Tom Young - The Renegades

“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.

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.