Parson watched Gold eat as greedily as he had, devouring a pouch of banana bread and collecting crumbs from her shirt by dabbing at them with a fingertip. He realized that after these MREs they’d have nothing left but what they could scavenge. Pine needles and twigs. Survivor salad.
Gold untied the prisoner’s gag and gave him crackers and water. Parson listened to them speaking in Pashto, and he wondered what they could be chattering about.
“He says he won’t undress in front of infidels,” Gold said. “He sure won’t in front of me.”
“That’s all right,” Parson said. “If he sits there long enough, he’ll get dry. Just hang his coat up near the fire and tell him to take off his boots and socks.”
More chatter in Pashto.
“He won’t take off his boots,” Gold said. “These guys don’t like any kind of nakedness in front of strangers.”
“I don’t want to drag his ass after he gets trench foot,” Parson said. “Tell him to dry his damn socks or I’ll give him another manicure.”
Gold spoke to the prisoner again. The mullah removed his boots and slapped his wet socks over the bed frame where he was chained. Then Gold untied her hair and brushed it out with her fingers. When she opened the stove to add kindling, her locks shone in the firelight like the copper on a jacketed bullet. Parson felt almost sad when she closed the grate and retied her hair. Then he reminded himself to look outside and not inside.
Parson’s wrist throbbed as he kept watch. He wished he could see farther through the snow and fog, but not even NVGs could penetrate deep into that darkness. The murky shapes of mountains loomed like great ships convoying through an ocean of night, and it seemed to him that everything he’d ever feared lay just beyond the edge of visibility.
The mullah spoke again, several words enunciated clearly, as though he wanted to make sure Gold understood.
“What is it now?” Parson asked.
“He says this storm is the answer to his prayers.”
“So he thinks he can conjure the weather?”
“There is such a thing as Islamic mysticism,” Gold said, “but I couldn’t tell you where he stands on that.”
“Tell him I’m not superstitious.”
Gold said nothing. After a time, her clothes dried and she redressed. She and Parson traded places again, and Parson stripped to his T-shirt and boxers, hung his clothes to dry. He added wood to the snapping fire, and at one point he looked at his watch and saw that he’d lost two hours while sleeping sitting up.
Parson found another empty ammo crate, and he began to take it apart with the ax, more carefully this time. He worked loose a slat, leaving it fairly intact. Then he held it by one end and split it with the ax blade, sheared off a stick about a foot and a half long. He chopped again and broke off another, then another. By repeating the effort, he sliced the box into a jumble of sticks, all roughly the same size.
“More kindling?” Gold asked.
“Nope.”
Parson placed two sticks across each other and lashed them together with the cord he’d scrounged from the Russian tank. He added more sticks until he’d made a flat, crosshatched pattern.
“How long have you been an interpreter?” he asked as he tied a clove hitch.
“A long time,” Gold said.
“Do you want to take a shower every time you talk to one of these guys?”
“Sometimes it’s unnerving. Sometimes it’s infuriating. And it’s always sad.”
“How can you stand it?”
“It’s an education in human nature.”
“You’re not going to tell me we’re all really alike, are you?”
“No. But they show us what people can turn into if they’re taught a certain way.”
Parson placed one of his boots on top of the stick frame, and he tied the boot to his creation.
“Ah,” Gold said. “Snowshoes. I’m impressed, sir.”
“Right out of the survival manual.” Parson noticed the mullah watching him. “What is he looking at?”
“He thinks we’re decadent sinners,” Gold said. “He’s probably surprised to see you coping.”
Parson began to work on another improvised snowshoe. “So do these bastards really think they’re going to heaven for suicide bombings and shit like that?” he asked.
“Some do,” Gold said. “Some learned that stuff in madrassahs. Some are just confused kids. Some are criminals happy for an excuse to hurt people.”
“What about him?”
“He’s a true believer. Used to run the Ministry for Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue.”
“What’s that?” Parson asked.
“You remember the religious police that beat up women for showing a lock of hair?” Gold said. “His boys.”
“Very nice.”
“His good eye is colder than his glass one.”
Parson had a hard time imagining what motivated someone like the mullah. Or even someone like Gold, whose job was to understand these people. From the start of his career, nearly all his schooling had been technical. A degree in applied math. Training in aerodynamics, weather, physics. How to guide a plane from point A to point B. How to find your way with radio signals, satellite beams, or stars. How to make an airdrop hit the ground right where you want it.
Why
was up to the politicians.
Until now, Parson had not carried much anger as he’d flown his Afghanistan missions. It was just his job. But this felt like 9/11 all over again, only far more personal. And the man to blame was right in front of him.
He tried to think of something else, so he busied himself with his snowshoe project, made five and a half of them before running out of cord. He decided to take the half-finished one for himself.
When his clothes and flak vest had dried, he put them back on and took watch again. Gold stretched out on the floor by the stove and fell asleep immediately. The mullah snored. The noise irritated Parson, and he considered waking him to stop the snoring. But Parson let him rest so he’d have more strength when they had to walk again.
He stood the rifle on its stock and leaned his forehead against the hand guard. When his head drooped, he woke with a start, cursed himself for such carelessness. He had no idea how long he’d slept, but he saw that his breath had left a spray of frost on the M-4’s receiver. White veins of rime decorated the gunmetal like fine engraving. In another time they’d have shot you for sleeping on watch, he told himself, and you’d have deserved it.
Parson turned on his goggles, looked carefully. He half expected to see a Taliban patrol he’d let sneak up on him. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. To take a bullet in your sleep and not even know you’d left this world. How much worse could it be than this?
You have a job to do, he reminded himself. Whether God put you here for a reason, the Air Force sure as hell did.
He scanned again, watched the electro-green flickers of a war night. A swirl of fog around the trunks of the conifers seemed to hang there, and Parson watched what he thought must be his imagination. But the swirl remained still, then moved jerkily, then moved again like a solid object and like a man—a man walking, and the son of a bitch had an AK-47.
Three more figures emerged, and Parson felt his palms sweat. It will end for me here in this doorway, he thought. Stop it. Stop and think hard.
Two of the apparitions split from the other two and began circling around the clearing. Dear God, they’re flanking me, Parson thought. They know where I am and I can’t get them all. But they don’t know I see them.
Parson realized all he could do was change the facts. I won’t be where they think I am, he decided. He got up and prodded Gold.
“Listen,” he whispered. “Four men are approaching from either side. I’m going out the back with your rifle. You take my sidearm. Anybody but me comes in the doorway, shoot them. I’ll cough before I come back in.”
Parson handed Gold his Beretta, and he slipped out the back door still in his bare feet. For the first few steps, the snow and ice stabbed like needles, then his feet went numb and felt nothing.
A wooded slope fell away from the back end of the shack, and Parson stumbled downhill in the first hint of gray dawn. At one point, he lost his footing and hooked his arm around a sapling, nearly dropped Gold’s carbine. He feared that clumsy move had given him away. Then he thought, I’ll know when they see me because they’ll shoot. Parson circled around to the side of the clearing, climbed back up to where he had the campsite in full view. Then he took a knee, turned on his night-vision goggles.
There they were, two men creeping from the right toward the front of the shack. He could make out little detail in the NVGs, but their baggy clothes suggested insurgents rather than ANA. Beyond that he could tell little about what manner of enemy they were: Taliban or al Qaeda, Pashtun or Arab. He guessed they were of the same party he’d seen the first night, but even that was speculation. Nothing in their hands but their Kalashnikovs. Good. At least this pair didn’t have night vision. They seemed intent on the shack, unaware of Parson watching them. He lowered the NVGs, tried to adjust his eyes to the dark shapes in what little natural light there was.
He placed his thumb on the M-4’s safety and applied just enough pressure to feel the lever start to budge, easing the selector to the semiauto position without the usual click. Now the rifle would fire a round for each trigger pull, every shot an act of will. No sense wasting ammo by spray-and-pray.
Parson raised the weapon to his shoulder. The carbine had one of those new advanced optical sights. He watched the two figures through the scope, the dot reticle glowing red in the low light. Parson placed the dot of radioactive tritium across the first man’s torso. He pressed the trigger.
The orange flash from the muzzle obscured his target momentarily, then the target was down. The shot scattered a flock of magpies from their roost. They squawked into the last of night, black rags twisting away through the trees. He swung the barrel onto the second man, fired two shots in quick succession, the recoil jolting his cheek. The insurgent dropped to the ground, moaning.
Shouts from the far side of the shack. Parson lay flat in the snow, waiting.
A man darted around the far corner of the shack and ran inside the front door before Parson could fire. Two shots exploded inside. Pistol rounds, he hoped. Please let that be Gold shooting.
Parson noticed movement in the corner of his eye. Someone approaching the shack’s rear door. The guerrilla walked bent low, rifle held almost at arm’s length. Long tunic with a military field jacket. British camo pattern. The insurgent swept his AK side to side in an arc as if it could illuminate all dangers.
Unseen, Parson had the luxury of a few seconds. He aimed through the M-4’s sight and took his time placing the red dot directly on the man’s forehead. The shot was so close he held a little low for bullet trajectory. Squeeze.
Red mist.
The guerrilla fell so hard and fast that Parson knew he’d made a clean head shot. Instant disconnect of the central nervous system. Parson shivered, yet a drop of sweat fell from the tip of his nose. In the dim light he saw his empty cartridge casings on top of the crusted snow, the hot brass melting little graves for themselves.
Wait, he told himself. Wait. You don’t know there were just four. The world about him stood so silent that he heard his own pulse.
When Parson had satisfied himself that no one else lurked in the trees, he got up and brushed off the snow. He shivered, had trouble walking to the cabin because he had no sensation below his knees. He stumbled over to the insurgent in the British camo. Hate to imagine how he came by that field jacket, Parson thought. Dead eyes stared into the sky with no final expression. Death had overtaken him with such velocity that his features never registered it. A small, round entry wound in the front and a mass of hair, bone, brains, and blood on the other side.
Parson staggered through the back door. Gold swung the Beretta with both hands, wide-eyed. Parson felt a microsecond of clarity, the recognition of an awful mistake. He tensed for the bullet.
It did not come. He closed his eyes and let out a long breath.
“I’m sorry. I forgot to cough,” he said.
“Thought you might.”
“Why didn’t you blow me away?”
“You said there were four,” Gold replied. “I got one. I heard you shoot at three.”
“Good thing you’re smarter than I am.”
Parson sat by the stove and dried his feet with a desert scarf. The prisoner sat on the floor, looking at the guerrilla Gold had killed with pistol fire.
“Guess the cavalry didn’t save you, huh?” Parson said.
“Inshallah.”
“Somebody knows where we are,” Gold said.
“Yeah, I hate like hell to leave a warm place, but we’re lucky we had it this long.”
He handed the M-4 to Gold, took his pistol from her. He holstered it in his survival vest, then gathered up the other sidearm and magazines he’d taken from the airplane. Parson placed all his gear in the backpack, now empty and damp. He filled the plastic bottles with the water in the cook pot.