The Renegades (30 page)

Then a voice shouted,
“Allah-hu akbar!”
A man charged forward from the darkness of the corridor.

Glint of silver. A sword slashed down toward Blount’s head.

The gunnery sergeant rolled. The blade caught the throat protector of his body armor.

Chaaku, Parson realized. Field jacket over a white tunic. Black beard and blazing eyes. The man drew back the sword with what looked like the practiced motion of a fencer. Poised to strike again. Parson fired at center mass.

Chaaku fell back. Clutched the sword with both hands, lunged again. So the son of a bitch had body armor, too.

Still on the ground, Blount swung his left leg, caught Chaaku in the knees. Chaaku dropped to the cave floor, still holding the sword. Parson tried to aim for a head shot, but Blount was in the way. He considered whether to just jump on the terrorist, but Blount seemed to be holding his own. Parson steadied himself, waited for a clear shot.

On his back, Chaaku swung the blade once more. With both hands, Blount thrust his rifle into the path of the sword. Steel glanced off steel. Rasp of scraping metal. Blount brought his weapon’s muzzle toward Chaaku’s neck. Chaaku writhed to his side in a manic frenzy. Took one hand off the sword’s grip, scooped up a handful of the powdery dirt. Flung it into Blount’s eyes. Looked at Parson. Swung his sword just as Parson fired again.

At a better angle, with a little more force, the blade might have clipped off Parson’s hands. But lying on the ground, Chaaku lacked leverage. The sword slashed Parson’s right forearm and spoiled his aim. The bullet flew wild, and Parson dropped the pistol.

Chaaku and Blount both sprang to their feet as Parson stumbled backward, bleeding. The terrorist lifted the sword high to deliver a death gash.

Blount fired from the hip. Chaaku had attacked as Blount tried to change magazines, and the round in the rifle’s chamber was the only one left. The bullet struck Chaaku’s body armor, knocked him off balance. Blount turned his weapon around, rammed the stock into the terrorist’s chest. Then he dropped the rifle.

In a move like Parson had never seen, Blount swept upward with his palms, locked Chaaku’s elbow and wrist. Twisted Chaaku’s arm. Kneed him in the groin. Released the terrorist’s forearm. Wrested the blade away with both hands.

Blood dripped from Blount’s gloves. He shoved Chaaku against the cave wall, jammed the sword’s point into Chaaku’s thigh. The terrorist screamed. Blount stabbed the blade in deeper, then yanked it out and flung the sword away.

Parson placed his left hand over the sword wound on his right arm. Blood ran between his fingers, saturated his sleeve. The cut burned all the way to the bone. He looked for his weapon, did not see it on the darkened cave floor.

Blount rammed the heel of his left hand into Chaaku’s chin. The insurgent’s jaw made a crack as it broke. Chaaku let loose a keening sound, as if he couldn’t open his mouth enough for a full scream. Blood from Blount’s soaked glove smeared the face of the terrorist.

Chaaku’s hand dropped to his side, came back up with a dagger. Blount tried to block it, but the blade entered under his right arm. The gunnery sergeant growled something unintelligible, slammed his fist into Chaaku’s neck. Chaaku slashed with the dagger again. This time Blount blocked it squarely.

Blount held on to Chaaku’s arm. With a maneuver that seemed too fast and finessed for a man his size, the Marine pivoted and kneeled. He brought his enemy’s arm over his shoulder, elbow down. Yanked hard.

Bones crunched as the arm bent the wrong way. The jagged point of a fracture tore through Chaaku’s sleeve. The terrorist made a series of high-pitched yelps. The dagger fell from his hand.

Parson had heard cries of pain in many forms, but not like this. The yelps expressed not just pain but panic, and Parson saw why. Blount could have killed Chaaku by now. He was toying with him, taking his time. The gunnery sergeant was not just large and powerful, but apparently skilled in a martial art. A big cat with a mouse, and the mouse knew what was happening.

Not many things scared Parson anymore. But he had never witnessed vengeance in quite this form. And it actually frightened him.

With his boot, Blount hooked Chaaku’s knees from behind. The terrorist fell flat. Blount stomped Chaaku’s fingers. More snaps of bones.

Parson considered whether to try to stop this. It had crossed the line from combat into something else. He knew what Gold would want him to do now: Follow the rules to the letter. But Gold had broken the rules herself when she’d seen the need. And their orders were to take Chaaku dead or alive. One or the other.

Blount lifted the insurgent up over his head and threw the man’s body against the cave wall. Chaaku’s back slammed into the stone.

Parson heard another crack. This time, the spine.

“You like edged weapons?” Blount shouted. “Lemme show you mine.”

Blount reached to his side, unsnapped his KA-BAR. Crouched beside Chaaku. When Chaaku saw the fighting knife, he began to mumble,
“Ash-hadu anla ilaha . . .”

“You praying to God?” Blount asked. Feebly, Chaaku raised his hand. Blount slapped it down. “Maybe you’re asking for mercy? You put suicide vests on children.”

Chaaku looked at Parson. Not exactly a look of hate, but something worse than that. Madness. Serial killer eyes. Take him dead or alive? Parson made his choice, held his silence.

“Maybe you’re saying you like my knife,” Blount said. “My grandpa carried it on Okinawa. Since you like knives so good, I’m gon’ let you look at it close.”

Blount raised the KA-BAR over Chaaku’s face, the leather-bound handle in a bleeding fist. The Marine’s blood trickled over the hilt and down the matte black finish of the blade, dripped off the tip.

The gunnery sergeant swept downward with his fist, plunged the point between Chaaku’s eyes. Drove in seven inches of carbon steel.

Chaaku’s limbs trembled, then stilled. His eyes remained open and fixed on the last thing he saw—Blount’s knife.

Blount stood, placed his boot on the Black Crescent leader’s face. Leaned over and pulled out his KA-BAR. Wiped one side of the blade on his trousers, then wiped the other side. Blood and brain matter left stains on his uniform.

He looked at Parson with eyes cold as flint. Eyes that reflected rage like Chaaku’s, but from a different place. Not from love of killing. From fury at being forced to kill.

“He made me shoot kids, man,” Blount said. The Marine bled from his hands, his right arm, his cheek.

Parson did not know how to respond. Blount looked around for his rifle, found it in the dirt. He took the weapon by the barrel. Swung it like a maul, smashed the buttstock into Chaaku’s head. The skull split open with a spatter of pink.

“It’s over, Gunny,” Parson said. “He’s dead.”

“I won’t ever get over what he made me do.”

Tendons and veins stood out on Blount’s neck, visible even in the poor light. Muscles in his face twitched as if he struggled to contain his wrath or hold on to his sanity.

Parson tried to think of something to say to bring him back, to pull him out of whatever dark night his mind had entered. Before any words came to Parson, four Marines came into the cave.

“Gunny,” one of them called, “are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Blount said. “Clear the rest of this hellhole.”

“Aye, Gunny.”

The Marines disappeared into the darkness farther down in the cave bunker. Parson heard no shots, nothing to suggest any insurgents remained alive inside. He saw his Beretta in the dust, and he holstered the weapon. Left bloody smears on the pistol’s grip.

“Let’s get out of here, Gunny,” Parson said.

The two men stumbled to the cave mouth, their wounds dripping. Just outside the cave, Blount stopped. He looked down at the remains of the boys he’d shot. Two of them lay where they’d fallen, blood congealing around them. Something had blown most of the face from one of them, either Blount’s bullets or shrapnel from the suicide bomb.

Of the child who had detonated himself, Parson saw only a torn leg. EOD will probably come in and blow up the other two, Parson thought. Simpler than defusing two suicide vests. Blount swayed on his feet, went down on one knee.

Voices in Pashto came from farther outside. The boys rescued from the cave babbled among themselves.

“Gunny,” Parson said, “listen to me. You’re going to see this the rest of your life. I get that. But when you see the kids you killed”—Parson pointed to the dead children—“I want you to see the kids you saved.” He pointed to the six boys. “They’re here because you did what needed doing. I’m giving you a direct order to remember that.”

Blount looked over at the children, now starting to gather around Rashid. The gunnery sergeant’s lips moved, and Parson understood Blount was counting the children.

“That’s right, Gunny,” Parson said. “There’s six of them. Six boys who’ll get a chance at becoming good men. My order to remember that stays in force even when you retire to a bass lake down South.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Blount said. He stood up, made his way over to the kids.

Parson found a corpsman, pulled up his bloody sleeve to expose the slash wound on his forearm. The corpsman placed a clean dressing over the cut, and he wrapped an Israeli bandage over the dressing.

“That’ll need a lot of stitches once we get you back to Mazar, sir,” the corpsman said.

“I know it,” Parson said.

The radio in the corpsman’s tactical vest must have been tuned to some common frequency the medics used. Parson recognized Reyes’s voice.

“I have a critical patient with a gunshot wound,” Reyes said. “Tension pneumothorax. I put a ten-gauge catheter in her thoracic cavity, and she’s breathing all right.”

She? Gunshot wound? Critical?

That could mean only Sophia, Parson knew. He had brought her here. What had he done to her?

28

T
he air entered Gold’s lungs heavily, as if it had an altered density. But at least the drowning sensation had gone. She lay on her back, and she guessed she was passing in and out of consciousness. Reyes had put dressings on the entrance wound where her arm met her shoulder, and on the exit wound in her back. But she didn’t remember him doing any of that.

Nearby, the combat controller and the Marine sniper and spotter still watched the target area through scope and NVGs. However, the gunfire downhill had stopped. A welcome stillness settled on the mountains. Reyes kneeled beside Gold.

“What happened?” she asked him.

“They just called clear,” Reyes said. “They got Chaaku.”

Gold inhaled slowly, sought the strength to speak again. “What about . . .” Paused for more air.

“Blount heard your warning, and he stopped the suicide bombers. You’re one tough blonde, I’ll give you that.”

The news eased her pain like morphine. She silently thanked a higher command. Forgot to ask after her own health, but there’d be time for that.

Reyes answered a call on his radio, spoke words Gold couldn’t quite make out. Then he said, “Pave Hawk is inbound, guys.”

The night grew fuzzy around her. Gold sensed she was about to lose consciousness again. But she had to know. She forced her awareness to hold on another moment, took in enough air for one word: “Parson?”

Reyes said nothing. Did that mean something had happened to Michael, or did Reyes just not know?

“Are you talking about the lieutenant colonel with a limp?” the Marine spotter asked, gazing through his NVGs.

“Yes.”

“He’s okay,” the spotter said. “I see him right now.”

Gold smiled, felt stickiness on her lips. Her own blood.

She relaxed her mind, let perceptions and memories wander. A stray thought came to her—Mullah Durrani’s storied ancestor, Ahmad Shah Durrani, was also a poet. He wrote of his devotion to Afghanistan:

By blood, we are immersed in love of you.

Gold did not necessarily love Afghanistan. But she loved many of its people as much as she loved her comrades in arms.

“I wish I could give you something for pain,” Reyes said, “but narcotics might suppress your respiratory function.”

Nature did what drugs could not. Gold’s vision turned hazy; her hearing dulled. She let herself pass out again.

—

W
here was that damned Pave Hawk? An eternity had passed since Parson learned Sophia was hit. He paced outside the cave entrance, cursed, condemned himself for bringing her here at all. He wanted to climb to that knoll, go to her right now. But it was too steep to scale without gear, even for someone without a slash wound to the arm and a bad leg. The quickest way to see her was to wait for the HH-60. The waiting hurt worse than the cut.

A few Marines watched over the other injured—Rashid, Blount, shotgun man, and a half dozen wounded Afghan troops. The rest of the jarheads manned a perimeter, waited for the Osprey to pick them up. The six rescued boys sat on the ground, chattered in Pashto with Rashid. Gutsy of him, Parson thought, to find the strength to comfort those kids with his hand nearly blown off. The corpsman had given Rashid a fentanyl lollipop. Maybe that helped. Now the corpsman was taping dressings onto Blount’s bleeding palms and fingers. The gunnery sergeant made no sound.

Rashid turned to Parson, pointed with his good hand to one of the boys.

“That one Mohammed,” he said.

So what? Parson thought. He felt relieved some of the kids had survived. Blount’s sanity might depend on that. But he was too worried about Sophia to care about their names. Half the boys in this part of the world were named Mohammed. But then he remembered.

“You mean that little girl’s brother?” Parson asked.

Rashid spoke in his own language again. The boy nodded. He wore a round hat, along with a woolen vest over a ragged and oversize shirt.

“Fatima his sister,” Rashid said.

Well, that was something. Sophia would be happy about that. At least Parson would have some good news for her. Dear God, please let her live to hear it.

“What about Lieutenant Aamir’s son?” Parson asked. “What was his name?”

“Hakim,” Rashid said.

Mohammed uttered a few syllables, began to cry.

“They give him bomb,” Rashid said.

And sent him out to Blount’s rifle, Parson thought.

The faint thump of helicopter rotors sounded from a distant valley, grew louder. Finally. Blount rose and stood beside Parson, opened his mouth to speak. He hesitated, had trouble with the words. Eventually he said, “Sir, if you gotta report what you saw me do in there . . .” Paused again. “I mean, there ain’t gon’ be no hard feelings. You just do what you think’s right.”

“We did it together, Gunny,” Parson said. “I was the highest rank there. And our orders said dead or alive. Let’s just not do it that way again.”

Blount pressed his lips together, thought for a moment. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Unless it needs doing.”

Good point, Parson thought. Unless it needs doing.

Parson listened to the Pave Hawk’s approach. Looked down at Mohammed and the other boys. Up at the dark knoll where Gold lay wounded. She was in critical condition because of Chaaku and Black Crescent. Yeah, Parson considered, Blount did what needed doing. Damn straight. Parson wished he’d done it himself.

The helicopter circled
Kuh-e Qara Batur
. Parson watched through his night vision goggles as it descended toward the knoll. Within several meters of the ground, the main rotor kicked up dust. Arcs of green formed at the blade tips. From his vantage point about a half mile away, Parson watched the corona effect shimmer into a full halo as the Pave Hawk touched down to pick up Gold.

Reyes and the combat controller lifted her. Sophia’s arm swung from the litter as they carried her into the aircraft. The sight looked far too much like images of the dying Parson had seen all over Afghanistan, and it worried him sick.

The helicopter lifted off, gathered speed. It banked, then descended toward the cave bunker where Parson stood with the Marines and Afghans. The broken Mi-17 remained on the LZ, and the Pave Hawk had little room to land. But Parson had seen choppers put down in less room.

Grit flew into Parson’s eyes as the Pave Hawk settled next to the Mi-17. Without waiting for a signal, Parson ran to the HH-60’s open door. Sophia lay on a litter, IV in her arm, some kind of needle in her chest. Dirt and dried blood across her pale skin.

“How is she?” Parson shouted to Reyes over the engines and rotors.

“She got shot real bad,” Reyes said. “But with this kind of wound, if they make it this far, they usually hang on.” Matter-of-fact. Like she was just another patient. Reyes arranged a blanket across her torso, kept the fabric clear of the needle. He rolled up another blanket and propped her feet on it. Treating her for shock, Parson realized.

Parson kneeled beside her, took her hand. She did not open her eyes or respond in any way. But her fingers felt warm, and he took that as a good sign. Maybe she wasn’t in deep shock.

Reyes and the corpsman helped load some of the other wounded onto the aircraft. They placed Rashid on a stretcher, put him down across from Gold. One of the other Afghans had a bloody bandage covering most of his head.

When the corpsman motioned for Blount to board, the gunnery sergeant waved with a hand wrapped in white. “I can wait for the Osprey,” he said. “Take some of these boys. They been here longer than I have.”

“Bring that one,” Parson said. He pointed to Mohammed. Reyes and the corpsman collected Mohammed and two other kids. Buckled them into web seats at the back of the Pave Hawk.

The Pave Hawk’s flight engineer slid the door shut, took his seat behind his gun. Two turbine engines above Parson’s head howled in unison, and the helicopter lifted off.
Kuh-e Qara Batur
dropped away, receded in the darkness.

A few minutes after the helicopter leveled at altitude, Gold opened her eyes.

“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.

—

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