Tom Young - The Renegades

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 place 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.”