A squeal and a pop came over the interphone as someone plugged in an audio jack.
“MCD back on headset,” the lieutenant colonel said. “We have a patient restrained.”
“What about the other one?” Parson asked. “Weren’t there two with head injuries?”
Seconds ticked by with no response. Nothing on interphone but electronic hum.
“That one’s already dead.”
GOLD SAW THAT DUNNE WAS CONCENTRATING
on a gauge in the middle of his panel. It had large and small hands like a clock, but this was different. The big hand crept toward zero while the little hand reached twenty-five thousand.
“Almost there,” Dunne said. “All right, zero differential. We’re depressurized.”
“I still need that volunteer,” Parson said.
“Can I do it?” Gold asked.
“Thanks,” Parson said, “but I need someone who knows the airplane.”
“I’ll go,” Dunne said. “Just get the scanner to watch the panel for me.”
“Good,” Parson said. “Bundle up, if you can.”
Not much to do that with, Gold thought. I’d offer him a coat, if I could, but who carries a coat around during warm months in Kabul?
“Hey, Gold,” Parson said. “There is something you can do. Go with Dunne and keep an eye on him.”
“Yes, sir,” Gold said.
“Don’t follow him into the tail section. Just watch him from those negative pressure relief valves. You’ll see what I mean when you get there. Take my flashlight.”
Parson reached into his helmet bag and pulled out a Maglite, passed it to Gold. It felt substantial in her hand, loaded with D cells. The kind police carried because it could double as a blackjack.
From the bulkhead behind his seat, Dunne lifted a yellow metal bottle with a mask attached to it.
“Do you know how to use these MA-1 cylinders?” he asked.
“No,” Gold said.
“There’s one for you in front of the nav table. Take off the mask you’re wearing now and use the one on the walkaround bottle.”
Gold found the MA-1 bottle and switched masks.
“Disconnect your headset,” Dunne added. “When we get back there, you can plug into the interphone with this.” Dunne showed her the audio connections on the oxygen bottle’s mask. Then he pointed to a gauge on the bottle and said, “Keep an eye on this needle. When your oxygen gets low, refill it like I show you.”
Dunne detached a silver hose mounted on the cockpit wall, plugged it into a port on the bottle. Gold heard a pneumatic hiss, saw the pressure needle rise.
“This refills it from the ship’s supply,” he said. “We got plenty of liquid oxygen on board.”
“Is that liquid in the bottle?” Gold asked.
“No. It turns to gas before it gets that far.”
Gold found that her bottle had a nylon strap. She put the strap across her shoulder, leaving her hands free to carry the flashlight. Dunne pulled on his flying gloves, donned what Gold supposed was a summer-weight flight jacket. Then he went aft to a crew bunk room and came back with a green U.S.-issued blanket.
“Are you ready to do this?” Dunne asked.
“I think so,” Gold said.
“You guys be careful,” Parson said. “Sergeant Major, all you need to do is watch him, and let us know if anything’s wrong.”
“Yes, sir,” Gold said. “Hooah.”
Parson looked at her strangely, and she reminded herself these flyboys spoke a different language. Maybe they didn’t know what HUA meant: Heard, Understood, Acknowledged.
“If you find something,” Parson said, “don’t move it. At least, not yet.”
“Don’t worry,” Dunne said.
Dunne led the way down the flight deck ladder to the cargo compartment. Downstairs, Gold saw that a blanket covered the face of one of the patients. And the wounded sergeant lay still and quiet now, Flex-Cuffed to his litter. At least he’d survived the depressurization. Blood stained the bandage around his head.
When they passed Mahsoud’s stretcher, he looked at Gold as if to say
What on earth are you doing?
Gold touched his arm as she walked by, but she didn’t stop to speak to him. It was too hard to yell through the mask at someone not on headset.
At the aft end of the cargo compartment, Gold and Dunne climbed another ladder to the troop section. At the back of the troop compartment, Dunne moved aside an aluminum cage that guarded two circular hatches in the wall, each big enough for someone to crawl through. They had hinges at the top, so they could swing open vertically. What the crew had called valves looked more like round doors to Gold.
Dunne flipped a wall-mounted toggle switch marked EMPENNAGE SERVICE LIGHT and raised the lower door. Cold air rolled from it like he’d opened a freezer. When the frigid air mingled with the warmer atmosphere of the troop compartment, fog swirled as if some malevolent specter haunted the aircraft.
“These are the negative pressure valves,” he said. “They just lift open now that we’re depressurized. Hold this one for me, please, and you can watch from here.”
Dunne took an interphone cord from the wall and connected it to Gold’s mask. Then he wrapped himself in the blanket and snapped on his flashlight. Gold held the pressure valve as he squeezed through it.
He passed into a hollow dark opening big enough to contain two Army trucks. Inside the tail cone, the plane’s structure rattled and shook. With no insulation or noiseproofing there, the slipstream raged like a hurricane tearing at a tin shack. A service lamp trembled in its mounts and cast a dim, pulsing glow on cables, wiring, endless rows of rivets.
This strange section of the aircraft amounted to a tunnel about eighty feet long. At the entrance, by the pressure valves, it was about thirty feet wide, but it narrowed toward the end of the tail. The area contained no seats or steps; it was obviously not intended for access in flight. The metal cavity was larger than the interior of some passenger planes Gold had seen, but in this aircraft it served only as the aft tip of the tapered fuselage.
Gold watched as Dunne made his way down a catwalk, cradling his oxygen cylinder in one arm. He steadied himself against the vibration with the other arm, found handholds among the braces and formers. To Gold, he looked like a coal miner descending a contaminated shaft during an earthquake. She found her TALK switch and pressed it.
“He’s in the tail,” she said.
“Roger that,” Parson said. “How’s he doing?”
“I’m sure he’s freezing, but he’s moving around okay.”
Dunne swept his flashlight beam, a pool of light playing against the cold, buckling metal. So many hiding places, Gold thought. She shone Parson’s Maglite at Dunne’s feet, hoped she could at least help keep him from tripping.
He came to a ladder at the aft end of the tail cone. Pocketed his flashlight, ascended the ladder. His boots disappeared as he climbed out of sight.
“He’s headed up some kind of passageway,” Gold said. “Where’s he going?”
“That leads up into the vertical stabilizer,” Parson said. “The maintenance guys use it.”
“I can’t see him now.”
“He shouldn’t be gone long.”
Seconds ticked into minutes, and Gold began to worry. Still no sign of the flight engineer. Had he gotten stuck up there? Passed out?
“I still don’t see him,” Gold said.
“Keep me advised,” Parson answered.
Gold wanted to go back and look, but Parson had specifically told her not to do that. The pressure on her bottle was dropping, and she knew Dunne had to be low on oxygen, too. Gold wasn’t an aviator, but common sense told her that since Dunne was exerting himself and he was a big guy, he was probably using up oxygen faster than she was. And there certainly wouldn’t be any refill hoses where he had gone, in a part of the plane never meant to be manned.
She stood and refilled her own bottle from a recharger hose on the troop compartment wall. The effort brought a stitch of pain in her ribs. She watched the oxygen pressure needle climb back to 300 psi. Then she kneeled by the pressure valves and looked around for Dunne. Still nothing.
Another oxygen cylinder stood in a bracket nearby. Gold took it, checked its pressure. Full. She scanned the tail cone again with the flashlight.
Dunne’s boots appeared on the ladder, first his left, then his right. He seemed steady enough on his feet.
“I see him,” Gold said. “He’s coming back down.”
“Copy that,” Parson said.
Dunne reached the catwalk, began walking toward Gold. Now he appeared to move with effort, as if his boots were sticking to the metal. Then he sank to his knees, fell forward as if shot. Motionless.
Gold took off her headset and scrambled through the lower valve, pointing the flashlight so she could see where to step. The strap on the extra oxygen cylinder caught on the lip of the valve opening, and Gold jerked until it ripped free. A stabbing pain spread through her torso, but she tried to ignore it. Dropped the flashlight. Gold fumbled in the shadows cast by the weak service lamp overhead and found the flashlight underneath the catwalk. She grasped for it with ungloved hands, the catwalk’s steel so cold it seemed to burn. As she raised herself back up, she grabbed a cross brace for support. Her sweating palm stuck to it. She yanked her hand away, left a strip of skin frozen to the steel.
When she reached Dunne, she cradled her flashlight between her knees and rolled him over. No response, like moving a corpse. His eyes were closed, face ashen. Pressure on his oxygen bottle was zero.
Gold disconnected his mask from the empty bottle, plugged the hose into the spare, and felt it seat into the receptacle with a click. Dunne opened his eyes, blinked. Gold could hardly believe one breath would make him recover so quickly. Though she was a paratrooper, she had never been free fall qualified, so she had no training in high-altitude physiology. Now she just hoped Dunne could get up. She thought she could drag him to the pressure valves if she had to, but it would hurt like hell. Pulling him all the way through one of the valves would be impossible.
Rays of sunlight filtered through a louvered panel on the floor. Blue segments shining from some kind of access hatch, hints of clouds and sea below.
Dunne staggered to his feet, tried to shout something. Gold could not understand him above the roar. She put his arm around her neck and helped him to the pressure valve. He went down on his knees and crawled through. When Gold followed, she found him shivering on the troop compartment floor, still clutching the blanket around him.
He yelled again through his mask. Unintelligible.
“What?” Gold said.
He grabbed his oxygen mask by the hose and pulled it far enough from his face to speak.
“There’s something back there,” he said.
6
T
oo much time had passed since Parson had heard anything from Gold and Dunne.
“Sergeant Gold,” he called, “are you still on headset?”
No answer. Parson cursed himself for not briefing her that you always checked with the aircraft commander before you went off headset. She’s bright, he thought, but don’t expect her to think like aircrew.
Then he heard clicks on the interphone, the whine of audio feedback, Dunne’s voice. Sounded out of breath: “Pilot, Engineer. We got problems.”
For a moment, Parson said nothing. The objects around him seemed to blur, as if imagined in some dreamlike state. Switches and instruments faded, their purposes forgotten. His mouth had a leaden taste in it that made no sense.
Parson knew of a C-130 crew years ago that had made a navigational blunder on a low-level training flight. They flew into a box canyon and found they had neither the turning radius to reverse course, nor the power to climb over the rim. Was this how they felt in those moments before they hit the canyon wall?
Focus, he told himself. Function. Face whatever comes. He took a deep breath, pressed the TALK switch.
“Tell me what you saw,” he said.
“There’s a duffel bag up in the stabilizer.” Dunne’s voice shook. Probably still shivering, Parson guessed. “It has wires attached,” Dunne added.
So there it was. Nothing theoretical about the threat now. Parson’s universe narrowed, tunneled, consisted only of the airplane, its crew and passengers, fuel, sky, and high explosive.
“Can you remember anything else?” Parson asked. “We need to describe it to TACC.”
“There’s more than the bomb,” Dunne said. “Pasteboard boxes and black plastic bags. Maybe a half dozen. I didn’t see any wires in those.”
What the fuck? Parson thought. Then he understood. A dirty bomb. Or worse. Anthrax spores. Sarin. Mustard gas. Or VX.
“You didn’t touch any of it, did you?” Parson said.
“Negative.”
“Good. God only knows what that garbage could be.”
“Yeah, but I got a vague idea.”