Warriors (9781101621189)

by Young, Tom

  “The aircraft commander wanted to land here no matter what,” Gold said. “You’ll see what I mean when you read the transcript.”

  “If he’d landed safely, where would he have gone next?” Cunningham asked.

  “Back home,” Webster said. “We checked with the Afghan Air Force. He had orders to fly back to Bagram.”

  “What about his cargo?” Cunningham said.

  “We haven’t looked into that yet,” Webster said. “It would have been offloaded here and then picked up by another flight. Probably a civilian cargo line.” Webster explained that American and Kyrgyz authorities had not publicly announced the discovery of opium on the plane. No sense alerting the traffickers—they’d just suspend shipments until they found another route. “We figured we’d better let the professionals take it from here,” Webster added.

  “I appreciate that,” Cunningham said. “If you’d snooped around without knowing what you were doing, the bad guys would have just disappeared.”

  Good thing Webster brought a background as a country prosecutor, Parson thought. At least he knows what not to do. Sometimes these Guard guys brought civilian skills that came in handy.

  “So what do you need us to do?” Gold asked.

  “Just maintain,” Cunningham said. “Don’t bring in drug dogs to check flights from Afghanistan. Don’t change anything you’re doing. Let ’em think we don’t know anything.”

  “That’s easy enough,” Parson said.

  The meeting broke up, and Parson headed for the door. He needed to write a report for the Air Force Safety Center—leaving out the drug connection, of course—and he dreaded it. The task brought back memories of papers he’d done for university professors and War College instructors. The papers usually came back with red marks all over them. Maybe Gold could help him with her plain old English skills. Cunningham held back, still standing by his chair. He looked down at the carpet; apparently he was thinking about something.

  “Ms. Gold,” he said, “how long will you stay here at Manas?”

  “Well, I’d like to get back to my work in Afghanistan, but I could probably make arrangements,” she said. “Why?”

  “It would help if you can stay and find out if the Afghans have any ground support people here,” the agent said. “If they do, talk to them—purely about safety. Tell me if anybody acts nervous.”

  “They’ll all act nervous,” Parson said. “They’ll think they’re in trouble because of the crash itself.”

  “Yeah,” Cunningham said, “but that’s a different kind of nervous. Anyway, it couldn’t hurt as long as you’re careful not to tip them off.”

  “Do you want to come with us if we talk to them?” Parson asked.

  “Not now,” Cunningham said. “They don’t need to see me just yet.”

  Later in the day, Parson walked along the ramp area to watch the activity. In his flight suit, he could look around all he wanted without arousing suspicion. At any moment, a dozen other men dressed just like him worked on the ramp: pilots and flight engineers conducting preflight inspections, crew chiefs fueling their planes, loadmasters pushing pallets.

  The morning looked pretty typical. Three KC-135 Stratotankers waited side by side, electrical cables snaking from generator carts to receptacles along the sides of the aircraft. Parson knew the tanker crews would take turns flying over Afghanistan in case any wayward fighter pilots needed an emergency refueling. The Stratotankers might fly planned refuelings, too. As American forces drew down, C-5 Galaxies and C-17 Globemasters hauled trucks, Humvees, and helicopters out of Bagram and Kandahar. Sometimes the big jets departed so heavy with cargo that they could not put on enough fuel to reach Europe and still get off the runway. So they’d take off with a light fuel load, then rendezvous with a tanker and get all the gas they needed. Parson remembered the pride he took in the deft control needed to fly one big aircraft within feet of another, the satisfying whack as the refueling boom seated in the receptacle.

  Civilian aircraft came and went, as well. An Air Astana 757 from Kazakhstan taxied for takeoff. At the passenger terminal, an Airbus pushed back from the gate. The plane bore the green, gold, and white livery of Pakistan International Airlines. And a Russian Antonov lumbered toward a hangar.

  In front of the hangar, a ramp worker beckoned the Antonov to a parking spot. The cargo jet rolled into its space, engines whining near idle. The ramp guy crossed his fists over his head, and the Antonov shuddered to a stop. After several minutes—a cool-down for the engines, Parson supposed—the turbines finally quieted. Crew members climbed from the aircraft as a forklift approached. The forklift carried a single pallet.

  As Parson strolled nearer, he saw that the forklift driver wore a military uniform. The forklift stopped under the tail of the aircraft, and Parson walked over to talk to the driver. The man’s uniform bore the insignia of an Afghan Air Force sergeant.

  “Good morning,” Parson said.

  The bearded Afghan Air Force man looked at him and smiled. Then the man shook his head and said, “No English, sir. No English.”

  Parson held up one hand and said, “That’s okay. No problem.” He knew the sergeant probably hadn’t lied. Few Afghan military personnel spoke good English. But now he knew the Afghans had a ground detachment at Manas. Nothing sinister about that; it made perfect sense for them to keep maintenance and cargo-handling capability here. But that also created an infrastructure that traffickers could exploit. So, Parson thought, Agent Cunningham had come to the right place to start his investigation.

  In the afternoon, once ground crews had loaded the Antonov and sent it on its way, Parson returned to the Afghans’ cargo facility with Gold. The two sat with the Afghan sergeant in a break room just off the hangar. The place smelled of cigarette smoke and grease. Parson slouched on a tattered sofa so worn that its stuffing spilled from rips and tears. Gold and the sergeant chose metal folding chairs, rusted and bent. Cases of Fanta lined the walls. The sergeant eyed Parson, then looked through the door to where the other Afghans folded cargo netting and swept the floor. Maybe the sergeant wondered why he was being interviewed alone, but that was normal procedure for a safety probe.

  Parson opened a notepad, clicked a ballpoint pen, and said, “Tell him we’re very sorry about the crash, and we’re trying to learn its cause.”

  Gold spoke a long sentence in Pashto. Probably adding more courtesy to his opening statement, Parson imagined. Whatever she said must have worked; the man seemed to relax a little.

  “Did he see the accident?” Parson asked.

  Gold translated the question, and the sergeant said, “Ho.” Parson had picked up that much of the language. The word meant yes.

  “Tell him to describe what he saw,” Parson said. Didn’t really matter what the man had seen. Parson knew why the C-27 had pranged into the ground. But this question would get the sergeant talking—and, Parson hoped, thinking this was still just a safety investigation.

  The man began a stream of words Parson could not understand. Parson tried to listen for pauses, to determine when one sentence ended and another began, but he could not even tell that much. Like every accident witness, this guy had a story to tell, and he told it in excited tones. He raised his hand with thumb and little finger outstretched to represent wings. The hand traced a slanting descent path, then crashed onto his knee. The sergeant said, “Bhoom.” No interpreting needed there.

  Gold told Parson what the man had described. The English translation included nothing Parson hadn’t seen for himself during the event.

  “Ask him what the plane was carrying,” Parson said. Now I’m acting like a lawyer, he thought, asking only questions to which I already know the answer.

  Gold spoke, and the man responded. Shorter answers this time.

  “Equipment in boxes,” Gold said. “That’s all he seems to know.”

  “All right,” Parson said
, “ask him where the plane would have gone if it hadn’t crashed here.” Another question to which he knew the answer.

  After Gold asked the question in Pashto—which sounded like all vowels, to Parson’s ears—the man answered quickly, rubbing the palms of his hands along his thighs.

  “He says the plane would have gone back to Afghanistan,” Gold said. “Civilian airplanes carry the cargo to Europe.”

  Careful now, Parson told himself. Don’t get too close to the wrong topic.

  “Tell him we’re wondering how well the pilot knew the approaches to Manas,” Parson said. “Does he know if that crew had flown here before?”

  More chatter in Pashto. Parson envied Gold’s language ability. He wished he could know what she knew, but achieving that would take more than a few hours of Rosetta Stone. Gold had studied hard for years. Making a good interpreter took as long as making a pilot. And she’d done all that work and training for enlisted pay.

  “He says C-27s come here at least twice a week,” Gold said.

  “Interesting,” Parson said. “Let me think for a minute.” So they could have shipped a hell of a lot of opium through here, he considered. Maybe this guy knows about it; maybe he doesn’t. Parson decided to quit while he was ahead and just ask some fluff questions to cover his tracks.

  “Ask him if this aircraft commander had a good reputation, if his men respected him,” Parson said.

  Parson hardly listened as Gold translated and then came back with “‘Oh, yes.’”

  Whatever. Jackass didn’t deserve respect now; that was for damned sure. Parson remembered an old saw he’d heard from one of his instructors years ago: A superior aviator uses his superior judgment to avoid situations that would require his superior skill. Well, that bonehead who’d bought the farm out there hadn’t possessed skill or judgment.

  Gold and Parson spoke with the three other Afghans who made up the ground detachment. They all gave similar answers. Parson thanked them for their time, apologized for making them recount a traumatic event.

  At the end of the day, Parson and Gold walked down the flight line and out of the ramp area. As they walked across the apron, sunset bled across distant mountains. The dying light lent a shade of rose to the snow on the peaks, and Parson thought of all the things he and Gold had endured among mountains like that. Their working relationship had begun when a terrorist’s shoulder-fired missile had blown his C-130 Hercules out of the sky. Parson and Gold survived the crash landing, but the ordeal of surviving a winter storm and evading insurgents had left them with scars both visible and unseen.

  Parson brought his thoughts back to the current problem. So we have regular Afghan flights into Kyrgyzstan, he noted, and a permanent ground crew here. Nothing necessarily incriminating there. But regular flights? How much cargo would Afghanistan really need to send out of the country?

  “So what do you think?” Parson asked.

  Gold stopped and looked down at the concrete for a moment. She opened her mouth to speak, but the roar of a KC-135’s takeoff drowned her out. As the tanker jet retracted its landing gear and banked to the south, she said, “You touched a nerve somewhere.”

  “How’s that?” Parson said.

  “You made his palms sweat.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Did you see the way he was rubbing his hands along his legs?”

  Parson tried to recall the interview. Yeah, he remembered that. But so what? “Does that mean anything?” he asked.

  “Nothing you could prove in court,” Gold said. “But it’s a classic sign of somebody getting skittish.”

  “How do you know this?” Parson said. “You’re not a cop.” He didn’t doubt her; he just wondered how she could have picked up this particular tidbit. Gold knew so many things, and she never stopped surprising him.

  “Interpreting for interrogations,” Gold said. She looked off into the mountains, paused for a moment. Then she said, “I’ve heard things you wouldn’t believe. I’ve heard things I wish I hadn’t heard. And I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t seen. But I know when people are hiding something.”

  6

  A SETBACK, NOTHING MORE. Dušic told his contacts in Central Asia, along with the European customers for his new product, not to panic. We lost some inventory, he conceded, but Afghanistan had no shortage of poppies. Yes, the risk of detection existed now, but according to all reports, the C-27 had burned on impact. Perhaps the flames had consumed all of the product. Neither the Americans nor the Kyrgyz government had said anything about finding contraband. It would look suspicious if Dušic and his contacts changed the schedules of their flights. Better to let operations continue as normal.

  Dušic wanted to focus on the real mission; the dirty business of the drug trade only funded that mission, and drugs already took up too much of his time. At least he’d received some good news from his old army friend Stefan: Three veterans of the Volunteer Guard had pledged their support. And those three might help recruit more.

  Stefan had also reported progress on technical issues. Dušic wanted to see for himself—and meet the new volunteers—so he took his Aventador over the border into Bosnia. At the checkpoint, his false passport received barely a glance from the idiot border guard. That border never should have been there, in Dušic’s estimation. Greater Serbia should encompass the current Bosnia, and ultimately that was the purpose of his mission. He tried not to let his thoughts about the border ruin his day. For the moment, he enjoyed driving his Lamborghini down the winding rural roads. The sports car was designed for such motoring, not the stop-and-go congestion of Belgrade. He crossed bridges over streams running clear except where the water tumbled fast enough to turn white. The trip brought back memories as he sped past rolling green hills.

  Dušic’s unit served in this region, near Tuzla, early in the war. He remembered one day with particular vividness. As his men cleared a village of Turks, they found four women attractive enough to keep. The platoon gathered them in a house blown open by shelling, and the men waited for Dušic to come in from the field.

  That was the protocol: Officers got first pick, and they each got a woman to themselves. The enlisted had to share. Dušic knew the one he wanted immediately—second from the right in the lineup, hands bound in front of her. Shoulder-length black hair and a cotton peasant blouse over large breasts. She kept staring at the floor, so he placed his hand on her chin and forced her to look at him. Very pretty—fair skin, but eyes filled with Turkish hate.

  “It is your lucky day, my little whore,” he said.

  The girl spat in his face. His men hooted.

  Dušic slapped her. Then he pulled his sidearm. With one hand, he grabbed her by the hair. With the other, he jammed the pistol barrel against her cheek.

  “I bet you like it rough,” he said. Dušic pulled her hair harder. He heard his men behind him laughing. “You’re going to bear a Serb child,” he said, “if I let you live that long.”

  Then he dragged her into a back room. How that bitch screamed and cried. In the end, Dušic chose not to shoot her. He figured she was worth leaving for the next patrol that came along. One of the other three women did not survive the night with his men. When they left her untied after all the fun was over, the crazy Turk hanged herself. Dušic could still see that purple, bloated face, the tangled hair. He told his platoon not to worry. Just showed how little value these Muslims placed on life.

  Scenes like that raid repeated themselves many times for Dušic, but he remembered that one now because it had taken place not far from here. Younger days, better times, when victory seemed so near. He checked his GPS receiver—the handheld kind carried by soldiers, not the road-based type known to motorists. The place he was going had no street address; Stefan had chosen the location for its remoteness. Dušic was getting close. The GPS screen showed the destination at three-point-six kilometers ahead.

  He ste
ered the Lamborghini around a tight, tree-lined curve. When the road straightened, the pines gave way to an open field. The far end of the field bordered a small abandoned village. Five houses, roofs long since torn away by mortar fire, rotted under the advance of vines and weeds. The Turks, unfortunately, had managed to repair and reoccupy most of their damaged homes in this area. But for whatever reason, this village, once cleansed, had stayed that way. Maybe no children or heirs had survived to move back in and reclaim the property.

  Dušic slowed as he passed the dead village. Stefan should be somewhere near, he noted. The GPS receiver indicated DESTINATION REACHED.

  There. Two black SUVs sat idling on a dirt path that led deeper into more fields. Green stalks of corn grew in some of the fields, but part of the land lay fallow, producing nothing but brush and sapling trees.

  Mines, Dušic supposed, were the reason these fields remained untended. Farmers wouldn’t dare drive a tractor over land where mines might remain. Do-gooders had worked on demining here for years, but they hadn’t cleared every field.

  Dušic braked, turned off the blacktop and onto the dirt path. Just as Stefan had promised, the path was dry and level—suitable for parking the Aventador. Dušic would take his car no farther; he would ride in Stefan’s vehicle from here.

  The driver’s door on one of the SUVs opened. Stefan stepped out of a Toyota, looked at Dušic, grinned, and stretched his arms wide. Dušic’s friend appeared a little older now, the inevitable toll of time and too much slivovitz. More white in that shock of black hair, deeper lines across his forehead. But the green eyes still seemed alert, and Stefan wore no glasses. Maybe he still possessed the keen eyesight of the sniper he had once been. Dušic emerged from the Lamborghini, embraced his war comrade.

  “Wealth will ruin you, yet,” Stefan said. “Who drives a car like that to a meeting in the woods?”

  “Risk has rewards,” Dušic said.

  “So you can pay our recruits well,” Stefan said. “Let me introduce you.”