson in The Renegades, one of my West Virginia Air National Guard squadron mates deployed as an adviser to Afghan fliers, trying to help them create a modern, professional air force. Another of my colleagues worked as an aviation liaison to the Iraqi Ministry of Transportation, helping put Iraq’s civil aviation system back together. He was a pilot, not a bureaucrat. But he used what he knew—sometimes under fire—and he helped bring Iraq a little closer to normalcy.

  When service members take on such special duties, they tackle jobs for which there is sometimes no specific school, no War College course. They call on their experience and judgment in situations where they must think on their feet. In The Renegades, Parson faces a number of challenges: The Afghans fly aircraft unfamiliar to him, he doesn’t speak the language, and he’s never worked so closely with foreign forces. But he knows how to lead, and he tries to impart that knowledge to Rashid, a promising Afghan officer. And he knows someone who does speak the language, his old friend Sophia Gold.

  In this situation, it’s not outlandish that he’d call on Gold for assistance. In The Mullah’s Storm, they were thrown together by ill fortune. In Silent Enemy, they met again by chance. But this time, Parson sends for her by name. That could happen in real life. By now, the public is familiar with major deployments that call up entire units. However, military personnel can also take combat tours as individual augmentees, the way Gold does to help Parson in The Renegades.

  Once Gold arrives in Afghanistan, she and Parson find themselves working closely with different branches of the armed forces. Gold, of course, is an Army translator serving with Parson, an Air Force officer. They encounter Gunnery Sergeant Blount, who leads a team of Marines. The Marines get air support from an Air Force combat controller and medical support from a Navy corpsman.

  That sort of interservice cooperation happens in the modern military. People from different branches train together to leverage their combined strengths. Hollywood stereotypes notwithstanding, soldiers and airmen don’t get into fistfights every time they meet in a bar. They’re more likely to swap stories about the last time they worked together. My own helmet bag carries a collection of patches from past missions that included Navy SEALs, Marine riflemen, and Army paratroopers.

  Even though I’ve served in the armed forces for almost twenty years, I’m still learning about different specialties in each of the branches. One job I got to explore in The Renegades is pararescue. Air Force pararescuemen are referred to informally as PJs, for pararescue jumpers. Represented in The Renegades by Sergeant Reyes, PJs are medics trained to do whatever it takes to reach a wounded soldier or downed airman. They attend schools that include scuba diving and free-fall parachuting, in a program so tough, its washout rate can exceed ninety percent.

  You would hate to need the services of a PJ, because that would mean you were having a really bad day. But in a training environment or a social situation, it’s a pleasure to meet people so capable and upbeat.

  Another skill crucial to the modern military is winning what counterinsurgency experts call the human terrain. Making friends, essentially. Gold has dedicated her life to it. And younger troops follow in her footsteps, like my characters Ann and Lyndsey with the Lioness team. That’s a real program, and that’s its real name. (Don’t worry; it’s not classified.) The role of women in combat zones has expanded greatly in recent years, and not without controversy. But real-world counterparts of Ann and Lyndsey, in meetings with Afghan women, have made contact with a segment of Afghanistan’s population essentially sealed off from American men.

  One specialty I’d like to learn more about is working with military dogs. I’ve often flown dogs on airlift missions. When the animals get loaded on board, they usually bark constantly in their kennels until takeoff. Then they go right to sleep. On landing, the barking starts again. Those canine passengers inspired the Belgian Malinois that survived the Mi-17 crash landing in The Renegades. That breed makes good military dogs. I met one several years ago at a base in the Middle East while waiting for cargo and troops to show up at my aircraft. A dog handler and his bomb-sniffing Malinoi
s arrived early. The rest of the troops got delayed for several hours. We passed the time by playing with the dog and feeding it pizza.

  Sergeant Major Gold’s high altitude/low opening parachute drops also come right out of the real world. Back in my C-130 days, I got more of a kick out of HALO drops than any other flight operations. I have especially fond memories of a training mission well before 9/11 at the former Indian Springs Auxiliary Field, Nevada (now Creech Air Force Base). My crew flew Army Special Forces jumpers on HALO drops for about a week.

  Each day we’d do two drops, break for dinner, and come back for a night drop. All at high altitude, unpressurized, on oxygen. With no higher rank present than a captain, we had no adult supervision at all. Just a bunch of young guys who thought we were bulletproof, and an airplane and parachutes to play with. It was glorious.

  As it happens, I got my first look at a Predator drone during that training mission. The Predators were still fairly new then, developed in a program at Indian Springs. I saw them next in Bosnia, and later in Southwest Asia.

  Like my previous novels, The Mullah’s Storm and Silent Enemy, I wrote The Renegades for two reasons: First, I wanted to create a compelling story that readers would find entertaining; I’ve always loved fiction. But through these novels, I also wanted to convey something about the motivations and mind-sets of American servicemen and -women. I hope my books do justice to their dedication, and to the expertise their work requires.

  Tom Young

  Alexandria, Virginia

  January 2012

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If you enjoyed reading The Renegades, thank my wife, Kristen, who took pen in hand, put her feet up on the ottoman, and ripped the manuscript up one side and down the other. She’s done the same for all my books. Thanks also go to my parents, Bob and Harriett Young, for a little help copyediting and a lot of help getting the word out.

  I also received helpful input from Barbara Esstman, Jodie Forrest, Liz Lee, and Robert Siegfried. A special tribute goes to Dick Elam, who has given me good writing advice for thirty years. Even now I look at his comments on my manuscripts and think, Damn, I should have thought of that.

  My squadron mates in the 167th Airlift Wing, West Virginia Air National Guard, have provided inspiration, moral support, and comradeship. Joe Myers enjoys a well-earned retirement now, and he edits copy with the precision you’d expect from a military instructor pilot. Pete Gross offered generous descriptions of his time as an adviser to the Afghan Air Force, and his observations were tremendously helpful. James Freid-Studlo also gave valuable descriptions from his experiences in Afghanistan—and darn near wore me out on a bike ride through rural Germany as we waited for our airplane to get fixed.

  Like Parson, all of my helicopter time has been as a passenger, so I called on some experts to keep me straight on rotary-wing flying. They included Adam Albrich, Keith Olson, Sean Roehrs, Michael Adair, and Rob Tatum.

  Brandon Forshaw and his colleagues at the 920th Rescue Wing, Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, schooled me on the pararescue career field. I received other valuable medical tips from my cousin, Billy Perry, and from the world’s greatest flight nurse, Sandie Duiker.

  If the novel contains any errors about medicine or helicopters, those errors are mine alone. With other technical aspects, I have taken artistic liberties. For example, some of the operations described in The Renegades would probably involve more personnel, and especially more officers, than depicted. However, I chose to limit the number of characters for the sake of the narrative.

  Were it not for my agent, Michael Carlisle, my novels would be nothing more than files on my computer. Thanks also to Lyndsey Blessing, who has helped bring my stories to readers in Europe and Asia. Author and professor John Casey helped me get this adventure started, and I owe to him continued thanks.

  As always, it’s a pleasure to work with Putnam publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Nyren and company president Ivan Held, as well as Thomas Colgan at Berkley. Thanks also to Michael Barson, Victoria Comella, Sara Minnich, Kate Stark, Chris Nelson, Lydia Hirt, Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski, Alexandra Israel, and everyone at Penguin Group.

  About the Author

  Tom Young has logged nearly 4,000 hours for the Air National Guard in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere. The author of The Mullah’s Storm and Silent Enemy, Young has studied writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, among other places, and lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

  ALSO BY TOM YOUNG

  FICTION

  The Mullah’s Storm

  Silent Enemy

  NONFICTION

  The Speed of Heat: An Airlift Wing at War in Iraq and Afghanistan

  Copyright

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2012 by Tom Young

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Young, Thomas W.

  The renegades / Tom Young.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-58654-9

  1. Parson, Michael (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Gold, Sophia (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Soldiers—Fiction. 4. Afghan War, 2001—Fiction. 5. Earthquakes—Fiction. 6. Disaster relief—Fiction. 7. Taliban—Fiction. 8. Afghanistan—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3625.O97335R46 2012 2012010954

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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