Silent Enemy (34 page)
Authors: Tom Young
“They do,” Parson said. An argument normally would have made him angry, but he was glad to talk about Colman and Dunne. “They did damned good.”
“So let them fly the plane.”
“I will,” Parson said. “I can’t fly now. I sure as hell can’t push on rudder pedals. But I can think. So I need to be with my crew.”
“We’ll see, Major.”
As Parson spoke with the MCD, he could hear Colman and Dunne on interphone. It sounded like they’d restored some of the lost hydraulic pressure, but not to the control surfaces in the tail.
“So what do we have?” Parson asked.
“Nothing to the rudders and elevators but system one,” Dunne said. “It’s real sluggish.”
Parson knew pilots who had crashed the simulator with lesser malfunctions. He’d thought his crew would be home free if they got rid of the bomb. But now when they tried to maneuver for landing, would the airplane just roll over on its back and die?
“By the way, sir,” Colman asked, “what made the bomb go off?”
“Damned if I know,” Parson said. “I cut the mercury switch and moved it, no problem. But when I dropped it out, the son of a bitch exploded.”
“It went off outside the plane?” Dunne asked.
“Yeah.”
“I guess that’s why we’re still flying,” Colman said.
“If it was triggered barometrically,” Dunne said, “there’s no telling what kind of pressure gradients it hit when it entered the slipstream.”
Typical flight engineer to want to know how the fucking thing worked, Parson thought. All that mattered was that it
had
worked. Just not inside the aircraft, thank God.
had
worked. Just not inside the aircraft, thank God.
“Look,” Parson said, “you guys keep doing what you’re doing. I’d like to get back up there as soon as I can, but the nurses want to work on me first.” At least he felt confident leaving the aircraft to Colman and Dunne a little longer. Despite the Air Force’s endless management courses, Parson felt you couldn’t teach leadership. It was a natural ability, like hand-eye coordination. Either you had it or you didn’t. And those two had enough to get by.
“No rush, sir,” Dunne said. “I think the worst is over.”
Parson didn’t know about that. They needed to take an object weighing hundreds of tons, flying at more than four hundred miles per hour, and get it down to landing speed on a narrow strip of asphalt. That required control they might not have.
“The aircraft’s in bad shape,” he said, “but at least it’s all ours now.”
“Roger that, sir,” Colman said.
A small comfort, Parson thought. We’ve traded one crisis for another. He sensed an almost mechanical tightness inside him, something more than muscles tensed by pain. This felt spring-loaded, held by a pawl he could not unlatch. The burden of his duties had become tactile.
“Should we work on him here or downstairs?” the medic asked.
“Let’s take Major Parson down the steps,” the MCD said. “He can’t stay up here forever, and he seems to think he’s going back to the flight deck eventually.”
“I’ll help,” Gold said.
“Know how to do a seated carry, ma’am?” the medic asked.
Gold nodded. She kneeled beside Parson and put his arm over her shoulder. Then she and the medic joined their arms under his thighs and stood up with him. That hurt; he felt shards grinding into the meat of his legs. Gold and the medic began easing him down the troop compartment steps one rung at a time. Each step stung, though it was bearable.
By now, Dunne had restored cabin pressure, and Gold had removed her oxygen mask and cylinder. Her untied blond hair spilled over Parson’s forearm and hand. For a moment, he let the strands flow among his fingers. Then he forced his mind to a different train of thought.
“Will Justin make it?” he asked.
“I really don’t know,” the medic said. “He’s lost a lot of blood, enough to cause tachycardia. His heart rate’s way up, trying to pump up the pressure.”
Just like a machine, Parson thought, like the systems in an aircraft. Everything around me seems to be dying for lack of fluid and pressure.
GOLD AND THE MEDIC PLACED PARSON
on a litter in the cargo compartment. He winced as he lay back. She hated seeing him hurt like that. She wished she could do more for him, but she could only place her hand on his chest and say, “You did well, sir. Thank you.”
on a litter in the cargo compartment. He winced as he lay back. She hated seeing him hurt like that. She wished she could do more for him, but she could only place her hand on his chest and say, “You did well, sir. Thank you.”
“It’s not over yet,” Parson said.
“I know.”
The MCD and another nurse put Justin on a litter beside Parson. The wounded aeromed still showed no sign of consciousness.
“He needs a transfusion,” the MCD said. “Right now.”
The other nurse checked Justin’s dog tags. “He’s B negative,” the nurse said. “Rare.”
“Find out if anybody else on board has that blood type,” the MCD said.
The aeromeds checked the dog tags and medical records of the less seriously injured patients. They also polled the crew on interphone. Nobody had B negative. When the nurses asked Gold, she said, “I’m O negative.”
“We can work with that,” the MCD said. “O negative is the universal donor.”
For the second time in twenty minutes, Gold offered a cosmic thanks. She felt useful again, a functioning senior noncommissioned officer. Without another word, she unbuttoned her ACU top and removed it. The T-shirt underneath bore the white arcs and splotches of salt stains from dried sweat.
The MCD tied a blue elastic band around Gold’s arm, about two inches above the elbow. Gold felt the pinch of the restricting band, then the cold wet of the alcohol pad and the prick of the needle. The little discomforts gave her a slight glow of satisfaction. Her blood filled the clear tubing connected to the needle and made it look like red cord. The MCD handed her a roll of gauze.
“Squeeze on this,” the aeromed commander said.
Gold closed her first around the gauze. She alternately gripped the roll and then relaxed her fingers. At the other end of the tubing, the blood smeared into the folds of a plastic pouch. Slowly, it filled the plastic wrinkles with scarlet. Gold closed her eyes and tried to rest, let the blood flow and her mind wander.
In all of her travels, studying, and reading, she had yet to understand why people did such awful things as place bombs on airplanes. She sometimes doubted the terrorists themselves believed the stated justifications. But philosophy—and her own experience—had led her to one conclusion: Ultimately, evil was the assertion of self-interest over the greater good. So its opposite had to be self-sacrifice. If she could bleed a little for someone else—in this case quite literally—then perhaps she was pulling in the right direction.
From across the cargo compartment, Gold watched the aeromeds work on Parson. They slit open the pant legs of his uniform from ankle to hip.
“Hey,” Parson protested, “I don’t have another flight suit with me.”
“That’s the least of your problems,” the MCD said.
“You got that right.”
Dried blood matted the black hairs of Parson’s legs. Despite the well-defined calf and thigh muscles, the bruises, lacerations, and puncture wounds made his limbs look frail and weak. The MCD painted his injuries with an antiseptic tincture. Then she worked at one of his wounds with a set of forceps. Parson swore, and the MCD apologized. In the jaws of the forceps, she lifted a bloody, twisted shard of metal and dropped it into a trash bag of medical waste.
“So how bad is it?” Parson asked.
“I don’t see anything real serious, apart from the fracture,” the MCD said. “Whenever this is over, a surgeon can get more of this stuff out of you than I can.”
The plane still seemed to ride swells. It worried Gold to realize the crew did not have the aircraft entirely under control. As a paratrooper, she understood only the very basics of aerodynamics. But she knew an airplane moved in three axes: pitch, roll, and yaw. Right now, pitch seemed to have a mind of its own.
She could understand why Parson wanted so badly to get back in the pilot’s seat. And she hoped the MCD wouldn’t give him much of an argument. His body was wounded, but his head remained sound. The more aeronautical minds on that flight deck, the better.
The MCD pulled three more pieces of shrapnel from Parson’s legs. He made no noise, but as she worked he gripped the side poles of his litter so hard that the bones of his hands stood out. Gold had watched him swallow the aspirin. Poor medicine for this kind of pain.
The ancient Stoics would have approved of him, she thought. Despite the sting of metal barbs under his skin, he wanted to do his job.
Gold didn’t know what it would take to put this wounded airplane on the ground safely, or if it was even possible. She had a feeling Parson wasn’t even sure himself. Out the windows, she could see puffy fair-weather clouds dotting the ocean like a field of cauliflower. The Pacific was waiting for the aircraft, whether it touched down intact on an island or plunged inverted into the water. The elements, the sea and the sky—just like the forbidding terrain of Afghanistan—took no sides, made no judgments. But neither did they forgive mistakes.
When Gold had filled the pouch with a pint of her blood, the MCD removed the needle.
“Will that be enough?” Gold asked.
“It’ll have to be,” the MCD said. “You’re the only person who can give him blood.”
The MCD took the pint and connected fresh tubing to it. Then she mounted it on a pole beside Justin’s litter and inserted a needle into his arm.
“Somebody hack the clock and keep an eye on him for fifteen minutes,” she said. One of the medics pressed a button on his flight watch and stood by Justin. The MCD went back to Parson.
“What are you looking for?” Gold asked the medic.
“Hemolytic reaction, anaphylactic reaction,” he said. “But if it happens, there’s not much we can do about it.”
“Why not?”
“We’re not equipped to deal with it. This transfusion just has to work. Most people have ten or twelve pints, and he’s lost at least four or five.”
“Can I give another pint?” Gold asked.
“No,” the medic said. “Good of you to ask, but we won’t do that. We’ll do the next best thing.”
The medic inserted a second needle in Justin’s other arm. The additional IV dripped clear liquid from a bag marked LACTATED RINGER’S INJECTION USP.
Justin’s eyelids fluttered, and he made a long, moaning sound.
“Hold on for us, buddy,” the medic said. “You done good.”
“I’m sorry your friend got hurt,” Gold said to the medic. “Do you know him well?”
“Yeah, he’s pretty green. But he doesn’t mind working. I can’t figure why he cracked up earlier. Seen too much too early, maybe.”
“May I talk to him?” Gold asked.
“It won’t hurt,” the medic said, “but I don’t know if he can hear you.”
Gold had seen chaplains whisper words of comfort to the wounded and dying. A soothing voice could give strength to someone fighting for life or ease the passing of someone losing that fight. A minister had once told her it didn’t even matter what you said. It helped just to keep them company, remind them they weren’t alone.
She wanted to be in three places at once. She wanted badly to check on Mahsoud. She wanted to let Parson squeeze her hand while the MCD plucked foreign objects from his body. But for now, she thought she could do the most good here.
“Airman,” she whispered, “this is the sergeant major. We’re all proud of you. You helped Major Parson do what he had to do.”
Justin’s eyes opened about halfway. They seemed cloudy and uncomprehending. Gold watched her blood flow into him, and to her relief, he suffered no reaction to the transfusion. The medic checked his watch. “Well, at least that’s working,” the medic said.
“The transfusion’s going fine, Justin,” Gold said. “I’d have felt rejected if you didn’t like my blood.” She tried to think of more to say, just to keep the words coming. “That injury doesn’t have to stop you. You can still be a paramedic, almost anything you want. You know the Golden Knights, the Army parachute team? One of those guys has an artificial leg.”
Gold continued her monologue. She spoke of the New England countryside, of maple leaves and maple syrup. She asked if Justin liked Bach. She inquired about his favorite subjects in school. She told him hers were history and social studies. After a while, his eyes opened all the way, and he looked straight at her.
“Bomb gone,” he said.
26
P
arson’s legs felt as if they were on fire, reignited with each touch of the MCD’s forceps. Finally, she stopped and said, “That’s all I can do. You’ll still set off metal detectors, though.”
arson’s legs felt as if they were on fire, reignited with each touch of the MCD’s forceps. Finally, she stopped and said, “That’s all I can do. You’ll still set off metal detectors, though.”
The MCD and another nurse bandaged his wounds as best they could. The pain still burned, but the flames flickered down into a heated ache like banked embers. The nurses closed the rips in the pant legs of his flight suit with safety pins.
“Now you look like a punk rocker,” the MCD said.
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