Tom Young - The Renegades

“Thanks.”

Conway dropped his pistol. Reyes tossed the magazine, and Conway caught it one-handed. Smacked it into the M4’s magazine well, released the bolt. Fired two rounds.

“Where’s that gunship?” Parson shouted.

“Five minutes,” Reyes said.

Parson doubted his group could hold out much longer than that. They were armed for survival and evasion, not an extended gunfight to hold a fixed position.

Please let that thing get here, he thought. The Spectre was an armed version of the C-130s he’d flown during his days as a navigator. But the Spectre carried no cargo; armaments were its only payload. It mounted an M102 howitzer and a forty-millimeter Bofors cannon. Parson imagined the crew running attack checklists, ready to press the FIRE button as soon as they arrived overhead. He didn’t know all their procedures, but he did know the flight engineer had a consent switch for firing the guns. The pilot had the trigger, but the FE could break its circuit. Even the gunship’s engineering reflected the moral responsibilities of its crew.

Movement caught Parson’s eye. Something underneath the crumpled tail boom of the Mi-17. He turned with both hands on his pistol, thumbs along the left side of the grip. An insurgent crouched behind the helicopter.

Before Parson could aim, the man opened up with his AK. The burst hit Conway full in the chest. Conway wore no armor. Blood spewed from three exit wounds as he went down. Droplets spattered Parson’s sleeve as he leveled his sights and fired four times. The jihadist crumpled. Parson’s Beretta locked open. Empty.

We’re about to be overrun, Parson realized. He leaned to grab the M4 from Conway. The civilian’s left arm quivered; his body spasmed. Parson snatched the weapon away. He fired at another insurgent sliding downhill toward him. The man held his rifle up out of the dirt, fabric sling swaying, dust rising behind him as he shuffled through the rocks. Parson got off only two shots; the third pull brought nothing. Empty. His target fell, but other insurgents fired down from the ridge.

Parson dropped the M4 and drew his boot knife. He’d fight with that until they shot him; he would not let himself get captured.

Reyes was talking on the radio again. The only phrase Parson could make out was danger close . The PJ picked up his smoke flare and yanked the lanyard. Orange smoke boiled from the end and billowed downwind into the valley.

Parson heard that familiar turboprop thrum. He looked up to see the Spectre over the ridgeline, higher than he’d expected. It came straight on, grew larger. Banked to the left. That’s the side the guns were on.

And then the earth itself came apart.

Stones and soil roared into the air. Blinded by dust, Parson saw only shadows and flashes. The ground trembled and bucked underneath him. A pulsing howl raged in his ears. Grit flailed his skin. An alien force sucked breath from his lungs, burned his throat. His tongue contracted, sensed ashes and steel. The very taste of fire.

Balance left him. Sky and terrain joined, swirled into each other, physical reality gone liquid. Then solid again. He felt something hard against his spine. Parson found himself on his back, but he could not remember falling.

Wind swept away the noise and brought form back to the mountain. The sky returned to its place, and amid the blue, Parson saw the gunship turning.

He rolled onto his stomach and looked up. The ridge above him still smoked, and it had changed form. The outcropping was gone; the profile of boulders and scree had rearranged. Nothing moved but the rising cinders.

Voices echoed below. Parson pushed himself onto his side, sat up, and squinted downhill. Six, seven insurgents ran away toward the canal.

The Spectre completed its turn, leveled its wings. The jihadists sprinted about a hundred yards from Parson, fleeing through the valley with no effort to use cover.

The gunship overtook them in seconds, seemed to float past them. For a moment Parson wondered if the crew had chosen mercy. But then the AC-130 banked left again, and fire speared from the fuselage, long streaks of light. Thunder pealed from a clear sky. The land around the insurgents convulsed, boiled with flame.

When wind cleared the dust, Parson saw no one running. He saw no one at all, not even a corpse. A deep breath filled his chest. The growl of aircraft engines faded, and the mountains grew silent once more.

After nightfall a broken cloud layer drifted over the airfield at Mazar, an onyx sky with fissures of stars. Gold lacked an aviator’s sense of weather, but she’d heard Parson talk about meteorology enough to realize a few things. First, if she could see stars so brightly between the clouds, that meant the dust lofted earlier had cleared. Second, the wind still flicked strands of hair around her cheeks, but now she could face into it without her eyes stinging. Both good signs.

Sometimes flyboys like Parson got so wrapped up in their fancy machines that they didn’t think enough about the big picture. But she admired the way they spoke the language of wind and rain, sun and cloud. It drew them more closely to the natural world, the elements of creation. No wonder so many of them spent their off-duty hours with a fishing rod, a hunting rifle, or a hiker’s backpack.

She checked in at command post to see when the rescue flight would launch. Flight orders had already been cut; Gold felt relieved to see the duty officer remembered to put her with the crews. The orders listed her as an MEGP: mission-essential ground personnel.

“When do they go out?” she asked.

“As soon as they get here,” the duty officer said. “A pair of Pave Hawks coming up from Bagram.”

“Have you heard from Michael—I mean, Lieutenant Colonel Parson?” she asked.

“Yeah, he’s okay, but he sounded a little stunned. They had to call in an air strike pretty close, and I think it rang their bells.”

That chill of anxiety went through her again. Memories and fear. Thoughts of knifepoints and frostbite, bomb blasts and blood. Focus, she told herself.

“I didn’t know they’d come under fire,” she said.

“Happened pretty quick. You could hear shooting anytime the PJ keyed his mike.”

“You mean Sergeant Reyes?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Puerto Rican guy. That dude was ice cold on the radio. Gave coordinates like he was talking about math homework.”

“Is he all right?”

“Yeah, but they have a KIA. One of those civilian workers.”

The news of the firefight and the death left Gold feeling unstrung. She wanted to get to Parson, to see with her own eyes he was all right. She thought of the family of the dead civilian, about to get that awful knock at the door. A strong force of dread settled on everything around her—the command post, the tarmac outside, the mountains beyond.

With time to wait before the helicopters came in, she tried to think of something useful to do. But she could only pace and worry, imagine the worst. What if they came under fire again? What if the winds picked up once more, and Parson and the crew had to stay out there all night?

She was still waiting in command post when the Pave Hawks arrived. The plywood walls shuddered as the helicopters thudded overhead. After the choppers landed, they shut down only long enough to refuel. Lettering on the metal skin of one of the aircraft, near the tail rotor, read DANGER KEEP AWAY.

A helmeted flight engineer beckoned her aboard, then resumed his place by the right side’s minigun. Another crewman manned the left gun, and two pararescuemen rounded out the enlisted crew. Gold knew none of them, and the pilots did not offer her an interphone cord for her headset. Parson always treated her as a crew member, but she knew she was just a passenger to these guys.