When Gold returned to the cargo compartment, she offered Baitullah the coffee. He frowned when he took the first sip, but he drank it all while nibbling on the orange peels. His first experience in the care of Americans, Gold thought, and he’s hungry enough to eat trash. She gave the water bottles to the crewmen who’d fought, and she offered another one to Mahsoud. He looked even paler.
“How’s he doing?” Gold asked the MCD.
“He’ll need a respirator if he keeps declining.”
“The bunk rooms upstairs have oxygen regulators. Would it help to move him up there?”
The lieutenant colonel’s eyes widened. “They do?” she said. “Yeah, it would help. We should have thought of that, but we don’t normally use this airframe.”
A loadmaster overheard the conversation. “Due respect, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Look what happened last time we let an Afghan patient upstairs.”
Gold suppressed a surge of anger. She’d say something she’d regret. And she felt responsible for what Fawad had done. “What’s he going to do?” she asked. “He has one leg.”
“You never know what a motivated terrorist is capable of,” the loadmaster said.
“You do if their oxygenation is that poor,” the MCD said. “But it’s up to the aircraft commander.”
Gold plugged in her headset and explained to Parson what she wanted to do. He said nothing for a while. Then he asked, “You want to bring another one up here?”
A knife to her heart. One that she deserved, in her estimation. She looked at Mahsoud, and her eyes brimmed.
“Hell, no,” Dunne said. “Sir.”
Parson did not answer.
He said he still trusted me, Gold thought, but he didn’t expect to have to prove it. He just wanted to make me feel better.
“Major,” the MCD said, “this patient’s in bad shape. He couldn’t hurt you if he wanted to.”
“The other one was wounded, too,” Dunne said.
So the jury’s deciding Mahsoud’s punishment for my mistake, Gold thought. Dear God, everything I touch gets destroyed.
“If he wanted to bring us down,” Parson said, “he wouldn’t have told us about that mercury switch.”
“If that’s what it is,” Colman said.
They’re going to sacrifice Mahsoud to paranoia, Gold realized. Why can’t they just take it out on me? The interphone fell silent.
“Pilot,” the lieutenant colonel said. “MCD. We need a decision.”
No sound but the tenor of the engines and the wind. Then the click of a microphone switch.
“Bring him up here,” Parson said.
20
A
livid dawn materialized as the C-5 flew west. Parson could not see the sun rising behind him, but its rays lightened the sky ahead with a milky colorless glow. Broken stratus formations obscured the ocean surface, and their edges melded with surrounding air in a way that made it hard to identify any cloud’s boundaries. In a few places, darker blotches hung suspended like smoke rising through fog. The entire atmosphere seemed a pastel smear, as if viewed through cataracts.
At least I’m not flying through black billows of ash, Parson thought. But as he looked down through a sky heavy with particulates, he realized that
was
the ash cloud, diffused and spreading, far from its source. Motes of silica from deep within the earth, hurled into the sky and drifting on the trades.
Exhaustion dragged on him like a chronic disease. According to Dunne’s fuel log, the jet had been airborne for almost twenty hours. Parson had worked with augmented crews kept on duty for twenty-four hours at a stretch; the regs allowed that if you had an extra pilot. Because of screwed-up circadian rhythms, those augmented days could translate into thirty or more hours without real sleep. Flying tired was nothing new to Parson, but he’d never pushed it this far on any single flight. Once, twice, three times sleep overtook him, until his head sagged and he startled awake.
Thuds, boot steps, and curses echoed from behind and below, and the flight deck door rattled open. Someone’s fingers wrapped around the doorframe, and then Gold pulled herself into the cockpit. She turned around, kneeled, and lifted, and she backed up holding the front handles of Mahsoud’s litter. Gold and her unseen assistants levered him onto the flight deck floor.
“Sir,” Colman asked, “are you sure this is a good idea?”
“Look at him,” Parson said.
Mahsoud’s face wore the gray cast of the dying. His facial muscles hung slack except at the jaw, clenched in evident pain. Eyes open but unfocused, black pools of fear.
Gold, Justin, and the MCD lifted him again and carried him into the forward bunk room. After they had him settled, Justin leaned the collapsed litter against an aisleway bulkhead.
A faint scorched scent permeated the cockpit. Parson began to worry about another electrical fire—no telling what unseen damage had resulted from the lightning.
“How’s your electrical panel looking?” he asked Dunne.
“Yeah, I smell it, too,” Dunne said. “I got no warning lights or popped breakers. Load meters all look normal.”
“It’s getting stronger,” Colman said.
“I’ll look around,” Dunne offered. “Engineer’s going off headset.”
Dunne got up and opened an avionics compartment door. He unzipped a flight suit pocket, removed a penlight, and shone it around. Then he leaned forward and sniffed. The effort put Parson in mind of a suspicious Brittany spaniel checking a hedgerow for pheasants. Dunne repeated the process at the aft avionics bay, shrugged his shoulders, and returned to his seat.
“Find anything?” Parson asked.
“You can hardly smell anything back there.”
“Anybody cooking in the galley?”
“There’s nothing left to cook.”
Parson ran his eyes over his instruments and annunciator panel. No new warning lights there, either. Not that there isn’t enough wrong with the airplane already, he thought. His airspeed and altitude readings all made sense, and they all agreed with the instruments on Colman’s panel. So the air data computers weren’t fried.
Yet the smell grew worse. The flight deck stank of sulfur. The odor of hell.
Dunne leaned back, sniffed again. “It’s coming from the gasper outlets,” he said. “Do you see any engine damage?”
Parson looked outside, back at the left wing. An engine with a blown duct or a fluid leak might explain the problem: The air-conditioning used purified air tapped off the engine compressors. Any smoke or fluid loosed in an engine could get sucked into the bleed air.
“My side’s good,” Colman said.
So was Parson’s. Two intact engines, humming away. But in the pallid light of dawn, Parson noticed an odd sight: a shimmering luster surrounded the nacelle inlets. Sharp-edged glints sparkled and danced like sunlight reflected off quartz. In all the strange meteorological phenomena Parson had witnessed in almost two decades of flying, he had never seen anything like this. But through the funk of sleep deprivation, he did manage to connect all the signs.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” Colman asked.
“We aren’t over the ash cloud. We’re
in
it.”
“I thought the advisory center said most of it would stay below us.”
“They forgot to tell the damned volcano.”
Parson hadn’t expected to need to climb so early. He felt doubly grateful to that airline crew, because the captain had requested a block altitude for him between twenty-five thousand and thirty-eight thousand feet. Now he wanted the top of it.
“I got the plane for a while,” Parson said to Colman. “You take the radios.”
“Yes, sir. But the radios aren’t working.”
“Call in the blind on HF,” Parson said. “Say we’re climbing to three-eight-oh, but you’ll probably be talking to yourself.”
“Rog,” Colman said. When he spoke on the air, no one answered.
Parson set 38,000 in the altitude selector and advanced the throttles. With the tip of his middle finger, he nudged the autopilot pitch wheel to limit the nose’s rise to five degrees. He could get no better than a two-hundred-foot-per-minute climb. The jet was near the ceiling for its weight, and it seemed to claw for every inch.
The aircraft finally leveled at the new altitude, and Parson eased the power back slightly to a cruise setting. As he did so, he noticed a buzz in the throttles. Weird. But he thought he knew where it came from. When he touched each throttle stem individually, he found the rattle came from number four. He’d noticed it earlier, but now it was more severe. Whatever was wrong with that engine, it shook hard enough to telegraph the problem along hundreds of feet of throttle cable.
“The vibration on four’s getting worse,” he said. “I can feel it in the throttle.”
“That ain’t good,” Dunne said. “Wish I could look at it, but my computer’s toast.”
It really didn’t matter to Parson whether Dunne could look at that engine’s tormented waveform on a computer screen. Parson needed all four engines to stay out of the ash; he wasn’t about to shut one down and descend back into that shit. For all he knew, it was ash damage that had worsened the vibration. To see that engine’s problems quantified by mils and scope divisions would just be pointless aggravation.
At least the sky seemed clearer here. The growing brightness forced Parson to dig into his helmet bag for his aviator’s sunglasses. He put them on and looked down. The air below bore the color of dishwater, unfit even for machines to breathe.
The sulfur odor began to dissipate, but the ash left a scorched tang in the air almost as if someone had been smoking. From the bunk room, he heard Mahsoud cough. Parson made a mental note to check on him later.
No horizon existed; the ash seemed to have scoured it away. Land remained out of sight, and Parson navigated by an integrated solution from GPS and inertial gyros. As long as those gyros knew where they started, they always knew where they were. Parson could determine his position within feet.
He did not consider himself a student of history, but he counted among his heroes Magellan and Drake. He admired the confidence and courage it must have taken to set out across oceans armed with little but a compass and an astrolabe. In those days, navigators had latitude nailed, but they could not accurately fix longitude until the invention of the marine chronometer, and that led to dangerous errors.
I got problems they couldn’t imagine, Parson thought, but at least I know where the hell I am. Headed toward another aerial refueling somewhere near the New World.
IN THE BUNK ROOM,
the MCD placed an aircrew oxygen mask over Mahsoud’s mouth and nose. As he inhaled, Gold watched the blinker on the regulator flip from black to white, and it held white for long seconds. A deep breath, then an extended sigh. The green pneumatic hose constricted slightly each time Mahsoud pulled the oxygen into his lungs. After he took three strong drags, he raised his good arm and held the mask in place with his own hand.
“Does that feel better?” Gold asked.
Mahsoud opened his eyes, nodded. His chalky pallor began to change, growing more ruddy with each cycle of the regulator. Eventually, he lifted the mask enough to speak.
“If I die up here,” he asked, “am I that much closer to heaven?”
“Your faith and your deeds may take you to heaven,” Gold said, “but not today.” She wasn’t sure she believed that, but it seemed the right thing to say.
“Let’s get his antibiotic started again,” the MCD said to Justin. “Go downstairs and bring me an IV stand.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Justin returned with the chrome rods, he assembled them and placed the stand by Mahsoud’s bunk. The MCD hung on to it a small plastic packet labeled CEFAZOLIN INJECTION, USP. She connected it to tubing that ran to a needle taped to Mahsoud’s wrist. “We don’t have any more of this,” she said.
Mahsoud’s eyes met Gold’s, then he looked at the MCD. He seemed grateful for the treatment he was receiving, and Gold felt the same way. In some Afghan villages, medical care did not exist. Mahsoud had probably never seen anything like this. Gold, on the other hand, had seen aeromeds in action before.
After the ordeal of her torture and trek through the mountains with Parson, the Army had sent her to Landstuhl for a medical and psych evaluation. She’d traveled to Germany on a C-17, along with soldiers suffering from gunshot wounds, blast amputations, and traumatic brain injuries. The aeromeds’ compassion and skill had restored some of her hope for humanity at a time when she’d nearly lost it. One female medic spent most of the flight holding the hand of a blinded Marine.
At Landstuhl, doctors pronounced her medically fit. Technically, her torn and lacerated fingertips were minor injuries. But psychologists told her to expect post-traumatic stress disorder. Her commanders let her spend a month at the Edelweiss Lodge in Garmisch. She didn’t even have to take leave. They told her to work on her mission and her mission was to recover.