Tom Young - The Renegades

Both pencil marks fell within a spur of mountains called Kuh-e Qara Batur . Gold examined the spur’s contour lines. The contours ran closely together, indicating steep terrain. The ridge base at the valley floor lay at an elevation of two thousand feet, and the mountain’s peak topped out at 5,692. Just a hill, by Afghan standards.

“Have you ever been to that location?” Gold asked in Pashto.

“Never,” Aamir said. “They did not even tell me if there was a flat spot to land.”

What Gold really wanted to know was whether Black Crescent hid there, in a compound or cave complex. Or was it just a random spot they’d chosen for this single purpose? No way to find out quickly. To Aamir, the location was just a set of coordinates.

On a thread of hope, she thought back to her conversation with Mullah Durrani’s wife. If Gold ever got to talk to Durrani himself, perhaps she could ask if there was something in Kuh-e Qara Batur . As an old mujahid, Durrani would know about all the old caves and forts that insurgents might use. But if she asked, would he just turn around and warn Black Crescent?

Tomorrow she would visit Durrani’s wife again. The woman had said she’d have an answer about a meeting with her husband. That whole exercise could turn out to be a waste of time or worse. But Gold knew only one way to find out.

Once again, Parson found himself in Gold’s world. Riding in the Cougar MRAP, even his clothes felt strange. For this ground mission, he wore MultiCam fatigues—officially known as the Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern—instead of his usual flight suit. He’d been issued one set of MultiCams for this deployment, though he’d never expected to use them. Just free hunting clothes for later, Parson had thought. He’d not even bothered to get the cloth wings of a command pilot sewn onto the shirt. Body armor hid that oversight. No one could see he was technically out of uniform.

Blount and his driver rode up front. A gunner stood in the turret. A second MRAP, another Cougar, carried more Marines. Parson rode with Gold in Blount’s vehicle, and Gold introduced him to the Marine Corps Lionesses, Ann and Lyndsey.

“Did you have any trouble getting permission to come with us?” Gold asked Parson.

“Yeah, a colonel with Joint Relief Task Force gave me a ration of shit. Said this fell outside my role as an Air Force adviser. He didn’t even like it that I’d let you go last time. But I told him it might lead to the people who took Aamir’s boy.”

“So if it’s the business of the Afghan Air Force, then it’s your business,” Gold said.

“Ah, I didn’t put it quite that well, but that’s kind of what I said.”

He’d actually used words he shouldn’t have uttered to a superior officer, but he’d made them a little more acceptable by adding a sir at the end. Eventually, the task force commander had seen the logic and told him he could go as long as he filed a full report.

The armored vehicles rumbled through the airfield checkpoint and out onto the road. Overhead, the rotor-and-turbine pulsing of helicopters rose above the Cougar’s diesel. Parson looked up to see a flight of three Mi-17s climbing toward the south. More loads of rice and Unimix, he knew. People had to eat. Parson didn’t have Gold’s understanding of cultures and history, of human nature and spirit. But he’d seen enough to know that some of the most powerful tools of foreign policy were a bowl and a spoon.

With Mazar receding behind him in the dust, Parson felt vulnerable, out of his element. Here on the ground, roadside bombs presented a constant danger; Gold and the Marines had received a loud reminder of that. Certainly there were plenty of ways to die in the air, but Parson had training and experience to handle those risks. Ground threats seemed more sinister. However, if Gold was going to take these kinds of chances, he wanted to go with her.

Beside him, Gold took off her helmet and untied her blond hair. She shook it out with the fingers of both hands. Parson liked how her hair fell around her shoulders. As she tied it back into a ponytail, Parson glanced down at her helmet on the floor. She had written something in black marker, tiny script on the inside liner. Soldiers often did that. Many wrote their blood type, for obvious reasons. Parson had also seen girlfriends’ names, Remember 9/11 , and Gotcha Osama . But this was different—two lines of poetry, something vaguely familiar. Parson thought he might have read it in an English class long ago, though he had no idea who wrote it:

Gold caught him looking. “Emily Dickinson,” she said as she put the helmet back on and snapped the chin strap into place. “It reminds me not to get careless.”

She’s too smart to get careless, Parson considered. But he liked the way she could find, in all the stuff she’d read, thoughts that cut to the heart of issues they faced. Parson’s own reading seldom ventured beyond flight manuals, newspapers, and Field & Stream .

He wondered what experience had inspired that poem. In his own life, he’d come to understand the truth of those lines. Death sure as hell didn’t care what plans you’d made. Parson just hoped Gold’s musing on the subject didn’t mean she’d taken some dark turn in her thinking. She’d seemed different on this deployment, with an undercurrent of sadness. You could hardly blame her, given all the things she’d witnessed. He just wished she’d stop owning all the problems in Southwest Asia. Too big a mission for anybody.

For now, though, she appeared okay. Gold and these Marine Corps women seemed to have hit it off pretty well, too.

Blount turned in his seat to face Parson. “Sir,” he said, “we’re taking mostly a different route than what we used coming and going last time. But it’ll be the same for the last couple miles. There’s only one road into that village.”

“I’m sure you know what you’re doing,” Parson said. He appreciated being kept informed, but the update didn’t make him feel more secure.

Parson decided to focus on things he could control. If this op produced some actionable intelligence, what would he do with it? Well, if it led to a fix on where this Chaaku jackass hung out, maybe he could arrange for a little visit. Ideally, Parson thought, from the Spectre gunship that had rained down so much fire two days ago. Parson could not order such a strike himself, but with decent intel he could make a strong case for it up the chain of command.

The Spectre’s terrible majesty reminded him of a bird of prey. Thinking of it now, he remembered seeing a red-tailed hawk make a strike—and perform what to Parson was amazing flying. He’d been sitting in a deer stand last fall. His rifle in the crook of his arm, the air spiced with the smell of autumn woods, he saw the hawk plunge through the trees. At maybe a fifty-degree dive angle and at God only knew what airspeed, the bird snatched a squirrel from a fallen log and zoomed up in an escape maneuver. But a hickory tree blocked the egress route. The hawk’s tiny brain made an instant calculation worthy of the newest avionics: The bank angle required to miss the tree causes too high a load factor at my current weight. If I jettison my payload, I can make it. The hawk dropped the squirrel, made a hard right turn, missed the hickory, and disappeared. When Parson climbed down from his stand, he examined the squirrel. Though the hawk’s talons had clutched it for no more than a second, the rodent was stone cold dead.

That image gave Parson an oblique comfort. He looked forward to taking this fight back into the air one way or another. Find out where Black Crescent hid, then get a Special Tactics Team in there and call down some fire and steel.